How a team of social media experts is able to keep track of the UK jihadis

Mark Townsend

17 January 2015

A team of analysts at King’s College in London is building an exhaustive database of western Islamic State fighters – through Twitter and Facebook 

A Facebook posting by Collin Gordon, one of the 700 or so western fighters for Isis in the database at King’s College London. He is thought to have died last month with his brother, Gregory, during fighting in Dabiq.

Another Briton had died in Syria, and back in London investigators were busy “scraping” through his online peer network for clues about fellow Islamic State (Isis) foot soldiers.

It was little surprise that Rhonan Malik knew two Canadian brothers, Gregory and Collin Gordon. After all, Twitter rumours suggested that all three had been killed in the same December air strike. More intriguing was the prodigious Facebook presence of Collin Gordon which indicated that, shortly before becoming a jihadist, he had been “quite the party boy”.

On a labyrinthine upper floor of King’s College London is the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), the first global initiative of its type, whose offices are frequently contacted by counter-terrorism officers, hungry for information on the continuing flow of Britons to the ranks of Isis.

At 4.30pm on Thursday the centre’s researchers were assiduously examining social media “accounts of value”, noting the ongoing ripples of jubilation following the Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks. A pseudonymous jihadist from Manchester, Abu QaQa, had said that the shootings had persuaded Isis and al-Qaida supporters to bury their differences.

“He’s saying we should be happy that jihad was made against the crusaders. It doesn’t matter that AQ and IS have been fighting each other – if it brings attacks against the west he’ll support it,” said Joseph Carter, research fellow at the ICSR.

NEW ENERGY SUPPLY SECURITY DYNAMICS OF EU-RUSSIA-TURKEY TRIAD – ANALYSIS

By Hasan Selim Ozertem

JANUARY 22, 2015

The gradual rise in the complexity of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 has necessitated a multidimensional review of relations between Russia and the West. Current circumstances have sparked the emergence of new parameters in the EU-Russia-Turkey Triad with regard to energy policy.

The gradual rise in the complexity of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 has necessitated a multidimensional review of relations between Russia and the West. While increasing the depth and scope of sanctions against Russia, the EU was also busy formulating new strategies that are to shape its relations with Moscow through 2020.

In this respect, the EU’s revised energy policies actually represent the demarcation of its relations with Russia, which up until then had largely been characterized by the former’s dependency on the latter. Moreover, questions of resource efficiency and supply security came to occupy top positions of the agenda in Brussels. These changes have paved the way for the EU’s reassessment of its existing structure and prompted the emergence of new equations within the EU-Russia-Turkey Triangle.

Stress tests and the growing importance of the Southern Corridor

The EU Commission’s Energy Security Strategy released on 28 May 2014 differentiated EU-wide energy policies between those with short and medium term outlooks. Hereunder, short term measures outlined in the document included “stress tests” that were aimed at evaluating the extent of risks faced by EU members in terms their dependency on Russian gas. Following these assessments, it was to be decided to what extent the following actions should be taken: i) increasing gas stocks, ii) developing new systems that enable reverse flows, iii) reducing short-term energy demand, and iv) expanding the use of renewable energy technologies.

Understanding conflict is the road to peace, prosperity, Stanford scholar says

BY BETH DUFF-BROWN AND CLIFTON B. PARKER

The Empirical Studies of Conflict project focuses on the causes and characteristics of politically motivated violence.

In a project called Empirical Studies of Conflict, Stanford scholar Joe Felter tries to understand the nature of conflict in the world's most dangerous flashpoints.

Understanding the nature of violent conflict in the world's most dangerous flashpoints may help find ways to peace and stability, according to a Stanford expert.

Once a soldier, now a scholar, Joe Felter knows better than most the intrinsic meaning of war and conflict – he served on the front lines in the U.S. Special Forces in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines.

Today, the senior research scholar at Stanford'sCenter for International Security and Cooperation and research fellow at the Hoover Institution is on a different kind of mission: building knowledge on the subject of politically motivated conflict.

For example, how are the most casualties suffered and under what conditions? Are there patterns to why rebels are surrendering? And how do armed battles affect development and education in local communities?

Answers to these and other questions are found in the Empirical Studies of Conflict project database, which is led by Felter and Jacob Shapiro, his former Stanford political science classmate, now a professor at Princeton University. The effort focuses on insurgency, civil war and other sources of politically motivated violence worldwide. Launched last year, it currently covers the Philippines, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Mexico, the Israeli-occupied territories, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews.

Since 2009, Felter has collaborated with colleagues at Princeton, the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions in developing the database. Today, they are advising policymakers and military leaders on how best to curb conflict, reduce civilian casualties and promote prosperity.

Felter's research on Filipino insurgencies, for instance, has produced significant results. The senior officials there have invited him to brief their military on battlefield trends and counterinsurgency strategy, as Felter and his colleagues have interviewed thousands of combatants as part of the project.

What do they learn about the insurgent mindset? One Islamic militant chief talked tactics with him, then revealed that his greatest tool was his men's belief that Allah was waiting for them on the other side. Others included a Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money to help the poor and a young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family.

Pathways to peace

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should cause much more than a hiccup in relations

By Editorial Board

EUROPEAN FOREIGN ministers met Monday to consider proposals for resuming diplomatic contacts and cooperation with Russia in a range of areas — a strategy pressed by several governments that wish to paper over the breach opened by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Unfortunately for the doves, the discussion came just as Russian forces, after several weeks of relative calm, launched a new offensive in eastern Ukraine. 

By Tuesday, the Ukrainian government and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine were reporting that fresh Russian army units were crossing the border and attacking Ukrainian positions north of the city of Luhansk and at the Donetsk airport. “The situation,” European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told us shortly after arriving in Washington, “is not going in the right direction.” Appropriately, the European ministers concluded there were no grounds for altering the existing sanctions on Russia, some of which will come up for renewal at a summit meeting in March — and the plan for detente came under heavy criticism. 

Boko Haram, ISIS and al-Qaeda: how the jihadists compare

By Daniel Schwartz

Jan 20, 2015

Nigeria's Boko Haram getting less attention

Boko Haram is suspected of using girls as suicide bombers. Children stand near the scene of an explosion in a mobile phone market in Potiskum, Nigeria, Jan. 12. Two female suicide bombers targeted the busy marketplace the previous day. (Adamu Adamu/Associated Press)

Boko Haram, the vicious jihadist group carrying out attacks in northern Nigeria and neighbouring countries, hasn't received the media and diplomatic attention that al-Qaeda and ISIS get.

But terrorism experts are now seeing growing similarities between Boko Haram and ISIS, which operates in Iraq and Syria.

While the world news media was focusing on the Charlie Hebdo and related killings in Paris, Boko Haram was apparently carrying out even bloodier attacks in northeastern Nigeria. 

Boko Haram: Nigerian militant group's attacks on the rise

All Spin and No Substance: The Need for a Meaningful Obama Strategy

By Anthony H. Cordesman

JAN 21, 2015 

It may be unfair to expect any meaningful discussion of strategy and America’s security position in a State of the Union address. But, it is all too clear that President Obama failed to go beyond a few sentences of vacuous spin in dealing with the world outside the United States. The most he did was to claim that the United States has fewer troops at war. He provided no insights at all as to the security of the United States, his future defense policies, and his ability to translate strategic concepts into action

Unfortunately, he has done little better in the past. President Obama has often been strong on concepts, but short on actual plans and progress. He has often talked about the importance of transparency, but has then provided little more than rhetoric and spin. Some six years after taking office, he still seems to find it extraordinarily difficult to get down to actual substance and to provide the kind of supporting data that gives him real credibility.

Consider where the United States now stands and what the president has not addressed in any detail or tangible form: He has decided to rush a withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 without issuing any meaningful assessment of the risks, a clear action plan for the critical period between 2015 and the end of 2016, details on what the small number of U.S. forces and civilians left in country will actually do, and a clear explanation of planned U.S. expenditures.

The president said nothing about Russia and the Ukraine. More broadly, his administration has failed to define a clear strategy for dealing with Russia, for strengthening NATO, or reassessing the U.S. presence and force levels in Europe. The United States has issued many statements, concepts, and exercises in rhetoric about its policies, but little real substance.

It is now well over two years since the Obama administration announced a rebalancing to Asia. Once again, however, it has stuck with concepts and rhetoric and provided few actual details. It is unclear how U.S. force levels in Asia will change, how many aircraft and ships will shift from NATO to Asian missions, or what changes will take place in the U.S. budget.

The Crisis of Europe

By George Friedman

january 21, 2015

Last week, I wrote about the crisis of Islamic radicalism and the problem of European nationalism. This week's events give me the opportunity to address the question of European nationalism again, this time from the standpoint of the European Union and the European Central Bank, using a term that only an economist could invent: "quantitative easing."

European media has been flooded for the past week with leaks about the European Central Bank's forthcoming plan to stimulate the faltering European economy by implementing quantitative easing. First carried by Der Spiegel and then picked up by other media, the story has not been denied by anyone at the bank nor any senior European official. We can therefore call this an official leak, because it lets everyone know what is coming before an official announcement is made later in the week.

The plan is an attempt to spur economic activity in Europe by increasing the amount of money available. It calls for governments to increase their borrowing for various projects designed to increase growth and decrease unemployment. Rather than selling the bonds on the open market, a move that would trigger a rise in interest rates, the bonds are sold to the central banks of eurozone member states, which have the ability to print new money. The money is then sent to the treasury. With more money flowing through the system, recessions driven by a lack of capital are relieved. This is why the measure is called quantitative easing.

The United States did this in 2008. In addition to government debt, the Federal Reserve also bought corporate debt. The hyperinflation that some had feared would result from the move never materialized, and the U.S. economy hit a 5 percent growth rate in the third quarter of last year. The Europeans chose not to pursue this route, and as a result, the European economy is, at best, languishing. Now the Europeans will begin such a program - several years after the Americans did - in the hopes of moving things forward again.

A Global Course in Basic Economics

By Fabio Rafael Fiallo

January 22, 2015

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We have of late received a real-life crash course in basic economics, with the lessons imparted at the highest levels of the global economy. We are all seeing the laws of supply and demand in action, with their manifold implications, and we are learning that it is impossible to circumvent those laws without paying a high price. Wherever we look, the attempts of the state to outsmart markets are showing their limits, and more often than not ending in utter fiasco.

Let us begin with a look at the free-falling oil market. Oil-producing countries would of course like to reverse the current trend. Some would curtail production to push prices up, but the rest have learned from experience that collective restrictions only benefit the countries that do not comply. Like it or not, intergovernmental decisions won't alter the factors underlying the fall in the price of oil. One key element is the global deceleration of economic growth, particularly in China, a large energy consumer. Add to this the entry of fracking into the oil game, notably in the United States - just one factor expanding the global supply of energy.

These joint developments substantially push down the demand for, and consequently the price of, oil - so much so that financial economist Anatole Kaletsky asserts that $50 for a barrel may well become a price ceiling rather than a floor.

The supremacy of market laws is manifest in Russia, too.

Gone are the days when Putin's supporters cheerfully claimed that retaliatory restrictions imposed by Russia against imports of Western agricultural goods would be a godsend for the Russian economy. According to that flawed narrative, the import restrictions would boost local Russian production.

Obama Tries to Out-Putin Putin

By Leonid Bershidsky

JAN 21, 2015 

Source Link

According to his State of the Union address, U.S. President Barack Obama has solved the Russia problem. His brief passage on the subject shows he's either blind to the dangers of the deteriorating relationship between Moscow and the West or merely too quick to take credit for a victory that is not even on the horizon.

Here's what Obama had to say about the biggest threat to European stability since the fall of the Berlin wall 25 years ago:

We're upholding the principle that bigger nations can't bully the small -- by opposing Russian aggression, supporting Ukraine's democracy and reassuring our NATO allies. Last year, as we were doing the hard work of imposing sanctions along with our allies, some suggested that Mr. Putin's aggression was a masterful display of strategy and strength. Well, today, it is America that stands strong and united with our allies, while Russia is isolated, with its economy in tatters. That's how America leads -- not with bluster, but with persistent, steady resolve.

Every one of these sentences is, to put it mildly, a stretch.

The U.S. has indeed disapproved of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and loudly enough for everyone to hear. But that doesn't mean it has supported Ukraine's democracy. 

The answer to India’s billion dollar banking problem lies in three easy tweaks

T T Ram MohanProfessor, IIM Ahmedabad

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All is not well with India’s public sector banks (PSBs).

The PSBs, which account for over 70% of the assets in the banking system, face enormous challenges—a worrying level of non-performing assets, low credit growth in a stalled economy and capital requirements of Rs 500,000 crore ($800 billion) over the next five years.

There is a large gap between the performance of PSBs and private sector banks. Return on assets, a key indicator, is 0.5% at PSBs, compared to 1.65% at private banks.

Many in the country, including the Reserve Bank of India’s P J Nayak committee (pdf), which submitted its report in May 2014, see the performance gap as evidence of a fundamental problem with the culture, management and governance of PSBs.

The problem, they believe, can be fixed only with “big bang” reforms including:

Lowering the government’s stake to below 51%, which would take PSBs outside the purview of agencies such as the CAG and CVC and facilitate a risk-taking culture at the banks 

Creation of a bank holding company to which the equity of all PSBs would be transferred. The holding company would be run by professionals and would operate at arm’s length from the government 

Splitting the post of chairman and managing director so that a non-executive chairman can exercise checks on the managing director. 

Making pay for top managers at PSBs more competitive so that they can attract the right talent 

In short, get the PSBs to look and act more like their private bank counterparts.

The diagnosis and the prescriptions are both flawed.

The problems at PSBs today cannot be entirely ascribed to their culture or management 

It’s incorrect to derive inferences about PSBs by looking at their performance in today’s highly stressed situation. Over a period of a decade-and-a-half following reforms initiated in 1993-94, academic research finds a trend towards convergence in performance between PSBs and private banks. If something were fundamentally wrong with PSBs, this couldn’t have happened.

Here’s what happened Wednesday at Davos

http://qz.com/322745#1/heres-what-happened-wednesday-at-davos/

The 45th annual World Economic Forum is underway in Davos, where the focus is on broad uncertainty challenging both the billion- and civilian-minded. With a theme like “The New Global Context,” are attendees feeling fresh mists of post-recession spring or ever-gatheringfog of disaster and gloom? As one cartoonist sees it, you can take your pick:

Here’s what’s worth keeping an eye on from the first big Davos day.

CLIMATE CHARGE Ambition. Urgency. Unveiling. PowerPoint. Celebrity. If Davos bingo exists, Al Gore speaking on climate challenges would be every player’s dream. And that’s not meant to criticize—hiswork is Davos gold. Gore used his “What’s Next? A Climate for Action” panel to announce a “Live Earth” series of concerts on June 18th that Creative Director Pharrell Williams cryptically promised will “harmonize” all of humanity before crucial Paris climate talks in December.

Gore linked recent record temperatures to natural disasters, echoing the State of the Union reference President Obama made Tuesday night to our very hot millennium so far. He gave Typhoon Haiyan and Hurricane Sandy the context of warmer oceans and more water vapor, while doing the same with drought and fire on very dry land. He even drew a line from halted grain exports after a Russian drought (and fire that killed 55,000) to global food riots and the self-immolation of a Tunisian food vendor that many say began the Arab Spring.

But there are ways to combat climate chaos. Gore pointed to booming wind and solar power advances—and not just in the developed world (Bangladesh has the top rate of solar installations). He noted that “political will is a renewable resource” while lauding the historic China-US emissions cap agreement last year. At the “Better Growth, Better Climate” panel with Felipe Calderon, who spearheaded a climate reportlast year with the same name, Gore gave it a forceful endorsement.“It is possible to have economic growth and tackle climate change at the same time,” Calderon said, calling on the world to “decarbonize” economic growth. Panelist Lord Stern highlighted a similar joint battle:

Private jets and all, climate had a true Davos moment. Far away from the Alps, many will hope for much more on the horizon.

YES, UKRAINE One of the conference’s biggest stories so far is about who’s leaving, not who’s coming. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenkoannounced that he was headed home early to address escalating conflict with Russia. But he didn’t depart before giving a rousing speech saying that his “pro-European” country was “under aggression” and fighting for peace, punctuating his remarks by holding up part of a bus from a recent conflict scene.

Poroshenko cast Ukraine’s plight as a global one, pleading for support. He said he would resume negotiations right away, but without progress on a ceasefire and restored borders secure from Russian-backed rebels, he saw little reason for hope.

Interactive graphic: How nations compete on pay, innovation, and education

Source Link

Annually, the World Economic Forum releases their Global Competitiveness Report, a comprehensive assessment of national competitiveness worldwide. The different aspects of competitiveness are analyzed through twelve pillars–including infrastructure, labor market efficiency, technological readiness–that produce 114 unique indicators. The primary measurement established by the report is the Global Competiveness Index, a country-based ranking that takes each pillar, as well as the nation’s stage of development, into account.

The interactive map above explores this year’s Competitiveness Index and country-level rankings for select indicators (we’ve also listed the top ten for each of those measurements below). The data presented within, which has long served as an important tool for policymakers, will inform many of the discussions taking place at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos this week.

Global Competitiveness Index (score)

Switzerland (5.7)

Singapore (5.65)

United States (5.54)

Finland (5.5)

Germany (5.49)

Japan (5.47)

Hong Kong SAR (5.46)

Netherlands (5.45)

United Kingdom (5.41)

Sweden (5.41)

GDP per capita

Luxembourg

Norway

Qatar

Switzerland

Australia

Denmark

Sweden

Singapore

United States

Canada

Russia to Test Strategic Missile Forces in Unscheduled Drills

Jan 22, 2015

http://www.spacewar.com/pageone/spacewar-2015-01-21.html

Russia has kicked off its first unannounced drills of the year for the country's Strategic Missile Forces with over 1,200 active duty servicemen in western Siberia, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Igor Egorov said Tuesday.

"During the unannounced exercises of the missile forces, a committee will study the current condition in organizing activities by the commanders in completing drills of fighting terrorism as a command unit, missile force regiments and a number of other subdivision units," Egorov said.

The exercises will include more than 20 tasks and will also train with the Emergencies Ministry's troops, as well as with Internal Ministry and Federal Security Service forces.

"There will be no less than four of these kinds of drills during 2015," Egorov added.

The drills are being held at the Uzhursky Missile Unit in the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

Earlier in January, Egorov said that the Strategic Missile Forces plan to hold more than 100 exercises throughout the year. In late December 2014, Russian Armed Forces' Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov said that building up Russia's nuclear forces is one of the army's key tasks for 2015.

PacNet #4A - Cyber war, national security, and corporate responsibility

By Jongsoo Lee 

JAN 16, 2015 

The recent hacking of Sony Pictures, allegedly perpetrated by North Korea, and its aftermath may go down in history as the dawn of “cyber 9/11.” This event raises important issues about the tension between free speech, national security, and corporate responsibility in the new era of cyber warfare.

What was disturbing about the way this incident unfolded was how Sony’s provocation of North Korea with the planned release of a movie forced the US president to weigh in on a private company’s business decisions and, in the process, metastasized into a potentially dangerous confrontation between the United States and an assertive nuclear power under an unpredictable tyrant.

In a free-market society, a company’s right to pursue profit-generating business and exercise its freedom of speech is not in dispute. While some may object to a film featuring the assassination of the sitting head of state, Sony had the right to produce such a film. That does not necessarily mean that Sony’s action was in the best interests of US national security. Although many in the US satirize Kim Jong Un, North Korea is a nuclear power with a significant and growing cyberattack capability. Pyongyang has been developing nuclear-tipped ICBMs and SLBMs that will one day reach the US mainland and, according to some analysts, already possesses the ability to launch an EMP attack that can paralyze the US national power grid.

In provoking Pyongyang, a fiercely nationalistic regime centered on the worship of the Kim dynasty that is paranoid about a US attempt to force a regime change, Sony risked inviting a North Korean reprisal without shoring up its own sloppy cyber security, which had made it the victim of past hacking attacks. In the resulting fallout, for which Sony was unprepared, the US as a nation was dragged into a potentially open-ended cyber war against Pyongyang when Obama vowed to retaliate. Unfortunately, by this time, the US as a nation had already suffered a setback, given the unprecedented damage done to a major US company, as well as the decision by Sony and the biggest US theatre chains to cancel the film’s showings – a decision made without consulting the US government and which was seen as capitulation to foreign cyber terror and blackmail.

A Brief Glimpse At The Use Of Robotics In Warfare

James Clark

January 22, 2015

Every year it seems like more and more of what we once considered science fiction is giving way to reality. The Navy is developing rail guns, and nobody bats an eye at unmanned aerial vehicles. Governments even userobots for rescue operations. As we near a time when robotics may become commonplace in the military and civil services, let’s take a look at some of the technologies.

Photo by Staff Sgt. Tony R. Tolley. The “Sally B” B-17 Flying Fortress bomber aircraft flies overhead during the Memorial Day ceremony held at the Madingley American Cemetery near the city of Cambridge, England, in honor of the World War II fallen, May 31, 2004.Operation Aphrodite: An early attempt at aerial drone technology during World War II, Operation Aphrodite was a U.S. military operation and a catastrophic failure. The plan called for stripping down B-17-flying fortresses and loading them to the brim with explosives, at which point, a skeleton crew would take off, because the radio-controlled system wasn’t sophisticated enough to do it on its own. After the crew reached a safe altitude, they would jettison the plane, and an aircraft trailing behind would remotely fly the bomber into an enemy position, like some bloated pigeon with a suicide vest and a death wish.

6 Threats, 6 Changes, & A Brave New World: Intel Chief Vickers

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. 

January 21, 2015

Source Link

WASHINGTON: There’s no one thing that keeps the Pentagon’s chief of intelligence up at night. There’s half-a-dozen things — terrorism, cybersecurity, Iran, North Korea, Russia, andChina — but Mike Vickers has a six-point plan to counter them.

“The big challenge we face is really in the aggregation of challenges,” the under secretary for intelligence said this morning at the Atlantic Council. “It’s not that any one challenge is so daunting, it’s that there’s six of them. [They] are diverse, they’re all significant, they’re likely to be enduring.”

“Unlike the Cold War, when we had one big enduring threat and then a series of episodic threats, we have several that are likely to be enduring now,” Vickers added, “[and] all of them over the past few years have gotten worse.”

A Sense of Siege: The Senate & Yemen

“As Zbigniew Brzezinski and others have noted, we’re in a time of unprecedented instability in international system,” Vickers said.

That sense of siege is certainly shared. Just this morning, Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was the inaugural hearing of new chairman John McCain, who greeted the two elder statesman with sobering words.

What the Cyber Language in the State of the Union Means to You

Source Link

On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama appeared before the American people and again acknowledged digital data theft and data destruction as one of the most important issues facing the nation. “No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets, or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids. We are making sure our government integrates intelligence to combat cyber threats, just as we have done to combat terrorism. And tonight, I urge this Congress to finally pass the legislation we need to better meet the evolving threat of cyber-attacks, combat identity theft, and protect our children’s information.”

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Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist, where he served for nine years. Tucker's writing on emerging technology ... Full Bio

It was a rallying cry for greater “cyber security.” But according to many security experts, “security” and the specific cyber-security proposal the president unveiled last week could be a pretext for expanded, unchecked surveillance that may not actually make the nation safer. The ideas in the proposal face no strong political resistance especially since the information collection organism would not be the government itself but rather private companies reporting user information to the government.

The Post-Snowden Era

What prompted the inclusion of cyber security in the address? The president has been restrained in his discussions of what some consider to be the most significant cyber attack on aU.S. entity in recent memory, the Sony hack. (Sony Pictures is a sub unit of Sony America and is still ultimately part of the Sony parent company, which is Japanese.) Obama called the hack an act of “cyber vandalism” not tantamount to war. 

But in the days leading up to the State of the Union address, the Obama administration released a cyber securityproposal, which will be sent to Congress, that speaks directly to the Sony incident. The key component of the proposal is, indeed, “integration.” Specifically, it affords private companies liability protection to share information with the Homeland Security Department’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.

Hackers Don't Need Wi-Fi to Steal Your Data

ERIC NIILER

Source link

Your laptop or smartphone may be leaking electronic emissions that contain your password or other private data, even when it’s not connected to the Internet, according to two groups of researchers.

The vulnerability could make it possible for a hacker to obtain information from your device just by sitting next to you at a coffee shop.

The researchers are tracing leaks of electromagnetic radiation that are byproducts of various electronic components of computer hardware, including computer processors and capacitors.

Passwords are sooo 1995. With today's technology there are some seriously wicked new ways to secure your life.

Some of the signals are created when you type at the keyboard and can be picked up with the right kind of electronic eavesdropping equipment.

In their recent study, the Georgia Tech researchers developed a way to measure the strength of the emissions and offer ways for hardware and software designers to plug those electronic holes.

So far, these kinds of leaks are not overly exploited by hackers.

“If you are comparing this to Internet attacks, it is less of a problem,” said Alenka Zajic, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“But they are very hard to detect. With any sort of Internet attack, you will find the attacker. With this one you just need to be close by and there’s no way to know who took your data.”

Zajic and her colleagues say they were able to pick up keystroke information from laptops using just an AM radio and a cellphone. “You could probably hide it under the desk,” Zajic said. “It’s just a matter of motivation.”

These side-channel emissions can also be measured from hidden antennas in a briefcase, while acoustic emissions from the device’s electronic capacitors, can be picked up by tiny microphones.

"Active Defense - in Cyberspace, too"

Amir Rapaport, Gaithersburg 

21/1/2015

http://www.israeldefense.com/?CategoryID=483&ArticleID=3320

Exclusive: Amir Rapaport visited the cyber warfare operations center of the Lockheed Martin Corporation in Maryland and spoke with the chief cyber analyst of the giant corporation about cyber defense in the new era

The first thing that catches the eye, once the appropriate passwords have been entered and the large metal doors at the entrance to Lockheed Martin’s cyber warfare operations center have opened, is the massive array of display screens mounted on the walls. 

The screens display an endless sequence of green code lines, in a never-ending cybernetic motion. 

Only after a few long seconds of initial wonder, one begins to note the other details: the operations center is arranged as a single, endless open space. Dozens of cyber warfare specialists, both “good guys” and “bad guys” fill the space, along with figures that represent the “bad guys” in the cybernetic war: large, fully dressed dummies, just like comic book characters. The screens constantly display examples of deceptions and information about particularly threatening malwares. 

The operations center, located at Lockheed Martin’s IT HQ in Gaithersburg, Maryland, is very close to the Capital, Washington DC. From here, Lockheed Martin defends itself, first and foremost. A similar operations center operates in Denver, Colorado. 

According to various reports, Lockheed Martin is one of the prime targets for cyber warfare attacks from all around the world. In the last decade, Chinese hackers stole blueprints associated with the development of the F-35 future fighter from the Company. Today, Lockheed Martin is a major supplier of integrated cyber warfare solutions. 

The rare visit to Lockheed Martin’s cyber operations center was held in late 2014 with Eric Hutchins, the analyst who heads the cyber defense effort of the giant corporation, considered the largest IT company in the US defense and government sector and one of the largest global corporations with operations in Israel. 

According to Eric Hutchins, the cybernetic world has changed dramatically in recent years. Cyber defense is no longer what it used to be. It has become much more active, in view of the threats that continue to develop. 

Is Cyber-Terrorism the New Normal?

BY DAN HOLDEN, ASERT 

01.21.15 

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/is-cyber-terrorism-the-new-normal/

With recent news stories involving serious attacks on Sony and its PlayStation Network, Microsoft’s Xbox Live network, alongside other high profile attacks on the Tor project and North Korea’s Websites, has cyber-terrorism become a very real and dangerous reality for enterprises to battle alongside other threats? 

Let’s start from the beginning. What is the difference between cyber-terrorism, vandalism, or even war? Looking back to the 90s and early 2000s, websites were commonly defaced just to satisfy an attacker’s ego. Just like graffiti, this is a great example of vandalism. A more recent example of this sort of attack was the recent defacement of the U.S. Central Command’s Twitter page – a textbook example of vandalism. 

If you consider malware like Stuxnet discovered in June 2010 and nicknamed the “world’s first digital weapon” things change drastically. Stuxnet had moved beyond the virtual world and was capable of causing physical destruction to computer equipment and possible large-scale destruction – or cyber-war. However, cyber-terrorism seems to have found a different niche where the destruction or disruption of service isn’t a military or state target, but that of a commercial entity or service – the businesses, services, or information that you and I often times depend upon. 

Snowden on Cyberwar: America Is Its Own Worst Enemy

BY LAUREN WALKER 

1/21/15

http://www.newsweek.com/snowden-cyber-war-america-its-own-worst-enemy-301175 

After a year punctuated by hacks and data breaches, most notably a cyberattack against Sony, President Barack Obama used part of his State of the Union address on Tuesday to mention the growing threat to cybersecurity. “No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids,” he said.

The president’s speech came a week after the White House outlined acybersecurity policy proposal that calls for more information sharing between the private sector and government, an increase in penalties for hacking and an update in the standards for when companies have to report that their customers’ data has been compromised.

Yet in a recent interview on PBS’s Nova, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked a large number of classified documents about government surveillance, argued that one of the biggest threats to American cybersecurity may actually be ourselves.

“When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future,” Snowden said, “we’re going to know that that’s a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.”

In the interview, Snowden argued that Stuxnet, a digital virus that the U.S. and Israel allegedly used to attack Iran’s nuclear program in 2007, was a tipping point in the history of cyberconflict and led to a proliferation of attacks. “I think the public still isn’t aware of the frequency with which these cyberattacks, as they’re being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world,” he said. “We really started this trend in many ways.”

It’s impossible to know how many cyberattacks have been carried out by or against the U.S. But the numbers appear to be rising. In 2013, U.S. military and federal government computers were invaded 46,605 times, up from 26,942 in 2009, according to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Underscoring Snowden’s point: Der Spiegel released a trove of documentsearlier this week, which revealed that the NSA broke into North Korea’s computer network in 2010, out of fear of the country’s growing cybercapabilities. That’s why the FBI was quick to accuse North Korea of carrying out the Sony hack, which eventually led to the leak of sensitive internal documents and partially canceled the release of The Interview.

​‘International cyber warfare is becoming more sophisticated’

January 21, 2015

http://rt.com/op-edge/224823-cyber-war-obama-speech-leaks/

U.S. President Barack Obama (C) delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, January 20, 2015. (Reuters / Mandel Ngan)

Cyber warfare has developed into a more sophisticated type of combat between countries, where you can destroy communications infrastructure, said Marc Rogers, Head of Security for DefCon, adding that ordinary people become pawns in these games.

US President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union Address this Tuesday in which one of the main issues discussed was US cyber-security policy. In June 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked several documents, according to which the US and its allies had been attempting to expand their influence in the digital world. In the wake of the leaks, Obama urged Congress to pass legislation to “meet the evolving threat of cyber-attacks.”

RT: Snowden's new leaks show that the US military is preparing for a new area of battle - Cyber warfare. Could you tells us in detail how it is planning to combat potential enemies?

Marc Rogers: I don’t think there is anything that new here. Cyber war is something that has been going on for some time. It just is becoming more sophisticated. Traditionally cyber war was essentially blocking the communications channels of other countries. So if you are preparing to invade someone you then flood their networks, flood their telephone systems, flood their data and cripple their ability to communicate.

CRUSHING THE US ENERGY EXPORT DREAM – OPED

By Arthur Berman

JANUARY 22, 2015

Exporting crude oil and natural gas from the United States are among the dumbest energy ideas of all time.

Exporting gas is dumb.

Exporting oil is dumber.

The U.S. imports almost half of the crude oil that we use. We import 7.5 million barrels per day. The chart below shows the EIA prediction that production will slowly fall and imports will rise (AEO 2014) after 2016.

This means that the U.S. will never be self-sufficient in oil. Not even close.

To Endure and Prevail

By Kristen Rouse

https://medium.com/@WordsAfterWar/to-endure-and-prevail-3748b060d8a2

When I returned in early 2007 from my first deployment to Afghanistan, I found myself teaching a college English composition and literature course at the Fort Drum education center. I’d taught a class there before — I was one of those odd (although not totally rare) birds who enlisted in the active duty Army with a master’s degree in hand and experience teaching college English. I was a supply sergeant by day, English instructor by night. (Also worth noting: in my Army day job, I wrote really great emails.) Teaching on base was a welcome relief from Army life because I could talk about literature and feel relaxed with a room full of students, free of the demands, rank structure, and other pressures that came with wearing the uniform. It seemed like an accident of good luck to get an email at the end of my deployment asking if I could pick up teaching a course upon returning home because another instructor had dropped out at the last minute. It would be a perfect way, I thought, to spend my last few months at Fort Drum, waiting to transition back to civilian life.

I started teaching less than a month after returning from Afghanistan. I had students who had also just returned from Afghanistan, or who’d been working at Fort Drum to support units those of us who’d been deployed. Others were spouses and family members of soldiers just returned or still deployed. War was fresh and urgent for all of us, and as I perused the curriculum, it almost jumped off the page at me — so many of the works we looked at were in some way touched by the aftermath of war or some other pivotal social conflict. So I opted to make this an entry point for our discussions. How did the stress of awaiting an impending attack of the Turkish navy impact Othello’s judgment as a military leader, or as a jealous husband? How did Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” measure against the experiences of the soldiers in class who’d just been in Afghanistan? Did it make any difference that the setting of “The Masque of the Red Death” seemed modeled on the casemate at Fort Monroe where Edgar Allan Poe was stationed as a soldier in the 1820s? How did Stanley’s military background factor into his characterization as a strong, self-made man in A Streetcar Named Desire? How did the conflicts surrounding the legacies of slavery, Civil War, and civil struggle in the South play out in the stories of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston?

I’d started with the thought that focusing on war would make the literature more relevant to the lives of my students. What I soon started noticing was that we were actually looking at how literature made war and civil conflict more relevant to society as a whole.

IT'S TOO HARD TO DISCIPLINE OR REMOVE POOR-PERFORMING FEDERAL EMPLOYEES, CRITICS SAY. BUT WILL THE SYSTEM EVER CHANGE?

BY ERIC KATZ

Sharen Greene serves as a taxpayer advocate at the Internal Revenue Service. Nowhere in her job description is the word “baby sitter.”

But that’s exactly what Greene, a career civil servant in Albany, New York, wound up doing when an employee with a drinking problem was unloaded on her office. “Every single day I had to escort him out of the building for being inebriated,” Greene says. “It was evident. It was obvious.”

Agency managers never dealt with the employee. In Greene’s estimation, they determined it was easier to, quite literally, push the problem to the corner. Greene’s horror story is an extreme example of the way many people perceive the federal government: It is nearly impossible to remove an entrenched, poorly performing or even malfeasant federal employee. The red tape is too thick to penetrate. The bureaucracy protects itself.

Even the Office of Personnel Management, the federal agency charged with creating and enforcing governmentwide human resources policy, concedes there is a pervasive sense that firing a fed is difficult. “The procedures for terminating employees are perceived as a lengthy process,” says Tim Curry, OPM’s deputy associate director for partnership and labor relations.

I believe it was easier for managers to move individuals into other positions than it was to discipline them or fire them.REP. JEFF MILLER, R-FLA.

Undoubtedly, there are major hurdles to removing an employee from federal service; federal workers are guaranteed levels of due process not typically provided to employees in the private sector. Whether that’s a problem is the subject of a lengthy and nuanced debate, but the mere perception that incompetent federal employees operate with impunity creates fractures that divide agencies from their workforces, the legislative branch from the executive branch, managers from their employees and the American people from their government.

“Whether or not it is a fair statement,” says Dan Blair, president and CEO of the congressionally chartered National Academy of Public Administration, “it becomes reality.”

I Hate Fridays Ten Maxims to Be All You Can Be

https://medium.com/@Doctrine_Man/i-hate-fridays-3a773e84edcc

I hate Fridays with a passion. At the end of a long week, I’m usually left with an overflowing email inbox, the product of meetings, sidebar conversations, and a well-developed habit of leading by interacting with people face-to-face. All of the crises of the previous four days seem to reach a crescendo sometime between 1600 and 1800 on Friday. Serious Incident Reports, last-minute taskers, and other life-draining events all occur after 1600 on Friday. Like clockwork.

So, it was late on a Friday afternoon, the inbox was overflowing, and an agitated officer stood outside the doorway to my office. I had more work than I could possibly complete in the remaining hours of the day, and I knew from repeated, painful experience that the individual now pacing outside my door would occupy at least the next 60 minutes, if not more. I pushed my keyboard drawer under the desk and let out an exasperated sigh. “Come on in,” I said, as little piece of my soul died.

Ninety minutes later, the officer walked out of my office. My inbox was even fuller than it had been. I was hungry, tired, and more than a little irritated. I pulled the keyboard drawer back out from under my desk, opened Microsoft Word and started typing. I pounded out ninety minutes of frustration in relatively short order, and the bones of this post began to take shape.