March 2013 - cypherpunks-legacy

[hackerspaces] Byzantium Linux v0.3a is out!
by Eugen Leitl 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

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Re: [ZS] In case you're wondering where I've been...
by Eugen Leitl 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

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You have been sent a file (Filename: Cypherpunks_N415174.pdf)
by Xanga 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

Sendspace File Delivery Notification:You've got a file called Cypherpunks_N270.pdf, (059.66 KB) waiting to be downloaded at sendspace.(It was sent by PEARLE ).You can use the following link to retrieve your file:Download Thank you,Sendspace, the best free file sharing service.

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Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We're Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets
by Eugen Leitl 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-was-just-a-pr… Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We're Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets POSTED: March 22, 10:53 AM ET U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning Alex Wong/Getty Images I went yesterday to a screening of We Steal Secrets, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's brilliant new documentary about Wikileaks. The movie is beautiful and profound, an incredible story that's about many things all at once, including the incredible Shakespearean narrative that is the life of Julian Assange, a free-information radical who has become an uncompromising guarder of secrets. I'll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secrets comes out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we're headed for a major confrontation between the government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode. We've seen the battle lines forming for years now. It's increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line. This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks b and especially the real subject of Gibney's film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an incredible act of institutional vengeance is being charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and could, theoretically, receive a death sentence. Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning? There's also the horrific case of Aaron Swartz, a genius who helped create the technology behind Reddit at the age of 14, who earlier this year hanged himself after the government threatened him with 35 years in jail for downloading a bunch of academic documents from an MIT server. Then there's the case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian computer programmer who allegedly stole the High-Frequency Trading program belonging to Goldman, Sachs (Aleynikov worked at Goldman), a program which prosecutors in open court admitted could, "in the wrong hands," be used to "manipulate markets." Aleynikov spent a year in jail awaiting trial, was convicted, had his sentence overturned, was freed, and has since been re-arrested by a government seemingly determined to make an example out of him. The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz And most recently, there's the Matthew Keys case, in which a Reuters social media editor was charged by the government with conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to alter a Los Angeles Times headline in December 2010. The change in the headline? It ended up reading, "Pressure Builds in House to Elect CHIPPY 1337," Chippy being the name of another hacker group accused of defacing a video game publisher's website. Keys is charged with crimes that carry up to 25 years in prison, although the likelihood is that he'd face far less than that if convicted. Still, it seems like an insane amount of pressure to apply, given the other types of crimes (of, say, the HSBC variety) where stiff sentences haven't even been threatened, much less imposed. A common thread runs through all of these cases. On the one hand, the motivations for these information-stealers seem extremely diverse: You have people who appear to be primarily motivated by traditional whistleblower concerns (Manning, who never sought money and was obviously initially moved by the moral horror aroused by the material he was seeing, falls into that category for me), you have the merely mischievous (the Keys case seems to fall in this area), there are those who either claim to be or actually are free-information ideologues (Assange and Swartz seem more in this realm), and then there are other cases where the motive might have been money (Aleynikov, who was allegedly leaving Goldman to join a rival trading startup, might be among those). But in all of these cases, the government pursued maximum punishments and generally took zero-tolerance approaches to plea negotiations. These prosecutions reflected an obvious institutional terror of letting the public see the sausage-factory locked behind the closed doors not only of the state, but of banks and universities and other such institutional pillars of society. As Gibney pointed out in his movie, this is a Wizard of Oz moment, where we are being warned not to look behind the curtain. What will we find out? We already know that our armies mass-murder women and children in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, that our soldiers joke about smoldering bodies from the safety of gunships, that some of our closest diplomatic allies starve and repress their own citizens, and we may even have gotten a glimpse or two of a banking system that uses computerized insider trading programs to steal from everyone who has an IRA or a mutual fund or any stock at all by manipulating markets like the NYSE. These fervent, desperate prosecutions suggest that there's more awfulness under there, things that are worse, and there is a determination to not let us see what those things are. Most recently, we've seen that determination in the furor over Barack Obama's drone assassination program and the so-called "kill list" that is associated with it. Weeks ago, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul b whom I've previously railed against as one of the biggest self-aggrandizing jackasses in politics b pulled a widely-derided but, I think, absolutely righteous Frank Capra act on the Senate floor, executing a one-man filibuster of Obama's CIA nominee, John Brennan. Paul had been mortified when he received a letter from Eric Holder refusing to rule out drone strikes on American soil in "extraordinary" circumstances like a 9/11 or a Pearl Harbor. Paul refused to yield until he extracted a guarantee that no American could be assassinated by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime. He got his guarantee, but the way the thing is written doesn't fill one with anything like confidence. Eric Holder's letter to Paul reads like the legal disclaimer on a pack of unfiltered cigarettes: Dear Senator Paul, It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: "Does the president have the additional authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer is no. Sincerely, Eric Holder You could drive a convoy of tanker trucks through the loopholes in that letter. Not to worry, though, this past week, word has come out via Congress b the White House won't tell us anything b that no Americans are on its infamous kill list. The National Journal's report on this story offered a similarly comical sort of non-reassurance: The White House has wrapped its kill list in secrecy and already the United States has killed four Americans in drone strikes. Only one of them, senior al-Qaida operative Anwar al-Awlaki, was the intended target, according to U.S. officials. The others b including Awlaki's teenage son b were collateral damage, killed because they were too near a person being targeted. But no more Americans are in line for such killings b at least not yet. "There is no list where Americans are on the list," House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers told National Journal. Still, he suggested, that could change. "There is no list where Americans are on the list" b even the language used here sounds like a cheap Orwell knockoff (although, to be fair, so does V for Vendetta, which has unfortunately provided the model for the modern protest aesthetic). It's not an accident that so much of this story is starting to sound like farce. The idea that we have to beg and plead and pull Capra-esque stunts in the Senate just to find out whether or not our government has "asserted the legal authority" (this preposterous phrase is beginning to leak into news coverage with alarming regularity) to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without trial would be laughable, were it not for the obvious fact that such lines are in danger of really being crossed, if they haven't been crossed already. This morning, an Emory University law professor named Mary Dudziak wrote an op-ed in the Times in which she pointed out several disturbing aspects to the drone-attack policy. It's bad enough, she writes, that the Obama administration is considering moving the program from the CIA to the Defense Department. (Which, Dudziak notes, "would do nothing to confer legitimacy to the drone strikes. The legitimacy problem comes from the secrecy itself b not which entity secretly does the killing.") It's even worse that the administration is citing Nixon's infamous bombing of Cambodia as part of its legal precedent. But beyond that, Obama's lawyers used bad information in their white paper: On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page "white paper," Justice Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international law does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield. They cited as historical authority a speech given May 28, 1970, by John R. Stevenson, then the top lawyer for the State Department, following the United States' invasion of Cambodia. Since 1965, "the territory of Cambodia has been used by North Vietnam as a base of military operations," he told the New York City Bar Association. "It long ago reached a level that would have justified us in taking appropriate measures of self-defense on the territory of Cambodia. However, except for scattered instances of returning fire across the border, we refrained until April from taking such action in Cambodia." But, Dudziak notes, there is a catch: In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more than a year earlier. (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson knew this.) So the Obama administration's lawyers have cited a statement that was patently false. Now, this "white paper" of Obama's is already of dubious legality at best. The idea that the President can simply write a paper expanding presidential power into extralegal assassination without asking the explicit permission of, well, somebody, anyway, is absurd from the start. Now you add to that the complication of the paper being based in part on some half-assed, hastily-cobbled-together, factually lacking precedent, and the Obama drone-attack rationale becomes like all rationales of blunt-force, repressive power ever written b plainly ridiculous, the stuff of bad comedy, like the Russian military superpower invading tiny South Ossetia cloaked in hysterical claims of self-defense. Why Rand Paul's Filibuster Matters The Wikileaks episode was just an early preview of the inevitable confrontation between the citizens of the industrialized world and the giant, increasingly secretive bureaucracies that support them. As some of Gibney's interview subjects point out in his movie, the experts in this field, the people who worked on information security in the Pentagon and the CIA, have known for a long time that the day would come when all of our digitized secrets would spill out somewhere. But the secret-keepers got lucky with Wikileaks. They successfully turned the story into one about Julian Assange and his personal failings, and headed off the confrontation with the major news organizations that were, for a time, his allies. But that was just a temporary reprieve. The secrets are out there and everyone from hackers to journalists to U.S. senators are digging in search of them. Sooner or later, there's going to be a pitched battle, one where the state won't be able to peel off one lone Julian Assange or Bradley Manning and batter him into nothingness. Next time around, it'll be a Pentagon Papers-style constitutional crisis, where the public's legitimate right to know will be pitted head-to-head with presidents, generals and CEOs. My suspicion is that this story will turn out to be less of a simplistic narrative about Orwellian repression than a mortifying journey of self-discovery. There are all sorts of things we both know and don't know about the processes that keep our society running. We know children in Asia are being beaten to keep our sneakers and furniture cheap, we know our access to oil and other raw materials is being secured only by the cooperation of corrupt and vicious dictators, and we've also known for a while now that the anti-terror program they say we need to keep our airports and reservoirs safe involves mass campaigns of extralegal detention and assassination. We haven't had to openly ratify any of these policies because the secret-keepers have done us the favor of making these awful moral choices for us. But the stink is rising to the surface. It's all coming out. And when it isn't Julian Assange the next time but The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian standing in the line of fire, the state will probably lose, just as it lost in the Pentagon Papers case, because those organizations will be careful to only publish materials clearly in the public interest b there's no conceivable legal justification for keeping us from knowing the policies of our own country (although stranger things have happened). When that happens, we'll be left standing face-to-face with the reality of how our state functions. Do we want to do that? We still haven't taken a very close look at even the Bradley Manning material, and my guess is because we just don't want to. There were thousands of outrages in those files, any one of which would have a caused a My-Lai-style uproar decades ago. Did you hear the one about how American troops murdered four women and five children in Iraq in 2006, including a woman over 70 and an infant under five months old, with all the kids under five? All of them were handcuffed and shot in the head. We later called in an airstrike to cover it up, apparently. But it barely registered a blip on the American consciousness. What if it we're forced to look at all of this for real next time, and what if it turns out we can't accept it? What if murder and corruption is what's holding it all together? I personally don't believe that's true b I believe it all needs to come out and we need to rethink everything together, and we can find a less totally evil way of living b but this is going to be the implicit argument from the secret-keeping side when this inevitable confrontation comes. They will say to us, in essence, "It's the only way. And you don't want to know." And a lot of us won't. It's fascinating, profound stuff. We don't want to know, but increasingly it seems we can't not know, either. Sooner or later, something is going to have to give. Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-was-just-a-pr… Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

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Re: [liberationtech] Privacy, data protection questions
by Eugen Leitl 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

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Re: [liberationtech] What's wrong with the kids these days? - On the moral decay of the Dutch hacker scene
by Eugen Leitl 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

----- Forwarded message from Shava Nerad <shava23(a)gmail.com> -----

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by "Инвестиции в мобильные технологии!" 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

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Neuroimaging 'biomarker' linked to rearrest after incarceration.
by Eugen Leitl 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

http://www.nature.com/news/brain-scans-predict-which-criminals-are-more-lik… Brain scans predict which criminals are more likely to reoffend Neuroimaging 'biomarker' linked to rearrest after incarceration. Regina Nuzzo 25 March 2013 Activity in a particular region of the cortex could tell whether a convict is likely to get in trouble again. DOUG MENUEZ/GETTY In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner. Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the non-profit Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his collaborators studied a group of 96 male prisoners just before their release. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the prisonersb brains during computer tasks in which subjects had to make quick decisions and inhibit impulsive reactions. The scans focused on activity in a section of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a small region in the front of the brain involved in motor control and executive functioning. The researchers then followed the ex-convicts for four years to see how they fared. Among the subjects of the study, men who had lower ACC activity during the quick-decision tasks were more likely to be arrested again after getting out of prison, even after the researchers accounted for other risk factors such as age, drug and alcohol abuse and psychopathic traits. Men who were in the lower half of the ACC activity ranking had a 2.6-fold higher rate of rearrest for all crimes and a 4.3-fold higher rate for nonviolent crimes. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. There is growing interest in using neuroimaging to predict specific behaviour, says Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He says that studies such as this one, which tie brain imaging to concrete clinical outcomes, b provide a new and so far very promising wayb to find patterns of brain activity that have broader implications for society. But the authors themselves stress that much more work is needed to prove that the technique is reliable and consistent, and that it is likely to flag only the truly high-risk felons and leave the low-risk ones alone. b This isn't ready for prime time,b says Kiehl. Wager adds that the part of the ACC examined in this study b is one of the most frequently activated areas in the human brain across all kinds of tasks and psychological statesb. Low ACC activity could have a variety of causes b impulsivity, caffeine use, vascular health, low motivation or better neural efficiency b and not all of these are necessarily related to criminal behaviour. Crime prediction was the subject of Dick's 1956 short story b The Minority Reportb (adapted for the silver screen by Steven Spielberg in 2002), which highlighted the thorny ethics of arresting people for crimes they had yet to commit. Brain scans are of course a far cry from the clairvoyants featured in that science-fiction story. But even if the science turns out to be reliable, the legal and social implications remain to be explored, the authors warn. Perhaps the most appropriate use for neurobiological markers would be for helping to make low-stakes decisions, such as which rehabilitation treatment to assign a prisoner, rather than high-stakes ones such as sentencing or releasing on parole. b A treatment of [these clinical neuroimaging studies] that is either too glibly enthusiastic or over-critical,b Wager says, b will be damaging for this emerging science in the long run.b Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12672 References Aharoni, E. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1219302110 (2013). Yarkoni, T., Poldrack, R. A., Nichols, T. E., Van Essen, D. C. & Wager, T. D. Nature Methods 8, 665b670 (2011).

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FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013
by Eugen Leitl 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/03/26/andrew_weissmann_fbi_wan… FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as b Top Priorityb for 2013 By Ryan Gallagher | Posted Tuesday, March 26, 2013, at 4:58 PM For now, law enforcement has trouble monitoring Gmail communications in real time Image courtesy Google Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a b top priorityb this year. Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. He gave a few updates on the FBIbs efforts to address what it calls the b going darkb problembhow the rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted. Itbs no secret that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the feds can easily obtain archive copies of emails. When it comes to spying on emails or Gchat in real time, however, itbs a different story. Thatbs because a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act only allows the government to force Internet providers and phone companies to install surveillance equipment within their networks. But it doesnbt cover email, cloud services, or online chat providers like Skype. Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (b the chat feature in Scrabbleb) to Gmail and Google Voice. b Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,b he said. While it is true that CALEA can only be used to compel Internet and phone providers to build in surveillance capabilities into their networks, the feds do have some existing powers to request surveillance of other services. Authorities can use a b Title IIIb order under the b Wiretap Actb to ask email and online chat providers furnish the government with b technical assistance necessary to accomplish the interception.b However, the FBI claims this is not sufficient because mandating that providers help with b technical assistanceb is not the same thing as forcing them to b effectuateb a wiretap. In 2011, then-FBI general counsel Valerie CapronibWeissmannbs predecessorbstated that Title III orders did not provide the bureau with an "effective lever" to "encourage providers" to set up live surveillance quickly and efficiently. In other words, the FBI believes it doesnbt have enough power under current legislation to strong-arm companies into providing real-time wiretaps of communications. Because Gmail is sent between a userbs computer and Googlebs servers using SSL encryption, for instance, the FBI canbt intercept it as it is flowing across networks and relies on the company to provide it with access. Google spokesman Chris Gaither hinted that it is already possible for the company to set up live surveillance under some circumstances. b CALEA doesn't apply to Gmail but an order under the Wiretap Act may,b Gaither told me in an email. b At some point we may expand our transparency report to cover this topic in more depth, but until then I'm not able to provide additional information.b Either way, the FBI is not happy with the current arrangement and is on a crusade for more surveillance authority. According to Weissmann, the bureau is working with b members of intelligence communityb to craft a proposal for new Internet spy powers as b a top priority this year.b Citing security concerns, he declined to reveal any specifics. b It's a very hard thing to talk about publicly,b he said, though acknowledged that b it's something that there should be a public debate about.b

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Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility
by Eugen Leitl 27 Mar '13

27 Mar '13

(full text available on site) http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/full/srep01376.html Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Cisar A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen & Vincent D. Blondel Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 1376 doi:10.1038/srep01376 Received 01 October 2012 Accepted 04 February 2013 Published 25 March 2013 We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals. Subject terms: Applied mathematicsComputational scienceStatisticsApplied physics

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