Apple Warn: Gov Chilling Demands

 

Apple is standing up for & defending the rights of Americans.

An unprecedented  demand has been squarely refused by Apple.

If you’ve ever used a mobile device or an iPhone more specifically you should be aware the U.S. Government via the FBI is sending a clear message about everything we thought was private, on our iPhones, in the cloud or for our eyes or ears  only.

“We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them,” Cook wrote in a letter published on Apple’s website.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has backed Apple’s refusal to comply with a federal court order to help the FBI unlock an iPhone used by one of the assailants in the mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. in December.

“But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.”

Snowden called on Internet giant Google to stand with Apple, saying, “this is the most important tech case in a decade.”

Apple and Google engineered their software so they cannot unlock devices in the wake of damaging revelations by Snowden that made the world suspicious they created “back doors” for American intelligence and law enforcement.
The fear: Unlocking the iPhone could hand law enforcement a master encryption key. The FBI hasn’t been able to access the smartphone because it is passcode-protected.
“The technical changes the @FBI demands would make it possible to break into an iPhone (5C or older) in a half hour,” Snowden tweeted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. Navy Deploys First Laser Weapon

While the days of a science-fiction future full of fury at the hands of James Cameron looking robots wielding weapons of untold lethality remains a distant thought… deployment of the first laser weapon (LaWS) into combat by the U.S. Navy is a sign we are getting closer.  

The futuristic weapon has boosted the arsenal of the Fifth Fleet’s command vessel in the Persian Gulf. The laser is said to be effective against numerous small targets, such as Iran’s gunboats.

A 30-kilowatt-class Laser Weapon System has been equipped on the USS Ponce amphibious transport ship since late August, Navy officials told Bloomberg.

USS Ponce

The device is capable of focusing beams from six solid-state commercial welding lasers into a single strong beam, which can be used both as a blinding warning shot and as a weapon capable of setting fire to a drone or small boat.

It took Naval Sea Systems Command technicians seven years and $40 million to develop the technology to the current stage. The tour in the Gulf is more of a trial continuation than regular duty, as the Navy wants to learn more about its new tool.

The technology’s big advantage is its operational efficiency, as firing one shot costs just around $1, the Navy stressed. But lasers have their own peculiarities, with their efficiency depending on weather conditions, the presence of dust and vapors in the air, and other factors. The range of the laser, which is limited by those factors, remains classified.

There is also the issue of power, which the laser weapon requires in abundance – hence its deployment by the Navy on a warship with powerful generators.

Back in April, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, called the deployment of the laser on the USS Ponce “a worthwhile experiment” because “it’ll help us feel out the operational limitations” such as power constraints.

It was crucial to learn how the system would operate in the environment and how much energy it would consume, Kendall added.

The fact that the USS Ponce is stationed in the Persian Gulf “provides a unique platform” to deploy the laser “in an operationally relevant region,” Fifth Fleet commander Vice Admiral John Miller told Bloomberg in an email.

The US Navy has been boosting its presence in the area since 2011. The US targeted Iran’s oil industry and financial sector with economic sanctions aimed to put leverage on Tehran over its controversial nuclear program.

Amid the tensions, Iran threatened to close the Persian Gulf’s bottleneck, the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the global oil trade passes. Washington’s response was that it would use its Navy to prevent such a blockade.

Iran’s supposed plan to stifle the oil trade of its Gulf rival relied on large US warships with swarms of fast, small boats. Incidentally, the Pentagon’s new weapon is designed to destroy small, fast-moving targets.

However, in an interview earlier this year, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert stressed that the laser does not specifically target Iran.

“I wouldn’t target a country for a weapon, nor would I preclude putting together a weapons system for a country by itself,” Greenert said.

|  Read More About This Advanced Weapons System 

Twitter’s Cryptographic Upgrade

What is Perfect Forward Secrecy?

Impossible mathematical problem first discovered by GCHQ, British Intelligence Agency, used by Twitter to protect its users from electronic snooping. 

The company said “perfect forward secrecy” (PFS) was now live on all its services, drastically increasing the effort required to intercept its traffic. The so-called Diffie-Hellman method used by Twitter was first discovered by GCHQ analysts in the early 70s, but remained classified until it was independently patented by a pair of American cryptographers.

Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group (ORG), said it was a “policy move” driven by revelations about mass surveillance by British eavesdropping agency GCHQ and the American National Security Agency (NSA). He said: “Companies have now realized precisely how vulnerable their information is on the internet. It’s no longer a theoretical risk. We know it’s been going on now.

“This is about asking users to trust the companies involved & to also force the legal authorities to approach companies directly rather than attempting to seize data…”

In standard encryption each side of a communication independently generates paired keys – a public key telling others how to encrypt the messages they send to it and a private one used to decode them when they arrive. The maths involved make it almost impossible to calculate the private key from the public one. But if an attacker acquires a company’s private key it can read anything sent to and from that company’s servers – even if it was recorded years earlier. 

PFS adds another stage where two machines collaborate on enormous sums to deduce a shared key which is never shared and never used again.

That means an attacker would have to use a more complicated and resource-intensive man-in-the-middle strategy specifically targeted at a single communication while it was still going on.

A post on Twitter’s engineering blog explained: “If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users’ encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter’s private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic.”

It stressed that the move was simply “part of a continuing effort to keep our users’ information as secure as possible” and that PFS should become “the new normal.”

Dr. Ian Brown, an ORG trustee and associate director of Oxford University’s Cyber Security Centre, said PFS “effectively reinforces the rule of law about interception” and described the Diffie-Hellman problem as “effectively impossible.”

Read The Full Twitter Blog Post 

NSA Infected 50,000 Networks

Netherlands-based news site NRC.nl reports the American intelligence service – NSA – infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. 

A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide (presentation slide shown below).

In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses ‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, malicious software.

While Cyber operations are increasingly important for the NSA the hacks that enable agency hackers to collect sensitive data are relatively inexpensive. Attacks are performed by a special department called TAO (Tailored Access Operations).

Public sources show that this department employs more than a thousand hackers. As recently as August 2013, the Washington Post published articles about these NSA-TAO cyber operations. In these articles The Washington Post reported that the NSA installed an estimated 20,000 ‘implants’ as early as 2008. These articles were based on a secret budget report of the American intelligence services.

Read The Web Article @ nrc.nl

Google Scrambles | Reveals Encryption Initiative

“It’s an arms race,” said Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, based in Mountain View, Calif. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”

Experts say that, aside from the U.S. government, sophisticated government hacking efforts emanate from China, Russia, Britain and Israel.

The NSA seeks to defeat encryption through a variety of means, including by obtaining encryption “keys” to decode communications, by using super-computers to break codes, and by influencing encryption standards to make them more vulnerable to outside attack, according to reports Thursday by the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica, based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“Google officials declined to provide details on the cost of its new encryption efforts, the numbers of data centers involved, or the exact technology used,” and it added that “the project is likely to be completed soon, months ahead of the original schedule.”

Read The Full Story  |  Multiple Perspectives @ Your Fingertips

Washington Post  |  Arstenica  |  TheNextWeb  |  The Verge

NSA Collects Every Communication “Word for Word”

Not sure who the public is going to believe here. Considering the reality of terrorism and the impact of using fear to control the activities of the population… it is important to consider the reality this entire Snowden, NSA & PRISM disclosure/leak is one giant psy-op initiated in an attempt to cover tracks.