Police State: Secret Prisons, Drone Bases, Surveillance Stations...

[paulitician]

Fascinating, but disturbing read.


Secret state: Trevor Paglen documents the hidden world of governmental surveillance, from drone bases to "black sites"

As anyone who has worked there knows, Kabul is a tough place, redeemed by the charm of the people and the abundance of cheap taxis. But Trevor Paglen had trouble finding a taxi driver willing and able to take him where he wanted to go: north-east out of the city along an old back road reputed to be so dangerous – even by Afghan standards – that it had seen no regular traffic for more than 30 years.

Finally he succeeded in digging out an old man who had been driving a cab since before the Soviet invasion. "We started driving and we left the city behind and we're out in the sticks," he recalls, "and we end up in a traffic jam – not cars but goats. And we wait for the goats to go by and we see the shepherd, this very old man, traditional Afghan clothes, big beard, exactly what you'd picture in your head. But he's wearing a baseball hat.

"The shepherd finally turns to look at us in the car – and on that baseball cap are the letters KBR. It stands for Kellogg Brown and Root – a company that was a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Dick Cheney was on the board of. The local goatherd is wearing a Dick Cheney baseball cap!" It was the final clue he needed that this particular bad road was the right road. There in the distance, behind a high cream wall and coiled razor wire, was what Paglen was looking for: the nondescript structures of what he says he is "99.999 per cent sure" is the place they call the Salt Pit: a never-before-identified-or-photographed secret CIA prison.

Trevor Paglen is an artist of a very particular kind. His principal tool is the camera, and most of his works are photographs, but the reason they are considered to be art – the reason, for example, that this bland photo, three feet wide by two feet high, showing the outer wall and the interior roof outline of the Salt Pit, with a dun-coloured Afghan hill behind it, sells for $20,000 – is because of the arduous, painstaking, sometimes dangerous path that culminated in pressing the shutter; and because it reveals something that the most powerful state in history has done everything in its power to keep secret.

Since he was a postgraduate geography student at UCLA 10 years ago, Paglen has dedicated himself to a very 21st-century challenge: seeing and recording what our political masters do everything in their power to render secret and invisible.

Above our heads more than 200 secret American surveillance satellites constantly orbit the Earth: with the help of fanatical amateur astronomers who track their courses, Paglen has photographed them. A secret air force base deep in the desert outside Las Vegas...

Read More:
Secret state: Trevor Paglen documents the hidden world of governmental surveillance, from drone bases to "black sites" - Americas - World - The Independent
DRUDGE REPORT 2014®

 

[waltky]

iMessage wiretap sought...

US government considers suing Apple for real-time access to user iMessages
September 9, 2015 -- Officials at the Justice Department have reportedly considered taking legal action against Apple to force it to provide an iMessage wiretap.

Officials at the Justice Department have reportedly considered suing Apple to force it into providing an iMessage wiretap. The New York Times on Monday reported that Apple was served a court order by the Justice Department this summer over an investigation involving drug and gun crime, demanding it provide real time access to text messages sent between suspects using iPhones. Apple reportedly said its iMessage system was encrypted and, as a result, it couldn't comply with the order. Consequently, the company can't provide the same interception capabilities to law enforcement officials under US wiretap laws as telecoms operators can. Apple's apparent defiance came amid calls this summer from the FBI director James Comey for a master key to bypass end-to-end encryption, where companies such as Apple and WhatsApp that offer messaging services don't have access to the decryption keys. Instead, encryption and decryption occurs on the devices.

In response, Apple CEO Tim Cook argued earlier this year that forcing the company to provide a master key would be "incredibly dangerous" and would be like putting a "key under the mat for the cops" that a burglar could find too. Master keys can leak too, as a Washington Post story about the Transport Security Agency's physical master keys recently demonstrated. Apple also doesn't keep copies of users' messages unless they're backed up to iCloud, where they're not encrypted. The New York Times report notes that Apple did turn over some stored iCloud messages in the investigation, though not the real-time texts the FBI wanted.

According to the report, Apple's reasoning has prompted calls within the Justice Department and the FBI to take Apple to court. However, those plans are on hold and officials believe that winning a case would be a long shot. Despite Apple's claims that it cannot provide a wiretap on iMessage, Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, last month outlined why Apple does in fact support wiretapping in iMessage. That's due to the central key server used to handle public keys and the fact that devices don't have a way to independently confirm that the server provides the correct key for the intended participants.

As Weaver explains: "When Alice wants to send a message to Bob, Alice's iPhone contacts Apple's keyserver, a central authority which knows everyone's public keys, and asks 'I am Alice, please tell me all my public keys' and 'I am Alice, please tell me all of Bob's public keys'. Then Alice's phone encrypts the message with all the public keys and sends the result to Apple, which forwards the encrypted messages onto everyone's devices. Since only the devices know the corresponding private keys and not appleID, Apple claims this is 'end-to-end' secure." "But there remains a critical flaw," he continued. "There is no user interface for Alice to discover (and therefore independently confirm) Bob's keys. Without this feature, there is no way for Alice to detect that an Apple keyserver gave her a different set of keys for Bob. Without such an interface, iMessage is 'backdoor enabled' by design: the keyserver itself provides the backdoor." In order to tap Alice, the keyserver can be modified to create an FBI key for Alice that's presented to her. As a result, the FBI can decrypt all the messages she receives. To tap Alice's outgoing messages, an FBI key can be added to every request she makes for other people's keys.

US government considers suing Apple for real-time access to user iMessages | ZDNet

See also:

FBI Director: Mobile encryption could lead us to 'very dark place'
October 17, 2014 -- Apple's and Google's encryption plans have not gone down well with US law enforcement, and the agency's director says the companies are leading us down a dark path.

FBI Director James Comey believes that in a "post-Snowden" world, the pendulum has swung too far — and unchecked encryption could lead us all to a "dark, dark place" where criminals walk free. Speaking at an event at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., Comey said that public misconceptions over the data collected by the US government and technological capabilities of agencies such as the NSA have encouraged heightened encryption — but the consequences could be dire.

The FBI chief, who has been in his post just over a year, said that "the law hasn't kept pace with technology, and this disconnect has created a significant public safety problem." In particular, "Going Dark" worries law enforcement the most — the spectre of facing black spots in surveillance, and not being able to gather or access evidence related to suspected criminals. "We have the legal authority to intercept and access communications and information pursuant to court order, but we often lack the technical ability to do so," Comey admitted.

Current law governing the interception of telecommunications data and records requires broadband and network providers to build interception capabilities into their networks, under the terms of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). However, this law was brought in 20 years ago — and now technology has outstripped this legislation, as new communication technologies are not necessarily covered by the act.

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[waltky]

Boomerang effect could let other countries look into our emails...

Microsoft Seeks to Block US From Accessing Email Overseas
Sep 9, 2015, Microsoft got a chilly reaction from a federal appeals court Wednesday to its claims that the United States should not be able to touch data it stores for customers overseas.

Microsoft lawyer E. Joshua Rosenkranz told a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan that "global chaos" could result if it failed to overturn a lower-court judge's ruling last summer. That judge ordered the Redmond, Washington-based company to turn over a customer's email account that it stores in Dublin, Ireland, for a narcotics probe. "If we can do it to them, then other countries can do it to us," Rosenkranz said. Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch seemed unfazed by Rosenkranz's predictions that other nations would react negatively if the U.S. was permitted to get the records.

He said Congress can respond if foreign relations are affected. "That's on them," Lynch said. "They're the people who make the laws and deal with foreign relations." Rosenkranz said the case was about national sovereignty and the need to protect from the reach of the U.S. government everything from attorney-client communications to love letters to trade secrets. "We would go crazy if they tried to do that to us," he said of other countries that might try to get access to records stored in the United States. Assistant U.S. Attorney Justin Anderson said the U.S. properly followed the law.

He said the U.S. government had repeatedly asked Microsoft without success to cite what foreign law might be compromised if it receives the Dublin email file that can be retrieved by U.S.-based Microsoft employees. Lynch said it seems there might not be as much protection of electronic communications as service providers might like. The case was initiated by Microsoft after prosecutors obtained a warrant for the information in December 2013, saying there was probable cause to believe the account in a Dublin facility opened in 2010 was being used to further narcotics trafficking. Microsoft turned over the customer's address book, which was stored in the United States.

Dozens of organizations and businesses submitted written arguments to the appeals court, including 29 major U.S. and foreign news and trade organizations. They said journalists and publishers worldwide rely on email and cloud-storage services provided by Microsoft and others to gather, store and review documents protected by the First Amendment. A ruling in the case is unlikely for months.

Microsoft Seeks to Block US From Accessing Email Overseas

 

[paulitician]

The Shadow Government. The one no one talks about.

 

[waltky]

Apple flaw makes iMessage vulnerable to hackers...

Apple Flaw could Allow Hackers to Access Devices Via Messaging
July 22, 2016 - Researchers have discovered a flaw in Apple’s operating systems that could allow a hacker to gain access to your Mac or iPhone by sending an iMessage.

A researcher from Cisco Talos found the vulnerability in which a hacker could send a certain type of photo file, called a .TIF, which would give the hacker access to the device’s storage and passwords.

“This vulnerability is especially concerning as it can be triggered in any application that makes use of the Apple Image I/O API when rendering tiled TIF images, said Tyler Bohan from security firm Cisco Talos, according to The Guardian.

A 3D printed Apple logo is seen in front of a displayed cyber code in this illustration​

“Depending on the delivery method chosen by an attacker, this vulnerability is potentially exploitable through methods that do not require explicit user interaction, since many applications (ie iMessage) automatically attempt to render images when they are received in their default configurations,” he added.

The problem was reportedly found in many versions of iOS and OS X, but users who update to the latest versions of both should be able to avoid it.

Apple Flaw could Allow Hackers to Access Devices Via Messaging

See also:

Edward Snowden Develops Anti-Spy Phone Device
July 22, 2016 - Whistleblower and former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden says he's working on a mobile phone case that would prevent users from being spied on. The ex-National Security Agency analyst hopes the case for the iPhone 6 will prevent the phone from transmitting certain data, particularly the location of the user.

The case, which would not block cellphone signals, would stop the phone from transmitting GPS data even when the phone is in “airplane mode.” Currently an iPhone 6 continues to transmit GPS data even in airplane mode, and this is seen as a potential way for governments or hackers to remotely “turn on” a phone. "Front-line journalists are high-value targets, and their enemies will spare no expense to silence them," Snowden wrote, describing the project in a paper submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab on Thursday morning. "Unfortunately, journalists can be betrayed by their own tools. Their smartphones, an essential tool for communicating with sources and the outside world -- as well as for taking photos and authoring articles -- are also the perfect tracking device."

Conceptual rendering of a “battery case” style introspection engine, piggybacked on an iPhone6.​

The case, which slips over the bottom of the phone, connects to the SIM card port and monitors outbound data, is being co-developed with Andrew Huang, a Singapore-based American hacker. An alarm would be triggered, should the device detect an unwanted signal.

A prototype of the case is expected next year, but don’t expect it to be widely available. "The project is run largely through volunteer efforts on a shoestring budget," Snowden and Huang wrote.

The U.S. government believes Snowden jeopardized America's security by leaking classified information while he was working as a contractor for the NSA in 2013. He is believed to be living in Moscow.

Edward Snowden Develops Anti-Spy Phone Device