Monthly Archives: April 2014

Snowden defends his surveillance question for Putin

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MOSCOW, April 21 (UPI) -- NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote an op-ed in The Guardian newspaper defending his staged question to Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding mass surveillance in Russia.

In the op-ed, Snowden said he regretted that his appearance and question appeared to the west to be a staged stunt to show support for Russia and allow Putin to take a shot at the U.S.

"I regret that my question could be misinterpreted, and that it enabled many to ignore the substance of the question -- and Putin's evasive response -- in order to speculate, wildly and incorrectly, about my motives for asking it."

Russia is known for having a large mass surveillance infrastructure to spy on its citizens and a very tightly controlled state media. Putin said that the existence of such a surveillance system would be against Russian law, a statement seen as a swipe at the Obama administration and the NSA surveillance programs that have been slammed as a violation of the U.S. constitution.

Snowden said his motives were purely to push the conversation forward about mass surveillance and took an advantage to use the tightly controlled Q&A broadcasted on state television to talk about the taboo subject.

"I expected that some would object to my participation in an annual forum that is largely comprised of softball questions to a leader unaccustomed to being challenged. But to me, the rare opportunity to lift a taboo on discussion of state surveillance before an audience that primarily views state media outweighed that risk. Moreover, I hoped that Putin's answer -- whatever it was -- would provide opportunities for serious journalists and civil society to push the discussion further."

He added that while he understands the concern of his critics, he pointed out that the only way to invalidate Putin's claims is for Putin to make them in the first place, which he says he wanted to facilitate.

[HuffPost Live] [The Guardian]

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Snowden defends his surveillance question for Putin

Snowden Regrets Participating in Putin Propaganda

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NSA leaker and indefinite Russian tourist Edward Snowden is not yet a pro at PR. After he showed up on state television to lob Vladimir Putin a question about the countrys own surveillance apparatus Putin dunked an incredulous, anti-U.S. blanket denial Snowden tried to explain that he was hoping to get Putins evasive response on the record. Now Snowdens allies are admitting the whole thing was a bad look. I dont think theres any shame in saying that he made an error in judgment, an anonymous source close to Snowden told the Daily Beast.

He basically viewed the question as his first foray into criticizing Russia. He was genuinely surprised that in reasonable corridors it was seen as the opposite, said ACLU lawyer and Snowden adviser Ben Wizner. It was the strongest possible question that could possibly get through [Putins propagandists], another person added. Predictably, Snowden was not permitted a follow-up.

I know this is hard to believe. I know if I was just watching from afar, Id think, Wow, they forced him [Snowden] to do this, Wizner added. But its not true. He just fucking did it.

If the plan was to kickstart a discussion, it worked the problem is were talking about Snowdens mistakes, not Putins.

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Snowden Regrets Participating in Putin Propaganda

Activists want net neutrality, NSA spying debated at Brazil Internet conference

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IDG News Service - A campaign on the Internet is objecting to the exclusion of issues like net neutrality, the cyberweapons arms race and surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency from the discussion paper of an Internet governance conference this week in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

A significant section of the participants are also looking for concrete measures and decisions at the conference rather than yet another statement of principles.

The proposed text "lacks any strength," does not mention NSA's mass surveillance or the active participation of Internet companies, and fails to propose any concrete action, according to the campaign called Our Net Mundial.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the surveillance programs of the U.S., which allegedly included real time access to content on servers of Internet companies like Facebook and Google.

The Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, also called NETmundial, released Thursday a document to guide the discussions starting Wednesday among the representatives from more than 80 countries .

An earlier document leaked by whistle-blower site WikiLeaks proposed international agreements for restraining cyber weapons development and deployment and called for the Internet to remain neutral and free from discrimination. WikiLeaks said the document was prepared for approval by a high-level committee.

Dilma Rousseff, the president of host country Brazil, has been a sharp critic of surveillance by the U.S. after reports that her communications were being spied on by the NSA.

Though the Brazil discussion document does not directly mention NSA surveillance, it refers to the freedom of expression, information and privacy, including avoiding arbitrary or unlawful collection of personal data and surveillance.

The meeting's call for universal principles partly reflects a desire for interstate agreements that can prevent rights violations such as the NSA surveillance, wrote Internet governance experts Milton Mueller and Ben Wagner in a paper. The Tunis Agenda of the World Summit on the Information Society also called for globally applicable public policy principles for Internet governance.

"But there have been so many Internet principles released in recent years that it is hard to see what the Brazil conference could add," Mueller and Wagner wrote.

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Activists want net neutrality, NSA spying debated at Brazil Internet conference

Activists want net neutrality, NSA spying debated at Internet governance conference

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A campaign on the Internet is objecting to the exclusion of issues like net neutrality, the cyberweapons arms race and surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency from the discussion paper of an Internet governance conference this week in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

A significant section of the participants are also looking for concrete measures and decisions at the conference rather than yet another statement of principles.

The proposed text lacks any strength, does not mention NSAs mass surveillance or the active participation of Internet companies, and fails to propose any concrete action, according to the campaign called Our Net Mundial.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the surveillance programs of the U.S., which allegedly included real time access to content on servers of Internet companies like Facebook and Google.

The Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, also called NETmundial, released Thursday a document to guide the discussions starting Wednesday among the representatives from more than 80 countries .

An earlier document leaked by whistle-blower site WikiLeaks proposed international agreements for restraining cyber weapons development and deployment and called for the Internet to remain neutral and free from discrimination. WikiLeaks said the document was prepared for approval by a high-level committee.

Dilma Rousseff, the president of host country Brazil, has been a sharp critic of surveillance by the U.S. after reports that her communications were being spied on by the NSA.

Though the Brazil discussion document does not directly mention NSA surveillance, it refers to the freedom of expression, information and privacy, including avoiding arbitrary or unlawful collection of personal data and surveillance.

The meetings call for universal principles partly reflects a desire for interstate agreements that can prevent rights violations such as the NSA surveillance, wrote Internet governance experts Milton Mueller and Ben Wagner in a paper. The Tunis Agenda of the World Summit on the Information Society also called for globally applicable public policy principles for Internet governance.

But there have been so many Internet principles released in recent years that it is hard to see what the Brazil conference could add, Mueller and Wagner wrote.

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Activists want net neutrality, NSA spying debated at Internet governance conference

SSD Survey Highlights Misconceptions About Encryption & Performance

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Co. -- A survey by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) launched last fall has revealed some interesting user perceptions regarding the characteristics of solid state drives (SSDs), including their endurance expectations and their lack of interest in using built-in encryption features.

Paul Wassenberg, chair of SNIAs Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) said the results of the survey will be used to guide the groups education activities around the capabilities and features of SSDs. The call for input began last fall. Initial results, comprising 75% of the ultimate total of participants, were presented at the Storage Visions Conference earlier this year.

The survey identified respondents in four market segments, namely the mobile, desktop, server, and storage subsystem segments. Within each segment, SSD uses were broken down based on applications as well as interfaces being used. Overall, the highest use of SSDs is in storage subsystems -- by approximately 33%, with servers at roughly 27%, and mobile at around 21%. Desktop use of SSDs was about 8%. The majority, approximately 65%, were using the using the 2.5-inch form factor, 19% were using PCIe cards, and less than 5% were using mSATA. Capacity-wise, about 33% of respondents were using SSDs greater than 500 GB, followed closely by about 31% using between 301 and 500 GB.

The SSSI survey focused on five key attributes of SSDs -- performance, power, endurance, data integrity, and data encryption. While the ratings varied depending on the segment and uses, across all segments performance was fairly important, with IOPS and latency favored over throughput. Power was fairly important, but power management received only middling ratings.

Wassenberg said endurance was most important of all attributes for users, who consistently ranked it above all else. Data integrity and encryption were rated as fairly important, but the latter less so than anticipated. Wassenberg said this was notable, since comments from the survey revealed some outdated data ideas that encryption can reduce performance. That isnt true, he said, because recent generations of self-encrypting drives (SEDs) do not measurably impact SSD performance.

Key management is also a concern in larger systems with multiple drives, the survey found. Wassenberg said mobile devices, such as notebooks PCs, are particularly vulnerable to theft, and encryption would prevent the data from being accessed. Many SSDs being shipped today have data protection and encryption features built in, but often those abilities are not being switched on by OEMs.

Samsung, for example, recently added new security features to its self-encrypting drive (SED), the 840 EVO SSD, making it compatible with professional security software employed by enterprise organizations. In addition, there are a number of third-party vendors such as WinMagic and Wave Systems that offer tools to make SEDs easier for IT departments to deploy and manage while not degrading the performance of SSDs and or complicating the user experience.

Wassenberg said educating users on encryption technologies for SSDs and the benefits will be a focus for the SSSI going forward. Another area of education will be performance, he said, and the importance of preconditioning drives so that users have better expectations of how a drive performs over time. An SSDs performance is higher fresh out of the box, but it will drop after several writes, and then give a more realistic indication of how it will likely perform over time.

The SSSI offers test specification, specifications and software that allow users to test workloads and maintain industry-standard methodology for pre-conditioning and steady state determination for SSDs.

For now, the SSSI survey is going to be kept open for an indefinite period to gather more data, and users are welcome to participate in a dedicated LinkedIn group.

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SSD Survey Highlights Misconceptions About Encryption & Performance