The suggestion that a British Chinese solicitor has been allegedly working on behalf of China to influence UK politics adds further evidence of the bilateral relationship mutating from a golden era to an ice age.

The latest development will clearly not help improve ties and, along with previous incidents, make the China v the west narrative increasingly look like an early cold war plot: suspected influence operations and although not apparently the case here alleged espionage as well as expulsion of personnel.

On Thursday, the British political establishment was warned that Christine Lee, a solicitor, may have been seeking to improperly influence parliamentarians for a number of years.

The memo alleged Lee, who, according to Companies House filings, is also a British national, has facilitated financial donations to serving and aspiring parliamentarians on behalf of foreign nationals based in Hong Kong and China. The memo further accused that the facilitation was done covertly to mask the origins of the payments.

Lee has not responded to the allegations. The Guardian has contacted her law firm. The Chinese embassy in London said that Beijings non-interference foreign policy means that it has no need to buy influence. We firmly oppose the trick of smearing and intimidation against the Chinese community in the UK, it added.

Modern states are not strangers to spycraft and influence operations. They may happen among allies, too, both through on-the-ground and cyberspace operations, as Edward Snowdens NSA revelations showed nearly a decade ago. But Thursdays reporting came after repeated warnings from Britains top security officials about Beijing amid deteriorating diplomatic ties.

Under David Cameron, the British-Chinese relationship was touted as a golden era. In his speech in Beijing in September 2015, the then chancellor, George Osborne vowed to make Britain Chinas best partner in the west. The claim was made despite criticisms from his own party about Chinas human rights record and the situation in Hong Kong.

In the years since, a consensus has formed among strategic communities from London to Washington: that China is seeking to change the postwar world order led by liberal democracies. The diplomatic relationship between the UK and China, in particular, has deteriorated further since the start of the Covid pandemic. There have been bilateral sanctions in place because of Chinas actions in the Xinjiang region and in Britains former colony of Hong Kong.

Bilateral relations between the UK and China are not in great shape, but todays announcement might not make it worse, either, as it wouldnt be in Beijings interest to see this happening, said Dr Andrew Chubb, a China researcher at Lancaster University. [But] it sends a clear message that London is scrutinising Beijings friends and allies in Britain for potential crossovers into interference.

In his last public address, the head of MI6, Richard Moore, said a rising China had become Secret Intelligence Services single greatest priority for the first time in the agencys history. China accused Moore of peddling fake news and false intelligence.

Security services in Britain have been pivoting to China in recent years as threats from Islamist terrorism recede. Last year, the British press reported three journalists were asked to leave the UK for allegedly working as spies for China. The alleged departure was low-key and was not revealed until months later. China denied the report.

As diplomatic relations sour, Chinas modus operandi both inside its own territory and around the world are now under heavy scrutiny. For example, although it is dismissed by some seasoned China researchers for lack of substantial evidence, Moore insisted last month that Beijing was using a debt trap to exert control over smaller states.

Thursdays announcement may come as no surprise to those who have been following Lees successful and sometimes controversial legal career in the UK. In 2017, she was accused of using money to influence British politics and through projects such as the British Chinese Project , which she founded in 2006. Politicians across the Labour and Conservative divide were implicated by the claims.

The irony is that, until recently, Lee was one of the few visible faces of the small but growing British Chinese community in the UK. With the British Chinese Project, which has been suspended since the Covid pandemic started, she was rewarded for including more British-Chinese people in the UK political system.

You should feel very proud of the difference that the British Chinese Project is making in promoting engagement, understanding, and cooperation between the Chinese and British communities in the UK, Theresa May, then prime minister, said in a personal letter to Lee when awarding her the 2019 Points of Light award. Lees award has now been rescinded.

The prestigious award was first established by President George HW Bush in 1990, with the UK initiative launched in the cabinet room at No 10 in April 2014. The award committee says the honour highlights an enormous array of innovative and inspirational volunteering across the length and breadth of Britain.

The wellbeing of the British Chinese community in the UK will always be of great importance to me and I am pleased to have had the opportunity to assist in any small way with our integration into UK society, Lee responded to May after the award.

See the original post here:
MI5 warning on lawyer sends a clear message to Chinas allies in UK - The Guardian

OPINION:

Late last Friday, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center warned the American public against the dangers of spyware manufactured by one Israeli corporation. Spyware is unwanted software that can expose the entire contents of ones mobile or laptop device to prying eyes.

This warning from the feds, issued with a straight face, is about as credible as American television executives warning about the dangers of watching too many British period dramas.

Here is the backstory.

Though America has used the services of spies since the Revolutionary War, until the modern era, spying was largely limited to wartime. That changed when America became a surveillance state in 1947 with the public establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency and the secret creation of its counterparts.

The CIAs stated public task at its inception was to spy on the Soviet Union and its satellite countries so that American officials could prepare for any adverse actions by them. This was the time of the Red Scare, in which both Republicans and Democrats fostered the Orwellian belief that America needed a foreign adversary.

We had just defeated Germany in World War II, and an ally of ours in that war an ally that suffered horrendous losses suddenly became so strong it needed to be kept in check. The opening salvo in this absurd argument was fired by President Harry Truman in August 1945 when he used nuclear bombs to intentionally target civilians of an already defeated Japan. One of his targets was a Roman Catholic cathedral.

But his real target so to speak was his new friend, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union.

When Truman signed the National Security Act into law in 1947, he also had Stalin in mind. That statute, which established the CIA, expressly stated that it shall have no internal intelligence or law enforcement functions and that its collections of intelligence shall come from outside the United States.

These limiting clauses were integral to the statute creating the CIA, as members of Congress who crafted it feared the U.S. was creating the type of internal surveillance monster that we had just defeated in Germany.

Of course, no senior official in presidential administrations from Mr. Truman to President Biden has taken these limitations seriously. Last week, this column reminded readers that as recently as the Obama administration, the CIA boasted that it had the capability of receiving data from all computer chips in the homes of Americans.

The same column reminded state lawmakers that, contrary to the law that created it, the CIA is physically present in all 50 statehouses in America. What is it doing there?

Fast-forward to today, and we know that the CIA has rivals in the government for the acquisition of intelligence data. Today, the feds admit to funding and empowering 16 domestic intelligence agencies spies next door. The most notorious of these is the National Security Agency, which, when it last reported, employs more than 60,000 persons, mostly civilians, with military leadership.

What do they do? They spy on Americans. We know this thanks to the personal courage of Edward Snowden and others who chose to honor their oaths to uphold the Constitution. NSA spying has produced so much data that the NSA recently built in Utah the second largest building in the U.S. after the Pentagon for use as a storage facility of the data it has collected, and it is running out of room.

What has it collected? Quite simply, everything it can get its hands on. These domestic spies the CIA, the NSA, even the FBI all have access to every keystroke and all data on every digital device everywhere in the United States, without a warrant. This is computer hacking, a federal crime, but the feds dont prosecute the spies they have hired to spy on us.

It also represents an egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to privacy of all persons. The operative language is the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.

The law defines all searches and seizures conducted without a warrant as presumptively unreasonable and thus violative of not only this amendment but also the uniquely American value it was enacted to protect the right to be left alone. Surely the computer chip in every desktop, mobile device, dishwasher and microwave is an effect protected by the Constitution.

The spies and, sadly, the presidents for whom they have worked dont see it that way. They have claimed in federal courts and elsewhere that the Fourth Amendment does not pertain to spies because they are not law enforcement and because they work directly for the president, who, when he is operating as the commander in chief, is free to employ government assets as he wishes.

This argument has been used to justify the CIAs violent killings of Americans and others in foreign lands using its drones and its agents dressed as military. It has justified the brutal torture of foreign nationals, even those whom the CIA deemed were being truthful during their interrogations. And, of course, it has justified ignoring the Constitution and the rights it protects and the values that underlie it.

It also belies the very purpose of the Constitution to keep the government off the peoples backs. Of course, when the late Justice William O. Douglas coined that phrase, there were no computer chips, the CIA was thought to be law-abiding, and the NSA didnt exist.

So, we can see how tongue-in-cheek the Biden administration was last Friday afternoon when it announced the need to be careful of commercial spyware. We can avoid commercial spyware, but how can we avoid a totalitarian government that spies on everyone?

According to the Declaration of Independence, we can do so by peacefully altering or abolishing it.

Andrew P. Napolitano is a former professor of law and judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey who has published nine books on the U.S. Constitution.

Original post:
The domestic danger of the feds' cyber capabilities - Washington Times

NFTs theyre everywhere! Theyre nowhere! Are they art? Are they the future? Are they proof that weve all lost our collective minds? A $69 million Beeple sold at Christies last year; Jack Dorsey sold an NFT of his first tweet. Martha Stewart got in on it. So did Edward Snowden, Melania Trump, the NBA, MF DOOM, and the Associated Press.

It was only a matter of time before this digital sensation came for restaurants. And now, the moment has arrived: NFT guru Gary Vaynerchuk and his hospitality company, VCR Group, have announced they will open what they are calling the 1st NFT Restaurant, and it will be right here in New York City. What does this mean? Why is this happening? What on earth are we even talking about right now? All good questions! And weve got some answers!

What is the worlds first NFT restaurant?The restaurant in question will be called Flyfish Club, according to its own marketing materials. It will be a members-only restaurant. The membership will be the NFT. You will pay for it with cryptocurrency.

Remind me what NFTs are again?An NFT is a non-fungible token

So the restaurant wont serve mushrooms?I see what you did there, but no a non-fungible token is a unique digital asset stored cryptographically on the blockchain.

I wont even bother to ask you to decipher all of that.Right. Its a computer thing that cant be copied, essentially.

Right, right, right. So to go to this restaurant, I need to buy one of these NFTs?Yes.

Which is a membership.Sort of. An NFT is an asset. You can sell it; you can transfer it. Because there is a leasing mechanism whereby the token holder can lease their token to a nontoken holder on a monthly basis, there is even, Flyfish Clubs website explains, a potential passive income strategy that could exist here, although that depends largely on the existence of a constant stream of would-be diners hungry for temporary access to your membership, which is why it is potential.

But its just a restaurant?Oh, definitely not. It will have a cocktail lounge, an upscale seafood restaurant, an omakase room (reserved for top-tier members only), and outdoor space spanning more than 10,000 square feet in an iconic New York City location, although that exact location has not yet been announced.

Is this a metaverse thing, or will it physically exist?Flyfish Club is slated to open at a real-world location sometime in the first half of 2023.

And it will have real food?The food will be corporeal, yes.

And Ill pay for it with cryptocurrency?No. You pay for your membership with crypto. You pay for food with fiat currency.

What kind of food?Seafood inspired.

Honestly, after these past couple of years, I would love to belong to something anything! How much will this cost me?Well its complicated. When the company released 1,151 tokens on Friday, the regular membership, which gets you into a lounge and the high-end seafood restaurant, was going for 2.5 ETH (about $7,900). An omakase membership, on the other hand which includes access to reservations at a 14-seat omakase room, in which a still-unspecified master sushi chef will prepare you fish newly arrived from Japan was going for 4.25 ETH (approximately $13,485).

Oh my.Those arent the prices now. If you want a membership now, youre looking at the secondary market. On OpenSea which you can think of as NFT eBay standard memberships are currently going for somewhere around 3.4 ETH, or (as of this writing, at 9:23 a.m. on Wednesday) $11,527.77.

I dont think I have $11,000 available just to buy the ability to go to a specific, as-yet-unopened restaurant.Dont worry it all fluctuates wildly. By next week, it might be even more expensive or, alternatively, a bargain!

But its definitely going to open?Probably!

And this would be a good development?Think of it this way: If Flyfish Club really does open during its announced time frame of sometime in the first half of 2023, then it at least means weve all made it to 2023. At this point, thats at least something to hope for.

Sign up for the Grub Street newsletter.

Link:
Flyfish Club Will Be NYC's 'First NFT Restaurant' - Grub Street

As the internet of things starts to take off, a whistleblower sounds an alert on how user data is being collected for government surveillance.

As of 2013, the red carpet question Who are you wearing? could have been answered with a tech brand. From rings to wigs, wearable tech came out in force.

Glass testers were recruited and pairs of smart specs were donned by tech influencers. Robert Scoble wore his in the shower. Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak admitted to being oddly attracted to Google Glass, though rumour had it that the iPhone maker was refining its own wearable tech product.

The so-called iWatch was the subject of the kind of hyperactive rumour mill only Apple fans could power up. But while Apple was still keeping its smartwatch up its sleeve, Samsung launched the Galaxy Gear and the Sony SmartWatch was already on its second generation by mid-year.

The former was launched at a Samsung event ahead of IFA in Berlin, which is also where Silicon Republics Elaine Burke first got to try out the much-talked-about Oculus Rift VR headset for a dizzying ride on a pixelated rollercoaster.

And while hardware was finding new space to occupy in our lives, social media was becoming more transient. Hundreds of millions of ephemeral Snapchats were being sent every day and the popularity of Twitter-owned Vines short-form clips forced Instagram into video.

One Irish company finding success in deciphering this new media landscape was Mark Littles Storyful, which was acquired by News Corp for 18m in 2013. Meanwhile Microsoft, still trying to carve out a name for itself in the smartphone market, had bought Nokias device business for 5.4bn, announcing the deal just days after CEO Steve Ballmer revealed his plans to retire.

As was evident in 2013s wearable tech trend, more and more machines were becoming connected, or smart, devices. This internet of things (IoT), which included billions of sensors as well as gadgets transmitting data, was taking shape amid a maker movement that saw technologists and inventors piecing together electronics and other objects like they were Lego sets.

Suitably, Intel made its presence felt at the Rome Maker Faire with the unveiling of its Galileo dev board based on Arduino open-source standards. Key to Galileo was a new system on a chip (SoC) designed by a skunkworks team in Ireland led by Philip Moynagh.

The Quark SoC X1000 was the first product from the Intel family of low-power, small-core products. And, to the Irish teams credit, the first batch of Galileo boards was marked Designed in Ireland. By the year end, Intel had set up an entire division dedicated to the internet of things.

Another major 2013 tech trend driven by the maker movement was 3D printing. Our former editor John Kennedy was right on the money when he predicted that this would be a big year for small-scale additive manufacturing.

3D printing was used to create everything from batteries to food, fashionand even guns. Rightfully freaked out by this last part, tech entrepreneur Kim Dotcom had designs for 3D-printed guns removed from his file-sharing website, Mega.

Mcor Technologies, Inspire 3D and FabAllThings were just some of Irish start-ups jumping in the sprint to print, with Mcors machines using one of the most affordable materials around: A4 paper.

One person who might have cautioned us against the heavily sensored and connected world we were building in 2013 is Edward Snowden. The former CIA employee and NSA contractor became one of the worlds most famous whistleblowers when he revealed details of a number global surveillance programmes including PRISM, which collected user data from some of the worlds biggest tech companies.

Memes debated whether Snowden was a hero or a traitor, but one former US vice-president was unequivocal in his stance. Snowden, however, was unbowed: Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honour you can give an American, he said.

Snowden was later granted asylum by Russia having sought protection in 20 different countries, including Ireland. Weeks later, another US whistleblower wouldnt be so lucky. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking confidential information including video footage of a Baghdad airstrike and thousands of US diplomatic cables.

Irelands Data Protection Commission was pulled into the spotlight amid this long-running affair. Commissioner Billy Hawkes said his office would not investigate Apple or Facebook over the transfer of personal data to the NSA because of the Safe Harbour agreement, which made assurances that data transfers between the US and EU would adhere to the latters standards of data protection. However, the European Commission initiated a review of this agreement in light of Snowdens revelations.

The year ended with tech leaders urging US president Barack Obama to move decisively on surveillance reform. Meanwhile, the data debacle led to a wave of new encrypted messaging services. The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde made an attempt but the breakout app was Telegram, which came from the founders of Russian social network VK.

Something there was no covering up in 2013 was that the world of STEM continued to be dominated by men, largely leaving women out of the spotlight and the conversation. This led Silicon Republic CEO Ann ODea to launch Women Invent Tomorrow on International Womens Day.

First announced as a year-long campaign in partnership with Accenture Ireland, Intel and the Irish Research Council, its aim was to champion the role of women in science, technology, engineering and maths.

As part of the campaign, Silicon Republic highlighted 10 Irish women who were pioneers in STEM history, and invited readers to help select Irelands greatest woman inventor for the chance to win a prize. In September, physician Dorothy Stopford Price was chosen as the favourite and our competition winner later took a trip to NASAs Space Centre Houston and the Intel Museum in Silicon Valley.

This was just the beginning of Silicon Republics continuing efforts to put women in STEM in the spotlight, and a spirit of change was in the air.

That same year, CoderDojo began running weekly sessions specifically for young girls at Dublin City University, Enterprise Ireland appointed its first woman CEO, and Twitter appointed its first woman board member. Towards the end of 2013, Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou wrote a Medium post that challenged tech employers to reveal the number of women engineers they had on staff, demanding that these figures not be hidden away. This would be the start of a whole host of changes for gender diversity in tech.

Finally, 2013 saw three new Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) research centres added to the Irish sci-tech ecosystem.

As we predicted, big data got bigger in 2013, hence the timely launch of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Billed as the largest investment in a single research centre in the history of the State, Insight secured funding of 88m for six years. It brought together 200 researchers and numerous industry partners, and started a collaboration with RT to make 60 years of its archive digitally accessible.

Irish science also took a plunge into a new energy sector with the launch of the Marine Renewable Energy Ireland (MaREI) research centre at University College Cork (UCC). To be housed in the newly constructed Beaufort Research Centre, MaREI later secured substantial funding from SFI and a roster of 45 industry partners.

The Advanced Materials and Bio-Engineering Research Centre (AMBER) followed with a 58m investment. Based at Trinity College Dublin, AMBER also brought together researchers from UCC and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland to number almost 100 scientists.

11 January: Programmer, entrepreneur and internet activist Aaron Swartz dies by suicide as he faced 30-plus years in prison and a fine of up to $1m for illegally downloading 5m articles from an academic library.

23 January: Scientists reveal that they have encoded data including the complete sonnets of Shakespeare on a strand of synthetic DNA.

7 February: Sky enters the Irish broadband market challenging Eircom, Vodafone and UPC.

8 February: Silicon Republic hosts the Future Jobs Forum in Dublin, discussing Irelands challenges and opportunities in the global battle for talent.

20 February: The first Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences are awarded. The prizes are funded by Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner, Anne Wojcicki and Priscilla Chan and reward researchers with $3m for discoveries that extend human life.

13 March: The Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the worlds most powerful radio telescope, is officially launched in Chile.

2-4 April: Hacking group Anonymous takes aim at North Korea, claiming to have obtained thousands of user records from a government website and later taking over the countrys Twitter and Flickr accounts.

11 April: WordPress endures a major brute force attack, affecting almost every major web hosting company in the world.

17-18 May: 13-year-old Irish coder Jordan Casey attends TiEcon in Silicon Valley as the youngest ever entrepreneur to speak at the conference.

31 May-3 June: The Transatlantic Communications and Light Gathering on Valentia Island begins an international heritage project to explore the historical role the island played in linking Europe and North America as the eastern terminus of the first commercially viable transatlantic telegraph cable.

17 June: The chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary announces that the publication will bend its rule that a new word needs to be current for a decade before inclusion, so that the next edition can include the modern definition of tweet.

18 June: As part of Project Loon, Google launches a fleet of solar-powered balloons intended to deliver wireless internet connectivity to remote locations.

24 June: An Bord Pleanla gives Intel the go-ahead to construct a $4bn 14nm chip plant in Leixlip.

3 July: Astronaut Chris Hadfield retires following many months in the media spotlight for his images captured aboard the ISS and starring in the first music video from space.

11 July: DARPA and Boston Dynamics unveil Atlas, an autonomous 6ft humanoid robot.

18 July: An Oireachtas committee report recommends new rules to stop cyberbullying on social networks.

25-28 July: The legacy of Dublins designation as the 2012 European Capital of Science sees the inaugural Festival of Curiosity take place in the city.

12 August: Elon Musk publishes a paper proposing Hyperloop, a new form of transport consisting of a solar-powered vacuum tube through which cars would travel at almost the speed of sound.

12 August: UPC launches the Horizon set-top box, combining a Wi-Fi router, DVR and digital TV services.

11 September: Google marks 10 years in Ireland with the opening of The Foundry, a 5.5m innovation centre in Dublin.

12 September: Twitter announces that it has filed for an IPO, via Twitter.

16 September: Irelands first community-owned windfarm is opened in Templederry, Co Tipperary.

22 September: GAA Football sponsor Eircom uses 360-degree photo-capture technology from FanPic to capture a group photo of the more than 82,000 people in attendance at the All Ireland final in Croke Park.

26 September: NASA reports that the Curiosity rover has found evidence of an ancient streambed on Mars.

7 October: Wi-Fi access and mobile services arrive on transatlantic Aer Lingus flights.

8 October: Franois Englert and Peter Higgs are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory on the origin of mass, which was confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

17 October: Eircom launches eVision, a TV service delivered via its fibre broadband network.

5 November: India launches its first Mars-bound spacecraft.

10 December: The European Union launches the 80bn Horizon 2020 R&D fund at the Convention Centre in Dublin.

14 December: Chinas Change 3 mission reaches the moon, marking the first lunar landing since the 70s.

19 December: The European Space Agency launches the Gaia space telescope.

30 December: Three Irish applicants make the shortlist of 1,058 candidates for Mars One, a proposed privately funded one-way mission to Mars.

Dont miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republics digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Continued here:
2013: Everything is connected - Siliconrepublic.com

CBDC season could soon be coming, as Chinareadies for the launch of its digital yuan and other countries also race to complete white papers or even pilot programs. However, a new report has made note of some potential risks that CBDC service providers and central banks must address as early as possible.

The International Securities Services Association released its Blue Print for CBDC in Post-Trade-Settlementreport. The report outlined some financial and regulatory risks that could pose a threat to an interoperable multi-CBDC system on a global scale.

In terms of financial risk, the report pointed to possible issues such as fragmented liquidity, multiple levels of counter-party risk, and challenges with settling a net amount. Coming to regulatory concerns, these included how settlements would be finalized across borders, a difference in technological standards, and the matter of which laws would apply to which jurisdiction.

The report also added,

Costs and risks from a lack of timely interoperability between tokenised and non-tokenised systems also needs careful consideration, especially where transactions are moving via on-ramp/off-ramp models between fiat and CBDC for instance.

But these arent the only risks, as potential CBDC users have their own anxieties as well. For example, NSA whistleblower and privacy advocate Edward Snowden called CBDCs a danger. He also suggested that the state could use them to surveil and control its population.

However, some believe the opposite. For example, theEuropean Central Bank has expressed its worry about foreign intermediaries handling European payments. At the same time, a survey of German respondents showed that out of the minority who supported CBDCs many also wanted to sidestep private payment stakeholders.

As the Winter Olympics approach, the East Asian regime has reportedly introduced a variety of ways for both domestic and foreign visitors to make use of its CBDC. Whats more, foreign companies are said to be feeling the pressure as well.

For its part, ISSAs report also warned of the dangers of early CBDC adopters leaving other countries behind. The report noted,

This is especially true at the start of adoption where there will be a sunrise challenge: i.e., some systems will adopt the new features first while other systems in the same ecosystem/value chain will lag, giving rise to the need for interoperability.

Link:
New report reveals risks that CBDC service providers & central banks have to address - AMBCrypto

U.S. Takes Hooded, Shackled Detainees to Cuba, declared the Washington Post headline on January 11, 2002. The reporters who wrote it were on the ground at Guantnamo Bay and in Kandahar, Afghanistan. I was in Washington, at my desk in the Post newsroom, where I worked as a researcher. As I read the story, one ominous revelation stuck with me: The 20 prisoners, whose identities have not been made public

I would spend the next two decades learning those prisoners names and covering the story of Americas not-so-secret terrorism detention complex. It started as a research challenge: to uncover the secrets of what some have called the American Gulag. Later, as hundreds more nameless enemy combatants were brought to the remote U.S. naval base on the south coast of Cuba, I followed the story through the brief wax and long wane of the Guantnamo news cycle. I wanted to know who was detained and why and when the war on terror would end.

I collected boxes of files and spreadsheets of data, building a trove of Guantnamo research as I moved to new jobs and new cities. Along the way, I encountered other reporters and researchers with similar habits and disparate methods, all seeking to understand what was going on down there.

Related

Some 780 Muslim men have been held at Guantnamo since 2002. More than 500 were released during the Bush administration, about 200 under President Barack Obama, one by President Donald Trump, and one so far by President Joe Biden. Many have been repatriated, while others have been transferred to countries that negotiated with the U.S. to accept them. Nine died in custody. Thirty-nine remain at Guantnamo today. Of those, 18 have been approved for transfer to other countries, including five approved by the Biden administration on Tuesday.

In 2004, the Post appended my list of detainees and added my name to the Page 1 byline of a story headlined Guantnamo A Holding Cell In War on Terror. Reporters Scott Higham and Joe Stephens had visited the U.S. enclave in Cuba while I stayed behind in the newsroom. They brought me back a baseball cap with the logo of the Joint Detention Operations Group, known as JDOG, from the Guantnamo gift shop.

The Joint Detention Operations Group logo.

Photo: Margot Williams/The Intercept

In September 2006, President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIAs secret detention program, saying that 14 high-value detainees in CIA black sites had been brought to Guantnamo. (I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world: The United States does not torture, Bush pledged in the same speech. Its against our laws, and its against our values. I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it.)

So Im announcing today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and 11 other terrorists in CIA custody have been transferred to the United States naval base at Guantnamo Bay, the president said to applause from a supportive audience in the White House. They are being held in the custody of the Department of Defense. As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September the 11th, 2001, can face justice.

Fifteen years later, the organizers of the 9/11 attacks still have not faced justice.

Members of the media are escorted to a courtroom to witness the arraignment of accused September 11organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, on May 5, 2012.

Photo: The Miami Herald via AP

On January 22, 2009, Obamas second day in office, he signed an executive order to shut down Guantnamo within a year. He wanted to try the 9/11 architects in U.S. federal courts, but a Democratic-controlled Congress blocked him. In 2011, the government initiated a new procedure for reviewing the status of the remaining detainees, and the military commission trials were reset. I was following the war on terror as it came home.

At NPR, where I had by then joined a new investigative team, I worked with criminal justice reporter Carrie Johnson to expose another secretive prison system right here in the U.S., where convicted terrorists, mostly Muslim, were segregated in facilities known as Communications Management Units. Our editors dubbed these prisons Guantnamo North.

We could not visit the facilities, but we met with prisoners who had been released, including one man at his home in Washington, D.C. (The only former Guantnamo detainee Ive met in real life, as opposed to via Zoom, is Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was imprisoned there for six years. We talked when I was seated at his table at an awards banquetduring a journalism conference in Norway in 2008.)

In April 2011, NPR and the Times collaborated to publish a trove of secret Guantnamo documents obtained by WikiLeaks. I went up to New York to read and process them for inclusion in the Guantnamo Docket database while reporting on the revelations for NPR.

Finally, on May 5, 2012, the 9/11 defendants were arraigned in the military courtroom in Guantnamo. I was watching on closed-circuit TV from a building in Fort Meade with a large group of reporters who had not made it onto the military-approved media trip to Guantnamo. As the hours passed, we glimpsed the accused when the camera panned over the defense tables. It was our first look at a gray-bearded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed known to everyone as KSM who would appear worldwide the next day in sketch artist Janet Hamlins amazing drawing.

Torture was always the subtext. As months and years of pretrial hearings dragged on, the defense lawyers continued to demand evidence about the conditions under which the captives had been held, details of their enhanced interrogations, and the reliability of admissions made while being held underwater, locked in a box, or standing naked and sleep-deprived in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Guantnamo.

After I joined The Intercept in 2014, I continued to trek to Fort Meade for the military commission hearings and to the Pentagon to watch the Periodic Review Board process launchedduring the Obama administration. Detainees who have not yet been charged despite being held for 15 to 20 years can make their case to a panel of U.S. defense and intelligence officials as to whether they still pose a threat. The open portion, which observers can watch on live video at the Pentagon, lasts at most 15 minutes, and the detainee doesnt speak. I attend these so that I can seethe prisonersand report back, and so that the Pentagon knows that yes, the press is still interested in howthey look and the aging of the detainee population. It goes without saying that there are very few in the media room for these ongoing hearings.

When the Senate Intelligence Committees report on the torture regime was released in December 2014, my Intercept colleagues and I mined the text and footnotes to map the black sites and looked for the CIA detainees who didnt get to Guantnamo.

The banality of the torture system shone through in 2016 as we developed Guantnamo stories from The Intercepts archive of NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2003, an NSA staffer described an assignment there. As we reported:

On a given week, he wrote, he would pull together intelligence to support an upcoming interrogation, formulate questions and strategies for the interrogation, and observe or participate in the interrogation.

Outside work, fun awaits, he enthused. Water sports are outstanding: boating, paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling, and SCUBA. If water sports were not your cup of tea, there were also movies, pottery, paintball, and outings to the Tiki Bar. Relaxing is easy, he concluded.

In this photo of a sketch by Janet Hamlin, reviewed by the U.S. military, family members of victims of the September 11 attacks observe courtroom proceedings during hearings for five alleged9/11 co-conspirators in the courthouse at Camp Justice at the Guantnamo Bay naval base in Cuba on July 16, 2009.

Illustration: Janet Hamlin/AP

In January 2017, I went to Guantnamo for the first time, as a reporter for The Intercept covering the 9/11 military commission hearings. Under the guidance of Rosenberg, the doyenne of the Gitmo press corps who was then writing for the Miami Herald, I was introduced to the amenities of the press room, the media sleeping tents, latrines, showers, and the confusing, ever-changing rules of the road. No Wi-Fi except at the supermarket complex, pay-by-the-week internet access in the press room, and dont forget your ethernet connector. Military minders accompanying us everywhere on base. Operational security OPSEC reviews of every photo taken every day. Notebooks and pens only in the visitor gallery at the back of the courtroom, where we sat separated by glass from the defendants, legal teams, and judge. No drawing or doodling allowed.

I was excited to be there, in the room as the 9/11 defendants walked in, surrounded by military guards until they took their seats, then turning to chat among themselves. Five defendants, each with a legal defense team headed by learned counsel, meaning an attorney experienced in death penalty cases.

Also in the visitor gallery, separated from the press and nongovernmental organization representatives by a curtain, were relatives of the victims, bearing witness to the proceedings.

The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers faking it.

In June 2018, I went on the Joint Task Force Guantnamo media tour. JTF GTMO is in charge of the detention center. We were able to go inside the prison, although mostly to see a Potemkin village reproduction of a cellblock, complete with a prison library. With my former Intercept colleague Miriam Pensack and a crew from Voice of America, we were given access to parts of the mysterious facility, including lots of institutional kitchens. We even briefly glimpsed one detainee from inside the guard center, a man I was later able to identify from his physical description in the files Id been compiling for the previous 16 years.

The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers faking it. We also went on a drive to the abandoned Camp X-Ray, where the first detainees were held in 2002 and the location of those infamous photos of men in orange jumpsuits and shackles. We took photos of the fences and weeds and drove to the lonely border with Cuba, where more photos were allowed and then OPSECd.

On September 11, 2019, reporters and victims relatives joined sailors, soldiers, their families, and military commission attorneys atthe base for the annual 9/11 eveningrun that commemorates the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fallen jet in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. At sunset, near the turnaround mark, I saw the Windward Point Lighthouse, built in 1904 by the 1898 U.S. occupiers of Guantnamo. I was the last person to finish the race on that beautiful tropical night. The next day, back in the courtroom, motion hearings about classified evidence and discovery and potential witnesses continued.

Returning in January 2020, I watched as the defense called a reluctant and antagonistic witness, James Mitchell, a psychologist known as the architect of the CIAs enhanced interrogation techniques. He testified just yards from the defendants waterboarded under his orders in the black sites. I felt my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who voluntarily took up arms against us, Mitchell said, holding back tears. Id get up today and do it again.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. The military commissions were suspended for more than a year and a half. When they restarted, the media tents were gone and public health restrictions prevailed. Wary, I watched from Fort Meade in August 2021 as the arraignment of the three alleged Bali bombers, 18 years after their capture, dissolved into disagreements over the quality of the Malaysian interpreters.

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In November 2021, there were required Covid tests, masks, and takeout meals in hotel rooms and on backyard patio tables. Camp X-Ray was now off-limits, no photos were allowed, and we had to agree that any selfies from the border gate would not be published or posted. There was a new judge in the 9/11 case the fourth and he had a lot of catching up to do. The chief prosecutor was gone, and the chief defense officer was retiring. Some of the victims families were now speaking out about possible plea agreements, instead of a capital trial after 20 years of waiting.

The Biden administration could take some relatively simple steps to increase transparency around Guantnamo. To begin with, it could declassify the 6,000-page Senate torture report. A second courtroom now being built at Guantnamo for $4 million could have facilities for press to observe the proceedings in person, which are not in the current plans. Andit could speed up the Freedom of Information Act process. My 2017 request for State Department documents relating to the detainee transfer process is still open, with a projected delivery date in 2023.

I signed up for this months session at Guantnamo so that I could be there on the 20th anniversary of the first detention, which was Tuesday. But the hearings in the 9/11 case were canceled. So I didnt take an Uber to Joint Base Andrews at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday for a Covid test and a charter flight to Cuba a few hours later. I didnt need my ethernet connector or my bug spray or my T-Mobile phone because thats the only carrier on the base.

And my press ID? I hung it on a hook with an old Capitol Hill pass, where itll stay until the trial of the 9/11 defendants begins in 2023.

More:
I Spent 20 Years Covering America's Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext. - The Intercept

Of course, your employees are diligent, security conscious and loyal. But the real world tells a different story. A grand total of 94% of organizations had an insider data breach in the past year, with 84% of the data breaches resulting from human error. And while 66% of data breaches resulted from a malicious leak, the same study mentions that only 28% of IT leaders list intentionally malicious behavior as the type of insider breach that most concerns them. Perhaps most hair-raising of all, 23% of respondents to an employee poll believe they are entitled to take data with them to a new company.

On the last point, one high-profile case illustrated the potential consequences of this behavior: two General Electric employees started a competing company based on trade secrets that they downloaded at work. These two former GE employees ended up with a prison sentence and a $1.4 million fine a searing reminder that employees do not have the right to take company data to another company.

While most insider data breaches arent quite as malicious or blatant, its important to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

An insider threat typically refers to potential attacks from users with internal or remote access inside the systems firewall or other network perimeter defenses. These threat actors can include employees, contractors, third-party vendors and even business partners. In other words, anyone with network access. Potential results include fraud, theft of intellectual property (IP), sabotage of security measures or misconfigurations to allow data leaks.

Of course, not all insider threats come from actual insiders. Its not hard to imagine instances where, for example, an external party gains access to the physical premises and connects to the network directly, deploying a router in a discreet location for future remote access. This example raises the importance of on-premises security and early detection whenever unapproved devices are added to the network.

A few common examples, like memory sticks or Bluetooth transmitters, can also often pass under the radar. Does your system detect these on insertion? Probably not. This is important because it emphasizes a few key points:

How do we pin down and anticipate the possible motivations of potential insider threats? For the most part, the type of insider threat actor that applies to your company will depend on your industry, company size, and the scope of your IT infrastructure. Lets look at a few of the most common drivers:

1. Human error: Most companies deal with human error, where the actor has no malicious intent. They may not be aware that their actions compromise security (especially if their role doesnt involve technical know-how), or they may just be careless.

2. Lack of clarity about responsibility for securing data: As many IT pros can attest, some users need more help than others to take security seriously. Senior executives are infamously cavalier in their attitude to security, believing IT procedures dont apply to them. Theyre focused on the Big Picture. (Insert audible sigh.) Suffice to say, its critical for all employees to take responsibility and ownership of security. Execs especially must lead by example when it comes to security awareness.

3. Malicious intent: Malicious insiders, however, are another story. Their goals are often very simple: to sell the data they acquire or profit (in conjunction with an external party) from reconfiguring security assets for remote access. Disgruntled employees, like those who failed to get that pay raise, promotion, or due recognition (ever had a manager claim credit for your work?) are all potential threats. Human nature being what it is, an employee could also simply harbor a grudge for who knows what reason and deliberately disrupt operations to get back at the company or the individual responsible for IT security.

Organizations in sensitive sectors such as intelligence, defense, and critical infrastructure face additional insider threats. Employees may, in fact, be spies for a rival organization or perhaps existing employees are blackmailed into acting in the interests of a rival. Edward Snowden, despite being a whistleblower guided by his conscience, did harvest data as an insider, changing cybersecurity objectives worldwide as a direct result. Can your company protect itself against a similar threat?

Lets consider a few other risk factors that can make organizations vulnerable to insider threats:

1. Level of access: Your IT administrators have the highest-level network credentials, allowing them full control. Lets assume one of them is feeling undervalued and is planning to leave the company. Rather than just leave, the administrator installs several copies of Microsoft Office, knowing that they will be unlicensed. A mysterious whistleblower then informs an organization such as BSA | The Software Alliance and receives a percentage of the hefty penalty awarded for licensing infringement. For smaller companies, this insider threat could well lead to bankruptcy.

2. CCTV: If youre a healthcare provider and install CCTV cameras facing computer screens where patients medical records are displayed, you are violating HIPAA (in the U.S.) and other data privacy laws for healthcare records in other countries. Its a possible insider threat and carries the usual high penalties that compensate a government department (and not, unfortunately, the victims).

3. Social engineering: Members of your team are regulars at a few local coffee shops, restaurants, or bars. One day, as part of a promotion, memory sticks are given to all customers at a place your staff is known to frequent. Congratulations, all who accept the promo are now proud owners of a malware variant that allows the hacker remote access to the system when inserted into the USB port. The memory sticks were donated by a friendly neighborhood hacker as part of a fake company promotion, with the plan of targeting your company, a large local employer. How many of your employees will use these memory sticks at work?

4. Remote work: As remote work becomes more and more prevalent, theres a rising spat of insider threats originating outside the network infrastructure. First, because being outside the network infrastructure makes it easier for hackers to gain access unless the same security tools are installed on all devices used for work on- and off-premises. The trend of bring your own device (BYOD) only complicates the task for IT pros, especially if these devices are lost or stolen. Is a remote wipe possible on all devices? Also, how can you ensure that anyone who has access to a remote machine doesnt manually copy or take pictures of sensitive information? All photos of text documents are fair game to hackers and just as valuable as the files themselves.

Yes, identifying insider threat personas is a difficult task. But the consequences of failing to do so are great. Data loss or security breaches cost money. Any service outages cost money as well. Then you have reputational damage to consider. Finally, legislative penalties are often substantial under a variety of industry standards and data privacy laws. So, whether its a sales executive accidentally emailing wholesale pricing to a retail client or a malicious insider selling trade secrets on the dark web, the company pays a price.

In cases where insiders work with external actors, is the on-premises security posture robust enough to prevent stranger access or dumpster diving where the insider has placed IP documentation for later collection? Finally, in a business environment where insider threats are obviously on the rise, what security measures can prevent attacks without negatively affecting employee productivity and morale? Now that is the real conundrum.

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Data security in the age of insider threats: A primer - Help Net Security