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Shailene Woodley Praises Edward Snowden as a "Hero," Plays His Girlfriend in New Oliver Stone Movie

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The U.S. government may believe that Edward Snowden is a criminal, but Shailene Woodley doesn't.

In fact, the Insurgent star, who plays Snowden's longtime dancer-acrobat girlfriend Lindsay Mills in Oliver Stone's upcoming drama about the National Security Agency whistleblower, thinks he should be celebrated for his work.

"I define a hero as somebody, who against the judgment of other people, if they believe something will positively impact the world and they choose to do it and honor their integrity, that's what I sort of consider a hero, no matter how big or mall a feat they create," she told me this weekend while promoting Insurgent (in theaters on March 20). "And in that light, absolutely I think that Edward Snowden is a hero."

Woodley hasn't had the chance to talk to Mills or Snowden, but she'd like to.

NEWS: See the first pic of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden

"You are the epitome of the word selfless," Woodley said of Snowden, who has been living in Moscow since seeking asylum there in 2013 after facing espionage charges in the U.S. for leaking the classified information to the press. "You did something knowing you wouldn't be able to come home, knowing that your country would have very mixed feelings and yet your integrity on what you believe was right or wrong or should be public knowledge was more important to you than almost your own comfortability and the life that you had lived for so long. So I would like to say thank you to him."

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in the film as Snowden. Rounding out the cast are Zachary Quinto, Scott Eastwood and Nicolas Cage. Citizenfour, a documentary about Snowden and the NSA scandal, recently won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

On a less serious note, Woodley said she learned how to pole dance for the film for Mills' YouTube videos showing off her performing skills.

"It's so much fun," Woodley said.

And so was filming Insurgent, the second of the four films in the Divergent franchise.

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Shailene Woodley Praises Edward Snowden as a "Hero," Plays His Girlfriend in New Oliver Stone Movie

Edward Snowden’s Girlfriend Posts Two Mysterious New Blog Entries

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Over the last several days, Edward Snowden's girlfriend's dead blog has suddenly sprung back to life, with two cryptic blog entries accompanied by photos of the acrobat-blogger-dancer. What does it mean?

Lindsay Mills faced a flurry of attention in 2013, when her boyfriend became the source of one of the biggest intelligence leaks in US history. In the aftermath of Snowden's revelations, the media mined her (amazing) blog L's Journey for photos of the couple, information about their life together in Hawaii, and a truly incredible collection of self portraits of Lindsey Mills in various costumes, including one where she toplessly clutches a stuffed turtle to her breasts. Truly, a woman who was living her best life.

After Snowden fled his life in Hawaii to Hong Kong, Mills herself vanished from the public eye for over a year. Footage shown in the documentary Citizenfour, however, revealed that Mills wasn't abandoned at all. In fact, she and Snowden were still together, and she visits him in Russia regularly. She even took to the stage at the Oscars as Citizenfour filmmaker Laura Poitras accepted her award for Best Documentary.

Mills's return to cyberspace consists, so far, of two tidbits. One, dated March 8, consists of a photo of her in front of the home she and Snowden shared in Hawaii accompanied with the caption "oh HI!" The other, more contemplative entry dated yesterday, features a shot of Mills sitting on a canyon ledge with the words,

Canyon of misinterpreted judgment before me. My polkadots, never one to back down from a challenge, have softened to a muted hue. Fearful to illuminate in an over-saturated habitat. I prop myself on flexible support that bends too easily on shaky ground. Avalanching down the rock wall into green valleys. That give a glimmer of support for growth. But open on a landscape of relentless rehashing that hamper my expressive dots from flourishing. While darker clouds ever loom overhead. As a reminder of the difficulties in traversing this unknown expanse.

Canyon of Misinterpreted Judgment was by far my least favorite Nancy Drew book.

Does this mean that the best spy girlfriend blog in history is returning to cyberspace for good? Will we, the denizens of the web, be privy once again to the adventures of L and her mysterious boyfriend E?

One can only hope.

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Edward Snowden's Girlfriend Posts Two Mysterious New Blog Entries

Did GCHQ crack encryption? Parliament’s security committee suggests GCHQ can read encrypted communications

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Today's report from Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee has suggested that GCHQ has broken computer encryption systems and is able to read messages that ought to be secure.

The admission is made at the bottom of page 67 of the report.

Under the headline, "Reading Encrypted Communications", it states: "Terrorists, criminals and hostile states increasingly use encryption to protect their communications. The ability to decrypt these communications is core to GCHQ's work, and therefore they have designed a programme of work - [redacted] - to enable them to read encrypted communications."

The report states that there are three main strands to GCHQ's work, two of which are redacted in the report, but the third simply reads "developing decryption capabilities". The wording of the report, though, suggests that GCHQ has already achieved this, although how efficiently and quickly it is able to do so, and what encryption systems it refers to, remains open to question.

The report claims that such encryption-cracking is legal under section three of the Intelligence Services Act, which empowers the security services to, "monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions and to obtain and provide information derived from or related to such emissions or equipment and from encrypted material".

No additional ministerial or judicial authorisation is required for these activities, claims the report, although there is an internal procedure that the committee redacted from the report.

"Many people believe, based on the Snowden leaks, that GCHQ systematically undermine and weaken common internet encryption products," claims the committee. But under questioning, representatives of GCHQ claimed that they "have increasingly taken into account the interests of members of the public who will use relevant products".

One of the early claims arising from the disclosures by US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden was that the NSA had "circumvented or cracked" internet encryption.

One of the ways in which it did this was by nobbling an encryption standards-setting committee to incorporate technology it knew to be flawed. It could then exploit those flaws when the technology was commercially deployed.

It also paid RSA Security, one of the best-known security software companies, $10m to incorporate flawed technology in its products and NSA-compromised technology was later found in a second security tool, the Bsafe security suite, sold by RSA.

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Did GCHQ crack encryption? Parliament's security committee suggests GCHQ can read encrypted communications

How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

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Chris DiBona was worried everything would end up in one place.

This was a decade ago, before the idea of open source software flipped the tech world upside-down. The open source Linux operating system was already running an enormous number of machines on Wall Street and beyond, proving you can generate big valueand big moneyby freely sharing software code with the world at large. But the open source community was still relatively small. When coders started new open source projects, they typically did so on a rather geeky and sometimes unreliable internet site called SourceForge.

DiBona, the long-haired open source guru inside Google, was worried that all of the worlds open source software would end up in that one basket. There was only one, and that was SourceForge, he says.

So, like many other companies, Google created its own site where people could host open source projects. It was called Google Code. The company had built its online empire on top of Linux and other open source software, and in providing an alternative to SourceForce, it was trying to ensure open source would continue to evolve, trying to spread this religion across the net.

But then GitHub came along and spread it faster.

Today, Google announced that after ten years, its shutting down Google Code. The decision wasnt hard to predict. Over the past three years or so, the company has moved about a thousand projects off of the site. But its official demise is worth noting. Google Code is dying because most of the open source worlda vast swath of the tech world in generalnow houses its code on GitHub, a site bootstrapped by a quirky San Francisco startup of the same name. All but a few of those thousand projects are now on GitHub.

Some argue that Google had other, more selfish reasons for creating Google Code: It wanted control, or it was working to get as much digital data onto its machines as it could (as the company is wont to do). But ultimately, GitHub was more valuable than any of that. GitHub democratized software development in a more complete way than SourceForge or Google Code or any other service that came before. And thats the most valuable currency in the software development world.

After just seven years on the net, GitHub now boasts almost 9 million registered users. Each month, about 20 million others visit without registering. According to web traffic monitor Alexa, GitHub is now among the top 100 most popular sites on earth.

Its popularity is remarkable for a site thats typically used by software coders, not people looking for celebrity news, cat videos, or social chatter. If you look at the top 100 sites, says Brian Doll, GitHubs vice president of strategy, youve got a handful of social sites, thirty flavors of Google with national footprints, a lot of media outletsand GitHub.

The irony of GitHubs success, however, is the open source world has returned to a central repository for all its free code. But this time, DiBonalike most other codersis rather pleased that everything is in one place. Having one central location allows people to collaborate more easily on, well, almost anything. And because of the unique way GitHub is designed, the eggs-in-the-same-basket issue isnt as pressing as it was with SourceForge. GitHub matters a lot, but its not like youre stuck there, DiBona says.

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How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

Opinion: How to defuse a simmering crypto war

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Watch a debate on balancing national security with privacy featuring White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel, Lance Hoffman, and others live on CSMonitor.com starting at 9 a.m. Thursday, March 12. If you are in Washington, you can register for the event here.

What is a nation's optimum cryptography policy? In 1993, the US government proposed it be allowed back-door access to communications via an encryption chip the Clipper chip built into computer systems. Under suitable conditions, the government would be able to decrypt any communication and thus thwart criminal activity. Thatproposal did not sit well with privacy advocates, civil libertarians, and others who saw it as overreach on the governments part and a serious infringement on civil liberties.

After the Edward Snowden leaks and subsequent efforts by Google, Apple, and others to build strong encryption that makes it almost impossible for governments to break into their products, the federal government has reopened the crytography discussion.

Many of the same issues that arose in the Clipper chip debate are being raised now and many of the same solutions are being proposed, this time by the Obama administration. The tensions between national security, law enforcement, and civil liberties are now more obvious in a post-9/11 world, but the basic question is not new. Controlling the actions of people in positions of power was discussed by Plato in "The Republic."

A system with a back door built in is also a system with a built-in vulnerability, exploitable by friends as well as foes. Sometimes even systems thought to be secure have bugs that arent discovered or fixed for years, such as the recently discovered FREAK exploit. Introduced in the 1990s for compliance with US cryptography export regulations, it affected several popular web browsers.

Governments should examine the political, economic, and social costs of effectively mandating insecure operating systems, hardware, and standards. Witness governments such as Germany demanding more secure systems built in their own countries (with personal data kept there also). Apple and Google and other companies hear this. They know that trust, once lost, is hard to rebuild.

Technological responses by themselves are not solutions. But they can provide part of the solution to the puzzle, just as encryption already does in verifying nuclear test-ban treaty compliance. For example, technological methods exist that require a majority of "trusted" parties to agree before a key is made available. These trusted parties could include the phone manufacturer, the police, a civil liberties organization, a news organization, and others. Just how many parties should be involved and who they should be are difficult questions that require many viewpoints global viewpoints to be considered.

And here is where much more dialogue among technologists, lawyers, and policymakers should be encouraged. Cross-disciplinary thought is woefully underfunded; thats one reason for the current chaotic state of affairs. Research by independent parties on the economic, political, and social costs and benefits of surveillance mechanisms, not only on the mechanisms themselves, should provide a starting point and will help realize the Internets potential for building bridges, as opposed to barriers, between cultures.

Lance J. Hoffman is director of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at The GeorgeWashington University in Washington. Follow him on Twitter@LanceHoffman1.

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Opinion: How to defuse a simmering crypto war

Assange appeal to be heard by Supreme Court

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Sweden's Supreme Court. Photo: TT

Sweden's Supreme Court has agreed to hear Julian Assange's appeal to have the European arrest warrant against him lifted, as the Wikileaks founder continues to fight extradition to the Nordic nation following rape and sex assault allegations.

Julian Assange is wanted for questioning in Stockholm following sex allegations made by two different Swedish women in 2010, claims which he denies.

Sweden's Supreme Court announced on Tuesday that it would consider the Australian's appeal against the decisions of two lower Swedish courts, which ruled that an arrest warrant against him should stand, paving the way for police to question him in Stockholm.

In a statement it said that it had reached the decision in the light of the "conduct of investigations and the principle of proportionality".

He has not left the embassy for two years and according to Samuelson "he has not taken one step outdoors. He has not even leaned out of the window".

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Assange appeal to be heard by Supreme Court

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lodges appeal in Swedish Supreme Court in bid to quash rape arrest warrant

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Reuters

Sweden's highest court will hear an appeal by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as he seeks to quash an arrest warrant arising from rape and sexual molestation allegations.

On Tuesday the Swedish Supreme Court agreed to consider Mr Assange's appeal against the decisions of lower courts to uphold an arrest warrant issued in November 2010.

The Supreme Court has decreed that the Swedish "Attorney-General [Minister of Justice Morgan Johansson] expeditiously submit its reply to the case, especially on the issue of the conduct of investigations and the principle of proportionality".

Last week a United States court confirmed that WikiLeaks and Mr Assange are still being targeted by the US Department of Justice in a criminal investigation prompted by leaks of secret military and diplomatic documents by US army private Chelsea Manning in early 2010. US laws referenced in search warrants executed in the WikiLeaks probe relate to espionage, conspiracy, theft of US government property and computer fraud and abuse.

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Mr Assange was arrested in the United Kingdom in December 2010, to be extradited in accordance with a European arrest warrant to Sweden to be questioned about sexual assault allegations made by two Swedish women three months earlier. After a period of incarceration in Wandsworth Prison, Mr Assange was bailed and resided under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk.

In June 2012, after a series of unsuccessful appeals in the British courts, Mr Assange moved to Ecuador's London embassy, where he was granted political asylum on the grounds that he is at risk of extradition to the United States to face espionage and conspiracy charges.

British police are on guard outside the embassy 24 hours a day, waiting to arrest Mr Assange so he can be extradited to Sweden. Mr Assange denies the allegations and his lawyers have advised that his extradition to Sweden could facilitate his extradition to the US.

In June 2014, Mr Assange's lawyers applied to the Swedish district court seeking to quash the original arrest warrant on the grounds that prosecutors had failed to progress the case by refusing to interview him in the United Kingdom and that he has been denied access to key facts forming the basis for the decision to arrest him. The application was rejected and that decision was upheld by Sweden's court of appeal in November 2014. Mr Assange then appealed to the Swedish Supreme Court which only considers cases that raise constitutional questions or where it is important to establish a precedent for guidance of lower courts.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lodges appeal in Swedish Supreme Court in bid to quash rape arrest warrant


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