The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites.
“They’re saying it’s a security document but it was sent to every airport and airline,” says Steven Frischling, one of the bloggers. “It was sent to Islamabad, to Riyadh and to Nigeria. So they’re looking for information about a security document sent to 10,000-plus people internationally. You can’t have a right to expect privacy after that.”
Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Suzanne Trevino said in a statement that security directives “are not for public disclosure.”
“TSA’s Office of Inspections is currently investigating how the recent Security Directives were acquired and published by parties who should not have been privy to this information,” the statement said.
from forbes: After 10 months of delays, President Obama has finally chosen a cybersecurity coordinator, filling the so-called "cyber czar" position he had long promised to create to shore up the nation's defenses against hackers and cyberspies. His pick: Howard Schmidt, head of the Information Security Forum, a non-profit cybersecurity research consortium. Schmidt has an impressive resume, with stints in government cybersecurity as well as at large corporations like eBay and Microsoft. But the last ten months weren't necessarily spent finding the perfect candidate for Obama's top cybersecurity job so much as finding someone willing to accept it. At least three other candidates had been privately offered the position and turned it down, as Forbes reported in July (see: "Obama's Unwilling Cyber Czars"). Cybersecurity industry watchers told Forbes at the time that was because the position had been stripped of much of its power in an effort to ensure that new cyber regulations didn't hamper economic recovery.
it's like salt for hackers... from the register: The US and Russia have begun talks on limiting the the military use of cyberspace. Entry into the cyber arms reduction talks - convened by a United Nations arms control committee - represents a significant shift for the US, which has resisted entering such talks for years, the New York Times reports. The change of tack came after the US decided that the cyberwarfare capabilities were spreading across the globe to countries such as North Korea and China.
The Russians have long called for talks on spreading the spread of cybermunitions along the lines of treaties limiting the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical warfare forged during the cold war era. The US has resisted such moves for a long time but is now coming around to the view that regulations do have some role to play.
The US wants the talks to cover greater international co-operation in the fight against cybercrime, while Russia is keen to discuss the supposed risks to national sovereignty posed by cyberterrorism. The Obama administration ordered a review of US internet security strategy in February but is yet to appoint anyone to the cybersecurity czar role established as part of the review.
from dark government: A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night [dec9] has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing sight to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor or a shock wave – although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre – lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm – which astronomers have said did not appear to have been connected to the aurora, or Northern Lights, so common in that area of the world. The mystery deepened tonight as Russia denied it had been conducting missile tests in the area.
Problem is they attempted to do this with a PDF editor and blew it big time. Instead of printing the document and marking out the areas by hand, they merely placed black boxes over the text in the editor. Call it laziness or stupidity. Either way, the boxes were easily defeated because they are not part of the document. Even a sixth grader with rudimentary knowledge of Acrobat or other PDF editors knows this.
At any rate, the document reveals a few things the feds don’t want us to know. For instance, Section 2A-2 (C) (1) (b) (iv) addresses which twelve passports will instantly get you moved to secondary screening. Other juicy details include the procedure for CIA-escorted passengers to be processed and the calibration process of airport metal detectors.
from raw story: The Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit against several government agencies hoping to force the revelation of how the U.S. utilizes social networks like Facebook and MySpace to collect intelligence.
"Millions of people use social networking sites like Facebook every day, disclosing lots of information about their private lives," said James Tucker, a student working with EFF, in a media advisory. "As Congress debates new privacy laws covering sites like Facebook, lawmakers and voters alike need to know how the government is already using this data and what is at stake."
However, when EFF went looking for that information by filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, they ran into a stone wall of silence.
"Internet users deserve to know what information is collected, under what circumstances, and who has access to it," said Shane Witnov, a law student working on the case, according to the EFF's release. "These agencies need to abide by the law and release their records on social networking surveillance."
The EFF's full complaint, which encompasses the Central Intelligence Agency, Departments of Justice, Defense and Homeland Security, the Treasury and Director of National Intelligence, can be read here [136kb PDF].
from allgov: Whether it’s using human spies or launching attacks in cyberspace, China is stepping up its intelligence efforts against American security. Experts from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission told Congress this week in a report that Chinese hackers are going after U.S. military and civilian websites more than ever.
The confirmation of the NSA's role, which began during the development of the software, is a sign of the agency's deepening involvement with the private sector when it comes to building defenses against cyberattacks.
"Working in partnership with Microsoft and (the Department of Defense), NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to enhance Microsoft's operating system security guide without constraining the user's ability to perform their everyday tasks," Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's Information Assurance Director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a statement prepared for a hearing held this morning in Washington. "All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later in the product cycle."
The partnership between the NSA and Microsoft is not new...
Schaeffer said that the NSA is also working to engage other companies, including Apple, Sun, and RedHat, on security standards for their products. The agency also works with computer security firms such as Symantec, McAfee, and Intel.
Trackers - the servers that bootstrap each BitTorrent download - are no longer necessary with enhancements like DHT and PEX that allow peers to locate one another without accessing a central server, site operators wrote in the Bay’s blog.
“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down!” reads the announcement. “It’s the end of an era.”
“This is what we consider to be the future,” the Bay wrote. “Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.”
The changeover, first reported by TorrentFreak, does not decommission Sweden’s The Pirate Bay, whose four co-founders face a year in prison for facilitating copyright infringement. The site continues to host and index torrent files in a more streamlined fashion.
from the register: Animal rights groups are apparently not pleased with NASA's plan to zap squirrel monkeys with repeated doses of radiation for science. The US space agency will expose between 18 to 28 of the moneys to low doses of radiation daily to better understand the effects of long-term exposure outside Earth's protective magnetic shield. American anti-animal testing group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, has launched a protest asking concerned citizens to tell NASA Administrator Charles Bolden to put a stop the experiment. "Radiation experiments involving nonhuman primates commonly involve restraint and other cruel procedures," the organization claims. "Monkeys, like other primates, are highly intelligent, have strong family bonds, demonstrate empathy, and, most importantly, suffer."
from newsweek: Congress and civil libertarians have always been twitchy about involving the ultrasecretive National Security Agency—masters of electronic spying—more deeply in domestic security matters. Revelations that George W. Bush authorized the NSA (Motto: Never Say Anything) in the wake of 9/11 to expand warrantless electronic eavesdropping on Americans caused heartburn for both intelligence officials and private industry. Dragged into the controversy were phone companies and Internet service providers who took part in the program, although Congress later passed legislation that both tweaked and largely ratified Bush administration practices. (Congress gave retroactive immunity from civil lawsuits to private firms that collaborated.)
If anything, the Obama administration, citing the threats of computer hacking and cyberterrorism, is now moving to involve the NSA more deeply in domestic security issues. The growing role of the NSA—a Defense Department agency with thousands of military personnel—in domestic matters was on semi-public display on Friday. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano visited a nondescript office complex in Arlington, Va., for the formal opening of a new high-tech command post called the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC, pronounced "en-kick"). The facility is officially described as “a 24-hour, DHS-led coordinated watch and warning center that will improve national efforts to address threats and incidents affecting the nation’s critical information technology and cyber infrastructure.”
The NSA’s official seal was displayed prominently on a big-screen graphic listing the center’s participants. The NSA’s director, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, was among the dignitaries standing at Napolitano’s side as she formally cut a ribbon inaugurating the facility, which, without its spooky graphics and tight security cordon, would look like a large newsroom or trading floor equipped with rows of computer workstations.
from antifascist-calling: Social networking sites and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and their competitors can facilitate communication and information sharing amongst diverse groups and individuals is by now a cliché.
It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren't tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.
No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a "total information" surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call "actionable intelligence." ...
In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable document October 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.
Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.
a small but apparently growing number of people are cutting the television service connections from cable satellite & telephone companies in favor of viewing their picks over the computer. from latimes: Jazz musician Bill Cunliffe loves television - but he doesn't watch it on a TV set. "I can watch anything I want, any time I want," he said, "on my bottom-of-the-line Mac PowerBook." Cunliffe, 53, is one of a growing number of TV viewers who get all their programs via the Internet.
For reasons that include saving money, convenience, personal choice and a hatred of commercials, these viewers are cutting the cord from cable, satellite and telephone suppliers of TV service, and even throwing away the rabbit ears and other antennas that brought in over-the-air broadcasts.
"The idea that you come home and your entertainment choices are dictated on what some entertainment channel decides is not for me," said video game producer Chris Codding, whose Venice apartment has a 52-inch Sony television that's used only for video games and viewing DVDs. "I really like the concept of having something in your mind that you want to watch," Codding said, "and then going to the computer and watching it." ...
Shows are also available, unauthorized, on underground sites that are the bane of the TV (as well as movie) industry. "You can download just about anything you want right after it's broadcast," said one user of these sites who asked that his name not be used. "My wife asks for a show, and I can just go on and get it for her."
Cunliffe, who said he sticks to authorized sites, began watching online when TV went entirely digital in June. Up until then, he used rabbit ears to bring in broadcast stations. After the switch-over, he could no longer receive some of his favorite stations, even with a digital converter box.
He was ready to give up on TV until he discovered how easy it was to get programs online. Now he's ready to move up from his laptop screen. "I'm going to go out and buy the cheapest flat-screen monitor I can find and plug it in," he said. "I'm watching more TV than ever."
update/rebuttal: cord cutting?: without data, the latimes writes the story it wanted anyway from tv by the numbers: There seem to be a few memes that persist in the TV media world even though there is no data to back them up. One is the “Oprah ratings down because of Obama endorsement”, another is “Look at all the people cutting the cord” (i.e. canceling their subscription TV service). Recently it’s been spun as an after effect of the economic problems, in today’s LA Times cord cutting is touted as a combination of technology and consumer choice, which of course it is, and the anecdotal examples are charming, but the problem is the data just doesn’t support the fact that it’s a general phenomenon. In fact, total subscriptions to cable/satellite/telco TV services continue to grow slowly, as they have for many years. Who knows what will happen in the future, but it’s not happening now!
so, these 2 supposedly opposing pieces both come to the same conclusion: "i'm watching more TV than ever."
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence" — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
from space.com: A small asteroid will buzz the Earth late Friday EDT, flying just inside the orbit of the moon. It should pass safely by our home planet, according to a crack team of NASA space rock trackers. The space rock, named 2009 TM8, was just discovered Thursday by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. It will get within 216,000 miles of Earth when it zooms by at a speed of about 18,163 mph. "That's slightly closer than the orbit of our moon," NASA's Asteroid Watch team said Friday via Twitter. The time of closest approach will be 11:44 p.m. EDT tonight. The asteroid hunters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., stands on constant watch for rogue space rocks that could pose an impact risk to Earth. It was the same team which, last week, scaled back the risk of another asteroid — a large space rock called Apophis — hitting the Earth in 2036.
It suggests that "after two decades of rigorous research from the world's top astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, physicists, engineers, futurists, we know that in 2012 a series of cataclysmic forces will wreak havoc on our planet".
It stars John Cusack and is directed by Roland Emmerich, who was behind the blockbusters Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. The film will include scenes of a tsunami washing an aircraft carrier into the White House and Los Angeles falling into the sea.
But the site has been so successful that hundreds of people have been convinced that something terrible is about to befall the planet.
Dr David Morrison, a senior scientist at Nasa's Astrobiology Institute, said he had received more than 1,000 inquiries from worried members of the public.
That included teenagers saying they would rather commit suicide than witness the world end. Dr Morrison said the website was "ethically wrong". But Vikki Luya, Sony's publicity director said: "It is very clear that this site is connected to a fictional movie. This can readily be seen in the logos on the site."
The unnamed man had been assigned to an analysis project for the organization, better known as CERN, since 2003, the group said in a press release. He had no contact with anything that could be used for terrorism, it added. He was arrested Thursday in the French city of Vienne.
His detention came as two brothers also suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda were arrested in in Vienne on a warrant issued by an antiterrorism judge at the Paris prosecutor's office. Police didn't release their names or nationalities, but the Associated Press reported they were aged 25 and 32.
Shortly after coming online last year, CERN's LCH, or Large Hadron Collider, was downed by a faulty electrical connection between two magnets in the 17-mile doughnut-shaped atom smasher. It has been under repair ever since.
A CERN spokeswoman assured the AP there were no indications of sabotage and that the arrested physicist had access only to the experiment he was working on and not to the tunnel itself.
CERN is providing support to French authorities investigating the arrested man. More from the Associated Press and The New York Times is here and here.
from afp: The US Navy announced Thursday [oct1] it was consolidating intelligence gathering and other data capabilities under a single command in a bid to maintain an increasingly challenged US military supremacy in cyberspace. Naval Intelligence chief Vice Admiral Jack Dorsett said the navy was creating an "Information Dominance Corps" bringing together over 44,000 sailors - including an expansion of the navy's cyberworkforce by about 1,000 people. The move was part of a broader US effort to maintain competitive advantage over adversaries like China. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead described the cyber world as a "battlespace" where attacks on US security and military systems are unlikely to wane.
In the early hours of Friday morning [oct9], the LCROSS probe will separate from the Centaur upper stage of the rocket that carried it to lunar orbit, and send the spent module crashing into the Cabeus crater at the Moon’s south pole.
When the 2.4-tonne Centaur hits at 12.31pm BST, at a speed of 2.5km per second (1.6 miles per sec), it will throw up a plume of debris 10km (6 miles) high.
update: US spacecraft crash into moon in search for water from reuters: Searching for stocks of water on the moon, NASA crashed two spacecraft into an eternally dark lunar crater on Friday, hoping to splash ice into the light where instruments could assess it. A two-ton empty rocket stage hit the dark Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole at about 4:31 a.m. PDT (7:31 a.m. EDT) and a second craft crashed four minutes later. A camera on the following spacecraft did not capture an image of the impact as hoped, but scientists said they were confident that the explosive hit took place as planned. "We didn't see a big splashy plume like we wanted to see," said Michael Bicay, director of science at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center. Bicay said an infrared camera showed changes that suggested an explosion.
from threat level: Two bloggers received home visits from Transportation Security Administration agents Tuesday after they published a new TSA directive that revises screening procedures and puts new restrictions on passengers in the wake of a recent bombing attempt by the so-called underwear bomber.
