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EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Explains Why Apple Should Continue To Fight the Government on Encryption
EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Explains Why Apple Should Continue To Fight the Government on Encryption
As the Obama administration campaign to stop the commercialization of strong encryption heats up, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is firing back on behalf of the companies like Apple and Google that are finding themselves under attack.
“Technologists and companies working to protect ordinary citizens should be applauded, not sued or prosecuted,” Snowden wrote in an email through his lawyer.
Snowden was asked by The Intercept to respond to the contentious suggestion — made Thursday on a blog that frequently promotes the interests of the national security establishment — that companies like Apple and Google might in certain cases be found legally liable for providing material aid to a terrorist organization because they provide encryption services to their users.
In his email, Snowden explained how law enforcement officials who are demanding that U.S. companies build some sort of window into unbreakable end-to-end encryption — he calls that an “insecurity mandate” — haven’t thought things through.
“The central problem with insecurity mandates has never been addressed by its proponents: if one government can demand access to private communications, all governments can,” Snowden wrote.
“No matter how good the reason, if the U.S. sets the precedent that Apple has to compromise the security of a customer in response to a piece of government paper, what can they do when the government is China and the customer is the Dalai Lama?”
Weakened encryption would only drive people away from the American technology industry, Snowden wrote. “Putting the most important driver of our economy in a position where they have to deal with the devil or lose access to international markets is public policy that makes us less competitive and less safe.”
Snowden entrusted his archive of secret documents revealing the NSA’s massive warrantless spying programs all over the world to journalists in 2013. Two of those journalists — Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras — are founding editors of The Intercept.
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The Chilling Thing Gartner Just Said About a Once Hot Engine of Global Growth
The Chilling Thing Gartner Just Said About a Once Hot Engine of Global Growth
Hope took another hit from the reality of fickle, strung-out consumers.
Apple sold 1.5 million watches during the first week, about 200,000 a day, its most successful product launch ever. Before the launch, media hype had become a total-immersion program. No company has ever dominated the media like this. Today,MarketWatch reported that sales, based on data from Slice, might have plunged 90% since that week, to fewer than 20,000 watches a day, and on some days fewer than 10,000.
“The value of a smartwatch for the average user is still not compelling enough,” explained IT research and advisory company Gartner in its report on worldwide electronic device shipments.
But it’s not just smartwatches.
The other beacon of hope in the electronic device sector, the smartphone, got broadsided today by Samsung, which cut its Q2 guidance, expecting revenues to drop 8% from a year ago. Yet, in April, the company had launched its flagship Galaxy S6 which was supposed to boost sales. Samsung didn’t give details, but there are a few culprits, such as lousy S6 performance against its competitors, weak demand in China and Europe, and the old standby, currency headwinds.
Gartner now expects shipment growth in the once sizzling mobile phone market to slow to a barely perceptible 3.3% in 2015. The report points at China:
The global market has been affected by a weaker performance in China. We have witnessed fewer and fewer first time buyers in China, a sign that the mobile phone market there is reaching saturation. Vendors in China will have to win replacement buyers and improve the appeal of their premium offerings to attract upgrades, if they want to maintain or increase their market share.
So it’s going to get tough in the Promised Land of 1.36 billion consumers. Hence, hope has to move beyond China:
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Chinese Stocks Crash Most In 19 Years, Re-Open Limit Down (Despite PBOC Hail Mary)
Chinese Stocks Crash Most In 19 Years, Re-Open Limit Down (Despite PBOC Hail Mary)
Carnage…
- *CHINA STOCK PANIC SELLING TO CONTINUE, CENTRAL CHINA ZHANG SAYS
This leave China’s CSI-300 broad stock index futures up just 7% year-to-date…
- *CHINA CSI 500 STOCK-INDEX FUTURES FALL BY MAXIMUM 10% LIMIT
- *CHINA CSI 500 STOCK-INDEX FUTURES FALL BY LIMIT FOR 2ND DAY
- *HKEX DROPS AS MUCH AS 7.3%, MOST SINCE SEPT. 2011
- *SHANGHAI COMPOSITE INDEX EXTENDS DROP TO 7.5%
- *SHANGHAI COMPOSITE HEADS FOR BIGGEST 3-DAY DROP SINCE 1996
Carnage-er…
- *CHINA’S CSI 300 INDEX FALLS 3.4% TO 4,190.3 AT BREAK
- *CHINA’S SHANGHAI COMPOSITE FALLS 3.8% TO 4,035.48 AT BREAK
- *CHINA’S CSI 500 STOCK INDEX FUTURES EXTEND LOSSES TO 5.7%
- *CHINEXT INDEX PLUNGES 7.8% FOR 3-DAY 20% SLIDE
After The People’s Daily proclaimed… “investors were moved to tears” thanks to the PBOC’s actions…
- *FOUNDATIONS FOR A-SHARES ARE `SOLID’: CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL
- *CHINA STOCK MARKET TO HAVE 30 YEARS `GOLDEN AGE’: SEC. JOURNAL
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Secret Manuals Show the Spyware Sold to Despots and Cops Worldwide – The Intercept
Secret Manuals Show the Spyware Sold to Despots and Cops Worldwide – The Intercept.
When Apple and Google unveiled new encryption schemes last month, law enforcement officials complained that they wouldn’t be able to unlock evidence on criminals’ digital devices. What they didn’t say is that there are already methods to bypass encryption, thanks to off-the-shelf digital implants readily available to the smallest national agencies and the largest city police forces — easy-to-use software that takes over and monitors digital devices in real time, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
We’re publishing in full, for the first time, manuals explaining the prominent commercial implant software “Remote Control System,” manufactured by the Italian company Hacking Team. Despite FBI director James Comey’s dire warnings about the impact of widespread data scrambling — “criminals and terrorists would like nothing more,” he declared — Hacking Team explicitly promises on its website that its software can “defeat encryption.”
The manuals describe Hacking Team’s software for government technicians and analysts, showing how it can activate cameras, exfiltrate emails, record Skype calls, log typing, and collect passwords on targeted devices. They also catalog a range of pre-bottled techniques for infecting those devices using wifi networks, USB sticks, streaming video, and email attachments to deliver viral installers. With a few clicks of a mouse, even a lightly trained technician can build a software agent that can infect and monitor a device, then upload captured data at unobtrusive times using a stealthy network of proxy servers, all without leaving a trace. That, at least, is what Hacking Team’s manuals claim as the company tries to distinguish its offerings in the global marketplace for government hacking software.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
