Panopticon of global surveillance

[Jan Klimkowski]

Reports from the Mediterranean indicate that two of the undersea cables severed and repaired earlier this year have been cut again, disrupting internet access and phone service between the Middle East, Europe, and parts of Asia. An additional third cable is down in the same region.
The cuts are causing traffic to be re-routed through the United States and elsewhere.

:moon2:

The military-multinational-intelligence complex is insatiable: It can never have enough Power and Control.

[Magda Hassan]

The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping

The newest NSA leaks reveal that governments are probing "the Internet's backbone." How does that work?
OLGA KHAZANJUL 16 2013, 1:55 PM ET

Barta IV/Flickr

In the early 1970's, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications link between two major Soviet naval bases. The problem? The Soviet Navy had completely blocked foreign ships from entering the region.
Not to be deterred, the National Security Agency launched Operation Ivy Bells, deploying fast-attack submarines and combat divers to drop waterproof recording pods on the lines. Every few weeks, the divers would return to gather the tapes and deliver them to the NSA, which would then binge-listen to their juicy disclosures.
The project ended in 1981, when NSA employee Ronald Pelton sold informationabout the program to the KGB for $35,000. He's still serving his life prison term.
The operation might have ended, but for the NSA, this underwater strategy clearly stuck around.
In addition to gaining access to web companies' servers and asking for phone metadata, we've now learned that both the U.S. and the U.K. spy agencies aretapping directly into the Internet's backbone -- the undersea fiber optic cables that shuttle online communications between countries and servers. For some privacy activists, this process is even more worrisome than monitoring call metadata because it allows governments to make copies of everything that transverses these cables, if they wanted to.
The British surveillance programs have fittingly sinister titles: "Mastering the Internet" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation," according to The Guardian.
A subsidiary program for these operations -- Tempora -- sucks up around 21 million gigabytes per day and stores the data for a month. The data is shared with NSA, and there are reportedly 550 NSA and GCHQ analysts poring over the information they've gathered from at least 200 fiber optic cables so far.
The scale of the resulting data harvest is tremendous. From The Guardian:

This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites -- all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

In an interview with online security analyst Jacob Appelbaum, NSA leaker Edward Snowden called the British spy agency GCHQ "worse than" the NSA, saying it represents the first "full take" system, in which surveillance networks catch all Internet traffic regardless of its content. Appelbaum asked Snowden if "anyone could escape" Tempora:
"Well, if you had the choice, you should never send information over British lines or British servers," Snowden said. "Even the Queen's selfies with her lifeguards would be recorded, if they existed."
The U.S.'s own cable-tapping program, known by the names OAKSTAR, STORMBREW, BLARNEY and FAIRVIEW, as revealed in an NSA PowerPoint slide, apparently functions similarly to Tempora, accessing "communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," according to The Washington Post. The slide indicates that Prism and these so-called "upstream" programs work together somehow, with an arrow saying "You Should Use Both" pointing to the two operations.
So how does one tap into an underwater cable?
The process is extremely secretive, but it seems similar to tapping an old-fashioned, pre-digital telephone line -- the eavesdropper gathers up all the data that flows past, then deciphers it later.

A map of undersea cables. (TeleGeography)
More than 550,000 miles of flexible undersea cables about the size of garden watering hoses carry all the world's emails, searches, and tweets. Together, they shoot the equivalent of several hundred Libraries of Congress worth of information back and forth every day.
In 2005, the Associated Press reported that a submarine called the USS Jimmy Carter had been repurposed to carry crews of technicians to the bottom of the sea so they could tap fiber optic lines. The easiest place to get into the cables is at the regeneration points -- spots where their signals are amplified and pushed forward on their long, circuitous journeys. "At these spots, the fiber optics can be more easily tapped, because they are no longer bundled together, rather laid out individually," Deutsche Welle reported.
But such aquatic endeavors may no longer even be necessary. The cables make landfall at coastal stations in various countries, where their data is sent on to domestic networks, and it's easier to tap them on land than underwater. Britain is, geographically, in an ideal position to access to cables as they emerge from the Atlantic, so the cooperation between the NSA and GCHQ has been key. Beyond that partnership, there are the other members of the "Five Eyes" -- the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians -- that also collaborate with the U.S., Snowden said.
The tapping process apparently involves using so-called "intercept probes." According to two analysts I spoke to, the intelligence agencies likely gain access to the landing stations, usually with the permission of the host countries oroperating companies, and use these small devices to capture the light being sent across the cable. The probe bounces the light through a prism, makes a copy of it, and turns it into binary data without disrupting the flow of the original Internet traffic.
"We believe our 3D MEMS technology -- as used by governments and various agencies -- is involved in the collection of intelligence from ... undersea fibers," said a director of business development at Glimmerglass, a government contractor that appeared, at least according to a 2010 Aviation Week article, to conduct similar types of interceptions, though it's unclear whether they took part in the British Tempora or the U.S. upstream programs. In a PowerPoint presentation, Glimmerglass once boasted that it provided "optical cyber solutions" to the intelligence community, offering the ability to monitor everything from Gmail to Facebook. "We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception. They've passed laws, publicly known, that they will monitor all international traffic for interdiction of any kind of terrorist activity."

Slide from a Glimmerglass presentation
The British publication PC Pro presented another theory: that slightly bending the cables could allow a receiver to capture their contents.

One method is to bend the cable and extract enough light to sniff out the data. "You can get these little cylindrical devices off eBay for about $1,000. You run the cable around the cylinder, causing a slight bend in cable. It will emit a certain amount of light, one or two decibels. That goes into the receiver and all that data is stolen in one or two decibels of light. Without interrupting transfer flow, you can read everything going on on an optical network," said Everett.
The loss is so small, said Everett, that anyone who notices it might attribute it to a loose connection somewhere along the line. "They wouldn't even register someone's tapping into their network," he added.

Once it's gathered, the data gets sifted. Most of it is discarded, but the filters pull out material that touches on one of the 40,000 search terms chosen by the NSA and GCHQ -- that's the content the two agencies inspect more closely.
The British anti-surveillance group Privacy International has filed a lawsuit against the U.K. government, arguing that such practices amount to "blanked surveillance" and saying that British courts do "not provide sufficiently specific or clear authorization for such wide-ranging and universal interception of communications." Their argument is that the existing surveillance laws are from the phone-tapping days and can't be applied to modern, large-scale electronic data collection.
"If their motivation is to catch terrorists, then are there less intrusive methods than spying on everyone whose traffic happens to transverse the U.K.?" said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International.
Meanwhile, the British agency, the GCHQ, has defending their practices by saying that they are merely looking for a few suspicious "needles" in a giant haystack of data, and that the techniques have allowed them to uncover terrorist plots.
If groups like Privacy International are successful, it may put an end to the capture of domestic Internet data within the U.K., but as NSA expert Matthew Aid recently told me, since 80 percent of the fiber optic data flows through the U.S., it wouldn't stop the massive surveillance operations here or in other countries -- even if the person on the sending end was British.
It's also worth noting that this type of tapping has been going on for years -- it's just that we're now newly getting worked up about it. In 2007, the New York Times thus described President Bush's expansion of electronic surveillance: "the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants -- latching on to those giant switches -- as long as the target of the government's surveillance is 'reasonably believed' to be overseas."
Want to avoid being a "target" of this "switch-latching"? A site called "Prism-break" recently released a smorgasbord of encrypted browsing, chat, and email services that supposedly allow the user to evade government scrutiny.
The only platform for which there is no encrypted alternative is Apple's iOS, a proprietary software, for which the site had this warning:
"You should not entrust neither your communications nor your data to a closed source device."
[URL="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-longstanding-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/"]http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-longstanding-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855
/[/URL]

[Jan Klimkowski]

For the military-multinational-complex:

You think
Therefore you're dangerous

[Magda Hassan]

Surveillance will be a one way street of course.

No shooting at protest? Police may block mobile devices via Apple

Published time: September 05, 2012 10:12
Edited time: September 05, 2012 14:12 Get short URL







Tags
Information Technology, Internet, Mass media, Meeting, Police, Protest, SciTech, Security

Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem "sensitive", and "protected from externalities."
*In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.

And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says "covert police or government operations may require complete blackout' conditions."

"Additionally," Apple says," the wireless transmission of sensitive information to a remote source is one example of a threat to security. This sensitive information could be anything from classified government information to questions or answers to an examination administered in an academic setting."

The statement led many to believe that authorities and police could now use the patented feature during protests or rallies to block the transmission of video footage and photographs from the scene, including those of police brutality, which at times of major events immediately flood news networks and video websites.

Apple patented the means to transmit an encoded signal to all wireless devices, commanding them to disable recording functions.

Those policies would be activated by GPS, and WiFi or mobile base-stations, which would ring-fence ("geofence") around a building or a "sensitive area" to prevent phone cameras from taking pictures or recording video.

Apple may implement the technology, but it would not be Apple's decision to activate the "feature" it would be down governments, businesses and network owners to set such policies, analyzes ZDNet technology website.

Having invented one of the most sophisticated mobile devices, Apple now appears to be looking for ways to restrict its use.

"As wireless devices such as cellular telephones, pagers, personal media devices and smartphones become ubiquitous, more and more people are carrying these devices in various social and professional settings," it explains in the patent. "The result is that these wireless devices can often annoy, frustrate, and even threaten people in sensitive venues."

The company's listed "sensitive" venues so far include mostly meetings, the presentation of movies, religious ceremonies, weddings, funerals, academic lectures, and test-taking environments.

http://rt.com/news/apple-patent-transmission-block-408/

[Peter Lemkin]

Surveillance will be a one way street of course.

No shooting at protest? Police may block mobile devices via Apple

Published time: September 05, 2012 10:12
Edited time: September 05, 2012 14:12 Get short URL







Tags
Information Technology, Internet, Mass media, Meeting, Police, Protest, SciTech, Security

Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem "sensitive", and "protected from externalities."
*In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.

And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says "covert police or government operations may require complete blackout' conditions."

"Additionally," Apple says," the wireless transmission of sensitive information to a remote source is one example of a threat to security. This sensitive information could be anything from classified government information to questions or answers to an examination administered in an academic setting."

The statement led many to believe that authorities and police could now use the patented feature during protests or rallies to block the transmission of video footage and photographs from the scene, including those of police brutality, which at times of major events immediately flood news networks and video websites.

Apple patented the means to transmit an encoded signal to all wireless devices, commanding them to disable recording functions.

Those policies would be activated by GPS, and WiFi or mobile base-stations, which would ring-fence ("geofence") around a building or a "sensitive area" to prevent phone cameras from taking pictures or recording video.

Apple may implement the technology, but it would not be Apple's decision to activate the "feature" it would be down governments, businesses and network owners to set such policies, analyzes ZDNet technology website.

Having invented one of the most sophisticated mobile devices, Apple now appears to be looking for ways to restrict its use.

"As wireless devices such as cellular telephones, pagers, personal media devices and smartphones become ubiquitous, more and more people are carrying these devices in various social and professional settings," it explains in the patent. "The result is that these wireless devices can often annoy, frustrate, and even threaten people in sensitive venues."

The company's listed "sensitive" venues so far include mostly meetings, the presentation of movies, religious ceremonies, weddings, funerals, academic lectures, and test-taking environments.

http://rt.com/news/apple-patent-transmission-block-408/

If that is not overturned in Court, we're finished....literally. There will be no way to show the crimes of the Police and Authorities; or the innocence of those accused of wrongdoing....and the Police et al. will have their cameras, from which they'll use the images they want - or even create fake ones. Fuck Apple for producing this. Their list of 'sensitive venues' is very interesting...it mentions the mundane and doesn't mention street actions, protests, conflicts with Police and authorities, declarations of martial law et al. Sanitized list.

[David Guyatt]

My mind immediately casts itself back to the 60's and 70's at the height of the cold war, where citizens would film events surreptitiously - knowing that were they caught they would be sent to a gulag, and therefore, almost certain death.

To think that the "west" won the cold war only to become the new "eastern bloc" in all but name.

[Jan Klimkowski]

My mind immediately casts itself back to the 60's and 70's at the height of the cold war, where citizens would film events surreptitiously - knowing that were they caught they would be sent to a gulag, and therefore, almost certain death.

To think that the "west" won the cold war only to become the new "eastern bloc" in all but name.

Indeed.

Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem "sensitive", and "protected from externalities."
*In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.

And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says "covert police or government operations may require complete blackout' conditions."

To imagine that much of what passes for the avant garde Left in Amerika considers Apple to be a fantastic, radical, model company.

BOYCOTT APPLE!

I spent a decade of my life in the BBC Science department. We were divided between those who considered science as pure and apolitical knowedge and those who believed that ethically scientists must consider the benign and malign uses of their discoveries.

I was in the latter camp.

With this technology, there is no room for discussion. The purpose is clearly, unequivocally, malign: it is to suppress the truth.

Fuck Steve Jobs.

Fuck Steve Wozniak.

Fuck Arthur Levinson.

Fuck Apple Inc.

[Malcolm Pryce]

Thing is, unless I have been completely deluded all my life, Apple really were an admirable company not very long ago. When I fell in love with their products, around, say the early 1990s, they were the rebels and iconoclasts with a really appealing ethos. (Or so I thought.) They were dwarfed by Microsoft who represented everything bad and Apple were the good guys. As far as I can see, this really only started to change with the introduction of that revolutionary first iPod and the process snowballed with the iPhone. At that point they were no longer a computer company and didn't seem to greatly care about their once loyal user base. In fact, I suspect they would be happy to jettison the computer division altogether. The astonishing thing is, they have become Microsoft in the space of such a small space of time. Just a few years. This latest technology is too Orwellian for words. One feels sheepish about always reaching for the Orwell analogy, but there really is no way to avoid it. Even so, I don't think it's the end of the world in that there will be plenty of alternative products that will enable one to film the police brutality. It's really the audacity of Apple's arrogance that astonishes me. And maybe this will be their undoing. Folk will take a lot but there comes a point… And the cracks are already beginning to appear in the Apple facade. They are not the same company after the death of Steve Jobs, and really, like Manchester United without Ferguson, there really is only one way and that is down. Anyone stil remember the kings of the early internet, Netscape? Whatever happened to them?

[Lauren Johnson]

Anyone stil remember the kings of the early internet, Netscape? Whatever happened to them?

Netscape was involved in a intellectual lawsuit with Microsoft. Microsoft was getting its ass handed to it in court. When the GWB admin took power, the "Justice" Department withdrew its lawsuit. Microsoft had spent some very good money lining Bush's campaign pockets.

Netscape was taken over by AOL.

[Magda Hassan]

Moscow has U.S. Internet surveillance server - Vedomosti quoting Snowden's disclosures

11:40 August 12, 2013 Interfax

One of the servers of U.S. global system of monitoring Internet users is located in Moscow, Vedomosti daily reported on Monday quoting information shared by former CIA employee Edward Snowden with The Guardian.
Vedomosti says this follows from a 2008 presentation of the U.S. National Security Agency published on the Guardian's website on July 31.
"It turns out that the U.S. spying infrastructure is located in Moscow. The presentation contains a map of the locations of 700 servers of the global Internet surveillance system called XKeyscore. The servers are located in 150 countries, not just in Moscow but also in Kyiv and even in Beijing," the Vedomosti article says.



According to the NSA presentation, XKeyscore collects information about electronic correspondence, downloaded or sent files, visited Internet pages, activeness in instant messengers, including lists of friends, and also information from the telephone books of mobile users.
The system can also monitor the entire traffic of a user after he or she is indentified in the Internet, including the computer software which NSA is unaware of yet.
Vedomosti wondered where the XKeyscore server in Moscow may be located.
A representative of the Federal Security Service (FSB) did not answer the newspaper's question.
A newspaper source in Russian special services said that the services had not studied the question but said that he was "practically 100 percent sure" that the server should be located at the American embassy in Moscow.
He accounted his point of view to the map showing that servers of the system are absent from the countries that don't have U.S. embassies but in which U.S. intelligence takes keen interest, such as Iran.
"An NSA representative did not comment on XKeyscore either but suggested checking the agency's website. The U.S. embassy in Moscow does not comment on any matters related to Snowden. Attempts to contact Snowden also failed - his lawyer Anatoly Kucherena is on holiday until the end of the month," the article says.


Vedomosti says that Russian experts simply did not believe the story about the XKeyscore server in Moscow.
Thus, director of the Coordinating Center of the Internet National Domain Andrei Kolesnikov thinks that the Guardian journalist who reported about the system first mixed something up in its description. In his opinion, the servers of the system cannot remain unnoticed considering the volume of traffic with information about users.
Meanwhile, CEO of Highloadlab company Alexander Lyamin does not believe Snowden personally. "I would not want to comment on the disclosures of clowns," the newspaper quotes Lyamin as saying.
However, the founder of Russia's biggest social network, VKontakte, Pavel Durov has taken Snowden's words seriously. He invited the former CIA employee to deal with the security of user data in his network.
Durov did not answer Vedomosti's questions about XKeyscore.
http://rbth.ru/news/2013/08/12/moscow_ha...28824.html