Your tax dollars at work

Glenn Greenwalds steady drip feed of reports (combined with Edward Snowdens disappearance into Putins Russia) seems to be keeping the focus of attention on the NSAs capabilities.

Early Warning has a look at a new report about the deliberate insertion of security vulnerabilities into software - Your tax dollars at work....

Personally, I thought the Internet was already quite insecure without the US government spending large amounts of money to deliberately make it worse.

Im not surprised by most of the revelations but I did find the notion of "LOVEINT" a little astonishing - it hadnt occurred to me that intelligence operatives would use their powers to stalk hot chicks, but I guess in retrospect thats a little naive. John Quiggin notes that polygraphs are used to prevent this sort of thing (presumably a phrenologist administers the backup test if the polygraph machine isnt working) - LOVEINT.

The drip feed of revelations about spying by NSA, related agencies and international subsidiaries like ASIO/ASIS, is taking on a familiar pattern. Take some long-held suspicion about what they might be up to, and go through the following steps

1. “You’re being paranoid. That can never happen, thanks to our marvellous checks and balances”
2. “Well, actually it does happen, but hardly ever, so there’s no need to worry about it”
3. “OK, it happens all the time, but you shouldn’t be worried unless you have something to hide”

An example which must have occurred to quite a few of us is whether NSA employees can spy on current or former partners, potential love interests and so on. Until a few days ago, this was at stage 1. Now, it’s been admitted that this not only happens, but it has a name “LOVEINT“. Still, we are told by the great defender of our liberties Dianne Feinstein, this has only happened on a handful of occasions (Stage 2).

All very reassuring, until you read the following

Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.

In other words, while NSA monitors everything you and I do all the time, it relies on witchcraft to detect wrongdoing by its own employees. I guess we’ll just have to hope that NSA staff are too busy snooping on our emails to read any of the 194 000 Google hits on “how to cheat a polygraph”.

George Washington at Zero hedge has a good summary of some of the latest news (lots of links at the original) - High-Level American Intelligence Source: “We Hack Everyone Everywhere".

Offensive cyber operations are not only occurring overseas …

The Department of Defense has long waged cyber-war against Americans by censoring and manipulating social media and other websites. More proof here and here.

This is not entirely surprising, given that:

• Programs which the government claims are aimed at foreign entities have long been used against American citizens living in the United States
• The “war on terror” has come home. If the government claims the power to assassinate and indefinitely detain American citizens living on U.S. soil … it’ s not going to hesitate in targeting them for propaganda and cyber-warfare
• The government has long sought to spread propaganda through mainstream media, video games, movies, television, and every other popular medium. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says the CIA bought and paid for many successful journalists. See also this New York Times piece, this essay by the Independent, this speech by one of the premier writers on journalism, and this and this roundup.
• And the CIA is investing in technology which lets them cut out the middle man altogether … by having a computer write news stories
• On the other hand, real reporters who criticize those in power are being harassed, targeted and smeared
Government agencies are scouring the Web for any critical comments about them, actively manipulating social media for propaganda purposes, and to help the too big to fail businesses compete against smaller businesses (and here), and to promote viewpoints which have nothing to do with keeping us safe

The Business Insider also has a good roundup of links - The Guardians Bombshell Revelation About NSA Domestic Spying Is Only The Tip Of The Iceberg.

Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — worked for the defence Department’s foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he “could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution.”

He’s detailed how, ever since 9/11, the NSA has run a top-secret surveillance program that amasses electronic data — phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media, entire government databases — and analyses the information “to be able to monitor what people are doing” and who they are doing it with.

Binney would know — he built the original software (i.e. ThinThread) that identified, in real time, networks of connections between individuals based on their electronic communications. “I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time,” Binney told documentarian Laura Poitras.”This is something the KGB, the Stasi or the Gestapo would have loved to have had.”

{ Read More }

Total Arctic sea ice at record low in 2010 study

Scientific American has a post on the decline of arctic sea ice - Total Arctic sea ice at record low in 2010: study.

The minimum summertime volume of Arctic sea ice fell to a record low last year, researchers said in a study to be published shortly, suggesting that thinning of the ice had outweighed a recovery in area The study estimated that last year broke the previous, 2007 record for the minimum volume of ice, which is calculated from a combination of sea ice area and thickness.

The research adds to a picture of rapid climate change at the top of the world that could see the Arctic Ocean ice-free within decades, spurring new oil exploration opportunities but possibly also disrupted weather patterns far afield and a faster rise in sea levels.

The authors developed a model predicting thickness across the Arctic Ocean based on actual observations of winds, air and ocean temperatures. "The real worrisome fact is downward trend over the last 32 years," said Axel Schweiger, lead author of the paper, referring to a satellite record of changes in the Arctic.

He was emailing Reuters at the Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise, in the Arctic Ocean between the Norwegian island of Svalbard and the North Pole. "(It fell) by a large enough margin to establish a statistically significant new record," said the authors in their paper titled "Uncertainty in modeled Arctic sea ice volume."

The researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle checked the model results against real readings of ice thickness using limited submarine and satellite data.

The Arctic Sea Ice Blog is a good place to keep up with what is happening in this field.

{ Read More }

A Look Back at the Space Shuttle

The New York Times has a look back at the now gone era of the space shuttle, with one segment looking at Bucky Fullers long awaited image of the earth from space - A Look Back at the Space Shuttle.

DP: What do you feel as you see the shuttle program winding down?

WG: I feel a little sadness, a little bit, because I know what we can continue to keep doing with this shuttle. It would be nice if that other program was coming along a little bit faster, and we could kind of roll right from this program to the next one.

But I think we can still use that same work force to re-tool, build solid plans and then kind of get ready to go move forward.

The Apollo astronauts said that, basically by going to the moon, we learned more about the earth than we did by staying here. And those first images from the surface of the moon, of the earthrise, seeing the earth as a sphere, with this thin atmosphere, really pushes how fragile our world is, and how small our world is.

By continuing to push the technology envelope, we really learn a lot more about what’s really happening here on the earth.

DP: The space shuttle that we use to get to the space station is now retired. So how are we gonna get back and forth now?

WG: We’re gonna use the Soyuz spacecraft, which we’ve been actually using for crew rotations for about the last two years. We’ve focused the shuttle on doing the assembly activities.

DP: We rent space on the Russian aircraft?

WG: Yep. Our crews are trained in Russia to operate and help them fly the spacecraft.

DP: And doesn’t that bother anyone? I mean, doesn’t that make us sort of second-class space citizens?

WG: I don’t really look at it that way. Because if you look at the space station, it’s really an international facility. So there are Russian modules. There’s also a Japanese module. The European space agency has another module. And the U.S. has a large research facility. We provide power to the Russian side—our solar rays generate power, and provide it to the Russian side. And they do propulsion for us on the space station.

So when you ask me about transportation, it’s not different than all these other dependencies I have already. We are truly an international team. It’s not competition like it was before, where we’re gonna beat the Russians, or we’re gonna beat the Chinese.

There’s a control center in Moscow, a control center in Houston, a control center in Japan, and also in Europe. And we all work together to keep this space station flying, and operating.

{ Read More }