"We need to put more pressure on social media," Bay says, "to address these vulnerabilities that can be used for the detriment of national security for individuals and for society as a whole."

A5. Not too late to add a little @TowCenter #stealthis #security action to your best practices this year #DFMchat

As I noted earlier, most journalists do not understand technology. Having an iPhone does not mean you know how it works – not in a way that the programmer who built it does. Relying on something you don’t understand to protect your sources is a big risk.

Herein lies the difference between a ‘‘technology activist’’ and ‘‘an activist who uses technology’’ – the former prioritizes tools that are safe for their users; the latter prioritizes tools that accomplish some activist goal. The trick for technology activists is to help activists who use technology to appreciate the hidden risks and help them find or make better tools. That is, to be pessimists and optimists: without expert collaboration, activists might put themselves at risk with poor technology choices; with collaboration, activists can use technology to outmaneuver autocrats, totalitarians, and thugs.

EFF will be working with other organizations to launch an Open Wireless Movement in the near future. In the mean time, we're keen to hear from technologists with wireless expertise who would like to help us work on the protocol engineering tasks that are needed to make network sharing easier from a privacy and bandwidth-sharing perspective. You can write to us at openwireless@eff.org.

Today in my undergraduate security class, we set up a sniffer so we could run Wireshark and Mallory to listen in on my Android smartphone. This blog piece summarizes what we found.

While smartphones have been heralded as the coming of the next generation of communication and collaboration, they are a step backwards when it comes to personal security, anonymity and privacy.

The Guardian Project aims to create easy to use apps, open-source firmware MODs, and customized, commercial mobile phones that can be used and deployed around the world, by any person looking to protect their communications from unjust intrusion.

Responsible disclosure would normally prevent me from publishing the advisory while there is a chance the users will get a fix in a reasonable time frame. However, despite the speed at which Google has worked to develop a patch I don’t believe this can happen. The reason is that Android OS updates usually rely on OEMs and carriers to provide an update for their devices. Not all OEMs are providing Android OS updates to all of their devices, and the ones that are we have seen are not always doing it in a timely fashion. There may be legitimate reasons for this but the bottom line is there will still be a great deal of devices exposed for quite some time or perhaps forever, including my own.

Better that we know now and have the chance to protect ourselves, or at least understand the risk. I don’t expect to see the exploitation of this issue become widespread, but if you are really worried about it there are a few things you can do to identify it or prevent it [...]

To be clear, I don’t have old-fashioned notions about privacy on the Internet. I know the realities of today’s Internet life. In order to enjoy the convenience of using web-based services, one has to make some sacrifices, and living socially online will eventually lead to an erosion of privacy. However, what I find egregious is how the information is surreptitiously collected all over the web, then aggregated to be sold, without us having any control or ability to look into that data. Sure we can opt out, but only if we know that we’re being profiled. (Ironically, you have to register to opt-out.)

"[...] The products, called Axon and Protector, intend to take electronic surveillance to confounding new heights. Axon is a camera mounted on a cop's radio earpiece that can record video of all interactions with suspects and store them indefinitely on a database called Evidence.com. Protector is Big Brother on a BlackBerry, an overprotective parent's digital dream come true: a twenty-four-hour surveillance program that allows adults to monitor and control kids' cell phones, driving, and whereabouts. Both products promise safety at some expense to privacy and civil liberties. [...]"

Don't despair. For every dirty little secret revealed herein, we describe a fix or a way to work around it (if any exists). You don't have to be a victim, if you know what to do.

Just remember: You've been warned.

Nonviolent resistance movements are typically driven by students, i.e., young people, who are increasingly born digital natives. With expanding access to mobile phones, social networking software and online platforms for user-generated content such as blogs, the immediate financial cost of speaking out against repressive regimes is virtually nil. So resistance movements are likely to make even more use of new communication technology and digital media in the future. In fact, they already are.

At the same time, however, the likelihood and consequences of getting caught are high, especially for those political activists without any background or training in digital security. Indeed, recent research by Digital Democracy research suggests that organizational hierarchies are being broken down as youth adopt new technologies. While this empowers them they are also put at risk since they don’t tend to be as consequence-conscious as their adult counterparts.

"[I]nnovation is now the only path to growth, prosperity, environmental sustainability and national security for America. But it is also an incredibly competitive world. Many information industries require that products be improved by 100 percent every 12 to 36 months, just for the company to stay in business."

"[...] This spring, [New Delhi] also installed cameras at 59 stops along its subway line. So far, concerns about privacy have been muted, likely because so much of the city remains outside of CCTV’s watchful eye – a far cry from London’s roughly 1,800 cameras, monitoring virtually every inch of public space. But there have been concerns about how surveillance footage will be used. The surveillance industry does not fall under any government legislation. [...]"

"I believe people in the future will (sic) weild unimaginable tools of forensic transparency — and they'll aim them back at history. They'll find out about what every major player did all the way back with tools we can't imagine today. There will be no

"I don't think you can expose yourself to 10,000 people a day and not get hurt on a regular basis."

"The real cultural dividing line on this continent is not the Canadian border, but the Ohio River. America's Northern states would fit more amicably into a union with Ontario and Nova Scotia than the one with Arizona and Texas."

AFAIK, the most trouble I've gotten from owning notherethere.com has been a few fake M_S___e IDs

"Option 1: Learn not to care about your data. Don't save any old email, use a film camera, and only listen to physical CDs and not MP3s. If you have no posessions, you have nothing to lose."

"I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."

"Preservation of the global public sphere, individual civil liberties at home and the safety of dissidents in totalitarian regimes are now inextricably linked. It's not an easy knot to untangle, but we must try."

"The special relationships the United States nurtured with countries like Venezuela and the security guarantees offered to Saudi Arabia have lost their appeal; and the threats, which include sanctions and military intervention, have lost their effect.”

*looks at watch* That was fast.

Lookin' at my watch and it's ... useful time.

... You know, just maybe ...

... If I stare at this long enough ...

... I might-could figure it out ...

... but then again, maybe not ...

Like I needed one more excuse to switch clients to Mozilla Thunderbird? OK, blogosphere, I get it!