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Edward Snowden marks one year in Russia as U.S. fugitive …

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Fugitive U.S. intelligence agent Edward Snowden on Thursday marked one year of political asylum in Russia where he continues to live a life shrouded in mystery.

Little has been heard of the movements of the former National Security Agency contractor since he first obtained provisional leave to remain in Russia after spending according to the official version a month in the transit area of Moscows Sheremetyevo airport.

In April, he made a shock appearance on an annual question-and-answer session with President Vladimir Putin and posed pointed questions about surveillance of Russias population. I would like to ask you: Does Russia intercept, store or analyze, in any way, the communications of millions of individuals? he asked in a recorded message, appearing against a black background wearing a dark jacket and grey t-shirt.

Mr. Snowdens lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, was quoted by the state news agency RIA Novosti on Thursday as saying he expected a decision soon on his application for a renewal of his residence permit and that Mr. Snowden could stay at least until the decision is made.

Analysts believe Mr. Snowden is still useful to Russia, both practically and politically. Independent defence analyst Pevel Felgenhauer said this week that while Mr. Snowden no longer has access to new information, he can explain how U.S. spy agencies operate.

As a consultant on how the NSA works he is very useful, he was quoted as saying in Novaya Gazeta.

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Snowden’s asylum status in Russia ending, but he waits for decision on extension

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A demonstrator against spying holds a sign asking for asylum for former NSA contractor Edward Snowden outside US Army's 'Dagger Complex' near Griesheim, Germany, Saturday, July 26, 2014. The massively secured property is run by the US Military and supposed to be used by the US intelligence agency NSA (National Security Agency). (AP Photo/Michael Probst)(AP Photo/Michael Probst)The Associated Press

MOSCOW Edward Snowden's temporary asylum status in Russia will expire at midnight Thursday, but the former U.S. National Security Agency systems administrator appears set to stay on until authorities decide on his application for an extension.

Snowden was stranded in a Moscow airport last year en route from Hong Kong to Cuba, shortly after he revealed the NSA's sprawling program of tapping phones. He received temporary asylum in Russia, attracting Washington's ire.

Under Russian law, that status must be renewed annually. Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, was quoted by the state news agency RIA Novosti on Thursday as saying he expected a decision soon on the application and that Snowden could stay at least until the decision is made.

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Snowden's asylum status in Russia ending, but he waits for decision on extension

Russia: Whistleblower Edward Snowden trapped without legal protection

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The reports that Edward Snowden has been living in Russia with precarious temporary leave to remain rather than under any formal asylum protection is further evidence he must be allowed to travel to and seek asylum in the country of his choice, said Amnesty International today.

Russias one-year permit for the whistleblower and former US intelligence analyst to stay in the country is now reported to have expired without confirmation that it will be extended.

Edward Snowden is cornered in a legal limbo, without a passport or asylum protection from any government, said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Deputy Director of Global Thematic Issues at Amnesty International.

States should fully consider any asylum application from Edward Snowden, taking into account the massive human rights violations that he exposed, and noting the US governments repressive actions against him.

We call on all governments not to block him from travelling in order to seek protection. By interfering in his ability to do so, they are effectively complicit with the USA in his unjustified and repressive punishment, said Sherif Elsayed-Ali.

European states have reportedly refused to allow him to even cross their airspace to travel.

The USA has revoked Edward Snowdens passport, however any state could issue Edward Snowden with a travel document. We are calling on governments around the world to facilitate his travel and process any asylum application he should file, said Sherif Elsayed-Ali.

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Russia: Whistleblower Edward Snowden trapped without legal protection

Snowden’s Russia Asylum Has Expired But He Will Stay Put Until Authorities Approve Reapplication

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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is awaiting an extension on his asylum status in Russia, which expired at midnight on Thursday, but will stay on in the country while the authorities review his appeal.

His whereabouts in the country are not known but his lawyers say that he would prefer staying in Russia for some more time, as it is the safest place for him. Snowden was stranded in Russia last year after his passport was revoked by the U.S. while he was in a transit zone in a Moscow airport. According to Russian rules, an asylum plea has to be renewed every year and Snowden's plea comes at a time when the U.S. and Russia are facing the worst period in bilateral relations since the Cold War over the latter's involvement in Ukraine.

If he had not gone to Hong Kong and just held a press conference, he would have been arrested and I think he would have been placed in solitary confinement and no one would have heard anything from him about who he is, why he decided to make the disclosures that he did, what he was trying to achieve, Jesselyn Radack, one of Snowdens lawyers, said in an interview to ABC Radio on Wednesday.

According to Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden, who had earlierclaimedthat he was trained as a spy, is learning Russian and is working in the country to fulfill some of the requirements of renewing his asylum status, Bloombergreported, adding that his plea is most likely to beaccepted.

Although U.S. officials have repeatedly urged Snowden to return home to face charges of espionage for disclosing the secret workings of the NSA and other American intelligence agencies, Snowdens lawyers maintain that going back to the U.S. could be dangerous for him and have advised him to stay in Russia.

He didn't voluntarily go to Moscow. The US is the reason that he is in Moscow. He was ticketed to fly to Latin America and had to go through the transit zone in Moscow during a layover and at that point the US revoked his passport, effectively stranding him there, Radack said,accordingto ABC Radio, adding: For now he is in the safest place that he can be and Russia has indicated that it intends to plan on having him, allowing him to continue to stay.

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Snowden's Russia Asylum Has Expired But He Will Stay Put Until Authorities Approve Reapplication

Attackers can easily create dangerous file-encrypting malware, new threat suggests

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A new program that encrypts files to extort money from users highlights that attackers dont need advanced programming skills to create dangerous and effective ransomware threats, especially when strong encryption technology is freely available.

Researchers from antivirus vendor Symantec recently came across a Russian-languagefor nowransomware program of which the core component is a simple batch filea command-line script file.

This development choice allows the attacker to easily control and update the malware, said Symantec researcher Kazumasa Itabashi in a blog post Thursday. The batch file downloads a 1024-bit RSA public key from a server and imports it into GnuPG, a free encryption program that also runs from the command line. GnuPG, which is an open-source implementation of the OpenPGP encryption standard, is used to encrypt the victims files with the downloaded key. If the user wants to decrypt the affected files, they need the private key, which the malware author owns, Itabashi said. In public-key cryptography, which OpenPGP is based on, users generate a pair of associated keys, one that is made public and one that is kept private. Content encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with its corresponding private key. The new ransomware threat that Symantec calls Trojan.Ransomcrypt.L encrypts files with the following extensions: .xls, .xlsx, .doc, .docx, .pdf, .jpg, .cd, .jpeg, .1cd, .rar, .mdb and .zip. Victims are asked to pay a ransom of 150 (around US$200) to recover them. What sets Trojan.Ransomcrypt.L apart is not its use of public-key cryptography for encryptionother threats do the samebut its simplicity and the fact that the author chose to use a legitimate and open-source encryption program instead of creating his own implementation, which malware authors often do. There are some complex ransomware programs with advanced features that are developed with the primary goal of being sold to other cybercriminals who lack the skills to create their own.

However, Trojan.Ransomcrypt.L is proof that developing ransomware can be done for little cost and without advanced programming knowledge, which could lead to an increase in the number of such threats in the future.

Lucian Constantin writes about information security, privacy and data protection. More by Lucian Constantin

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Attackers can easily create dangerous file-encrypting malware, new threat suggests

Open source IT is the way forward

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A PRESENTATION by the European nuclear research organisation CERN at the recent open source convention (OSCON) has provided a glimpse at where IT organisations are going to have to go in order to remain competitive. They will need to leave old legacy proprietary approaches behind and adopt open source.

CERN collects huge volumes of data every day from thousands of detectors at its nuclear collider ring located under the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. It organises and archives all of this data and distributes much of it to research scientists located throughout the world over high-speed internet links. It presently maintains 100 Petabytes of legacy data under management, and collects another 35 Petabytes every year that it remains in operation. One Petabyte comprises one million Gigabytes.

Years ago, CERN realised that its data management challenge would completely overwhelm it unless it adopted open source methods. Therefore, it proactively developed its own Scientific Linux distribution based on Red Hat Linux and it took an active part in contributing to the development and use of open source hardware and software systems. It has virtualised its systems and employs many of the latest, cutting-edge approaches to capturing, archiving and distributing data.

During its talk at OSCON, CERN revealed that it has open source contributors on its staff. It uses Openstack hardware standards as it builds out its data centre infrastructure, and uses open source based software like Puppet and Ceph, along with other open source software utilities, tools and products. It revealed that within 12 months, Puppet will be managing 100,000 cores in its data centre.

CERN did the right thing. It rolled up its sleeves and got involved in open source at the basic level of developing its hardware and software infrastructure operations in collaboration with others in universities and IT industry firms - instead of seeking to outsource its data centre infrastructure to commercial vendors, though of course it does outsource the global telecommunications links that it maintains to universities, primarily in Europe and North America.

There's a lesson in CERN's success for governments and industry alike, however, and those organisations that pay attention and emulate it will be successful long term.

Even the UK government has recognised that open source offers the potential to provide IT services that better meet requirements at far lower cost than its legacy proprietary systems. UK cabinet minister Francis Maude made the proposal earlier this year to migrate UK government systems to open source software. That decision must have seemed almost prescient after it was revealed that the UK government paid 5.5m to Microsoft for just one year of continued security updates to its many obsolete Windows XP systems.

As proprietary firms like Microsoft move into charging exorbitant rental fees for software and services, the advantages of using open source will become even more compelling, both for the UK and other governments globally and corporations in all industry sectors.

The IT organisations that take notice of the lessons provided by the success of CERN's embrace of open source will gain immense benefits from following its lead, and will reap tremendous competitive advantages, starting now.

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Open source IT is the way forward

IEEE Projects 2013 | Self-Organized Public Key Cryptography in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks – Video

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IEEE Projects 2013 | Self-Organized Public Key Cryptography in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Including Packages ======================= * Base Paper * Complete Source Code * Complete Documentation * Complete Presentation Slides * Flow Diagram * Database File * Screenshots * Execution...

By: myproject bazaar

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IEEE Projects 2013 | Self-Organized Public Key Cryptography in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks - Video

Activists, media groups slam Australian court’s gag order

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public.

SYDNEY: An Australian courts gag order banning the reporting of allegations against several foreign political leaders in a major bribery scandal was slammed as unacceptable by activists and media groups.

Details of the suppression order, imposed by the Victorian Supreme Court in Melbourne on June 19, were revealed by whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

It relates to an ongoing investigation into allegations that Asian officials and their families were bribed to secure contracts to print their currencies by a company, Securency, that is linked to Australias central bank.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) said the gag was issued after the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade stepped in, arguing that publication of the names could affect national security and international relations.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called it the largest blanket suppression order since 1995, when Australia sought to prevent the publication of details of a joint United States-Australian intelligence spying operation against the Chinese embassy in Canberra.

With this order, the worst in living memory, the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public, said the former computer hacker, himself an Australian.

This is not simply a question of the Australian government failing to give this international corruption case the public scrutiny it is due.

The concept of national security is not meant to serve as a blanket phrase to cover up serious corruption allegations involving government officials, in Australia or elsewhere.

France-based Reporters Without Borders spokesman Benjamin Ismail said the order spoke volumes about the current level of transparency in Australia.

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Activists, media groups slam Australian court’s gag order


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