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Saudis Sent Death-Row Inmates to Fight Syrian Government
September 8th, 2013From January.
Via: USA Today:
Saudi Arabia has sent death-row inmates from several nations to fight against the Syrian government in exchange for commuting their sentences, the Assyrian International News Agency reports.
Citing what it calls a “top secret memo” in April from the Ministry of Interior, AINA says the Saudi offered 1,239 inmates a pardon and a monthly stipend for their families, which were were allowed to stay in the Sunni Arab kingdom. Syrian President Bashar Assad is an Alawite, a minority Shiite sect.
According to an English translation of the memo, besides Saudis, the prisoners included Afghans, Egyptians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Somalis, Sudanese, Syrians and Yemenis. All faced “execution by sword” for murder, rape or drug smuggling.
Research Credit: noguru
9/11 & Operation Gladio
September 8th, 2013Via: Russia Today:
NSA Can Access Data on All Smartphones
September 8th, 2013Via: Spiegel:
The United States’ National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google’s Android mobile operating system.
The documents state that it is possible for the NSA to tap most sensitive data held on these smart phones, including contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.
The documents also indicate that the NSA has set up specific working groups to deal with each operating system, with the goal of gaining secret access to the data held on the phones.
Recovery: Poverty in N.J. Reaches 52-Year High
September 8th, 2013Via: Star Ledger:
Poverty in New Jersey continued to grow even as the national recession lifted, reaching a 52-year high in 2011, according to a report released today.
The annual survey by Legal Services of New Jersey found 24.7 percent of the state’s population — 2.1 million residents — was considered poor in 2011. That’s a jump of more than 80,000 people — nearly 1 percent higher than the previous year and 3.8 percent more than pre-recession levels.
“This is not just a one-year or five-year or 10-year variation,” said Melville D. Miller Jr., the president of LSNJ, which gives free legal help to low-income residents in civil cases. “This is the worst that it’s been since the 1960 Census.”
And it may get worse: The report warned Census figures for 2012 to be released this month may be higher. Those numbers are expected to show some of the impact from Hurricane Sandy, which took a bite out of the state’s economy and destroyed a large amount of affordable housing.
Computer Program Uses Twitter to ‘Map Mood of Nation’
September 7th, 2013Via: BBC:
British scientists have developed a computer program they say can map the mood of the nation using Twitter.
Named Emotive, it works by accessing the emotional content of postings on the social networking site.
The team, from Loughborough University, say it can scan up to 2,000 tweets a second and rate them for expressions of one of eight human emotions.
They claim Emotive could help calm civil unrest and identify early threats to public safety.
More than 500 million people across the world use Twitter, and more than 340 million tweets are posted daily.
The team, from the university’s new Centre for Information Management, say the system can extract a direct expression of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, shame and confusion from each tweet.
The academics said that using the Emotive software to geographically evaluate any mass mood could help police to track potential criminal behaviour or threats to public safety.
It may be able to guide national policy on the best way to react to major incidents, they added.
Related: Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation
Is NSA Dropping Its Own Versions of Open Source Encryption Software Onto the Wire As We Download Them?
September 7th, 2013Hijacking the stream and substituting the content?
Trivial. I used to do this for fun on wi-fi networks last decade. Definitely trivial.
But what I don’t get is how the downloads would pass hash checks?
For example, you can check GPG’s SHA-1 values here.
What’s SHA-1, you ask?
In cryptography, SHA-1 is a cryptographic hash function designed by the United States National Security Agency and published by the United States NIST as a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard.
…
In 2005, cryptanalysts found attacks on SHA-1 suggesting that the algorithm might not be secure enough for ongoing use. NIST required many applications in federal agencies to move to SHA-2 after 2010 because of the weakness.
Oh.
Via: Bruce Schneier:
How Far • September 5, 2013 4:22 PM
Could the NSA be intercepting downloads of open-source encryption software and silently replacing these with their own versions? Is there any way to detect such interference had the NSA enough control over communications channels to automatically replace binaries and published hash lists?
Bruce Schneier • September 5, 2013 4:35 PM
“Could the NSA be intercepting downloads of open-source encryption software and silently replacing these with their own versions?”
Yes, I believe so.
John Gilmore on NSA Meddling in Cryptography Standards
September 7th, 2013Via: Cryptography Mailing List:
To this day, no mobile telephone standards committee has considered or adopted any end-to-end (phone-to-phone) privacy protocols. This is because the big companies involved, huge telcos, are all in bed with NSA to make damn sure that working end-to-end encryption never becomes the default on mobile phones.
Wikipedia: John Gilmore
Is British Government Decrypting Data Encrypted with TrueCrypt from Hard Drive David Miranda Was Carrying?
September 7th, 2013I did a double take while reading this Reuters article about the Snowden material:
Miranda was held and questioned for nine hours before being allowed to resume his trip from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, where he and Greenwald live. Greenwald has said that Miranda had carried Snowden related material from him in Brazil to Laura Poitras in Berlin, an American film-maker who has also met with Snowden, and that Miranda was carrying Snowden-related materials which Poitras gave to him back to Greenwald.
In her witness statement submitted to the British court on Friday, Detective Superintendent Caroline Goode, who said she was in charge of Scotland Yard’s Snowden-related investigation, said that among materials officials had seized from Miranda while detaining him was an “external hard drive” containing data encrypted by a system called “True Crypt,” which Goode said “renders the material extremely difficult to access.”
Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data, “of which only 20 have been accessed to date.” She said that she had been advised that the hard drive contains “approximately 58,000 UK documents which are highly classified in nature, to the highest level.”
Goode said the process to decode the material was complex and that “so far only 75 documents have been reconstructed since the property was initially received.”
It would be very nice to know what that part above in bold means.
“Reconstructed”
What does Goode mean when she says, “So far only 75 documents have been reconstructed”? Is the use of the word reconstructed layperson speak for cryptanalyzed?
In other words, are the 75 clear text documents referenced above the product of cryptanalysis or some other computer forensic process?
It would also be very nice to know which TrueCrypt encryption settings (encryption algorithm/s, bit strength/s) were were used on that drive.
The issue is further confused by an Ars Technica piece which indicates, on the one hand, that Miranda was carrying written procedures (and passwords???) for accessing the information, but on the other hand:
“Anyone claiming that David Miranda was carrying a password that allowed access to documents is lying. UK itself says they can’t access them,” Greenwald wrote on Twitter. In another tweet, he wrote, “Good encryption requires multiple passwords, not just one. That pw allows no access to documents, period.”
Questions, questions.
Recovery: Americans Are Participating in the Workforce at the Lowest Level in 35 Years
September 7th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
Americans are participating in the workforce at the lowest level in 35 years, according to government data released Friday, as lackluster job growth fails to offset the droves of people who have given up looking for work.
According to the Labor Department, the economy added a disappointing 169,000 jobs in August. In addition, the government lowered its estimate of the number of jobs created in June and July by 74,000 positions.
The grinding pace of recovery has hollowed out the workforce. Government data showed that only 63.2 percent of working-age Americans have a job or are looking for one, the lowest proportion since 1978. Nearly 90 million people are now considered out of the labor force, up 1.7 million from August 2012.
