Josh Wieder

This time the kneecap-breaker is Stewart Baker, former counsel general of the NSA and assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (currently counsel with Steptoe & Johnson LLP). Baker claims that Blackberry (AKA RIM) should blame its use of strong encryption for its poor market performance . Specifically: He claimed that by encrypting user data Blackberry had limited its business in countries that demand oversight of communication data, such as India and the UAE and got a bad reception in China and Russia. “They restricted their own ability to sell. We have a tendency to think that once the cyberwar is won in the US that that is the end of it - but that is the easiest war to swim.” Of course, Baker makes no mention of the iPhone snatching up corporate mobile market-share, or tiny changes in the phone market like, I dunno, the implementation of the Android OS. But who cares about little fish like that when the United Arab Emirates is at stake? Baker's s...

The Details This is a bit of an old story, but I've found to my unpleasant surprise that the issues surrounding the story are not widely understood or known. Here's the gist: leaks from the US intelligence service have explicilty confirmed that the NSA targets systems administrators that have no ties to terrorism or extremist politics . If you are responsible for building and maintaining networks, the NSA will place you under surveillance both personally or professionally; they will hack your email, social network accounts and cell phone. The thinking behind this alarming strategy is that compromising a sysadmin provides root-level access to systems that enable further surveillance; hack an extremist's computer, and you track just that extremist. Hack a sysadmin's computer, and you can track thousands of users who may include extremists among them (its a strategy that is remarkably similar to the targeting of doctors in war zones ). Five years ago such a lead paragr...

Fast Company - The Vatican has selected EMC to source roughly 2.8 Petabytes of storage for a project to digitize the Vatican library, home to over 1 million books. Business Week - Skype service in China is actively monitored for certain key phrases that are offensive to the state. When a user inputs these phrases, the conversation is forwarded to Chinese intelligence. Skype is currently owned by Microsoft, and in China is partnered with TOM Online to provide service in the region (like India, China requires foreign entities to be minority stake holders with a domestic corporation in order to do business). Microsoft has not responded to requests to clarify the surveillance features in Skype beyond saying that they adhere to Chinese law when operating there. No word yet on whether American users are monitored as well (at this point, I would be more shocked if they were not) - the Chinese program bears striking similarity to the NSA program that became public shortly after 9/11, ...