December 1, 2010: Israel has decided to encrypt the video data coming from its UAVs, to prevent Hezbollah and Hamas from looking in on the currently unencrypted video transmission. The U.S. decided to do this last year, after they found Islamic terrorists in Iraq using freely available hardware and software to eavesdrop. This capability was apparently supplied by Iran, which also provides help for Hezbollah and Hamas.
The Iranians had discovered that a $26 bit of software (SkyGrabber) enabled someone with a satellite dish and a laptop to intercept and capture video being sent to the ground. Normally, this is used by people to hijack Internet data being sent down via a satellite link. The idea for adapting this to grabbing Predator video transmissions did not require a lot of technical knowledge. In Iran, where satellite dishes are illegal, many people have responded by hiding small dishes, and doing whatever they can (often illegally) to obtain satellite based broadcasts. The electronic media in Iran is state controlled and censored by a bunch of Islamic conservative clerics. The Iranian secret police have thus come to learn all about stuff like SkyGrabber, and tipped off their brethren in the Quds organization (which takes care of support for foreign terrorists). U.S. troops discovered the terrorist use of SkyGrabber two years ago.
As for why the Predator video was liable to this kind of capture. Well, sometimes, you take a chance. And then you get caught. For years, the video from UAV was unencrypted. This was to save communications capacity (“bandwidth”), which was always in short supply. To encrypt the video would require more bandwidth, and specialized equipment on the UAVs and ground receivers. There would also be a slight delay for the guys on the ground using the video. For all these reasons, the video remained unencrypted. This was not a secret, it was known to people in the business. Now everyone knows, and encryption, and all its costs, will be added to UAV video broadcasts in more and more countries.
Sitting on a train headed back to central London after a day of exploring the sprawling city, I stared out the window as the landscape flew by. Travelling on public transportation had become my favorite time to sit, think, and, admittedly, eavesdrop.
As I nonchalantly flipped the pages of “The Guardian” and skimmed the headlines, I tuned in to the conversation going on in the seats across the aisle.
An Englishman sporting a dapper suit and tie was engaged in an intense conversation with a man who, I later found out, had just moved to London from Africa.
From the way the man carefully chose his words, it was obvious that he was still learning English.
“When you speak, focus on what your face reflects to the person you are conversing with.
Right now your face looks strained because you are focusing on speaking English,” the Londoner said. “Use your hands to speak. Practice in the mirror every day and soon it will become more natural.”
What is he talking about, I wondered. But as the conversation progressed, I began to catch on.
The Englishman was explaining to this man the subtleties of Western communication – the things that we don’t even think about but that play a huge role in our social interactions: our facial expressions, gesticulations, sarcasm, irony and humor.
Sarcasm was a difficult notion to explain. “You say something that you don’t mean in a tone that insinuates the opposite of what you said.” The man pondered this for a moment before saying in a strange tone, “Ah, I don’t see what you are saying” and hopefully smiling at his instructor. “Well, technically I guess that is sarcasm,” the Brit replied.
The conversation got me thinking about how we communicate with other people.
Though the African man could be talking about his love of kittens, flowers and rainbows, his furrowed brows and mouth turned down in concentration would affect how someone might perceive what he is saying.
The old saying “actions speak louder than words” takes on a new meaning when you apply it to this scenario.
According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, only seven percent of communication involves actual words, while 55 percent is visual (body language, eye contact) and 38 percent is vocal (tone, speed, volume, etc.).
An episode of the sitcom “30 Rock,” starring Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, humorously pointed out how body language and tone overshadow the content of communication.
In it, guest star Queen Latifah played a grandstanding congresswoman with an affinity for impromptu speeches.
As she began to rant with the bravado of an impassioned preacher about the inequalities at NBC, she continued with the same gusto, “Now I may have lost my train of thought several minutes ago, but if I continue to talk like this no one will notice and when I stop, you will applaud my energy. Thank you!”
She received a standing ovation.
Often, our actions relay a message that we may not have intended. Or conversely, someone might deliberately deceive through the manner in which he communicates.
More than ever, I have become aware of how I communicate and the behaviors that accompany my words.
Whether meeting a new person, talking to a friend or interviewing for a job, visual and vocal communication are paramount to success.
The Indian government says it’s reached an agreement that will allow government agencies in that Asian nation to eavesdrop on traffic emanating from the BlackBerry Messenger Service. It’s a temporary solution, but India’s government says a permanent deal should be in place by Jan. 31, 2011.
India first threatened to shutter the service a few months ago. So BlackBerry’s parent company, Research In Motion, found itself in quite a pickle – either risk losing access to a market of more than 1 billion people, or agree to subvert its own customers’ privacy. Obviously, the threat of taking a big financial hit won out.
India and several other nations in Asia and the Middle East have expressed concern that terrorists can use texting services like BBM to carry out their activities, and without government monitoring, they might be able to do so unchecked. The United Arab Emirates came to a similar agreement with RIM a couple of weeks ago, although BBM wasn’t specifically mentioned.
The Firesheep plug-in was developed by security researchers to highlight how insecure public Wi-Fi networks can be. Mission accomplished. Unfortunately, the tool works quite well, and its public availability now places a relatively powerful snooping tool that requires virtually no hacking skills or exceptional tech knowledge in the hands of anyone.
Another Firefox plug-in called Blacksheep was developed as a Firesheep alarm. It won’t secure your wireless data, and it won’t prevent your information from being snooped by Firesheep per se, but it will alert you when Firesheep is in use on the network you’re connected to so that you’re aware.
Bottom line, wireless networks are not as secure as their wired counterparts, and Wi-Fi hotspots open to the general public are even less secure. If your laptop can connect to a wireless router 100 feet away, then so can any other device in a 100-foot radius of that wireless router–which is why the router should have encryption enabled and require a password of some sort to gain access.
The issue is mainly a function of public Wi-Fi hotspots which generally have a completely open, and unencrypted wireless network available for patrons to join. In some cases, such as hotels, the Wi-Fi may actually use a password to prevent abuse by users who aren’t actually staying at the hotel, but those are only slightly more secure because the password is shared with everyone who stays there, and is rarely changed so acquiring it is a trivial matter.
Chet Wisniewski, a senior security advisor with Sophos, implored establishments such as Starbucks and McDonald’s to improve security by adopting an encrypted network with a default shared password. The sentiment is admirable, and the solution offered would provide better protection than no encryption at all–and prevent snooping by the current version of Firesheep–but, in the grand scheme it’s not much better.
A comment on the Sophos blog explains, “I’m not really sure “free” as password is a great idea, since a password in WPA2 is nothing but a pre-shared secret, which in turn is then used to create a unique key. The problem is, when everyone uses the same password, everyone will end up with the same key, which will be in intended use client and access point, but if someone else knows the password he will be able to come up with the same key,”
The commenter concludes with, “You might say now it’s better to have some encryption instead of none, but I think that’s even more dangerous, because people now will actually think they are secure, and will therefore feel at ease to do more dangerous stuff, while a black hat will actually have just little more inconvenience to decrypt it first based on the password he knows. In fact, a black hat might even be more attracted to such hot spots because he knows people feel more at ease to do dangerous things there.”
Public hotspots are convenient. It is nice to be able to kick back and surf the Web while sipping a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks. Just realize that the Wi-Fi is insecure and limit your activities. Go ahead and read the headlines at CNN.com, but don’t check your bank balance, or do anything else that requires entering a username, password, or account number.
If you want or need to do more sensitive tasks over the public Wi-Fi, use a VPN connection of some sort so that there is an encrypted tunnel between your laptop or tablet and the destination you are connecting to.
 In a vast cosmic experiment equivalent to hitting “redial,” astronomers in a dozen countries are aiming telescopes to listen in once again on some of the stars that were part of the world’s first search for alien life 50 years ago.
The coordinated signal-searching campaign began this month to mark the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, a 1960 experiment that was christened the world’s first real attempt in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI.
Like Project Ozma, which got its name from a character in L. Frank Baum’s series of books about the Land of Oz, the new search is called Project Dorothy.
Project Ozma was conducted by astronomer Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. Drake is also famous for devising the Drake equation, which predicts the number of alien civilizations with whom we might be able to communicate.
The formula is based on factors including the rate of star formation in the galaxy and the percentage of stars thought to have planets. Making educated guesses for some of the equation’s terms, scientists have used it to predict we could find evidence of ET intelligence within the next 25 years.
“It is thrilling for me to witness the beginnings of Project Dorothy, the continuation of my search of 50 years ago,” Drake said in a SETI announcement. “To have so many talented people using so many telescopes in this new search, with the electronics and computer equipment of today, is a joyful thing to me. The equipment of today is far better than what we could have 50 years ago and will result in both very much better and very much more data than could be obtained then.”
The anniversary observations, which began Nov. 5, will continue throughout the month. Astronomers in Australia, Japan, Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Argentina and the United States are taking the first shifts, searching for signs of an intelligent civilization from a few nearby stars.
Astronomer Shin-ya Narusawa of Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory in Japan, who launched Project Dorothy, said: “Two of the original stars from Project Ozma – Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani – are the nearest solar-type stars in the northern hemisphere.
Therefore, these two stars were the best SETI targets a half century ago. They remain the symbol of Project Ozma and are two of the target stars for Project Dorothy.”
The new search includes some particularly promising targets for extraterrestrial intelligence, including stars with known planets, which modern telescopes were only recently able to detect. The scientists are aiming for stellar systems where planets are thought to orbit at roughly the right distance from their suns to hold liquid water and thus, possibly, life.
“Project Dorothy vividly demonstrates just how far SETI has come in the past 50 years,” said the SETI Institute’s Douglas Vakoch, who is a member of Project Dorothy’s working group. “The lessons learned through Project Dorothy provide critical preparation for the day we finally detect a signal from another civilization.”
Though the searches undertaken by astronomers at the SETI Institute and elsewhere over the past 50 years have not found indications of little green men, experts say it’s too early to give up hope.
“Over the past 50 years our searches have not yet produced the discovery we all hope for,” Drake said. “This is understandable – in our vast and awesome universe it will take long, painstaking and comprehensive searches before we will have a good chance of success. This is the major lesson learned from previous searches. Project Dorothy is a major step in meeting the challenge created by this lesson.” (Space.com)
