Should Faking a Name on Facebook Be a Felony? Imagine that President Obama could order the arrest of anyone who broke a promise on the Internet. So you could be jailed for lying about your age or weight on an Internet dating site. Or you could be sen... Read more »
Hacker Stock Photo Art
Boing Boing has a brilliant collection/dissection of the stock photography used when news websites attempt to report on “hacking” and cybercrime. Strained visual metaphors abound, and the usual suspects include disembodied hands that try to... Read more »
No Such Agency (NSA) Teams With Providers To Monitor Your Email
Surely they were doing this anyway? Ellen Nakashima reports for the Washington Post:
Read more »The National Security Agency is working with Internet service providers to deploy a new generation of tools to scan e-mail and other digital traffic with the goal of thwarting cyberattacks against defense firms by foreign adversaries, senior defense and industry officials say.
The novel program, which began last month on a voluntary, trial basis, relies on sophisticated NSA data sets to identify malicious programs slipped into the vast stream of Internet data flowing to the nation’s largest defense firms. Such attacks, including one last month against Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, are nearly constant as rival nations and terrorist groups seek access to U.S. military secrets.
“We hope the . . . cyber pilot can be the beginning of something bigger,” Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III said at a global security conference in Paris on Thursday. “It could serve as a model…
FOI Topics and Links of the Week
IR-transmitted metadata. Last week, Apple filed for a patent on an iOS camera that can detect infrared in addition to visible light. If a user aims the camera at an object that is sending out additional information about that object in the IR band, the camera transmits that information to the device, and potentially also [...] Read more »
U.S. Government: ‘Hack Us And We’ll Bomb You’
I’m not sure that they’ll really bomb China, which seems to be where most hacks on American corporations and government originate, but it could be a good excuse for another Middle East intervention. Nate Anderson reports for ArsTechnica:
Read more »The US revealed its “International Strategy for Cyberspace” (PDF) yesterday. It’s mostly blather about how terrific “cyberspace” is, but it gets more specific on a few key issues like national defense. Could our next war start because of a hack? The government says it’s possible.
“States have an inherent right to self-defense that may be triggered by certain aggressive acts in cyberspace,” says the policy. Indeed, such aggressive acts might compel a country like the US to act even when the hacking is targeted at an allied country.
“Certain hostile acts conducted through cyberspace could compel actions under the commitments we have with our military treaty partners,” says the document. “When warranted, the United States…
FOI Topics and Links of the Week
Smartphone tracking data. Two researchers reported last month that Apple has been storing time-stamped location information on users’ iOS devices since June. An unencrypted file with these data is saved onto a user’s computer each time she syncs her device with it, as well. Apple appears to have good reasons for collecting the location information, [...] Read more »
Will the U.S. get an Internet “Kill Switch”?
In the past month we’ve seen two countries try to “turn off” the Internet. On January 27, in Egypt, which had previously known few restrictions on Internet access (though, to be sure, intimidation of bloggers and activists was common), nearly all ISPs stopped delivering bits to their subscribers, even though data transiting Egypt from the [...] Read more »
Wikileaks News
Image by New Media Days via Flickr From the web and the wires: wired on upcoming leaks: After a brief quiescence, the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks is about to explode again onto the global stage with the impending release of almost 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War, marking the largest military leak in [...] Read more »
Political Motivation for Cyberattacks
According to a new report, 53 percent of critical infrastructure providers report that their networks have experienced what they perceived as politically motivated cyber attacks. Participants of the Symantec survey claimed to have experienced such an attack on an average of 10 times in the past five years, incurring an average cost of $850,000 during [...] Read more »
Iran-Stuxnet Update
From the wires: Iran suspects that a foreign organization or nation designed “Stuxnet,” a quickly mutating computer worm that has been infiltrating industrial computer systems in the Islamic republic, a high-ranking official said Monday. “We had anticipated that we could root out the virus within one to two months,” Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran’s [...] Read more »
