February 2020 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

WhooHoo FluMongering: CJR just comes right out and says it
by Razer 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

"Why COVID-19 is not the problem" (but the sensationalized reporting and ignorant reactionary humans sure are!) "So why is so much attention being paid to COVID-19? First, because it’s new, and spreading. But as Max Fisher wrote in the New York Times, COVID-19 “hits nearly every cognitive trigger we have.” Its novelty and the uncertainty around it override the recognition that other diseases, including flu, are far more endemic and dangerous. He likens the reaction to that after a plane crash, when people shun flying even though a crash is an anomaly and flying is overwhelmingly safe. And social media spreads the rumors, fake cures, and other untruths that we won’t link to, but include words like “genocide” and “Zionist conspiracy.” Journalists have the responsibility to put things in context. Cover COVID-19 and its effects, be they economic, physical, or social. But acknowledge its place in the pantheon of disease. Reporting as if it were the end of the world is an epidemic of a different kind." https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/covid-19-coronavirus.php

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Joyce Meyer yanks fire alarm to cover mistaken 1 Timothy 2 reference
by Zig the N.g 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

Following up the following is "enlightening" (for humorous ^B useful values of the word 'enlightening'): Joyce Meyer Pulls Fire Alarm To Distract Audience From 1 Timothy 2 https://babylonbee.com/news/joyce-meyer-pulls-fire-alarm-distract-audience-… WICHITA FALLS, TX—In a major faux pas for the female preacher, Joyce Meyer misspoke at a local Bible conference Tuesday, mistakenly telling her audience, “Open your Bibles to First Timothy, Chapter 2,” when she was supposed to say Second Timothy, Chapter 1. It took her a matter of seconds to realize her mistake—and the grave trouble she had gotten herself into. Sources at the scene confirm that Meyer then screamed out, “Hey, look at that!” while pointing toward the back of the building. When most of the audience turned around to see what she was pointing at, she reportedly dashed across the stage in an age-defying sprint, leaped over a row of chairs, and forcefully activated the building’s fire alarm, causing the ceiling-mounted sprinklers to unleash a torrent of water on attendees, triggering an immediate evacuation and effectively preventing them from reading Paul’s teachings on female leaders in the church. Pressed to explain the incident, Joyce Meyer Ministries issued a statement, which read, in part, “This organization disavows all knowledge of any so-called ‘first letter to Timothy.’ After decades of studying the Bible, Joyce Meyer confirms that the Apostle Paul wrote a second letter to Timothy, and no others.” Ok, soap, not having read the bible since being a wee pre-teen, a refresher was in order: Joyce Meyer ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Meyer Joyce Meyer (born Pauline Joyce Hutchison; June 4, 1943) is an American Charismatic Christian author and speaker and president of Joyce Meyer Ministries. Joyce and her husband Dave have four grown children, and live outside St. Louis, Missouri. Her ministry is headquartered near the St. Louis suburb of Fenton, Missouri. ... 1 Timothy 2 New International Version (NIV) https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Timothy+2&version=NIV Instructions on Worship 2 I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— 2 for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 3 This is good, and pleases God our Savior, 4 who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed to at the proper time. 7 And for this purpose I was appointed a herald and an apostle—I am telling the truth, I am not lying—and a true and faithful teacher of the Gentiles. 8 Therefore I want the men everywhere to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or disputing. 9 I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, 10 but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God. 11 A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women[c] will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. Ahah. Enlightenment dawns. Mmhmm.

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Ex-CIA Joshua Schulte Describes His Data/Crypto Hiding Prowess
by John Young 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

Ex-CIA Joshua Schulte Describes His Data/Crypto Hiding Prowess (WikiLeaks Vault 7) "Which brings me to my next point. Do you know what my specialty was at the CIA? Do you know what I did for fun? Data hiding and crypto. I designed and wrote software to conceal data in a custom-designed file system contained within the drive slack space, or hidden partitions. I disguised data. I split data across files and file systems to conceal the crypto. Analysis tools would never detect random or pseudorandom data indicative of potential crypto. I designed and wrote my own crypto. How better to fool buffoons like forensic examiners and the FBI than to have custom software that doesn't fit into their two-week class where they become forensic experts? Make no mistake. I am an expert in data hiding and cryptography with thousands of hours of experience and among the top specialists in the world, or was." From Trial Transcript February 26, 2020 https://cryptome.org/2020/02/schulte-trial-2020-0226.pdf https://cryptome.org/2020/02/schulte-hide-crypto.jpg

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Wormholes Reveal a Way to Manipulate Black Hole Information in the Lab | Quanta Magazine
by jim bell 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

https://www.quantamagazine.org/wormholes-reveal-a-way-to-manipulate-black-h… Jim Bell's comment: Articles like this give me a headache.

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Scientists may have accidentally created a new form of matter.
by Steven Schear 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

https://phys.org/news/2020-02-physicists-accidentally-state.html

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Prose: All I can think of are the #Nazis
by Razer 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

They're keeping #JulianAssange in a glass box, so you think of Eichmann, and #Nazis... Because the people persecuting #Assange understand and relate to #Nazis, because they are #Nazis. He is obviously not a flight or courtroom disruption risk, due to their torturing him like #Nazis do, so there's no reason he shouldn't be able to sit next to his lawyer and effectively plan a defense, except that the #Nazis want you to think of #Nazis when you see him... But all I can think of are the #Nazis who have him on display like an animal in a glass box. https://www.facebook.com/DEAcampaign/videos/205346360871180/

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N.S.A. Phone Program Cost $100 Million, but Produced Only Two Unique Leads
by coderman 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/us/politics/nsa-phone-program.html N.S.A. Phone Program Cost $100 Million, but Produced Only Two Unique Leads A disputed program that allowed the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans’ domestic calls and texts yielded only one significant investigation, according to a newly declassified study. By Charlie Savage Feb. 25, 2020 WASHINGTON — A National Security Agency system that analyzed logs of Americans’ domestic phone calls and text messages cost $100 million from 2015 to 2019, but yielded only a single significant investigation, according to a newly declassified study. Moreover, only twice during that four-year period did the program generate unique information that the F.B.I. did not already possess, said the study, which was produced by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and briefed to Congress on Tuesday. “Based on one report, F.B.I. vetted an individual, but, after vetting, determined that no further action was warranted,” the report said. “The second report provided unique information about a telephone number, previously known to U.S. authorities, which led to the opening of a foreign intelligence investigation.” The report did not reveal the subject matter of the one significant F.B.I. investigation that was spurred by the Freedom Act program, and it did not divulge its outcome. But the high expense and low utility of the call records collected sheds new light on the National Security Agency’s decision in 2019 to shutter the program amid recurring technical headaches, halting a counterterrorism effort that has touched off disputes about privacy and the rule of law since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The information surfaced as Congress was weighing whether to allow the law that authorizes the agency to operate the system — the USA Freedom Act of 2015 — to expire on March 15, or whether to accede to the Trump administration’s request that lawmakers extend the statute, so the agency could choose to turn the system back on in the future. The House Judiciary Committee will meet on Wednesday to consider a draft bill that would adjust surveillance law in several ways, including terminating the program’s authority. Separately on Tuesday, Attorney General William P. Barr met with Republican senators to urge them to extend three other investigative powers also set to expire on March 15. The privacy board is an independent agency created by Congress on the recommendation of the commission that studied the Sept. 11 attacks. A declassified, partly censored version of the board’s 103-page report was obtained by The New York Times. In an interview, the board’s chairman, Adam I. Klein, praised the National Security Agency for deciding last year to suspend the program — not only because of its high cost and low value, but because of continuing problems in which telecommunications companies kept sending the agency more people’s phone records than it had legal authority to collect. “It shows a lot of judgment to acknowledge that something that consumed a lot of resources and time did not yield the value anticipated,” Mr. Klein said. “We want agencies to be able to reflect on their collection capabilities and wind them down where appropriate. That’s the best way to ensure civil liberties and privacy are balanced with operational needs.” In a statement appended to the report, Mr. Klein also noted that phone records were becoming less important as people shifted to using encrypted chat apps. And, he noted, the government could still gain access to some phone logs through other means, like traditional subpoenas for records of discrete accounts, or N.S.A. collection abroad, where there are fewer legal limits. The Times reported last year that the National Security Agency had delivered a bleak internal assessment of the call records program’s steep costs and minimal benefits without taking an explicit position on whether the Trump administration should seek to extend the law that authorized it. But the specific figures undergirding that briefing were previously classified. The privacy board, working with the intelligence community, got several additional salient facts declassified as part of the rollout of its report. Among them, it officially disclosed that the system has gained access to Americans’ cellphone records, not just logs of landline phone calls. It also disclosed that in the four years the Freedom Act system was operational, the National Security Agency produced 15 intelligence reports derived from it. The other 13, however, contained information the F.B.I. had already collected through other means, like ordinary subpoenas to telephone companies. The report cited two investigations in which the National Security Agency produced reports derived from the program: its analysis of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., in June 2016 and of a February 2016 incident in Ohio where a man attacked people at a restaurant with a machete. But it did not say whether the investigations into either of those attacks were connected to the two intelligence reports that provided unique information not already in the possession of the F.B.I. The system traces back to a secret decision by President George W. Bush to unleash the National Security Agency from certain legal constraints after the Sept. 11 attacks. Among other things, the agency began collecting customer calling records in bulk from several large telecoms. Counterterrorism analysts used the data as a map of social links, hunting for hidden associates of known terrorism suspects by looking at indirect connections. In 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court secretly blessed the program under a legally disputed interpretation of the Patriot Act. In 2013, the program’s existence was leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, prompting an uproar over privacy rights and the rule of law. Defenders of the program claimed that it could have stopped the Sept. 11 attacks. But in practice, its most concrete accomplishment, according to a 2014 report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, was leading the F.B.I. to scrutinize a San Diego man who turned out to have donated several thousand dollars to the Shabab, the Islamist group in Somalia. There was no accusation that he was planning to a terrorist attack. In 2015, Congress enacted the USA Freedom Act, which ended the bulk collection of phone records under the Patriot Act, but authorized the National Security Agency to operate an alternative system that kept the bulk records in the hands of phone companies. With a judge’s permission, the agency could query the system to swiftly obtain the records not only of a suspect, but of everyone with whom that suspect had been in contact. The exponential math meant that the agency was still gathering a huge number of call and text records about Americans, however. In 2018, the agency obtained 14 court orders, but gathered 434 million call detail records involving 19 million phone numbers. There were repeated signs of trouble. In spring 2018, the National Security Agency purged hundreds of millions of records after it realized that its database was contaminated with some files the agency had no authority to receive. And in fall 2018, it discovered again that it was overcollecting data. The agency turned off the program in 2019. The agency has said that the cause of the problems was largely that telecoms were returning erroneous call records. The unclassified version of the privacy board’s report adds a few details to that discussion, but sections about exactly what went wrong remain blacked out. Mr. Klein said that after the agency’s staff worked with the intelligence community to get large amounts of information declassified, the board met with Joseph Maguire, the former acting director of national intelligence, to ask for four more things to be made public. Mr. Maguire agreed to declassify one — that the program had cost taxpayers $100 million — but three others remain secret despite the board’s request. Among them, Mr. Klein said, were additional details about what kinds of records the program did and did not collect, about the cause of the compliance problems with the telecoms and about how the agency processed the data. Katie Benner and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting. © 2020 The New York Times Company NYTCoContact UsWork with usAdvertiseT Brand StudioYour Ad ChoicesPrivacyTerms of ServiceTerms of SaleSite MapHelpSubscriptions

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Joshua Schulte Trial Archive
by John Young 27 Feb '20

27 Feb '20

US/CIA v. Joshua Schulte transcripts and exhibits https://alexaobrien.com/archives/4380 Preview of Assange trials.

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TechRadar: Chrome patches another serious zero-day vulnerability
by jim bell 27 Feb '20

27 Feb '20

TechRadar: Chrome patches another serious zero-day vulnerability. https://www.techradar.com/news/chrome-patches-another-serious-zero-day-vuln…

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ZDNet: New Kr00k vulnerability lets attackers decrypt WiFi packets
by jim bell 27 Feb '20

27 Feb '20

ZDNet: New Kr00k vulnerability lets attackers decrypt WiFi packets. https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-kr00k-vulnerability-lets-attackers-decryp…

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