Whither whistleblowing: Where have all the leaking sites gone?
In News on March 13, 2013 at 10:57 AM
03/13/2013
The student still has not become the master
If there were a site with any chance of rivaling WikiLeaks’ success, it would be OpenLeaks. In September 2010, Daniel Domscheit-Berg left his position as the number two at WikiLeaks to found this rival leaking outlet. Domscheit-Berg famously didn’t see eye to eye with Julian Assange, and he even wrote a book about it.
Since its humble beginnings, OpenLeaks set out to be a kinder, gentler version of WikiLeaks. Back in 2010, Domscheit-Berg told Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, that OpenLeaks’ aim was not to duplicate what WikiLeaks had already done. Instead, the goal was to act as a platform that could sit on top of existing media or activist websites. It was originally conceived as a system that would allow for targeted and timed leaking to certain sites, then eventually let other OpenLeaks partners see the documents in question.
But more than anything, Domscheit-Berg specifically wanted to open up the virtual doors to the process. WikiLeaks was, of course, extremely secretive. In the beginning, Domscheit-Berg talked about establishing a formal, legal, Germany-based, nonprofit foundation.
“This foundation will support the OpenLeaks project and it will support whistleblowing in general,” he said in 2010.
In the near-term, we are looking into establishing the proper mechanisms, responsibilities, processes and all these things that will make sure that the people in the board of that foundation will have a say in the critical decisions that need to be taken in the OpenLeaks platform. We are looking into incorporating all of this properly.
We don’t want to expose that project to the same kinds of political pressure that the WikiLeaks project is suffering from right now. Because no one understands actually what the processes are, who is taking decisions, how the financials work and all of these sorts things are very obscure —here not even necessarily something bad is going on. These guys are asking transparency from everyone else but they are not transparent themselves. So I think a more open approach and a more organized approach is a better one because you are not going to fall prey to that kind of criticism.
Slow and steady
By early January 2011, OpenLeaks did go live, for a time—partnering with some European media and activist groups. t no significant leaks came from OpenLeaks. By August 2011, Domscheit-Berg got into a very public spat with the Chaos Computer Club that resulted in his removal (Google Translate) from the famed hacker group. The ejection was only the second in the club’s history.
“That was the time when we decided for the whole organization that we’re going to do this differently,” Domscheit-Berg told Ars.
Today, the “six to ten person” OpenLeaks group continues to work largely from a property Domscheit-Berg and his wife bought, in a small town 55 miles north of Berlin.
“I think we are a little bit wiser today and we are understanding the requirements a little bit better,” Domscheit-Berg said. “One of these requirements is that the differences between organizations are much greater than we had thought. There is some common ground, [but] the platform needs to provide security, you need to think about how to anonymize, and how to deal with [something that’s not a] document that comes in. Plus, when you want to embed this into an existing system, it gets much more complicated.”
In other words, while receiving PDFs (Balkanleaks said it strongly prefers PDFs) or Word documents is one thing, what happens if a leaker wants to send a MySQL database or something in a non-traditional format?
“Most of the time at WikiLeaks, we were not well-known enough for people to send in such a range of stuff,” Domscheit-Berg added.
Further, as WikiLeaks’ own data dumps have shown, just because a group publishes a set of documents doesn’t make them automatically interesting or newsworthy. It takes journalists, activists, or other analysts to make sense of the information for public consumption. It’s this reason, Domscheit-Berg said, that OpenLeaks felt compelled to work with groups that might want to receive leaked documents, challenging them to think long and hard about what they would do with such leaks.
“It doesn’t help if, at the end of the day, people perceive what you do as a product,” he continued. “We think we have to make these organizations part of the intellectual development process so that they understand where they are today and where they want to go and the way in between. The technical part generally is not the complicated part. The complicated part is embedding this into an environment so that people understand what it means. It’s all the processes that need to be created around it.”
So why doesn’t OpenLeaks open up its doors in the name of transparency and release the code it’s been working on?
“If we would open-source it, people would think that this is the solution and then they would use it and they wouldn’t
take care, and then something would go wrong,” he said. “That is part of the experience. The whole media and the whole NGO world, they are facing a big learning curve of know-how to understand the technicalities of the Internet.”
Given OpenLeaks’ previous public setbacks, the group now seems content to sit back and come up with a bulletproof system. Its struggles certainly show that technology may not be the issue—leakers need to know and trust it before they’re even willing to leak.
The German activist and his colleagues have worked quietly, unlike those involved in the media-driven WikiLeaks story, and they continue to provide feedback and suggestions at no charge. Domscheit-Berg won’t call it consulting because “that sounds too much like making money” to groups like Al Jazeera English, the German newspaper Die Zeit, and Reporters Without Borders.
“There [was a lot of hype] about word record publications,” he added. “In order to make an impact it requires a lot of dry work and it requires a lot of journalistic work that is not very exciting but that requires you to stick to it and requires you to bite into it. It doesn’t feel like you’re involved in a James Bond movie.”
When I jokingly asked if he was James Bond, Domscheit-Berg didn’t miss a beat: “That’s another guy, and I think you know who I mean.”
Making Tor even easier to use
On the opposite end of Europe, there’s another project that may be further along in the same quest OpenLeaks started: becoming an open-source whistleblowing platform that transforms any individual site into its own, highly secure, individualized drop box.
Meet the Hermes Foundation. It’s an Italian non-profit organization currently working on version 0.2 of GlobalLeaks, what it describes as the “first open-source whistleblowing framework. It empowers anyone to easily set up and maintain a whistleblowing platform.”
(Hermes is behind a number of other hacktivist-style, transparency-focused projects, including Tor2Web. Tor2Web was co-created by the late Aaron Swartz, and Ars reported on the project back in 2008.)
The site says its beta release will be sometime in “early 2013.” It was all facilitated by a $108,000 grant (PDF) from the Open Technology Fund, a program of Radio Free Asia, which is funded by the American government.
“The GlobaLeaks server will run as a Tor Hidden Service for security and privacy reasons,” states the group’s “Project Plan” (PDF).
“Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of Tor Hidden Services is that they have a high latency. For this reason all of the application logic will come bundled into the [GlobaLeaks] Client that can be downloaded over a different channel, verified and then loaded into the browser (as a plugin, or opened locally). The client at this point will only do asynchronous requests to the backend via Tor and be able to display feedback to the user on the status of the requests.”
GlobalLeaks’ primary tool is the Anonymous Python Application Framework (APAF), which was announced on the Tor developers’ e-mail list nearly a year ago. Its goal “is to give a container allowing anybody to build their Web application in a way that it will automatically publish itself to the Tor network as a Tor Hidden Service.”
“If WikiLeaks was like Napster—[a] centralized, new, and innovative idea that showed the world the power of file-sharing—we are like BitTorrent, the next evolution of this software that is much more resilient, faster, and more flexible to the user needs,” said Claudio Agosti, one of GlobalLeaks’ developers.
For now though, GlobalLeaks said that few, if any, organizations and news outlets have made use of its platform on a consistent basis. There don’t appear to be any major leaks that have come as a result of the GlobalLeaks platform.
“I believe that a lot of people have tried version 0.1, but they are unhappy about the maturity of the software,” he added.
GlobalLeaks thinks that part of the problem with leaking sites is that it’s too hard—people need to be told how to use Tor and how to protect themselves. They want to make leaking as easy as possible and are taking a quite deliberate approach to doing so.
Like a sieve
There’s another notable leaking site that also made a name for itself in 2013: LocalLeaks. So far, its sole “disclosure” appears to be the publication of “The Steubenville Files,” detailing a horrific alleged rape and kidnapping case in a small town in Ohio.
“Despite all this, it looked as though a town rife with corruption, cronyism, illegal gambling, and fixated upon their star high school football team (a major economic revenue engine) were prepared to orchestrate a major cover-up in order to sweep the entire affair under the rug,” LocalLeaks writes. “As this disclosure will document, this cover-up was perpetrated by people in the high school administration, local government and law enforcement.”
The case will go to trial on March 13, 2013. It has captivated the local community and the nation, fueled largely by a New York Times story from December 2012.
LocalLeaks is partnering with two other groups, including KnightSec (a splinter group of Anonymous) and Occupy Steubenville. The latter has largely orchestrated in-person protests in the town.
“All three of these entities have their own objectives and tactics, as well as their realm of responsibility within the over-arching Operation,” LocalLeaks wrote to Ars in an anonymous e-mail. “Anonymous, as led by KnightSec—desire justice and use standard cyber-activist strategies to work toward that goal. Occupy Steubenville desire a reformation of corrupt civil life in Steubenville and utilize the standard Occupy methods of protest to achieve this. LocalLeaks wants only to reveal the truth, and we use the industry standard method of disclosure to do this. All three of these entities are distinct in organization and purpose, yet we are in constant communication every day and coordinate our efforts within the Operation.”
LocalLeaks claims to be receiving leaks “every day,” and so far has received “in excess of 1,000 separate leaks,” from “students, administrators, attorneys, police officers, government officials, and employees” in Steubenville and the region.
Largely, though, the narrative LocalLeaks outlined on its site is composed of damning photos, tweets, and other evidence. It entails “a small group of high school students and other individuals (including one member of the ‘Rape Crew’) who were eye-witness to some part of the events that unfolded the night Jane Doe was attacked. All have come forward to us and identified themselves and agreed to cooperate with us in piecing together exactly what happened to Jane Doe that night.”
LocalLeaks makes use of the German Privacy Foundation’s open-sourced PrivacyBox, which includes OpenPGP encryption, as well as AnonFiles, which makes zero verifiable claims with respect to privacy.
Still, at the end of the day, LocalLeaks exemplifies the fact that all these sites are dependent on individuals coming forward. The sites also need to have a group of outside volunteers who will sit together to assemble what’s been leaked. If Steubenville residents had simply just dumped a bunch of documents all of a sudden, it seems unlikely that anyone would be paying as much attention.
More than a forum
For now, there are only a few active leaking sites—with perhaps a couple others on the way—but many experts say the ecosystem won’t grow on its own. After all, leaking sites remain dependent on leakers’ willingness to bring a document or other piece of information into the light.
“By far the majority of leaks have nothing to do with encrypted e-mails—they have to do with brave people within various bureaucracies having relationships with enterprising journalists,” said Ben Wizner, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project.
“Technology can aid whistleblowing, but technology is not a solution. It doesn’t create the courageous patriotic whistleblower who is willing to face risk to expose illegality. It doesn’t create that person because it cannot create a foolproof way to leak without detection and punishment—and I don’t think [such sites purport] to. What the leaking sites are trying to do is to minimize the risk of leaking, but they can’t eliminate that risk. We still need brave human beings. It doesn’t replace the person who has to make a moral decision—and a moral decision with some risk.”
Via Arstechnica
One of First Iraq Veterans to Publicly Oppose War Will Die for Our Sins
In News on March 13, 2013 at 9:47 AM
03/13/2013
I flew to Kansas City last week to see Tomas Young. Young was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He is now receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary “Body of War.” He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him.
“I had been toying with the idea of suicide for a long time because I had become helpless,” he told me in his small house on the Kansas City outskirts where he intends to die. “I couldn’t dress myself. People have to help me with the most rudimentary of things. I decided I did not want to go through life like that anymore. The pain, the frustration. …”
He stopped abruptly and called his wife. “Claudia, can I get some water?” She opened a bottle of water, took a swig so it would not spill when he sipped and handed it to him.
“I felt at the end of my rope,” the 33-year-old Army veteran went on. “I made the decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding and fade away. This way, instead of committing the conventional suicide and I am out of the picture, people have a way to stop by or call and say their goodbyes. I felt this was a fairer way to treat people than to just go out with a note. After the anoxic brain injury in 2008 [a complication that Young suffered] I lost a lot of dexterity and strength in my upper body. So I wouldn’t be able to shoot myself or even open the pill bottle to give myself an overdose. The only way I could think of doing it was to have Claudia open the pill bottle for me, but I didn’t want her implicated.”
“After you made that decision how did you feel?” I asked.
“I felt relieved,” he answered. “I finally saw an end to this four-and-a-half-year fight. If I were in the same condition I was in during the filming of ‘Body of War,’ in a manual chair, able to feed and dress myself and transfer from my bed to the wheelchair, you and I would not be having this discussion. I can’t even watch the movie anymore because it makes me sad to see how I was, compared to how I am. … Viewing the deterioration, I decided it was best to go out now rather than regress more.”
Young will die for our sins. He will die for a war that should never have been fought. He will die for the lies of politicians. He will die for war profiteers. He will die for the careers of generals. He will die for a cheerleader press. He will die for a complacent public that made war possible. He bore all this upon his body. He was crucified. And there are hundreds of thousands of other crucified bodies like his in Baghdad and Kandahar and Peshawar and Walter Reed medical center. Mangled bodies and corpses, broken dreams, unending grief, betrayal, corporate profit, these are the true products of war. Tomas Young is the face of war they do not want you to see.
On April 4, 2004, Young was crammed into the back of a two-and-a-half-ton Army truck with 20 other soldiers in Sadr City, Iraq. Insurgents opened fire on the truck from above. “It was like shooting ducks in a barrel,” he said. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spinal column. A second bullet shattered his knee. At first he did not know he had been shot. He felt woozy. He tried to pick up his M16. He couldn’t lift his rifle from the truck
bed. That was when he knew something was terribly wrong.
“I tried to say ‘I’m going to be paralyzed, someone shoot me right now,’ but there was only a hoarse whisper that came out because my lungs had collapsed,” he said. “I knew the damage. I wanted to be taken out of my misery.”
His squad leader, Staff Sgt. Robert Miltenberger, bent over and told him he would be all right. A few years later Young would see a clip of Miltenberger weeping as he recounted the story of how he had lied to Young.
“I tried to contact him,” said Young, whose long red hair and flowing beard make him look like a biblical prophet. “I can’t find him. I want to tell him it is OK.”
Young had been in Iraq five days. It was his first deployment. After being wounded he was sent to an Army hospital in Kuwait, and although his legs, now useless, lay straight in front of him he felt as if he was still sitting cross-legged on the floor of the truck. That sensation lasted for about three weeks. It was an odd and painful initiation into his life as a paraplegic. His body, from then on, would play tricks on him.
He was transferred from Kuwait to the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, and then to Walter Reed, in Washington, D.C. He asked if he could meet Ralph Nader, and Nader visited him in the hospital with Phil Donahue. Donahue, who had been fired by MSNBC a year earlier for speaking out against the war, would go on, with Ellen Spiro, to make the 2007 film “Body of War,” a brutally honest account of Young’s daily struggle with his physical and emotional scars of war. In the documentary, he suffers dizzy spells that force him to lower his head into his hands. He wears frozen gel inserts in a cooling jacket because he cannot control his body temperature. He struggles to find a solution to his erectile dysfunction. He downs fistfuls of medications—carbamazepine, for nerve pain; coumadin, a blood thinner; tizanidine, an anti-spasm medication; gabapentin, another nerve pain medication, bupropion, an antidepressant; omeprazole, for morning nausea; and morphine. His mother has to insert a catheter into his penis. He joins Cindy Sheehan at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, to protest with Iraq Veterans Against the War. His first wife leaves him.
“You know, you see a guy who’s paralyzed and in a wheelchair and you think he’s just in a wheelchair,” he says in “Body of War.” “You don’t think about the, you know, the stuff inside that’s paralyzed. I can’t cough because my stomach muscles are paralyzed, so I can’t work up the full coughing energy. I’m more susceptible to urinary tract infections, and there’s a great big erection sidebar to this whole story.”
In early March 2008 a blood clot in his right arm—the arm that bears a color tattoo of a character from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”—caused his arm to swell. He was taken to the Kansas City Veterans Affairs hospital, where he was given the blood thinner coumadin before being released. One month later, the VA took him off coumadin and soon afterward the clot migrated to one of his lungs. He suffered a massive pulmonary embolism and fell into a coma. When he awoke from the coma in the hospital he could barely speak. He had lost most of his upper-body mobility and short-term memory, and his speech was slurred significantly.
It was then that he began to experience debilitating pain in his abdomen. The hospital would not give him narcotics because such drugs slow digestion, making it harder for the bowels to function. Young could digest only soup and Jell-O. In November, in a desperate bid to halt the pain, he had his colon removed. He was fitted with a colostomy bag. The pain disappeared for a few days and then came roaring back. He could not hold down food, even pureed food, because his stomach opening had shrunk. The doctors dilated his stomach. He could eat only soup and oatmeal. Three weeks ago he had his stomach stretched again. And that was enough.
“I will go off the feeding [tube] after me and my wife’s anniversary,” April 20, the date on which he married Claudia in 2012. “I was married once before. It didn’t end well. It was a non-amicable divorce. At first I thought I would [just] wait for my brother and his wife, my niece and my grandparents to visit me, but the one thing I will miss most in my life is my wife. I want to spend a little more time with her. I want to spend a full year with someone without the problems that plagued my previous [marriage]. I don’t know how long it will take when I stop eating. If it takes too long I may take steps to quicken my departure. I have saved a bottle of liquid morphine. I can down that at one time with all my sleeping medication.”
Young’s room is painted a midnight blue and has a large cutout of Batman on one wall. He loved the superhero as a child because “he was a regular person who had a horrible thing happen to him and wanted to save society.”
Young joined the Army immediately after 9/11 to go to Afghanistan and hunt down the people behind the attacks. He did not oppose the Afghanistan war. “In fact, if I had been injured in Afghanistan, there would be no ‘Body of War’ movie to begin with,” he said. But he never understood the call to invade Iraq. “When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor we didn’t invade China just because they looked the same,” he said.
He became increasingly depressed about his impending deployment to Iraq when he was in basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. He asked the battalion doctor for antidepressants. The doctor said he had to meet first with the unit’s chaplain, who told him, “I think you will be happier when you get over to Iraq and start killing Iraqis.”
“I was dumbstruck by his response,” Young said.
He has not decided what will be done with his ashes. He flirted with the idea of having them plowed into ground where marijuana would be planted but then wondered if anyone would want to smoke the crop. He knows there will be no clergy at the memorial service held after his death. “It will just be people reminiscing over my life,” he said.
“I spend a lot of time sitting here in my bedroom, watching TV or sleeping,” he said. “I have found—I don’t know if it is the result of my decision or not—[it is] equally hard to be alone or to be around people. This includes my wife. I am rarely happy. Maybe it is because when I am alone all I have with me are my thoughts, and my mind is a very hazardous place to go. When I am around people I feel as if I have to put on a facade of being the happy little soldier.”
He listens, when he is well enough, to audiobooks with Claudia. Among them have been Al Franken’s satirical book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” and Michael Moore’s “The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader.” He was a voracious reader but can no longer turn the pages of a book. He finds some solace in the French film “The Intouchables,” about a paraplegic and his caregiver, and “The Sessions,” a film based on an essay by the paralyzed poet Mark O’Brien.
Young, when he was in a wheelchair, found that many people behaved as if he was mentally disabled, or not even there. When he was being fitted for a tuxedo for a friend’s wedding the salesman turned to his mother and asked her in front of him whether he could wear the company’s shoes.
“I look at the TV through the lens of his eyes and can see he is invisible,” said Claudia, standing in the living room as her husband rested in the bedroom. An array of books on death, the afterlife and dying are spread out around her. “No one is sick [on television]. No one is disabled. No one faces death. Dying in America is a very lonely business.”
“If I had known then what I know now,” Young said, “I would not have gone into the military. But I was 22, working various menial jobs, waiting tables, [working] in the copy department of an OfficeMax. My life was going nowhere. Sept. 11 happened. I saw us being attacked. I wanted to respond. I signed up two days later. I wanted to be a combat journalist. I thought the military would help me out of my financial rut. I thought I could use the GI Bill to go to school.”
Young is not the first young man to be lured into war by the false sirens of glory and honor and then callously discarded by the war makers. His story has been told many times. It is the story of Hector in “The Iliad.” It is the story of Joe Bonham, the protagonist in Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 novel “Johnny Got His Gun,” whose arms, legs and face are blown away by an artillery shell, leaving him trapped in the inert remains of his body.
Bonham ruminates in the novel: “Inside me I’m screaming, nobody pays any attention. If I had arms, I could kill myself. If I had legs, I could run away. If I had a voice, I could talk and be some kind of company for myself. I could yell for help, but nobody would help me.”
For Young, the war, the wound, the paralysis, the wheelchair, the anti-war demonstrations, the wife who left him and the one who didn’t, the embolism, the loss of motor control, the slurred speech, the colostomy, the IV line for narcotics implanted in his chest, the open bed sores that expose his bones, the despair—the crushing despair—the decision to die, have come down to a girl. Aleksus, his only niece. She will not remember her uncle. But he lies in his dimly lit room, painkillers flowing into his broken body, and he thinks of her. He does not know exactly when he will die. But it must be before her second birthday, in June. He will not mar that day with his death.
And though he is an atheist, though he believes that there is nothing after death—that, as he says, “the body is like a toy that runs out of batteries, only there are no replacements”—his final act honors the promise of Aleksus’ life. As he spoke to me softly of this child—it hurts, even now, he said, to know she will grow up without him—I wondered, sitting next to him on his bed, if he saw it, the glory of it, his final bow not before the specter of his death but the sanctity of her life. The resurrection.
Via Truth-Out
White House Petition: Broadcast United States vs. Pfc. Bradley Manning’s Trial on C-Span
In Bradley Manning, News, Other Leaks, USA, USA, WikiLeaks, World Revolution on March 13, 2013 at 2:06 AM WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
Broadcast United States vs. Pfc. Bradley Manning’s trial on C-Span
The trial of United States v. Pfc. Bradley Manning is expected to begin on June 3, 2013. C-SPAN should be granted access to show the proceedings on television and the Internet, live or with a short delay to appease security concerns. No matter your opinion on this case, the fact remains that it is of very high interest to the public and should be made available for all, not just those who can attend. Bradley Manning is facing life in prison for an “Aiding the Enemy” charge, yet he has been nominated for 3 Nobel Peace Prizes. Being the largest government leak trial in our history, this is a highly controversial case with opinions of Manning ranging from traitor to hero. This would be a great resource for lawyers, law students, journalists, and those with limited access or means of travel.
SIGN PETITION HERE
www.BradleyManning.org/
Raytheon’s Riot Program Mines Social Network Data Like a Google for Spies
In Big Brother, News, OpBigBrother, Other Leaks, Science & Technology on February 10, 2013 at 9:51 PM
A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.
A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an “extreme-scale analytics” system created by Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
Raytheon says it has not sold the software – named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology – to any clients.
But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analyzing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.
The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.
The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a “Google for spies” and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.
Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person’s life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map – in little more than a few clicks of a button.
Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location at which the photographs were taken.
“We’re going to track one of our own employees,” Urch says in the video, before bringing up pictures of “Nick,” a Raytheon staff member used as an example target. With information gathered from social networks, Riot quickly reveals Nick frequently visits Washington Nationals Park, where on one occasion he snapped a photograph of himself posing with a blonde haired woman.
“We know where Nick’s going, we know what Nick looks like,” Urch explains, “now we want to try to predict where he may be in the future.”
Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter. It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them.
Mining from public websites for law enforcement is considered legal in most countries. In February last year, for instance, the FBI requested help to develop a social-media mining application for monitoring “bad actors or groups”.
However, Ginger McCall, an attorney at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said the Raytheon technology raised concerns about how troves of user data could be covertly collected without oversight or regulation.
“Social networking sites are often not transparent about what information is shared and how it is shared,” McCall said. “Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search.”
Raytheon, which made sales worth an estimated $25bn (£16bn) in 2012, did not want its Riot demonstration video to be revealed on the grounds that it says it shows a “proof of concept” product that has not been sold to any clients.
Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon’s intelligence and information systems department, said in an email: “Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation’s rapidly changing security needs.
“Its innovative privacy features are the most robust that we’re aware of, enabling the sharing and analysis of data without personally identifiable information [such as social security numbers, bank or other financial account information] being disclosed.”
In December, Riot was featured in a newly published patent Raytheon is pursuing for a system designed to gather data on people from social networks, blogs and other sources to identify whether they should be judged a security risk.
In April, Riot was scheduled to be showcased at a US government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category “big data – analytics, algorithms.”
According to records published by the US government’s trade controls department, the technology has been designated an “EAR99″ item under export regulations, which means it “can be shipped without a license to most destinations under most circumstances”.
Via TheGuardian
LINK;
http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/raytheons-riot-program-mines-social-network-data-like-a-google-for-spies/
Anonymous: Operation Angel – Aaron Swartz Day (2/11/2013)
In Aaron Swartz, Anonymous, News, Science & Technology, USA, USA, World Revolution on February 10, 2013 at 11:08 PM
What is #AaronSwartzDay? It is a day of rememberance, it is a day of awareness. We take this day in the name and memory of Aaron Swartz. Aaron was a brilliant young mind who co-founded RSS 1.0 at the age of 14. Aaron wasn’t satisfied with such an amazing accomplishment at such a young age, he realized he had a gift and wanted to share that gift with the world. Aaron went on to contribute to the creation of the CreativeCommons licensing process. He continued his career by creating Reddit.com and OpenLibrary.org.
Of course Aaron is best known for his unauthorized work with JSTOR. Aaron sought to liberate millions of JSTOR documents from their vaults into the archives of the internet as a product of Open Access. Aaron was a staunch believer in Open Access (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, Swartz) and had faith that through Open Access the people of the world could reach an unprecedented state of being. In other words, Aaron was seeking a new age of enlightenment through Open Access. Simply put, Aaron wanted as we all do, Freedom of Information.
We choose this day to remember Aaron through social media because it represents the one-month mark since Aaron was found dead. Aaron Swartz committed suicide because of the impossible amounts of pressure put on him by a “justice” system that seeks to persecute rather than prosecute suspected criminals. Aaron was charged with a large number of felonies adding up to a potential 50-Year sentence. While he was given the chance to plea out of the case by taking 6 months in prison and pleading guilty to all of his charges, this was not an acceptable option for Aaron. Aaron, as we do, believed that his actions in regards to JSTOR were not criminal but done altruistically with the hopes of enlightening mankind as a whole. An obvious act of defiance that was meant to show that every person can play a role in making Open Access a reality.
#OPAngel became a reality shortly after Aaron was found dead, we initially existed to protect Aaron’s funeral service from a radical cult that sought to use his death as a soapbox for their hateful rhetoric. We ensured the cult’s failure in a matter of less than two days. Phase 1 of #OPAngel also consisted of online protests aimed at raising awareness to the miscarriage of justice that the DOJ perpetrated upon Aaron. Those guilty parties were identified and #OPAngel entered Phase 2.
With the advent of Phase 2 #OPAngel saw the creation of Aaron’s Law by Rep. Zoe Lofgren. #OPAngel also saw the creation of many petitions and services aimed at #CFAA reform and the administration of justice upon those responsible for Aaron’s Death, including Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann. Phase 2 consisted of a multitude of Online and Offline petitions which called for reform. The success of these protests spawned what is to be known as Phase 3 of #OPAngel.
Phase 3 of #OPAngel is to consist of more offline and online protests until #CFAA reform becomes a reality and those responsible for Aaron’s death are held as such. We will continue to bring awareness to these issues in any way we deem necessary. #OPLastResort has come to light with a number of high-profile hacks including those on the Fed. #OPLastResort shares many of the same core ideas as #OPAngel and in many ways #OPLastResort is a logical extension of #OPAngel. In that, we support #OPLastResort in their effort to raise awareness of Aaron, his struggles, and #CFAA reform. (See below for protest details on the 18th of February in DC and Boston)
Celebrate Aaron’s Life with us on this wonderful #AaronSwartzDay and share your stories of Aaron, share Aaron’s works, share facts about Aaron, share everything! We urge people to archive the information shared on this special day for later use. I hope we are able to use this day for #CFAA reform awareness, and show people who Aaron Swartz was and why his ideas did not die with him.
–Binary
@anon1101101
#OPAngel
#AaronSwartzDay
#OPAngel on Anon Relations: http://anonrelations.net/tag/opangel/ (PR/Video Archive)
February 18th Protests to get Carmen Ortiz & Steve Heymann Fired:
http://pastebin.com/djMfhXVS
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto:
http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto
Aaron Swartz on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1
Petition to Remove Steve Heymann From Office:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-attorney-steve-heymann/RJKSY2nb
Petition to Remove Carmen Ortiz From Office:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
#OPAngel in DC honoring Aaron Swartz:
The Definitive Aaron Swartz Memorial Site:
http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/
Memorial JSTOR Liberator Project:
http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/
A source of documents for and from Aaron Swartz:
Cryptome.org
Open Source #CFAA reform:
ForkTheLaw.org
#1 Source for Leaks Around the World!
#OpAngel, Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz Day, Angel, Anonymous, Day, Operation, Operation
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