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NSA Cracked Open Encrypted Networks of Russian Airlines, Al Jazeera, and Other “High Potential” Targets

FILE -- In this Nov. 1, 2006 file photo, a Qatari employee of Al Jazeera Arabic language TV news channel walks past the logo of Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar. Hackers allegedly broke into the website of Qatar's state-run news agency and published a fake story quoting the ruling emir, authorities there said Wednesday, May 24, 2017, as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates responded by blocking Qatari media, including broadcaster Al-Jazeera. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili, File)
Photo: Kamran Jebreili/AP

NSA CRACKED OPEN ENCRYPTED NETWORKS OF RUSSIAN AIRLINES, AL JAZEERA, AND OTHER “HIGH POTENTIAL” TARGETS

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY successfully broke the encryption on a number of “high potential” virtual private networks, including those of media organization Al Jazeera, the Iraqi military and internet service organizations, and a number of airline reservation systems, according to a March 2006 NSA document.A virtual private network, or VPN, uses an encrypted connection to enable users to go over the internet and connect to a private network, such as a corporate intranet. This allows an organization’s staff to access internal services like file-sharing servers or private wikis without having to physically be in the office.

The NSA’s ability to crack into sensitive VPNs belonging to large organizations, all the way back in 2006, raises broader questions about the security of such networks. Many consumers pay for access to VPNs in order to mask the origin of their internet traffic from the sites they visit, hide their surfing habits from their internet service providers, and to protect against eavesdroppers on public Wi-Fi networks.

The fact that the NSA spied on Al Jazeera’s communications was reported by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in 2013, but that reporting did not mention that the spying was accomplished through the NSA’s compromise of Al Jazeera’s VPN. During the Bush administration, high-ranking U.S. officials criticized Al Jazeera, accusing the Qatar-based news organization of having an anti-American bias, including because it broadcasted taped messages from Osama bin Laden.

“Both protocols offer a zillion configurable options, which is a source of a lot of the vulnerabilities.”

At the time, Al Jazeera defended itself against this criticism, insisting that its reporting was objective. “Osama bin Laden, like it or not, is a party to this present crisis,” news editor Ahmed Al Sheikh told the BBC in 2001.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Op-Ed: Et Tu, The Intercept? Smear Of Assange Murderously Timed

Less than 48 hours after a UK judge ruled against Julian Assange’s legal team in their efforts to free him from the Ecuadoran embassy, The Intercept published a disingenuous and sloppy character assassination against the Wikileaks Editor-In-Chief.

The timing of the article’s publication acted to brutally counter growing support for Assange that arose in the wake of a clearly unjust UK ruling. Essentially, the publication of the smear attempted to deflect attention from the revelation of corruption in the ongoing detention of Assange, and to assassinate his character in the process.

The Intercept’s decision to publish the article at such a time unfortunately serves to characterize the outlet as a servant of the same US deep state that The Intercept has gained a reputation for – at least in theory – opposing.

The serious errors contained in The Intercept’s character assassination of the Wikileaks co-founder were quickly dismantled earlier today by independent journalists including Suzie DawsonCaitlin Johnstone, HA Goodman and others. That Micah Lee, who has engaged in continual attacks against Assange on social media, would be allowed to contribute to an article of this kind represents a fundamental conflict of interest in the work, not to mention the factual inaccuracies and assumptions it makes without so much as pausing to take a breath.

The claims made in The Intercept’s hit piece regarding messages sent privately by Wikileaks’ Twitter account were disingenuous on multiple levels, beginning with the  assumption that Assange was the sole author of the texts. The inference is clearly stated in the article, destroying any shred of journalistic integrity that might be expected from a well-respected news outlet.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Edward Snowden’s New App Uses Your Smartphone to Physically Guard Your Laptop

Illustration: The Intercept

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S NEW APP USES YOUR SMARTPHONE TO PHYSICALLY GUARD YOUR LAPTOP

LIKE MANY OTHER journalists, activists, and software developers I know, I carry my laptop everywhere while I’m traveling. It contains sensitive information; messaging app conversations, email, password databases, encryption keys, unreleased work, web browsers  logged into various accounts, and so on. My disk is encrypted, but all it takes to bypass this protection is for an attacker — a malicious hotel housekeeper, or “evil maid,” for example — to spend a few minutes physically tampering with it without my knowledge. If I come back and continue to use my compromised computer, the attacker could gain access to everything.

Edward Snowden and his friends have a solution. The NSA whistleblower and a team of collaborators have been working on a new open source Android app called Haven that you install on a spare smartphone, turning the device into a sort of sentry to watch over your laptop. Haven uses the smartphone’s many sensors — microphone, motion detector, light detector, and cameras — to monitor the room for changes, and it logs everything it notices. The first public beta version of Haven has officially been released; it’s available in the Play Store and on F-Droid, an open source app store for Android.

Snowden is helping to develop the software through a project he leads at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which receives funding from The Intercept’s parent company. I sit on the FPF board with Snowden, am an FPF founder, and lent some help developing the app, including through nine months of testing. With that noted, I’ll be forthright about the product’s flaws below, and have solicited input for this article from people not involved in the project.

Also collaborating on Haven is the Guardian Project, a global collective of mobile security app developers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Upgrade Your iPhone Passcode to Defeat the FBI’s Backdoor Strategy

YESTERDAY, APPLE CEO TIM COOK published an open letter opposing a court order to build the FBI a “backdoor” for the iPhone.

Cook wrote that the backdoor, which removes limitations on how often an attacker can incorrectly guess an iPhone passcode, would set a dangerous precedent and “would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession,” even though in this instance, the FBI is seeking to unlock a single iPhone belonging to one of the killers in a 14-victim mass shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, in December.

It’s true that ordering Apple to develop the backdoor will fundamentally undermine iPhone security, as Cook and other digital security advocates have argued. But it’s possible for individual iPhone users to protect themselves from government snooping by setting strong passcodes on their phones — passcodes the FBI would not be able to unlock even if it gets its iPhone backdoor.

The technical details of how the iPhone encrypts data, and how the FBI might circumvent this protection, are complex and convoluted, and are being thoroughly explored elsewhere on the internet. What I’m going to focus on here is how ordinary iPhone users can protect themselves.

The short version: If you’re worried about governments trying to access your phone, set your iPhone up with a random, 11-digit numeric passcode. What follows is an explanation of why that will protect you and how to actually do it.

If it sounds outlandish to worry about government agents trying to crack into your phone, consider that when you travel internationally, agents at the airport or other border crossings can seize, search, and temporarily retain your digital devices — even without any grounds for suspicion. And while a local police officer can’t search your iPhone without a warrant, cops have used their own digital devices to get search warrants within 15 minutes, as a Supreme Court opinion recently noted.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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