Congress Continues Its Crusade Against a Free and Open Internet

In case you thought SOPA was defeated, here's a reminder that it has merely been turned into a zombie bill that cannot be killed via traditional means.  From Geek:

Two years ago, major websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit blacked out their services as a form of digital protest against SOPA, the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act . . . Eventually, the widespread outrage over the bill was acknowledged and Congress knocked it off. Various forms of SOPA attempted to make a comeback since the original proposal back in 2011, but none have made it through. Now, though, SOPA might be making a comeback, but in a much sneakier fashion.

On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee met to discuss copyright reform, but rather than redesign SOPA, it is instead taking the more sinister route of voluntary commitments from individual entities to comply with a ruleset similarly sinister to SOPA.  

In other words, the old SOPA policies would be administered on a voluntary basis, meaning the rule of law on the issue would be outsourced to the arbitrary policies of copyright fundamentalists. 

Facebook to Government: Back Off! Spying on Facebook Users is OUR Job!

From the NYT:

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, has complained directly to President Obama about the continuing revelations that the United States government has secretly spied on the activities of some of his company’s 1.2 billion users.

Mr. Zuckerberg spoke with the president on Wednesday following the most recent news report on the National Security Agency’s surveillance tactics. The account, published in The Intercept from documents leaked by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, described how government computers sometimes masqueraded as Facebook servers in order to send malicious software to infect the machines of Facebook users. The documents say the process was automated so the N.S.A. could target millions of people for the attacks.

What Does Your Metadata Reveal About You?

Last year, when the Snowden leaks started dripping into the mainstream media, the apologists of the National Security Police State and Surveillance Society went to great lengths to downplay the fact of the illegal surveillance, arguing that "It's just metadata! Nothing to see here!"  An article in the Guardian reports on a study that reveals just how much about a person can be inferred from their metadata:

Identities of cannabis grower, woman seeking an abortion and MS sufferer inferred in study that confirms danger of widespread access to metadata . . .

Warnings that phone call “metadata” can betray detailed information about your life has been confirmed by research at Stanford University. Researchers there successfully identified a cannabis cultivator, multiple sclerosis sufferer and a visitor to an abortion clinic using nothing more than the timing and destination of their phone calls.

Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, the researchers behind the finding, used data gleaned from 546 volunteers to assess the extent to which information about who they had called and when revealed personally sensitive information.

NSA Spreads Malware By the Millions

From the Intercept:

Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

Top Senate Witch Spooked by CIA

Senator Diane Feinstein of California is one of the most outspoken supporters of turning the United States into a totalitarian surveillance society.  Apparently, however, she only supports these policies when it is everyday folks whose rights are being trampled upon by the lawless spy agencies that are eroding our rights and liberties.  When it is her and the rest of the degenerate parasites in the Congress who are under the microscope, she appears to have a different view.  From CNN:

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee suggested Tuesday the CIA violated federal law by secretly pulling classified documents from her panel's computers during a staff probe of the spy agency's controversial detention and interrogation program.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said CIA Director John Brennan told her in January that agency personnel searched the computers because they believed the panel's investigators might have gained access to materials on an internal review they were not authorized to see.

"The CIA did not ask the committee or its staff if the committee had access to the internal review or how we obtained it," Feinstein said in blistering remarks on the Senate floor. "Instead, the CIA just went and searched the committee's computer."

Feinstein said that she had "grave concerns" the search may have violated federal law regarding domestic spying as well as congressional oversight responsibilities under the Constitution.

Note that Feinstein engaged in no such concern trolling to defend the people's rights against unlawful search and seizure when they are routinely violated by the federal government.  Throw this witch to the curb. 

Policy Makers Likely Even More Ignorant Than the Public on Tech Security Matters

The other day, we poked some fun at the US public for ignorance of basic tech-related terminology.  Much more serious, however, is the depth of ignorance and incompetence common among public officials who hold sway over cyber-policy decisions.  Whether it is a "cybersecurity" official who doesn't know what an ISP is, a judge who doesn't understand  email or a technophobic luddite who controls the Department of Homeland Security . . .  these people's ignorance actually puts the public at large in danger, and represent real threats to our security not to mention our civil liberties.  Of course, one would not expect anything less from the Democrats and Republicans.  From the Guardian:

One of the world’s leading cyberwarfare experts has warned of the damaging lack of government literacy in cybersecurity issues, pointing out that some senior officials don’t know how to use email, and that one US representative about to negotiate cybersecurity with China asked him what an “ISP” was. . . .

Yet former head of US homeland security Janet Napolitano once told Singer. “Don’t laugh, but I just don’t use email at all,” Singer recalled. “It wasn’t a fear of privacy or security - it’s because she just didn’t think it was useful. A supreme court justice also told me ‘I haven’t got round to email yet’ - and this is someone who will get to vote on everything from net neutrality to the NSA negotiations.”

Obama himself, Singer said, had expressed concern that the complexity of the issue was overwhelming policy makers.

Ignorance hiding behind complexity.  I'm sure they'll find a way to simply it for themselves while making the rest of us less secure and less free at the same time.  Win/win from their end, I suppose.  

Critical Linux Vulnerability Discovered

From Ars Technica:

Hundreds of open source packages, including the Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Debian
distributions of Linux, are susceptible to attacks that circumvent the most widely used technology to prevent eavesdropping on the Internet, thanks to an extremely critical vulnerability in a widely used cryptographic code library.
The bug in the GnuTLS library makes it trivial for attackers to bypass secure sockets layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protections available on websites that depend on the open source package. Initial estimates included in Internet discussions such as this one indicate that more than 200 different operating systems or applications rely on GnuTLS to implement crucial SSL and TLS operations, but it wouldn't be surprising if the actual number is much higher. Web applications, e-mail programs, and other code that use the library are vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers monitoring connections to silently decode encrypted traffic passing between end users and servers.
The bug is the result of commands in a section of the GnuTLS code that verify the authenticity of TLS certificates, which are often known simply as X509 certificates.