#Surveillance
nevver:
Fredo & Pidjin
Strong password protection is by far the best general security you can give your data. But choosing an unbeatable password is harder than it sounds. Many people are shocked to discover that their ingenious choice is actually among the most popular passwords. By studying large databases of passwords, attackers can compile vast lists of possible passwords sorted from the most likely to the outright improbable. These lists include tweaks and modifications, like replacing letters with similar-looking numbers or symbols, adding numbers or punctuation to the beginning or end of words, or stringing a few words together. Software allows attackers to rapidly test them against a password-protected device or service. Traditional password choices quickly succumb to these attacks.
Read more in CPJ’s Digital Security Guide
accessnow:
Nafkot Nega thinks journalists are terrorists. When I visited him and his mother, Serkalem Fassil, at their tiny apartment in the outskirts of Washington, DC, in early January, 9-year-old Nafkot intermittently murmured and jabbed his hands, pretending to be a superhero fighting criminals.
Perhaps some of those criminals were journalists like his father, Eskinder Nega, who was convicted of violating Ethiopia’s anti-terror law in July 2012. Eskinder is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence.
“Journalism is a crime or a terrorist act in his mind because what has been portrayed about [his dad],” Serkalem explained to me through a translator. “Not only his dad, but if you mention any journalist he will scream and say ‘I don’t like journalists!’”
Their story is a weaving tale that mirrors how Ethiopia, home to over 90 million people, became a digital hermit nation. How Nafkot come to believe journalism is a crime equivalent to terrorism is a case study of how governments have used the internet as a tool for repression.
(From CJR)
Remember one year ago when then-Attorney General Eric Holder supposedly tightened restrictions on the Justice Department so it could not easily conduct surveillance on journalists’ emails and phone calls? Well it turns out the Justice Department inserted a large loophole in its internal rules that allows the FBI to completely circumvent those restrictions and spy on journalists in secrecy—and with absolutely no court oversight—using National Security Letters.
And what, exactly, are the Justice Department’s rules for when they can target a journalist with a National Security Letter (NSL)? Well, according the government, that’s classified.
Read more.
Image:
A redacted page in the Justice Department’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DOIG) makes clear the government can spy on journalists with NSLs while circumventing the Attorney General’s media guidelines
Yesterday, during a panel on encryption policy hosted by Just Security, an online forum covering national security law and policy, top U.S. intelligence lawyer Robert S. Litt pressed the case for engineering backdoors in encryption without undermining computer security as a whole. As CPJ has documented, leading security and policy experts consider this impossible.
Continue reading.
IN THE WAKE OF THE ARAB SPRING, the UK riots, and Occupy Wall Street, when the same digital tools that were enabling journalists to share information and organize in unprecedented ways—through Twitter, Facebook, mobile phones—had also enabled the authorities to surveil and target their efforts, journalist Susan McGregor understood that metadata was the biggest security risk to her colleagues and their sources. With a grant from the Brown Institute, she started building a mobile app called Dispatch that allowed for secure, authenticated, and anonymous communication and publishing.
Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review.
(via the Intercept)
Documents obtained by hackers from the Italian spyware manufacturer Hacking Team confirm that the company sells its powerful surveillance technology to countries with dubious human rights records.
Hacking Team has an unusually public profile for a purveyor of surreptitious technology, and it has drawn criticism because its malware has shown up on the computers of activists and journalists. Most of the countries identified in the leaked files have previously been connected to Hacking Team by human rights researchers working with computer forensics experts.
Read more.
nevver:
Who’s watching who? Jakub Geltner
by Alan Rusbridger for CJR.
Two very big questions linger on—one about whether the very technologies Edward Snowden revealed are compatible with independent, inquiring reporting; and one crucial question about journalism itself, which could be boiled down to: “What is it supposed to be, or do?”
Continue reading.
Image: Wired
postgraphics:
Information is divided up, sent in chunks across the world and reassembled when it reaches its destination. See the graphic. Read: Part 1 | Part 2.
theonion:
“Unfortunately, lawmakers chose to limit our intelligence-gathering capabilities by discontinuing key sections of the Patriot Act, and now we have no choice but to depend on a number of other civilian-monitoring initiatives that continue to remain hidden from the public,” said NSA director Michael Rogers.
More.
