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Julian Assange | Democracy Now!

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You trust Democracy Now! to bring you the news stories and global headlines you won't find anywhere else. But did you know that Democracy Now! never accepts money from advertisers, corporate underwriters or governments? This allows us to maintain the editorial independence you rely onbut it also means we need your help. If everyone seeing this gave just $4 a month, it would more than cover our expenses for the entire yearand today a donor will DOUBLE your first month. Please do your part. It takes just a couple of minutes to make sure that Democracy Now! is there for you and everybody else. Thank you so much!-Amy Goodman

You trust Democracy Now! to bring you the news stories and global headlines you won't find anywhere else. But did you know that Democracy Now! never accepts money from advertisers, corporate underwriters or governments? This allows us to maintain the editorial independence you rely onbut it also means we need your help. If everyone seeing this gave just $4 a month, it would more than cover our expenses for the entire yearand today a donor will DOUBLE your first month. Please do your part. It takes just a couple of minutes to make sure that Democracy Now! is there for you and everybody else. Thank you so much!-Amy Goodman

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Julian Assange | Democracy Now!

Permanent Record: Edward Snowden: 9781250237231: Amazon …

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A riveting account... Reads like a literary thriller... Snowden pushes the reader to reflect more seriously on what every American should be asking already. What does it mean to have the data of our lives collected and stored on file, ready to be accessednot just now, by whatever administration happens to be in office at the moment, but potentially forever?... When it comes to privacy and speech and the Constitution, his story clarifies the stakes.The New York TimesGripping... Snowden demonstrates a knack for explaining in lucid and compelling language the inner workings of [CIA and NSA] systems and the menace he came to believe they posed.The Washington PostSnowden eventually decided his loyalties lay not with the agencies he was working for, but the public they were set up to protect. He felt ordinary citizens were being betrayed, and he had a duty to explain how.... His account of the experiences that led him to take momentous decisions, along with the details he gives of his family background, serve as a robust defense against accusations that he is a traitor. It also offers a reminder that his disclosures of mass surveillance and bulk collection of personal information are as relevant now as they were in 2013. The Guardian

Even for those of us whove followed the Snowden revelations closely, Permanent Record is full of surprises.... A deeply reluctant whistleblower, Snowden also emerges as a peculiarly American patriot, with roots that go back to Plymouth Rock.... As his memoir makes clear, all the techniques he exposed in 2013 remain in place. For that renewed warningand for finally speaking for himselfhe deserves our thanks.The NationWell-written... Snowdens descriptions of the real impact of the various surveillance systems he disclosedstripped of abstract concepts and technical jargonare some of the most disturbing parts of the book.... Offers a useful reminder of the god-like omniscience that digital data can bestow on those with the power to collect it all.The Economist

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Permanent Record: Edward Snowden: 9781250237231: Amazon ...

Edward Snowden Is Exposing His Own Secrets This Time

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Provided by The Daily Beast Barton Gellman

Edward Snowden doesnt share new state secrets in his memoir, Permanent Record, which The Daily Beast obtained a copy of ahead of its release Tuesday. But he does offer some personal ones, from his transformation into Americas most famous secret-spiller, to the news that he was married, two years ago, to Lindsay Mills, the girlfriend he left behind when he fled the U.S. for Hong Kong with a virtual library of top secret files detailing Americas global electronic spying apparatus.. .

After enlisting in the Army at 21, Snowden writes that he was on a track called 18 X-Ray, with a chance to come out of training as a Special Forces sergeant, before breaking his leg at Fort Benning and receiving an administrative separation.

I had hoped to serve my country, he writes, as his family had before him, but instead I went to work for it as a contractor for the intelligence community. That was effectively a cover, in his telling, as the agencies were hiring tech companies to hire kids, and then giving them the keys to the kingdom because no one else knew how the keys, or the kingdom worked. He elaborates: Here is one thing that the disorganized CIA didnt quite understand at the time, and that no major American employed outside of Silicon Valley understood, either: The computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything.

Eventually, Snowden, having attained the security clearances necessary for his tech work, went govvy and signed up for a straight CIA job. He joined class 6-06 of the BTTP, or the Basic Telecommunications Training Program that disguises one of the most classified and unusual curricula in existence to train TISOs (Technical Information Security Officers), who work under State Department cover to manage the technical infrastructure for CIA operations, most commonly hidden at stations inside American missions, consulates, and embassies. [T]he worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage, he writes.

After being stationed in Vienna, Snowden moved to Tokyo in 2009 to work as a systems analyst for the NSA, he writes, though nominally as an employee of Dell. Two things about the NSA stunned me right off the bat: how technologically sophisticated it was compared with the CIA, and how much less vigilant it was about security in its every iteration, he writes, noting that the NSA hardly bothered to encrypt anything.

While working there on a project called EPICSHELTER a backup and storage system that would act as a shadow NSA: a complete, automated, and constantly updating copy of all the agencys most important material, which would allow the agency to reboot and be up and running again, with all its archives intact, even if Fort Meade were reduced to smoldering rubble Snowden began researching Chinas domestic surveillance system, which led to his first inkling that if such systems were possible, the U.S. might be using them too, given perhaps the fundamental rule of technological progress:. if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been.

That same summer, the U.S. released its Unclassified Report on the Presidents Surveillance Program, following the New York Times reporting on the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping program. Eventually, Snowden writes, he found the classified version, filed in an Exceptionally Controlled Information (ECI) compartment, an extremely rare classification used to make sure something would remain hidden even from those holding top secret clearance The reports full classification designation was TOP SECRET//STLW//HCS/COMINT//ORCORN//NOFORN, which translates to: pretty much only a few dozen people in the world are allowed the read this.

Snowden found it only because the STLW classification for STELLARWIND had raised a red flag for him as a system administrator, meaning he had to examine the file to determine what it was and how best to scrub it from the system where it wasnt supposed to have been placed.

It was clear that the unclassified version I was already familiar with wasnt a redaction of the classified report, as would usually be the practice, he writes. Rather, it was a wholly different document, which the classified version immediately exposed as an outright and carefully concocted lie to hide the transformation of the NSAs mission from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.

STELLARWIND, the classified report revealed, had been collecting communications in the U.S. since 2001, and continued even after Justice Department lawyers secretly objected to it in 2004. Its longevity owed everything to a kafkaesque legal position adopted by the Bush administration, that the NSA could collect whatever communication records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency searched and retrieved them from its database.

Having found the big secret, set up so that no one else knew it was there to even start asking questions, Snowden writes, he began using his access as a systems engineer and administrator to ask those questions, while keeping the knowledge a secret from his girlfriend and his family, and considering what to do about it.

Back in the US in 2011, Snowden experienced his first epileptic seizure. The following year on a contract with Dell again, he returned to the NSA, at its Kunia Regional Security Operations Center in Hawaii. There, he writes, my active searching out of NSA abuses began not with the copying of documents, but with the reading of them.

As the sole employee of the Office of Information Sharing, he was developing an automated readboard to scan the ICs own internal internet and create a custom digital magazine for each employee, based on his or her interests and security clearances. He called the system Heartbeat, and its servers stored a copy of each scanned document, making it easy for me to perform the kind of deep interagency searches that the heads of most agencies could only dream of. Heartbeat, he writes, was the source of nearly all of the documents that I later disclosed to journalists.

Snowden mentions a rare public speech Ira Gus Hunt, the CIAs chief technology officer, delivered a week after then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had lied to Congress about the NSAs collection of bulk communications. In the speech, covered only by the Huffington Post, Hunt flatly declared that we try to collect everything and hang on to it forever. Youre already a walking sensor platform, he said. It is nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information). As Snowden notes, a video of the talk has less than 1,000 views.

After that, Snowden recounts his efforts to reach out to journalists, and to carefully hide his digital breadcrumbs by encrypting data and distributing the keys to it, while perhaps hiding his findings on SD cards inside of Rubiks Cube cubes to get them out of the NSAs underground tunnel in Hawaii.

He then took what he saw as a less prestigious new position to gain access to the XKEYSCORE system, which hed learned about but not used himself, and, he writes, is perhaps best understood as a search engine that lets an analyst search through the records of your life.

It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction Ive ever seen in science fact, he writes, allowing users to put in someones basic information and then go through their online history, even playing back recordings of their online settings and watching people as they searched, character by character. Everyones communications were in the systemeveryones, including the presidents, he writes. The potential for abuse was obvious. NSA workers even had a word, LOVEINT for love intelligence, to describe analysts cyber-stalking current, former and prospective lovers, while among male analysts intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency, Snowden writes. This was how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one anothers crimes.

Finally, Snowden recounts his trip to Hong Kong, after taking a medical leave, his efforts to reach Ecuador, and his exile in Russia, where he was finally reunited with Lindsay (whose diary entries recounting his disappearance, and the pressure then placed on her by U.S. authorities are given a full, moving chapter.

Snowden speaks well of a very different leaker, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, writing that while people have long ascribed selfish motives to Assanges desire to give me aid, I believe he was genuinely motivated in one thing above allhelping me evade capture Its true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even bullying after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based communication, I never communicated with him againbut he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the publics right to know, a battle he will do anything to win.

Most important to [Assange], writes Snowden, was the opportunity to establish a counter-example to the case of the organizations most famous source, US Army Private Chelsea Manning, whose thirty-five-year prison sentence was historically unprecedented and a monstrous deterrent to whistleblowers everywhere.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Edward Snowden Is Exposing His Own Secrets This Time

Sex, Lies and Julian Assange (2012) | Four Corners

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When Julian Assange arrived in Sweden in August 2010 he was greeted like a conquering hero.

But within weeks there was a warrant out for his arrest and he was being investigated for rape and sexual molestation.

Until recently he was taking sanctuary in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, arguing he won't receive justice if he's taken to Sweden and that US authorities are building a case for his extradition.

In this program from 2012, Four Corners reporter Andrew Fowler examines in detail what happened in those crucial weeks while Julian Assange was in Sweden. What was the nature of his relationship with the two women who claim he assaulted them? And what did they tell police that led the authorities to seek his arrest?

Both Assange and his supporters believe the attempt by authorities to force his return to Sweden is simply the first step in a plan to see him extradited to the United States.

Four Corners looks at claims the United States is working hard to unearth evidence that would lead to a charge of "conspiracy to commit espionage" being made against Assange - which in turn would be used in his extradition from Sweden.

The program also documents the harassment experienced by Assange's supporters across the globe - including his Australian lawyer - and the FBI's attempts to convince some to give evidence against him.

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Watch more Four Corners investigations here: https://bit.ly/2JbpMkf You can also like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abc4corners/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/4corners And sign up to our newsletter: https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/newsl...

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Sex, Lies and Julian Assange (2012) | Four Corners

Chelsea Manning – – Biography … – BIO

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U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning delivered hundreds of thousands of classified documents that he found troubling to WikiLeaks, and in 2013 was sentenced to 35 years in prison for espionage and theft. In 2014, Manning, who is transgender, was granted the right to be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from prison in 2017.

Bradley Manning was born on December 17, 1987. Years later, the Crescent, Oklahoma native, who is transgender,was granted the right to be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.After joining the Army and enduring harsh bullying, Manning was sent to Iraq in 2009. There she had access to classified information that she described as profoundly troubling. Manning gave much of this information to WikiLeaks and was later arrested after her actions were reported to the U.S. government by a hacker confidant.

On July 30, 2013, Manning was found guilty of espionage and theft, but not guilty of aiding the enemy. In August 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Serving time in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Manning was able to receive hormone treatments, although she has faced other restrictions around gender expression. On January 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted Manning's remaining sentence, and she was released from prison on May 17, 2017.

Bradley Manning was born in Crescent, Oklahoma on December 17, 1987. Years later, Manning announced that she is transgender and hence would be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.

As a child, Manning was highly intelligent and showed an affinity for computers. Though presenting as a boy during her youth, Manning dressed as a girl at times in private, feeling profoundly alienated and fearful about her secret. She was bullied at school and her mother also attempted suicide at one point. (Her father would later paint a more stable picture of the household.)

After her parents split, Manning lived during her teens with her motherin Wales, where she was also bullied by peers. She eventually moved back to the United States to live with her stepmother and father, who was a former soldier. There the family had major clashes after Manning lost a tech job, and at one point Manning's stepmother called the police after a particularly volatile confrontation. The young Manning was then homeless, living in a pickup truck for a time and eventually moving in with her paternal aunt.

Manning joined the Army in 2007 at the behest of her father, girded by thoughts of serving her country and believing that a military environment might mitigate her desire to exist openly as a woman. She was initially the target of severe bullying there as well, and the besieged, emotionally suffering Manning lashed out at superior officers. But her posting at Fort Drum in New York had some happy moments. She began dating Tyler Watkins, a Brandeis University student who introduced Manning to Boston's hacker community.

A U.S. Army photo of Bradley Manning. (Photo: By United States Army [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

In 2009, Manning was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, an isolated site near the Iranian border. Her duties as an intelligence analyst there gave her access to a great deal of classified information. Some of this informationincluding videos that showed unarmed civilians being shot at and killedhorrified Manning.

Manning reportedly made her first contact with Julian Assange's WikiLeaks in November 2009 after having made attempts to contact The New York Times and TheWashington Post. While at work in Iraq, she proceeded to amass information that included war logs about the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, private cables from the State Department and assessments of Guantnamo prisoners. In February 2010, while on leave in Rockville, Maryland, she passed this informationwhich amounted to hundreds of thousands of documents, many of them classifiedto WikiLeaks. In April, the organization released a video that showed a helicopter crew shooting at civilians after having confused a telephoto lens for weaponry. Releases of other information continued throughout the year.

Upon her return to Iraq, Manning had behavioral issues that included attacking an officer. She was demoted and told she would be discharged. Manning subsequently reached out to a stranger online, hacker Adrian Lamo. Using the screen name "bradass87," Manning confided in Lamo about the leaks. Lamo contacted the Defense Department about what he had learned, which led to Manning's arrest in May 2010.

Manning was first imprisoned in Kuwait, where she became suicidal. After returning to the United States, she was moved to a Marine base in Virginia. Manning was kept in solitary confinement for most of her time there, and was unable to leave her small, windowless cell for 23 hours each day. Deemed a suicide risk, she was watched over constantly, sometimes kept naked in her cell and not permitted to have a pillow or sheets.

Even when a psychiatrist said that Manning was no longer a danger to herself, the conditions of her imprisonment did not improve. When word of these conditions spread, there was an international outcry. Manning was transferred to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas in 2011, where she was allowed to have personal effects in a windowed cell. In January 2013, the judge in Manning's case ruled that her imprisonment had been unduly harsh and gave her a sentencing credit.

In June 2010,Manning was charged with leaking classified information. In March 2011, additional charges were added. These included the accusation of aiding the enemy, as the information Manning had leaked had been accessible to Al-Qaeda.

In February 2013, Manning pleaded guilty to storing and leaking military information. She explained that her actions had been intended to encourage debate, not harm the United States. She continued to plead not guilty to several other charges while her court martial proceeded. On July 30, Manning was found guilty of 20 counts, including espionage, theft and computer fraud. However, the judge ruled she was not guilty of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge Manning had faced.

On August 21, 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.Manning was dishonorably discharged, reduced in rank and forced to forfeit all pay.

The Obama administrationmaintained that military and diplomatic sources were endangered by Manning's leaks. Even with Manning's conviction, the debate continues as to whether she shared dangerous intelligence or if she was a whistleblower who received too harsh of a punishment.

On the day after her sentencing, Manning announced via a statement on the morning talk showTodaythat she is transgender. "As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible," Manning said.

How Chelsea Manning sees herself. By Alicia Neal, in cooperation with Chelsea herself, commissioned by the Chelsea Manning Support Network, April 23. 2014. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

After filing a court petition, Manning was granted the right in late April of 2014 to be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning. The army made hormone therapy available to the former intelligence analyst, who continued to be held at Fort Leavenworth, though other restrictions were imposed, including measures on hair length. During the summer of 2015, Manning was reportedly threatened with solitary confinement for prison rule violations that her attorneys asserted were veiled forms of harassment by authorities.

In May 2016, Manning's attorneys filed an appeal of her conviction and 35-year sentence stating that No whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly, and describing the sentence as "perhaps the most unjust sentence in the history of the military justice system.

On July 5, 2016, Manning was hospitalized aftera suicide attempt. She faced a disciplinary hearing related to her suicide attempt and was sentenced to solitary confinement. OnOctober 4, 2016, while spendingthe first night in solitary confinement, she attempted suicide again.

Support for her release continued to grow and in the waning days of President Barack Obama's presidency, 117,000 people signed a petition asking him to commute her sentence. On January 17, 2017, Obama did just that, cutting shortManning's remaining prison sentence, which allowed her to be freed on May 17, 2017. (An administration official said she was not immediately released in order to allow for time to handle items like procuring housing.) Manning served seven years of the 35-year sentence, with some Republicans, including Speaker of the HousePaul Ryan, critiquing the act of clemency.

Manning has shared her perspectives on gender identity, imprisonment and political affairs via a series of columns written for The Guardian. Four months after her release from prison, Manning appeared in the September 2017 issue of Vogue magazine, featuring photographs by Annie Liebovitz. Manning posted a photograph from the article, in which she is wearing a red bathing suit on the beach, writing: Guess this is what freedom looks like.

My goal is to use these next six months to figure out where I want to go, Manning explained in the Vogue interview. I have these values that I can connect with: responsibility, compassion. Those are really foundational for me. Do and say and be who you are because, no matter what happens, you are loved unconditionally.

In early 2018, Manning announced she was challenging Maryland's two-term U.S. Senator Ben Cardin in the Democratic primary. Positioning herself to the left of her opponent, whom she dismissed as an establishment insider, she called for a reduced police presence in the streets and championed the idea of a universal basic income.

For Manning, who has lived in Maryland since her release from prison, the choice to run for office in "the place that I have the strongest roots and ties to out of anywhere else" was an easy one. However, her bid was considered a long shot against a popular incumbent, particularly after a pair of late-May tweets that sparked concern about her well-being.

In late February 2019, Manning revealed that she was fighting a subpoena to testify before a grand jury about her interactions with WikiLeaks. She was taken into custody March 9, after a federal judge found her in contempt for her refusal to cooperate, and spent a month in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison before being moved into its general population.

In April, after Assange was arrested in London, it was reported that Manning's subpoena for grand jury testimony stemmed from her alleged online conversations with Assange around the time she forwarded the classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Manning was released from custody on May 9 and immediately summoned to appear before a new grand jury. However, she refused to comply once again and was sent back to jail on May 16.

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Chelsea Manning - - Biography ... - BIO

Who Is Chelsea Manning, What Did She Do Or Leak?

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In his final days in office, President Barack Obama granted executive clemency to over 500 federal inmates. Among them isChelsea Manning who was convicted for stealing government property, violation of theComputer Fraud and Abuse Act, among other things. While there are so many people who considered Manning as a traitor, there are others who see her as a hero for whistle-blowers.

Manning served in the US army before her conviction, and after that, she turned to politics and activism.

Popular as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, it was actually as Bradley Edward Manning that she was born on December 17, 1987, in Crescent, Oklahoma, U.S. She was brought up by her parents, Brian Manning who served in the US Navy and Susan Fox as their second child.

Growing up for her was not very easy, especially as her parents were both alcoholics and as a child, she was mostly taken care of by her elder sister, Casey Manning who is 11 years older than her. More than that, she was described as having a very controlling father.

Mannings childhood would continue to be rocky after her parents marriage suffered a divorce in 2000 and soon afterwards her father married again while she left the house with her mother and sister. In 2010, they moved to Wales to be close to her mothers family.

For her educational background, Chelsea Manning had her elementary education in the United States before attending the Tasker Milward Secondary School after her family moved to Wales.

She soon returned to the United States in 2007 as a result of an illness and moved in with her father. She would later work as a developer for a software company before she moved to the Montgomery College where she spent only a semester and quit after failing her exam.

See Also:Who Is Alan Dershowitz, What Is His Relationship With Trump and O.J Simpson

As stated, it was as Bradley Edward Manning that she was born, a boy. Bradley revealed to friends when he was still a child, that he was gay. As he struggled with how to get a job and settle down, his father encouraged him to think about joining the army, something he later decided to do as a way of resolving his gender identity disorder.

Chelsea Manning enlisted into the army in 2007 and was trainedatFort Leonard Wood, Missouriwhere he had to struggle withbullying for being different in every way possible. He was later posted to Iraq.

On 18 February 2010, WikiLeaks released a document known as the Reykjavik 13, leaked to it by Manning who got access to them while serving in the army. What would be the most damning release from Manning was a video on the Baghdad airstrike which it named Collateral Murder. The video captured American helicopters firing on a group of men before later turning the fire on a van that stopped to help the wounded. Two children who were in the van were injured in the process while their father was killed.

The video drew a lot of criticism against the United States and it was one of the main things that made WikiLeaks very popular.

Some more documents were later released by WikiLeaks, thanks to Manning. The new released was tagged the Afghan War Logs and Iraq War Logs which amounted to over 500 thousand documents. These were classified military documents that covered activities between January 2004 and December 2009.

Manning leaked some more documents including the United States diplomatic cables leak which placed the country in a diplomatic crisis with the world. The documents revealed US foreign strategies and how the country takes advantage of its embassies as a part of a global espionage network.

Another leak made by Chelsea Manning that was very damning was the Guantnamo leaks which gave the world an insight into what was really happening in Guantanamo Bay. The release showed that there are 172 prisoners in the detention camp without any hope of either a trail or a release, as well as an 89-year-old Afghan villager and a boy of 14. It also revealed that there were British nationals also held in the prison.

The entire documents leaked by Chelsea Manning became the largest set of classified documents to ever be released.

On May 27, 2010, Manning was arrested in Kuwait and placed on suicide watch. She was charged with a number of crimes including violation of the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy. In 2013, she pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges she was charged with. Although the Maximum sentence for her crime was 90 years, the government sought to have her jailed for 60 while her lawyers asked for a maximum of 25. Nonetheless, she was sentenced to 21 to 35 years in prison.

In the last days of the Obama Administration, Manning who had had her gender transition in prison was granted pardon after serving 7 years behind bars of her maximum 35 years.

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Who Is Chelsea Manning, What Did She Do Or Leak?

What is cryptography? – Definition … – SearchSecurity.com

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Cryptography is a method of protecting information and communications through the use of codes so that only those for whom the information is intended can read and process it. The pre-fix "crypt" means "hidden" or "vault" and the suffix "graphy" stands for "writing."

In computer science, cryptography refers to secure information and communication techniques derived from mathematical concepts and a set of rule-based calculations called algorithms to transform messages in ways that are hard to decipher. These deterministic algorithms are used for cryptographic key generation and digital signing and verification to protect data privacy, web browsing on the internet and confidential communications such as credit card transactions and email.

Cryptography is closely related to the disciplines of cryptology and cryptanalysis. It includes techniques such as microdots, merging words with images, and other ways to hide information in storage or transit. However, in today's computer-centric world, cryptography is most often associated with scramblingplaintext(ordinary text, sometimes referred to as cleartext) intociphertext(a process calledencryption), then back again (known as decryption). Individuals who practice this field are known as cryptographers.

Modern cryptography concerns itself with the following four objectives:

Procedures andprotocols that meet some or all of the above criteria are known as cryptosystems. Cryptosystems are often thought to refer only to mathematical procedures and computer programs; however, they also include the regulation of human behavior, such as choosing hard-to-guess passwords, logging off unused systems, and not discussing sensitive procedures with outsiders.

Cryptosystems use a set of procedures known as cryptographic algorithms, or ciphers, to encrypt and decrypt messages to secure communications among computer systems, devices such as smartphones, and applications. A cipher suite uses one algorithm for encryption, another algorithm for message authentication and another for key exchange. This process, embedded in protocols and written in software that runs on operating systems and networked computer systems, involves public and private key generation for data encryption/decryption, digital signing and verification for message authentication, and key exchange.

Single-key or symmetric-key encryption algorithms create a fixed length of bits known as a block cipher with a secret key that the creator/sender uses to encipher data (encryption) and the receiver uses to decipher it. Types of symmetric-key cryptography include the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a specification established in November 2001 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS 197), to protect sensitive information. The standard is mandated by the U.S. government and widely used in the private sector.

In June 2003, AES was approved by the U.S. government for classified information. It is a royalty-free specification implemented in software and hardware worldwide. AES is the successor to the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and DES3. It uses longer key lengths (128-bit, 192-bit, 256-bit) to prevent brute force and other attacks.

Public-key or asymmetric-key encryption algorithms use a pair of keys, a public key associated with the creator/sender for encrypting messages and a private key that only the originator knows (unless it is exposed or they decide to share it) for decrypting that information. The types of public-key cryptography include RSA, used widely on the internet; Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) used by Bitcoin; Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) adopted as a Federal Information Processing Standard for digital signatures by NIST in FIPS 186-4; and Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

To maintain data integrity in cryptography, hash functions, which return a deterministic output from an input value, are used to map data to a fixed data size. Types of cryptographic hash functions include SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1), SHA-2 and SHA-3.

The word "cryptography" is derived from the Greekkryptos, meaning hidden. The origin of cryptography is usually dated from about 2000 B.C., with the Egyptian practice of hieroglyphics. These consisted of complex pictograms, the full meaning of which was only known to an elite few. The first known use of a moderncipherwas by Julius Caesar (100 B.C. to 44 B.C.), who did not trust his messengers when communicating with his governors and officers. For this reason, he created a system in which each character in his messages was replaced by a character three positions ahead of it in the Roman alphabet.

In recent times, cryptography has turned into a battleground of some of the world's best mathematicians and computer scientists. The ability to securely store and transfer sensitive information has proved a critical factor in success in war and business.

Because governments do not wish certain entities in and out of their countries to have access to ways to receive and send hidden information that may be a threat to national interests, cryptography has been subject to various restrictions in many countries, ranging from limitations of the usage and export of software to the public dissemination of mathematical concepts that could be used to develop cryptosystems. However, the internet has allowed the spread of powerful programs and, more importantly, the underlying techniques of cryptography, so that today many of the most advanced cryptosystems and ideas are now in the public domain.

Attackers can circumvent cryptography, hack into computers that are responsible for data encryption and decryption, and exploit weak implementations, such as the use of default keys. However, cryptography makes it harder for attackers to access messages and data protected by encryption algorithms.

Growing concerns about the processing power of quantum computing to break current cryptography encryption standards led the National Institute of Standards and Technology to put out a call for papers among the mathematical and science community in 2016 for new public key cryptography standards. Unlike today's computer systems, quantum computing uses quantum bits (qubits) that can represent both 0s and 1s and therefore perform two calculations at once. While a large-scale quantum computer may not be built in the next decade, the existing infrastructure requires standardization of publicly known and understood algorithms that offer a secure approach, according to NIST. The deadline for submissions was in November 2017, analysis of the proposals is expected to take three to five years.

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What is cryptography? - Definition ... - SearchSecurity.com

Something Very Strange Is Going On With Bitcoin And BTC …

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Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices are well known to be closely tied to media and general public interest-though that could be changing.

The bitcoin price has been climbing so far this year, rising some 200% since January, though has recently plateaued at around $10,000 per bitcoin after peaking at more than $12,000 in June.

Now, it appears Google searches for bitcoin and BTC, the name used by traders for the bitcoin digital token, could be being manipulated-possibly in order to move the bitcoin price.

Google searches for "BTC" (red) have suddenly eclipsed "bitcoin" (blue) searches in the U.S. and around the world.

This week there has been a massive leap in Google searches for "BTC," which usually is lower than searches for "bitcoin"with search volume for "BTC" around the world now far higher than it was even at the top of bitcoin's epic 2017 bull run.

The trend may have started in Romania, researchers at bitcoin and cryptocurrency news and analysis website Kryptografen found.

"It is reasonable to assume that someone is behind these radical changes," wrote Kryptografen's Bendik Norheim Schei.

"That the same pattern can be seen all over the world may indicate that VPN services have been used to distribute the search across the world, thus achieving a global trend. Google Trends points out that changes have been relatively large in Romania. Is this the source, or is it just because there have been fewer searches for BTC previously? Whatever the answer issomething very strange has happened to the interest in the keyword 'BTC' this past week."

The bitcoin price has in the past tracked searches for "bitcoin" and "BTC" quite closely, with a sudden rise in searches for "BTC" without a similar rise in the price highly unusual.

Searches for "BTC" (red) have never been higher, with Romania a possible the source of the surge.

Other bitcoin and cryptocurrency analysts were quick to join Schei in pointing to potential market manipulation.

"Somebody's trying to game the trading algorithms," said Glen Goodman, trading veteran and author of bitcoin investment book, The Crypto Trader, who explained how this could be used to move bitcoin prices on the market.

"There are algorithms programmed to look at Google Trends data and try to find correlations between numbers of searches for the word 'BTC' and the movements in the bitcoin price."

"If they detect patterns, it may be profitable to trade off that data. This hacker may be buying some BTC, then sending a ton of 'BTC' search queries to Google, the algos see search numbers have risen and are triggered to buy a lot of BTC which pushes the price up, and the hacker then sells their BTC at a profit. Easy money!"

Meanwhile, it seems whoever is trying to manipulate the search results for "BTC" is doing it in an organised way.

The bitcoin price usually moves higher if Google searches for "bitcoin" and "BTC" rise, though this hasn't happened to a significant degree.

"These searches appear to be timed to coincide with the quietest time in each countryaround 4am or 5am, when search traffic is subdued, so the spam search queries will have maximum impact on the graph," Goodman added.

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Something Very Strange Is Going On With Bitcoin And BTC ...

Indictment and arrest of Julian Assange – Wikipedia

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The arrest of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange on 11 April 2019

Julian Assange, was allegedly investigated by the Eastern District of Virginia grand jury for computer-related crimes committed in the U.S. in 2012. His request for asylum was granted and he remained a resident in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012. In 2019, an indictment from 2017 was made public following the termination of his asylum status and the subsequent arrest by the Metropolitan Police of UK in London.[1] According to the indictment, Assange was accused of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion in order to help Chelsea Manning gain access to privileged information which he intended to publish on Wikileaks. This is a less serious charge in comparison to those leveled against Manning, and carries a maximum sentence of five years with a possibility of parole.[2]

Assange was arrested on 11 April 2019 by the London Metropolitan Police for failing to appear in court and now faces possible extradition to the US. His arrest caught media attention, and news of it went viral on social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook as it involved the possibility that the founder of Wikileaks and its editor-in-chief would be brought back to the US to face trial. Since his arrest, opinion on social media[by whom?] has been divided as to whether he should be extradited.[original research?] Some[who?] have argued that this is a necessary because he allegedly broke the law by attempting to hack sensitive material about US government operations. Others[who?] have said that such a move would be a threat to freedom of speech, protected by the First Amendment. Assange himself does not consent to extradition to the US, in an ongoing move to prevent this from happening.[3] On May 23, 2019, a grand jury added 17 espionage charges related to his involvement with former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, thus bringing a total of 18 federal charges against Assange in the US.[4][5] On 15 July 2019, documents revealed that Assange had used the Ecuadorian embassy to meddle in the 2016 US Presidential election and had met with Russian and various hackers from around the world to do so.[6]

Assange and some of his friends founded Wikileaks in 2006 and started visiting Europe, Asia, Africa and North America to look for, and publish, secret information concerning companies and governments that they felt should be made public. However, these leaks attracted little interest from law enforcement.[original research?]

In 2010, Assange was contacted by Chelsea Manning, who gave him classified information containing various military operations conducted by the US government abroad. The material included the Baghdad airstrike of 2007, Granai Airstrike of 2009, the Iraq War Logs, Afghan War Diaries, and the Afghan War Logs, among others.[7] Part of these documents were published by Wikileaks and leaked to other major media houses including The Guardian between 2010 and 2011.[8]

Critics of the release included Julia Gillard, then Australian Prime Minister, who said the act was illegal, and the Vice-President of the United States, Joe Biden, who called him a terrorist.[9][10] Others, including Brazilian president Luiz da Silva and Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa supported his actions, while Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said he deserved a Nobel prize for his actions.[11][12] The Manning leaks also led Wikileaks and Julian Assange to receive various accolades and awards,[13] but at the same time attracted police investigations.[citation needed]

Following the 2010 and 2011 Manning leaks, authorities in the US began investigating Assange and Wikileaks. Specifically, the investigations were being done by the Grand Jury in Alexandria, Virginia as of November 2011.[14] Assange broke bail to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning, and became a fugitive. The Australian government distanced itself from Assange.[15]

He then sought and gained political asylum from Ecuador, granted by Rafael Correa, after visiting the country's embassy in London.[16][17][18]

At the same time, an independent investigation by the FBI was going on regarding Assange's release of the Manning documents,[19] and according to court documents dated May 2014, he was still under active and ongoing investigation.[20] A warrant issued to Google by the district court cited several crimes, including espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and general conspiracy. The indictment continued to remain sealed as of January 2019, although investigations seemed to have intensified as the case neared its statute of limitations.[21]

After Assange's asylum was revoked, the Ambassador of Ecuador to the UK invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy on 11 April 2019. Following this invitation, Assange was arrested and taken to a central London police station.[22] Assange was carrying Gore Vidal's History of the National Security State during his arrest.[23] The news of the arrest went viral on Twitter and Facebook within minutes of its happening and several media outlets reported it as breaking news. President Moreno is quoted to have referred to Assange as a "spoiled brat" in the wake of the arrest.[24]

Assange was arrested in relation to his indictment in Sweden. Specifically, he was arrested for failing to appear in the UK court, which wanted to extradite him to Sweden to answer to sexual charges which were filed against him in 2012.[25] At a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court a few hours after his arrest, the presiding judge found Assange was guilty of breaching the terms of his bail.[26] On May 1, 2019, Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison.[27]

Opinions are divided on the question of the arrest of Assange.The United Kingdom, a member of Council of Europe, is committed to respecting Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights which provides the right to freedom of expression and information. This is why, several politicians[who?] and associations[who?] consider that the arrest of the whistleblower constitutes an attack on the freedom of expression and international law.[original research?]

The chairman of the Group of the European United LeftNordic Green Left, Tiny Kox, asked to Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, whether the arrest of Julian Assange and possible extradition to the US are in line with the criteria of European Convention on Human Rights, because Julian Assange can benefit from the protection of the right to freedom of expression and information.[28] Eva Joly, magistrate and MEP, states that "the arrest of Julian Assange is an attack on freedom of expression, international law and right to asylum".[29] Sevim Dagdelen, German Bundestag MP, specialized in international law and press law, describes Assange's arrest as "an attack on independent journalism" and says he "is today seriously endangered".[30][31] Dick Marty, a former Attorney General of Ticino and rapporteur on the CIA's secret prisons for the Council of Europe, considers the arrest of whistleblowers "very shocking".[32][33] Christophe Deloire, Secretary General of Reporters Without Borders, believes that "targeting Assange [...] would be a strictly punitive measure and would constitute a dangerous precedent for journalists, their sources and whistle-blowers".[34] British Veterans for Peace UK call British government to "respect the rights of journalists and whistle-blowers and refuse to extradite Julian Assange to the US" and expresses concern "that journalism and whistleblowing is being criminalised by the US and actively supported by British authorities".[35] Amnesty International calls on the UK to "refuse to extradite or send in any other manner Julian Assange to the USA where there is a very real risk that he could face human rights violations, including detention conditions that would violate the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment and an unfair trial followed by possible execution, due to his work with Wikileaks."[36]

Ecuadorian president Lenn Moreno, the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the British Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, U.S. Senator Mark Warner, Hillary Clinton campaign advisor Neera Tanden, and British Prime Minister Theresa May, who commented that "no one is above the law," are in support of the arrest.[37][38] Alternatively, it is has been asserted that such a move would be a threat to freedom of speech as protected by the first amendment to the US Constitution. This view is held by Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg, Rafael Correa, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Corbyn, Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, and Glenn Greenwald, who said "it's the criminalization of journalism".[37][39][40][41]

Ecuadorean president Lenn Moreno said in a video posted on Twitter that he "requested Great Britain to guarantee that Mr Assange would not be extradited to a country where he could face torture or the death penalty. The British government has confirmed it in writing, in accordance with its own rules."[42] On 14 April 2019, however, Moreno stated in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian that no other nation influenced his government's decision to revoke Assange's asylum in the embassy and that Assange did in fact use facilities in the embassy "to interfere in processes of other states."[43][44] Moreno also stated "we can not allow our house, the house that opened its doors, to become a centre for spying" and noted that Assange also had poor hygiene.[43][44] Moreno further stated "We never tried to expel Assange, as some political actors want everyone to believe. Given the constant violations of protocols and threats, political asylum became untenable."[43] On 11 April 2019, Moreno described Assange as a "bad mannered" guest who physically assaulted embassy security guards.[45][46]

According to Amnesty International's Massimo Moratti, if extradited to the United States, Assange may face the "risk of serious human rights violations, namely detention conditions, which could violate the prohibition of torture".[47]

Widespread criticism from the news media and other public advocates ensued following Assange's arrest on Espionage charges. Multiple organizations and journalists criticized Assange's arrest as a journalist citing first amendment claims.

Immediately following the arrest of Assange, the Eastern District of Virginia grand jury unsealed the indictment it had brought against him. According to the indictment, Assange was accused of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion in order to assist Chelsea Manning gaining access to privileged information which he intended to publish on WikiLeaks. This is a less serious charge than those leveled against Manning, and carries a maximum sentence of five years.[55]

Assange was arrested in April after being pushed out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had been living since 2012, avoiding an international arrest warrant, was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison by a British judge on 1st May 2019.[56]

Judge Deborah Taylor said Assange's time in the embassy had cost British taxpayers the equivalent of nearly $21 million, and that he had sought asylum in a "deliberate attempt to delay justice."

Assange offered a written apology in court, claiming that his actions were a response to terrifying circumstances. He said he had been effectively imprisoned in the embassy; two doctors also provided medical evidence of the mental and physical effects of being confined. To which the judge Deborah Taylor said "You were not living under prison conditions, and you could have left at any time to face due process with the rights and protections which the legal system in this country provides".

On 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted, in a superseding indictment, under the Espionage Act of 1917, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for offences relating to the publication of diplomatic cables and other sensitive information.[57] In the past the Act was used to charge Socialist congressman and newspaper editor Victor L. Berger, Emma Goldman and Eugene V. Debs.[54] The May 23 indictment adds 17 federal charges to the earlier federal indictment, thus bringing a total of 18 federal criminal charges against Assange from the US federal government with a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.[5][58][4][59][60] The charges are related to his involvement with Chelsea Manning, a former US Army intelligence analyst who gave Assange classified information concerning matters surrounding the US Defense Department.[4][5]

On 15 July 2019, CNN obtained documents from an Ecuadorian intelligence official which confirmed that Assange used the embassy as the command center for Wikileaks.[6] The documents also revealed that during the 2016 election, Assange used the embassy to meet with Russians and world class hackers from different countries.[6]

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Indictment and arrest of Julian Assange - Wikipedia

Where is Edward Snowden Now? What Did Edward Snowden Do?

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No one saw it coming, but Edward Snowden became a famous fugitive overnight after going to Hong Kong, China, and revealing classified documents stolen from the NSA to select journalists there. Within hours, the whole world knew of supposed top-secret surveillance programs being run by the NSA on American and foreign citizens. Snowden became a hero and a traitor at the same time, depending on the political lens you view it through. He is believed to be in Moscow, Russia, currently under asylum, and is reportedly trying to go to Latin America.

Its been more than four-and-half years since Edward Snowden copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA), but the American government has yet to get their hands on him. Edward Snowden is a computer professional who worked for the CIA and was a contractor for the United States government. So, what did Edward Snowden do? He was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after having stints in Dell and the CIA. He was posted at an NSA facility in Hawaii, but on May 20, 2013, left his job and flew to Hong Kong where, in early June 2013, he revealed thousands of classified documents to some journalists. This became an international incident as stories based on these leaked documents appeared in prestigious publications like The Guardian, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times.

The U.S. government moved in swiftly to retaliate, and on June 21, 2013, the Department of Justice charged Snowden on two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, and theft of government property. Where is Edward Snowden now? According to reports, he is currently in Moscow, Russia, where he was granted asylum. Russia initially granted him right of asylum for one year and have since given him extensions, much to the fury of the U.S. Reports say that he can stay in Russia until 2020, but Snowden was living in an undisclosed location and is seeking asylum in other places in the world.

Snowden disclosed documents about global surveillance programs, many of them run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the co-operation of European governments, and telecommunication companies. He spoke about the motivation that led him to leak these classified documents saying, I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.

Also Read:Lindsay Mills Wiki: Everything You Need to Know about Edward Snowdens Girlfriend

The American government views him differently and took legal steps to bring him back to the country so that he can face justice. Others are divided in their opinion, and Snowden has variously been called a hero, dissident, whistleblower, patriot, and a traitor. His disclosures have aggravated discussions about mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the delicate balance that must be maintained between national security and information privacy.

Several countries have offered him asylum, including Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. However, there are no direct flights to these countries from Moscow, and the U.S. government put pressure on countries along Snowdens route to hand him over. Snowden himself said that he preferred to stay in Russia as there was no safe way for him to reach Latin America. Today, with uncertainty in both the U.S. and in Russia, Snowden is in a precarious position about where he will stay in the future. For the moment, he is that rare man without a country to call his own. Patriot or traitor? Whats your opinion on Edward Snowden?

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Where is Edward Snowden Now? What Did Edward Snowden Do?


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