U.S. surveillance. The Obama administration, once again, is reaching farther than its predecessor on electronic surveillance. Now it wants a law requiring internet service providers to keep logs of their customers on the web — all of them, not suspected bad actors — just in case the government may want the data. Lots of ISPs keep logs already, but the government is trying to ensure that you can’t find one that offers greater privacy. This is not different in concept from requiring hotels and restaurants to install microphones and video recorders in every public space, lest the country’s 30 million existing surveillance cameras miss a spot. The Justice Department’s Jason Weinstein told Congress the proposed new law is — no, really — good for privacy:
… malicious cyber actors do not respect our laws or our privacy. The government has an obligation to prevent, disrupt, deter, and defeat such intrusions…Privacy interests can be undercut when data is not retained for a reasonable period of time, thereby preventing law enforcement officers from obtaining the information they need to catch and prosecute those criminals.
Can you spot the logical elision here? Surveillance is usually justified by reference to pedophiles and cyber spies, but most of the government’s data mining — involving hundreds of thousands of secret requests each year — do not even assert a reasonable suspicion that a customer has done anything wrong. The post-Patriot Act legal standard requires only that authorities can plausibly describe the information as “relevant to” an investigation. Authorities acknowledge that an enormous number of innocent Americans have had their private data swept up and stored (usually forever) in government archives.
Chinese cyber-spying. Government sponsored hackers in China appear to have impersonated National Journal‘s Bruce Stokes in a spear-phishing email attack on US diplomats. It’s a new twist on an old scheme, and it’s a reminder that you can’t assume the person on the “From” line is who he says he is:
The e-mails that seemed to come from Stokes contained a virus that, if opened, would have burrowed an electronic tunnel to the host computer, letting the intruder root around in the owner’s files and siphon off copies.
A minimum precaution: keep your anti-malware protections up to date, and install security updates for all your software as soon as they arrive.
Why I’ll Probably Be Locked Out of Facebook Soon. Facebook means well with its new security plan, which authenticates suspicious log-on attempts by asking users to identify photos of their friends. But there are “friends” and friends. Readers of my book on Dick Cheney often friend me, and I couldn’t name one of them by sight. And what about all those friends of yours whose profile pictures are babies and animals? Pick ten random names from your friends list. Could you pass Facebook’s new test?
PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 19 (UPI) — A former CIA agent has received extra prison time after admitting he continued to spy for Russia while jailed for espionage.
Harold Nicholson, 59, was sentenced Tuesday to eight years by U.S. District Judge Anna Brown in Portland, Ore., the Justice Department said. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and commit money laundering. The term will be served after the 24-year sentence he’s already serving for his 1997 espionage conviction.
He is the first convicted spy to be convicted of new crimes involving the same country while jailed for espionage, the government said.
Nicholson admitted giving his son, Nathaniel, spying instructions when he visited him at federal prison in Sheridan, Ore., from 2006 to December 2008.
Nathaniel met with Russian agents in San Francisco, Mexico City, Lima, Peru, and Nicosia, Cyprus, to pass information from his father and collect money for him, the government said.
Nathaniel Nicholson was sentenced in December to five years probation.
Chinaâs President Hu Jintao promoted the emerging spirit of American-style entrepreneurialism during his visit to Washington D.C. this week for the highly-scripted U.S.-China Summit.
Jintao has not yet commented on the status of Chinese governmentâs home-grown brand of âshadow innovation,â which began nearly 30 years ago and is evolving today into an insidious and dangerous trend called âentrepreneurial espionage.â
In 1986, Deng Xiao Peng established âProgram 863,â a sort of academy of sciences and technologies charged with closing the scientific gap between China and the worldâs advanced economies in a very short period of time. The 863 program and its institutional derivatives not only sponsored actual research, they also promoted the acquisition of advanced technologies from other countries legally or illegally.
Today, counter-intelligence activities in the United States that have a nexus with China typically involve the illegal acquisition of U.S. technologies. Unlike Russian intelligence officers looking to exploit ego, greed, or other personal weaknesses, China has not normally paid agents for classified documents or engaged in clandestine activity like âdead drops.â
While some of the recent espionage cases brought against China have ties to Chinaâs intelligence services, the vast majority are linked to other state organizations, particularly the factories and research institutes of Chinaâs military-industrial complex. Multiple Chinese state entities are engaged in an active effort to acquire restricted U.S. technologies. Unlike other foreign governments, China has a history of encouraging and rewarding private individuals to obtain technology on its behalf.
Chinese intelligence practices rely on nonprofessional collectors motivated by profit, patriotism or other factors and acting either independently or on behalf of the Chinese government to gather science and technology intelligence.
Nonprofessional intelligence collectorsâincluding government and commercial researchers, students, academics, scientists, business people, delegations, and visitorsâalso provide China with a significant amount of sensitive U.S. technologies and trade secrets,â according to reports by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. â[I]n many cases, the collection efforts of these private-sector players are driven entirely by the opportunity for commercial or professional gain and have no affiliation with [PRC intelligence].â
This practice has led to a vast amount of âentrepreneurialâ economic and industrial espionage conducted by Chinese students, trade delegations, businessmen and educational and research institutions, according to reports by the U.S.-China Economic And Security Review Commission.
The Chinese government encourages such efforts and has benefited from them. In 2009, the Commission quoted testimony provided by former FBI Special Agent I.C. Smith that:
the Ministry of State Security sometimes places pressure on Chinese citizens going abroad for educational or business purposes and may make pursuit of foreign technology a quid pro quo for permission to travel abroad. However, this phenomenon of âentrepreneurial espionageâ appears to be particularly common among businessmen who have direct commercial ties with Chinese companies and who seek to skirt U.S. export control and economic espionage laws in order to export controlled technologies to the PRC. In such instances, profit appears to be a primary motive, although the desire to âhelp Chinaâ can intersect in many cases with the expectation of personal financial gain.
âEspionage entrepreneursâ are not focused solely on obtaining state-of-the-art, high-tech data and equipment. In many cases there is no obvious direct state involvement in the theft or illegal export of controlled technology. These entrepreneurial efforts frequently take the form of âmom-and-popâ companiesâmany of them nothing more than a titular business registered at a residential addressâthat legally purchase older military technology from U.S. manufacturers or through a secondary market of defense industrial equipment auctions, or even from the Internet, and then look for customer institutions back in China.
âThere are pieces of technology . . . that the Chinese are trying to acquire that are 20, 25 years old, [and] that are mainstays of existing U.S. defense systems but come nowhere close to being considered state-of-the-art, and yet a means-ends test would correctly identify those as critical gaps in the Chinese system,â said Dr. James Mulvenon, a specialist on the Chinese military at the Defense Group, Inc., stated during testimony before the Commission in 2009.
* Espionage aimed at investment plan, not technology-Ghosn
* Renault chief says has ample proof in spying case
* Lawyer calls on Renault to provide evidence of wrongdoing
By Daniel Flynn
PARIS, Jan 23 – The chief executive of French carmaker Renault RENA.PA said on Sunday that a case of suspected industrial espionage at the company would not affect the rollout of three electric car models this year.
In his first television interview since the case erupted, Carlos Ghosn said the suspected espionage appeared to have been aimed at uncovering Renault’s investment model for its electric vehicles rather than copying the technology.
Renault, which conducted its own internal investigation into the case for several months before alerting French authorities, has fired three senior executives in connection with the case.
A lawyer for one of the three men, who strongly deny any wrongdoing and say they will sue the company for damaging their reputations, had called on Ghosn to use Sunday’s interview to present some details of the case against them.
“We have certainties. If we did not have certainties, we would not be doing this,” Ghosn told TF1 television. He declined to provide specifics of what proof Renault held, saying simply: “They are multiple and that’s exactly why we started legal procedings.”
The scandal had threatened to harm improving relations between France and China after a government source said intelligence services were looking into a possible connection with China as part of initial checks before the official probe.
The French government has played down the possibility of a link to China, saying it is not accusing any one country of involvement, while China has denied any link to the case.
Asked whether there was indeed a Chinese connection to the case, Ghosn said it was now in the hands of judicial authorities and it was up to them to decide. “We are going to cooperate and be very discrete about this affair,” he said. “What is important is that we continue to advance in a cutting edge technology in which we have an advantage of two to three years over our rivals,” he said. “We have no evidence that it was technology itself which was the objective of this procedure.”
Renault is staking its future on growth in the electric car sector and Ghosn said that “under no circumstances” would the suspected spying case affect this.
MINISTER SAYS RENAULT TOO SLOW
Industry Minister Eric Besson had told French radio earlier on Sunday that Renault should have notified authorities much sooner, rather than pursuing its own investigation to its end.
Ghosn has said he was first notified about the case in August but the company did not formally present a legal complaint until mid January.
The Renault CEO said, however, that the company had its own internal procedures which needed to be respected. He earlier told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that the carmaker had not broken any laws by conducting its own lengthy internal inquiry into the affair before making it public. [ID:nLDE70L0CS]
Pierre-Olivier Sur, one of the lawyers defending Renault’s former vice president of advanced engineering, Michel Balthazard, said sources close to the investigation had said payments to offshore bank accounts in Liechtenstein and Switzerland had been uncovered.
“These financial flows are traceable,” Sur told Reuters, arguing that Renault as the plaintiff was not obliged to keep its evidence secret under French law.
“Let someone indicate these traces and we’ll see it doesn’t stand up, because my client has never had any offshore accounts. So there’s a mistake.”
Indeed, coming to you at the Continental Cup in St. Albert this week is an experiment which Warren Hansen of the Canadian Curling Association believes will be the future.
“I think if all of this works well, fans will soon be able to listen to what’s going on with the curlers as they discuss shot strategy on every sheet.
“It’s progressing there in our minds right now. We’re just not sure how quickly things will be able to move.
“We will be experimenting with getting the transmitter situation correct at the Continental Cup so the special FM radio bugs will be able to be used at the Scotties in Charlottetown and the Tim Hortons Brier in London.
“For the Continental Cup, anyone who brings an FM radio to the venue can easily tune into the TSN commentators on the broadcast. We’ll get this up and running by the Scotties where fans will be able to either bring their own radio or purchase one of the inexpensive headsets from from our merchandise area.”
Curling TV numbers have become the phenomenon of the sports world.
Indeed, four of the teams competing for the Continental Cup — Canada’s Kevin Martin, Norway’s Thomas Ulsrud, Germany’s Andrea Schopp and Canada’s Cheryl Bernard — all played before almost seven million on Canadian television alone during the gold-medal games of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
As was the case with the Torino 2006 and Salt Lake 2002 Olympics, the TV numbers reported around the world were mind boggling for the often ridiculed sport where they throw rocks at houses and sweep pimpled ice with brooms.
“The use of rf mics is what has set curling apart from all other sports and has been a contributing factor to the large television numbers we enjoy today,” Hansen, a former Brier winner curling with Hec Gervais, who also won three Little Grey Cups playing football with the Edmonton Huskies.
“We also allow the cameras in very tight on the curlers so someone sitting in their living room feels as if they are right there in the conversation between the skip and vice skip.
“It is the only sport where the television viewer feels as if they are in the midst of the action. I believe the result is that it has brought in a great many viewers who otherwise may not be there.”
The trouble is, it meant that the guy watching at home for free on TV was, although missing the live atmosphere and the experience of being there, which was phenomenal at the Vancouver Olympics, was being cheated out of the thing which has made the sport compelling on TV.
This will now bring that component into play for those sitting in the stands.
“Our initial plan is to easily make it possible for all fans to listen to the FM signal provided by TSN. Making the rf mics available on every sheet would be the next step. but we aren’t there yet.”
If this becomes a part of the live curling experience, it will be a legacy of the Vancouver Olympics where the bugs were made available to the crowd and Edmonton radio host Jackie Ray Greening, the organizing committee chairman of the 2005 Brier, 2007 Worlds and 2009 Olympic Trials here, delivered a running commentary to the crowd, directing their attention from one sheet to the other.
“The experiment with Jackie Rae worked very well, which is why we’re expanding the idea this year with plans to create something even more extensive for the future.
“I thing one of the reasons it was especially popular in Vancouver was because a large percentage of the audience was not very familiar with curling,” said Hansen.
“Actor Donald Sutherland was at the venue a lot in the latter days and he always had on a headset.”
