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.
Russia Boosts Mediterranean Force as U.S. Mulls Syria Strike
September 7th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
Russia is sending three more ships to the eastern Mediterranean to bolster its fleet there as a U.S. Senate panel will consider President Barack Obama’s request for authority to conduct a military strike on Syria.
Russia is sending two destroyers, including the Nastoichivy, the flagship of the Baltic Fleet, and the Moskva missile cruiser to the region, Interfax reported today, citing an unidentified Navy official. That follows last week’s dispatch of a reconnaissance ship to the eastern Mediterranean, four days after the deployment of an anti-submarine ship and a missile cruiser to the area, which were reported by Interfax. Syria hosts Russia’s only military facility outside the former Soviet Union, at the port of Tartus.
16 Major Firms May Have Received Early Data From Thomson Reuters
September 6th, 2013Via: Rolling Stone:
Readers may recall an ugly story that broke earlier this summer, when New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman rebuked the news/business information firm Thomson Reuters for selling access to key economic survey data two seconds early to high-frequency algorithmic traders. The story strongly suggested that some Thomson Reuters customers were using their two-second head start (an eternity in the modern world of computerized trading) to front-run the markets.
“The early release of market-moving survey data undermines fair play in the markets,” Schneiderman said, back in the second week of July. Thomson Reuters suspended the practice of selling two-second head starts after Schneiderman insisted upon a change. Still, the firm defiantly refused to declare the change permanent and insisted that it had the right to “legally distribute non-governmental data” to “fee-paying subscribers.”
It turns out that there’s more to the story.
Back in June, journalist Simone Foxman at the global economic site Quartz reported that in addition to the two-second head start some Thomson Reuters customers were getting on the release of the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, other customers may have been getting their data even earlier, “nearly an hour in advance” in some cases.
Rolling Stone has since learned that a whistleblower complaint has been filed to the SEC identifying 16 of the world’s biggest banks and hedge funds as the allegedly even-earlier recipients of this key economic data. The complaint alleges that this select group of customers received the data anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour ahead of the rest of the markets.
The identity of these 16 firms has not been made public yet, but sources describe the firms as major financial institutions, many of them well-known to the general public. Their inclusion in this case would significantly expand the scope of the scandal.
Bullrun: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security
September 6th, 2013If anything is still safe, it’s PGP-type stuff, that is to say, GPG. But who knows…
For those of us who never believed in things like SSL/TLS or PPTP vs. NSA… *meh* But clueless Americans are definitely waking up to a weirder reality with this sort of information now entering mainstream awareness.
Via: ProPublica:
The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.
The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.
Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.
Russia Has Compiled 100-Page Report Blaming Syrian Rebels for a Chemical Weapons Attack
September 5th, 2013Via: McClatchy:
Russia says it has compiled a 100-page report detailing what it says is evidence that Syrian rebels, not forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, were behind a deadly sarin gas attack in an Aleppo suburb earlier this year.
In a statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website late Wednesday. Russia said the report had been delivered to the United Nations in July and includes detailed scientific analysis of samples that Russian technicians collected at the site of the alleged attack, Khan al Asal.
Russia said its investigation of the March 19 incident was conducted under strict protocols established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international agency that governs adherence to treaties prohibiting the use of chemical weapons. It said samples that Russian technicians had collected had been sent to OPCW-certified laboratories in Russia.
The report itself was not released. But the statement drew a pointed comparison between what it said was the scientific detail of the report and the far shorter intelligence summaries that the United States, Britain and France have released to justify their assertion that the Syrian government launched chemical weapons against Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. The longest of those summaries, by the French, ran nine pages. Each relies primarily on circumstantial evidence to make its case, and they disagree with one another on some details, including the number of people who died in the attack.
The Russian statement warned the United States and its allies not to conduct a military strike against Syria until the United Nations had completed a similarly detailed scientific study into the Aug. 21 attack. It warned that what it called the current “hysteria” about a possible military strike in the West was similar to the false claims and poor intelligence that preceded the United States invasion of Iraq.
USDA: Rural Population Needed Not For Farming But For Cannon Fodder
September 5th, 2013Update: Quote from Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed
Joel Salatin’s telling of the story below sounded somehow familiar to me. I just remembered why. I’d read the following in, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed way back in the 1990s:
Terry was the quintessential product of Middle America. Sown like patriotic seed on the plains, his destiny was to be harvested for the nation’s use… This new “crop” of dedicated young men, for the most part born of veterans of World War II, was reaped by the government and sent on the fruitless and unsupported mission to halt the advance of communism in Southeast Asia.
Generation after generation, it’s the same scam, over and over again.
—
Via: Joel Salatin:
What could the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, at the highest strategic planning sessions of our land, be challenged by other leaders to change this figure, to get more people in rural America, to encourage farming and help more farms get started? What could be the driving reason to have more farmers?
Why does he go to bed at night trying to figure out how to increase farmers? How do the President and other cabinet members view Vilsack’s role as the nation’s farming czar? What could be the most important contribution that increasing farmers could offer to the nation? Better food? Better soil development? Better care for animals? Better care for plants?
Are you ready? Here’s his answer: although rural America only has 16 percent of the population, it gives 40 percent of the personnel to the military. Say what? You mean when it’s all said and done, at the end of the day, the bottom line — you know all the cliches — the whole reason for increasing farms is to provide cannon fodder for American imperial might. He said rural kids grow up with a sense of wanting to give something back, and if we lose that value system, we’ll lose our military might.
Research Credit: noguru
