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Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto and Tom Wilkinson join Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden movie

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The stars are aligning for Oliver Stone.

The Wrap reported that Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto and Tom Wilkinson are poised to join the directors Edward Snowden film.

Leo is in talks to play Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who directed Citizenfour, the acclaimed documentary about Snowden.

Quinto will play Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer and journalist to whom Snowden leaked sensitive information.

Wilkinson is in negotiations to play Ewen MacAskill, a correspondent for the Guardian who helped break Snowdens story.

As previously reported, Joseph Gordon-Levitt will play Snowden and Shailene Woodley will play his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills.

The plot will focus on Snowdens trek from Hawaii to Hong Kong, where he met with Poitras and Greenwald to deliver classified NSA documents. The film will draw from the books Time of the Octopus by Snowdens Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena and The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the Worlds Most Wanted Man by journalist Luke Harding. In addition to directing, Stone co-wrote the script.

Eric Kopeloff and Moritz Borman are producing the film.

Credit: Walter McBride/INFphoto.com

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Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto and Tom Wilkinson join Oliver Stone's Edward Snowden movie

How to encrypt your Mac with FileVault 2, and why you absolutely should

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Apples first pass at built-in encryption was, frankly, terrible. The original FileVault, introduced with 10.3 Panther in 2003, only encrypted a users home directory, and had a number of functional and implementation problems. FileVault 2 appeared in 2011 with 10.7 Lion, and had almost nothing to do with the original except the name.

FileVault 2 offers full-disk encryption (FDE). When enabled, the entire contents of the startup drive are encrypted. When your computer is powered off, the drives data is fully unrecoverable without a password. It also lets you use Find My Mac to wipe your drive in a matter of seconds remotely if youre concerned about into whose hands your computer has fallen. You can enable FileVault 2 with an existing Mac, but starting with 10.10 Yosemite, OS X now encourages turning on FileVault 2 during setup of a laptop.

This has made some law-enforcement officials unhappy, who seemingly dont want your data to be protected this strongly, so they can get access in the unlikely event that they need it. Relatively few people engage in criminal activities, and of them, even fewer ever have their computers seized and examined. Its a good sign as to how well FileVault 2 works that officials are so morose about it.

FileVault is easy to enable in System Preferences > Security & Privacy, and then once the intial encryption is over, it won't even slow your Mac down day to day.

FileVault 2 takes advantage of the ever-improving processor speed and features in Macs to perform on-the-fly encryption and decryption. Every chunk of data read from and written to disk, whether of the spinning variety or SSD, has to go through this process. Macs introduced starting in 2010 and 2011, and every model since, can use encryption circuitry in the processor, boosting performance.

FileVault 2 works hand in hand with OS X Recovery, a special disk partition that lets you run Disk Utility from the same drive you may be having trouble with, restore or install OS X via the Internet, restore a Time Machine backup, or browse Safari. With FileVault 2 enabled, your computer boots into the Recovery volume, prompting you to login with any account thats been allowed to start up the computer.

On a system without FileVault 2 already in place, you need to turn it on, which converts your startup drive from its unencrypted state to fully encrypted. This comes with a few big flashing red warnings and pieces of advice before you proceed. (You can encrypt secondary and external drives by Control-clicking a drives icon and select Encrypt Drive Name, but it doesnt tie in with login: you set a password for the drive, and have to enter it to mount it.)

Warning 1! During the setup, OS X creates a Recovery Key for your drive. As with Apples two-step verification for Apple ID accounts, this Recovery Key is critical to retain. Without it, if you lose or forget the account password to all FileVault 2enabled accounts, your drive is permanently inaccessible. Keep a copy of the Recovery Key, probably printed out, for emergencies.

Warning 2! Once you start the conversion, theres no stopping it. It has to complete, and it consumes CPU resources like mad, slowing down your machine and likely firing up the fan to high speed. Your computer also has to remain plugged in. The operation takes many hours. A friends niece accidentally accepted the option to enable FileVault 2 when upgrading to Yosemite a few evenings ago, and had her machineneeded for a computer-science class the next morningslow to a crawl.

Apple provides step-by-step details in a Knowledge Base note, so I wont repeat all of that, but will highlight the critical parts.

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How to encrypt your Mac with FileVault 2, and why you absolutely should

The World’s Email Encryption Relies on a Guy Who Is Going Broke

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The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.

"I'm too idealistic," he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in Germany in December. "In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up and take a straight job." But then the Snowden news broke, and "I realized this was not the time to cancel."

Like many people who build security software, Koch believes that offering the underlying software code for free is the best way to demonstrate that there are no hidden backdoors in it giving access to spy agencies or others. However, this means that many important computer security tools are built and maintained by volunteers.

Now, more than a year after Snowden's revelations, Koch is still struggling to raise enough money to pay himself and to fulfill his dream of hiring a full-time programmer. He says he's made about $25,000 per year since 2001 a fraction of what he could earn in private industry. In December, he launched a fundraising campaign that has garnered about $43,000 to date far short of his goal of $137,000 which would allow him to pay himself a decent salary and hire a full-time developer.

The fact that so much of the Internet's security software is underfunded is becoming increasingly problematic. Last year, in the wake of the Heartbleed bug, I wrote that while the U.S. spends more than $50 billion per year on spying and intelligence, pennies go to Internet security. The bug revealed that an encryption program used by everybody from Amazon to Twitter was maintained by just four programmers, only one of whom called it his full-time job. A group of tech companies stepped in to fund it.

Koch's code powers most of the popular email encryption programs GPGTools, Enigmail, and GPG4Win. "If there is one nightmare that we fear, then it's the fact that Werner Koch is no longer available," said Enigmail developer Nicolai Josuttis. "It's a shame that he is alone and that he has such a bad financial situation."

The programs are also underfunded. Enigmail is maintained by two developers in their spare time. Both have other full-time jobs. Enigmail's lead developer, Patrick Brunschwig, told me that Enigmail receives about $1,000 a year in donations just enough to keep the website online.

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The World’s Email Encryption Relies on a Guy Who Is Going Broke

Julian Assange’s asylum has cost UK taxpayers over £10m

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Policing costs for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange passes 10m as asylum at Ecuadorian embassy continues(Reuters)

The cost to the UK taxpayer for policing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during his asylum stay at the Ecuadorian embassy has passed 10m, figures show.

Assange has sought asylum in the embassy since June 2012 in order to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he has been accused of sexually assaulting two women in Stockholm in 2010.

The allegations are denied by Assange and it is feared that he will be extradited to the US from Sweden, where he faces charges of leaking secret government documents.

UK Minister of State Hugo Swire said in a statement to Parliament that the government would welcome a visit from the Swedish prosecution if they sought to question Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy.

"If (the prosecution) wishes to travel here to question Mr Assange in the embassy in London we would do absolutely everything in order to facilitate that," Swire said. "Indeed, we would actively welcome it."

Cost estimates have been taken from a statement by the Metropolitan Police in January 2015, in which it was revealed that the government was spending around 10,500 per day by maintaining a police presence at the embassy.

A minimum of three police officers are stationed outside the embassy 24-hours-a-day under orders to arrest Assange if he attempts to leave. Ecuador has stated that Assange can stay indefinitely.

A website dedicated to tracking the costs of Assange's asylum stay estimates that the money spent by the UK taxpayer on police at the embassy is the equivalent of around 40,000 hospital beds for one night.

"Why should this continue to be the UK's problem?" the website states. "Sweden won't come to London to question Assange, and Ecuador has given Assange the right to stay in their embassy indefinitely.

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Julian Assange's asylum has cost UK taxpayers over £10m

Citizen Dave: A college degree does not guarantee presidential timber

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There are lots of reasons Gov. Scott Walker should not be president, but one of them is not the fact that he didn't complete his college degree at Marquette.

This is a topic that comes up regularly with my neighbors and others in my circle of friends and acquaintances. They're incredulous that a guy who didn't get his higher education ticket stamped would have ever been seriously considered for governor much less president. While I guess I shouldn't be surprised at that attitude in a college town like ours, it's in those moments that I get a taste for why the rest of the state thinks we're a bunch of out-of-touch elitists.

For evidence that college is overrated as a prerequisite for leadership I offer George W. Bush. Bush has a bachelor's degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. His record speaks for itself. I could rest my case right there, I suppose.

But let's look at the other side of the equation: those without college degrees who went on to be successful in all kinds of fields. They include Microsoft founder Paul Allen, film director Woody Allen, singer Joan Armatrading and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. And that's just a small sampling from those with names starting with "A".

A man who should have been president but never finished college was the late Illinois Sen. Paul Simon. Simon, who ran for president in 1988, was highly regarded for his thoughtfulness on the issues. He was the author of some 20 books. There was a joke going around at the time that Simon had written more books than the outgoing president in 1988, college graduate Ronald Reagan, had ever read.

Look, I understand that for people with average intellects, like myself, college pays off in higher earnings over a lifetime, and, we hope, it might make us better citizens for having a broader education. For those reasons alone Walker's $300 million cut to the UW System's budget is shortsighted. If college accomplishes anything, it should instill a lifelong habit of learning, but I know lots of people who have that intellectual curiosity who didn't finish college and lots who don't who did.

Aside from the fact that the college rap on Walker is just wrong, the reason that Democrats have to shed this education-elitist attitude is that it's killing them at the polls. Fully 68% of Americans don't have a college degree and are probably too old to seriously consider getting one. (And in nations like Germany, where far fewer people go to college, but where technical school training is stronger, the middle class does better.)

Those non-college grads include my mother, who was plenty smart enough to get into college but simply couldn't afford to go. To the extent I'm any kind of a halfway decent writer I get that from her. I only wish I had her penmanship.

So, what does it say to my mom and to millions of other Americans who couldn't afford to go to college or whose life experiences kept them away or who simply found success without it, that we think you can't be president if you didn't put in your four years?

Democrats got crushed in 2014 in large part because they lost by a big margin among middle-class whites without a college education -- the very people who are being so badly hurt by Republican policies and who could be helped by Democratic initiatives. They voted against the Democrats because of this yawning cultural divide, which is only fed by the idea that those not privileged to have collected a diploma need not apply to lead the nation.

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Citizen Dave: A college degree does not guarantee presidential timber

Edward Snowden, Pope Francis and Russian Newspaper Among Nobel Peace Nominees – Video

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Edward Snowden, Pope Francis and Russian Newspaper Among Nobel Peace Nominees
A Russian newspaper critical of President Vladimir Putin is among the nominations for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Edward Snowden, Pope Francis and a priest helping African migrants....

By: WochitGeneralNews

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Edward Snowden, Pope Francis and Russian Newspaper Among Nobel Peace Nominees - Video

Obama Puts Limited Restraints on NSA Spying After Snowden …

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(Bloomberg) -- U.S. intelligence agencies will limit the use of information they collect on foreigners, including purging material that isnt relevant to national security after five years, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The new measures outlined in a report issued Tuesday are the Obama administrations response to the backlash against National Security Agency spying that was exposed by former U.S. contractor Edward Snowden.

U.S. intelligence agencies have updated their existing policies for collecting and retaining data about Americans and foreigners through electronic surveillance, or what is also known as signals intelligence, according to the report. Data on foreigners is now to be deleted within five years unless the director of national intelligence grants an extension.

As we continue to face threats from terrorism, proliferation, and cyber-attacks, we must use our intelligence capabilities in a way that optimally protects our national security and supports our foreign policy while keeping the public trust and respecting privacy and civil liberties, Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, said in a statement.

However, privacy advocates, some lawmakers and other critics have been seeking more severe restraints on the extensive government surveillance programs that intercept phone, Internet and other communications.

The report explains changes that intelligence agencies -- including the NSA, CIA and FBI -- have made to spying in response to a directive President Barack Obama issued in January 2014. The directive followed revelations of NSA spying that heightened tensions between the U.S. and other governments.

A rift developed between the Obama administration and other countries when classified documents leaked by Snowden to the media revealed the U.S. had spied on at least 35 foreign leaders, including the personal phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Obama is scheduled to host Merkel at the White House next week.

Under the policy changes, the National Security Council will have greater insight into the collection of foreign intelligence in order to address potential risks to national interests and our law enforcement, intelligence, and diplomatic relationships abroad, according to the report.

The NSA has enhanced its processes to ensure that targets are regularly reviewed, and those targets that are no longer providing valuable intelligence information in support of these senior policy maker-approved priorities are removed, according to the report.

The report doesnt substantially alter one of the most controversial domestic spying programs: the NSAs collection and storage of billions of phone records on Americans who arent suspected of any wrongdoing. The phone records include the time duration and dates of calls, not the content of conversations.

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Obama Puts Limited Restraints on NSA Spying After Snowden ...


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