CITIZENFOUR MOVIE TRAILER – Edward Snowden – TruthIsComingSOS – Video


CITIZENFOUR MOVIE TRAILER - Edward Snowden - TruthIsComingSOS
Everyone should see this film. An important origin story to the work of Dramatis Personai. Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/yourewelcomesos You #39;re welcome. CITIZENFOUR is the never before seen,...

By: You #39;re Welcome SoS

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CITIZENFOUR MOVIE TRAILER - Edward Snowden - TruthIsComingSOS - Video

‘Citizenfour’ looks at sacrifices made by Snowden

Former U.S. intelligence operative Edward Snowden speaks during a virtual press conference. EFE/File

Rating: R

When: Opens Friday

Where: Landmark La Jolla Village

Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Movies come along all the time that people say everyone should see. Usually, that isnt actually true, but I believe it is in the case of Citizenfour, the new documentary from filmmaker Laura Poitras about Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked a treasure-trove of classified documents to Poitras, journalist Glenn Greenwald and others last year, blowing the whistle on the NSAs massive surveillance and data-mining operation.

Put aside politics for a moment, as well as your feelings as to whether Snowden, a bright 29-year-old who tossed his life aside to expose those practices, is a hero, a patriot or a traitor. Citizenfour, which is the code name Snowden used when he originally contacted Poitras, puts you in the Hong Kong hotel room for the initial meetings between Snowden and Greenwald, and gives the viewer incredible insight into Snowdens personality and motives, as well as explaining precisely what the NSA and other intelligence organizations around the world have been up to.

It plays out like a real-life espionage thriller, and its horrifying in its scope. Most importantly, Citizenfour offers dramatic insight into what was probably the worlds biggest security breach of the new millennium, and might make you reconsider whether you currently think Snowden deserves the Nobel Peace Prize or a jail cell.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Citizenfour is the humanization of Ed Snowden. It hits home as you watch this young mans life crumble, while hes half a world away, doing his best to live up to his own ideals. Snowden comes across as thoughtful, sharp and committed to letting the public know the truth about the world in which they live, and he expects it to cost him everything. Still, when it does, the weight of all that information is clearly heavy on his shoulders, and hes juxtaposed with the audacity of the NSAs secret data collection, and the blatant lies its leaders told Congress.

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‘Citizenfour’ looks at sacrifices made by Snowden

‘Citizenfour’: a gripping look at Edward Snowden, surveillance

Im not the story, Edward Snowden insists to his journalist handlers in the absorbing, thrilling Citizenfour.

Too late.

Directed with deft technical touch by Laura Poitras, Citizenfour is the much anticipated documentary on how Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency, leaked documents on the agencys top-secret surveillance programs to Poitras and reporter Glenn Greenwald, who then worked for The Guardian newspaper in London.

Given the explosive nature of Snowdens revelations, viewers will recognize at least some of these tidbits: a secret court order requiring Verizon to turn over metadata from U.S. citizens to the NSA; a clandestine operation to penetrate the servers of Google and Facebook and tap into underwater data cables; powerful software that collects and analyzes astonishing amounts of personal data in real time.

But taken together, the resulting tapestry of Big Brother overreach presented by Citizenfour still shocks.

Citizenfour is actually the code name Snowden used when he first contacted Poitras through emails that contained encrypted files.

Poitras employs clever techniques to depict the cloak-and-dagger nature of their relationship: During the films opening scenes, she reads Snowdens emails in a matter-of-fact but ominous voice-over. Later on, the Internet chats between Snowden and Poitras are typed across the movie screen, as if the conversation was unfolding at that very moment.

Poitras and Greenwald eventually meet and interview the prized source at a hotel in Hong Kong, where even the sound of a fire-alarm test is enough to make everyone in the room sufficiently paranoid.

Some of the documentarys most powerful moments occur when Poitras points her camera at Snowdens face as he watches the fallout from his leaks play out on CNN. Snowdens expressions betray not self-righteous triumph but rather genuine fear, a fear we assume pushes him to eventually seek asylum in Russia, where he remains today.

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‘Citizenfour’: a gripping look at Edward Snowden, surveillance

"Citizenfour" a real-time portrait of Edward Snowden plotting to reveal NSA spying

Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden in "Citizenfour." RADiUS-TWC (The Denver Post | RADiUS-TWC)

Documentary. Not rated. 113 minutes.

Citizenfour: Hedline for a severly truncated movie review

Information is a weapon that cuts both ways in Laura Poitras' extraordinary portrait of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Ronnie Scheib No amount of familiarity with whistleblower Edward Snowden and his shocking revelations of the U.S. government's wholesale spying on its own citizens can prepare one for the impact of Laura Poitras' extraordinary documentary "Citizenfour." Far from reconstructing or analyzing a fait accompli, the film tersely records the deed in real time, as Poitras and fellow journalist Glenn Greenwald meet Snowden over an eight-day period in a Hong Kong hotel room to plot how and when they will unleash the bombshell that shook the world. Adapting the cold language of data encryption to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates that information is a weapon that cuts both ways.

"Citizenfour" reps the final installment of the Oscar-nominated Poitras' trilogy on post-9/11 America (following 2006's "My Country, My Country" and 2010's "The Oath"). She was already two years deep into a film about surveillance when contacted by the pseudonymous "Citizenfour," who sought her help in exposing proof of the government's indiscriminate gathering and processing of U.S. citizens' e-mails, cellphone conversations, bank accounts and digital transactions. Chosen because she herself had withstood countless invasive acts of targeted surveillance, Poitras quickly agreed. She then convinced Snowden, who had already decided to reveal his identity once his info was safely delivered, to be filmed.

Snowden makes clear that he lacks both the desire and the competence to decide which information to make public; rather, he believes, it is the job of the journalists to whom he transmits the data (Poitras, Greenwald and, to a lesser degree, U.K. intelligence journalist Ewen MacAskill) to avoid releasing any documents that could compromise national security. Snowden voices deep concerns that "personality journalism" may wind up making him the story, rather than his revelations. If he hides, speculation about his identity will dominate the conversation. But if he reveals himself, how can he avoid becoming the media's diversionary target? As it turns out, his apprehensions are well justified, as Snowden becomes a more visible presence and talked-about phenomenon than the NSA betrayal that so profoundly touched billions of lives.

Poitras skillfully avoids casting Snowden as either her hero or the determining focus of her story, instead portraying him as a fascinating, calm, utterly sincere gatherer of unwelcome information whose scientific brain collates and analyzes data with an odd combination of cool distance and deep-seated paranoia (sometimes manifested by his hiding under a blanket, which he ironically dubs his "mantle of power," while accessing sensitive data). Poitras affords him a surprising amount of privacy within the frame, showing him quietly typing away on his computer or staring out the window at the city of Hong Kong.

Like Poitras herself, Snowden fully accepts the possible repercussions of his actions on his personal well-being, even while actively seeking to avoid them. His biggest moments of vulnerability concern Lindsay Mills, the longtime girlfriend he left behind in Hawaii and whom he kept uninformed in an attempt to protect her. A later cozy scene of kitchen domesticity, fleetingly glimpsed through a back window, attests to their successful reunion in Russia.

Poitras contrasts the gaudy, graphics-heavy nature of the news exploding on the hotel-room TV screen with her own weighty establishing shots of the locales through which she and her band of co-conspirators pass as they evaluate and disseminate Snowden's evidence (Poitras herself resides in Berlin, while Greenwald and his three dogs happily dwell in Rio de Janeiro). The courtrooms, newspaper offices and foreign governmental committee rooms where the disclosures are discussed and analyzed take on a physical rootedness very different from the shadowy, abstractions of espionage (evoked by Poitras' strong use of white-on-black title cards and a mysteriously repeated shot of white lights strung like Morse code against the blackness of the night, only later recognized as the tunnel through which the director drove to arrive at her initial assignation with Snowden).

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"Citizenfour" a real-time portrait of Edward Snowden plotting to reveal NSA spying

Calculating encryption schemes’ theoretical security guarantees eases comparison, improvement

Oct 30, 2014 by Larry Hardesty Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT

Most modern cryptographic schemes rely on computational complexity for their security. In principle, they can be cracked, but that would take a prohibitively long time, even with enormous computational resources.

There is, however, another notion of securityinformation-theoretic securitywhich means that even an adversary with unbounded computational power could extract no useful information from an encrypted message. Cryptographic schemes that promise information-theoretical security have been devised, but they're far too complicated to be practical.

In a series of papers presented at the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, researchers at MIT and Maynooth University in Ireland have shown that existing, practical cryptographic schemes come with their own information-theoretic guarantees: Some of the data they encode can't be extracted, even by a computationally unbounded adversary.

The researchers show how to calculate the minimum-security guarantees for any given encryption scheme, which could enable information managers to make more informed decisions about how to protect data.

"By investigating these limits and characterizing them, you can gain quite a bit of insight about the performance of these schemes and how you can leverage tools from other fields, like coding theory and so forth, for designing and understanding security systems," says Flavio du Pin Calmon, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on all three Allerton papers. His advisor, Muriel Mdard, the Cecil E. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is also on all three papers; they're joined by colleagues including Ken Duffy of Maynooth and Mayank Varia of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

The researchers' mathematical framework also applies to the problem of data privacy, or how much information can be gleaned from aggregatedand supposedly "anonymized"data about Internet users' online histories. If, for instance, Netflix releases data about users' movie preferences, is it also inadvertently releasing data about their political preferences? Calmon and his colleagues' technique could help data managers either modify aggregated data or structure its presentation in a way that minimizes the risk of privacy compromises.

Staying close

To get a sense of how the technique works, imagine an encryption scheme that takes only three possible inputs, or plaintexts"A," "B," and "C"and produces only three possible outputs, or ciphertexts. For each ciphertext, there is some probability that it encodes each of the three plaintexts.

The ciphertexts can be represented as points inside a triangle whose vertices represent the three possible plaintexts. The higher the probability that a given ciphertext encodes a particular plaintext, the closer it is to the corresponding vertex: Ciphertexts more likely to encode A than B or C are closer to vertex A than to vertices B and C. A secure encryption scheme is one in which the points describing the ciphertexts are clustered together, rather than spread out around the triangle. That means that no ciphertext gives an adversary any more information about the scheme than any other.

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Calculating encryption schemes' theoretical security guarantees eases comparison, improvement

Raising cryptography’s standards

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

31-Oct-2014

Contact: Abby Abazorius abbya@mit.edu 617-253-2709 Massachusetts Institute of Technology @MITnews

Most modern cryptographic schemes rely on computational complexity for their security. In principle, they can be cracked, but that would take a prohibitively long time, even with enormous computational resources.

There is, however, another notion of security information-theoretic security which means that even an adversary with unbounded computational power could extract no useful information from an encrypted message. Cryptographic schemes that promise information-theoretical security have been devised, but they're far too complicated to be practical.

In a series of papers presented at the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, researchers at MIT and Maynooth University in Ireland have shown that existing, practical cryptographic schemes come with their own information-theoretic guarantees: Some of the data they encode can't be extracted, even by a computationally unbounded adversary.

The researchers show how to calculate the minimum-security guarantees for any given encryption scheme, which could enable information managers to make more informed decisions about how to protect data.

"By investigating these limits and characterizing them, you can gain quite a bit of insight about the performance of these schemes and how you can leverage tools from other fields, like coding theory and so forth, for designing and understanding security systems," says Flavio du Pin Calmon, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on all three Allerton papers. His advisor, Muriel Mdard, the Cecil E. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is also on all three papers; they're joined by colleagues including Ken Duffy of Maynooth and Mayank Varia of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

The researchers' mathematical framework also applies to the problem of data privacy, or how much information can be gleaned from aggregated and supposedly "anonymized" data about Internet users' online histories. If, for instance, Netflix releases data about users' movie preferences, is it also inadvertently releasing data about their political preferences? Calmon and his colleagues' technique could help data managers either modify aggregated data or structure its presentation in a way that minimizes the risk of privacy compromises.

Staying close

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Raising cryptography's standards

T-DOSE 2014 Opening T-DOSE 2014 Open Source Software event, Jean Paul Saman – Video


T-DOSE 2014 Opening T-DOSE 2014 Open Source Software event, Jean Paul Saman
http://www.CityTV.nl http://www.t-dose.org Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBZBIkixHEidJ05uKM6orHYps0A0uNQ94 25 10 2014 Jean-Paul Saman T-DO...

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T-DOSE 2014 Opening T-DOSE 2014 Open Source Software event, Jean Paul Saman - Video