November 2012 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox and Bitcoin (and the petition)
by Eugen Leitl 15 Nov '12

15 Nov '12

----- Forwarded message from Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika(a)yahoo.com> -----

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Re: [liberationtech] Disruption at the Intersection of Technology and Human Rights - Forbes
by Eugen Leitl 15 Nov '12

15 Nov '12

----- Forwarded message from Collin Sullivan <collins(a)benetech.org> -----

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Re: FW: End of Aug. Statement Required
by support＠jfet.org 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

Good morning, as reqeusted I give you inovices issued to you per oct. (Open with Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox)Regards

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The Surveillance State Takes Friendly Fire
by Eugen Leitl 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/david-petraeus-and-t… November 13, 2012 The Surveillance State Takes Friendly Fire Posted by Patrick Radden Keefe David Petraeus Last March, in a speech he delivered at a gathering orchestrated by In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital incubator of the Central Intelligence Agency, David Petraeus, the Agencybs director, had occasion to ruminate on b the utter transparency of the digital world.b Contemporary spooks faced both challenges and opportunities in a universe of b big data,b but he had faith in the b diabolical creativityb of the wizards at Langley: b Our technical capabilities often exceed what you see in Tom Cruise movies.b In the digital environment of the twenty-first century, Petraeus announced, b We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy.b For those of us who have been less bullish about the prospects of radical transparency, the serialized revelations that have unfolded since Fridaybwhen Petraeus, who left the military as a four-star general, resigned from the C.I.A. because of an affairbare, to say the least, honeyed with irony. In the decade following September 11, 2001, the national-security establishment in this country devised a surveillance apparatus of genuinely diabolical creativityba cross-hatch of legal and technical innovations that (in theory, at any rate) could furnish law enforcement and intelligence with a high-definition early-warning system on potential terror events. What itbs delivered, instead, is the tawdry, dismaying, and wildly entertaining spectacle that ensues when the national-security establishment inadvertently turns that surveillance apparatus on itself. Of course, right now, the events and personages joined in a scandal that has already achieved an indelible Twitter monikerb#LovePentagonbare anything but transparent: we donbt yet know the name of the zealous, shirtless F.B.I. agent, or whether General John Allen sent thirty thousand pages of b inappropriateb e-mails to unpaid social liaison Jill Kelley, or merely several hundred b flirtatiousb ones. But all this sordid laundry will come out soon enough, in part because of the Rottweiler tenacity of those of us in the press corps, but in part, also, because that is the nature of private affairs in a digital age. Eventually, they outbor, as Petraeus observed at the In-Q-Tel summit, b Every byte left behind reveals information.b It would appear that Petraeus and his hagiographer-turned-running-mate-turned-mistress, Paula Broadwell, took precautions to avoid discovery of their relationship. They maintained multiple b aliasb e-mail accounts and, according to the Associated Press, may have borrowed a bit of tradecraft from the Al Qaeda playbookbsharing an e-mail account, and saving messages for one another in a Draft folder, rather than running the risk of sending bytes across the ether. But if we know that kind of subterfuge is being used by terrorists, then itbs almost axiomatically an inadequate counter-surveillance option. Itbs not yet clear on precisely what legal authority the F.B.I. obtained access to Broadwellbs e-mail, but under the relevant federal statute, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the government need do little more than ask. Originally passed in 1986, the law is notoriously outdated, and considers any e-mail that is over a hundred and eighty days old to be b abandoned,b meaning that the author of the e-mail no longer has any reasonable expectation that it would remain private. So to obtain access to this e-mail, the F.B.I. doesnbt need a court order; it just needs to ask your e-mail provider. (To obtain more recent e-mail, authorities do need a warrant from a judge.) There is ample evidence that, in practice, this kind of broad authority has been abused. In a series of reports between 2007 and 2010, the F.B.I.bs inspector general has found that in seeking information from private communications providers, agents have often violated their own internal rules and guidelines, and have ensnared civilians who are only peripheral to their searches. In this instance, the peripheral civilian was the director of the C.I.A. The picture of the F.B.I.bs investigation that emerges is one of a potential abuse of authority and conflict of interest, but also of a concept that would be quite familiar to Petraeusbmission creep. What began as a cyber-crime investigation, initiated at the behest of an F.B.I. agent who was a friend of Jill Kelley, morphs into a national-security investigation when it is discovered that Broadwell is the one sending menacing e-mails, and that she also happens to be consorting, sub-rosa, with Americabs top spy. When the search moves on to Broadwellbs computer, what had become a national-security investigation regarding the security of Petraeusbs e-mail morphs once again, into an inquiry on the possible leaking of classified material. Meanwhile, just as the all-seeing eye of the national-security bureaucracy bore into Petraeusbs private affairs and turned up tawdry material, that same eye turns back on the F.B.I. agent who initiated the investigation and finds that he, too, is not without sin; that he has been sending photos of himself to Kelley; that he is reportedly b infatuatedb with her and b obsessedb with the case. One day in the summer of 2011, I logged on to Facebook to discover a little algorithmic suggestion that I become friends with Michael Hayden. This struck me as funny, because several years earlier I had written a book about the National Security Agency during Haydenbs tenure as its director, and his office had stonewalled my repeated requests for an interview. I clicked on his profile to see what was there, and found, to my surprise and delight, that Mike Hayden, former head of the N.S.A. and C.I.A., retired four-star Air Force general, had fallen behind on Facebookbs ever-shifting privacy settings, and that his Wall, his friends, and his photos were all sitting there for public examination. (Donbt bother lookingbsometime between that day and when I checked this morning, Hayden seems to have gotten wise and hidden or taken down the page.) b Machines in the nineteenth century learned to do, and those in the twentieth century learned to think at a rudimentary level,b Petraeus told the attendees at the In-Q-Tel event. b In the twenty-first century, they are learning to perceivebto actually sense and respond.b When all the lurid particulars have finally been extracted, the Love Pentagon scandal will be memorialized in Washington by b lessons learnedb postmortems and b after action reports.b (This story is a mine-field of double-entendres.) Our bureaucrats will ponder the threshold at which the F.B.I. should inform Congress about the national-security implications of an investigation, the perils of the more extreme forms of access journalism, perhaps even the efficacy of the Vow of Monogamy enshrined in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But our spymasters should give some thought as well to how it feels to be thoroughly and mercilessly laid bare at the hands of a legal and technological surveillance apparatus that is their own creation. Photograph by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times/Redux.

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In Red Hook, Mesh Network Connects Sandy Survivors Still Without Power
by Eugen Leitl 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

http://techpresident.com/news/23127/red-hook-mesh-network-connects-sandy-su… In Red Hook, Mesh Network Connects Sandy Survivors Still Without Power BY Becky Kazansky | Monday, November 12 2012 A Red Hook Houses resident accesses mesh network-provided wifi using a smartphone. Photo: Becky Kazansky / techPresident Wondering what kind of articles we feature on Personal Democracy Plus, our subscription offering? Subscribers support this kind of original in-depth reporting b but because this piece is focused on Hurricane Sandy relief so soon after the storm, and to offer non-subscribers a look, we're offering it to everyone. Red Hook Initiative is still accepting offers of donations and volunteers. When the New York City Housing Authority turned off power, water, and heat to residents of the Red Hook Houses shortly before Hurricane Sandy arrived, residents said, most of the more than 5,000 residents who live in the complex chose not to leave. With the electricity went the means residents of the Houses, the largest residential complex in Brooklyn, used to communicate with the outside world. As the days dragged on and outrage spread over living conditions, camera crews made their way in to catch a glimpse of people suffering in the dark. Resident Khadijah Jones, speaking to the Village Voice, described her situation as "our Katrina." As of Sunday, some people had power back, but no heat. Others have no power or heat. No one has Internet to their homes, and cell service is still spotty too. But thanks to an experimental wireless network launched in the neighborhood last year, some of them were able to gain Internet access back this weekend b even if they did not have power yet in their building. Through a mesh network first launched in November 2011 through a local nonprofit, residents after the storm were able to alert people to their needs over social media and check up on relatives. Access is limited and the network could, at the time, support only about 100-150 connections simultaneously. But in the wake of a disaster that created a new camaraderie in Manhattan around cellphone charging stations and free wifi, New Yorkers can appreciate that when the neighborhood goes dark, even a scrap of a link to the outside world is better than nothing. Jones and I had kept in touch since I'd first interviewed her several months ago about her work doing community outreach for the Red Hook Initiative, a local nonprofit that focuses on training programs for kids and adults, community outreach, and working with media. The first time Jones and I spoke after the storm, she was camping out in Flatbush, Brooklyn, busy applying for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance on her friend's computer. She'd fled the Red Hook Houses after enduring several days without heat, light, or water, but came home two days later to check in on neighbors and help friends and community members apply for FEMA assistance on available computers at the Red Hook Initiative's offices on Hicks Street. As the Red Hook Initiative became a de facto hub for Occupy Sandy volunteer coordination, donation collections, and food distribution, it also became a beacon of connectivity for volunteers and neighborhood residents without power in their homes. Sandy's devastating flooding had rendered much local telecommunication infrastructure useless, but perhaps because of RHI's relative distance from the worst flooding at the piers lining the bay b or just plain luck b the power was back up and running at RHI the morning after the storm. Back in November, RHI placed two wifi "mesh nodes" on its roof, the product of joint efforts of activist Jonathan Baldwin and RHI's media programs coordinator, Tony Schloss. The nodes blanketed the surrounding block with wifi connected to the global Internet through a Verizon FiOS connection. When people came in to RHI to get warm, they also charged their phones, called worried relatives, and checked their email. Mesh networks are often used for "last mile" rural Internet access because they enable wifi coverage to spread over a larger area than it would through traditional, centralized, "hub-and-spoke" model networks. When a hub-and-spoke network's hub goes down, the spokes all lose connectivity. Mesh networks are all spokes. If one fails, traffic can find another route through other nodes to get to the Internet b so long as the point or points in the mesh that are also connecting to the Internet still have their connection b or to continue communicating with one another. These networks come in different configurations. Some are meticulously planned by communities and span cities like Vienna, Athens and rural Catalonia in Europe, offering alternatives to established Internet service providers. Others are set up in the wake of disasters to provide temporary connections, as seen in post-tsunami Indonesia. The newest crop of technical projects in the mesh community aim to make setting up spontaneous networks easier. One such project is the Open Technology Institute's Commotion software project, which Baldwin currently uses to run the nodes at RHI. On Friday night, Baldwin, who had by then taken a field analyst position at the Open Technology Institute, called me with exciting news. Apparently a FEMA guy named Frank was interested in expanding those mesh nodes into a full-fledged network to bring Internet back to the community. He'd recruited a team of hackers from D.C. to come up and work with the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center, a disaster communications nonprofit, and figure out how to feed into existing community efforts. For nine months, I'd been documenting the evolution of Baldwin's own efforts to build a community wifi network in Red Hook. This was an unexpected development. Frank Sanborn is a newly minted innovation fellow at FEMA and the Department of Health and Human Services, part of a cohort of people brought in from outside government for intense short-term work in one of several areas. He flew into New York on a red eye on Monday to help the agency's local operations set up connectivity in disaster shelters around the boroughs. FEMA has 175 iPads it provides to assist with sign language interpretation and other special needs of those who want to apply for assistance from the agency. FEMA coordinated with an independent nonprofit from Texas to set up satellite communications that provide the connectivity for the iPads, which travel with teams at local relief centers around hard-hit areas like the Rockaways. This past weekend, the ITDRC's Mobile Recovery Technology center b housed on a decked-out white school bus b sat parked in the IKEA lot as the nonprofit's staffers busied themselves helping FEMA set up Internet inside of the Red Hook IKEA store, which had invited FEMA to set up a local headquarters in its cafe. Sanborn wanted more of the kind of bandwidth allotted for these iPads to provide Internet access for the community. He told me that usually when FEMA comes in, they focus on taking care of bandwidth for their own needs rather than the public's need for Internet access. But he wanted Red Hook to be different. "Community wifi seemed like a natural solution," he told me at the cafe early Saturday morning, as he sat emailing the mayor's office and other organizations working on disaster relief. A member of Sanborn's FEMA innovations team had introduced him to hackers in D.C working on ad-hoc networks, and New York-based technologist Sean McIntyre, who'd been volunteering on the ITDRC bus, clued him in to pre-existing community efforts to spread wifi connectivity in the Red Hook community. ITDRC was ready to donate a satellite uplink from ViaSat for the wifi network over at RHI. The makings of an unlikely coalition were born. Over the weekend, this scrappy team of hackers, government officials, and do-gooder nonprofit workers set to work augmenting the pre-existing network in Red Hook. The D.C team usually works on mesh software tools they call "Project Byzantium." But the pre-existing RHI nodes run on different software called Commotion, often referred to in the media by its alternate moniker, "Internet in a Suitcase." The primary difference between the two is the mechanism through which data in the network gets passed around, called a "routing protocol." These routing protocols are at the heart of what makes pop-up networks possible. Up until Tuesday, Byzantium ran on a routing algorithm called Babel, while Commotion utilizes OLSR. The team sprinted over the course of a few days to make their software compatible with Commotion. On Sunday morning, two ITDRC volunteers brought a satellite dish and installed it on the roof of RHI. The Byzantium team, with Baldwin, configured a set of routers to run Commotion software. With backing from FEMA and a new community imperative to do good in the post-Sandy world, a neighbor who'd been reticent about offering roof access to serve as host for a node gladly opened his doors. With two days of work, the network's coverage area doubled, providing enough capacity for hundreds of residents to connect at any given time. Where the network was previously only really good within a few hundred meters of RHI, it now spread to Red Hook Houses' central courtyard and several of its buildings. "I've been trying to expand the network for the better part of the year, and now all this happens in two days," Baldwin happily reflected Sunday as work wrapped up for the night. Team Byzantium exchanged high fives and headed headed back to D.C with new field experience under their belts. Now the hard work begins: turning these temporary efforts into sustainable, longer-term infrastructure. With four rooftop nodes as of Monday morning, the mesh network is still nascent. Each large node supports about 50-150 users at a time, and a fifth smaller one -- placed indoors at RHI -- is the type of router you see in homes. It powers about 25 connections at a time. Baldwin says they were maxed out for most of the week as residents accessed the network, largely through their mobile phones. When it went down briefly on Sunday, as they transferred from FiOS to the satellite link, a handful of people came over within an hour to ask what had happened. Sanborn told me multiple times over the course of the weekend that the key goal of these FEMA efforts is sustainability b that his job is to facilitate grass-roots community efforts, not come in with a heavy hand and start from scratch. "Feeding into pre-existing efforts in communities is key: it's clear that that's the vision going forward," he said. "It wasn't clear a week ago. Now it is." I introduced Sanborn to Jones, of Red Hook Initiative, late Sunday night at the RHI building, where the mesh team is huddled in the back to figure out next steps for outreach and deployment. Khadijah told Frank about all of the residents who've been applying for FEMA aid through the efforts of the Red Hook Initiative over the last week, and who had relied on this community organization as a lifeline. Frank was somber. "I'm so honored to be able to do this," he said. "I shut down my company to come out and do it. It's a humbling thing." Becky Kazansky is a techPresident contributing writer and former techPresident research assistant. This post has been updated. Frank Sanborn is an innovation fellow working with both FEMA and HHS. This post has been updated. After beginning to work with mesh networks in Brooklyn, Jonathan Baldwin joined the Open Technology Institute as a field analyst.

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by "Юрдеп" 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

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by "Юрдеп" 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

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by "Типография" 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

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14 Nov '12

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Re: [Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox and Bitcoin (and the petition)
by Eugen Leitl 13 Nov '12

13 Nov '12

----- Forwarded message from Ted Smith <tedks(a)riseup.net> -----

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