RIM averts BlackBerry ban in UAE | Security - CNET News The announcement provides very little information about what RIM did to avert the ban, whether they made significant changed (compromises) to their system, or whether the UAE blinked and backed down from the threatened ban.
Technology firms endorse self regulation for privacy protection.
Read MoreUS Government Proposes to put back door in encrypted communications. Disastrous idea.
Read MoreDespite media hype, Haystack anti-censorship tool appears to be broken.
Read MoreIndia to Monitor Google and Skype - WSJ.com. As an extension of their policy of pushing for access to encrypted communications on RIM BlackBerry devices, they are now demanding access to data from both Google and Skype. India is demanding that Skype and Google install servers within India so the government can access the information on Indian users.
Obviously bad guys can trivially bypass this through the use of VPNs and by taking care to use servers located outside of India. The real impact will be to open all legitimate Internet users to universal surveillance.
India reviewing plan to enable BlackBerry Monitoring.
Read MoreIn a recent post on Privacy Digest, and an article in the NYTimes, there is a discussion of some major and well known vulnerabilities in the global public key infrastructure (PKI) and some examples of exploitations of that vulnerability.
The issue is with the proliferation of certificate authorities on the Internet, and the low level of oversight on their policies.
Using the web as an example, here is how it works. Embedded in every browser is a list of "certificate authorities". These are companies that are deemed trustworthy to issue and sign website certificates. Website certificates are what allows websites to be authenticated by your browser and enables SSL based secure connections (e.g. to your bank).
These certificate authorities may also be able to delegate their certificate signing authorities to other secondary certificate authority organizations. The list of primary certificate authorities in your browser is long (I count 43 in my copy of Firefox), and who knows how many secondary certificate authorities may be out there. These certificate authorities exist all over the world, and any of them can issue a certificate that your browser will accept as valid.
A malevolent certificate authority could issue certificates to allow them to impersonate any secure website.
The articles talk specifically about a secondary certificate authority called Etisalat, located in the UAE. They created a certificate which allowed them to sign code which would be accepted as valid and authorized by BlackBerry cell phones. They then created and distributed software to about 100,000 users which enabled government surveillance of the devices. RIM, the maker of BlackBerry, was able to detect and patch this introduced back door.
Etisalat could create certificates to allow the UAE to intercept and read all secure web traffic traveling over networks within that country.
It is likely that there are many other certificate authorities that are similarly willing to compromise the security of the PKI for various ends. To date, no action has been taken against Etisalat. The EFF is calling for Verizon to revoke Etisalat's ability to issue certificates (Verizon is the primary authority that delegated to Etisalat as the secondary).
In this interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, comes out very strongly against anonymity starting at about 5:10 in the video. His argument is that: "If you are trying to commit a terrible evil crime it is not obvious that you should be able to do so with complete anonymity." The problem is that absolute and complete anonymity is easy for criminals. There is a robust economy in stolen account, botnets, stolen credit cards, open networks and other capabilities that enable absolute anonymity for anyone willing to violate the law. It is only anonymity for the law abiding that is difficult, and the reason Anonymizer exists. Arguing against anonymity is, for all practical purposes, only arguing against anonymity for legitimate purposes while it thrives for illegitimate purposes.
I will spare you the lecture on the history of anonymity and anonymous speech dating back to the founders of the United States.
BTW, this was delayed for a while while I struggled with getting embedding working within WordPress. It seems to be working now on FireFox, but not when I view in Safari. Please comment with how I am being stupid if you know what is going wrong.
There has been a lot of media coverage of the threats of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to shut down BlackBerry connectivity in their countries unless RIM (the maker of BlackBerry) introduces a back door so they can monitor communications. I have been following this story closely, but wanted to wait until I had all the facts before blogging about it. At this point I don't think I am going to get the whole story. The statements I am seeing are absolutely contradictory and the whole thing is getting really fishy.
UAE/SA say that they need to be able to access BlackBerry communications, but they can't.
RIM says that their technology makes interception impossible because the communications are encrypted end to end between the BES server (located at the users place of business) and the handset. RIM claims not to have access to the decryption keys.
Third parties claim that RIM has arrangements with other countries (including the US and Russia) which allows such access.
RIM responds that this is false and that they don't have this ability.
It looks like RIM and UAE/SA will come to an agreement while both continue to claim that they have not compromised their positions.
The moral of this story is that you should not trust security you can not fully analyze yourself. Anonymizer Universal uses strongly encrypted L2TP VPN technology to secure your information so even if your telecommunications provider is cooperating with surveillance they still can't read the contents of your messages.
Unfortunately Anonymizer Universal does not support BlackBerry yet, but iPhone, Windows, and Mac users are protected.
Browser 'Privacy Modes' Not So Private After All - PCWorld
This article does a good job of discussing why the built in "privacy mode" built in to most browsers is less effective that you might have thought or wished.
In an interesting CNET article Google CEO Schmidt talks about how new technologies are going to impact society. One of his comments really struck me. Schmidt said that the only way to handle the new technologies is "much greater transparency and no anonymity." I have not seen the arguments and evidence behind such a bold claim. I would have argued exactly the opposite. We need MORE anonymity for users and more transparency and accountability from data collectors like Google.
BBC News - Details of 100m Facebook users collected and published
Ron Bowes wrote some software which scanned through Facebook to capture any unprotected personal information from the website.
The collected data has been compiled in to a huge file which is available over BitTorrent among other free channels.
While the program did not access any protected information, it has exposed any and all users who have not taken the proper steps to restrict access to their Facebook accounts, either through error or lack of knowledge, awareness or prudence.
The fact that it has been captured and distributed also makes it impossible to ever effectively change or remove any of the collected information. It is out there in the wild and out of anyones hands or ability to corral or correct.
This link will download the big (2.79GB) compressed database for you right now using a BitTorrent client (it may break at some point).
UK ISP TalkTalk Monitoring its Customers Online Activity Without Consent − ISPreview UK:
Here we go again with an ISP monitoring users without consent and collecting information about their activities.
In this case the ISP claims to be doing so as part of a project to improve some future security and parental control services. They say that they are not capturing any data about which users visit what sites, but obviously the capability is there. The ISP did not announce this to their customers and only admitted it after it had been discovered and exposed.
Whether the ISP later decided to start capturing that information, the government makes them start capturing it, or a hacker get in to trick the system in to capturing, there is a real likelihood that users of the TalkTalk broadband service in the UK will have their activities captured.
Once again, this shows that you can't trust your Internet providers. Their business is not privacy and their interests do not run parallel to your privacy interests. Only tools which encrypt your Internet activity, like Anonymizer Universal, can protect you against this kind of surveillance by your ISP.
Privacy Digest reports on a new White House proposal to extend the powers of FBI "national security letters" to include gathering of "electronic communication transactional records". While this may appear to be a small change, the potential impact is huge.
These records include all the header information from emails: To:, From:, Time, and often Subject:.
It may also include a list of the full URLs that you visit.
While it does not include the contents of the messages, this level of detail is often more than enough to discover social networks, relationships, intentions, plans, political affiliations, and more.
The real problem is that there are no checks and balances on national security letters. They are issued by FBI offices on their own authority without review by a judge. Historically, self restraint in the face of this kind of power has never worked well. While judges approve the vast majority of subpoenas and search warrants in a timely manor, they can reject egregious cases and the mere fact of their review causes law enforcement to be more restrained in their use.
From the Privacy Digest article:
The use of the national security letters to obtain personal data on Americans has prompted concern. The Justice Department issued 192,500 national security letters from 2003 to 2006, according to a 2008 inspector general report, which did not indicate how many were demands for Internet records. A 2007 IG report found numerous possible violations of FBI regulations, including the issuance of NSLs without having an approved investigation to justify the request. In two cases, the report found, agents used NSLs to request content information "not permitted by the [surveillance] statute."
We discovered a major security hole in Facebook almost by accident. The exploit is so trivial I can't justify calling it hacking. Any time you are on an open WiFi and accessing Facebook, anyone else on the same network can easily grab your credential and access Facebook as you with full access to your account.
We have posted a video demonstrating this to YouTube as well as putting it in the Anonymizer Labs section of our website.
Finally a viable solution to the privacy problem!!!
Lawmakers To Introduce New Internet Privacy Bill : NPR
Rick Boucher (D-VA) has released draft legislation to significantly increase required privacy notifications for Internet users.
Many websites are fighting the proposed bill, claiming it would hurt their business. I am unsympathetic to complaint that their business would suffer if people actually knew what they were doing with your information. Given that this would apply to all websites, if a policy is no worse than average it should not drive people to other sites.
I would very much like to see the market start to enable competition on the basis of privacy policies.
We shall see how this actually turns out once it has been through the sausage making process. My experience is that most bills about technology end up doing more damage through unintended consequences than they actually help.
The European Parliament appears to be trying to create a regulation to require search engine companies to retain total information about their user's searches for a period of years. If you are in the EU area, I strongly encourage you to reach out to fight this.
Declaration29: "A group of members of European Parliament is collecting signatures for a Written Declaration that reads: 'The European Parliament [...] Asks the Council and the Commission to implement Directive 2006/24/EC and extend it to search engines in order to tackle online child pornography and sex offending rapidly and effectively'.
The Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC requires that details on every telephone call, text message, e-mail and Internet connection be recorded for months, for the entire population, in the absence of any suspicion. As to what is wrong with data retention please refer to DRletter. The Written Declaration even wants to extend data retention to search engines, meaning that your search terms could be tracked for months back.
The proposed declaration has been signed by 371 MEPs (list of names here) - and thus reached the 368 members needed to pass it. Many MEPs signed because of the title of the document ('setting up a European early warning system (EWS) for paedophiles and sex offenders'), not knowing that they are endorsing blanket data retention as well. More than 30 MEPs decided to withdraw their signature, one even on the day of adoption."
This Article on Wired.com is about an initiative by Juniper Networks in collaboration with Feeva to sell a new tracking technology to ISPs.
The enhanced router would be sold to ISPs and will automatically insert your ZIP+4 into HTML headers. This will allow marketers to have much more accurate information about the user's physical location.
They claim that the "consumer is not in any way stripped of their privacy" but fail to actually explain how that is the case. The point is for ISPs to get a piece of the advertising pie. The ZIP will be encoded, not sent in the clear, but will be available to some undefined set of "trusted third parties". That does not give me much comfort.
I have seen many examples of websites which charge different prices based on where you live, or otherwise restrict access to web pages. This kind of targeting does not help me at all. If I want to be located, I have many ways of explicitly telling the site where I am.
This is another example of why you can't trust your ISP. Their interests are not the same as yours. They have a strong incentive to track and monetize your activity.
Fortunately it is easy to take back control. If your traffic is encrypted within a VPN, then the ISP will be unable to insert this information. It gives you the absolute ability to enforce your own "opt out" even if the ISP does not want to give you the option. Anonymizer Universal(TM) provides an easy tool to accomplish this.
Many sites, including the Los Angeles Times are reporting on a change to Apple's privacy policy that allows collection and sharing of "anonymous" location information. The only way to prevent this seems to be completely disabling location services on the iPhone.
It appears that Google's privacy policy allows a similar level of information collection.
Much of the chatter I have seen about this issue talks about targeted advertising and user tracking. While I have no doubt that both companies are very interested in doing that I don't think this particular disclosure is about that. Message targeting is more likely to happen within applications where the user has granted explicit permission to push location based advertising and alerts.
I think this is all about improving Enhanced GPS services. My guess (and it is just a guess at this point) is that the phones are reporting back GPS location, Cell tower IDs and signal strength, and all visible WiFi base stations and signal strengths. Given enough of these sets of measurements, they can provide extremely accurate location information given only WiFi information (which takes much less power than GPS and also works indoors). It has been well established that multiple companies, including Google, are building such databases from trucks driving around the world (see my last post).
One purely anecdotal data point I have is from my WiFi only iPad. For background, I live on a fairly large lot and the only WiFi I can detect is my own. One of the first things I did with the new iPad was to open up the map application. It almost instantly centered the location reticule on my house. The only available location information was from the WiFi. I know that the Street View truck has never been through my neighborhood, and doubt that any others have been. My suspicion is that phones used within my house have been providing the correlating data between my physical location and my personal WiFi base station hardware ID.