White House unveils cyber ID proposal

A man surfing the web at an internet cafe
© AFP/File Amro Maraghi

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House unveiled a plan on Friday designed to boost confidence and business in cyberspace through the creation of a single, secure online credential.

"By making online transactions more trustworthy and better protecting privacy, we will prevent costly crime, we will give businesses and consumers new confidence, and we will foster growth and untold innovation," President Barack Obama said in a statement.

"That's why this initiative is so important for our economy," Obama said.

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) proposes the creation of secure and reliable online credentials that would be available to consumers who want to use them.

Strangling of the Free Internet Begins

Editor's Note: For additional details about what Matt Ryan correctly calls a "cocktail of attacks" on the free Internet, please read the series of articles by practicing attorney and Activist Post contributing writer, David Makarewicz.

Dees Illustration

Matt Ryan -- Infowars

AT&T’s pending acquisition of T-Mobile USA has the tech world buzzing with various pros and cons of what this merging would mean for the consumer. Among the pros are the possibility of having a single mobile standard (4G LTE) and a market where phones aren’t restricted to a single carrier. The cons include having less choice between carriers and rate plans, millions of customers suddenly being subject to a more restricted terms of service, and the loss of what T-Mobile customers considered to be a much better overall customer experience.

What’s more troubling, are recent announcements by AT&T to begin capping the monthly usage and impose overage fees on their DSL and U-Verse customers. These customers were originally given a promise of unlimited usage by AT&T only to find an essential mode of communication is now restricted. In a sense, AT&T is forcing their customers to buy in to their cable and phone service to defer the bandwidth used by their online competitors, Skype, Hulu, Netflix, and others.

BBC World Service to sign funding deal with US state department

Customers in an internet cafe in Changzhi, China. The US government's investment is intended to help people circumnavigate state censorship. Photograph: Reuters

Low six-figure investment will aim to help combat censorship of TV and internet services in countries including Iran and China

The BBC World Service is to receive a "significant" sum of money from the US government to help combat the blocking of TV and internetservices in countries including Iran and China.

In what the BBC said is the first deal of its kind, an agreement is expected to be signed later this month that will see US state department money – understood to be a low six-figure sum – given to the World Service to invest in developing anti-jamming technology and software.

The funding is also expected to be used to educate people in countries with state censorship in how to circumnavigate the blocking of internet and TV services.

It is understood the US government has decided the reach of the World Service is such that it makes investment worthwhile.

The US government money comes as the World Service faces a 16% cut in its annual grant from the Foreign Office – a £46m reduction in its £236.7m budget over three years that will lead to about 650 job cuts. The money will be channelled through the World Service's charitable arm, the World Service Trust.

The deal, which is expected to be formally announced on International Press Freedom Day, 3 May, follows an increase in incidents of interference with World Service output across the globe, according to its controller of strategy and business, Jim Egan.

BBC Persian television, which launched in early 2009 and airs in Iran and its neighbouring countries, has experienced numerous instances of jamming. The BBC Arabic TV news service has also been jammed in recent weeks across various parts of north Africa during the recent uprisings in Egypt and Libya.

"Governments who have an interest in denying people information particularly at times of tension and upheaval are keen to do this and it is a particular problem now," said Egan.

Another area in which the BBC World Service is expected to use the US money is continuing its development of early warning software.

This will allow it to detect jamming sooner than it does currently where it relies on reports from users on the ground.

"Software like this helps monitor dips in traffic which act as an early warning of jamming, and it can be more effective than relying on people contacting us and telling us they cannot access the services," said Egan.

The BBC also expects to use state department money to help combat internet censorship by establishing proxy servers that give the impression a computer located in one country is in fact operating in another, thereby circumnavigating attempts by repressive governments to block websites.

"China has become quite expert at blocking websites and one could say it has become something of an export industry for them – a lot of countries are keen to follow suit," said Egan.

"We have evidence of Libya and Egypt blocking the internet and satellite signals in recent weeks."

Egan added that the battle against jamming is likely to be an ongoing one because repressive countries are likely to develop methods to counter any anti-censorship technology that is developed.

"It is a bit of a game of cat and mouse," said a BBC source.

Source:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/20/bbc-world-service-us-funding?CMP=twt_fd

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Insurers use "Predictive Modeling", Spy on Internet Posts to Gauge Risks

Leslie Scism and Mark Maremont
Wall Street Journal

Life insurers are testing an intensely personal new use for the vast dossiers of data being amassed about Americans: predicting people's longevity.

Insurers have long used blood and urine tests to assess people's health—a costly process. Today, however, data-gathering companies have such extensive files on most U.S. consumers—online shopping details, catalog purchases, magazine subscriptions, leisure activities and information from social-networking sites—that some insurers are exploring whether data can reveal nearly as much about a person as a lab analysis of their bodily fluids.


In one of the biggest tests, the U.S. arm of British insurer Aviva PLC looked at 60,000 recent insurance applicants. It found that a new, "predictive modeling" system, based partly on consumer-marketing data, was "persuasive" in its ability to mimic traditional techniques.

The research heralds a remarkable expansion of the use of consumer-marketing data, which is traditionally used for advertising purposes.

This data increasingly is gathered online, often with consumers only vaguely aware that separate bits of information about them are being collected and collated in ways that can be surprisingly revealing. The growing trade in personal information is the subject of a Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy.

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US Senate Bill S.3804 - Allows Government To Shutdown Whistleblower Websites

Just the other day, President Obama urged other countries to stop censoring the Internet. But now the United States Congress is trying to censor the Internet here at home. A new bill being debated this week would have the Attorney General create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block. - The first vote is scheduled Thursday!



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More Government Idiocy: Internet Black Lists

Karl Denninger
Market Ticker

There's dumb - and then there's really dumb, predicated on people who simply don't understand what they're doing, and should be barred from authoring legislation until they consult with some people who do know what they're doing.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced just one week ago, but it's greased and ready to move, with a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee this Thursday. If people don't speak out, US citizens could soon find themselves joining Iranians and Chinese in being blocked from accessing broad chunks of the public Internet.

Help us stop this bill in its tracks! Click here to sign our petition.

COICA creates two blacklists of Internet domain names. Courts could add sites to the first list; the Attorney General would have control over the second. Internet service providers and others (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the good favor of the government) if they block domains on the second list.

The lists are for sites "dedicated to infringing activity," but that's defined very broadly -- any domain name where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are "central to the activity of the Internet site" could be blocked.

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Age of Censorship and Internet Trade Wars

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COICA kills free speech: Write to Sen. Leahy

Chris Pratt
COTO Report

Blacklisted domains and terminated websites are both possibilities if bill S.3804 becomes law. It is called “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA) and it was introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy on September 20, 2010.

Hard to imagine that the same man who could say:

“I commend Secretary of State Clinton for reaffirming our nation’s deep commitment to openness and freedom of expression on the Internet. The Internet has become a vital tool to protect and ensure the rights and basic freedoms of Americans and the human rights of people everywhere.” Released by Leahy’s Office in January 2010

–or–


“Why did 9/11 happen on George Bush’s watch when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen?…. Had there been an independent congress, one that could ask questions, these questions would have been asked years ago. We’d be much better off…..” U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy — interview with Amy Goodman, 9/29/2006

is now proposing legislation that will allow the government to blacklist and close down websites engaged in “infringing activities.”

Although “infringing activities” are ill defined by this legislation, it appears that websites engaged primarily in copyright infringement are targets. Websites like mine and thousands of  bloggers and documentarians who use the copyrighted material of others to develop their work could well be in Leahy’s cross hairs.

As a Citizen Journalist and a Citizen Filmmaker,  I was so appalled by what I saw first under Republican rule and now under Democratic leadership that I produced a film, deceptions, with zero background and for less than $1,000. I then made this film available to the public on a website I created called DeceptionsUSA.com. Rady Ananda reviewed deceptions as a “brilliant clarion to save the Internet.”

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New Class of Malware Will Steal Behavioral Patterns

Computer scientists predict that a new generation of malware will mine social networks for people's private patterns of behavior.

Technology Review

It's not hard to find frightening examples of malware which steals personal information, sometimes for the purpose of making it public and at other times for profit. Details such as names, addresses and emails are hugely valuable for companies wanting to market their wares.

But there is another class of information associated with networks that is potentially much more valuable: the pattern of links between individuals and their behavior in the network--how often they email or call each other, how information spreads between them and so on.

Why is this more valuable? An email address associated with an individual who is at the hub of a vibrant social network is clearly more valuable to a marketing company than an email address at the edge of the network. Patterns of contact can also reveal how people are linked, whether they are in a relationship for example, whether they are students or executives, or whether they prefer celebrity gossip to tech news.

This information would allow a determined attacker to build a remarkably detailed picture of the lifestyle of any individual, a picture that would be far more useful than the basic demographic information that marketeers use today that consists of little more than sex, age and social grouping.

Today, Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and a few pals argue that the value of this data makes it almost inevitable that malicious attackers will attempt to steal it. They point out that many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data for things like recommender systems.

"There is no reason to think that developers of malicious applications will not implement the same method and algorithms into future malware, or that they have not already started doing so," they say.

The idea would be to release some kind of malware that records the patterns of links in a network. This kind of malware will be very hard to detect, say Altshuler and co. They've studied the strategies that best mine behavioral pattern data from a real mobile phone network consisting of 800,000 links between 200,000 phones. (They call this type of attack "Stealing Reality".)

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Microsoft proposes public health approach to internet infections: Only vaccinated computers can get online

Byron Acohido
USA Today

Microsoft has proposed a bold new Internet security model based on the principles used to preserve public health on a global basis.

Scott Charney, corporate vice president of trustworthy computing at Microsoft, unveiled the software giant'sCollective Defense proposal on Tuesday during his keynote at theInformation Security Solutions Europe(ISSE) conference in Berlin.

Charney urged government and tech industry officials to act collectively to protect citizens and critical infrastructure from growing cyberthreats. He compared unprotected and infected computers to unvaccinated and contagious individuals. Both, he said, can pose a threat to society.

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