With locations in: Brussels, London, Paris,
Zurich, Hong Kong,
and Shanghai
The “fog of cyber war”: getting to grips with that Yahoo/NSA issue
9 October 2016– We call it the “fog of cyber war”. In an era where everyone is amped up about cyber attacks, “other Snowdens”, etc. a lot of first impressions are tinged with paranoia and misinformation or are just flat out wrong. I don’t know what to do about this except to say that, as with other dramatic events like mass shootings, it’s best to take first reports with a giant grain of salt.
For instance, last week we were told that Harold Martin, the contractor arrested by the F.B.I. on Aug. 27th, brazenly violated basic security rules, taking home a staggering quantity of highly classified material. He had been doing this undetected, agency officials were chagrined to learn, since the late 1990s. He was “another Snowden”.
Except now intelligence officials say they have not been able to definitively connect Martin any of the leaked documents. So that means there was at least one more leaker still at large. For a list of the “not Snowden” leaks see the end of this post.
And in another
… Read moreWhither Tor? Building the next generation of anonymity tools
6 September 2016 – “Tor hasn’t changed, it’s the world that’s changed,” says Aaron Johnson, the lead researcher on a 2013 paper which reported that 80% of Tor users could be de-anonymized within six months, and that today’s users may want protection from different threats.
In a recent Ars Technica piece J Porup noted the most probable future we face is a world in which Tor continues to offer a good-but-not-perfect, general-purpose anonymity system, while new anonymity networks arrive offering stronger anonymity optimised for particular use-cases, like anonymous messaging, anonymous filesharing, anonymous microblogging, and anonymous voice-over-IP.
Nor is the Tor Project standing still. Tor today is very different from the first public release more than a decade ago, Tor project cofounder Nick Mathewson is quick to point out. That evolution will continue:
“It’s been my sense for ages that the Tor we use in five years will look very different from the Tor we use today. Whether that’s still called Tor or not is largely a question of who builds and deploys it first. We are not stepping … Read more
Europe’s data protection authorities: “We’ll give Privacy Shield one year to work – but then we’re gunning for you!”
By:
Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq.
Founder/CEO
30 July 2016 (Milos, Greece)– Europe’s data protection authorities will hold fire for one year on the new Privacy Shield agreement, withholding any potential legal challenges until mid-2017. In a statement by the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) (a fairly influential body in these matters) they noted it was still unhappy with the final text of the agreement — which replaces the previous Safe Harbor agreement between Europe and the United States and covers transatlantic data flows — but that it would wait until the first annual review before putting forward any formal challenges.
The decision will come as a huge relief to US corporations who rely on the agreement for billions of dollars of trade. The group had previously said the draft Privacy Shield agreement was “too complex … and therefore ineffective” and so overall was “not acceptable.” Those criticisms led to changes being made — which the group acknowledges in its letter — but it remains skeptical that they will be sufficient:
“The WP29 commends the Commission and … Read more