News You Need to Know – Page 16

Important Lessons All Around

The students of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are back in prison and are already learning some valuable lessons:

Survivors of the deadly school shooting in Florida have resisted new security rules that ban all but clear backpacks at their school.

Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, adorned their bags with signs, badges and slogans protesting against the measures.

Seventeen people were killed in the shooting on 14 February.

The attack led to an extensive social media campaign, culminating in a national march for tighter gun control.

But students have argued that the new bags will not prevent future attacks and infringe their privacy.

The first lesson, obviously, is that it sucks being punished for something you didn’t do.

The second lesson is probably a bit more subtle but the students have identified what the faculty who imposed this policy never comprehended: security theater is not security. Those students who are claiming that transparent backpacks don’t prevent future attacks are entirely correct. First of all, weapons can still be hidden in transparent backpacks. One can easily toss a weapon in a hollowed out book, pencil case, or tampon box. Moreover, an attacker doesn’t have to sneak a weapon into the school, they can just walk in with the weapon and shoot anybody who attempts to stop them.

The third lesson should be the most obvious but is probably the least obvious: laws (or in this case, policies) are irrelevant. While the school may require students to use transparent backpacks, the students have found the policy burdensome and are violating the spirit of it by concealing the contents of their backpacks behind signs and other obstructions. The words on pieces of paper that are the actual physical policy are unable to control the will of the students. This is why laws fail to prevent the behavior that they’re aimed at preventing. Gun control laws can’t stop individuals from acquiring of manufacturing a firearm. Transparent backpack requirements can’t stop individuals from obscuring the content of their backpacks.

Unfortunately, I have little faith that these lessons will be comprehended. The students, being interred in a government indoctrination center, are at a severe learning disadvantage due to the indoctrination that they’re being told is an education. The faculty were likely the product of the same indoctrination and are therefore also hindered from learning. And few people allow new knowledge to alter their beliefs. If new knowledge doesn’t support their beliefs, they will perform the mental gymnastics necessary to make it fit into their worldview.

You Can’t Predict What Will Set an Individual Off

I’m sure you’ve already heard about the shooting at YouTube’s headquarters. Before evidence of the shooter’s motives was revealed, most people predicted the common justifications given by or ascribed to shooters (an attack in the name of ISIS, a domestic issue, the shooter taking revenge for being bullied, etc.). However, this shooting took a slightly unusual twist when it was revealed that the shooter may have perpetrated the crime because she was upset about YouTube’s policy changes:

In several videos posted over the last year or so, she angrily spoke about the company’s policies, saying they were filtering her videos so they wouldn’t get any more views, and she was upset over demonetization. It appears the channels have now been completely removed by YouTube, citing policy violations.

Since the shooter committed suicide, we’ll never know for sure what her motivations were. But evidence indicates that her motivation may have been changes to YouTube’s monetization policies that caused at least some of her videos to be demonetized. If this was indeed her motivation, it goes to show that you can’t predict what will set an individual off.

Any action a company or individual takes is potentially dangerous. Although a vast majority of policy decisions don’t result in violence, once in a while the decision to either maintain or change a policy can result in a disgruntled individual responding with violence.

Part of the reason security is so difficult is because people are unpredictable. Who would have predicted that YouTube’s decision to demonetize some videos would result in an individual going to the company’s headquarters and opening fire on employees before turning the gun on herself?

Turnabout Is Fair Play

Cellular interceptors like the Stingray have received a lot of press in recent years. By imitating a cellular tower, interceptors can convince cellular phones to connect to it instead of a legitimate cellular tower. This allows the person operating the interceptor to surveil communications being transmitted or received by a connected phone. Government agents have been dismissive of questions about the warrant requirements of deploying a device that is capable of surveilling everybody in an area, which has lead to several court battles. However, it appears that government agents don’t appreciate turnabout because they’re upset that an unauthorized cellular interceptor was deployed in Washington DC:

The Associated Press reports today that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has confirmed that it found what appear to be unauthorized cell-site simulators, also known as Stingrays, in Washington DC last year. The agency told Senator Ron Wyden in a letter that it had found “anomalous activity” consistent with these sorts of devices in the Washington area and a DHS official told the AP that the findings were obtained through a 90-day trial that began in January of last year. Senator Wyden sent the DHS a letter last November requesting information on the use of cell-site simulators by foreign intelligence services.

That’s a shame.

I’m always amused by the hypocritical nature of government agents. They have no problem spying on all of us and even justify doing so. But when somebody spies on them it’s a fucking tragedy that needs immediate attention. I hope whoever was operating that interceptor acquired some good dirt on some high ranking politicians and leaks that information to the public.

The Intercept Likes Getting Its Sources Caught

Last years Reality Leigh Winner, who may have the most ironic name in history, leaked National Security Agency (NSA) documents to The Intercept. Instead of sanitizing the leaked documents, The Intercept staff just scanned them and posted them to their website. Since the documents weren’t sanitized, the NSA was able to use the watermark printed on the document by the printer to identify and arrest Winner.

Now another federal employee, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) by the name of Terry Albury, who appears to have leaked documents to The Intercept is sitting in a cage:

A request for a search warrant filed in Minneapolis federal court against Albury did not identify the news outlet, but a review by MPR News found the documents described in the search warrant that Albury leaked exactly match the trove of FBI documents posted by The Intercept.

In January 2017, The Intercept published a series titled “The FBI’s Secret Rules,” based on Albury’s leaked documents, which show the depth and broad powers of the FBI expansion since 9/11 and its recruitment efforts.

The Intercept made two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the FBI in late March 2016. The requests contained specific information identifying the names of documents that were not available to the public. In addition, the FBI identified about 27 secret documents published by The Intercept between April 2016 and February 2017.

“The FBI believes that the classified and/or controlled nature of the documents indicates the News Outlet obtained these documents from someone with direct access to them,” according to the warrant. “Furthermore, reviews of the FBI internal records indicate ALBURY has electronically accessed over two thirds of the approximately 27 documents via trusted access granted to him on FBI information systems.”

One of The Intercept’s FOIA requests, dated March 29, 2016, asked for copies of a specific document classified as secret. The document, titled Confidential Human Source Assessing, gives tips for agents on how to cultivate informants.

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that lists specific classified documents by title is going to kick off an internal investigation to discovery the individual who leaked the titles of those documents. It is also known that many federal agencies, especially those involved in law enforcement and intelligence, closely monitor their networks. They often know who accessed what file at what time. If a FOIA request comes in containing a list of specific documents by title and an agent has been found to access many of those documents without official cause, the internal investigation team is going to put two and two together.

The fact that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies closely monitor network access is well known. Knowing that network monitoring can identify who accessed what documents at what time and that correlating that information with a FOIA request is a trivial matter, a news agency that regularly deals with leakers should know that issuing such specific FOIA requests is likely to put their source at risk of being caught.

Between Reality Winner’s case and this one, the Intercept isn’t establishing a good track record for itself. If I were a federal agent with information to leak, I certainly wouldn’t leak it to The Intercept.

We’re at the Mercy of Service Providers

Yesterday I mentioned the changes Microsoft made to its terms of service and touched on the one sided licensing agreements to which users must agree in order to use Microsoft’s services. Today I want to take the discussion one step further by explaining the dangers these one sided agreements have to users integrated into entire company ecosystems.

Imagine that you, like many people, are heavily tied to Microsoft’s ecosystem. You have an Xbox 360 and an Xbox One. You play games online with your Xbox Live Gold membership. Your home computers all run Windows 10. You use Outlook.com for e-mail. You’re a developer who relies on Visual Studio to do your job and utilize One Drive and Office for online collaboration with coworkers. When you’re traveling to customer sites, you rely on Skype to keep in touch with your family. Your Microsoft account pretty much touches every facet of your life.

Now let’s say you’re on a work trip. While talking to your wife on Skype you say and offensive word and somebody at Microsoft just happens to be monitoring the session. Perhaps this individual is a stickler for the rules, perhaps they’re just having a bad day. Either way they decide to exercise Microsoft’s right under the terms of service to which you agreed to terminate your Microsoft account right then and there. Your Skype session terminates immediately. You can no longer access your e-mail. Your entire trip to the customer site is wasted because you no longer have the tool you need, Visual Studio, to do your job.

The trip was a complete loss but the pain doesn’t stop there. When you get home and decide to blow off some steam by tearing apart people online, you find that your Xbox Live subscription has also been terminated. You aren’t even able to play offline games because you purchased them all via the Xbox One Store and the licenses for those purchases were tied to your user account, which was terminated. Much of your life has come to a grinding halt because one Microsoft employee monitoring your Skype session decided to terminate your account.

While one could accuse me of hyperbole for concocting this scenario, it is a very real possibility under the terms of service to which you agree when signing up for a Microsoft account. The terms of service give you no power and Microsoft absolute power. Microsoft can make whatever rules it wants whenever it wants and your only options are to submit or not use its services.

Microsoft isn’t even unique in this regard. The same one sided agreements are made when you create a account with Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or pretty much any other service provider. The sad truth is that most of us rely heavily on accounts that we have no real control over. Your Google account could be suspended tomorrow and with it would go your Gmail account, any apps you’ve purchased for Android via the Play Store, revenue derived from YouTube ads, etc.

The licensing model ensures that we don’t actually own many of the things that we rely on. The one sided agreements to which we agree in order to access services that we rely on ensure that we have no recourse if our accounts are suspended. We’re effectively peasants and our lords are our service providers. What makes this situation even worse is that it’s one we helped create. By submitting to one sided agreements early on, we told service providers that it’s acceptable to take all of the power for themselves. By being willing to license software instead of owning it, we told developers that it’s acceptable to let us borrow their software instead of purchase it. We put ourselves at the mercy of these service providers and now we’re finally faced with an absurdly high bill and having regrets.

Teach Facebook a Lesson, Leave Facebook for Facebook

People continue to pretend that they’re upset with Facebook. Some of the people pretending that they’re upset have decided to leave Facebook for Instagram:

Goodbye Facebook, hello Instagram.

Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012 for $1 billion, is having a moment — and just in time to be a lone bright spot for its parent company, which is in crisis over its handling of people’s private information.

“Thank Goodness For Instagram,” said a Wall Street research note on Facebook’s mounting troubles earlier this week. “I will delete Facebook, but you can pry Instagram from my cold, dead hands,” read a headline on tech news outlet Mashable.

I say that they’re pretending to be upset with Facebook because they’re effectively leaving Facebook for Facebook. Instagram was purchased by Facebook back in 2012 for the then seemingly absurd sum of $1 billion.

If you want to disassociate with Facebook, you need to be willing to do a bit of research (literally a single search on DuckDuckGo) to avoid simply transferring yourself to one of the company’s other departments. Furthermore, you should invest some time into finding an alternative that isn’t likely to suffer the same pitfalls as Facebook. For example, any company that appears to be providing a “free” service likely has a similar business model to Facebook. If you jump ship to another company with the same business model, you’re going to suffer the same privacy violations.

Gun Crime is Rising in London

Remember what I said about laws being irrelevant? Here’s a great example of that:

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has been urged to consider a gun crime strategy for the capital, following a steep rise in the number of offences and fears that victims and perpetrators are getting younger.

The Metropolitan police recorded 2,542 gun crime offences in 2017, the highest number in five years and 44% more than the 1,755 recorded in 2014, according to a report by the London assembly’s police and crime committee.

Britain has enacted into law almost every restriction on gun ownership possible without a complete ban. According to the believers in law, this should have dwindled Britain’s gun crime to almost nothing. However, Britain is still experiencing gun crime and it’s increasing in parts of the country. How can this be? Simple, individuals have chosen to violate the country’s gun control laws. Since laws are nothing more than words on pieces of paper, they are entirely incapable of interfering with these individuals’ wills.

A government can pass whatever laws it desires. If people find the laws tolerable, they may obey them. If people find the laws intolerable, they will disobey them.

Microsoft Is Altering the Deal

Microsoft recently announced some changes to its terms of services:

5. In the Code of Conduct section, we’ve clarified that use of offensive language and fraudulent activity is prohibited. We’ve also clarified that violation of the Code of Conduct through Xbox Services may result in suspensions or bans from participation in Xbox Services, including forfeiture of content licenses, Xbox Gold Membership time, and Microsoft account balances associated with the account.

This is a great example of the pitfalls of the licensing model. When you purchase a game, movie, or other form of digital content from Microsoft, you’re merely acquiring a very one sided license. Effectively the license states that you can continue to use the content so long as Microsoft doesn’t decide to revoke your license. To make matters worse, the license gives Microsoft the option to alter the terms of the license whenever it wants and without even giving prior notice. In this case Microsoft changed the terms to state that your content licenses can be revoked if you use “offensive language” (a term so vague that it covers pretty much anything you say).

But the fun didn’t stop there. In order to enforce the new terms of service, Microsoft has also reserved the right to surveil you:

When investigating alleged violations of these Terms, Microsoft reserves the right to review Your Content in order to resolve the issue.

And this is a great example of the pitfall of not having end-to-end encryption. Microsoft’s services generally lack an end-to-end encryption option, which means a man in the middle, like Microsoft or any entity it authorizes, can view whatever information is being transmitted using its services. Your Skype sessions aren’t as private as you might think.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody. Any agreement that gives one party no power and the other party absolute power, like content licenses, is going to be abused by the party with absolute power. Fortunately, unlike with government, you have an option when Microsoft does something you don’t like; you can cease using its products and services.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Sorry… That His Products Are Upset

Mark Zuckerberg finally made an official statement about the entire Cambridge Analytica fiasco:

In the interviews, the first difference that jumps out is the presence of an actual apology for… something. As Zuckerberg said to Recode, “We let the community down and I feel really bad and I’m sorry about that.”

But why is he sorry? He can’t be sorry about Cambridge Analytica purchasing data about Facebook’s users since Facebook’s business model is built on exactly that. So he must be sorry that so many of Facebook’s users, his products, are upset. But why are his products upset? I guess it’s because they don’t understand the deal they made with Facebook.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch so if you’re getting something for free, there must be a catch. In the case of Facebook, the catch is that any information you post on Facebook can be sold by the company. Facebook isn’t exactly coy about this arrangement either, although it does try to pretend to care about your privacy by giving you a constantly changing smorgasbord of privacy settings to play around with. Perhaps those privacy settings are the source of contention. Perhaps they give users the false belief that they have control over the information they post to Facebook. Perhaps Facebook’s users are a bunch of socialists who believe in the fairy tale that lunches can be free. Either way, I’m going to try to clear up this apparently murky arrangement.

If you use Facebook, you are the product. Facebook’s business model is to collect your personal information and sell it. Nothing you post to Facebook is private. Everything you post to Facebook is for sale.

I hope that clears up any confusion.

Officer Noor Charged

Against all odds, the grand jury for the case of Justine Damond’s death decided that there were grounds for charging Officer Noor:

A Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed an Australian woman in July has been booked on charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

This decision is somewhat surprising considering how biased grand juries tend to be in favor of law enforcers. I can only imagine that the evidence provided by Officer Noor’s defense was nonexistent. However, now the case goes to a jury, which also tend to be heavily biased in favor of law enforcers, so there’s still a very good chance that Officer Noor walks away from this unpunished.