Sleepless in Midland

Theory of Belief Echoes explains why anti-Trump forces are so quick to spread fake news

The most recent publication of "fake news" was debunked so quickly it was all over before many of us had heard the first account. This particular fake news involved alleged sleazy behavior on behalf of Donald Trump. See Hours Before Trump's Press Conference CNN And BuzzFeed Hit 'Fake News' Bottom and Buzzfeed’s Trump report takes ‘fake news’ to a new level for rebuttals.

If Buzzfeed editors knew it was fake, or at least questionable, why did they publish it?

Here's a possible explanation -- they knew and took advantage of the theory of "Belief Echoes." The theory is described in Belief echoes: The persistent effects of corrected misinformation. Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

However, through a series of experiments, I find that exposure to a piece of negative political information persists in shaping attitudes even after the information has been successfully discredited. A correction—even when it is fully believed—does not eliminate the effects of misinformation on attitudes. These lingering attitudinal effects, which I call "belief echoes," are created even when the misinformation is corrected immediately, arguably the gold standard of journalistic fact-checking.

In other words, fake news can shape attitudes even after it's been proven fake. No wonder some partisans are so eager to publish it.

More cold water on the Russia hacking story

Yesterday on these pages we noted that cyber expert John McAfee cast some serious doubt on the reports that Russia was involved in hacking the U.S. election. He's got some company.

Bloomberg.com has this: U.S. Intelligence Got the Wrong Cyber Bear in which Leonid Bershidsky comes just shy of calling the claims "fake news."

As part of his support of the theory he cites wordfence.com which contains this article, Election Hack Report FAQ: What You Need to Know which contains, among other things, this brief but conclusive summary:

Does the report prove that Russia Hacked the 2016 US Election?

No it does not. What Wordfence revealed on Friday is that the PHP malware sample that the US government provided is:

-An old version of malware. The sample was version 3.1.0 and the current version is 3.1.7 with 4.1.1 beta also available.
-Freely available to anyone who wants it.
-The authors claim they are Ukrainian, not Russian.
-The malware is an administrative tool used by hackers to upload files, view files on a hacked website, download database contents and so on. It is used as one step in a series of steps that would occur during an attack.

Wordfence also analyzed the IP addresses available and demonstrated that they are in 61 countries, belong to over 380 organizations and many of those organizations are well known website hosting providers from where many attacks originate. There is nothing in the IP data that points to Russia specifically.

In other words, it could have been the Russians. Or maybe not. The available evidence is inconclusive.

BTW, does anyone notice the similarity between the claims about intelligence agency consensus in the hacking case and claims of scientific community consensus on global warming? If the msm had been more responsible during the 2016 campaign and the warnings about global warning their customers might be less suspicious of their reports.

John McAfee throws cold water on theory that Russia was responsible for hacking

To believe the Obama administration's claim that Russia hacked certain individuals and institutions in order to influence the election one would have to believe that Russia wanted to get caught.

Security expert John McAfee made some cogent points in 'It's a FALLACY' John McAfee shuts down 'manipulative' FBI claims of Russian hacking. Here's the meat:

“When the FBI or when any other agency says the Russians did it or the Chinese did something or the Iranians did something – that's a fallacy,” said McAfee.

“Any hacker capable of breaking into something is extraordinarily capable of hiding their tracks. If I were the Chinese and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it I would use Russian language within the code.

He makes it sound so easy. But he's probably right. However, that doesn't rule out the possibility that Russia really did do it and wanted everyone to know it. It's entirely possible Putin orchestrated the hacks not to influence the election but to demonstrate how capable Russia is and how weak and ineffectual the U.S. is. In that case, mission accomplished.

Dems want to blame Putin but it was so easy there had to be others who pilfered their data

The common refrain among Democrat pundits these days is that Russia hacked Hillary Clinton and the DNC for the purpose of helping Trump win the election. There are a lot of problems with that narrative. One of the main ones is that Putin would have been better off keeping the information secret for use against Hillary Clinton for Russia's advantage if she won. Furthermore, Russia would benefit from a U.S. president who opposed fossil fuel production.

But here's another issue. It seems that the Hillary's server and DNC's computers were easy to hack. And Podesta was such a novice any half witted trickster could have gotten him to divulge his password at a fake site.

So here's a theory. There was a lot of hacking going on because Hillary, the DNC, and John Podesta made is so easy for them. There must have been several entities and individuals who did it. The next two questions are who passed the information to Wikileaks and why.

It could have been the Russians. But Democrat pundits who grab onto that and say the intent was to get Trump elected need to produce some evidence of the actual intent.

After all, the one thing we learned from the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton is that intent is paramount.

Edward Snowden is a hero, a traitor, and a master politician

"A good narrative is better than evidence." Johnnie Cochran didn't coin the phrase, but he probably gave it more exposure than any others before.

Cochran was on the O.J. Simpson dream team of defense lawyers that got their client off. The narrative was indeed better than evidence, at least for that jury.

Edward Snowden is applying the principle to his own situation. A friend announced that the movie "Snowden" was a must see. I declined. Seems to me to be a propaganda film to aid his effort to get a free pardon from President Obama. Will it work?

Well, Snowden is three things:

1. A hero for exposing the government's spying on citizens;

2. A traitor for stealing so many classified documents and potentially exposing them to enemies of the U.S. and

3. A master politician for convincing so many people that the hero part should outweigh the traitor part.

My movie going friend said I just needed to see the movie. Apparently, it's that persuasive. However, I prefer not to pay to be persuaded.

There was a discussion on NPR shortly after the movie premiered. And individuals argued both sides of the subject. The conclusion I came away with was that there is no proof that Snowden shared the purloined material with Russia or China.

"No proof" is not the same as "Innocent." But like the O.J. verdict, it's good enough.

Snowden needs to face trial here in the U.S. If he's innocent, or if indeed there is no proof, his high powered supporters would be trying to encourage his return.

Meanwhile, for all the spying the U.S. is supposed to be doing on citizens, the recent terrorist operations in the U.S. suggest it isn't doing much good. Americans might be more tolerant of said spying it it appeared to be doing some good and the agencies themselves weren't so susceptible to being spied on.

Sometimes this old fashioned notion of fairness shouldn't apply -- yeah I'm talking about Iran

We keep hearing this talk about that $400 million in cash that was sneaked into Iran, probably to secure the release of four hostages. But the pretense by the Obama administration was that the money belonged to Iran anyway, and the U.S.A. was merely returning it.

But what exactly does Iran's ownership claim have to do with it? When you are dealing with bullies who (1) don't respect us and (2) don't respect the law, why do we shackle ourselves with the same rules that would we would apply to those who do respect us and the law?

It's the rule of the playground: If a bully doesn't respect the rules of decency, then all rules are off.

Here's another one: Possession is nine tenths of the game. Give it away, and you've given the game away.

If that's what the KGB released on Hillary, is that their best shot?

The Wikileaks disclosure of the DNC emails is telling. Krauthammer says on FOX news this is the kind of intrusion into local politics that Russia does in the countries the West doesn't care about. Yet here it is in the USA. That's scary enough.

But if they're playing the email card against Hillary now. Are they telling us that's the best they can do considering what they must have purloined from that infamous private server?

Most of us thought they would hold the best stuff back until Hillary got elected then use it to blackmail her. That seems to be wrong. Those KGB guys are smart. So there has to be something they think would serve them better with a Trump administration.

Krauthammer thinks it's the diminution and possible dissolution of NATO. Boy. This international intrigue is so much more entertaining when it's a trained CIA agent up there on the TV screen wrecking havoc all over the Russian empire.  Instead we've got a sloppy former Secretary of State more concerned with FOIA than the KGB.

Two simple sentences sum up Hillary Clinton's email problem

There are a few people with the verbal skill to explain complex subjects in concise, easy to understand, explanations. Glenn Reynolds has that skill. And here's an example as he explains what Hillary Clinton did in two simple sentences:

She wanted to maintain FOIA immunity by ensuring that her emails were never in the custody of the State Department. She did that by breaking the law on handling classified information, and by making high-level secrets readily available to our enemies.

The motive, the act, and the result -- the whole story summed up in two sentences. Impressive.

"The Americans" doing a good job of not whitewashing the ruskies -- the honey trap catches its prey

This week's episode of "The Americans" was sobering. Scenes in the episode titled, The Day After, from the made for TV movie "The Day After" brought back memories of how startling that movie was at the time, and some of the characters in "The Americans" did fret about nuclear annihilation. However, that was not the highlight of the episode, because the character Elizabeth took some giant strides toward earning the Cruella De Vil award for on screen villainy, small screen category.

The scenes in which Elizabeth pulled a honey trap on Don, the devoted husband and father in a Korean-American family, were very distressing. Elizabeth had been playing up to Don's wife for several episodes, but it appears as though Don was the target all along. Elizabeth was getting nowhere with the wife, so she tricked Don into giving her a ride home. Then once home, she persuaded him to come in and move a chest for her.

Then, oh, while you're here, sample this expensive wine and tell me what you think. In went the mysterious, apparently tasteless, little pill. After drinking a glass, poor Don was unconscious on the floor.

Elizabeth put him in the bed, stripped him naked, stripped herself, crawled in bed next to him, lubed his penis, and waited for him to awaken.

What a shock for him to wake up nude next to a nude female who was supposed to be his wife's friend.

We don't know whether Elizabeth is going to work him for spy stuff in future episodes or whether that's all we'll see of him. But it certainly was a good demo of what must have happened to a lot of otherwise innocent Americans who ended up providing information to the Russians during the cold war.

No doubt spies from every regime are still working that technique with good effect these days. Maybe our own spies do it.

In any event, "The Americans" often makes the main characters sympathetic even though they are Russian spies. But they killed enough people and betrayed enough trust to dispel any notion that they are really just nice people with rotten jobs. They're bad. But, it's just a TV show, and often villains can exhibit the most interesting behavior.

So what did we learn from this? Beware the honey trap.

Does anyone doubt that the Chinese have a way to decrypt iPhones

Customers in China probably make up a fairly large percentage of iPhone purchasers. So when Tim Cook preaches to the American audience about Apple's responsibility to protect information on iPhones, one wonders if foreign customers get the same respect.

We all know how repressive regimes like to keep tabs on their citizens, and it seems likely that if a particular product prevented that, it would be banned. Or more likely, the producer would be required to modify it so that the government could spy on it.

Maybe this is simply paranoid speculation. But it makes perfect sense.

As does this: A third party claims to have found a way to unlock an encrypted iPhone. Imagine that.

The San Bernadino terrorist attack puts the lie to the claim that the expired surveillance law kept us safe

If the news reports are accurate, authorities knew very little, if anything, about the couple who shot up the county party room in San Bernadino. More likely, those two were somewhere in the files but buried under mountains of data about everyone else.

The NSA domestic surveillance program that recently expired didn't do anything to prevent it. The program's only obvious use so far is to put together histories after a crime. While that's helpful, it still doesn't justify the mass surveillance.

So maybe the president and others will stop whining about how law enforcement hands are tied by the requirement that they have to go to the FISA court for authority to get telephonic meta data.

Our enemies must hope that the entire U.S. bureaucracy is of the same caliber as OPM's Katherine Archuleta

She appears to have been appointed to her position not because of any skill she possessed but as a reward for helping Barack Obama get elected president.

Jim Geraghty reviews her qualifications, or lack thereof, in The OPM Hack and Obama’s Politicization of the Federal Bureacracy. Political appointments all the way, with heavy emphasis on diversity over skill.

She seemed unconcerned when Inspectors General pointed out security holes. And unfortunately for federal employees, and potentially everyone else, someone exploited those holes and made off with way too much private information about those employees.

Presently, there are concerns that bureaucrats will get blackmailed into doing something against the national interest. How exactly would that work? Maybe a foreign agent will threaten to tell a bureaucrat's spouse about some infidelity described in his/her confidential personnel file. Now here's where we need Justice Kennedy. He needs to intervene and explain to the cheated-on spouse how important marriage is like he did in the gay marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, and describe in poignant detail the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. There. Fixed that.

The nation's enemies probably like Ms. Archuleta. She's been good for them. And she'll be equally loyal to her new overlords once a foreign flag gets hoisted over the capital.

Your mother's maiden name sound funny HA HA -- Top ten mocking emails from China about stolen data trove -- satire alert

Sleepless in Midland's crack hacker was able to purloin some emails out of the dumpster behind a federal government building this morning. And she found emails from individuals in China to U.S. government employees which appeared to be mocking them over contents of their personnel files.

Top ten mocking Chinese emails:

"Password1 -- good password. Don't change it."

"Your mother's maiden name sound funny. HA HA!"

"Town where you got married. That nice place?"

"Must be relief they not call you "queer" anymore."

"Thanks for all the technology."

"You named your first pet that? Ha ha! You silly!"

"New weapon you're working on? That's old technology."

"You give us Pentagon password, we erase that sexual harassment charge."

"You be first one fired when we take over U.S. Don't worry, you get Obamaphone."

"You elect Barack Obama twice. You make it too easy."

Meanwhile, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that OPM Director Katherine Archuleta is just biding her time at that office. After all, she paid the advance fee and is currently waiting for millions of dollars from the late Nigerian Finance Minister's widow who emailed asking for her help investing in the U.S.

Obama: Yeah, we're gonna collect phone data 6 more months for good measure

All that talk about how security was at risk because the law authorizing collection of telephone meta data would expire now seems a bit hyperbolic.

Team Obama was ready. And according to theguardian.com, the administration filed a request with the FISA court to allow it to collect the phone data for six more months. The filing was made a mere four hours after Obama said he would sign the new legislation which would ban that practice. See Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court's decision on spying.

It makes one wonder what would happen if the FISA court rejected the request. Would the administration keep doing it anyway?

Polygraph -- The lie detector that doesn't detect lies

My first experience with a lie detector happened when I was about four or five years old. Some older kids in the hood built one. It looked like a ordinary cardboard box except that it had two holes in it, one covered by red cellophane and the other by green cellophane. If you told the truth, the green one would light up, but if you told a lie the red one would light up.

Questioner: Do you have a girl friend?
Me: No.
Lie detector: Red light.

Wait, what?

Turns out there was another kid inside the box with a flashlight. Doh!

The modern polygraph machine is a little bit more sophisticated, but it probably isn't that much better at distinguishing truth from fiction. There have been some famous cases of guilty people passing the poly. Spy Aldrich Ames, for example.

And no doubt there are many honest people who flunked it. Fortunately, the test results are generally not admissible in court.

The real value of the polygraph is if the test taker believes it will work. The technician tells the subject that the test says he/she lied. Faced with this scientific proof and a convincing technician, the test taker then confesses.

Oh, did I let the cat out of the bag? Nah. This is old stuff and came to us by way of thedailybeast.com in The Polygraph Has Been Lying for 80 Years.

P.S. This is barely related and didn't involve a polygraph. There's a very good talk on C-span in which Sandra Grimes talks about her book, "Circle of Treason" and her work in the CIA ferreting out the spy Aldrich Ames. It's a fascinating story, and her talk is worth a look and listen.

Maybe the Russians could give us Hillary's hard drive contents

This is another example of how easy it must be for determined hackers to get into a secure computer system. In this case, Russia is the suspect. CNN tells us about it in How the U.S. thinks Russians hacked the White House.

The FBI, Secret Service and U.S. intelligence agencies are all involved in investigating the breach, which they consider among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems. ​The intrusion was routed through computers around the world, as hackers often do to hide their tracks, but investigators found tell-tale codes and other markers that they believe point to hackers working for the Russian government. ...

To get to the White House, the hackers first broke into the State Department, investigators believe.

The State Department computer system has been bedeviled by signs that despite efforts to lock them out, the Russian hackers have been able to reenter the system. One official says the Russian hackers have "owned" the State Department system for months and it is not clear the hackers have been fully eradicated from the system.

As in many hacks, investigators believe the White House intrusion began with a phishing email that was launched using a State Department email account that the hackers had taken over, according to the U.S. officials.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in a speech at an FBI cyberconference in January, warned government officials and private businesses to teach employees what "spear phishing" looks like.

If the Russians have tapped into the State Department and the White House, why would they have stopped there? If Hillary Clinton was using the insecure private system we've been told about then penetrating it was probably easy.

In that case, the Russians could probably produce all those emails she deleted. Of course, expecting the Russians to cooperate with Republicans is nonsense. If they had anything on Hillary they would most certainly hold onto it for strategic use if she became president. And in the meantime, they'll be doing what they can to see that she does get elected.

The answer to why Obama got so huffy about Netanyahu's speech to Congress

Remember the open mic gaff Obama made to the Russians a while back when he wanted Putin to know that he would have more flexibility after the election? We learned from that that Obama was merely trying to sound tough for the U.S. audience, but he didn't really mean it.

Something similar was going on with the negotiations with Iran. William A. Jacobson relays a story from the subscription only part of wsj.com. Apparently, Obama had not come clean with the American public about what was going on behind closed door with the Iranians. Jacobson came to this conclusion:

Now it’s all making sense. The Israelis saw Obama acting deceptively, hiding negotiations that would affect Israel’s existence, and giving away the store to the Iranians.

Netanyahu saw no choice but to go to Congress both through the Israeli ambassador and the speech to Congress, knowing that it would harm Israel with the administration.

This was not something done for election purposes.

Jacobson provides some lengthy excerpts from the WSJ article. See them at Obama furious Israel found out Iran nuke deal secrets and told Congress.

Obama admin can't stop blabbing about its spying -- revealed how it knows North Korea hacked Sony

The Obama administration has been relentless in its attacks on leakers of information harmful to the administration.

But if something might make them look good, then strategic leaks put it all over the news. So we found out that the Stuxnet virus that hampered Iran's nuclear activity was a U.S. action. We found out the details of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Arguably, these things should have been keep close to the vest.

Here's another dirty little secret now public. We now know how the U.S. knew that North Korea hacked Sony's information system. See Why the US was so sure North Korea hacked Sony: it had a front-row seat. Excerpt:

According to the New York Times, a recently released top-secret document traces the NSA's infiltration back to 2010, when it piggybacked on South Korean "implants" on North Korea's networks and "sucked back the data". ...

Unidentified officials told the New York Times that the program snowballed, to the point that malware was placed to track the internal workings of many of the computers and networks used by North Korea's cyber forces: an army that South Korea’s military recently said has about 6,000 elite hackers.

But like a lot of surveillance, it didn't prevent anything, it just helped identify the culprits.

In any event, that particular avenue of information is now compromised. That leads us to speculate that either Obama administration desperately needed something to brag about, or they calculated that the elite North Korea hackers couldn't do anything worse than mess up Sony's computer system.

Retailers request customers' zip codes to get more info for their dossier on you

For a while I was answering "90210" when asked by store clerks for my zip code. The reactions ranged from laughs to scowls. Eventually I started providing the same zip code as the store.

If you are wondering why stores aren't so insistent about our zip codes these days it's because some class action lawyers in Boston have been suing retailers over this. There's a story about that at BostonGlobe.com. The link follows this excerpt:

In the past two years, at least 25 retailers have been sued for more than $100 million for requesting ZIP code information from Massachusetts customers. Most of the lawsuits have been settled or withdrawn, but the practice of asking customers for their postal codes — bits of information with a marketing value of perhaps 5 cents each — has cost retailers millions of dollars in settlements and attorneys’ fees.

Preston Leonard, a Boston lawyer who has filed class-action lawsuits against companies including J. Crew and Brooks Brothers for collecting customer ZIP codes, said that retailers don’t ask for postal codes to make sure the person swiping the card actually owns it. Instead, he said, they use the information to confirm shoppers’ addresses and then bombard them with junk mail.

“A lot of people think it’s required as a condition of completing the transaction, when it’s not required by the card companies,” Leonard said. “The idea just generally is to gather as much data about the consumer as possible.”

Here's the link: Mass. retailers ask for ZIP code, and lawsuits follow. But be forewarned that the site will tell you you can read five articles for free before you have to subscribe. Further, as with any other website, it will attempt to collect as much information about website visitors as it can.

What should we make of the news that a DOJ prosecutor wants an indictment against General Petreaus?

The alleged crime seems to be that some classified documents were found on his mistress's computer. She probably shouldn't have had them, so the question is, how did they get on her computer?

When the government lacks credibility anyway -- so much of what the Obama administration does is political -- it's hard to trust them on this.

We know that federal agents can put things on people's computers without the owner knowing about it. Ask Sharyl Attkisson about that. As for her take on Petraeus, she excerpts passages about him from her book here.

Meanwhile, another controversy is waiting to boil over within the Obama administration: a sex scandal involving the CIA’s Petraeus. The timing is—intriguing. Only after the Benghazi attacks, as Petraeus’s loyalty to the administration falls into question, does everything turn sour for the spy chief.

We should be learning more about the government's tampering with Attkisson's computer as her lawsuit proceeds.

FBI unimpressed with evidence North Korea didn't hack Sony

The FBI said on December 19 that the North Korean govenment hacked Sony:

As a result of our investigation, and in close collaboration with other U.S. government departments and agencies, the FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions.

Then on December 29th, Norse Corporation said this:

The investigators believe the disgruntled former employee or employees may have joined forces with pro-piracy hacktivists, who have long resented the Sony’s anti-piracy stance, to infiltrate the company’s networks. ...

Norse plans to fully brief the FBI on the current status of their investigation early this week, and says it is up to law enforcement to decide if there is enough evidence to pursue the individuals identified.

The disclosure casts further doubt on the FBI’s assertion that the attack was carried out by state-sponsored actors under the control of North Korea, a theory that has been all but discredited by a host of security professionals over the last week, including former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch.

Then on December 30 Politico said this:

After FBI agents were briefed yesterday, they concluded the security company offering the alternate theory did not have an accurate understanding of all the evidence, a U.S. official familiar with the matter told POLITICO today.

The three-hour meeting with FBI investigators yesterday by cyber intelligence firm Norse “did not improve the knowledge of the investigation,” according to the U.S. official.

So who is right? We still don't know. It would be nice to think the FBI is the top expert in this field. But that's not a given.

On the other hand, it is a given that the FBI has digital dossiers on all of us, so it's nice to think that they may actually use that to clear someone of wrong doing.

If Obama claims North Korea hacked Sony -- Obama's history tells us to be suspicious

It was only two years ago that the Obama administration made a major screw-up in Benghazi. Americans were killed, and Obama, et al., lied about it blaming a video. The videographer went to jail, Hillary Clinton said "what difference does it make," and the Obama administration did some major stonewalling which continues to this day.

So now Obama, et al., blame North Korea for hacking Sony over a different video. Why should we believe him? He has done nothing to rehabilitate his credibility.

Now we see this in Daily Mail: North Korea was NOT behind the Sony hack according to multiple security experts who discredit FBI findings and reveal that a studio insider named 'Lena' may be responsible.

It's such a shame that the President of the United States has become so untrustworthy. There was a time when he could tell a lie that people believed. Those days are gone.

Now the question on people's minds is why Obama blamed North Korea. There's an ulterior motive that's not apparent just now, but we're sure to learn it eventually.

Valerie Plame removes all doubt that the whole thing was partisan politics

In Outing Valerie Plame the New York Post reminded us how Valerie Plame, et ux., Joe Wilson, made such a big deal about how someone outed her as a CIA employee. It was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove who leaked that information. But that didn't come out until later, so their disinformation operation on the Bush administration was a success.

Now we learn from the article linked above that Valerie Plame "has happily retweeted" an article at Glenn Greenwald's site that names the CIA employee who allegedly participated in the enhanced interrogations of terrorist suspects and lied to Congress.

So Valerie Plame is an anti-Republican hypocrite. Not much news there for those who paid attention. But then there are the folks who saw Fair Game and believed it was a true story. They are the ones who elect presidents. What a shame that they can be so easily duped.

FBI drive-by malware makes it impossible to hide in the internet

Forum users and blog commenters can still remain anonymous to most of the other users. But some of the most serious tools of anonymity look to be easily pierced by determined governments.

After the Edward Snowden revelations about how the US government was spying on US citizens some of the tech gurus were advocating use of Tor to thwart the spies and skip around the internet anonymously.

However, Tor isn't such a good place to conceal one's internet usage after all. The FBI used some dubious tactics to dig out some purveyors of kiddie porn who were hiding in the Tor tunnel. See Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer. It's a good story.

The Netherlands police had a web crawler written which would collect every Tor address it could find in that portion of the web not revealed by the typical search engine. They found one in 2011 with an administrator account without a password and went to work on it to find the owners location. It was in Nebraska, and they turned it over to the FBI.

The FBI watched it for a year while developing malware which would find out who was visiting the site. In 2012 they arrested the operator and and installed drive-by downloads on his three servers. The downloads would infect each computer that visited the sites and reveal their IP addresses, hardware MAC addresses, a Windows host names. They obtained that information on at least 25 visitors to the site, some of whom are currently on trial.

Apparently, just visiting a kiddie porn site is illegal. That's a good reason to keep anyone else from using your computer, and pity the poor person who stumbled on one of those sites accidentally.

As for the FBI malware, apparently it wasn't a one time deal. And as with any new technological tool, there's plenty of opportunity for abuse. combine malware that provides an opportunity to spy on anyone regardless of their attempts to hide and an environment in which political opponents are singled by a government, and there's a problem that should worry us all.

You're not paranoid if you don't trust public Wi-Fi, but you're still weird because 3/4ths do

Naked Security tells us about a survey in which 77% of respondents expressed no concern for security when using public Wi-Fi. See Most people think public Wi-Fi is safe. Seriously?. It was the British Office of Communications study, but there's no reason to think Americans would be any different. (See page 322 of the report; 326 in PDF.)

Naked Security says:

It's a grievous error to trust Wi-Fi to the degree that these numbers reflect.

What's the harm? Well, companies, people and governments could be spying on you.

They provide some recommendations:

Don't automatically join a network based on its name.

Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Use a VPN.

Turn off geo-tagging for those services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that use it.

Do all of those. Also wear a belt and suspenders.

Those snooping cell phones - they're such busy bodies

Google and Apple know where you've been and how long you were there if you carry a phone with one of their operating systems. This is according to Psst! Your phone is snooping on you. What you need to know and how to stop it – video. (Via article of the same title at theguardian.com.)

Most users don't care, otherwise they'd opt out or use different phones. IPhone has a privacy feature which enables the user to refuse to give information to app providers. Unfortunately for Android users, those features are hard wired into the phone's operating system.

How long before NSA gets access to it? Oh wait. They already do.

There's a way to hide your data with a special phone pouch. How does it work? From Detraktor.com:

This is accomplished by having a conductive material encapsulate the device, card or passport. The conductive material acts as a Faraday Cage which shields all RF signals from going into or out of the device or card.

I assume there's a wire mesh inside the pouch. Meanwhile, I'll be making my own tin-foil-hat.

Editor's note: You know they haven't made tin foil in years, don't you? -- Robo-ed | Dammit, I smell a conspiracy! Sleepless.

Stealth technology to send unreadable emails through NSA radar

Some of us would like to think our emails are personal and private, like the old snail mail was. But that isn't the case. The big email providers in the U.S. like Yahoo and Gmail are not only subject to the demands of National Security Letters and possibly unauthorized snooping by the NSA, but the companies themselves snoop in our emails to use our words against us in a marketing sense, or to use their rationalization, to enhance our online experience.

Not too long ago we talked about Hushmail.com, a Canadian email provider, as a viable alternative to the American email biggies. Now there's another one. This one is located in Switzerland and is called ProtonMail. Here's a writeup about it at Forbes.com titled The Only Email System The NSA Can't Access. (Forbes link via Liberty Pen.)

The problem with secure services like Hushmail and Proton is that their end to end encryption means nothing when your email correspondents still use the American biggies. So emails to those people go right into the databases of Google, Yahoo or whichever service they use. It's a good start, but if the Snowden scandal didn't send those people out looking for more secure email services then there probably isn't much that will.

Quick takes -- is Edward Snowden a hero or a villain? He's both

Edward Snowden's spy jinks may be old news now, but the question still lingers: Is he a hero or a villain?

Simple answer. He's both.

He alerted Americans that their own government was spying on them under the authority of the most routine of court orders, if they even had that. And that was information Americans were glad to know. Whether we were conducting nefarious operations or simply living clean lives didn't seem to matter -- our personal data were collected by the government and presumably will occupy some tiny amount of space in some huge hard drive forever. For that, Snowden is a hero.

But some of the commentators say Snowden may have exposed some super secrets to our enemies and done damage which will take decades to repair . We need some evidence of that, but if it's true, he's a villain.

He's a hero and a villain. He's like the hypothetical deviant who robs a man he saved from drowning. So the real question is what should be done with such an individual. Maybe they could give him the key to the city as he goes off to jail, but the irony in that might be too rich.

Spy vs. Spy -- Intelligence Report on Huawei and ZTE

So I was surfing through Amazon.com for phones and came upon one from ZTE. Doing a little due diligence on it I ran across this report from the House Intel: Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE (PDF). Apparently, Huawei Technologies Company was under a cloud of suspicion, and in an open letter published in early 2011 the company denied any security concerns and asked the U.S. government for an investigation into their corporate operations to clear their reputation. The House of Representatives took them up on it.

Here's an excerpt from the executive summary:

Despite hours of interviews, extensive and repeated document requests, a review of open - source information, and an open hearing with witnesses from both companies, the Committee remains unsatisfied with the level of cooperation and candor provided by each company. Neither company was willing to provide sufficient evidence to ameliorate the Committee’s concerns. Neither company was forthcoming with detailed information about its formal relationships or regulatory interaction with Chinese authorities. Neither company provided specific details about the precise role of each company’s Chinese Communist Party Committee . Furthermore, neither company provided detailed information about its operations in the United States. Huawei, in particular, failed to provide thorough information about its corporate structure, history, ownership, operations, financial arrangements, or management. Most importantly, neither company provided sufficient internal documentation or other evidence to support the limited answers they did provide to Committee investigators.

During the investigation, the Committee received information from industry experts and current and former Huawei employees suggesting that Huawei, in particular, may be violating United States laws. These allegations describe a company that has not followed United States legal obligations or international standards of business behavior. The Committee will be referring these allegations to Executive Branch agencies for further review, including possible investigation.

We've known, or at least suspected, that China has been spying on us for a long time. And those of us paranoid enough have wondered whether our own electronic devices are ticking time bombs waiting for the signal from home to participate in a DDOS attack or do something even more nefarious.

By the way, that last sentence of the quoted passages about referring the allegations to the Executive Branch may not have been necessary. The U.S. had been spying on Huawei since 2009 according to the Snowden leaks via Spiegel. Well, good. That's the kind of spying we expect from our government.

In any event, Huawei and ZTE phones are off my wish list. And apparently they're off many other Americans' lists, too, as those companies' sales in the U.S. are dwarfed by their sales in other countries.

But here's the twist. The U.S. has been active in the spy game, too. And at least one writer speculated that the leaks about America's spying would turn customers off U.S. made products, too.

So what's a consumer to do? If all of our electronics are spying on us, I suppose we have to choose which country we want stealing our communications. But here's a radical thought: snail mail. The NSA would really have to work to read our letters. In my case, I can barely read my own hand writing, and to pilfer and read my letters would require a level of physical energy that probably isn't there.  The USPS may get a second life. Let's not declare it dead just yet.

Ask Zelda -- the Dear Abby for spies

When it's about the NSA one never knows what's true or false. But like those good stories that arrive by email, some are so good we don't want to check them for fear that they're wrong.

Here's one at Glenn Greenwald's website written by Peter Maas, titled The NSA Has An Advice Columnist. Seriously. It's about "Ask Zelda" in SIDtoday, the NSA newsletter type bulletin. (SID is the Signals Intelligence Directorate spy shop within the National Security Agency.)

Mr. Maas reproduces a letter from a NSA employee who complained because his/her boss is constantly spying on the letter writer and the other employees and even uses snitches. Zelda's advice is quite good. Here's an excerpt:

Dear Silenced,

Wow, that takes “intelligence collection” in a whole new – and inappropriate – direction. …. We work in an Agency of secrets, but this kind of secrecy begets more secrecy and it becomes a downward spiral that destroys teamwork. What if you put an end to all the secrecy by bringing it out in the open?

Sigh. If only the NSA could see how their spying on the American public is contributing to this same downward spiral of trust of the government.