Chinese Hackers Resume Attacks on U.S. Targets
WASHINGTON — Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of China’s People’s Liberation Army went silent amid evidence that they had stolen data from scores of American companies and government agencies, they appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials.
The Obama administration had bet that “naming and shaming” the groups, first in industry reports and then in the Pentagon’s own detailed survey of Chinese military capabilities, might prompt China’s new leadership to crack down on the military’s highly organized team of hackers — or at least urge them to become more subtle.
But Unit 61398, whose well-guarded 12-story white headquarters on the edges of Shanghai became the symbol of Chinese cyberpower, is back in business, according to American officials and security companies.
It is not clear precisely who has been affected by the latest attacks. Mandiant, a private security company that helps companies and government agencies defend themselves from hackers, said the attacks had resumed but would not identify the targets, citing agreements with its clients. But it did say the victims were many of the same ones the unit had attacked before.
Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor’s biotech firm
Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security.
Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.
U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say doing so would be very difficult. Nevertheless, Danzig has energetically promoted the threat — and prodded the government to stockpile a new type of drug to defend against it.
CARA (newest advance in Facial Recognition Tech) Sees ALL, Knows All, In Real time
May 17, 2013 by Jack Blood
Filed under Sci-Tech
Minority Report and “The All Seeing Eye” on Steroids (and this is just what is admitted!) There is literally nowhere left to hide.
Yeah… Its just for advertising – uh huh…. right.
IMRSV developed software for smart advertising billboards. But now it’s bringing sight to the Internet of Things. It could even make a toy smile back.
When Jason Sosa started work on a webcam technology that detects, in real time, the age, gender, attention time, and glances of the people looking at it, he thought he was solving an advertising problem. It’s turned out to be much more.
His startup’s first product was a digital billboard that changes the ads it displays depending on who looks at them–showing, for instance, an ad for a toy to a child and an ad for aftershave to a man.
It wasn’t long, however, before requests started pouring in from other industries eager to use the technology:
In a car, one request proposed, real-time facial detection could monitor a driver’s attention, alerting him if he falls asleep.
In a fast-food restaurant, it could track how many people are standing in line.
In a house, it could help control the temperature based on who is home.
In a bar, it could keep tabs on the gender ratio (though startup SceneTap already does so using a similar technology).
It could even make a toy smile back.
“This was a much bigger task than what we could do alone,” Sosa says he quickly realized. So for the past two years, he and his team at IMRSV (previously Immersive Labs) have been developing software that allows developers to turn any webcam into a real-time video analytics sensor. They call it Cara, which means “face” in Spanish.
Cara is different than face recognition technology such as that of Face.com, which helps identify individuals in photos and was recently acquired by Facebook. Because Cara runs locally, it is instantaneous, allowing for real-time analysis of video that can be used to trigger a reaction in real time. It’s also designed for a different purpose, which Sosa argues makes it less of a privacy risk. “The goal isn’t to identify people individually,” he says. “Our software doesn’t record images, it doesn’t save video, it doesn’t collect any personal information. It’s simply gathering stats.”
What separates Cara from IMRSV’s previous billboard technology and others like it–and makes it a potential game changer–is that any developer with any webcam can use it for $39.99 per month.
Most who have signed up so far are working on solutions for advertising, retail analytics, and enterprise systems, but the possibilities extend as far as developers take them. The Internet of Things has sensors for moisture, motion, temperature, humidity, light, pressure, and other qualities. Cara gives it something that could potentially be more interesting: a sense of who is in the room.
“It can be that my living room is telling my kitchen that I’m coming,” Sosa says.
US Supreme Court finds for Monsanto in seed patent battle
May 14, 2013 by Jack Blood
Filed under Sci-Tech
AFP – The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto Monday over an Indiana farmer accused of having pirated the genetically-modified crops developed by the agribusiness giant.
The high court’s unanimous decision focuses specifically on seed production, but experts say it may also have implications on intellectual property law in medicine, biotechnology and software.
The nine justices ruled that laws limiting patents do “not permit a farmer to reproduce patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent holder’s permission.”
The crux of the argument was over “patent exhaustion” which states that, after a patented item has been sold, the purchaser has “a right to use or resell that article,” Justice Elena Kagan explained in the court’s 10-page decision.
“Such a sale, however, does not allow the purchaser to make new copies of the patented invention,” she added.
At 2 pm (1800 GMT) on Monday after the ruling, Monsanto stock was down 1.1 percent at $106.94.
In a lawsuit filed in 2007, Monsanto had accused Vernon Hugh Bowman, a farmer, of infringing on its intellectual property rights by replanting, cultivating and selling herbicide-resistant soybean seeds it spent more than a decade developing.
The patented seed, which allows farmers to aerially spray Monsanto-made Roundup herbicide over their entire fields, was invented in 1996 and is now grown by more than 90 percent of the 275,000 US soybean farmers.
The farmer, 75, said he had respected his contract with Monsanto and purchased new Roundup Ready seeds each year for his first planting.
But he said hard times forced him to purchase a cheaper mixture of seeds from a grain elevator starting in 1999, which he used for his second planting.
The mixture included Roundup Ready soybeans, which Bowman was able to isolate and replant from 2000 to 2007.
“Under the patent exhaustion doctrine, Bowman could resell the patented soybeans he purchased from the grain elevator; so too he could consume the beans himself or feed them to his animals,” Kagan explained.
“But the exhaustion doctrine does not enable Bowman to make additional patented soybeans without Monsanto’s permission (either express or implied).
“And that is precisely what Bowman did,” she said.
The court found that the law rightly protects Monsanto from such a practice because, “were the matter otherwise, Monsanto’s patent would provide scant benefit.”
It upheld a lower court ruling demanding Bowman — whose lawyer has said is in dire economic straits — pay the $85,000 in damages Monsanto had sought.
Monsanto cheered the decision in a statement Monday.
“The Court’s ruling today ensures that longstanding principles of patent law apply to breakthrough 21st century technologies that are central to meeting the growing demands of our planet and its people,” Monsanto executive vice president David Snively said.
The company had been supported in court by the US government and, during the hearing, several justices already seemed disposed to rule in its favor.
Monsanto attorney Seth Waxman argued that Bowman was able to profit from the seed giant’s technology without having to pay for it, comparing the case to software piracy.
The high court agreed:
“If simple copying were a protected use, a patent would plummet in value after the first sale of the first item containing the invention,” Kagan wrote in the decision. “And that would result in less incentive for innovation than Congress wanted.”
Although the decision specifically limited its scope to the seed industry, “there’s one clause saying it may be broader,” patent expert Michael Ward told AFP.
“Where the replication is not inadvertent, as long the replication is not a necessary but incidental step, that decision would apply,” he explained.
First major hemp crop in 60 years is planted in southeast Colorado
Springfield, Colo., farmer Ryan Loflin on Monday planted the nation’s first industrial hemp crop in almost 60 years.
Loflin’s plans to grow hemp already have been chronicled, and Monday’s planting attracted the attention of more media in southeastern Colorado and a documentary film crew.
Hemp is genetically related to marijuana but contains little or no THC, the psychoactive substance in marijuana. Hemp has dozens of uses in food, cosmetics, clothing and industrial materials.
21 to Drink Coffee? The U.S. FDA announced a plan to investigate and potentially regulate caffeine
I’d like to tell you about a little utopian community nestled in some faraway mountains where caffeine is heavily regulated. Everyone is 20 percent prettier than average and owns a modest home outright. There is no divorce or attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. But such a place does not exist to serve as either a model or cautionary tale. A few European countries have moved toward regulation — in Sweden, for example, many grocery stores do not sell energy drinks to people under 15. The United States is not likely to lead the charge into federal regulation tomorrow or next year, but when Michael Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine at the Food and Drug Administration, was asked last week, “Is it possible that FDA would set age restrictions for purchase?” he responded:
We have to be practical; enforcing age restrictions would be challenging. For me, the more fundamental questions are whether it is appropriate to use foods that may be inherently attractive and accessible to children as the vehicles to deliver the stimulant caffeine, and whether we should place limits on the amount of caffeine in certain products.
Taylor’s comment came in the context of the FDA’s announcement that, as the organization put it, “in response to a trend in which caffeine is being added to a growing number of products, the agency will investigate the safety of caffeine in food products, particularly its effects on children and adolescents.” It’s a kind of nonchalant way to say that the organization in charge of making sure everything we eat and drink is safe for us is, decades into the mass marketing and sale of heavily caffeinated products without regulation to all U.S. markets, going to look into their safety.
Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the US Government? Duh…
May 5, 2013 by Jack Blood
Filed under Sci-Tech
A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case
By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK
05 May 13
VIA RSN
he real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.
Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.
On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
“All of that stuff” – meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant – “is being captured as we speak”.
On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:
Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.
There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained “that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” and that “contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.” But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein’s claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.
That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:
Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.
It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens” (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that “the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want.”
Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be “stunned” to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.
Strangely, back in 2002 – when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak – the Pentagon’s attempt to implement what it called the “Total Information Awareness” program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted – without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo – with little controversy or even notice.
Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:
“‘In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance – and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight – that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,’ [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. ‘Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.’”
That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).
Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That’s why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter’s TIA was unveiled.
Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one’s views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.
Insecticide firms in secret bid to stop ban that could save bees
Europe is on the brink of a landmark ban on the world’s most widely used insecticides, which have increasingly been linked to serious declines in bee numbers. Despite intense secret lobbying by British ministers and chemical companies against the ban, revealed in documents obtained by the Observer, a vote in Brussels on Monday is expected to lead to the suspension of the nerve agents.
Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed on disease, loss of habitat and, increasingly, the near ubiquitous use of neonicotinoid pesticides.
The prospect of a ban has prompted a fierce behind-the-scenes campaign. In a letter released to the Observer under freedom of information rules, the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, told the chemicals company Syngenta last week that he was “extremely disappointed” by the European commission‘s proposed ban. He said that “the UK has been very active” in opposing it and “our efforts will continue and intensify in the coming days”.
4 Law enforcement officials: The decision to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were wrongly being targeted as suspects on Reddit and other social media sites
FBI agents quickly came to Bauman’s bedside. A man in sunglasses and black baseball cap had walked right up to him, placed a black backpack on the ground and stepped away, Bauman remembered.
His tip became a critical lead, according to law enforcement officials.
Of course, investigators had 2,000 other leads, too, in the form of photos and video that “almost became a management problem, there was so much of it,” said Davis, who led the local piece of the probe, initially from a ballroom at the Westin Hotel where 100 officers and commanders from local, state and federal law enforcement collaborated. The room was equipped with tables for laptops, power strips and, most important, land lines, since cellphones were unreliable in the chaos after the bombing and satellite phones worked only if you stood by a window.
Davis had learned of the central importance of video from a police commander in London after the public transit bombings there in 2005, when the city’s extensive system of surveillance cameras led to identification of four suspects within five days of the attacks, after examination of hundreds of hours of video.
Eight years later, the social media revolution meant that the FBI and Boston authorities were under intense pressure to move even faster, because thousands of amateur sleuths were mimicking the official investigation, inspecting digital images of the crowd on Boylston Street and making their own often wildly irresponsible conclusions about who might be the bombers.
On an investigative forum of Reddit.com, since removed from the site, users compiled thousands of photos, studied them for suspicious backpacks and sent their favorite theories spinning out into the wider Internet.
“Find people carrying black bags,” wrote the Reddit forum’s unnamed moderator. “If they look suspicious, then post them. Then people will try and follow their movements using all the images.”
The moderator defended this strategy by arguing that “it’s been proven that a crowd of thousands can do things like this much quicker and better. . . . I’d take thousands of people over a select few very smart investigators any day.”
In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials. Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were wrongly being targeted as suspects in the news media and on the Internet.
That decision, which appeared to be a straightforward request for the public’s help in identifying the two men, turns out to have been a tactic with several purposes.
INTERNET FASCISM; CISPA Cyber Security Bill Passed By Congress, Boston Bombings Used As Excuse
Have we been sufficiently distracted by the Boston Bombings to allow CISPA to be pushed through?
This reminds of the passing of the US PATRIOT Act… certain politicians opposed received anthrax letters (now ricin letters) other politicians died in plane crashes (Paul Wellstone).
2013.4.18 Cispatriot Act; US Reps Approve CISPA Cyber Security Bill (RT, youtube.com)
The controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act has been approved by the House of Representatives. One of the Congressman evoked Monday’s deadly bombings in Boston as a reason to pass it. RT America’s website producer, Andrew Blake is closely following the debates over the bill.
