Archive: Year: 2014

Vitam Et Bello According to NBC News, a secret division of GCHQ (Britain's NSA) has launched distributed denial of service attacks against chat rooms used by members of Anonymous. McGill professor Gabriella Coleman writes in Wired that this news raises serious concerns: There are clearly defined laws and processes that a democratic government is supposed to follow. Yet here, the British government is apparently throwing out due process and essentially proceeding straight to the punishment — using a method that is considered illegal and punishable by years in prison. Even if DDoS attacks would do more damage upstream (than to IRC), it’s a surprising revelation. The real concern here is a shotgun approach to justice that sprays its punishment over thousands of people...

Obscurity Taking advantage of a slight loosening of government restrictions, major Internet companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Facebook have started publishing how many government requests for user data they have received under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Kevin Bankston, the Policy Director of New America’s Open Technology Institute, commented to Sam Gustin of Time magazine that, “What these reports reveal is far less than what we need for adequate accountability from the government. Lumping all of the different types of surveillance orders together into one number, then adding obscurity on top of obscurity by requiring that number to be reported in ranges of one thousand, is not enough to educate the American public or reassure the international community that the...

Lip Reading Top editors from the New York Times and the Guardian kicked off a "Journalism After Snowden" series at Columbia Journalism School, arguing that the press needs greater protection from government pressure. Doing a series of Google Hangouts on Friday, President Obama repeated his support for net neutrality, and denied that the NSA was engaging in surveillance of Americans without court approval. US Attorney General Eric Holder is traveling to Sweden, fueling rumors there that a deal might be in the works regarding Julian Assange, who is still wanted for questioning there. Ryan Gallagher points out that Canadian national security officials aren't responding with candor to his (and Glenn Greenwald and Greg Weston's) Thursday story on how the country's spy agency is monitoring...

Oh, Canada The Snowden files made news in Canada again today, with Greg Weston, Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher of CBC News reporting that the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), Canada's NSA, had used WiFi systems at the country's airports, hotels, and Internet cafes to track the behavior of thousands of ordinary citizens. Cybersecurity expert Ron Diebert told the CBC that CSEC's actions were almost certainly illegal. "All Canadians with a smartphone, tablet or laptop are 'essentially carrying around digital dog tags as we go about our daily lives,'" Deibert noted. Ontario's privacy commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, told the CBC News she was "blown away" by the news. "I mean that could have been me at the airport walking around… This resembles the...

The following is the text of the remarks I made yesterday at "As Darkness Falls," an international conference that took place this past weekend in Berlin, which was focused on "Theory and Practice of Self-Empowerment in the Age of Digital Control." (People here are taking the NSA surveillance revelations very seriously.) One of my co-panelists was Jacob Applebaum, an independent hacker and security expert who works on Tor, whom I refer to as Jake at one point in my comments. Video of our full panel should be posted online soon. This talk is supposed to be about lessons of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for the transparency movement, but I want to start with two different touchstones: the coder...

Bitcoin Agonistes Marc Andreesen, one of the first to unleash the potential of the world wide web with the development of what became the Netscape browser, argues that BitCoin has a similar revolutionary potential. It's not because it's a digital currency; it's because it enables trustworthy digital transfers of property without needing a central intermediary. From there, he argues that Bitcoin can eliminate credit card fraud, make money transfers easier, and make micropayments "trivially easy"--which could open a huge new economy for content monetization. On Medium, Glenn Fleischman tartly parses Andreesen's essay. He says the rise of Bitcoin has "little in common" with previous disruptive technologies like the PC or the Internet, both of which were developed through extensive public collaboration. But...

Paranoid LIberalism Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has penned a lengthy attack on Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange--"the leakers"--claiming to uncover "their deepest beliefs and motives" in past writings, which his witheringly sums up as "paranoid libertarianism." But a close reading suggests that it's Wilentz, the liberal, who is being paranoid about critics of the national surveillance state. Henry Farrell, who is steadily emerging as one of the most thoughtful writers we have on the politics of the Networked Age, savages Wilentz in response, calling his essay "perhaps the purest exercise in even~the~liberal~New Republic~ism that the magazine has published since its change in ownership." (For you younger First POST readers, that a reference to TNR's success at getting attention by counter-intuitively...

Leeway President Obama told David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, that Snowden did not expose any crimes and complained that while he had raised “legitimate policy questions” the question was, “Is the only way to do that by giving some 29-year-old free rein to basically dump a mountain of information, much of which is definitely legal, definitely necessary for national security, and should properly be classified?” As the New York Times national security reporters Eric Schmitt and David Sanger observed of Obama's comments to Remnick: "Mr. Obama insisted that 'the benefit of the debate he generated was not worth the damage done, because there was another way of doing it.' But he did not say what that way was, and even...

Welcome to the NBA Peter Baker's front-page story in The New York Times on "Obama's Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying" is today's must-read. The second of two stories in the paper of record that the White House is obviously enabling to manage expectations around the President's speech Friday on NSA reform, Baker's story notably includes rare on-the-record quotes from top Obama political advisers David Plouffe and David Axelrod explaining how the harsh realities of what the Oval Office hears each morning has sobered the once civil-liberties-minded constitutional law professor. Message to the base: trust us. Most intriguing to this reader: how Obama's views reportedly started to shift during the 2008 transition: Mr. Obama was told before his inauguration of a...

Battle Lines The New York Times Peter Baker and Charlie Savage preview President Obama's Friday speech on NSA reformreporting that he "trying to straddle a difficult line in hopes of placating foreign leaders and advocates of civil liberties without a backlash from national security agencies." If their report proves accurate, Obama's changes will probably satisfy no one, least of all the civil liberties community. On the storage of bulk data, Obama is reportedly going to leave it in NSA hands for now, but ask Congress to weigh in. Worse, he is considering reducing the number of "hops" that the NSA can take when examining the connections and records of a target, from three to…two. Since the NSA argues that storing Americans phone...