Canadians freed in Egypt still face travel ban

The Guardian reports: Two Canadians held without charge inside one of Egypt’s most notorious prisons were released unexpectedly from custody early on Sunday morning.

The renowned film-maker John Greyson and emergency medic Tarek Loubani had been detained for over seven weeks after being arrested while observing protests in Cairo on 16 August. Like many of the protesters arrested that day, they were held on suspicion of murder and intention to kill. In a letter their lawyers later smuggled from prison, the pair said they had been beaten in custody, and were being held in an overcrowded, cockroach-infested cell.

Their release this weekend came as a surprise, coming shortly after Egyptian authorities ordered their detention for another 45 days. Officials had also recently implied the pair had been acting as foreign spies, a symptom of widespread nationalism and xenophobia that has spread across Egypt since the overthrow of ex-president Mohamed Morsi in July.

The news sparked jubilation in Canada, where the pair’s detainment had become a cause célèbre, with Alec Baldwin and Charlize Theron among 150,000 people who had signed a petition calling for their release.

Reuters adds: Two Canadians freed at the weekend after being held in Egypt for more than six weeks without charge are still barred from flying home, their lawyer said on Monday.

“When the men went to the airport they found there was a travel ban with their names on it and so they couldn’t travel and came back to Cairo,” Marwa Farouk, the lawyer representing John Greyson and Tarek Loubani, told Reuters.

“I am appealing to the prosecutor general to lift the travel ban,” said Farouk, who had said the previous day that the Canadians were flying to Toronto after their release.

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Internet companies push for NSA data-request transparency

Time reports: The largest Internet companies in the U.S. are preparing for a showdown with the U.S. government over their campaign to be more transparent about national-security-data requests. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn have until Oct. 21 to file a brief with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) after the Department of Justice formally opposed their request to disclose statistics about the nature and scope of government requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The impending FISC showdown comes as U.S. lawmakers are weighing two bills that would give the companies the right to publish basic statistics about the government’s national-security-data demands. Since the initial revelations about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs were published in June — thanks to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — the tech titans have been waging a battle to be more transparent about such data requests in an effort to demonstrate that they are not serving as NSA stooges.

The companies have repeatedly argued that their inability to be more transparent with the public undermines user trust, which in turn could have adverse consequences for their businesses.

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New law to permit Turkish police to detain ‘possible’ protesters

Hürriyet Daily News reports: A new regulation will allow Turkish police to detain those who possess the “risk of conducting a protest” from 12 to 24 hours without the demand of a prosecutor or a judge, prompting acute worries from opposition deputies.

The new regulations that will be conducted jointly by the justice and interior ministries will allow the police to detain a suspect who “may hold a protest” for up to 24 hours without any court decision while also increasing the penalties for resistance to police and damaging public property.

The move to strengthen police powers was precipitated by the countrywide Gezi Park protests, which began at the end of May.

Organizations which “tend to hold protests” will be monitored and their members could be detained by police if intelligence reports suggest they are planning to conduct a demonstration or action.

A judge will also be able to extend the 24-hour detention period if desired. Under the current law, a judge’s or prosecutor’s order is necessary to detain people in such cases.

The regulations will also increase the penalties for resistance to police and damage to public property. Those who possess Molotov cocktails might be sentenced to up to five years in prison under the new regulations. The draft also includes a board to regulate security forces, which will monitor malpractice within the institutions.

Criticizing the moves, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) deputy leader Semih Yalçın said the regulations were “signs of police state.” [Continue reading…]

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Al-Shabaab target may explain U.S. secrecy over failed Somali raid

Simon Tsidall writes: Official US reluctance to identify the target of the failed Somali raid by Seal Team Six special forces commandos may stem from a wish not to further bolster the reputation of al-Shabaab’s shadowy leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, also known as Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr.

The Islamist militia’s hardline emir emerged as Africa’s most wanted man after the 21 September Westgate mall attack in Nairobi that killed least 67 people, for which he claimed responsibility. His capture would have been portrayed as a triumph. By extension, his eluding of US-style justice will be seen as a serious setback. Pentagon officials will say only that the target of the dawn raid on the seaside town of Barawe, south of Mogadishu, was a “high-value” al-Shabaab terrorist linked to Westgate. Local sources said the Seals attacked a building housing foreign fighters, and that an unidentified Chechen fighter may have been their quarry.

But this is unlikely to be the whole story, given the elaborate preparations for the raid, which began soon after Westgate. The US navy Seals are the same crack unit that killed the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, two years ago in Pakistan. This time, too, Barack Obama was reportedly kept closely informed of the progress of the Somali plan, and of the almost simultaneous operation in Libya.

Given the political sensitivity, at home and in the Muslim world, that surrounds such US on-the-ground incursions, Obama will have personally given the go-ahead for both raids. His orders were reportedly to capture, if possible, rather than kill. [Continue reading…]

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Clashes across Egypt kill 51, more protests called

The New York Times reports: At least 51 people were killed as street clashes erupted in several Egyptian cities on Sunday, in a surge of violence that raised new questions about the ability of the interim government to secure the fractured country.

The death toll was the highest in a single day since mid-August, when the authorities began their punishing crackdown on Islamist supporters of former President Mohamed Morsi, who was ousted by the army on July 3. The military-backed government that replaced him has tried to project an aura of stability in order to lure back the tourists and investors scared off by several years of turmoil in the country.

But on Sunday, only grim, familiar scenes of violence returned, along with the sounds of gunfire.

The deadly bloodshed came as thousands of Egyptians celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1973 war with Israel, setting up a day of bizarre contrasts that served as reminders of Egypt’s deepening polarization since the ouster of Mr. Morsi.

As the military’s supporters celebrated the anniversary in Tahrir Square in Cairo with music and fireworks, officers and armed civilian loyalists set upon Islamist protesters who were also trying to reach the square, driving back their marches with tear gas and gunfire.

More than 250 people were injured, officials said.

Over the last three months, with little resistance from the public, the military has set out to vanquish the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that propelled Mr. Morsi to power. Since July, hundreds of Brotherhood members have been killed and most of the movement’s leaders have been sent to jail or fled the country.

And Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters, who have re-branded themselves under the banner of the “anti-coup” movement, have continued to protest even with the repression of their marches and sit-ins, and despite dwindling attendance at their demonstrations.

They had billed the protests on Sunday as their own tribute to the armed services, while promising a new level of confrontation: for the first time since Mr. Morsi’s ouster, the Islamists called for marches on Tahrir Square, a stronghold of the anti-Morsi movement. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu’s ignorance about Iran

From the 2012 Fall collection of Tehran fashion designer Farnaz Abdoli.

From the 2012 Fall collection of Tehran fashion designer Farnaz Abdoli.

The New York Times reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel tried to take his campaign against the Iranian leadership to Iran’s young population last week, saying that if they were truly free, they would be able to wear jeans, listen to Western music and participate in free elections.

The problem is that Iranians do wear jeans and manage to listen to whatever music they want to listen to, just like people almost anywhere, except maybe in North Korea.

That is to say, Mr. Netanyahu’s effort at outreach backfired, as Twitter lit up Sunday with retorts.

“Netanyahu, here are my #Jeans and #Western music,” wrote a user named Sallar, posting a picture of his jeans and his iPad showing a pop album cover, and adding an insult to the prime minister’s intelligence.

A user with the handle mohhzg wrote, “Netanyahu, I’m wearing jeans like many old & young people in #Iran.”

Mr. Netanyahu made his faux pas — at least when it comes to Iranian fashion — in an interview Thursday with the BBC Persian channel, despised by the Iranian leadership because it allows the government’s adversaries direct access to the public.

“If the people of Iran were free, they could wear jeans, listen to Western music and have free elections,” he said, in an apparent effort to get the Iranian public to oppose the nation’s nuclear program. [Continue reading…]

In the interview, Netanyahu claimed, “I saw Neda,” images of whose death became an icon of the 2009 protests, yet he failed to notice that she, like hundreds of thousands of other Iranian protesters, were wearing blue jeans.

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International monitors begin to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons equipment

The Washington Post reports: Personnel overseen by a team of international monitors took blowtorches and high-speed saws to Syria’s chemical weapons equipment Sunday, the first step on the road to dismantling what is believed to be one of the world’s largest arsenals of the weapons of mass destruction.

The destruction of mixing equipment, missile warheads and aerial bombs was carried out by a team of Syrians under supervision from experts from the Netherlands-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the United Nations said in a statement.

The mission, which received the backing of a U.N. Security Council resolution last week, faces a daunting task, dealing with a tight timetable with the added logistical and security challenges of working in the midst of a raging civil war. The 20-member advance team has been quick to get to work since arriving in Damascus on Tuesday.

The pressing schedule sees the elimination of Syria’s ability to produce chemical weapons by the beginning of November, before the complete destruction of its stockpiles within nine months.

Work to dismantle delivery and production equipment is relatively straightforward, according to experts, using simple tools, or even vehicles to run over and crush items. It is the later phases — disposing of highly corrosive precursor chemicals and filled warheads — that will pose the biggest challenge. Some precursors are expected to be transported out of the country to be destroyed. [Continue reading…]

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Libya demands explanation for ‘kidnapping’ of citizen by U.S. forces

The Guardian reports: Libya has demanded an explanation for the “kidnapping” of one of its citizens by American special forces, hours after a separate US military raid on a terrorist target in Somalia ended in apparent failure and retreat.

In Tripoli the US army’s delta force seized alleged al-Qaida leader Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Abu Anas al-Liby and wanted for the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 220 people.

But US navy Seals suffered a major setback when they launched an amphibious assault to capture an Islamist militant leader said to be Ahmed Godane, described as Africa’s most wanted man and the architect of last month’s attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya. The elite Seals were beaten back by heavy fire and apparently abandoned equipment that the Somali militants photographed and posted on the internet.

As dramatic details of Saturday’s twin operations emerged, US secretary of state John Kerry insisted that terrorists “can run but they can’t hide”, but faced growing questions about America’s military reach in Africa and the consequences of unilateral aggression.

Al-Liby was captured outside his family home at 6.15am in Noufle’een, a quiet suburb in eastern Tripoli, according to witnesses, but there were conflicting reports over who took him. His brother, Nabih, told the Associated Press that al-Liby was parking when a convoy of three vehicles encircled his car. Armed gunmen smashed the car’s window and seized al-Liby’s gun before grabbing him and taking him away, the report said. The brother said al-Liby’s wife saw the kidnapping from her window and described the abductors as foreign-looking armed “commandos”.

But al-Liby’s son Abdullah insisted that Libyan forces were involved. Appearing on Tripoli’s Nabir TV station, he said: “The people who took my father were Libyan, not Americans – they spoke with Tripoli accents. [Continue reading…]

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How Obama’s effort to get re-elected may have prolonged the war in Syria

Michael Hirsh reports: Despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s frenetic efforts, preparations for the “Geneva II” peace conference on Syria’s civil war are already foundering. The rebel movement has become increasingly radicalized against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and more fractured. A newly confident Assad, meanwhile, has somewhat relegitimized himself as a signatory to a new chemical-weapons ban negotiated by the United States and Russia under U.N. auspices, which his government is tasked with implementing over the next year. Defying global opprobrium over his use of sarin gas, Assad has also positioned himself in a series of high-profile TV interviews as a preferable alternative to Islamist rebels who want to create a fundamentalist state.

All of which should prompt a reexamination of the first Geneva conference in the summer of 2012, on which Kerry’s new push for peace is based. According to some officials involved, perhaps the greatest tragedy of Syria is that, some 80,000 lives ago, President Obama might have had within his grasp a workable plan to end the violence, one that is far less possible now. But amid the politics of the 2012 presidential election—when GOP nominee Mitt Romney regularly accused Obama of being “soft”—the administration did little to make it work and simply took a hard line against Assad, angering the special U.N. Syria envoy, Kofi Annan, and prompting the former U.N. secretary-general to quit, according to several officials involved.

Former members of Annan’s negotiating team say that after then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on June 30, 2012, jointly signed a communique drafted by Annan, which called for a political “transition” in Syria, there was as much momentum for a deal then as Kerry achieved a year later on chemical weapons. Afterward, Annan flew from Geneva to Moscow and gained what he believed to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s consent to begin to quietly push Assad out. But suddenly both the U.S. and Britain issued public calls for Assad’s ouster, and Annan felt blindsided. Immediately afterward, against his advice, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice offered up a “Chapter 7” resolution opening the door to force against Assad, which Annan felt was premature.

Annan resigned a month later. At the time, the soft-spoken Ghanaian diplomat was cagey about his reasons, appearing to blame all sides. “I did not receive all the support that the cause deserved,” Annan told reporters in Geneva. He also criticized what he called “finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council.” But former senior aides and U.N. officials say in private that Annan blamed the Obama administration in large part. “The U.S. couldn’t even stand by an agreement that the secretary of State had signed in Geneva,” said one former close Annan aide who would discuss the talks only on condition of anonymity. “He quit in frustration. I think it was clear that the White House was very worried about seeming to do a deal with the Russians and being soft on Putin during the campaign.” One of the biggest Republican criticisms of Obama at the time was that he had, in an embarrassing “open mike” moment, promised Moscow more “flexibility” on missile defense after the election. [Continue reading…]

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By accident or design, ISIS is helping Assad

James Traub writes: I’ve spent much of the last week in Antakya, an ancient city, known to Byzantine Christians as Antioch, which now serves as a bivouac for Syrian rebel fighters and a jumping-off point for journalists and humanitarian actors working in Syria, which lies 20 miles to the west. One subject preoccupies everyone in the Turkish town: not the brutality of the regime in Damascus, but the nihilistic violence of the foreign jihadi group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

Firas Tammim, a native of the Syrian city of Latakia who now brings medical supplies and other goods to the region, said to me, “I don’t want to say Assad is better, but at least he didn’t arrest or kill people because they were smoking.” Tammim showed me a picture on his phone of a crowd of villagers, including children, witnessing an ISIS beheading of an alleged infidel. “Think what this does to these children,” he said. Over time, Tammim said, Syrians are becoming inured to what they once would have found unspeakable.

ISIS appears to have up to 8,000 soldiers in Syria, a tiny number compared with the 100,000 or so rebel fighters. But the group’s medieval ideology, as well as its pathological obsession with enforcing Islamist rectitude in the towns and cities its soldiers have infiltrated, has made it a source of terror. One evening I was sitting at an outdoor cafe where a grizzled man was steadily smoking a hookah and shooting jets of tobacco smoke through his nostrils. He called himself Abu Abdul, and he was a fighter with a brigade affiliated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the “moderate” forces backed by the West. We talked about the jihadists. Then he said something else. “He asks that you not mention the name of his brigade,” my interpreter said. “Everyone is scared of ISIS.”

President Bashar al-Assad has received two enormous gifts in recent months. The first is the Russian-brokered deal to remove Syria’s chemical weapons, which distracted attention from his relentless campaign to kill and terrorize his enemies and also compelled Western governments to work with him as the country’s legitimate ruler. The second is ISIS, which has also deflected attention away from the war between the regime and the rebels and has vindicated as nothing else could Assad’s persistent claim that he is confronting, not political opponents, but “terrorists,” as his foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, recently claimed at the United Nations.

For this reason, it has become a fixed conviction in Antakya that ISIS functions as a secret arm of the regime. This sounds like an all-too-understandable conspiracy theory, yet even Western diplomats I’ve spoken to consider it plausible, if scarcely proved. In the summer of 2012, Assad released from prison a number of jihadists who had fought with al Qaeda in Iraq and who are thought to have helped formed ISIS. Reporters, activists, and fighters also note that while regime artillery has flattened the FSA’s headquarters in Aleppo, the ISIS camp next door was left untouched until the jihadi group left; the same is true in the fiercely contested eastern city of Raqqa. ISIS, for its part, has done very little to liberate regime-held areas, but has seized control of both Raqqa and the border town of Azaz from FSA forces. [Continue reading…]

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Most Israelis would support unilateral strike on Iran

USA Today reports: Two-thirds of Israelis would support a unilateral Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear targets if they believed their country was in real danger of attack, according to a new opinion poll.

The poll was conducted less than a week after Iranian President Hasan Rouhani told the United Nations that his country’s nuclear power is intended solely for peaceful purposes, and that Iran is open to negotiations and clarifications related to its nuclear capabilities.

In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. that “Israel will not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons.”

“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he said.

The Oct. 2 poll, conducted for Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, a conservative newspaper that has the largest daily circulation in Israel, reveals deep Israeli public skepticism over Iran’s true intentions. It also indicates that Israelis question the value of the diplomacy being pursued by President Obama. [Continue reading…]

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In leaked video, Egyptian army officers debate how to sway news media

The New York Times reports: A leaked video of senior Egyptian Army officers debating how to influence the news media during the months preceding the military takeover offers a rare glimpse of the anxiety within the institution at the prospect of civilian oversight.

In the leaked six-minute clip of a private meeting led by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi in the period before his July 3 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, the officers express their dismay at public scrutiny of the army, unknown in Egypt until after the 2011 uprising. Calling even mildly disrespectful news coverage “dangerous” and abnormal, the officers call for a restoration of “red lines” that had protected the military for decades. And they urge General Sisi to pressure the roughly two dozen big media owners into “self-censorship.”

Mixing humor and cool confidence, General Sisi tells the officers that they must adjust to the new reality of public and parliamentary oversight, but he also counsels patience while he recruits allies in the news media.

“Building a statewide alliance takes a long time and effort,” he continues. “It takes a very long time until you possess an appropriate share of influence over the media.”

“The revolution has dismantled all the shackles that were present — not just for us, not just for the military, but for the entire state,” he says at another point. “The rules and the shackles were dismantled, and they are being rearranged.”

The officers’ winter uniforms and references to last December’s constitutional referendum suggest the meeting took place around that time. But the conversation foreshadowed the broad media crackdown that has played out since the military takeover. The new government has shut down Islamist television networks and the main newspaper supporting Mr. Morsi, and the police have arrested several journalists perceived as critical of the government or the military. And for whatever reason, privately owned newspapers and satellite networks now resound with cheers for the army and demonization of its Islamist opponents, just as the officers hoped.

The leak of the video, though, may raise different alarms. The clip was one of several snippets of the same meeting released Wednesday night and Thursday by RNN, an Islamist Web site, and in an interview, its acting director, Amr Farrag, said the material was obtained from “sources inside the military.” Military officials said Thursday that the army was starting an investigation.

Analysts said the video offered insights into motivations that might have helped propel the military’s takeover. “It betrays a real fear of what democratic discourse might look like and what that would mean for the military, in terms of what might be talked about and what might be exposed,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a researcher on Egypt at the Century Foundation in New York.

The officers’ thin skin about the loss of the military’s “red lines,” he argued, is symptomatic of a much deeper worry. “If the military can be talked about in these unprecedented ways, the concern is that it erodes the stature of the military in the public imagination, and then the role of the military as an institution is potentially under threat.” [Continue reading…]

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How we have become the tools of our devices

The New York Times reports: Once, only hairdressers and bartenders knew people’s secrets.

Now, smartphones know everything — where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, are finding new, sophisticated ways to track people on their phones and reach them with individualized, hypertargeted ads. And they are doing it without cookies, those tiny bits of code that follow users around the Internet, because cookies don’t work on mobile devices.

Privacy advocates fear that consumers do not realize just how much of their private information is on their phones and how much is made vulnerable simply by downloading and using apps, searching the mobile Web or even just going about daily life with a phone in your pocket. And this new focus on tracking users through their devices and online habits comes against the backdrop of a spirited public debate on privacy and government surveillance.

On Wednesday, the National Security Agency confirmed it had collected data from cellphone towers in 2010 and 2011 to locate Americans’ cellphones, though it said it never used the information.

“People don’t understand tracking, whether it’s on the browser or mobile device, and don’t have any visibility into the practices going on,” said Jennifer King, who studies privacy at the University of California, Berkeley and has advised the Federal Trade Commission on mobile tracking. “Even as a tech professional, it’s often hard to disentangle what’s happening.”

Drawbridge is one of several start-ups that have figured out how to follow people without cookies, and to determine that a cellphone, work computer, home computer and tablet belong to the same person, even if the devices are in no way connected. Before, logging onto a new device presented advertisers with a clean slate.

“We’re observing your behaviors and connecting your profile to mobile devices,” said Eric Rosenblum, chief operating officer at Drawbridge. But don’t call it tracking. “Tracking is a dirty word,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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The NSA is making us all less safe

Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into—airplanes, cars—and something we put into our bodies—pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy. — Electronic Freedom Frontier Fellow Cory Doctorow

Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm write: Cory’s right, of course. And that’s why the recent New York Times story on the NSA’s systematic effort to weaken and sabotage commercially available encryption used by individuals and businesses around the world is so important — and not just to people who care about political organizing, journalists or whistleblowers. Thanks to additional reporting, we now know it matters deeply to companies including Brazil’s Petrobras and Belgium’s Belgacom, who are concerned about protecting their infrastructure, negotiating strategies and trade secrets. But really, it matters to all of us.

We all live in an increasingly networked world. And one of the preconditions of that world has to be basic computer security — freedom to use strong technologies that are fully trustworthy.

Every casual Internet user, whether they know it or not, uses encryption daily. It’s the “s” in https and the little lock you see in your browser — signifying a secure connection — when you purchase something online, when you’re at your bank’s website or accessing your webmail, financial records, and medical records. Cryptography security is also essential in the computers in our cars, airplanes, houses and pockets.

By weakening encryption, the NSA allows others to more easily break it. By installing backdoors and other vulnerabilities in systems, the NSA exposes them to other malicious hackers—whether they are foreign governments or criminals. As security expert Bruce Schneier explained, “It’s sheer folly to believe that only the NSA can exploit the vulnerabilities they create.” [Continue reading…]

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How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts

Ars Technica reports: The Dread Pirate Roberts, head of the most brazen drug trafficking site in the world, was a walking contradiction. Though the government says he raked in $80 million in commissions from running Silk Road, he allegedly lived under a false name in one bedroom of a San Francisco home that he shared with two other guys and for which he paid $1,000 a month in cash. Though his alleged alter ego penned manifestos about ending “violence, coercion, and all forms of force,” the FBI claims that he tried to arrange a hit on someone who had blackmailed him. And though he ran a site widely assumed to be under investigation by some of the most powerful agencies in the US government, the Dread Pirate Robert appears to have been remarkably sloppy — so sloppy that the government finally put a name to the peg leg: Ross William Ulbricht.

Yesterday, Ulbricht left his apartment to visit the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library in the southern part of the city. Library staff did not recognize him as a regular library patron, but they thought nothing of his visit as he set up his laptop in the science fiction section of the stacks. Then, at 3:15pm, staffers heard a “crashing sound” from the sci-fi collection and went to investigate, worried that a patron had fallen. Instead, library Communications Director Michelle Jeffers tells us that the staff came upon “six to eight” FBI agents arresting Ulbricht and seizing his laptop. The agents had tailed him, waiting for the 29-year-old to open his computer and enter his passwords before swooping in. They marched him out of the library without incident.

For a promising young physics student from Austin, Texas, this wasn’t how things were supposed to turn out.

Sure, you could buy meth, LSD, cannabis, heroin, and MDMA on the Silk Road, but the hidden website wasn’t (just) about drugs. Silk Road was, said its owner, about freedom. In January 2012, as part of a “State of the Road Address” posted in the site’s discussion forum, the Dread Pirate Roberts explained the site’s goal: “To grow into a force to be reckoned with that can challenge the powers that be and at last give people the option to choose freedom over tyranny.”

To that end, the Dread Pirate Roberts built the Silk Road marketplace in 2011 as a “hidden” service accessible only over the encrypted Tor network. To connect, users first had to install a Tor client and then visit a series of arcane site names (the most recent was silkroadfb5piz3r.onion), but the reward was a simple, effective marketplace to buy drugs from sellers all over the world using such Internet commerce staples as escrow accounts and buyer feedback. [Continue reading…]

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The NSA’s struggle against Tor

The Register reports: An NSA presentation released by Edward Snowden contains mixed news for Tor users. The anonymizing service itself appears to have foxed US and UK government snoops, but instead they are using a zero-day flaw in the Firefox browser bundled with Tor to track users.

“These documents give Tor a huge pat on the back,” security guru Bruce Schneier told The Register. “If I was a Tor developer, I’d be really smiling after reading this stuff.”

The PowerPoint slide deck, prepared in June last year and entitled “Tor stinks”, details how the NSA and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been stymied by trying to track Tor users, thanks to the strength of the open source system.

“We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time,” the presentation states. “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user.”

The presentation says that both the NSA and GCHQ run Tor nodes themselves (the Brits use Amazon Web Services for this under a project entitled Newton’s Cradle), but these are only a very small number in comparison to the whole system. This makes tracking users using traditional signals-intelligence methods impossible.

There’s also a case of diminishing returns as Tor becomes more popular. With each user acting as a transport node, the sheer scale of the system means it becomes steadily more difficult for the intelligence community to run enough nodes to be useful for tracking.

Bruce Schneier reports: The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA’s application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world.

According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The trick identified Tor users on the internet and then executes an attack against their Firefox web browser.

The NSA refers to these capabilities as CNE, or computer network exploitation.

The first step of this process is finding Tor users. To accomplish this, the NSA relies on its vast capability to monitor large parts of the internet. This is done via the agency’s partnership with US telecoms firms under programs codenamed Stormbrew, Fairview, Oakstar and Blarney.

The NSA creates “fingerprints” that detect http requests from the Tor network to particular servers. These fingerprints are loaded into NSA database systems like XKeyscore, a bespoke collection and analysis tool which NSA boasts allows its analysts to see “almost everything” a target does on the internet.

Using powerful data analysis tools with codenames such as Turbulence, Turmoil and Tumult, the NSA automatically sifts through the enormous amount of internet traffic that it sees, looking for Tor connections.

Last month, Brazilian TV news show Fantastico showed screenshots of an NSA tool that had the ability to identify Tor users by monitoring internet traffic.

The very feature that makes Tor a powerful anonymity service, and the fact that all Tor users look alike on the internet, makes it easy to differentiate Tor users from other web users. On the other hand, the anonymity provided by Tor makes it impossible for the NSA to know who the user is, or whether or not the user is in the US. [Continue reading…]

Everything you need to know about the NSA and Tor in one FAQ.

Reports in The Guardian and the Washington Post, and the leaked documents: Tor: ‘The king of high-secure, low-latency anonymity’ and ‘Tor stinks’.

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