Monthly Archives: October 2014

Snowden, pope, refugees, Congo rights campaigner in the buzz for 2014 Nobel Peace Prize

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Published October 09, 2014

STAVANGER, Norway Bettors this year are putting their money on Edward Snowden, Pope Francis or a Pakistani schoolgirl as favorites to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

As usual, the secretive Norwegian Nobel Committee hasn't dropped any hints ahead of Friday's announcement, revealing only that it had received a record 278 nominations. Geir Lundestad of the Norwegian Nobel Committee has suggested the choice was more difficult this year, telling The Associated Press they had "seven meetings rather than five or six."

Here's a look at some names generating the most Peace Prize buzz this year:

EDWARD SNOWDEN

The former National Security Agency contractor blew the lid on mass U.S. surveillance in the summer of 2013 too late to be a contender for last year's prize but two Norwegian lawmakers nominated him for the 2014 award. One of them, Snorre Valen, said Snowden's disclosures qualified for the peace prize because "surveillance is the latest arms race. For there to be any chance of peace, countries have to be able to trust each other." Snowden, who remains exiled in Russia, has said he is proud to have been nominated but considers himself an outsider for the $1.1 million award.

POPE FRANCIS

Since he became pope in March 2013, Francis has been a notable champion of the poor with incognito visits to homeless people and demands for development and wealth redistribution. The pope is the bookmakers' favorite but, after the fallout when President Barack Obama got the prize in 2009, awarding Francis the Nobel a year into his papacy might be too soon. If he did win, the Argentine would be the first head of the Catholic Church to get the prize.

MALALA YOUSAFZAI

The Pakistani teen who campaigned against the Taliban's destruction of girls schools was shot in the head by the group in 2012. Many guessed she would win last year and were wrong, as the prize went to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Now 17, she has continued to speak out in support of women's rights but is considered more of an outsider for the prize. Still, her odds have dropped to 12-1 from 20-1 a few weeks ago, according to the betting firm Unibet.

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Snowden, pope, refugees, Congo rights campaigner in the buzz for 2014 Nobel Peace Prize

Google Chairman on NSA Spying: ‘We’re Going to Break the Internet’

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Google chairman Eric Schmidt lobbed harsh criticism at NSA surveillance on American citizens.

Just because you can do it, doesnt mean you should do it, Schmidt said during a hearing in Palo Alto, Calif. hosted by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

The hearing on Wednesday came weeks before a potential Congressional vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill that would stop the NSA from collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens. The event was designed to gin up public support for the legislation while giving Silicon Valley executives a venue to vent about how recent revelations about government spying threaten their businesses.

For years, Sen. Wyden had suggested the NSA was engaged in questionable surveillance practices. But it was not until former government contractor Edward Snowden leaked top-secret documents last year, confirming widespread monitoring of online communications, did the issue gain worldwide attention.

In 2011 on the floor of the United States Senate, I warned that people were going to be stunned and angry when they found out how the U.S. government has been secretly applying its surveillance authority, Sen. Wyden said. And it turned out I was right about that.

The event, held in the gym of Palo Alto High School, was carefully choreographed as an outlet for outrage at government surveillance. Executives were uniformly critical of the NSA, mostly answering softball questions lobbed by Sen. Wyden, who had attended the school long before the Internet industry grew up around it.

The scene, itself, was a bit surreal. Over 100 high school students sat on the basketball court in the bleachers as executives spoke and, at one point, interrupted the proceedings by leaving en masse after the school bell rang to signal the end of a class period.

Joining Schmidt were Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad Smith, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, Dropbox General Counsel Ramsey Homsany and John Lilly, a venture capitalist with Greylock Partners.

Revelations about the surveillance have tarnished the reputations of many Silicon Valley companies. Some documents have suggested that U.S. tech giants were complicit in handing huge amounts of customer information to the federal government, an accusation that the executives vehemently deny. Rather, they say they only respond to legal demands for user data. Any wholesale surveillance, they insist, was done without their help or knowledge.

Whether the companies should even be collecting so much personal data never came up. Digital rights groups have been particularly critical of the practice, saying it leaves users vulnerable.

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Google Chairman on NSA Spying: 'We're Going to Break the Internet'

Web Encryption – It’s Not Just for E-Commerce, Anymore

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Last week, I re-tweeted Cloudflare's announcement that they are providing universal SSL for their customers. I believe the announcement is a valuable one for the state of the open Internet for a couple of reasons:

First, there is the obvious they are doubling the number of websites on the Internet that support encrypted connections. And, hopefully, that will prompt even more sites/hosting providers/CDNs to get serious about supporting encryption, too. Web encryption it's not just for e-commerce, anymore.

Second, and no less important, is the way that the announcement articulates and shares their organizational thought processes. They are pretty clear that this is not a decision made to immediately and positively impact their bottom line of business. It's about better browsing, and a better Internet in the long run is better business. And, they are also pretty open about the challenges they face, operationally, to achieve this. That's another thing that can be helpful to other organizations contemplating the plunge to support SSL.

So, go ahead and have a read of their detailed announcement and please forget to check if my website supports encrypted connections. It does not :-/ (yet). I've added it to my IT todo list right after dealing with some issues in my e-mail infrastructure. I asked the head of IT for a timeline on that, and she just gave me a tail-flick and a paw-wash in response. Life as a micro-enterprise.

More substantially, I could easily become a Cloudflare customer and thus enable encryption up to the Cloudflare servers. But, proper end-to-end encryption requires my site to have a certificate, based on a unique IP address for this website and the going rate for that, given where my site is, is $6/mo. That adds, substantially, to the cost of supporting a website, especially when you might have several of them kicking around for different purposes.

There's work to be done yet in the whole security system (economics) model, it seems to me. Open discussion of practical issues and eventual work arounds does seem like a good starting place, though.

A version of this post originally appeared on http://www.thinkingcat.com.

By Leslie Daigle, Principal, ThinkingCat Enterprises and Editor, InternetImpossible. More blog posts from Leslie Daigle can also be read here.

Related topics: Privacy, Security, Web

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Web Encryption - It's Not Just for E-Commerce, Anymore

Smartphones ‘remotely wiped’ in police custody, as encryption vs. law enforcement heats up

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Summary: British police are warning that smartphones in custody for forensics and ongoing investigations are being remotely wiped, potentially killing vital evidence.

British police forces have complained that as many as six smartphones seized have been remotely wiped in the past year, potentially killing vital evidence as part of ongoing investigations.

The somewhat comical angle from the BBC News on Thursday was thatCambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Nottingham, and Durham police "don't know how people wiped them."

Here's a hint, police: "Find my iPhone."

The issue stems around the technology that allows users to remotely wipe their device, and potentially corporate secrets and personal information, in cases where their devices have been lost or stolen.

Most modern phones come with this technology: Apple iPhones, Android and Windows Phone devices all do. In many cases, like with BlackBerry handsets, company IT administrators can also remotely wipe data.

But this poses a problem for the British bobbies. The report said, citing one forensics expert, "If a device has a signal, in theory it is possible to wipe it remotely."

Police often use radio-frequency shieldedbags, or even microwave ovens (so long as they're never turned on) to prevent cell service from getting through.However, in some cases, even that short period of time after a device has been seized can be enough to send through a remotely-activated data kill switch.

Law enforcement in the U.S. over the past few weeks have complained at Apple and Google's move to encrypt data on their devices by default, forcing police and federal agents to go to the device owner, rather than to the company themselves.

Many U.S. federal agencies, including the FBI and the NSA, complained that Apple and Google's encryption efforts will hamper investigations.Drug dealers, pedophiles, identity thieves, and other violent criminals will be able to evade capture, they say, with the FBI DirectorJames Comey criticizing Apple for allowing its customers to "place themselves beyond the law."

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Smartphones 'remotely wiped' in police custody, as encryption vs. law enforcement heats up

Edward Snowden: whistleblower, criminal … Nobel Peace Prize winner?

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Oslo, Norway The US government says he's a criminal. Others call him a hero. But will Edward Snowden soon be described as a Nobel Peace Prize winner?

Some experts are predicting that the former US contractor for the National Security Agency now living under asylum in Russia will be announced on Friday as this year's honoree. But Mr. Snowden's selection would give new fuel to an ongoing debate in Norway about just how independent the Nobel Committee there really is.

Experts say Snowden, who alerted the publicto the US government's widespread surveillance through the release of enormous volumes of documentation last year, tops their predictions of Nobel contenders.

He has been nominated by Socialist Left parliamentarians, and supported in several editorials in leading Norwegian papers and by lawyers and academics internationally, points out Asle Sveen, a Norwegian Nobel historian at Nobeliana. Giving the prize to Snowden would also underline the independence of the parliament-appointed Norwegian Nobel Committee, which selects the winner.

Questions over the autonomy of the committee were resurrected earlier this year when the Norwegian government refused to meet with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on the 25th anniversary of his Peace Prize over fears of irking China.

Giving it to Snowden would run against all political instincts, says Kristian Harpviken, director at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. He is, after all, considered a traitor to one of Norways closest allies."

Indeed, awarding the prize to Snowden would rock US relations. Norway is still dealing with the fallout from awarding the prize four years ago to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. China stalled bilateral trade talks and cut trade with Norway in retaliation. Though awarding Snowden this year's prize would likely not draw as harsh a rebuke from the US, it would still shake the relationship.

And under treaty agreements with the US, Norway could be obliged to arrest Snowden at the award ceremony at Oslo City Hall in December, according to Michael Tetzschner, a Conservative member of parliament.

"We would have another empty chair, Mr. Harpviken added, referring to Mr. Liu, who was prevented from attending the award ceremony in Oslo.

The committee has alternatives, of course, some of which are just as controversial. Novaya Gazeta, the independent Russian newspaper set up in 1993 at the initiative of Mikhail Gorbachev, has been a favorite among speculators for some time. The paper has seen the killings of its journalists and been the subject of numerous cyberattacks. A prize to the media watchdogs would be topical given Russias current involvement in the Ukraine conflict.

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Edward Snowden: whistleblower, criminal ... Nobel Peace Prize winner?

Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden Spec Auctions Friday; Joseph Gordon-Levitt Stars As Whistleblower

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EXCLUSIVE: Around the same time that the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour premieres at the New York Film Festival on Friday, studio heads will be reading the drama script that Oliver Stone and producing partner Moritz Borman have been working on about the hot-button subject of a leaker some call gutsy while others call a traitor. Stone will direct Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the role of the American who fled to Russia seeking asylum after making public more classified documents than anyone since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.

The film has indie financing with Canal Plus involved, so they are going to make this in Munich in January, with Moritz Borman producing with Eric Kopeloff. Deadline revealed last month that Gordon-Levitt would play Snowden; he just played Philippe Petit in the Robert Zemeckis-directed The Long Walk for TriStar and now is shooting Xmas with Seth Rogen at Sony.

As Deadline has reported, Stone and Borman have a deal with Snowdens Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, for film rights to his novel Time Of The Octopus. That is the basis for the story of an American whistle blower who heads to Russia and the back and forth between the leaker and his lawyer as he waits while that country considers his request for asylum. Stone and Borman also bought the screen rights to The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The Worlds Most Wanted Man, a book by Guardian journalist Luke Harding thats published by Guardian Faber. Like Julian Assange, Snowden is a polarizing figure that some would call brave, and others including the U.S. government would call a turncoat.

The script is being auctioned by Stones reps at CAA, and only a small circle of studio heads will get to read it. Given the notoriety of Snowden and the nature of the project, they will do their best to make sure the script doesnt leak. Feels like this one will sell very quickly.

Stone is positioned to beat several other movie projects based on the Snowden story. Sony Pictures acquired film rights to Pulitzer-winning journalist Glenn Greenwalds upcoming book No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA, And The U.S. Surveillance State, with 007 producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli attached.

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Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden Spec Auctions Friday; Joseph Gordon-Levitt Stars As Whistleblower

Snowden and Pope Tipped for ‘Wide Open’ Nobel Peace Prize

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File photo of Edward Snowden. (Agence France-Presse)

Mr Snowden, the former intelligence analyst who revealed the extent of US global eavesdropping, was one of the joint winners of the "alternative Nobel peace prize" last month. A hero to some and a traitor to others, he would be a highly controversial choice for the 878,000-euro ($1.11-million) award.

The Pakistani girls' education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, who was also a favourite last year, is also said to be in the running along with Pope Francis and a Japanese pacifist group.

Predicting the winner is even harder than usual this year, as the Nobel committee has received a record 278 candidates, so experts only have the names of those made public by their sponsors to go on.

Mr Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst, was proposed by two Norwegian members of parliament. Last month he shared the "alternative" $210,000 Norwegian Right Livelihood Award with The Guardian newspaper and human rights and environmental activists.

But from his exile in Russia, the US fugitive said during a recent press conference that "it is somewhat unlikely that the Nobel committee would back..." him winning the real Nobel.

However, other Russian-based individuals or groups could be a popular choice for the Nobel Committee.

For the Nobel committee president Thorbjoern Jagland, "sanctioning Moscow would be a way to prove that he acts independently, since (Jagland) is (also) the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, which counts Russia as a member," Mr Jacob told AFP.

Co-founded by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1993 with part of his peace prize money, the pro-democracy Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta has been tipped as a possible laureate. It is one of the few independent media outlets left in Russia and has seen several of its journalists murdered, including Anna Politkovskaya who exposed huge human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Malala 'still very young'

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Snowden and Pope Tipped for 'Wide Open' Nobel Peace Prize