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WikiLeaks, Greenwald Blast Guardian Journalist’s Book On ‘FSB Prisoner’ Snowden

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Details Published on Tuesday, 04 February 2014 17:36

Is Snowden being held hostage in Russia?/npr.orgWHISTLEBLOWING project WikiLeaks has excoriated a new book by Guardian foreign correspondent Luke Harding, who claims former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is being kept hostage by the Russian security agency, the FSB.

A new exclusive extract from Hardings book The Snowden Files, published by the Guardian on Sunday, has sparked a furious reaction from supporters of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, including WikiLeaks and former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Titled Is Edward Snowden a prisoner in Russia? the extract appeared to focus on Hardings favorite topic the activities of Russias Federal Security Service, the FSB, which the author views as a simple rebranding of the notorious Soviet KGB agency. It is full of clichs of the Kremlins hand and FSB connections, and referring to East Berlin the author does not hesitate to brand it Stasiland.

Readers may wonder where Snowden, who exposed the vast surveillance activities of the US security agency, the NSA, and has been stranded in Moscow ever since the US revoked his passport, fits into this picture. Harding claims: The hacker turned whistleblower had got his asylum. But the longer he stayed out of public view, the more it appeared that he was, in some informal way, the FSBs prisoner.

According to Harding, from the very start of Snowdens stay in Russia the former CIA employee has been surrounded by minders from the FSB, with even his trusted lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, being an FSB-handpicked person of the system.

Harding then attempts to find every possible hint of Snowden being under Russian pressure in those few statements and video recordings of the whistleblower released during his time in Sheremetyevo Airport and afterward. Allegations of Snowden being a Russian spy or his leaks archive having been possibly accessed by the Russian agents are also cited, although Harding himself clearly does not believe Snowden to be a traitor.

The end of the extract outlines an imagined bleak future for Snowden, saying that: He is a guest of the Russian Federation, whether he likes it or not. And, in some sense, its captive. No one quite knows how long his exile might last. Months? Years? Decades?

However, Harding does not mention in the extract that Russia was the only country that did provide the whistleblower with a safe haven, despite the threat of a diplomatic row with the US. He also does not mention that it was Washington that left Snowden stranded in Moscows Sheremetyevo Airport transit zone by canceling his US passport.

But crucially, it turns out that all of Hardings reasoning and allegations are based on media reports and Snowdens statements available on the internet. According to WikiLeaks, Harding never contacted Snowden.

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WikiLeaks, Greenwald Blast Guardian Journalist’s Book On ‘FSB Prisoner’ Snowden

NSA SPYING on US – Taps INTERNET Transmissions and It Will Only Get Worse – Video

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NSA SPYING on US - Taps INTERNET Transmissions and It Will Only Get Worse
NSA SPYING on US - Taps INTERNET Transmissions and It Will Only Get Worse According to the New York Times, the NSA is searching the content of virtually every email that comes into or goes...

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NSA SPYING on US - Taps INTERNET Transmissions and It Will Only Get Worse - Video

Hackers Sue German Government Over NSA Spying

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A group of computer hackers and human rights campaigners in Germany announced Monday that they are suing their government for allegedly breaking the law by aiding foreign spies.

The Chaos Computer Club and the International League for Human Rights submitted a criminal complaint to federal prosecutors claiming that Chancellor Angela Merkel, her government and security officials tolerated and even helped members of the U.S. National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ to spy on German citizens.

The groups point to documents released by NSA leaker Edward Snowden as evidence that the emails, social media messages and phone calls of ordinary citizens are screened beyond what is allowed under German law.

"With this criminal complaint, we hope to finally initiate investigations by the Federal Prosecutor General against the German government," the Chaos Computer Club said in the statement. The group calls itself Europe's largest association of hackers; it regularly campaigns for greater privacy rights and exposes flaws in electronic security systems.

Federal prosecutors have been considering for months whether to open an investigation of alleged NSA activities. They will now have to consider whether to open an investigation on the basis of the new criminal complaint as well.

While the German government has expressed misgivings about some of the reported allegations and is seeking to negotiate a 'no-spy' agreement with the United States, opposition lawmakers have accused Merkel's administration of failing to put sufficient pressure on Washington for fear of jeopardizing diplomatic relations and intelligence cooperation.

Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, noted that "everyone in Germany can file a criminal complaint" and declined to comment on the hackers' suit.

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Hackers Sue German Government Over NSA Spying

Revolutionary new cryptography tool could make software unhackable

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A team of researchers from IBM and Microsoft may have just made a breakthrough in the quest for unbreakable cryptography. The results produced by the team from UCLA and MIT offer hope that encryption could protect not just an output, but an entire program. Once believed to be too powerful to exist in any real sense, this new method of program obfuscation could lead to ultra-secure software that keeps your personal information safe from nefarious individuals.

The idea of obfuscating a program has been around for decades software companies have tried all sorts of methods to distort their code in order to prevent others from seeing how it worked. However, the security and hacking communities have been able to defeat all these measures. Cryptographic experts have long been tinkering with stronger approaches, but it wasnt until the most recent collaboration that the pieces started falling into place.

Cryptographers have been chasing the idea of a so-called black box obfuscator for years. The idea is that any program passed through the black box would be so fundamentally garbled that no one would be able to figure out how it worked or what secrets it might hold only inputs and outputs would be visible, which is exactly what you want. This method could make communications almost completely secure. All you would need to do is create encryption keys with an obfuscated program, then make that program available to the other party or everyone for that matter, since no one would be able to figure out the decryption key from examining the obfuscated program.

One member of the team, Amit Sahai worked on a principle known as indistinguishability obfuscation a few years back, which at the time was considered a weak type of obfuscation. It involves passing a program through said obfuscator to disguise the origin. Two programs that do the same thing would be indistinguishable from each other at the end of it. Recent work has pointed to this as a surprisingly powerful cryptographic tool, though. The only problem, an indistinguishability obfuscator didnt exist until now.

The obfuscator created by Sahai and his colleagues appears to almost reach the level of broad protection described by the theoretical black box obfuscator. The tool, based on indistinguishability obfuscation, can be used to generate digital signatures, encryption keys, and more without leaking any of the inner workings of applications. It works by splicing random bits of data into the programs code so that it cannot be extracted in a functional state. However, when run as it is supposed to be, the random junk cancels itself out and you get the desired output.

After creating this obfuscation scheme, the team tried to break it by deploying every tool and hack they could come up with. The result? The obfuscator remains undefeated. The team feels this is as close to unbreakable as encryption gets right now, but its possible some future advance in computing or lattice mathematics could result in a breach.

While having access to strong cryptographic tools is certainly desirable, remember that companies and governments use encryption to protect sensitive data and trade secrets too. Breaking the encryption on future electronic devices might not be as easy as it was with DVD or the PS3. The indistinguishability obfuscator is still not ready for real world use, though. Right now it turns efficient little apps into ungainly monstrosities with all that random code inserted. Its still a very big step for cryptography.

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Revolutionary new cryptography tool could make software unhackable


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