July 16, 2013 archive

Good Son Pavlik

Pavlik, was a Soviet youth praised by the Soviet press as a martyr. His story, dated to 1932, is that of a 13-year old boy who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family. His story was a subject of reading, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera and six biographies. The cult had a huge impact on the moral norms of generations of children.

Experts: Obama’s plan to predict future leakers unproven, unlikely to work

By Jonathan S. Landay and Marisa Taylor, McClatchy

Posted on Tuesday, July 9, 2013

In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.



Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.



But even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.

“There is no consensus in the relevant scientific community nor on the committee regarding whether any behavioral surveillance or physiological monitoring techniques are ready for use at all,” concluded a 2008 National Research Council report on detecting terrorists.

“Doing something similar about predicting future leakers seems even more speculative,” Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a member of the committee that wrote the report, told McClatchy.



When asked about the ineffectiveness of behavior profiling, (Gene) Barlow (a spokesman for the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive) said the policy “does not mandate” that employees report behavior indicators.

“It simply educates employees about basic activities or behavior that might suggest a person is up to improper activity,” he said.



But research and other programs that rely on profiling show it remains unproven, could make employees more resistant to reporting violations and might lead to spurious allegations.

The Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have spent tens of millions of dollars on an array of research projects. Yet after several decades, they still haven’t developed a list of behaviors they can use to definitively identify the tiny fraction of workers who might some day violate national security laws.

“We are back to the needle-in-a-haystack problem,” said Fienberg, the Carnegie Mellon professor.

“We have not found any silver bullets,” said Deanna Caputo, principal behavioral psychologist at MITRE Corp., a nonprofit company working on insider threat efforts for U.S. defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “We don’t have actually any really good profiles or pictures of a bad guy, a good guy gone bad or even the bad guy walking in to do bad things from the very beginning.”



But some current and former U.S. officials and experts worry that Obama’s Insider Threat Program could lead to false or retaliatory accusations across the entire government, in part because security officials are granted access to information outside their usual purview.

These current and former U.S. officials and experts also ridiculed as overly zealous and simplistic the idea of using reports of suspicious behavior to predict potential insider threats. It takes years for professional spy-hunters to learn their craft, and relying on the observations of inexperienced people could lead to baseless and discriminatory investigations, they said.

“Anyone is an amateur looking at behavior here,” said Thomas Fingar, a former State Department intelligence chief who chaired the National Intelligence Council, which prepares top-secret intelligence analyses for the president, from 2005 to 2008.



Eric Feldman, a former inspector general of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that oversees U.S. spy satellites, expressed concern that relying on workers to report colleagues’ suspicious behaviors to security officials could create “a repressive kind of culture.”

“The answer to it is not to have a Stasi-like response,” said Feldman, referring to the feared secret police of communist East Germany. “You’ve removed that firewall between employees seeking help and the threat that any employee who seeks help could be immediately retaliated against by this insider threat office.”

Cartnoon

On This Day In History July 16

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on images to enlarge

July 16 is the 197th day of the year (198th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 168 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Photobucket

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Bhagavad Gita

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Plans for the creation of a uranium bomb by the Allies were established as early as 1939, when Italian emigre physicist Enrico Fermi met with U.S. Navy department officials at Columbia University to discuss the use of fissionable materials for military purposes. That same year, Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt supporting the theory that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction had great potential as a basis for a weapon of mass destruction. In February 1940, the federal government granted a total of $6,000 for research. But in early 1942, with the United States now at war with the Axis powers, and fear mounting that Germany was working on its own uranium bomb, the War Department took a more active interest, and limits on resources for the project were removed.

Brigadier-General Leslie R. Groves, himself an engineer, was now in complete charge of a project to assemble the greatest minds in science and discover how to harness the power of the atom as a means of bringing the war to a decisive end. The Manhattan Project (so-called because of where the research began) would wind its way through many locations during the early period of theoretical exploration, most importantly, the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi successfully set off the first fission chain reaction. But the Project took final form in the desert of New Mexico, where, in 1943, Robert J. Oppenheimer began directing Project Y at a laboratory at Los Alamos, along with such minds as Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Fermi. Here theory and practice came together, as the problems of achieving critical mass-a nuclear explosion-and the construction of a deliverable bomb were worked out.

Racist America’s Atrocious Color Line

Was not Michelle Obama her great-great-great-grandfather’s granddaughter?

The First Family: A New Glimpse of Michelle Obama’s White Ancestors

We knew that the Sunday article about Mrs. Obama’s white ancestors would stir considerable interest so we decided to invite readers to pose questions and make comments. We never imagined that one of those readers would provide us with the first glimpse of two key figures in the first lady’s family tree: The white man who owned Mrs. Obama’s great-great-great grandmother, Melvinia Shields, and his son, who most likely fathered Melvinia’s child.

The photo came from Jarrod Shields, a science teacher at a community college in Alabama who also happens to be the great-great-great grandson of Henry Wells Shields. He was getting ready to mow the lawn when his wife, Tonya, got a call about the article and called him to come inside. Jarrod had grown up knowing that his family had once owned slaves and always wondered what happened to their descendants. His wife sent me an e-mail this week, outlining her husband’s connection to the Shields family, along with the photograph.

When I spoke to Jarrod by phone, he told me that he hoped that he might be able to meet his extended black family, he said of the descendants of the slaves his ancestors had owned. “I always really wanted to say I was sorry.

Why is Jarrod sorry?  

“I always really wanted to say I was sorry. I also wanted to let them know that we’re glad that you’re part of our family, however it came about.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interac…

The sentiment is appreciated but why should Jarrod be sorry and Michelle not sorry?  Didn’t they both have the same ancestry?

The obvious goodwill and good intentions of Jarrod Shields leave a bitter aftertaste to those who will see instead of only feel.

As long as there is “them” and “us” based only on an insane and uncertain color line, there will continue to be armies of victims like Trayvon Martin on both sides of the line.

The lines extend far beyond the separate and unequal societies to a very lethal effect on scientific medical research as one example.

Best,  Terry

Late Night Karaoke

MIcrosoft a More Than Willing NSA Partner

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Microsoft has previously admitted to cooperating with the NSA. New revelations reveal that it is far worse than was previously disclosed giving the NSA up-to-date access to its customer data whenever the company changes its encryption and related software technology. Microsoft helped the security agency find ways to circumvent its encryption on its Outlook.com portal’s encrypted Web chat function, and the agency was given what is described as “pre-encryption stage” access to e-mail on Outlook, including Hotmail e-mail.

How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

by Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, Spencer Ackerman and Dominic Rushe, The Guardian, Thursday 11 July 2013

• Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism

• Outlook.com encryption unlocked even before official launch

• Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls

• Company says it is legally compelled to comply

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

• Microsoft also worked with the FBI’s Data Intercept Unit to “understand” potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

While Microsoft claimed it had no choice but to cooperate arguing that it provides customer data “only in response to government demands and we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers”. Emptywheel proprietress, Marcy Wheeler is interested in some of the details about the cooperation:

For example, the story describes that this cooperation takes place through the Special Source Operations unit.

   The latest documents come from the NSA’s Special Source Operations (SSO) division, described by Snowden as the “crown jewel” of the agency. It is responsible for all programs aimed at US communications systems through corporate partnerships such as Prism.

But we saw that when NSA approached (presumably) Microsoft in 2002, it did not approach via SSO; it used a more formal approach through counsel.

In addition, note how Skype increased cooperation in the months before Microsoft purchased it for what was then considered a hugely inflated price, and what is now being called (in other legal jurisdictions) so dominant that it doesn’t have to cooperate with others.

   One document boasts that Prism monitoring of Skype video production has roughly tripled since a new capability was added on 14 July 2012. “The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video. Now, analysts will have the complete ‘picture’,” it says.

   Eight months before being bought by Microsoft, Skype joined the Prism program in February 2011.

   According to the NSA documents, work had begun on smoothly integrating Skype into Prism in November 2010, but it was not until 4 February 2011 that the company was served with a directive to comply signed by the attorney general.

   The NSA was able to start tasking Skype communications the following day, and collection began on 6 February. “Feedback indicated that a collected Skype call was very clear and the metadata looked complete,” the document stated, praising the co-operation between NSA teams and the FBI. “Collaborative teamwork was the key to the successful addition of another provider to the Prism system.”

While this isn’t as obvious as Verizon’s MCI purchase – which for the first time led that carrier to hand over Internet data – it does seem that those companies that cooperate with the NSA end up taking over their rivals.

The Guardian article includes a statement from Microsoft and a joint statement by Shawn Turner, spokesman for the director of National Intelligence, and Judith Emmel, spokeswoman for the NSA.

In his New York Times article, James Risen reports that some Silicon Valley companies fearing negative public response have begun to openly push back against the security agency:

Yahoo, for example, is now asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court that rules on data collection requests by the government, to allow it to make public the record of its 2008 challenge to the constitutionality of the law requiring it to provide its customer data to the agency.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said Thursday that the company was “seeking permission from the FISA court to unseal the arguments and orders from the 2008 case.”

Risen also reported that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) believes that the White House is considering scaling back data collection over concerns about privacy issues and public backlash against the security agency’s large-scale collection of the personal data:

“I have a feeling that the administration is getting concerned about the bulk phone records collection, and that they are thinking about whether to move administratively to stop it,” he said. He added he believed that the continuing controversy prompted by Mr. Snowden had changed the political calculus in Congress over the balance between security and civil liberties, which has been heavily weighted toward security since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I think we are making a comeback,” Mr. Wyden said, referring to privacy and civil liberties advocates.

Tanglewood Boston Symphony Orchestra/West Side Story (film) Concert:

Hi, everybody !  This past weekend, I went out to Tanglewood,  out in Western Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, where I attended a fabulously spectacular Boston Symphony Orchestra/West Side  Story concert, at Tanglewood.  The Boston Symphony orchestra played a fantastic live rendition of the musical score to the film West Side Story, which added a new dimension to an already-great classic movie, of which a beautifully restored, digital, HD, reprinted, cleaned up and remastered version was shown, along with the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s live rendition of the musical score.  Word had it that there were at least 20, 000 people in all at Tanglewood last night.  I did know that this particular concert sold out, big time, despite at least a couple of lawn benches being added on.  

Since I had a ticket for a seat inside the shed at Tanglewood, and had ordered a bag-lunch/dinner to go, way in advance,  everything was great, and I didn’t have to worry about anything.   This fabulous evening, however, on my part, was preceded by sort of a (mis)adventure;  the unexpected break-down of my car, at a service plaza 26 miles from Tanglewood.  At the advice of the guy behind the counter, I called the State Police, after being given their number, and they, in turn gave me the number of a towing company to call, known as Red’s Towing, who I called immediately.  3/4 of an hour later, a young guy driving a flatbed tow truck came to the plaza where I was, after having told them where I was.  The young man who was driving the tow truck asked me where I was going and what I was going to see, so I told him.  Aftter calling afew places and finding them closed, he called a Munro Car repair place not far from the place where I’d stayed last night after the Tanglewood concert, towed my car and gave me a ride to Monro’s, and afterwards, the small inn where I was staying for the night, after the concert.  I got to the concert via taxicab, and had a wonderful time..

It was a great concert, and exuberant crowd, and much applause took place after each WSS number, leading me to believe that there were a great many New Yorkers in this audience.  Boston audiences, btw, enjoy West Side Story just as much as New Yorkers, despite being a bit more reserved, so that’s okay.  

The movie/concert was 2.5 hours long, and ended at about 11:00 that night.  What a way to spend a Saturday night;  seeing one’s favorite movie and hearing a live rendition of the musical score played by a famous Orchestra (i. e. the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to boot!).  Everything was crowded, traffic was high, and, having had to take a taxi to the concert due to my not having a car,  it was all very well that I didn’t have my car that night.  So, I hoofed it partway back to the inn where I was staying for the night, and, believe it or not, when I asked a cop how far it was to where I was staying and answered that I had a least 3-4 miles to go before reaching my  overnight destination, he gave me a ride the rest of the way.  It had been a fabulous night.

Getting back home to Boston the next day was much more ardous;  I called afew towing companies and afew car-rental places.  Unfortunately, no car rental places, especially nearby were open, and none of the Berkshires area towing companies would tow all the way from Lenox, MA, to Boston, MA.  I finally got a towing and a ride back to Boston with the towing guy, after a 4 hour wait, as opposed to a 2.5 hour wait as had been predicted earlier.   It was a very good crowd at the concert, and word had it that there were 20, 000 people there.  Not surprisingly, this concert sold out, big time, despite the addition of afew lawn benches.  I was glad to have been able to attend the special Boston Symphony Orchestra/West Side Story concert out at Tanglewood that I’d so been looking forward to after having bought my ticket and made my room reservation back in late January of this year!

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