« First...102030...1,9701,9711,9721,9731,974...1,9801,9902,000...Last »

Assange appeals to Sweden’s Supreme Court

Posted on by

Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have filed an appeal to Sweden's Supreme Court seeking to quash the 2010 warrant for his arrest on accusations of rape and molestation.

Assange's lawyer Per Samuelsson said he lodged the appeal with Sweden's top court on Wednesday afternoon to end the stand-off.

The Australian remains holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London to avoid arrest and extradition, while Swedish prosecutors refuse requests he be questioned there.

"We have to end this - the situation is completely stalled, and that's the point we raised in our appeal," Samuelsson said in criticising what he called the "total passivity" of prosecutors who he said "have done nothing in four years".

With the law requiring judges to decide if they are legally competent to accept the appeal, Samuelsson said "the Supreme Court now has the ball".

The arrest warrant was issued in 2010 by Swedish prosecutors investigating a case based on one woman accusing Assange of rape and another alleging sexual molestation.

Assange, 43, refused to return to Sweden to refute the charges he adamantly denies on fears Stockholm would extradite him to the US to be tried for his role in WikiLeaks' publication of huge stores of classified diplomatic, military and intelligence documents.

In 2012, he sought refuge in Ecuador's British embassy to avoid arrest and likely forced extradition to Sweden.

He has proposed to testify in the Swedish inquiry from inside that mission, but prosecutors insist Assange must return to Stockholm to be interviewed.

Little has evolved since then and after a lower Swedish court rejected the warrant appeal in November, Assange's lawyer took the motion to the Supreme Court.

Excerpt from:
Assange appeals to Sweden's Supreme Court

Julian Assange launches ‘final’ arrest appeal

Posted on by

Julian Assange with Ecuador's ambassador in London in 2013. Photo: TT

UPDATED: The Wikileaks founder's lawyers have asked Sweden's Supreme Court to throw out the European arrest warrant against him, on the grounds that his freedoms have been unreasonably restricted since he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The move is the latest development in Julian Assange's long battle to fight extradition to Stockholm where he faces arrest following sex allegations made by two different Swedish women in 2010, claims which he denies.

Assange's defence team filed its submission to Sweden's Supreme Court at 4pm, one of his lawyers, Per Samuelson has revealed to The Local.

He said the Wikileaks founder's legal team had argued that the "severe limitations" on Assange's freedoms caused by his inability to leave the Ecuadorian embassy without fear of arrest were "unreasonable" and "disproportionate" to the case.

The team's submission also questioned the chief prosecutors in the case who Samuelson believes have been "passive for the last four years". In addition, the lawyers asked to be given access to some 100 text messages sent between the women who claim Assange assaulted them and to some of their friends.

See the rest here:
Julian Assange launches 'final' arrest appeal

Assange appeal lodged in Sweden to lift arrest warrant

Posted on by

Assange's lawyers lodged an appeal on Wednesday to the Swedish Supreme Court to cancel an arrest warrant issued in 2010, after two women accused the WikiLeaks founder of rape and molestation.

Quashing the warrant would largely end the legal stand-off, which saw the Australian seek refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012, to avoid arrest and likely extradition to Sweden. He did so after losing a legal battle in Britain against the extradition.

The 43-year-old refused to go to Sweden to refute the charges, which he denies, as he fears Stockholm would extradite him to the US, where he is wanted over his part in WikiLeaks' publishing of classified military, diplomatic and intelligence documents.

Swedish prosecutors have refused to interview Assange in London, insisting he go to Stockholm to be questioned.

In November, a lower Swedish court rejected Assange's request that the extradition request be lifted, saying he should answer questions over the claims. But it did criticize prosecutors for failing "to examine alternative avenues" in the investigation.

Assange's lawyer hopes that taking the case higher in Sweden will end the impasse.

"We have to end this - the situation is completely stalled, and that's the point we raised in our appeal," said Assange's lawyer, Per Samuelsson.

"We are asking the court to give us access to the phone text messages that the two plaintiffs exchanged, and which (prosecutors) possess," Samuelsson said, saying he was certain the contents of the message would prove his client's innocence.

The complex in central London where Assange is exiled has been constantly guarded by police, at a cost reaching millions of pounds.

Last August, Assange told reporters he planned to leave the embassy "soon," without giving reasons for his announcement or disclosing where he would like to go.

Read the rest here:
Assange appeal lodged in Sweden to lift arrest warrant

Snowden: Spy Agencies ‘Screwed All of Us’ in Hacking Crypto Keys

Posted on by

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden didnt mince words during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Monday when he said the NSA and the British spy agency GCHQ had screwed all of us when it hacked into the Dutch firm Gemalto to steal cryptographic keys used in billions of mobile SIM cards worldwide.

When the NSA and GCHQ compromised the security of potentially billions of phones (3g/4g encryption relies on the shared secret resident on the sim), Snowden wrote in the AMA, they not only screwed the manufacturer, they screwed all of us, because the only way to address the security compromise is to recall and replace every SIM sold by Gemalto.

Gemalto is one of the leading makers of SIM cards used in billions of mobile phones around the world to secure the communications of telecom customers of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and more than 400 other wireless carriers in 85 countries. Stealing the crypto keys essentially allows the spy agencies to wiretap and decipher encrypted phone communications at will without the assistance of telecom carriers or the oversight of a court or government. The keys also allow the agencies to decrypt previously intercepted messages they hadnt been able to crack.

But in stealing the keys with the aim of targeting the communications of specific customers, the spy agencies undermine the security of billions of other customers.

Our governments should never be weighing the equities in an intelligence gathering operation such that a temporary benefit to surveillance regarding a few key targets is seen as more desireable than protecting the communications of a global system Snowden wrote.

As The Intercept reported last week, the spy agencies targeted employees of the Dutch firm, reading their siphoned emails and scouring their Facebook posts to obtain information that would help the agencies hack the employees. Once on employee systems, the spy agencies planted backdoors and other tools to give them a persistent foothold on the companys network. We believe we have their entire network, the author of a PowerPoint slide, leaked by Snowden to journalist Glenn Greenwald, boasted about the hack.

Snowden commented on the story after being asked what he thought about recent revelations from Kaspersky Lab that it had uncovered a spy module, believed to belong to the NSA, designed for hacking the firmware of hard drives. Snowden said the firmware hacking was significant but even more significant was the theft of the crypto keys.

[A]lthough firmware exploitation is nasty, Snowden responded, its at least theoretically reparable: tools could plausibly be created to detect the bad firmware hashes and re-flash good ones. This isnt the same for SIMs, which are flashed at the factory and never touched again.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute shared Snowdens sentiments about the crypto theft.

We hear a great deal lately about the value of information sharing in cybersecurity, he wrote in a blog post about the hack of Gemalto. Well, heres a case where NSA had information that the technology American citizens and companies rely on to protect their communications was not only vulnerable, but had in fact been compromised.[T]his is one more demonstration that proposals to require telecommunications providers and device manufacturers to build law enforcement backdoors in their products are a terrible, terrible idea. As security experts have rightly insisted all along, requiring companies to keep a repository of keys to unlock those backdoors makes the key repository itself a prime target for the most sophisticated attackerslike NSA and GCHQ.

More:
Snowden: Spy Agencies ‘Screwed All of Us’ in Hacking Crypto Keys

Why the ‘Equation Group’ Spying Program Should Make Us Proud

Posted on by

Learning about NSA spying programs is generally terrifying. Still to this day, Glenn Greenwald is trickling out leaked information from the Snowden revelations, and just today,Al Jazeera announced that they havemajor NSA news on the way.

But every once in a while, the U.S. government reminds us that it can totally nail it in terms of running a spy program.

Earlier this week, the world learned of the godfather of cyber-espionage programs. The Equation Group, as its discoverer Kaspersky Labs calls it, is sort of an Illuminati Death Star puppeteer of spy programs two decades old and almost certainly run by the NSA.

So why shouldnt we be reviled that the U.S. government could possibly run such a pervasive and persistent surveillance program?Well, given that the U.S. will almost always run some sort of spy program, there are three main reasons why this isexactly the kind of program the NSA should be running, instead of the broad domestic surveillance theyve developed in recent years:

1. Its targeted surveillance

The thing most people hate about the NSA isnt just that it operates in secret, or that they have so much influence over our foreign affairs, but that they manage to sweep up millions of innocent Americans in their surveillance programs.

But the malware created by the Equation Group targets individual computers and networks, and is often hand delivered to targets the group has already deemed interesting targets. From what Kaspersky labs could determine,only a few individuals were targeted by the Equation Groups attacks.

The Equation group uses several malware platforms to conduct highly targeted cyber-espionage attacks, Costin Raiu, Director of the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab, told the Observer. I would even say that the attackers work with a surgical precision.

As American cryptographer Bruce Schneierwrote in his popular cybersecurity blog last week, weve come to regard the NSAas over-reaching because in order to run a broad operation, it requires us all to give up a little bit of our security. The Equation Group was focused on severely penetrating and undermining a few powerful targets, not chipping away at as many parties as possible.

[I]ts the sort of thing we want the NSA to do, Mr.Schneierwrote. Its targeted. Its exploiting existing vulnerabilities. In the overall scheme of things, this is much less disruptive to Internet security than deliberately inserting vulnerabilities that leave everyone insecure.

Follow this link:
Why the ‘Equation Group’ Spying Program Should Make Us Proud

Franco-Dutch SIM card maker claims US and UK hacked its networks

Posted on by

Gemalto chief executive Olivier Piou said an internal investigation had shown that in 2010 and 2011 there had been two particularly sophisticated intrusions. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

The worlds largest producer of SIM cards says it believes both the US and UK security services hacked its computer systems in 2010 and 2011 trying to steal encryption keys that could have given them unfettered global access to mobile phone data.

The Franco-Dutch firm, Gemalto, which has its headquarters in Amsterdam, is listed on both the Paris and Amsterdam stock markets, and has 10,000 employees in 85 countries, said the hacks had breached its office network though it was unclear whether they had accessed the encryption keys.

The alleged hacks were reported last week by the specialist website, Intercept, which cited documents leaked to it by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

Gemaltos chief executive Olivier Piou said that while hacking was a constant problem, an internal investigation had shown that in 2010 and 2011 there had been two particularly sophisticated intrusions consistent with the Snowden documents.

They had reasonable grounds for believing, he said, those hacks had probably been the work of the NSA in the US and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), based in Cheltenham in the UK.

The operation appeared to have been an attempt to intercept the encryption keys that unlock mobile phone SIM cards while they were being transferred from Gemaltos high-security production facilities to mobile network operators worldwide.

Whether SIM security codes were stolen and how many, thats difficult to say, Mr Piou told reporters. How many were used, thats even harder to say.

However, even if the hack had succeeded in stealing codes, the agencies would have been able to spy only on 2G mobile phone networks. More up-to-date 3G and 4G networks were not vulnerable to that type of attack.

Asked if the company had contacted either GCHQ or the NSA when the hacks were discovered or since, he said it would have been a waste of time and they did not intend to take legal action for the same reason.

Here is the original post:
Franco-Dutch SIM card maker claims US and UK hacked its networks

Clinton is looking for a middle ground on encryption that experts say doesn’t exist

Posted on by

Hillary Rodham Clinton avoided taking a position on how easy it should be forlaw enforcement to access people'sencrypted e-mails and textsduring an interview at a women's leadership conference in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, calling the debate a "classic hard choice."

"I think what we're missing is that people are kind of in their corners arguing about liberty versus security instead of saying, 'Look, we all want to have privacy for the end users' that's what the companies are responding to. They're trying to be able to tell their customers, 'We're going to protect your data,'" she said. "But we also don't want to find ourselves in a position where it's a legitimate security threat we're facing and we can't figure out how to address it because we have no way into whatever is holding the information."

Clinton said people have a legitimate right to privacy, but she argued that the encryption debate was about finding "the right balance a balance Clinton said she hasn't figured out yet.

Clinton saidher position was "not a dodge," but some within the tech industry were not convinced, including Nu Wexler, a member of Twitter's policy communications team.

Asked by Re/code's Kara Swisher how she might resolve the issue, Clinton said she would start with having a "real conversation" with tech executives. "I think the conversation, rather than 'you don't understand privacy and you don't understand security,' ought to be 'OK, let's figure out how to do this,'" she said.

But there is already a dialogue going on between theObamaadministration and leaders of the technology industry and much of it is coming down to the technicalities of how encryption works more than an ideological debate over privacy and national security.

Technology companies have moved to expand their deployment of encryption in the wake of revelations about the scope of the National Security Agency's surveillanceprograms. Apple and Google, for instance, have made it impossible to unlock many mobile devices using their operating systems even if served with a legitimate warrant. This hascreated tensionwith U.S. law enforcement officials, who warn that this could allow cybercriminals or terrorists to "go dark." The officials have urged technology companies to build into their products ways for the government to intercept encrypted communications.

But cybersecurity experts have criticized this approach, saying that such "lawful intercept" technology can't be implemented without fundamentally undermining how encryption works adding complexity into the code that multiplies risks and gives hackers yet another target to attack.

The debate sparked aheated exchange between NSA Director Mike Rogers and Yahoo's information security chief officer, Alex Stamos, at a cybersecurity conference Monday. "Its like drilling a hole in the windshield," Stamos said.

Clinton's husband, former president Bill Clinton, oversaw an earlier round of the encryption debate, during the 1990s commonly known as the "cryptowars." As part of the cryptowars, the government promoted the use ofNSA technology called the "clipper chip" to provide intercept capabilities forencrypted phone calls. But researchers discovered vulnerabilities in the design that could be exploited, leaving those calls insecure against others hoping to eavesdrop.

Read more here:
Clinton is looking for a middle ground on encryption that experts say doesn’t exist

Oscars 2015: Edward Snowden Responds to ‘Treason’ Joke …

Posted on by

World News Videos | US News VideosCopy

Edward Snowden can take a joke.

The star of the Oscar-winning documentary "Citizenfour" was not able to attend the glitzy bash on Sunday "for some treason," host Neil Patrick Harris quipped after the filmmakers thanked the whistleblower for his courage.

Snowden has been living in Russia for more than a year after he was granted asylum. He is wanted in the United States under the federal Espionage Act for revealing classified National Security Agency information, meaning a return to the United States would likely be out of the question unless he wanted to surrender.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything interview with the team behind "Citizenfour," Snowden said he "laughed at NPH."

"I don't think it was meant as a political statement, but even if it was, that's not so bad," Snowden said of the Oscar host's clever play on words. "My perspective is if you're not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don't care enough."

Read more from the original source:
Oscars 2015: Edward Snowden Responds to 'Treason' Joke ...

Edward Snowden’s Girlfriend Makes an Oscars Appearance

Posted on by

World News Videos | US News VideosCopy

Lindsay Mills, the girlfriend of Edward Snowden, made an appearance at Sunday's Oscars -- part of the group accepting the Best Documentary Feature Award for Citizenfour, a film about the National Security Agency whistleblower.

Mills joined director Laura Poitras, producer Dirk Wilutzky and journalist Glenn Greenwald onstage.

Poitras film documents her initial meeting in Hong Kong with Snowden.

Snowden was charged under the federal Espionage Act and is currently living in asylum in Russia. Because of the sensitive nature of the footage, Poitras made "Citizenfour" under intense secrecy and edited it in Germany.

"Thank you to Edward Snowden for his courage, and for the many other whistleblowers, and I share this with Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who are exposing truth," Poitras said when accepting the award.

Oscars host Neil Patrick Harris mentioned Snowden as Poitras and her collaborators walked offstage.

"The subject of 'Citizenfour,' Edward Snowden, could not be here tonight for some treason," Harris said.

Snowden released a statement through the American Civil Liberties Union, congratulating Poitras on the Oscars win.

When Laura Poitras asked me if she could film our encounters, I was extremely reluctant, the statement read. Im grateful that I allowed her to persuade me. The result is a brave and brilliant film that deserves the honor and recognition it has received. My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.

See the original post:
Edward Snowden's Girlfriend Makes an Oscars Appearance


« First...102030...1,9701,9711,9721,9731,974...1,9801,9902,000...Last »