Today’s excursion into the spooky realm negins with drones, first with a headline from NBC News:
US investigates Yemenis’ charge that drone strike ‘turned wedding into a funeral’
The Obama administration has launched an internal investigation into a Dec. 12 drone strike in Yemen that targeted an al Qaeda militant but which local villagers say ended up hitting a wedding party, killing 12 and injuring 14 others, U.S. officials tell NBC News.
NBC News has obtained exclusive videos and photos taken in the aftermath of the strike. The graphic images show the scorched bodies of young men who villagers say were part of a convoy on their way to the wedding celebration when they were killed in their pickups by two Hellfire missiles fired by a U.S. drone.
The video and photographs were shot by Nasser Al-Sane, a local Yemeni journalist, and given to NBC News by Reprieve, a human rights group critical of U.S. drone policy. NBC News showed the video to White House and Pentagon officials who declined comment on it. A Yemeni official said the images are consistent with what its government knows about what happened after the attack.
Droning on, via the Register:
US Navy trials GIANT ROBOTIC SPYBIRD for coastal patrols
MQ-4C’s 40m wingspan rivals commercial airliners
The US Navy has completed early test flights on a drone aircraft which sports a wingspan of more than 130 feet (39.9m).
Northrop Grumman said that its MQ-4C Triton aircraft has passed a series of nine test runs with the Navy. The trials are designed to test the craft’s endurance and manoeuvrability under normal flight conditions.
The MQ-4C, which was designed for military surveillance and reconnaissance activities, will be deployed by the Navy to patrol vast areas of sea and coastal regions. With a 39.9m (130.9ft) wingspan, the massive MQ-4C bests both the Boeing 757 and Airbus A320 commercial airliners.
The Guardian confers:
Obama nears decision on NSA reforms as spy leaders meet at White House
Decision on surveillance expected before state of the union
Congressional leaders to join as president mulls NSA review
The leaders of the US intelligence agencies were holding talks at the White House on Wednesday as US president Barack Obama neared a decision on curbing the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk surveillance powers.
Obama was meeting the leadership of the US spy agencies and his privacy and civil liberties oversight board, to be followed on Thursday by additional meetings with key congressional leaders.
The McClatchy Washington Bureau parts company:
Intelligence committee divided over NSA limits after hearing from White House panel
The Senate Intelligence Committee quietly invited the White House-appointed National Security Agency task force to a closed briefing Tuesday afternoon to discuss proposed changes to the agency’s programs. But despite what lawmakers said was a productive discussion, committee members remain sharply divided over possible revisions.
“There is a spirited conversation in there in regards to the president’s panel’s recommendations,” said Colorado Democrat Mark Udall, a critic of the NSA’s collection of Americans’ cellphone metadata. “There’s still a broad range of viewpoints. We have momentum. And I don’t say that in a gloating fashion, I respect everyone on the committee.”
PCWorld suspects:
EU politicians doubt that fighting terrorism is only reason for U.S. surveillance
E.U. politicians said that they doubt data collection by the U.S. National Security Agency has been purely for the fight against terrorism.
In a draft report from the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, published Wednesday, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) say that it is “very doubtful that data collection of such magnitude is only guided by the fight against terrorism,” and that there may be other motives such as political and economic espionage.
The document urges E.U. countries to take legal action against the breach of their sovereignty perpetrated through such mass surveillance programs.
From the Verge, counsel:
US Commerce Department is advising the president on NSA spying reform
American tech companies whose customers and networks have been compromised by the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance efforts may have a new sympathetic ear inside Washington: the Commerce Department. “We’ve been talking to various constituencies within the business community, we understand their issues [with NSA spying],” said US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, speaking today at CES 2014 in Las Vegas, the first Commerce Secretary to do an open Q&A at the gadget conference. Pritzker also said that her division is “part of the conversation” going on now inside the White House about reviewing the NSA’s surveillance powers. “We very much have a voice at the table,” Pritzker added, saying that President Obama “would make something public shortly.”
“Inserting a cost-benefit analysis into the process is one of the things that’s being considered,” Pritzker told the panel attendees. “The president asked for a national conversation on the subject, and we’re having it.” Analysts have suggested that the US economy could see anywhere between $35 and $180 billion in losses to cloud-based companies by 2016 from concerns about NSA spying.
The Daily Dot appreciates:
Nearly half of U.S. security leaders say Snowden to thank for surveillance state debate
In a recent Defense News poll of 352 defense, military, and national security leaders in America, 47.2 percent said they believed that Edward Snowden’s disclosures helped the debate on limits to U.S. surveillance.
As Snowden disclosures continue and NSA-style surveillance spreads around the globe, the debate about Snowden’s ultimate value is still hot even in Washington’s inner circles.
PandoDaily crosses borders:
Thanks, NSA: 25% of UK and Canadian businesses are moving data outside the US, says report
Canada-based cloud hosting provider Peer 1 Hosting surveyed 300 UK and Canadian companies and found that 25% of those businesses are now moving their data outside the U.S. because of NSA security concerns. Meanwhile, a whopping 77% of decision-makers at these companies say they would sacrifice data performance and speed in favor of a more secure connection.
Peer 1 SVP Robert Miggins says this finding surprised him most. “You can find solutions that offer you both (security and speed). Even still, i was struck with how if you force someone to choose, they will pick security.”
Miggins was also surprised to find that 60% of decision-makers agree with the statement, “I do not know as much as I think I should about data security laws where my company’s data is stored.” This suggests, Miggins says, that the choice to move data outside the US may be borne more out of fear than out of having all the relevant information.
Ars Technica protests:
More researchers join RSA conference boycott to protest $10 million NSA deal
With seven weeks to go, at least 8 speakers cancel their RSA Conference plans.
More security researchers are pulling out of next month’s RSA security conference in protest of recent revelations that the event’s namesake, EMC-owned subsidiary RSA, received $10 million to make an NSA-favored random number generator the default setting in its BSAFE crypto tool.
By Tuesday afternoon, there were eight previously scheduled RSA participants who had publicly cancelled their engagements. They included Adam Langley and Chris Palmer, both on various security teams at Google; Chris Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union; EFF special counsel Marcia Hoffman; Mozilla Global Privacy and Public Policy Leader Alex Fowler; Josh Thomas, who is listed as “chief breaking officer” at Atredis Partners; and Jeffrey Carr, CEO of security consultancy Taia Global. They joined F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen, who announced his plans to withdraw two weeks ago.
The Daily Dot readies action:
Sen. Rand Paul and 100,000+ supporters will sue the NSA
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky appeared on Fox News show Hannity late Friday night and said he planned to file a lawsuit against the Obama administration over the security agency’s sweeping data-collection policies.
Paul said he actually started collecting signatures for a class-action lawsuit about six months ago and more than 100,000 people have signed up to join the suit.
“It’s kind of an unusual class-action suit in the sense that we think everyone in America that has a cell phone would be eligible for this class-action suit,” Paul told Fox News.
Techdirt covers more hypocrisy from California’s plutocratic senator:
Dianne Feinstein Admits That Her ‘NSA Reform’ Bill Is About Protecting Existing Surveillance Programs
from the oops dept
See, there’s a problem when you lie: you always forget how to keep your story straight. You may remember, for example, that Senator Dianne Feinstein, at the end of October, released a bill that pretended to be about reforming the NSA and its surveillance programs. The bill was spun in a way that was designed to make people think it was creating real reforms, with a fact sheet claiming that it “prohibited” certain actions around bulk data collection, but which actually codified them in the law, by including massive loopholes. It was an incredibly cynical move by Feinstein and her staff, pretending that their bill to actually give the NSA even greater power and to legalize its abuses, was about scaling back the NSA. But that’s the spin they put on it — which almost no one bought.
EurActiv divides Angela Merkel’s new coalition:
EU anti-terror law puts German coalition to the test
The Social-Democrat Justice Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) has said he would wait on a decision by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) before issuing a legislative proposal to implement the EU’s 2006 Data Retention Directive in Germany.
Maas’s cautiousness follows a decision by Germany’s highest court, which in a 2010 ruling annulled the legal texts adopted to implement the directive into German law. The ruling triggered a court action by the European Commission, which referred the matter to the ECJ in 2012, requesting that fines be imposed on Berlin for non-compliance.
Many Germans were outraged by the directive, which required telecom firms to retain all citizen’s telephone and internet data for up to two years. The measures were adopted in 2006 as part of the EU’s drive to fight terrorism following the 2004 train bombing in Madrid and bus explosion in London the year after.
The Daily Dot allies:
How a major bank and the U.S. government joined forces to spy on Anonymous
New details have surfaced regarding the surveillance protocols used by Bank of America to keep tabs on social activists. Last year, Anonymous hacktivists published 14 gigabytes of private emails and spreadsheets which revealed that Bank of America was monitoring social media and other online services used by activists for basic communication. This time however, information about the bank’s recent surveillance activities were obtained legally through a public records request by a single petitioner.
The newly published documents reveal a coordinated effort by Bank of America, the Washington State Patrol (WSP), and federal counterterrorism agencies, to monitor activists as they prepared for a public demonstration in Olympia, Wash. Over 230 people originally signed up to attend the “Million Mask March” event, which was organized by the Anonymous movement and took place on November 5, 2013.
PandoDaily raises a good question:
Surveillance Valley scammers! Why hack our data when you can just buy it?
For those of us concerned about how private technology companies use our data, the last few weeks of 2013 provided a couple of “I told you so” moments.
A white glove hacker group exploited a well-known security flaw in supposedly ultra-secure Snapchat to dump 4.6 million Snapchat usernames and associated phone numbers on the Internet. Meanwhile, Target was hit by a mega exploit of its payment system allowing scam-hackers to siphon off credit and debit card info on 40 million people. The retailer then sat on the news for a few days, hoping no one would notice…
The horrible truth is we’ve become desensitized to news of credit card heists, and are no longer surprised when our favorite apps and websites play loose with our information. It’s become an expected part of Surveillance Valley’s corporate culture: pay lip service to security, while selling people’s most intimate data to the highest bidder — be they governments, predatory corporations or notorious identity thieves.
TheLocal.se covers an onslaught:
Foreign powers behind IT attacks in Sweden: FRA
Foreign intelligence services were behind a number of hacker attacks against Swedish authorities, companies, and universities last year, Swedish intelligence officials have confirmed.
“We can confirm that incidents occurred last year where we dealt with computer hacking that was carried out by foreign intelligence services,” Fredrik Wallin, spokesman from Sweden’s National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets radioanstalt – FRA) told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper on Wednesday.
FRA, along with Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency (Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap - MSB), participate in a national cyber-defence project to analyze and assess IT threats to Sweden’s national security.
After the jump, it’s off to Asia, where border and zone crises, plus a large dose of revanchism, are the order of the day, hack attacks, Google sanctions, and your car is telling its manufacturer where you go. . .
For our first Asian headline, a Korean tempest from People’s Daily:
U.S., South Korea vow to face DPRK threat
Top diplomats from the United States and South Korea vowed Tuesday to face any threat or provocation by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as the Pentagon sent more troops to South Korea.
“We were deeply focused on the challenge of North Korea, particularly with the events that have taken place in recent weeks in North Korea,” Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters after meeting with his South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-Se at the State Department.
Kerry reaffirmed U.S. commitment to the defense of its ally, adding “we will continue to modernize our capabilities so that we are prepared to face any threat.”
A response from Beijing via China Daily:
US troop deployment stoking peninsula tensions: experts
Washington to add 800 soldiers, plus 40 tanks, to 28,000 stationed in ROK
The decision by the United States to deploy additional military forces, including troops and tanks, to the Republic of Korea will only contribute to heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula, according to Chinese observers.
The US said on Tuesday that it will send 800 more soldiers and about 40 Abrams main battle tanks and other armored vehicles to the ROK on Feb 1, citing the need to reaffirm its support for the security of the ROK.
“This addition of forces to Korea is part of the rebalance to the Pacific. It’s been long planned and is part of our enduring commitment to security on the Korean Peninsula,” said US Army Colonel Steve Warren, who is a Pentagon spokesman.
SINA English tests the limits:
Japan scrambles jets against China plane near disputed islands
Japan scrambled fighter jets on Tuesday to head off a Chinese government plane flying towards disputed islands in the East China Sea, Tokyo’s defence ministry said.
It is the first such incident to be announced by the ministry since China created its new air defence identification zone (ADIZ) in November last year.
The Chinese Y-12 propeller plane reportedly “flew into Japan’s own ADIZ”, about 160 kilometres from airspace around the Diaoyu Islands.
The Yomiuri Shimbun annexes:
280 remote islands to be nationalized
The government will nationalize about 280 islands whose ownership is unknown out of the about 400 remote islands that serve as markers for determining Japan’s territorial waters, the state minister for oceanic policy and territorial issues has announced.
Under the plan, announced Tuesday, the government will complete its search for the islands’ owners by June. Islands whose owners have not been tracked down by then will be registered on the national asset ledger.
The move aims to clarify the government’s intention to protect territories and territorial waters by designating remote islands as “important national territories,” and to reinforce the management of marine resources and national security.
JapanToday escalates:
China takes propaganda war with Japan to United Nations
China took its propaganda war with Japan to the United Nations on Wednesday, questioning Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s motives for visiting a controversial war shrine and calling on him to correct his “erroneous outlook” on history.
Abe’s Dec 26 visit to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals are enshrined along with other war dead, infuriated China and South Korea and prompted concern from the United States, a key ally.
“It all boils down to whether the leader of a country should stand on the side of maintaining the principles and purposes of the charter of the United Nations or to side with war criminals,” China’s U.N. envoy Liu Jieyi told reporters.
China fired a simultaneous volley, this time from Vienna, as People’s Daily reports:
Japan worships war criminals while Europe says no to Nazi: Chinese ambassador
No European politicians dare to defy world opinion by prostrating themselves before Adolf Hitler and other war criminals, in sharp contrast to Japanese leaders’ worship to a controversial war-linked shrine, the Chinese ambassador to Austria said.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s year-end visit to the Yasukuni shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead, including 14 class-A war criminals in World War II, seriously damaged the political basis of relations between Tokyo and its neighbors, Zhao Bin said in an article carried on Tuesday by the Austrian daily Wiener Zeitung.
He added that although nearly seven decades have passed since the end of WWII, Japan has constantly tore on the wounds of the victim countries.
Jiji Press ups the ante again:
Abe Indicates Willingness to Visit Yasukuni Shrine Again
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe indicated Wednesday that he is willing to visit Yasukuni Shrine again during his tenure, even after his visit to the war-related shrine in Tokyo last month provoked a fierce backlash from China and South Korea and frustrated the United States.
“Despite possible criticism, I have to fulfill my roles, responsibilities” as Japan’s prime minister, Abe said in a satellite television program.
At the same time, Abe stressed his intention to make efforts to gain the understanding of other countries about his visit to the Shinto shrine, which honors Class-A World War II criminals along with the war dead.
The Mainichi reconfigures militarily:
Defense ministry to revamp tank landing ships for joint operations with ground troops
The Ministry of Defense has decided to drastically upgrade the Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF)’s Osumi-class tank landing ships, starting in fiscal 2014, to smoothly carry out joint operations with the tilt-rotor transport aircraft Ospreys and amphibious vehicles that the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) plans to introduce.
It will be the first time for the ministry to upgrade the tank landing ships on such a large scale as part of efforts to step up coordination with the GSDF. One of the Osumi-class tank landing ships was deployed to help transport relief goods to the Philippines last year shortly after a major typhoon swept through the Southeast Asian country. Because it has become difficult to defend remote islands due to China’s growing maritime activities, the plan is aimed at effectively securing functions similar to those of a marine corps.
The Asahi Shimbun launches a key poiece of the new Japanese national security state:
New national security bureau faces rocky start
Abe picked Shotaro Yachi, a long-time foreign policy adviser, to head the bureau. Yachi has experience in helping to thaw Japan’s icy relations with China.
But high on Yachi’s agenda is a visit to Washington later in January to meet with his counterparts in the National Security Council on which the Japanese version is modeled.
Rather than explain what the Japanese council intends to do, Yachi may have to spend more time addressing U.S. concerns over Abe’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine in late December. The State Department issued a statement that said Washington was “disappointed” about the pilgrimage to the shrine that memorializes Japan’s war dead along with 14 Class-A war criminals.
The Asahi Shimbun looks back:
Testimony by ex-Indonesian comfort woman: ‘I was taken to a Japanese army tent’
More than 70 years after the Japanese occupation of Indonesia began, victims of the Imperial Japanese Army are telling their stories of being forced to serve as “comfort women” and being sexually assaulted by Japanese troops.
Asahi Shimbun reporters visited Indonesia and met many women who were cast aside by their families and have never told of the circumstances of the harm inflicted on them or had their stories investigated.
A support group for former comfort women, who were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers during World War II, is located on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, which sits just below the equator. Asahi Shimbun reporters asked the group to introduce them to people who had not previously been interviewed. An Asahi Shimbun investigative team spent about two weeks in Sulawesi, where it met 20 or so people who claimed to be former comfort women or witnesses.
The Jakarta Globe keeps secrets:
Australian PM Defends Secrecy Over Border Protection
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott defended the government’s secrecy over its border protection policy Thursday after reports that boats had been turned back to Indonesia and asylum-seekers mistreated.
Under the conservative government’s hardline Operation Sovereign Borders, officials refuse to discuss “operational matters.”
This has meant reports that at least one boat was forcibly turned or towed back to Indonesia, and that members of the Australian navy subjected those on board to verbal and physical mistreatment, have not been addressed.
In other news from the world of secrets. There’s this from Techdirt:
Judge In No Fly List Trial Won’t Let Plaintiff Or Her Lawyers See The Evidence
from the due-process! dept
We’ve written quite a few times about the lawsuit brought by Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim, testing the legality of the US’s no fly list, which she was put on in what appears to be a massive mistake by Homeland Security, which they’ve proceeded to make worse every chance they get. Being on the no fly list also appears to have made the State Department deny her a visa to come to her own trial, and then DHS directly got involved to block Ibrahim’s daughter from flying to the US to be a witness, and then directly lying about it to the court.
Ars Technica hacks away:
Hackers use Amazon cloud to scrape mass number of LinkedIn member profiles
EC2 service helps hackers bypass measures designed to protect LinkedIn users.
LinkedIn is suing a gang of hackers who used Amazon’s cloud computing service to circumvent security measures and copy data from hundreds of thousands of member profiles each day.
“Since May 2013, unknown persons and/or entities employing various automated software programs (often referred to as ‘bots’) have registered thousands of fake LinkedIn member accounts and have extracted and copied data from many member profile pages,” company attorneys alleged in a complaint filed this week in US District Court in Northern California. “This practice, known as ‘scraping,’ is explicitly barred by LinkedIn’s User Agreement, which prohibits access to LinkedIn ‘through scraping, spidering, crawling, or other technology or software used to access data without the express written consent of LinkedIn or its Members.’”
From Wired, virtual terrorism?:
U.S. Intel: Osama Bin Laden Avatar Could Recruit Terrorists Online for Centuries
When American and British spies were infiltrating virtual-world games like Second Life and World of Warcraft in a bid to detect real-world terrorists, U.S. intelligence warned that jihadists might create an Osama bin Laden avatar that could “preach and issue new fatwas for hundreds of years to come,” according to a once-confidential report disclosed today.
The 126-page study, (.pdf) commissioned by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides fresh insight into intelligence the authorities had accumulated around the time their online game snooping started.
The disclosure of report, prepared in 2008, comes one month after classified documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed that U.S. and British spies suspected the online games were a “target-rich communication network” that could provide terrorists “a way to hide in plain sight” and plan attacks.
Reuters penalizes:
France fines Google over data privacy
France’s data protection watchdog has fined Google 150,000 euros after the U.S. search engine ignored a three-month ultimatum to bring its practices on tracking and storing user information in line with local law.
The privacy watchdog, known as CNIL, has also ordered Google to post the decision on its google.fr homepage for 48 hours within eight days of being officially notified of the ruling.
At issue was the new approach to user data that Google began in March 2012, in which it consolidated its 60 privacy policies into one and started combining data collected on individual users across its services, including YouTube, Gmail and social network Google+.
And for our final item, we’re driven to despair by the Detroit News:
Carmakers keep data on drivers’ locations
A government report finds that major automakers are keeping information about where drivers have been — collected from onboard navigation systems — for varying lengths of time. Owners of those cars can’t demand that the information be destroyed. And, says the U.S. senator requesting the investigation, that raises questions about driver privacy.
The Government Accountability Office in a report released Monday found major automakers have differing policies about how much data they collect and how long they keep it.
Automakers collect location data in order to provide drivers with real-time traffic information, to help find the nearest gas station or restaurant, and to provide emergency roadside assistance and stolen vehicle tracking. But, the report found, “If companies retained data, they did not allow consumers to request that their data be deleted, which is a recommended practice.”
