Monthly Archives: March 2015

The NSA's plan: improve cybersecurity by hacking everyone else

Posted on by

The NSA wants more powers to hack whomever it wants. Photograph: Dado Ruvic/REUTERS

The National Security Agency want to be able to hack more people, vacuum up even more of your internet records and have the keys to tech companies encryption and, after 18 months of embarrassing inaction from Congress on surveillance reform, the NSA is now lobbying it for more powers, not less.

NSA director Mike Rogers testified in front of a Senate committee this week, lamenting that the poor ol NSA just doesnt have the cyber-offensive capabilities (read: the ability to hack people) it needs to adequately defend the US. How cyber-attacking countries will help cyber-defense is anybodys guess, but the idea that the NSA is somehow hamstrung is absurd.

The NSA runs sophisticated hacking operations all over the world. A Washington Post report showed that the NSA carried out 231 offensive operations in 2011 - and that number has surely grown since then. That report also revealed that the NSA runs a $652m project that has infected tens of thousands of computers with malware.

And that was four years ago - its likely increased significantly. A leaked presidential directive issued in 2012 called for an expanded list of hacking targets all over the world. The NSA spends ten of millions of dollars per year to procure software vulnerabilities from private malware vendors ie, holes in software that will make their hacking much easier. The NSA has even created a system, according to Edward Snowden, that can automatically hack computers overseas that attempt to hack systems in the US.

Moving further in this direction, Rogers has also called for another new law that would force tech companies to install backdoors into all their encryption.The move has provoked condemnation and scorn from the entire security community - including a very public upbraiding by Yahoos top security executive - as it would be a disaster for the very cybersecurity that the director says is a top priority.

And then there is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) the downright awful cybersecurity bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last week in complete secrecy that is little more than an excuse to conduct more surveillance.The bill will do little to stop cyberattacks, but it will do a lot to give the NSA even more power to collect Americans communications from tech companies without any legal process whatsoever. The bills text was finally released a couple days ago, and, as EFF points out, tucked in the bill were the powers to do the exact type of offensive attacks for which Rogers is pining.

While the NSA tries to throw every conceivable expansion of power against the wall hoping that something sticks, the clock continues to tick on Section 215 of the Patriot Act the law which the spy agency secretly used to collect every Americans phone records. Congress has to re-authorize by vote in June or it will expire, and as Steve Vladick wrote on Just Security this week, there seems to be no high-level negotiations going on between the administration and Congress over reforms to the NSA in the lead-up to the deadline. Perhaps, as usual, the NSA now thinks it can emerge from yet another controversy over its extraordinary powers and still end up receiving more?

More here:

The NSA's plan: improve cybersecurity by hacking everyone else

Posted in NSA

Rule 41 Change Could Allow FBI To Get Warrants To Remotely Search Suspects' Computers Without Notice

Posted on by

The Department of Justice recently edged closer to a rule change that would allow the FBI to track suspected criminals' computer activity more easily. The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules voted last week in favor of an update to Rule 41, which dictates how judges can issue search warrants on electronic devices, Government Executive reported. The new rule 41 would let judges OK warrants to examine computers remotely anywhere as opposed to only those in their districts. The FBI would also no longer would be required to give users notice ahead of its searches.

"The rule itself would be an acknowledgement that remote access searches are valid without notice, without special justification," Electronic Privacy Information Center general counsel Alan Butler told Gizmodo. "Notice is one of the essential procedural protections of the Fourth Amendment. Validating a rule that implies that notice will never happen does not comport with the Fourth Amendment."

The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches and seizures.

The FBI has requested the rule change to better function in the 21st-century world of technology, DefenseOnereported. The agency would have more options, like the authority to secretly install tracking software on the computers of alleged criminals.

Privacy groups are opposed to this. Google came out against the Rule 41 change last week, arguing it raises a number of monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal and geopolitical concerns that should be left to Congress to decide. The Department of Justice fired back, saying the amendment had been misread and would not authorize the government to undertake any search or seizure or use any remote search technique not already permitted under current law.

In any event, the proposal will next go before the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, then the Supreme Court. If approved, Gizmodo reported, Rule 41 could be updated by December 2016.

Read more here:

Rule 41 Change Could Allow FBI To Get Warrants To Remotely Search Suspects' Computers Without Notice

Bullet Ban Reloaded – Dems Introduce Armor-Piercing Rounds Bill – Attrack On Second Amendment – F&F – Video

Posted on by


Bullet Ban Reloaded - Dems Introduce Armor-Piercing Rounds Bill - Attrack On Second Amendment - F F
Bullet Ban Reloaded - Democrats Introduce Armor-Piercing Rounds Bill - Second Amendment - Fox Friends =========================================== **Please Click Below to ...

By: Mass Tea Party

See more here:

Bullet Ban Reloaded - Dems Introduce Armor-Piercing Rounds Bill - Attrack On Second Amendment - F&F - Video

Review: "Liberty's First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech, by Charles Slack

Posted on by

In the autumn of 1798, Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in prison. He was the first person convicted under the new Sedition Act, recently signed into law by President John Adams. It was now a crime to write, print, utter or publish false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States. As a reckless critic of Adams and the New England political elite, Lyon made an irresistible target.

The verdict shocked many Americans. Only a few years earlier, the states had ratified the Bill of Rights, which announced in its first sentence that Congress could make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. Now, it seemed, Congress had done exactly what the First Amendment forbade. And if a sitting representative could be imprisoned for criticizing the government, what chance did ordinary citizens have to exercise their democratic rights?

In Libertys First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech, Charles Slack artfully tells the story of the rise and eventual fall of the Sedition Act. He traces its origins to the fierce presidential election of 1796 in which Adams narrowly defeated Thomas Jefferson. After the election, Jeffersons allies hurled unprecedented abuse at the new president. Adams and his supporters in Congress wished to protect themselves and, in their view, the legitimacy of the young republic from the attacks pouring out in newspapers, pamphlets, orations and private conversations.

Slacks delightful narrative focuses not on Adams and Jefferson but on the vast and eccentric group of printers, orators, politicians, amateur philosophers and visionaries who fought against the Sedition Act. We are introduced to men and women such as Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin Bache (grandson of Benjamin Franklin) and his wife, Margaret Markoe, who were two of the most articulate critics of the Adams administration, and to Luther Baldwin, a somewhat less articulate ferryman from New Jersey who, after a day of drinking in a pub, voiced the opinion that the president of the United States should be kicked in his backside. His subsequent arrest made him a hero.

In this period, before the Supreme Court claimed the power of voiding unconstitutional laws, the job of defeating the Sedition Act fell to these misfits, who did much to ensure that Adams became the first one-term president and that the act was allowed to expire soon after his electoral defeat. On the last day of Adams presidency, Matthew Lyon, who had returned from prison to serve again in Congress, sent him a blistering farewell letter. The Bill of Rights was never, Lyon wrote of the Sedition Act, more shamefully, more barefacedly trampled on. Slack shows us how citizens such as Lyon gave the First Amendment its defining role in American politics.

Matthew Simpson is chairman of the Philosophy Department at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

Read more:

Review: "Liberty's First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech, by Charles Slack