Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
COMMENT: In our continuing analysis of the adventures of Eddie the Friendly Spook (Snowden) we revisit an aspect of our complex analysis that concerns economic warfare against the United States.
(Our series on this is long, complex and multi-layered: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI, Part XII, Part XIII, Part XIV, Part XV, Part XVI, Part XVII, Part XVIII, Part XIX, Part XX. It is impossible to do justice to this analysis within the scope of this post. Please digest the rest of the material, in order to come to terms with what we are presenting.)
For purposes of the analysis presented in this post, several previous entries dealing with the economic warfare aspects of this case bear examination.
A recent editorial in The San Jose Mercury News (Tues. September 10, 2013, p. A9) opined: “Revelations that the National Security Agency has cracked the encryption technology that was supposed to protect Internet users’ privacy is a nightmare for Silicon Valley. . .”
The concerns expressed by the Mercury News and echoed by Silicon Valley CEO’s at a recent high tech conference go to the thrust of the main part of what we feel is the primary goal of this multi-layered psy-op: to do to the Silicon Valley and the U.S. electronic business what the German and Japanese automobile industry’s capture of much of the U.S. market did to the city of Detroit.
In this regard, a number of things come to mind:
- Leaking journalist Glenn Greenwald stated that Snowden’s goal in leaking this information was to alert people that the software they were using was being accessed by NSA without their knowledge–a consideration that is almost certain to damage U.S. internet companies. (See text excerpts below.)
- Fear around the world about the NSA spying coverage is believed to be damaging U.S. internet companies. (See text excerpt below.)
- A recent story in the German periodical Die Zeit claimed that the German government warned against using Windows 8 (and also Chromebook, a Google product) because the TPM chip had been equipped with a “back door” to permit the NSA to clandestinely access information. Although the German government denied that they had actually said that, it appears that damage may have already been done, perhaps deliberately. (See text excerpts below.)
- As it happens, the leading maker of TPM chips is a German firm, Infineon, suggesting the distinct possibility that BND may be doing what the Die Zeit article accuses the NSA of doing. Note that BND has been doing exactly what the NSA has been doing for many, many years. (See text excerpts below.)
- In an update 99/26/2013), we learn that Infineon is a spinoff of Siemens AG, one of the German core corporations, a key element of the Bormann capital network and inextricably linked with the BND! (See text excerpts below.)
- An unnamed European chip maker has been placing kill switches in microprocessors, permitting the sabotage of high-tech weapons systems. Might that have been Infineon Technologies?
- In numerous posts, we have discussed the fact that the GOP has been infiltrated by the Underground Reich to such an extent that it is little more than a Nazi/fascist front at this point. Note that the GOP is de-funding scientific and technological development to such an extent that it fundamentally threatens the American high-tech economy, the Silicon Valley in particular. (See text excerpts below.) Of particular interest in this regard is the fact that the leading budget cutters are the Paulistinian “libertarian” elements of the GOP. The possibility that this may be a deliberate act on the part of an Underground Fifth Column is one to be seriously considered.
“About the Reuters Article” by Glenn Greenwald; The Guardian; 7/13/2013.
EXCERPT: . . . .A: Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States. But that’s not his goal. [His] objective is to expose software that people around the world use without knowing what they are exposing themselves without consciously agreeing to surrender their rights to privacy. [He] has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public. . . .
EXCERPT: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lashed out at the U.S. government Wednesday, saying that authorities have hurt Silicon Valley companies by doing a poor job of explaining the online spying efforts of U.S. intelligence agencies.
“Frankly I think the government blew it,” Zuckerberg complained during an onstage interview at the tech industry conference known as Disrupt, a weeklong event where Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer and other prominent tech executives also spoke out publicly and expressed frustration in person, for the first time, since a series of news leaks revealed the government’s controversial surveillance programs.
“It’s our government’s job to protect all of us and also protect our freedoms and protect the economy, and companies,” Zuckerberg told interviewer Michael Arrington, “and I think they did a bad job of balancing those things.”
He went on to say: “They blew it on communicating the balance of what they were going for.”
Facebook and other Internet companies have been under intense pressure in recent months after a series of news reports that suggest U.S. intelligence agencies have gained access to the online activities and communications involving users of Facebook and other popular services. Some of those reports have suggested that unnamed companies have cooperated with the U.S. efforts, although the details are unclear.
Analysts say those reports could hurt the companies financially, especially overseas, if if consumers and business customers believe their sensitive information isn’t safe from government prying. . . . .
“It’s an ill bird,” runs the adage, “that fouls its own nest.” Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us.
Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible for digital affairs, put it in a speech on 4 July: “If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust the cloud and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn’t matter – any smart person doesn’t want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity.“
“
Which providers? Why, the big US internet companies that have hitherto dominated the market for cloud services – a market set to double in size to $200bn (£126bn) over the next three years. So the first own goal scored by the NSA was to undermine an industry that many people had regarded as the next big thing in corporate computing.
...
EXCERPT: Claims that there is a backdoor in Windows 8 giving access to all versions of the operating system to US intelligence have been gently rebuffed by Microsoft.
A reporter in Zeit had suggested the backdoor stemmed from the Trusted Platform Module, or TPM chip, which seeks to improve security by powering the Secure Boot process that checks for and ignores malicious low-level code when a machine starts up. It does this through cryptographic keys that ensure code cannot be tampered with on loading and that the code is legitimate.
The Zeit writer had suggested the TPM could give the manufacturer of a device control over it.
He said that in light of the leaks from Edward Snowden, it would not be a surprise if TPM 2.0, the version used by Windows 8, was actually a backdoor the National Security Agency (NSA) could easily exploit. As the chips powering TPM are manufactured in China, the Chinese could easily access Windows 8 machines too, the report alleged.
The reporter attained documents from the German government that led him to reach his supposition. But the German government has not said there is a backdoor in the OS.
The Office for Information Security (BSI) later clarified the government’s position, and did say the use of TPM 2.0 and Windows 8 (TPM is used in other non-Windows machines, including Chromebooks, making the claims even more questionable) meant the user had to deal with “a loss of control over the operating system and the hardware used”. This could lead to greater risk for the federal government and critical infrastructure, it said.
But the body said it had not warned the general public nor government bodies against using Windows 8.
It said “the newly established mechanisms can also be used for sabotage by third parties”, but appeared only to be talking generally about vulnerability exploitation. There was no suggestion of a purposeful backdoor, as Zeit had hypothesised, even if the BIS does have problems with TPM.
Microsoft has responded to the kerfuffle first by denying it has ever provided such access to users’ data and by talking up the security benefits of TPM 2.0. It suggested government departments would be wise to use the security protections it provides by default. But for those governments who want to gain back control of their machines, they can go with OEMs who make Windows PCs without TPM. . . .
EXCERPT: With major industrial giants like Siemens, Germany is no small fry. As of 2012, it was the fourth-largest economy in the world. The German government’s recent announcement [that Windows 8 is unsafe due a backdoor called the Trusted Platform Module], is a dangerous omen for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ) .
AN ALTERNATIVE EXISTS
The growth of open-source computing is causing major headaches for Microsoft, and this situation is no different. Linux is open source, and generally has fewer security vulnerabilities than Windows. Government and corporate IT departments are starting to realize that they can make their operations more secure and cut costs by switching from Windows to Linux. Using open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office is yet another way to lower costs. The City of Munich recently moved 14,000 desktop PCs to Linux and plans to save $13 million by using LibreOffice.
MICROSOFT’S FUTURE
European Union austerity is making governments look for cost savings wherever possible. Microsoft is already feeling the pain in its bottom line. In 2013, operating income for the Windows division fell to $9.5 billion from $12.3 billion in 2011, and falling PC sales paint a grim future. . . .
“Don’t Let Paranoia over the NSA and TPM Weaken Your Security” by Ed Bott; ZDNet; 8/23/2013.
EXCERPT: The unintended by-product of Edward Snowden’s NSA document dump is a bull market in paranoid conspiracy theories.
The latest example is the breathless report out of Germany that Microsoft and the NSA have conspired to give American spies access to every copy of Windows 8, enforced by a mysterious chip called the Trusted Platform Module, or TPM. “It’s a backdoor!” scream the conspiracy theorists.
Apparently, Microsoft is so powerful that it is able to influence even its most bitter enemies.
. . . .The point is, a TPM is a platform-neutral device. It provides a secure way to encrypt data so that it can’t be accessed by anyone except you, and it protects your device from being tampered with. Both of those features are highly desirable these days.
But who knows what’s going on in that chip? I mean, they say it’s just a secure place to store encrypted keys, but who knows what else it can do? Obviously the American government or maybe the Chinese have intimidated the chip’s manufacturer, right?
Uh, maybe not. The most popular maker of TPM technology is Infineon Technologies AG , which is based in … Neubiberg, Germany. Perhaps those intrepid German journalists could, you know, hop on a train and head down to Infineon to see for themselves.
“Infineon Technologies’; Wikipedia.
EXCERPT: Infineon Technologies AG is a German semiconductor manufacturer founded on 1 April 1999, when the semiconductor operations of the parent company Siemens AG were spun off to form a separate legal entity. As of 30 September 2010, Infineon has 25,149 employees worldwide. In fiscal year 2010, the company achieved sales of €3.295 billion. . . .
“The Hunt for the Kill Switch” by Sally Adee; IEEE Spectrum; 5/1/2008.
Are chip makers building electronic trapdoors in key military hardware? The Pentagon is making its biggest effort yet to find out . . . .
. . . . According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a ”European chip maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, ”the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently, but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). . . .
EXCERPT: When Congress returns from its summer recess in early September, it will have exactly nine legislative days to agree on a budget or the government will shut down. House Republicans are seeking far greater cuts in non-defense spending than Senate Democrats, and some members of the GOP are threatening to hold up any budget agreement until the Obama administration abandons the Affordable Care Act. It’s going to be a slog, with all sorts of unseemly compromises. But let me suggest an area where Democrats should allow exactly zero more dollars to be excised from the federal budget: government research for science and technology. We’ve already seen a 13 percent drop in this area over the last two years, and it’s hard to overstate just how damaging to the country’s future further reductions would be.
Many people still cling to the idea that government is, without exception, a drag upon the private economy. Conservatives “know that when it comes to economic progress,” Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last year in National Review, “the best government philosophy is one that starts every day with the question, ‘What can we do today to get out of Americans’ way?’ ” They imagine the United States as a land of plucky inventor-entrepreneurs (“We built it!” they cry) who work out of garages and depend solely on their wits. The problem is that this vision of American inventiveness is pure myth.
Steve Jobs, who has nearly been beatified in his role as independent businessman, excelled at designing products based on government-funded inventions. Some of Apple’s most vaunted achievements—the mouse, a graphical user interface, the touch-screen, even Siri—were all developed in part with federal finances. Or take Google. Its search engine came out of a $4.5 million digital-libraries research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). You can also look at the pharmaceutical industry. According to a Congressional Budget Office study, 16 of the 21 “most influential drugs” introduced between 1965 and 1992 depended on federally funded research.
The list goes on. Federal money helped support the invention of lasers, transistors, semiconductors, microwave ovens, communication satellites, cellular technology, and the Internet. Now, the feds are prime backers of the Human Genome Project (which could transform medicine) and nanotechnology (which could transform manufacturing). Subtract these kinds of innovations from America’s future, and you have an economy dependent on tourism, the tottering superstructure of big finance, and the export of raw materials and farm products. More to the point, you have a weaker country—not just in comparison with its competitors, but also in its ability to provide its citizens with richer, longer, more imaginative lives. . . .
Uncle Sam and Il Duce
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/pirates-in-germany-dodge-the-nsa-s-watchful-gaze/279516/
The Atlantic
‘Pirates’ in Germany Dodge the NSA’s Watchful Gaze
(Encryption pirates, not plundering pirates)
GREG THOMAS SEP 10 2013, 10:59 AM ET
BERLIN — On a warm August night, inside a meeting room at the Berlin House of Representatives, American digital privacy activist Jacob Appelbaum pulled a small electronic device from his backpack and issued a challenge to parliament: The member who agreed to run the device, a custom WiFi node, from an office in the building could have it for free.
“If someone from the parliament here really believes in free speech, I’m happy to give this to them,” said Appelbaum. The node boosts the signal of a worldwide encryption network called TOR. Short for The Onion Router (think protective layers), TOR software provides a web browser that cloaks IP addresses, granting anonymity to Internet users. The National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program is thought to be using Internet nodes in foreign countries for espionage. TOR nodes create a blanket that shields Web content — emails, instant messages, metadata and browser histories, for example — from the government’s gaze. Without anonymity and privacy, Appelbaum argues, freedom is a fallacy.
“Fundamentally, it’s a very old idea that you should be free to read and free to speak and you should be free to do this without having to identify yourself,” Appelbaum told a packed room of concerned faces — about 60 in all. Appelbaum, a young man with thick-framed glasses and impeccably clear enunciation, acted as a de facto spokesman for WikiLeaks in 2010 after the group released intelligence cables handed over by Bradley Manning. With TOR, he explained, “instead of the 20th and 21st century surveillance state, you’re returning to a state where privacy is the norm.”
Appelbaum’s audience, a mix of programmers, off-duty journalists, and concerned citizens, leaned forward in their chairs and listened closely. Promoting encryption is a key part of Appelbaum’s agenda. Only a small substrata of Internet users currently go to such lengths. But the more people encrypt, the greater grow the hurdles to the kind of widespread government surveillance brought to light by former intelligence contract Edward Snowden. And an effective way to recruit new members to the encryption movement is through public events like the one in Berlin — what have become known as “cryptoparties.”
Many Germans have regarded ubiquitous web giants like Google and Facebook with a high degree of skepticism since well before Snowden’s intelligence leaks revealed that NSA surveillance relies on cooperation from some of the world’s most powerful telecommunications companies. A popular rationale for Germany’s collective apprehension cites the country’s history of extensive spying by both the Nazi secret police and then, in the 1980s, by Stasi state security forces. In July, German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview Appelbaum conducted with Snowden in which the former government contractor claimed that the NSA and German authorities are “in bed together.”
As of August 27, Germany was second only to the U.S. in the number of active TOR users (with nearly 49,000 users to the U.S.’s 97,000). In August, global TOR connections spiked to 150,000 monthly users, up from about 50,000 users in June and July. Publicly, incensed Germans are staging street protests and urging lawmakers to intervene with mechanisms that protect their web activities from the prying eyes of government. Privately, they’re turning to hackers for lessons on how to do it themselves.
Laptops open, dozens of people listening to Appelbaum prepared for an evening of privacy instruction. At cryptoparties, privacy activists and software specialists tutor people in the craft of data defense. Appelbaum led a workshop on TOR while two German instructors ran basic primers in encryption protocols called off-the-record messaging (OTR) and “pretty good privacy” (PGP). OTR prevents instant messaging conversations from being logged or viewed by outsiders. PGP is a program used to encrypt and decrypt messages and files, including emails. Communications between Snowden and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and documentarian Laura Poitras were secured using PGP.
A common analogy for explaining the importance of encryption supposes that an unencrypted message sent via, say, Gmail, exposes information to Google and an Internet service provider as if it had been written on a postcard and dropped in the mailbox. “You don’t see the postman but he’s certainly there,” said Anne Roth, a digital privacy activist in Berlin. Cryptoparty attendees are wary of the postman and his loyalties.
As expressions of political activism, cryptoparties first took root in 2011 in Australia when lawmakers were considering hotly contested legislation intended to reign in cybercrime. The bill, which passed in 2012, allows government authorities to force Internet service providers and carriers to retain and relinquish customer data. Even foreign governments could demand the information. In a letter to the Australian government, civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia cautioned that the bill “can potentially enable arbitrary interference with privacy and correspondence.”
In the past two years, cryptoparties have sprung up in Oakland, Boston, Calgary, Cairo, Reykjavik, London, Brussels, Manila, and elsewhere. The event in Berlin was the latest in a series of post-PRISM cryptoparties on German soil – and perhaps the country’s largest to date. The gatherings are often ad hoc, hosted by IT experts, and typically draw between five and a dozen pupils of varying ages, technical experience, and professional backgrounds. One such party in Cologne in July drew, among others, a tango instructor, a healthcare worker, and a schoolteacher.
The Berlin event was hosted by Alexander Morlang, a parliamentarian who belongs to Germany’s digitally vigilant Pirate party. He made a point of inviting roughly 180 government administrators. None showed.
“It’s important to teach employees of the government in case they want to do some whistle-blowing at some point,” said Morlang, a sturdy, bespectacled man with a pony-tail. His t‑shirt read, “Hell yeah it’s rocket science!”
A professional systems administrator, Morlang won his seat in 2011 during Germany’s second wave of Pirate nominations and served as chairman of a parliamentary committee on Digital Management, Data Protection and Freedom of Information until April. The first wave of Pirates were elected in 2009 during heated debate over a data retention law that drew criticisms similar to those raised in Australia. (A year after the German law passed, the country’s high court suspended it, citing privacy concerns.) In the wake of the NSA surveillance leaks, the concerns around which the Pirates built their campaigns — fears that some opponents called paranoid — have gained cross-party resonance.
“All democratically elected political parties have to take the topic of data protection on board,” said Jochim Selzer, a mathematician and cryptoparty coordinator, in an interview with German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in July. “The issue can’t be owned by a single party.”
For their part, the Pirates count digital privacy as fundamental right, not a privilege subject to compromise in the name of national security. Cryptography is a means to that end. It offers a sense of control and relief to people concerned that their personal liberties are being siphoned through their smartphones and ethernet cables.
“I’m worried that the government won’t grant me the privacy I think I deserve,” said Daniela Berger, a developer who attended the Berlin cryptoparty to learn about TOR. Like many Germans, she is both angry and disheartened by her country’s role in NSA surveillance operations. “I think my freedom should be of high value to my government and right now we’re steering in a direction where my privacy is an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all.”
A common refrain from people who don’t encrypt is that they have nothing to hide, so why bother? Allowing the government to comb through personal data is no problem if it might help foil the next terrorist plot, the reasoning goes.
Appelbaum and Roth would argue that encryption is a means of protecting freedom of expression of government overzealousness. Roth’s partner, Andrej Holm, a sociology professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, was arrested one summer morning in 2007 during a raid on the couple’s home. Authorities suspected him of leading a group of arsonists who had staged attacks in the city months earlier. Language he had used in academic essays about gentrification and urban policy bore similarities to rhetoric the arsonists used when claiming responsibility for the responsibility for the attacks, the government said. A pretrial detention document noted that authorities’ suspicions were triggered, in part, by Holm encrypting his emails.
After he spent time in jail and solitary confinement, a federal court ruled that the suspicions were not justified and overturned the arrest warrant. Holm, who by then was out on bail, did not have to return to jail. “Many people think you must have something to hide if you’re encrypting your email,” Roth said. “It’s something we have to get past.”
“Right now, as soon as someone is encrypting, he gets flagged” by government monitors, Morlang said. His theory is that so few Internet users go to such lengths to shield their data that the act alone is viewed as suspicious, even when the encrypted content is harmless. If the technique were to become the norm — if it reaches a critical mass of, say, 30 percent adoption, Morlang said — that might reduce the risk of getting flagged.
Morlang likened such a proliferation to a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack — a common weapon of hackers around the world that has been used to bring down websites of governments, banks, and news organizations. “We need to show that this surveillance practice is an unsustainable use of government resources,” he said. But couldn’t more encryption make the government’s job of finding potential terrorists more difficult? Rolling a cigarette with his fingers, Morlang chose his words carefully.
“Banning cryptography is not an option, and we will never get the government to stop monitoring,” he said. “But we can make it really expensive. If everyone is encrypting, then the government has to take more care with who it investigates.” Authorities would then have to resort to using more targeted and time-consuming tactics, like a targeted piece of malware. “Maybe they only use that 20 times a year, when they really have to,” Morlang said.
In the meantime, Morlang is coming to terms with the idea that encryption might put its users even more squarely in the government’s sights. “This is the price we pay to win the crypto war.”
Cloud computing is another area of the US tech sector that’s getting a lot of scrutiny following the NSA leaks. Notice how the obvious question “and why on earth would anyone trust any other major governments with their cloud data, especially all the governments that feigned shock at the NSA leaks only to get caught doing the same thing?” stll rarely gets asked:
And here’s an article that actually addresses the realities that no cloud computing service is truly trustworthy (that would require encryption technology no one could ever break even with a court order). The article suggests that there won’t really be much of an impact on the US cloud services for a variety of reasons including that tech companies might already realize that their local governments are also quite capable of spying on their cloud service providers. It’s a nice reminder that we’re really entering more of a “choose your Big Brother of choice” model vs a “choose real privacy if you want it” model for online communication. Plus, as the article points out, it might even be helping the US encryption companies. At least that’s the theory. We still have to wait and see what the long-term impact will be. With the global cloud computing industry poised to grow massively over the next few years the industry could change in very unpredictable ways. But the article makes one thing clear: US cloud computing firms won’t be getting any referrals from Bertelsmann:
With outrage over the NSA spying still growing in Brazil President Rousseff just canceled her planned visit to the US next month. It was to be the first such visit from a Brazilian president to the US since 1995.
It will be interesting to see how this controversy around the Petrobas spying unfolds because the reports about spying on Petrobas have acted as a sort of confirmation in many people’s mind that the NSA is engaged in massive industrial espionage on foreign firms. That’s the official stance of Rousseff herself. James Clapper tried to offer an explanation along the lines of “this was just standard intelligence gathering every nations does regarding major international energy firms given their importance in the energy markets” but that obviously isn’t going to satisfy anyone. So it’s still sort of a mystery as to what the NSA was interested in regarding Petrobas.
But it’s also a bit of a mystery as to why Rousseff, amongst all the leaders in the world, seems to be so interested in taking the faux-shock as far as possible by forcing the NSA to give a full explanation for why it was interested in Petrobas. After all, Rousseff, a former energy minister herself, is quite close to Petrobas’s leadership and Petrobas has a long and extensive history of corruption. So who knows, there may have been some rather unsavory details in those Petrobas emails that could be prompting real outrage and fear amongst Brazil’s leaders. But it’s a dicey strategy to continue fraying US/Brazil relations until a full explanation is given by the US because, given the reality of Petrobas, that explanation may not be pretty. Maybe it’s a PTSD-induced response:
It begins:
And now it sounds like Brazil and Argentina are going to create a joint cyberdefense initiative that could grow to include other South American nations:
It’s also worth recalling that US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks in 2010 contained quite a few very embarrassing revelations about both the Brazilian and Argentinian governments. So the current furor might, in part, be a delayed response to that previous leak-related diplomatic debacle:
Well, this probably won’t do much to increase actual privacy Brazil’s networks unless they’re planning on making Brazil’s future telecommunication networks uncrackable even by the Brazilian government itself, but at least it should be interesting to see how success Brazil is at build its own externally-uncrackable IT sector, including hardware and software. That can’t be easy:
The claims that espionage/intelligence concerns had nothing to do with the decision to select a French aerospace firm for the development of satellite that will handle secure military communications might seem kind of absurd at first given the current spying hysteria that seems to be preoccupying the government. Then again....:
Brazil says bye bye to Boeing:
Here’s an emerging story that addresses an aspect of the internet that’s received surprisingly little attention in the last year considering the attention focused on the government and the internet: There’s a growing censorship fight in Germany over a secret list of forbidden websites that the German government agency in charges of censoring illegal content forces major search engines and router manufacturers to automatically block. The law is applied via the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (BPjM) and the controversy is over whether or not the BPjM’s list of forbidden site should be made public now that someone decrypting the list after pulling it out of their router. There’s also a question raised in the article below about the validity of the list’s contents in general and the lack of public disclosure over how the list is generated in the first place. It’s a legitimately interesting debate.
And now, with the German government threatening to ban companies that work with the NSA for government contracts, it’s also an topical story about government contracts with hardware manufacturers that compels certain changes in functionality along with regular software updates. Such agreements shouldn’t really be surprising. The more important a nation is to global internet connectivity, the more companies will play ball with national requests (with the US, UK, and Germany being particularly influential). And there’s no indication that the BPjM was doing anything other than develop the censor list to be distributed to router manufacturers. But given that international concern over the private sector cooperation is focused specifically on the NSA and GCHQ, this is one of those stories that’s a good reminder that secretive private sector cooperation with influential governments in critical IT sectors, like router manufacturers, is probably pretty routine:
It’s also kind of noteworthy that, had the German government been using unbreakable encryption, the secret censorship list could have never been decrypted and the current debate over the past lack of public debate over how that list gets generated wouldn’t be taking place.
More details are available about Brazil’s planned Brazil-to-Portugal undersea cable and the firms that will be used to complete the project. As expected, while international firms like Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, and Ericsson are expected to make bids on the project, US companies need not apply:
In related news, Petrobras, the state-owned oil giant that became a symbol for NSA spying on Brazil last year, has a corruption scandal swirling around it after its former CEO alleged that dozens of policians were in a multi-billion dollar kickback scheme. A probe of the charges is ongoing, but if President Rousseff’s initial comments are what we should expect to result from the investigation the Petrobras scandal may change Brazil forever: