Nineteen Minutes into the Future

Italy - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi advanced a draft law through the senate that restricts the use of wiretaps by prosecutors and introduces fines and prison sentences for journalists who issue reports on tapped conversations.

The draft law's passage on Thursday by the senate prompted a torrent of criticism from Italian prosecutors, newspapers and opposition lawmakers. Mr. Berlusconi, a media magnate, says the bill aims to protect the privacy of Italians. Critics say the draft legislation, which still faces a vote in the lower house of Parliament, is an attempt by Mr. Berlusconi to weaken the judiciary branch's investigative powers and muzzle criticism of the prime minister in Italian media.

"The massacre of freedom has begun," said Anna Finocchiaro, a senator in the center-left Democratic Party. (more)

No pun intended?

Headline: "Italy's daily runs blank page"
Italy's left-leaning La Repubblica daily on Friday ran an all-white front page to protest a bill curbing police wiretaps and setting hefty fines on media for publishing transcripts of them. 'The muzzling law denies citizens the right to be informed,' reads a message, styled as a yellow Post-It note, on the otherwise blank space under the La Repubblica banner. (more)

Eighteen Minutes into the Future - Teleportation and the end of wiretapping?

A group of Chinese scientists has successfully achieved teleportation up to 9.9 miles, using quantum entanglement of photons...

"This is the longest reported distance over which photonic teleportation has been achieved to date, more than 20 times longer than the previous implementation," Discovery News quoted Cheng-Zhi Peng, one of the co-authors of the study and a scientist at University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University in Beijing, as saying.

In science fiction, teleportation usually describes the transfer of matter from one point to another, more or less instantaneously - a spooky aspect of quantum mechanics.

According to the theory, bits of light and matter can become entangled with one another and anything that happens to one particle will happen to the other, regardless of the distance or intervening matter...

A teleported telephone call, although no faster than a regular one, would however, be impenetrable and eavesdropping on a teleported telephone call would be impossible. (more)

The research is published in the current issue of the journal Nature Photonics.

FutureWatch: Teleportation's integration with communications. Then, teleportation as it relates to synchronicity... and a possible explanation to "it's a small world" and other coincidences.

Why do we eavesdrop?

Did you know, "that five and six centuries ago, English citizens had, in impressive numbers, been arrested for eavesdropping."

 

Want to know more? 

Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, by John Locke, is going to be released June 25th. (ISBN 13: 9780199236138)

The author writes...

"I wondered what, in the medieval mind, would have caused this behavior to be criminalized, and what the “criminals” themselves were doing, or thought they were doing, when they went out at night and listened to their neighbors’ conversations...

...until I began to study eavesdropping... I had never, in many years of research, encountered a behavior whose actual significance was so greatly at variance with its recognized importance. Look for books on social behavior with the word “eavesdropping” in the index section and you are likely to be severely disappointed. Enter the same word in computerized literature searches and your screen will display a list of books on wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance. But the word was coined centuries before telephones and recording equipment were invented, and the practice of eavesdropping documented nearly a thousand years earlier, when people were happy to entrust to unaided senses the question of who was doing what to whom." (more) (review)

Fascinating.

Now they really have something to kick about...

During this FIFA world cup, England’s football coach, Fabio Capello, plans to spy on his players using hi-tech TVs installed in their hotel rooms in order to keep out their wives and girlfriends (called as WAGs) and ensuring that the players are getting proper rest. Apparently, he believes that a sex ban will ensure that the players are bursting with energy right through the world cup. (more)

Bad Day for Spies Worldwide

France - A former senior spy accused of revealing French state secrets and the identities of fellow operatives in his recently-released memoir was being questioned by French police today. Defence Minister Herve Morin filed a complaint against Pierre Siramy, whose real name is Maurice Dufresne, author of "25 Years in the Secret Services," released in April. (more)

S. Korea - South Korea's military on Wednesday sought an arrest warrant for a two-star army general accused of leaking the country's war plan and other secrets to North Korea, a news report said. The Defence Security Command asked military prosecutors to arrest the major-general identified only as Kim for leaking classified information, Yonhap news agency said. (more)

India - The army has started probing the charges of espionage against an army officer posted in Andaman and Nicobar. He is being suspected of spying for Pakistan. About a month ago, when reports emerged that a major in Port Blair was caught spying for Pakistan, the army had dismissed it saying that his computer had been hacked by an external agency. But the government is now expecting to unearth a much larger spy network embedded in the military. (more)

Afghanistan - Suspected Taliban militants executed a seven-year-old boy in southern Afghanistan after accusing him of spying for the government, a provincial official said Wednesday. The child was captured by the militants in Sangin district of southern province of Helmand Tuesday, Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said. "The militants killed the seven-year-old boy in Heratiyan village of the district, on charges of espionage for Afghan government," Ahmadi said, citing information provided to police by relatives. (more)

Beware the Attack of the Killer Apps

Security researchers and government officials are growing increasingly concerned about the security of smartphone applications. Those concerns have been prompted by the discovery of a number of potentially dangerous apps in the app stores run by smartphone makers...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division, meanwhile, is investigating a number of malicious programs that have appeared in app stores, including apps designed to compromise mobile banking services and programs designed to be used by foreign countries to conduct espionage. (more)

"Just don't let the birds see them." ~Hitchcock

The way light hits a tropical butterfly's wings could make your bank card safer, according to a new U.K. study.

That's because scientists are now able to mimic the cell structure of butterfly scales to encrypt information on banknotes and other secure cards, researchers at Britain's Cambridge University say.

"We have unlocked one of nature's secrets and combined this knowledge with state-of-the-art nanofabrication to mimic the intricate optical designs found in nature," said lead researcher Mathias Kolle on the university's website. (more)

Run a shadow OS on your computer for super secrecy...

via lifehacker.com

...if you're really serious about protecting your data, you can actually hide your entire operating system. Here's how to do it.

To accomplish this task, we'll be using TrueCrypt, our favorite free and open-source disk encryption software that runs on all platforms, supports hidden volumes, and can even encrypt your entire hard drive.


Once we've completed the setup, you'll have two Windows installations and two passwords. One password will activate a hidden Windows installation as your real operating system, and the other, a decoy install to throw intruders off the trail. (more)

Mobile Smart Phone Spying... There are apps for that!

 As smartphones and the applications that run on them take off, businesses and consumers are beginning to confront a budding dark side of the wireless Web....

"Mobile phones are a huge source of vulnerability," said Gordon Snow, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division. "We are definitely seeing an increase in criminal activity."

The FBI's Cyber Division recently began working on a number of cases based on tips about malicious programs in app stores, Mr. Snow said. The cases involve apps designed to compromise banking on cellphones, as well as mobile "malware" used for espionage by foreign nations, said a person familiar with the matter. To protect its own operations, the FBI bars its employees from downloading apps on FBI-issued smartphones. (more)

Buy, buy anonymous pre-paid cell phones...

A bipartisan pair of Senate leaders have introduced a first-of-its-kind bill aimed at stopping terrorist suspects such as the would-be Times Square bomber from hiding their identities by using prepaid cellphones to plot their attacks.

The legislation sponsored by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) would require buyers to present identification when purchasing a prepaid cellphone and require phone companies to keep the information on file, as they do with users of landline phones and subscription-based cellphones. The proposal would require the carriers to retain the data for 18 months after the phone's deactivation. (more) 
...while you can.

"Y" ??? Because I liked you.

A former assistant to a top Disney executive was arrested for allegedly trying to sell the company's quarterly earnings to buyers who wanted to trade on inside information.
    

Prosecutors say Bonnie Hoxie, 33, who has worked as a secretary for Disney's PR chief since 2007, passed along inside information such as quarterly earnings statements to her boyfriend, Yonnie Sebbag aka Jonathan Cyrus, who was also arrested for his alleged role in the crime.
    

Sebbag, 29, then tried to sell the inside information to investors by sending anonymous letters to hedge funds and investment companies, according to the complaint in Federal Court. (more)

iPhone PIN Prick

Basically, plugging an up-to-date, non jail-broken, PIN-protected iPhone (powered off) into a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx will allow the people to see practically all of the user's data--including music, photos, videos, podcasts, voice recordings, Google safe browsing databases, and game contents. The "hacker" has read/write access to the iPhone, and the hack leaves no trace. (more)

Poll: Is '21st Century Living' worth the privacy tradeoffs?

Kevin's Security Scrapbook Poll Results

"Is '21st Century Living' worth the privacy tradeoffs?"
56.25%  No, not at all!
31.25%  Yes, definitely!
12.5%  The tradeoffs balance it all out.

A Data Loss Statistics Repository

DataLossDB is a research project aimed at documenting known and reported data loss incidents world-wide. The effort is now a community one.  

Help keep this Museum of Bitten Bytes going.
Open Security Foundation is the non-profit organization which runs the project. Their Web site, DataLossDB.org, asks for contributions of new incidents and new data for existing incidents. You can also contribute money.

Here is how some of their information is used...
The world's coolest data breach map!
Guaranteed to scare the dollars out of any tight-fisted CFO.

3 Graphic Arts Spy Techniques

If you use Photoshop or Illustrator you can send secret messages...
"You’re mission, if you choose to accept, is to learn how to smuggle secret information out of a building using Illustrator, encrypt a simple message using Photoshop and send a yes/no type of answer to a network of spies using a picture without any direct interaction. Enjoy!" (more)