Pentagon to use Facebook, Twitter as a resource and weapon

This is no great surprise after the recent comments on the social media's role in civil unrest - yet it's been on the agenda for quite a while, just surfacing now that public opinion is more open to the possibility:

The Pentagon is developing plans to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as both a resource and a weapon in future conflicts. Its research and development agency is offering 42 million dollars in funding to anyone who can help, the New York Times reports.

According to the NYT article, social media will change the nature of warfare just as surely as the telegraph, the radio and the telephone did, and the Pentagon does not want to be caught falling short on this score.

Some of its goals were laid out in a document being circulated among potential researchers and is to be presented at a briefing on Tuesday in Arlington, Virginia, at the offices of the military contractor System Planning Corporation. As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the U.S. military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker. It would be useful to know, for instance, whether signs of widespread rebellion were authentic or whether they were being created by a fringe group with little real support. Among the tools the successful seeker of government funding might choose to employ: linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining.

Social networks can allow the military not only to follow but also to shape the action.

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Cyber attacks: from Facebook to nuclear weapons

The Telegraph has a short piece on how cyber attacks are set to become part of everyday life in the 21st Century, citing such targets as social networking sites to secret nuclear facilities; and the need to establish new global conventions: 

World leaders are facing calls to amend the Geneva and Hague conventions to draw up “rules of engagement” for “cyber war”. Here are some of main types of cyber attack:

Denial-of-Service (DoS):

Also known as distributed denial-of-service attack (DdoS), this involves crmiinals attempting to bring down or cripple individual websites, computers or networks often by flooding them with messages.

Malware:

Malicious software designed to take over individuals’ computers in order to spread a bug onto other people’s devices or social networking profiles. It can also infect a computer and turn it into part of a “botnet” – networks of computers controlled remotely by hackers known as “herders” to spread spam or virusus. 

State cyber attacks:

US and Israeli intelligence agencies are believed to have recently used a mysterious computer virus called Stuxnet to carry out an invisible attack on Iran’s secretive nuclear programme.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently admitted that its facilities had been infected by the programme which appears to target and disable uranium enrichment centrifuges....

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Radiation risks cited in full-body airport scans

More controversy surrounding the use of full-body airport security scanners. This recent post explains how

Full-body airport security scanners manufactured by Rapiscan Inc. expose the skin to high radiation levels that may lead to cancer and other health problems, according to researchers from the University of California, San Francisco. Particularly at risk, the researchers said, are travelers who are pregnant, elderly or have weakened immune systems. The machines emit X-ray energy levels that would be safe if they were distributed throughout the body, but a majority of that energy is delivered to the skin and underlying tissue at levels that "may be dangerously high," the researchers wrote last month to the White House Office of Science and Technology. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security defended the use of Rapiscan's backscatter machines. The amount of energy emitted from the machines is equal to two minutes in flight at cruising altitude, said Dr. Alex Garza, chief medical officer for the Department of Homeland Security.

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Cell phones to 'smell' biochem attack?

I remember coving this topic about 2 years ago...seems like it's been taking a while to move on this. Anyway, its implications are both 'reassuring' and yet 'worrying' - hopefully, you won't need to ask why!

If you ever get caught up in a chemical or biological weapons attack, your cellphone may save your life. Or at least that's the ambition of the Department of Homeland Security. The Department's science and technology team has begun talks with four cell-phone manufacturers on designing 'nextgen' phones that would be able to sense a wide variety of noxious chemical compounds in the air - and alert the user. The director of the "Cell-All" program at the DHS, Stephen Dennis, tells CNN that within a year, "We expect up to 80 prototype cell phones to be developed that can be then tested against various agents."

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Hack attacks mounted on car control systems

Now this is interesting news: it seems that the computer systems used to control modern cars are 'very vulnerable to attack', according to new expert research:

An investigation by security researchers found the systems to be "fragile" and easily subverted.
The researchers showed how to kill a car engine remotely, turn off the brakes so the car would not stop and make instruments give false readings.Despite their success, the team said it would be hard for malicious attackers to reproduce their work.

The team of researchers, led by Professor Stefan Savage from the University of California-San Diego, and Tadayoshi Kohno from the University of Washington set out to see what resilience cars had to an attack on their control systems."Our findings suggest that, unfortunately, the answer is 'little,'" wrote the researchers from the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security.

The researchers concentrated their attacks on the electronic control units (ECUs)scattered throughout modern vehicles which oversee the workings of many car components. It is thought that modern vehicles have about 100 megabytes of binary code spread across up to 70 ECUs.

Read more on 'Hack attacks mounted on car control systems'

Cyberwar declared as China hunts for the West’s intelligence secrets

It seems that cyberattacks coming out of China have been rapidly escalating...and the West is starting to get concerned over secret intelligence:

Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China. The attacks have also hit government and military institutions in the United States, where analysts said that the West had no effective response and that EU systems were especially vulnerable because most cyber security efforts were left to member states. 

Nato diplomatic sources told The Times: “Everyone has been made aware that the Chinese have become very active with cyber-attacks and we’re now getting regular warnings from the office for internal security.” The sources said that the number of attacks had increased significantly over the past 12 months, with China among the most active players. 

In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.

Read original article - 'Cyberwar declared as China hunts for the West’s intelligence secrets'

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Net-surveillance figures

More CNet news about Net surveillance figures, which all comes on the top of recent news about privacy and police powers; security and surveillance, etc.....

A forthcoming survey of computer crime investigators suggests that electronic surveillance is a bit more commonplace than most people might expect.

Even a relatively small group of 100 police working on online investigations reports submitting as many as 22,800 legal requests for information a year to Internet and e-mail providers, a category that includes both subpoenas and search warrants.

CNET has reviewed a presentation scheduled to be given at a federal task force meeting on Thursday, which says that the survey respondents said they submitted a total of anywhere from 2,868 to 22,800 requests for information a year. (See one excerpt and another.)

"Most Internet users do not realize how often the government is demanding personal information from companies, often without judicial oversight, and how often companies turn it over," says Nicole Ozer, technology director for the ACLU of Northern California. "Companies are refusing to disclose to the public how many demands they get. It appears that the government is demanding that Internet companies turn over so much personal information about users, so often, that companies can't keep up."

No law requires that the number of subpoenas and search warrants sent to Internet and e-mail providers be made public. Federal law does require the disclosure of certain types of wiretaps--in 2004, for instance, there were 1,442 nonterrorism-related wiretaps, and only 4 percent targeted computers and electronic devices.

Read more - 'Net-surveillance figures'

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Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks

Moving on from what was said in a recent post about the 'cyber-attack' scenerio forcing a move into citizen privacy, here we have an alarming partnership between Google and the eaves-dropping scandalous NSA:

The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google -- and its users -- from future attack. 

Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans' online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users' searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data. 

The partnership strikes at the core of one of the most sensitive issues for the government and private industry in the evolving world of cybersecurity: how to balance privacy and national security interests. On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair called the Google attacks, which the company acknowledged in January, a "wake-up call." Cyberspace cannot be protected, he said, without a "collaborative effort that incorporates both the U.S. private sector and our international partners."

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How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA

Now that airport security is on a new drive for further scanning methods after the appallingly concocted 'underpant bomber' episode, this development in terahertz waves is interesting. It has been said that new scanning methods were set to employ terahertz waves - lets hope this is not the case after these recent findings:

Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and "frisk" people at distance. The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted can also be used to determine the chemical composition of a material...

The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. "Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none," say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.

Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they've found is remarkable....

Go to original site - 'How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA'

Age of cyber warfare is 'dawning'

 Although not 'new', at least it is now being officially stated that the world's nations are prepared for future cyber wars:

Cyber war has moved from fiction to fact, says a report.

Compiled by security firm McAfee, it bases its conclusion on analysis of recent net-based attacks.

Analysis of the motives of the actors behind many attacks carried out via the internet showed that many were mounted with a explicitly political aim.It said that many nations were now arming to defend themselves in a cyber war and readying forces to conduct their own attacks.

While definitions of what constitutes cyber war are not shared, it was clear that many nations were preparing for a future in which conflict was partly conducted via the net."There are at least five countries known to be arming themselves for this kind of conflict," said Greg Day, primary analyst for security at McAfee Europe.

The UK, Germany, France, China and North Korea are known to be developing their own capabilities.

Read more at 'Age of cyber warfare is 'dawning''

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INTERPOL issues its first ever passports

Well, it looks like the 'kinetic elite' just became a little more 'kinetic'.... and this time in the area of crime-busting.... INTERPOL has just declared that it is issuing 'its first ever passports which will enable Heads of National Central Bureaus (NCBs) and staff to travel internationally without requiring a visa when assisting in transnational investigations or urgent deployments to incidents':

Two countries, Pakistan and Ukraine, have already agreed to waive visa entry requirements for INTERPOL passport bearers, recognizing that those individuals will be travelling on behalf of the organization in the furtherance of international police co-operation.

Without the delay of visa processing procedures, any INTERPOL team can be immediately deployed to scenes of terrorist events, major crimes or natural disasters and officials from NCBs can easily cross borders to assist in fugitive extraditions.

The first member of the Executive Committee to receive the new passport, INTERPOL President Khoo Boon Hui, said that the document would significantly support the organization’s work.

“As the world’s largest police organization, INTERPOL needs to remain at the forefront of all activity which enhances member country security and safety,” said President Khoo.

While the rest of us have to wait in line....


Read official site - 'INTERPOL issues its first ever passports'

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The pocket spy: Will your smartphone rat you out?

NewScientist Tech has an article on how firms are able to extract personal information from mobile phones... sometimes at the behest of jealous partners.... a new trend! The post states that:

THERE are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card - but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten - here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.

I've just walked into a windowless room on an industrial estate in Tamworth, UK, where three cellphone analysts in blue shirts sit at their terminals, scrutinising the contents of my phone and smirking. "If it's any consolation, we would have found them even if you had deleted them," says one.

Worse, it seems embarrassing text messages aren't the only thing I have to worry about: "Is this a photo of your office?" another asks (the answer is yes). "And did you enjoy your pizza on Monday night? And why did you divert from your normal route to work to visit this address in Camberwell, London, on Saturday?"

I'm at DiskLabs, a company that handles cellphone forensic analysis for UK police forces, but also for private companies and individuals snooping on suspect employees or wayward spouses. Armed with four cellphones, which I have begged, borrowed and bought off friends and strangers, I'm curious to know just how much personal information can be gleaned from our used handsets and SIM cards.

Read article at - 'The pocket spy: Will your smartphone rat you out?'

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Do we now need ID cards for regional trips?

Another worrying development in the realm of 'restricted mobilities': this time the proposal for needing to track the movements of around 60million domestic UK passengers a year:

Passengers on ferries to the Isle of Wight and Scottish islands such as Mull and Skye will soon have to carry identity papers to comply with new police anti-terror powers.

And travellers flying between British cities or to Northern Ireland face having their personal data logged when booking tickets and checking in.

Until now ferry passengers on most routes in Britain have not been required to produce ID and internal flight passengers only face random police checks.

But under new Government security rules that will come into force next year, personal data, including name, date of birth and home address, will be typed into a computer record for the police by the booking clerk or travel agent.

Passengers will also face further ID checks when boarding their flight or ferry.

I would like to think that this was an April Fool's joke - yet the story was last updated on 29th March '09....

Read original article - 'Now we need ID cards for a trip to the Isle of Wight'

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Car surveillance box to track drivers

Here is something that was discussed in the forthcoming book 'After the Car' - the introduction of 'black boxes' on cars to enable the tracking of the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe. The Guardian reports that

The government is backing a project to install a "communication box" in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe, the Guardian can reveal.

Under the proposals, vehicles will emit a constant "heartbeat" revealing their location, speed and direction of travel. The EU officials behind the plan believe it will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. A consortium of manufacturers has indicated that the router device could be installed in all new cars as early as 2013.

However, privacy campaigners warned last night that a European-wide car tracking system would create a system of almost total road surveillance.

Details of the Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) project, a £36m EU initiative backed by car manufacturers and the telecoms industry, will be unveiled this year.

Also, that

The system uses the same connections as those in mobile telephones, Wi-Fi internet and security tags attached to clothes in shops.

A car will constantly stay in touch via all these methods of communication, stashed in a router behind the dashboard.

Crucially, vehicles beam out a "heartbeat" message, revealing their precise location, speed and direction, to all other cars within a 400m range.

Read - 'Highway Wi-Fi: How the new tracking system works'

Read original article at 'Big Brother is watching: surveillance box to track drivers is backed'

With this and the new e-borders scheme blogged previously, it sounds as if all mobilities will be under near-total surveillance: is this the future?

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Motorists could be banned from leaving Britain

Following on from the previous post about the plan to introduce the E-Borders travel security scheme, the Telegraph has a follow-up article about how an "Explanatory Memorandum" in the E-Borders program could be used for stopping millions of motorists with unpaid parking fines from leaving the country:

Ministers are examining whether to use powers to track the travel plans of everyone leaving the country under a system known as e-Borders to deal with the problem of unpaid fines...

...It says that e-Borders could help recoup millions of pounds of unpaid fines, and make it easier to enforce the confiscation of criminals' assets following a court order.

"Whilst not a key e-Borders priority, e-Borders could also contribute to compliance on fine enforcement, if provisions were issued prohibiting travel overseas whilst fines remained unpaid and confiscation orders undischarged."

It's becoming clearer that once this scheme has been established, its range of operations can be extended to cover most mobility agendas.


Read original article - 'Motorists could be banned from leaving Britain'

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Travel will never be the same again

Here it comes - it now appears that the travel plans and personal details of every holidaymaker, business traveler and day-tripper who leaves Britain are to be tracked by the Government under the new 'E-Borders' travel surveillance scheme:

Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade. Passengers leaving every international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal information as well as their travel plans. So-called "booze crusiers" who cross the Channel for a couple of hours to stock up on wine, beer and cigarettes will be subject to the rules.

In addition, weekend sailors and sea fishermen will be caught by the system if they plan to travel to another country - or face the possibility of criminal prosecution. The owners of light aircraft will also be brought under the system, known as e-borders, which will eventually track 250 million journeys annually.

Even swimmers attempting to cross the Channel and their support teams will be subject to the rules which will require the provision of travellers' personal information such as passport and credit card details, home and email addresses and exact travel plans.

The full extent of the impact of the government's "e-borders" scheme emerged amid warnings that passengers face increased congestion as air, rail and ferry companies introduce some of the changes over the Easter holidays.

Read original post at - 'All travel plans to be tracked by Government'

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Towards a Nomadic Fortress

One of my favourite blogsites - Subtopia - has a post called 'Towards a Nomadic Fortress' (I'm a bit behind on this post!) where Bryan Finoki discusses further about his ongoing interest in pervasive border spaces. Always a good read:

No longer just a question of contested territory, hard boundary lines, and stricter border enforcement between two nations, but a space that functions more ubiquitously on several paradoxes around global mobility and a rise in detention markets, detention politics, national security as the new global architecture. Rather than a single structure, the nomadic fortress is a whole syntax of control spaces linked across multiple landscapes that constitute perhaps the world’s first universal border fence, loosely connected across continents through a kind of geopolitical geometry that super-imposes a border just as much as enforces one between the First World and the Global South. It is, you might say, the Great Wall of Globalization.

This space has no regard for borders any more as we traditionally understand them, no respect for national territory; it hovers over and slips between those definitions, goes around and under them when it needs to, ultimately passing through border fixity as it sees fit. It is in some way the final border, a border that is never at rest but is always modifying itself for greater tactical vantage; a kind of flexible mock-hydrological regime that deploys and aligns other sub-border levers and valves below it to secure the conduits of neoliberal capitalism and the flows of people who are captives of them in one way or another. A structure that utilizes an entire atlas of border fences with a range of satellite technologies, web-based border vigilantes and extra-territorial floating prisons, to feed the border as a kind of geopolitical gutter space that siphons the subjects of migration off into a swollen infrastructure of detention where billions of dollars and are spent on their bounty...

...My essay Towards a Nomadic Fortress is a survey of the infrastructure of a border industrial complex, if you will, that is cashing in on creating and enforcing this new bordering, tracking down and detaining transients, unconscionably blurring the lines between immigration and national security to the point of total human rights devolution.

Read original post at - 'Towards a Nomadic Fortress'

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Hackers clone passports in drive-by RFID heist

Some recent news on the security and viability of using RFID for mobility ID as in passports. A British hacker has shown how easy it is to clone US passport cards that use RFID by conducting a drive-by test on the streets of San Francisco:

Chris Paget, director of research and development at Seattle-based IOActive, used a US$250 Motorola RFID reader and an antenna mounted in a car’s side window and drove for 20 minutes around San Francisco, with a colleague videoing the demonstration. During the demonstration he picked up the details of two US passport cards, which are fitted with RFID chips and can be used instead of traditional passports for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

I personally believe that RFID is very unsuitable for tagging people,” he said. “I don’t believe we should have any kind of identity document with RFID tags in them. My ultimate goal here would be, my dream for this research, would be to see the entire Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative be scrapped.”

Read more at 'Hackers clone passports in drive-by RFID heist'

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Humans will be implanted with microchips...?

First we had surveillance, then we had sousveillance - now we have 'uberveillance'. This new 'trend', it seems, refers to surveillance from within - and all around:

All Australians could be implanted with microchips for tracking and identification within the next two or three generations, a prominent academic says.

Michael G Michael from the University of Wollongong's School of Information Systems and Technology, has coined the term "uberveillance" to describe the emerging trend of all-encompassing surveillance.

"Uberveillance is not on the outside looking down, but on the inside looking out through a microchip that is embedded in our bodies," Dr Michael told ninemsn...

...But Dr Michael said the technology behind uberveillance would eventually lead to a black box small enough to fit on a tiny microchip and implanted in our bodies.

This could also allow someone to be located in an emergency or for the identification of corpses after a large scale disaster or terrorist attack.

Will it ever come to this - and should we be concerned now rather than later?


Read more at 'Humans 'will be implanted with microchips'

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iPhones will win the war in Afghanistan

Now here's an interesting development - or expose! It seems that NATO will be waging the war - for peace - with the iPhone:

The head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has said that progress is being made in the international community's battle against terror in Afghanistan - and that progress is being made by iPhones...

...More interestingly, the Alliance chief also revealed that he had suffered phone envy during a recent trip to Kabul. He also seemed to suggest that when a suffering people turn away from the dark horror-wracked night of despair and legacy technology, and instead reach out into the bright new Multitouch dawn - well, then peace and prosperity can't be far away.

According to Mr De Hoop Scheffer:

Today, half the country is relatively at peace. Access to education is up tenfold. So is access to health care. We are preparing for the second round of national elections. The Afghan Army, and increasingly the police, are growing and improving -- slowly, but clearly and steadily. And when I saw an Afghan fellow pull out his Apple iPhone in Kabul, while I was talking on my 5 year old NATO mobile, I saw another symbol of progress.

Read more - 'iPhones will win the war in Afghanistan'

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