The online universe, of course, has multiple trillions of points of data circulating for observation and use, or ignored and archived.
Occasionally, a few ‘bloggers’ stand out amidst the billions of posts, the hundreds of thousands of billions of pixels, and the petaloads of mined data being sifted for hooks.
Here we have an example of the blogiverse at work — a site that features InSecurity Watch in addition to their regular eclectic postings. Eats shoots ‘n leaves has come across Strategic Demands’ radar as a new site to introduce to our readers. We intend to occasionally circle back to their site, among others we intend to highlight going forward, for strategic world curating and bits of streaming.
We believe eats shoots ‘n leaves will appreciate us re-posting their post from yesterday, with acknowledgment. Consider this a strategic recycling… a green strategy.
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InSecurityWatch:
NATO nuclear drawdown now seems unlikely
Last summer in Berlin, President Obama called for “bold reductions” in U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear weapons to ease the risk of annihilation in Europe.
Obama was referring to the roughly 200 B61 nuclear bombs that the U.S. has deployed in five NATO nations stretching from the Netherlands to Turkey — as well as an even larger Russian arsenal estimated at 2,000 tactical weapons.
But since last summer, that hopeful outlook has evaporated. Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and nuclear threats made by Russian President Vladimir Putin have killed any chance that the U.S. would withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons any time soon.
“Withdrawing our relatively few weapons would be the absolute wrong signal at this moment,” said James Stavridis, the retired U.S. admiral who served as NATO chief until 2013 and is now dean of the Fletcher School of international affairs at Tufts University.
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Note: We will be discussing recent developments w/ the B61-11 and B61-12 in future postings to Strategic Demands. These nuclear weapons systems are among the most ‘useable’ nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal, given their deployment and tactical planning for use as “bunker busters”. May 2014 – New Mexico http://www.abqjournal.com/402297/news/sandia-national-labs-achieves-b61-milestone.html – http://fas.org/blogs/security/2014/01/b61capability/ – (“Low-yield nuclear weapons” B61-11 https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/b61_test/#.VB-IIhY8qnI
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Posted on 2014 September 18
For the first item in today’s compendium of the world of spies, snoops, cops, crimes, wars, geopolitics, hackery, and the like, we turn to reassurance from the Guardian:
CIA chief: ‘If I’ve done something wrong, I’ll stand up and admit it’
• John Brennan expresses frustration with Senate and media while decrying lack of trust in agency at intelligence conference
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency expressed frustration with his Senate overseers and the media on Thursday, even as he and his fellow heads of US intelligence agencies pledged to win back the trust of a skeptical American public.
“I certainly believe having the public’s trust makes all of our jobs much easier and better,” Brennan said on a panel at an intelligence conference, where he was joined by his colleagues at the helms of the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
But ahead of an impending clash with the Senate intelligence committee, which is due to release a public version of a report into CIA torture in the coming weeks, Brennan rejected “the narratives I see floating around the media.”
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From Gigaom, someone’s takin’ a bit out of the Apple:
Apple’s “warrant canary” disappears, suggesting new Patriot Act demands
When Apple published its first Transparency Report on government activity in late 2013, the document contained an important footnote that stated: “Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.”
Writer and cyber-activist Cory Doctorow at the time recognized that language as a so-called “warrant canary,” which Apple was using to thwart the secrecy imposed by the Patriot Act.
Warrant canaries are a tool used by companies and publishers to signify to their users that, so far, they have not been subject to a given type of law enforcement request such as a secret subpoena. If the canary disappears, then it is likely the situation has changed — and the company has been subject to such request.
Now, Apple’s warrant canary has disappeared. A review of the company’s last two Transparency Reports, covering the second half of 2013 and the first six months of 2014, shows that the “canary” language is no longer there.
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From the Register, score another one for Edward the Leaker:
Snowden’s NSA leaks have galvanised the storage world
• Vendors raise their game after gov securo-busting revealed
In a recent CyberArk survey of 373 C-level and IT security executives across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific, 37 per cent of respondents said Snowden’s breach of NSA security had influenced their security strategy more than any other incident over the past year.
Difficult decisions are having to be made across industries. Where and how to store data tops the list of priorities. Who to trust has also become a pertinent question when it comes to access management and procurement processes. Storage and security have become sexy again.
Indeed, one of the material outcomes of Snowden’s leaks has already been realised: inspired by renewed consumer and business interest in privacy, technology is becoming more secure.
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From the New York Times, as reported by James Bamford:
Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal
In Moscow this summer, while reporting a story for Wired magazine, I had the rare opportunity to hang out for three days with Edward J. Snowden. It gave me a chance to get a deeper understanding of who he is and why, as a National Security Agency contractor, he took the momentous step of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.
Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another country, it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing with Israel, the N.S.A. evidently did not ensure that the data was modified in this way.
Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to Israel contained the communications — email as well as phone calls — of countless Arab- and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” he told me. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.”
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From RT, bloody irony:
GTA-ISIS: Militants hooking youngsters with ‘Jihad video game’ trailer
Islamic State (IS) militants have released a jihadist video game trailer in which the aim is to destroy Iraqi and US forces, Arabic media report. The game, styling itself as a Grand Theft Auto adaptation, appears specifically aimed at young people.
The recruitment propaganda video trailer aimed to “raise the morale of the mujahedin and to train children and youth how to battle the West and to strike terror into the hearts of those who oppose the Islamic State,” according to the media wing of the IS (formerly known as ISIS), cited in Arabic media.
“The content includes all of the organization’s military tactics against its opponents,” the Islamic state said.
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Homeland Security News Wire covers an intelligence failure:
U.S. intelligence, leaders unclear on exact danger posed by ISIS
Considerable discrepancies in the reporting from U.S. intelligence services regarding the strength of the Islamic State (IS) have led critics to the conclusion that the U.S. intelligence community knows little about the terrorists’ actual strength as the United States is in the process of developing a military strategy to defeat the Islamist organization.
Considerable discrepancies in the reporting from U.S. intelligence services regarding the strength ofthe Islamic State (IS) have led critics to the conclusion that the U.S. intelligence community knows little about the terrorists’ actual strength as the United States is in the process of developing a military strategy to defeat the Islamist organization.
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From the Associated Press, The Most Transparent Administration in History™ flunks the test, again:
Journalists view Obama administration’s transparency as much worse than Bush’s
Editors and reporters meeting in Chicago raised concerns Wednesday about what they described as a lack of access and transparency undermining journalists’ work, several blaming the current White House for setting standards for secrecy that are spreading nationwide.
Criticism of President Barack Obama’s administration on the issue of openness in government came on the last day of a three-day joint convention of the American Society of News Editors, the Associated Press Media Editors and the Associated Press Photo Managers.
“The White House push to limit access and reduce transparency has essentially served as the secrecy road map for all kinds of organizations — from local and state governments to universities and even sporting events,” Brian Carovillano, AP managing editor for U.S. news, said during a panel discussion.
James Risen, a New York Times reporter who is facing potential jail time as he battles government efforts to force him to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information, also spoke at the conference. Risen said intense pressure on reporters and their sources is having a chilling effect on newsgathering.
He spoke of scaring one source just by going to his home and knocking on the front door. “He opened the door and he turned white,” Risen said. “He marches me back through the kitchen [to a back exit] and said, “‘Go out that way.’”
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Guns beat butter again, via the Guardian:
UN to cut food aid to Syria
Without more money, World Food Programme warns food rations will be reduced and voucher schemes slashed
The UN warned on Thursday that it will be forced to cut food rations for more than 6 million Syrians from next month unless it received more funding.
The World Food Programme said that while it still expects to reach almost 6 million Syrians inside the country and in neighbouring states in October and November, there will be significant cuts to the amount of food delivered. The WFP said it had no money for programmes in December.
A WFP official told Reuters that the food basket for Syrians could shrink to 825 calories, well under half the daily recommended intake.
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From the Associated Press, bordering on sanity:
Border Patrol to test wearing cameras
The U.S. Border Patrol will begin testing body-worn cameras on agents next month, the head of its parent agency said Thursday, a step toward seeing if the technology should be used in the field as the government seeks to blunt criticism about agents’ use of force.
R. Gil Kerlikowske, Customs and Border Protection commissioner since March, said a variety of cameras will be tested beginning Oct. 1 at the Border Patrol’s training academy in Artesia, New Mexico.
He didn’t say when or even if cameras will be introduced to the roughly 21,000 agents in the field.
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From Sky News, making a good point:
Assange: ‘Google Like A Privatised NSA’
• Julian Assange tells Sky News the search engine gathers and files information just like America’s National Security Agency.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has accused Google of behaving like a “privatised version of the NSA” in the way it collects and stores information about people.
He told Sky News the internet giant was not doing anything illegal but its behaviour was highly questionable. “It is not doing things which are illegal, what it is doing is legal,” he said. “It is collecting as much information about people as possible, storing it, indexing it, and using it to create profiles of people and then selling that to advertisers and others.
“Those are the same procedures that security agencies go through. That is why the NSA has latched on top of what Google is doing. Since 2009 the NSA had been engaged in the Prism system where information collected online is available to it.”
The accompanying video from Sky News:
Julian Assange ‘Will Leave Embassy With Asylum Intact’
Program note:
Sky’s Sarah Hewson talks to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
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From BuzzFeed, and reminding us of the a high school joke about the cat, who crept in, crapped, and crept out:
U.S. Company Distances Itself From Egyptian Surveillance System
• And the website of its Egyptian affiliate is taken down.
The U.S.-based Blue Coat company has issued a statement distancing itself from a project to monitor Twitter, Facebook, and
Skype in Egypt, following a BuzzFeed News report.
Egyptian officials had told BuzzFeed News that a company called See Egypt had won a tender to begin providing the government with a surveillance system that would allow them to comb through data from Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, among others. In interviews, the Egypt-based See Egypt called itself a “sister company” to Blue Coat, and listed the company as one of their affiliates.
Now, Blue Coat has issued a response saying that their products are not being resold to the Egyptian government.
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From the Dissenter:
Email Suggests Manufacturer of Stingray Surveillance Equipment May Have Lied to FCC
The American Civil Liberties Union has accused the manufacturer of StingRay surveillance products of providing inaccurate information and possibly even lying to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is the agency that is supposed to regulate communications over cable, radio, satellite, television and wire.
Harris Corporation is one of the leading manufacturers of StingRay technology. The technology was “initially designed for the military and intelligence community” and “operates by mimicking cellular service providers’ base stations and forcing all cellular phones in range to register their electronic serial numbers and other identifying information,” according to the ACLU.
The ACLU of Northern California chapter managed to obtain a series of emails from 2010 between the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) and Harris Corporation employees, where the “equipment authorization application for law enforcement use of Harris’ StingRay line of products” is being discussed.
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