October 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

The Most Lethal Weapon Americans Faced in Iraq
by Eugen Leitl 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

(did you see the LEDs blink?) http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/the-most-lethal-weapon-americans-… October 18, 2013, 10:35 am Comment The Most Lethal Weapon Americans Faced in Iraq By JOHN ISMAY In the first part of this series, At War explored the various conventional weapons used by insurgents in Iraq, as evidenced by reports, called “storyboards,” written by United States forces detailing the contents of captured weapons caches. Often times these weapons had been considered obsolete before 2003. But they were well known to Western intelligence services and militaries. Today, we look at weapons that the American military could not have reasonably foreseen entering the fray, but that caused large numbers of casualties. These are the improvised weapons that were made by hand, or in small shops, and that, with one exception, were not made in industrial factories. Improvised Explosive Devices At the time these storyboards were written, improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, caused approximately 80 percent of all coalition casualties. « Page 1 of 27 » A network of insurgents financed, designed and manufactured these weapons. Skilled bomb makers worked in clandestine shops, and leaders of I.E.D. networks sent “bomb emplacers” to bury or hide their improvised bombs along routes American patrols were expected to take. Standard bomb-making equipment showed up again and again in the caches, including: multimeters for checking the electrical continuity in circuits; personal mobile radios for transmitting firing signals; switches to close circuits; electric blasting caps; detonating cord for when multiple charges were used. Earlier firing systems often employed a variety of radio-controlled features. Keyless entry fobs for automobiles, garage door openers, toy car controllers — these all provided parts for initiating bombs, at least until coalition electronic countermeasures made them almost completely ineffective. Other common articles took their place. Insurgents stripped timers from washing machines, or bought them by the hundreds from commercial sources. Motion sensors meant to open grocery store doors or to turn on security floodlights also found their way into bomb-maker supply bins. These devices could trip a switch and initiate an explosion when a soldier crossed their path. The first bomb emplacers, many of them uneducated youth, sometimes blew themselves up while connecting the basic components of their weapons: power source, switch and explosive charge. They were supposed to connect these parts with an open circuit, since connecting a closed circuit would send current to an electric blasting cap. If that happened, it usually meant instant death for the emplacer. To make bomb emplacement less catastrophically failure-prone, bomb makers searched for devices that could mechanically break the electric circuit. The washing machine timer was one that worked. All the emplacer had to do was wind it up before connecting the circuit and he would have a set amount of time to escape before the bomb was armed. The use of these timers showed an adaptive enemy who learned from his mistakes. Explosively Formed Penetrators and Iranian C4 The single most lethal weapon American forces faced in Iraq was the explosively formed penetrator, or E.F.P. Unlike other I.E.D. charges, E.F.P. warheads required some skilled milling as well as heavy presses to produce. Certain copper alloys were used as well, and analysis of their construction was used to pinpoint the manufacturers. What makes E.F.P.’s so deadly is that they form “slugs” at detonation that maintain their shape over distances of over 100 yards or more, traveling at speeds of nearly a mile per second. This allowed insurgent forces to hide these weapons far from the road, better camouflaging them and making them far more deadly. In some I.E.D. factories, American forces found E.F.P.’s camouflaged to look like trash or rocks. Much has been made of E.F.P.’s generally being “new Iranian weapons,” but that conflates two unrelated facts. First, E.F.P.’s technology was invented in the late 1930s by the oil industry to punch holes through the metal pipe in wells and into the rock outside. These are called oil well perforators or perforator guns. Any country engaged in oil field development has access to E.F.P.’s. Iran lists their domestically produced perforators for sale online. Second, militaries applied this technology to anti-armor weapons as early as World War II. (The United States military currently employs several weapons incorporating E.F.P. warheads, to include the M2 SLAM, the TOW-2B, and the M303 SOF Demolition Kit.) But they became known as Iranian weapons because American intelligence agencies reported that Iran passed E.F.P. technology to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which in turn passed E.F.P. kits to proxy groups fighting in Iraq. In the case of the Iraqi insurgent weapons, E.F.P.s arrived in kit form, and were hand-packed with plastic explosives by bomb makers in Iraq just before use. For their explosive charges, insurgents often turned to an Iranian copy of an American staple: C4, packaged nearly identically to the original 1.25-lb M112 blocks. (Of note, the American M112 blocks changed their markings slightly in 1996 once chemical tracers, called taggants, were added in accordance with federal law; Iranian M112 block markings mimic the pre-1996 markings.) According to an official with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, manufacturing C4 is not difficult for any nation capable of making industrial chemicals. Homemade Explosives Not long after the invasion, insurgents began mixing their own batches of explosives and using them against their American adversaries. At first, these mixtures were referred to simply as U.B.E. – unknown bulk explosive. Later, the term HME, for “homemade explosive,” came into wide use. As an agrarian society, Iraq had a nonstop demand for nitrated fertilizers — urea and ammonium nitrate being the most common. Ground urea, mixed with nitric acid, drained and dried, is a powerful explosive. Some caches held bags of hexamethylenetetranitramine, which when mixed with nitric acids produces a powerful explosive known as RDX. Still others combined ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel oil to create the same explosive Timothy McVeigh used to level the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Fertilizer plants, such as this one at Baiji, produced 500,000 tons of fertilizer per year. When homemade explosives first came into wide use in Iraq, American military officers initially thought it was a sign that the insurgents were running out of conventional or “military-grade,” munitions. That assumption had no basis in fact. What it did signal was that the enemy had realized that bulk explosives were more valuable and, in certain situations, more lethal. Experience showed that a large enough charge could destroy any armor, or at least wreak enough damage to cause casualties inside the targeted vehicle. In Afghanistan, homemade explosives became such a problem for NATO forces that President Hamid Karzai’s government banned ammonium nitrate in 2010. End State Although the last United States Army mission to destroy excess ordnance ended in November 2011, violence in Iraq has continued well past the withdrawal of the last American combat forces. According to the United Nations, nearly 1,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September alone, amid levels of violence last seen in 2008. Between 2003 and 2010, the State Department spent more than $200 million on destroying unexploded munitions in the country. Groups like Mines Advisory Group continue their work in Iraq as well. In July 2012, the State Department’s own Web site gives an idea of the challenges that lie ahead: In spite of progress, at least 719 square miles of land is still contaminated by as many as 20 million land mines and millions of pieces of unexploded ordnance. More than 1,600 municipalities are affected, as are huge swathes of farmland, meaning clearing those explosives will be an economic necessity. And as American forces discovered early in the insurgency — and which Iraqis know all too well — every weapon and every explosive that is not disposed of will eventually be put to destructive use by some faction. John Ismay is a former U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer who served in Iraq in 2007, and is now a member of Columbia Journalism School’s class of 2014. Follow him on Twitter (@johnismay) and on his blog johnismay.com.

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Wall Street is furious
by Jim Bell 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

See http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/jpmorgan-dimon-obama-settlement/2013/10/2… "Sunday's New York Post page one headline about JPMorgan's fine screamed "Uncle Scam" with the sub headline "U.S. Robs Bank of $13B." Wall Street went into a tizzy this weekend with the news that one of the nation's biggest banks agreed to fork over to the federal government $13 billion in fines related to its mortgage securities business. The Post quoted bank analyst Dick Bove of Rafferty Capital as saying the deal "is a basic and fundamental attack on capitalism." "It is possible that the government is taking away the property of the JPMorgan shareholders without the shareholders having committed any crime or having any say in the expropriation of these funds," Bove told the New York Post. The deal, announced Saturday, settles civil penalties with the U.S. Justice Department, but doesn't stop any potential criminal prosecution. The Federal Housing Finance Agency sued JPMorgan and 17 other banks for faulty mortgage bonds two years ago. Wall Street insiders were furious about the deal, noting that 80 percent of the mortgages being probed were actually acquired from the failing banks Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. JPMorgan reportedly took over the risky portfolio at the request of the U.S. government in the wake of the 2008-09 financial meltdown. ============ end of quote from article ================= If such a bank is willing to part with $13 billion to avoid (even more?) civil liability, wouldn't they be willing to pay $20 million or so to clog up the federal courts with criminal prosecutions and thus reduce those courts' ability to engage in civil actions as well? (See my "Denial of Disservice Attack") Jim Bell

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Re: SRF: crypticl (ii) addenda
by brian carroll 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

> in this way, while things could appear to /certainly/ be moving from A > to B, given a series of moves, in a more complex environment an > inversion could have taken place that recontextualizes the ground upon > which these events take place, and at a critical juncture, a decisive > moment could arrive where TRUTH=FALSITY i meant to convey that through this inversion the situation could actually be moving from B to A instead, though appear otherwise, and that it is the flipping or switching of the analytical grounding of this [signage] into other frameworks or circuitry that essentially shifts and transforms the perspective, recontextualizing it within different parameters, dimensions (also: the mismapping of events and skewing of statistics possible by manipulating the bounded belief systems can be a realm for exploits, hacking and cracking systems via false-frameworks and viewpoints believed to exist via surface pattern-matching and assumptions)

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Re: SRF: crypticl (ii)
by brian carroll 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

> Show me the man and I will find you the crime. here is an example of these dynamics... say you are living in a surveillance society ruled by a hidden and malicious yet bounded dictatorship, so its malcious actions must be stealthy to break the illusion that a democracy has fallen into private despotism (which explains alot)... and so there are people who are politically oppressed who are targeted. say black bag jobs, censorship, bugs in your walls, active hostile monitoring and abuse and harassment as feedback. yet this also occurs in a context of 'private psychology' of the oppressors that is separated from the state, its beliefs, constitution, etc. knowing this, a person may live in a fishbowl that is routinely disrupted and their life not allowed to develop due to these conditions, essentially an open-air prison and only a matter of time and further political consolidation before extinction. that the oppressors have a A=B mindset then could allow a false perspective to be constructed, validating a sign=sign belief of the oppressors, thus establishing a boundary that confirms their ideological viewpoint of a given situation (reversing perspective, or reversing the panopticon). prisoners monitoring the guards, etc. so, a person may pursue the age-old, time worn, and time-tested Bearded Lady at the Circus routine, in this given context. and this event could confirm or ground to certain preconceived notions and views of the hidden observers, who seek to exploit this *hidden* data they are gathering and distributing via illegal surveillence. (in doing so, allowing their activities and distribution channels and political networks to themselves be thoroughly mapped...) Bearded Lady at the Circus https://www.dropbox.com/sh/e82s8vywvxlkoko/hxey1wl8FT so suddenly the secret network has its valuable data to frame a person with, they could even work to "out them" as a result and this could be monitored by an inmate, as to what tactics and techniques are used, and where the ideology begins and ends. that is, if beliefs are verified by matching patterns (in this sense: pT = pT), then it is equated with grounded truth (B=B), even though it could be only an illusion. or bounded within certain dimensionality or thresholds. so imagine the Dictator and their political groupies have such hidden data on someone and it could even be presented as if a crime, say for a corollary example, and that their release of such data is a threat that in its actualization would secure their victory-- their "true belief" that rationalizes and finitely determines events in their favor would be fully established by discrediting and criminalizing opponents to despotism. this occurs on the assumption that they can control the parameters by which an event is evaluated, such that a [event] in their limited framework would automatically tally into their calculation of universal truth (A=A), though this is based on bad faith and exploitation of truth to serve the observers, firstly, and thus they are "truth" and "law" and so forth. what is not accounted for in their private relativistic psychology is that the situation could be accounted for from all angles, as an ['event'], and that in this reframing from their limited self-serving viewpoint, a recontexualization could involve them and prove their involvement in this event, so they are not outside of it nor able to control its interpretation, and instead are in a model of the situation beyond their determination over it, via empirical analysis of the total situation. thus for instance if someone broke the legs of a child and kept this out of their observational equation, and then yelled and blamed the child for not being able to run, and even demands that they run with broken legs, the observer could say the child is not running because they are lazy or weak, not accounting for the injuries and malice. yet an external viewpoint could account for the breaking of the legs of the child by the observer, which is not accounted for in their self-serving viewpoint, due to its inherent biasing to a given interpretation, which could even be subconscious or covert, *hidden* or encrypted in the psyche of a silent running sleeper agent who has done terrible things yet plausibly can deny this because they are able to separate or compartmentalize this truth from their conscious belief, unless pressured enough to make errors, where A=B dynamics appear and must be resolved to reestablish psychic equilibrium, or it is a dangerous existence that only gets more polarized and in this way, increasingly schizoid as the world does not align with a worldview which becomes fragmented and at odds with itself in its onesided, conflicted reasoning in this way, the previous example of a hidden dictator having incriminating evidence could be viewed as their "sure thing" that is going to bring down an opponent, this as it relates to the drug war for most people in the depths, likely, as one instance of many approaches to blackmail and takedowns. the threat of imprisonment, or assassination if you are lucky, etc. and yet that limited perspective is ungrounded in the larger situation, reliant on a false perspective to establish such dynamics, power, control over events and their hidden interpretation and secret determination. this pT=T worldview of the dictator makes assumptions that are not wholly true nor accurate about other observers and their observations, because a false perspective could also be established for the dictator- so that things *appear* a certain way via feedback (B=B) yet that this is not actually the truth of what is going on, beyond that limited and controlled despotic boundary. it is an illusion, a fantasy detached from empirical reality - yet allowed, and thereby enables a pattern match between what is believed and what is seen, for the ungrounded true believers of despotic ideology. in other words, another reality (A=A) could exist in this same situation, albeit within different parameters, co-existing yet silent as a parallel yet _grounded reality. thus it really comes down to an issue of accounting for truth and how it is modeled, both in terms of observations yet importantly, critically- how the observers are themselves accounted for in their evaluations and claims. empirical truth removed of falsity (T) is a different perspective than relativistic pseudo-truth (pT) that includes and relies upon errors and to justify given viewpoints that equate with 'true beliefs'. there should be no allowance for such structural bias, distortion, warping, and skew of observation in terms of justice. error is essentially falsity in this 1 and 0 model, and it is not arbitrary, nor can denial of absolute truth disallow such investigations. key to this is 'belief' that is ungrounded, whereby "belief=belief" establishes truth (pT), instead of grounded belief that is empirically true (T). the former maps onto the individual or group that contains a worldview or viewpoint that is equated with truth, yet this is actually themselves that they are believing in, serving. their belief in truth is their belief in their own infallibility, their own ability to determine truth. it is about an observer whose mere act of ungrounded observation is ideologically believed to be a 1:1 correspondance with truth, as patterns match their biased viewpoints, and justify their correctness, thus allowing a self-righteous mindset inside of a protected finite boundary, that then has an internal model that is relativistic, 2-value, and not observant of unagreeable facts or reality or truth beyond this self-interested boundary. this essentially becomes a demographic of people who are *unbelievers* in truth outside their own viewpoints. this is insanely dangerous and violent ignorance. they happen to have taken over government to, as the private corps of the dictator. *believers* are those, in contrast, who defer to truth, recognize it beyond their limited boundary, via logical reasoning, and observe of views of events in their truth and do not seek to censor and shut down valid observations or make it conform to their limited worldview in order for it to be allowed or accepted as truth, only if it serves their self-interest or does not threaten their worldview and "belief system" or private religion (of self as if creator). so ungrounded observers could believe a partial-truth is universal even though warped and a false perspective, while grounded observers could know this and could have prepared a bounary condition that allows for this as an illusion, by ceding ~ground as it were, unaccounted for observations and activities that are effectively unnatural or virtual and tentative - lacking actual feedback to not spoil the illusion, and therefore a gigantic bubble-reality could exist surrounding and inside of this dictatorship where 'the reality' that is believed to exist is not actually real, and a given event could puncture the illusion and remap all events into a different, more accurate framework. in this way, 'the crime' that may be believed absolute truth in the self-serving viewpoint, not accounted for beyond the corrupt evaluation and biased interpretation, could function differently than expected for the dictator, whose goal is to play this as part of their winning hand... and thus if they have incriminating evidence, for instance, of the [crime], say it is of a closeted transvestite who is a male-lesbian, this could be their ace in the hole to play against an adversary as part of a game-winning strategy, wrongly believed equivalent to "burst the bubble" on the other side via politically exploiting the evidence... and so their poker hand could be a ROYAL FLUSH, the secret evidence the [ace], with King, Queen, Jack, and Ten cards lined up across all suits in all directions, as if a universal winning hand, owning the table and every player. yet there is another possibility-- the ['ace'] could actually be the lowest card, instead of the highest as believed. and thus it could be equivalent to a 1-card, king (2), queen (3), jack (4), ten (5), whereby the metaphysics of the game are different than expected. this is because 'the crime' could be interpreted beyond the self-serving limiting viewpoint and account for the role of the dicator in establishing the context for the crimes and involving in the criminality while seeking to judge other sin these same terms. how much hypocrisy can an entity contain, how much psychopathy, malice and ultimately: falsehood. it then becomes a dare. if they release their evidence it can be turned against them, especially with massive external evidence they are not even aware of, showing the direct involvement in oppression of the citizens of the state by the hidden dictatorship and those who serve it. and then it would be possible to account for other truth beyond the limited dimensions used as *threats* and as a basis for actual violence and oppression, harassment and even TORTURE of citizens, in these terms, to secure the false worldview as if 'reality' itself, yet in a private framework that only serves a specific group at the expense of everyone, for that epically wicked selfishness it is thus about how the truth is accounted for, in an ungrounded pattern-matched evaluation of relativistic [signs] in an agreed upon private political evaluation, or of the ['truth'] involved throughout the signs and language and claims and beliefs and grounded observations, in a single shared model of empirical truth, of the given events. without a free press (crypto.corrupted) that is extremely difficult, because their view is what scales easiest as an alternative viewpoint. and thus there is silence. though the dictator may believe or _feel this equates with acquiescence, affirming the rightness of their secret yet harmful rule. and it does not. it matters where the lines are drawn as to how this situation is perceived. and to be honest- these people are truly stupid, they have a limited intellectual capacity to deal with this situation and so that is easily exploited. yet the continuation of an illusion does not mean safety. and the tension in the air as things polarize will only be more and more telling. the best move by the dictator would be to make the attack, make the claim, bring the charges- arrest the perpetrator, bring the issue to public trial instead of secret judge, jury, executioner. it would validate the hardness, virility of their truth, as it corresponds with an extended sentence for the crime as portrayed. yet the failure to achieve this-- the faulty approach or unsubstantiated case or contrary evidence would instead shrink this "sure thing" should the approach fail, and political impotence and total loss of power and legitimacy would result in not succeeding in the normal channels. the fraudulent case and viewpoint would collapse as its interpretation goes beyond the boundary of the accuser, to involve the accuser of deep involvement in this and vast many other crimes against the human citizenry. so they would be on trial if they should bring a case and the collapse of government and their rule over it would be accounting for in any such legal deliberations. likewise, doing nothing brings impotence likewise as the false worldview is folded back upon itself into smaller and smaller territories of self-controlled belief, as the views once shared are fragmented and disconnected in their operational cohensiveness, and thus this particilized constituency would find itself outside the prevailing view which it cannot share or understand due to limits resulting from self-corruption and ideological conformance, and belief in superiority they now have to rationalize in polarized, contested, and very likely in fighting terms, with those they have oppressed by their ignorance and malicious intent. those most active and powerful will be weakened by outside comparison, even appearing foolish to themselves as irrationalism takes hold and madness sets in, once realizing their awful predicament in this way, while things could appear to /certainly/ be moving from A to B, given a series of moves, in a more complex environment an inversion could have taken place that recontextualizes the ground upon which these events take place, and at a critical juncture, a decisive moment could arrive where TRUTH=FALSITY for the other oppressive observer, where the binary worldview completely collapses into its opposite framework where only partial truth (pT) is allowed to be validated in a shared POV and that the evaluation goes beyond the given controlling constraints, thus allowing parallel observation via human identity as the shared empirical perspective, versus an ungrounded false perspective reliant on lies, falsehood, errors, to serve a private view and constituency to the ruin of the earth, life, and humanity there are no odds. there is only truth and its accounting. anything less is tyranny. ☑

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SRF: crypticl
by brian carroll 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > use of trusted cryptoids to front dubious surefire protection this gets to the more actual situation with ideological short-circuiting of mass surveillance: the search for terrorists comparable to the hunt for Bigfoot, Yetis, Nessie in the collective, Chupacabra and others how much is the data dragnet comparable to evaluating populations in these fuzzy terms, as if any aberration or anomaly will snap-to-fit in some framework of illegality to be used for biased prosecutions how much of the technology infrastructure functions as a toy versus tool, allowing wild theories to be explored and mapped onto citizenry, everyone a suspect, an unidentified type that hovers around categories due to demographics, statistics or other affiliations, awaiting exploits in other words- the hunt for terrorists is like a hunt for cryptid beings, yet in the total surveillance, instead of the pinpointing and tracking of such, it appears the entire society is held within this mindframe, everyone a threat to someone who is surveilling behind the curtain, credit ratings, coupon users, shoppers who return faulty goods, people requesting warranty service - as if cheaters and stealers in that- instead of many distributed spotters saying they located an anomaly in the northwest sector, this spotting and informing instead is ubiquitous, a flurry of such calculations of potential and known infractions, from someones warped self-interest view not accounting for the larger balanced evaluation, hidden tallying for awhile now have considered how a Bigfoot would exist in the surveillance society, especially urban areas, such as those who try to drop-out of change identities - how far could you get with biometrics or facial recognition and forged documents until the alarms start activating and you are tracked and then cornered yet what if this is every single person, potentially, given the one- way politics involved, the oppressive aim of domination of those hidden and beyond public accountability as they hold the public to account in terms they do not recognize or themselves obey in this way, a population of bigfoots, a hidden network of those spotting, tracking, and surveilling, the short-circuiting of this as if in the public interest and involving democratic aims of citizens, instead a massive setup, ungrounded interpretations giving way to orchestration of near-term centralization of dictatorial power, feedback loop somewhere outside of representation anymore what if the cryptid ID is the Dictator running the works behind all this, and requires other spotters and tracking to corner the illegal activities that continue, despite all the tools available, seemingly used instead for playpen antics first and foremost, in that babbel allows this situation to remain undocumented in its conceptual terms and actual dimensions of existence

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[linux-elitists] Browser fingerprinting
by Eugen Leitl 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Don Marti <dmarti(a)zgp.org> ----- Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2013 11:11:46 -0700 From: Don Marti <dmarti(a)zgp.org> To: linux-elitists(a)zgp.org Subject: [linux-elitists] Browser fingerprinting Message-ID: <20131006181146.GA21225(a)zea.gateway.2wire.net> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Corporate speak: "Tawakol and Ingis both said the new technology, which is still under development, would allow companies to use alternative approaches that are sometimes called statistical or probabilistic tracking, while remaining in compliance with industry privacy standards." Translation: "Fine, you smug cookie-blocking nerds. We're going to go all browser fingerprinting on you." http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/10/04/ad-groups-prepare-for-cookieles… Mozilla has been working on cleaning up the third-party cookie problem, and making a dent in it, as you can tell by the complaints from the creepy adtech business. Unfortunately, Firefox appears to be highly fingerprintable. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ says "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 3,458,043 tested so far." Ouch. Got to get my act together here. But of course the more that I customize, the more unique my browser looks. Who's got a browser that comes up reasonably generic on Panopticlick, and what did you do? -- Don Marti +1-510-332-1587 (mobile) http://zgp.org/~dmarti/ Alameda, California, USA dmarti(a)zgp.org _______________________________________________ Do not Cc: anyone else on mail sent to this list. The list server is set for maximum one recipient. linux-elitists mailing list linux-elitists(a)zgp.org http://zgp.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-elitists ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Snowden Comsec Is Stupefying
by John Young 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

We still don't know, and likely will never know, what is in the Snowden collection. Admirable as his courage may be, he erred in handing it over to media incapable of assessing the whole wad, which has led to the teasing and hyperbolized accounts valorizing crypto to armor info-warriors. Perhaps more capable assessment is being done and will be made public in a credible fashion instead of the goofy call for debate before much is known beyond rhetoric and hype. The heavy-handed redactions suggest official advice threats and culling, and do not augur well for seeing the rest. Stupid claims of hiding the collection, insurance as stupid as that of WikiLeaks, stupidly sending some or all of it to other parties, come across as patent dissimulation of the comsec advertising type. Comsec is now a fat mark-up of junk, espoused by stupid comsec advisers to journalists as if a saintly medallion to stop a bullet.

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<nettime> Why Glenn Greenwald's new media venture is a big deal
by Joly MacFie 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

Why Glenn Greenwald?s new media venture is a big deal By HENRY FARRELL Oct 17 2013 < http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/10/17/why-glenn-gre… > Glenn Greenwald, who has published many of the most important scoops from the Edward Snowden leaks, is leaving The Guardian and setting up a new media venture with long-time journalist Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill from The Nation. The venture is being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who has suggested that he?s prepared to invest more than $250 million in the new venture. This is big news for journalism. It?s also big news for people interested in the relationship between information technology and politics. Martha Finnemore and I drafted a paper a couple of years ago about how Wikileaks-type organizations were changing the relationship between knowledge, politics and hypocrisy. Our ideas about hypocrisy led to an article on the true consequences of the Snowden leaks, which is coming out in the next issue of Foreign Affairs. Our ideas about knowledge and politics maybe tell us something about the consequences of the new venture (but bear with me ? our argument is a little complicated). Fundamentally, we think that much of the commentary about Wikileaks and Snowden?s revelations are wrong. Most people think that Wikileaks, Snowden etc. are politically important because they reveal secret information that was hitherto unknown. Many of Wikileaks? defenders, including, initially, Julian Assange himself, thought that the organization would change politics and bring down corrupt regimes by revealing information that the government wanted to hide. The critics of Snowden and Wikileaks actually agree ? they argue that they have hurt America (and perhaps the world) by revealing information that should have stayed secret. Neither are right. Neither Wikileaks or Snowden has revealed any truly surprising anddamaging information. European and South American governments already knew that the U.S. was spying on them. China was certainly aware that U.S. agencies were trying to hack into its systems. On the other hand, Assange?s initial hope that he could change the world through publishing damaging information turned out to be completely unfounded. Wikileaks had a very frustrating time trying to get anyone except bloggers to pay attention to their early revelations. No one seemed to care. The reason why is important. There?s too much information out there for most people to pay attention to, let alone figure out whether they believe it or not. Hence, most people rely on other institutions such as media organizations to tell them which information is worth caring about. Not only do people not pay much attention to information until it gets the stamp of approval from some authoritative institution, but this information is transformed, because everybody knows that everybody else is paying attention to it. It stops being mere information, and becomes knowledge ? generally accepted facts that people use to build their understanding of what everybody knows about politics. Established newspapers like the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Financial Times play a crucial sociological role in deciding which information is important and trustworthy, and which is not. When one of these newspapers publishes information, it is legitimated as knowledge ? which people are not only more likely to take seriously themselves, but may have to take seriously, because they know that other people are taking it seriously. European Union governments knew perfectly well that the U.S. had been tapping communications in their building (and if you read specialist sources, you knew about this, too). However, these governments found it more politically convenient to ignore U.S. spying than to make a big fuss. When this information became knowledge ? when it was published and treated as authoritative by major newspapers ? it became impossible to ignore any longer. Assange and Wikileaks figured out some version of this early on. This is why they started working together with major newspapers such as the Guardian and New York Times ? because this was the only way that they could get people to systematically pay attention to the information they had uncovered, and to turn that information into knowledge that everyone accepted. Unsurprisingly, however, this relationship turned out to be very difficult. Newspapers ? even the most pioneering ones ? have political relationships with governments, which make them nervous about publishing (and hence validating) certain kinds of information. This also helps explain the awkwardness that many journalists express toward Greenwald. While they recognize that he has uncovered many valuable scoops, they don?t see him as bounded by the same rules as they are. On the one hand, people like Assange, Greenwald and Snowden need newspapers or similar media outlets. Without some such outlet, they are voices in the wilderness. On the other hand, exactly because newspapers play a crucial political role in validating knowledge, they have complicated relationships with governments and politicians. This leads them to actions which people like Assange and Greenwald are likely to see as compromises with power. [snip] via Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/> -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Joly MacFie 218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com VP (Admin) - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org -------------------------------------------------------------- - # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org

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[tt] NYT: Seeking Online Refuge From Spying Eyes
by Frank Forman 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

Seeking Online Refuge From Spying Eyes http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/seeking-online-refuge-from-spying-… By JENNA WORTHAM Consider this scene in "The Circle," Dave Eggers's new novel that imagines a dystopian future dominated by an omnipotent social networking company: Mae, the young protagonist, tries to unplug from her hypernetworked life to go on a covert, solitary kayaking trip. But when she returns to shore, she is greeted by police officers who have been alerted to her excursion by several hidden cameras. She quickly realizes that very little in her life isn't recorded, tracked and analyzed. It's a troubling image, one that some fear might not be limited to works of fiction. In fact, some elements of Mae's scenario have emerged recently in the news. There was the report that the National Security Agency can create sophisticated maps of some people's personal information and social connections. There were the recent changes to Facebook's privacy settings that will no longer allow users to hide their profiles from public searches. In addition, Google recently revealed that it was considering using anonymous identifiers to track browsing habits online, raising hackles among privacy advocates who have described it as "the new way they will identify you 24/7." And, at the same time, drones are becoming commonplace--used by the government in counterterrorism efforts and by hobbyists-- prompting discussions about the long-term impact on privacy. These developments, among others, have spurred the creation of a handful of applications and services intended to give people respite and refuge from surveillance, both online and off. They have a simple and common goal: to create ways for people to use the Internet and to communicate online without surveillance. Nadim Kobeissi, a security adviser in Montreal who works on an encrypted-message service called Cryptocat, said the security and hacker circles of which he is a part have long suspected that the government is listening in on online conversations and exchanges but "have never been able to prove it." He added: "It's been a worst-case-scenario prediction that all turned out to be true, to a worrying extent." If nothing else, the N.S.A. leaks and disclosures have brought these issues front and center for many people, myself included, who are troubled by how much of our daily and online interaction is concentrated in and around a handful of companies that have funneled data to the N.S.A. "It's sad that this is the proverbial kick in the butt that needs to bring awareness to this concept," said Harlo Holmes, who works for the Guardian Project, a group that is building several anti-surveillance and privacy applications. Ms. Holmes says interest has been surging in the Guardian Project's services, which include tools that let people make phone calls over the Internet which the organization says cannot be recorded. More than a million people have downloaded an app called Orbot that allows users to send e-mails anonymously through mobile devices. She said it was common to assume that people who want to avoid detection online are doing illicit things, like trying to buy drugs or look up illegal content--and that may happen. But it is certainly not the intent. She says the Guardian Project and its peers are built for people who live under governments that don't allow access to the Web or to certain apps, as well as for people who simply don't like the idea of their online activity being tracked and monitored. Ms. Holmes says that most of the tools are used by people in totalitarian states. "We get a lot of feedback from people who use it to get access to blogs and sites they can't access because of a firewall," she said, referring, for example, to a government blocking access to Twitter. Most of these services are still relatively small. For example, Cryptocat, the encrypted-message service, typically sees peaks of around 20,000 simultaneous users. In recent months, that number has grown to 27,000. But it's a far cry from the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, that mainstream social networking tools and services can claim. "As good as all of our intentions are, whatever looks good and is user-friendly gets critical mass," she said. "That is what is going to take off." But those who work on these services say they don't have to compete directly with the Facebooks, Twitters and Googles of the world. They just have to offer an alternative, independent space where people can interact if and when they need to. Dan Phiffer works on a project called Occupy.here that gives people access to a private messaging forum by creating small, localized pockets of Internet access. People who are nearby and whose laptops or mobile devices detect the network are directed to a discussion board where they can interact. Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the idea was to allow activists and organizers to interact in a way that would be hard for police officers to track. His project is naturally resistant to Internet surveillance, "but its original purpose was not for countersurveillance," he said. "What I am trying to do is build alternative online spaces for supporting activists and those who might be sympathetic to their cause." Mr. Phiffer also thinks that the project can have much larger implications and motivate "broader political engagement by offering a tool for people who are tired of the disregard of their civil liberties by their government." Of course, there is no guarantee that the Guardian Project, Mr. Kobeissi's project, or any others like it are safe from being broken into by a government or a hacker or another entity. But Mr. Kobeissi said that there was an upside to all of the disturbing security disclosures: at least now, he said, the security world can deal with the information disclosed in leaks "on a per-revelation basis" to make its own offerings stronger and more secure. The truth, he said, is that "we are developing software in an unknown environment, even though we know so much about the threats being posed." "The specifics are always changing," he added. Tools like Cryptocat, he said, are just the impetus for a larger discussion. "It's not an answer by itself," he said. "It is a combination of privacy and technology, democratic movement and political discussion that it is not acceptable to use the Internet as a surveillance medium." _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt(a)postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt

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Information Content Estimation
by Cathal Garvey (Phone) 21 Oct '13

21 Oct '13

Hey all, Am mulling over a federated datastore for zero-knowledge web applications, using hashcash as a "commitment" price for otherwise gratis data storage. All very straightforward, but: Zero knowledge is as much for host protection as client protection. Hosts don't WANT plaintext. Short of stupidly CPU-intensive stuff like letter counting, UTF8 decoding, etc, how might a server verify it's receiving encrypted data? I was thinking a function that estimates apparent entropy and rejects anything that doesn't look random enough to be encrypted, what such functions are available, fast, widely implemented? -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

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