A long-running personnel dispute at the Congressional Research Service offers up conflicting visions of the proper role of the congressional support agency, which provides policy and legal analysis to Congress.
In 2009, then-CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan fired then-CRS Division Chief Col. Morris Davis, a former Guantanamo prosecutor, after Davis publicly criticized the military commission process in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal. (“CRS Fires a Division Chief,”Secrecy News, December 4, 2009)
By engaging in public controversy (even as a private citizen), Col. Davis had deviated from CRS norms, according to Library of Congress General Counsel Elizabeth Pugh.
This CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force warns that “escalating attacks on countries, companies, and individuals, as well as pervasive criminal activity, threaten the security and safety of the Internet.” The number of “state-backed operations continues to rise, and future attacks will become more sophisticated and disruptive,” argues the Task Force report, Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet.
With the ideal vision of an open and secure Internet increasingly at risk, the Task Force urges the United States, with its friends and allies, “to act quickly to encourage a global cyberspace that reflects shared values of free expression and free markets.”
The Task Force concludes that “the most pressing current threat is not likely to be a single, sudden attack that cripples the United States,” but rather “a proliferation of attacks that steal strategically important or valuable data and destroy confidence in the safety and trustworthiness of the Internet.” The U.S. administration has named China as a major source of cyber espionage, and the Task Force also finds China to be a serious cause of concern.
Remember the old child game “duck duck goose?” It is now time to play “duck duck Google” with the top search engine chasing DuckDuckGo around in a circle. The privacy-based search engine may still end up being in the metaphorical pot, but Search Engine Journal reports, “DuckDuckGo vs. Google (Impressive New Stats)” that will make anyone quack with enthusiasm. According to new statistics released by DuckDuckGo, the tiny search engine has peeked at passing the two million searches in one day.
Click for Home Page
“It’s not compared to the billions daily that Google, Bing, or Facebook have but it’s a really good start. What’s most impressive is the HUGE increase and triple in traffic since January of this year!”
In February, DuckDuckGo hit its first one million web searches in a single day and only four months later they were able to double it. It is amazing news considering the billions of searches that are conducted via Google, Bing, and Facebook everyday. The underdog is coming out to show its thunder. Take note big engines, people do not like to have their searches tracked. DuckDuckGo is a metasearch engine, so it aggregates its results from other tools. However it does keep the results anonymous!
Exclusive: British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal
A major impact of the commercialization of the Internet has been the undermining of its peer-to-peer architecture. As Capital must always control the circulation of value in order to appropriate surplus, its champions view peer networks as a threat. The Web, although it sits on top of the Internet, is not a peer-to-peer technology but rather a client-server system where the interactions of the users are controlled and mediated by that site's operators.
With such centralization and control, the operators are in the position of capturing the value created by the users of these sites by way of selling this audience of users as a commodity to publishers of marketing and propaganda.
More importantly, the Capitalist-financed operators of such sites, can sell the data of the users, which often includes significant personal and demographic details, raw data for biometrics and detailed relationship graphs, to those that want to use this data to study, manipulate or control these users. These private, centralized services can also silence and lock out any user from participating or act to prevent any type of usage that is contrary to their own interests.
The new “Social Web” has fundamentally replaced the peer-to-peer Internet, and remaining peer communications technology has become marginal or even contraband as participants on peer networks face increasing legal attack and active sabotage from groups representing the interests of Capital.
The Internet is dead. In order to evade the flying monkeys of capitalist control, peer communication can only abandon the Internet for the dark alleys of covert operations. Peer-to-peer is now driven offline and can only survive in clandestine cells.
deadSwap is an offline file sharing system where participants covertly pass a USB stick from one to another. The route of the USB memory stick and the identity of the other participants is not known by the users but controlled by local, independently operated SMS gateways that are kept as a carefully shared secret by their users.
For those of you that don't know, the US doesn't spend much time/energy/effort on military strategy and theory. They do spend money on political scientists and engineers to provide a substitute. Regardless, this deficit means the US continually falls victim to strategic errors due to stale military theory.
The big one we recently fell victim to?
The US unilaterally launched an arms race in autonomous weapons (for more on this read my article; Pandora Smiled).
NOTE: In fact, in all of the work I've done for the national security system (CIA, NSA, DoD, JCS, DNI, etc.), I've never run across a true military theorist. They don't exist in the 2 m plus person bureaucracy, despite trillions in spending based on those theories. Go figure?!? It's like building a Large Hadron Collidor without a physicist.
Well, that arms race is starting to bite us back, but not in the way our lazy national security strategists expected. There's a pretty good article in Vanity Fair about cyberwarfare and Iran by Michael Joseph Gross that details how.
It starts with a nice kick at the start, like Brave New War (on its fifth printing), but for cyberware:
The data on three-quarters of the machines on the main computer network of Saudi aramco had been destroyed. Hackers who identified themselves as Islamic and called themselves the Cutting Sword of Justice executed a full wipe of the hard drives of 30,000 aramco personal computers. For good measure, as a kind of calling card, the hackers lit up the screen of each machine they wiped with a single image, of an American flag on fire.
As you can see, if you like my stuff, it's worth the click to read the entire thing. Here's one of the payoffs:
In the U.S., the escalating bug-and-exploit trade has created a strange relationship between government and industry. The U.S. government now spends significant amounts of time and money developing or acquiring the ability to exploit weaknesses in the products of some of America’s own leading technology companies, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In other words: to sabotage American enemies, the U.S. is, in a sense, sabotaging its own companies.
Here's another one from a bug developer:
“You don’t have to be a nation-state to do this,” he says. “You just have to be really smart.”
BTW: the lead graphic is close to an article I did for Wired in 2007, When Bots Attack. From the Vanity Fair article:
It reminded me of this graphic from my Wired article that I thought you would enjoy:
The data-collection debate we need to have is not about civil liberties.
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Weekly Standard, June 24, 2013
Should Americans fear the possible abuse of the intercept power of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland? Absolutely. In the midst of the unfolding scandal at the IRS, we understand that bureaucracies are callous creatures, capable of manipulation. In addition to deliberate misuse, closed intelligence agencies can make mistakes in surveilling legitimate targets, causing mountains of trouble. Consider Muslim names. Because of their commonness and the lack of standardized transliteration, they can befuddle scholars, let alone intelligence analysts, who seldom have fluency in Islamic languages. Although one is hard pressed to think of a case since 9/11 in which mistaken identity, or a willful or unintentional leak of intercept intelligence, immiserated an American citizen, these things can happen. NSA civilian employees, soldiers, FBI agents, CIA case officers, prosecutors, and our elected officials are not always angels. Even though encryption is mathematically easier to accomplish than decryption, the potential for abuse of digital communication is always there—all the more since few Americans resort to encryption of their everyday emails.
But fearing the NSA, which has been a staple of Hollywood for decades, requires you to believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of American employees in the organization are in on a conspiracy. In the Edward Snowden-is-a-legitimate-NSA-whistleblower narrative, it also requires that very liberal senators and congressmen are complicit in propagating a civil-rights-chewing national surveillance system.
