Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Opt out of global data surveillance programs like PRISM, XKeyscore andTempora.

Want to avoid being a "target" of this "switch-latching"? A site called "Prism-break" recently released a smorgasbord of encrypted browsing, chat, and email services that supposedly allow the user to evade government scrutiny.


Opt out of global data surveillance programs like PRISMXKeyscore andTempora.

Tempora is the codeword for a formerly secret computer system that is used by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). This system is used to buffer internet communications that are extracted from fibre-optic cables, so these can be processed and searched.[2] It was tested since 2008 and became operational in the autumn of 2011.[3]
Tempora uses intercepts on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet to gain access to large amounts of internet users' personal data. The intercepts are placed in the United Kingdom and overseas, with the knowledge of companies owning either the cables or landing stations.[4]
The existence of Tempora was revealed by Edward Snowden, a former American intelligence contractor who leaked information about the program to former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald in May 2013, as part of his revelations of government-sponsored mass surveillance programs. Documents Snowden acquired claimed that data collected by the Tempora program is shared with the National Security Agency of the United States.[5]

Operation[edit]

According to Edward Snowden, Tempora has two principal components called "Mastering the Internet" (MTI) and "Global Telecoms Exploitation" (GTE). He claimed that each is intended to collate online and telephone traffic.[5] This however contradicts two original documents, which say that Tempora is only for internet traffic, just like the XKeyscore system of the NSA, components of which are incorporated in Tempora.[2] [6]
It is alleged that GCHQ produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA. By May 2012 300 GCHQ analysts and 250 NSA analysts had been assigned to sort data.[5]
The Guardian claims that no distinction is made in the gathering of data between private citizens and targeted suspects.[5] Tempora is said to include recordings of telephone calls, the content of email messages, Facebook entries and the personal internet history of users. Snowden said of Tempora that "It's not just a U.S. problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight...They [GCHQ] are worse than the U.S."[5]
Claims exist that Tempora was possible only by way of secret agreements with commercial companies, described in Snowden's leaked documents as "intercept partners". Some companies are alleged to have been paid for their co-operation. Snowden also alleged that GCHQ staff were urged to disguise the origin of material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout".[5] The companies are forbidden to reveal the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables. If the companies fail to comply they can be compelled to do so.[5]
Lawyers for GCHQ said it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted by Tempora because "this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage".[5]
GCHQ set up a three-year trial at the GCHQ Bude in Cornwall. GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links by Summer 2011, each probe carried 10 gigabits of data a second.[5] NSA analysts were brought into the trials, and Tempora was launched in Autumn 2011, with data shared with the NSA. Ongoing technical work is expanding GCHQ's capacity to collect data from new super cables that carry data at 100 gigabits a second.[5] The data is preserved for three days while metadata is kept for thirty days.[1]
TEMPORA comprises different components, like the actual access points to fiber-optic cables, a sanitisation program codenamed POKERFACE, the XKEYSCORE system developed by NSA, and a Massive Volume Reduction (MVR) capability.[2]
In May 2012, GCHQ had TEMPORA systems installed at the following locations:[2]
  • 16 for 10 gigabit/second cables at the CPC processing center
  • 7 for 10 gigabit/second cables at the OPC processing center
  • 23 for 10 gigabit/second cables at the RPC1 processing center

Reactions[edit]

UK Defence officials issued a confidential DA-Notice to the BBC and other media asking the media to refrain from running further stories related to surveillance leaks including US PRISM program and the British involvement therein.[7][8]
The US Army has restricted its employees' access to the Guardian website since the beginning of the NSA leaks of PRISM and Tempora "in order to prevent an unauthorized disclosure of classified information."[9]
German Federal Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger tweeted that she considered the program an "Alptraum" ("nightmare") and demanded that European institutions investigate the matter.[10][11]
Jan Philipp Albrecht, German Member of the European Parliament and spokesperson for Justice and Home Affairs of the Greens/EFA parliamentary group, called for an infringement procedure against the United Kingdom for having violated its obligations relating to the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data under Article 16 of the Treaties of the European Union.[12]

See also[edit]

Help make mass surveillance of entire populations uneconomical! We all have a right to privacy, which you can exercise today by encrypting your communications and ending your reliance on proprietary services.

https://prism-break.org/en/

The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping

The newest NSA leaks reveal that governments are probing "the Internet's backbone." How does that work?




In the early 1970's, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications link between two major Soviet naval bases. The problem? The Soviet Navy had completely blocked foreign ships from entering the region.

Not to be deterred, the National Security Agency launched Operation Ivy Bells, deploying fast-attack submarines and combat divers to drop waterproof recording pods on the lines. Every few weeks, the divers would return to gather the tapes and deliver them to the NSA, which would then binge-listen to their juicy disclosures.

The project ended in 1981, when NSA employee Ronald Pelton sold informationabout the program to the KGB for $35,000. He's still serving his life prison term.
The operation might have ended, but for the NSA, this underwater strategy clearly stuck around.

In addition to gaining access to web companies' servers and asking for phone metadata, we've now learned that both the U.S. and the U.K. spy agencies aretapping directly into the Internet's backbone -- the undersea fiber optic cables that shuttle online communications between countries and servers. For some privacy activists, this process is even more worrisome than monitoring call metadata because it allows governments to make copies of everything that transverses these cables, if they wanted to.
The British surveillance programs have fittingly sinister titles: "Mastering the Internet" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation," according to The Guardian.

A subsidiary program for these operations -- Tempora -- sucks up around 21 million gigabytes per day and stores the data for a month. The data is shared with NSA, and there are reportedly 550 NSA and GCHQ analysts poring over the information they've gathered from at least 200 fiber optic cables so far.

The scale of the resulting data harvest is tremendous. From The Guardian:
This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites -- all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

In an interview with online security analyst Jacob Appelbaum, NSA leaker Edward Snowden called the British spy agency GCHQ "worse than" the NSA, saying it represents the first "full take" system, in which surveillance networks catch all Internet traffic regardless of its content. Appelbaum asked Snowden if "anyone could escape" Tempora:
"Well, if you had the choice, you should never send information over British lines or British servers," Snowden said. "Even the Queen's selfies with her lifeguards would be recorded, if they existed."

The U.S.'s own cable-tapping program, known by the names OAKSTAR, STORMBREW, BLARNEY and FAIRVIEW, as revealed in an NSA PowerPoint slide, apparently functions similarly to Tempora, accessing "communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," according to The Washington Post. The slide indicates that Prism and these so-called "upstream" programs work together somehow, with an arrow saying "You Should Use Both" pointing to the two operations.

So how does one tap into an underwater cable?
The process is extremely secretive, but it seems similar to tapping an old-fashioned, pre-digital telephone line -- the eavesdropper gathers up all the data that flows past, then deciphers it later.
Screen Shot 2013-07-16 at 11.17.56 AM.png
More than 550,000 miles of flexible undersea cables about the size of garden watering hoses carry all the world's emails, searches, and tweets. Together, they shoot the equivalent of several hundred Libraries of Congress worth of information back and forth every day.

In 2005, the Associated Press reported that a submarine called the USS Jimmy Carter had been repurposed to carry crews of technicians to the bottom of the sea so they could tap fiber optic lines. The easiest place to get into the cables is at the regeneration points -- spots where their signals are amplified and pushed forward on their long, circuitous journeys. "At these spots, the fiber optics can be more easily tapped, because they are no longer bundled together, rather laid out individually," Deutsche Welle reported.

But such aquatic endeavors may no longer even be necessary. The cables make landfall at coastal stations in various countries, where their data is sent on to domestic networks, and it's easier to tap them on land than underwater. Britain is, geographically, in an ideal position to access to cables as they emerge from the Atlantic, so the cooperation between the NSA and GCHQ has been key. Beyond that partnership, there are the other members of the "Five Eyes" -- the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians -- that also collaborate with the U.S., Snowden said.


The tapping process apparently involves using so-called "intercept probes." According to two analysts I spoke to, the intelligence agencies likely gain access to the landing stations, usually with the permission of the host countries oroperating companies, and use these small devices to capture the light being sent across the cable. The probe bounces the light through a prism, makes a copy of it, and turns it into binary data without disrupting the flow of the original Internet traffic.

"We believe our 3D MEMS technology -- as used by governments and various agencies -- is involved in the collection of intelligence from ... undersea fibers," said a director of business development at Glimmerglass, a government contractor that appeared, at least according to a 2010 Aviation Week article, to conduct similar types of interceptions, though it's unclear whether they took part in the British Tempora or the U.S. upstream programs. In a PowerPoint presentation, Glimmerglass once boasted that it provided "optical cyber solutions" to the intelligence community, offering the ability to monitor everything from Gmail to Facebook. "We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception. They've passed laws, publicly known, that they will monitor all international traffic for interdiction of any kind of terrorist activity."
Screen Shot 2013-07-10 at 6.54.48 PM.png
Slide from a Glimmerglass presentation
The British publication PC Pro presented another theory: that slightly bending the cables could allow a receiver to capture their contents.

One method is to bend the cable and extract enough light to sniff out the data. "You can get these little cylindrical devices off eBay for about $1,000. You run the cable around the cylinder, causing a slight bend in cable. It will emit a certain amount of light, one or two decibels. That goes into the receiver and all that data is stolen in one or two decibels of light. Without interrupting transfer flow, you can read everything going on on an optical network," said Everett.

The loss is so small, said Everett, that anyone who notices it might attribute it to a loose connection somewhere along the line. "They wouldn't even register someone's tapping into their network," he added.

Once it's gathered, the data gets sifted. Most of it is discarded, but the filters pull out material that touches on one of the 40,000 search terms chosen by the NSA and GCHQ -- that's the content the two agencies inspect more closely.

The British anti-surveillance group Privacy International has filed a lawsuit against the U.K. government, arguing that such practices amount to "blanket surveillance" and saying that British courts do "not provide sufficiently specific or clear authorization for such wide-ranging and universal interception of communications." Their argument is that the existing surveillance laws are from the phone-tapping days and can't be applied to modern, large-scale electronic data collection.

"If their motivation is to catch terrorists, then are there less intrusive methods than spying on everyone whose traffic happens to transverse the U.K.?" said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International.

Meanwhile, the British agency, the GCHQ, has defended their practices by saying that they are merely looking for a few suspicious "needles" in a giant haystack of data, and that the techniques have allowed them to uncover terrorist plots.
If groups like Privacy International are successful, it may put an end to the capture of domestic Internet data within the U.K., but as NSA expert Matthew Aid recently told me, since 80 percent of the fiber optic data flows through the U.S., it wouldn't stop the massive surveillance operations here or in other countries -- even if the person on the sending end was British.

It's also worth noting that this type of tapping has been going on for years -- it's just that we're now newly getting worked up about it. In 2007, the New York Times thus described President Bush's expansion of electronic surveillance: "the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants -- latching on to those giant switches -- as long as the target of the government's surveillance is 'reasonably believed' to be overseas."

Want to avoid being a "target" of this "switch-latching"? A site called "Prism-break" recently released a smorgasbord of encrypted browsing, chat, and email services that supposedly allow the user to evade government scrutiny.
The only platform for which there is no encrypted alternative is Apple's iOS, a proprietary software, for which the site had this warning:
"You should not entrust neither your communications nor your data to a closed source device."

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Millionaire Chess Announces Next Move

FM MikeKlein on 12/1/14, 11:44 PM


Millionaire Chess, the groundbreaking open event co-organized by GM Maurice Ashley and partner Amy Lee in October, announced Monday that the second edition will return to Las Vegas in October, 2015. Exact dates and host location have not yet been finalized.
The event gets its name from the $1,000,000 prize fund, easily the largest ever for an open tournament. In the inaugural edition, GM Wesley So took home the first prize of $100,000.
"While we gave due consideration to Orlando (Florida) in April (2015), we ultimately decided that the Spring was simply too soon to execute a quality tournament properly," their press release stated. It added that "odds are high" that Orlando will be considered again in 2016.
GM Maurice Ashley, having some fun at the 2013 Sinquefield Cup
"I am extremely excited to see all participants new and old at the next Millionaire Chess," Lee told Chess.com. "We have worked hard at incorporating all the feedback we have received and look forward to what the future holds."
For a wide array of opinions on how the first event ran, you can click here to see many links to chess sites and blogs.
Millionaire Chess invested a lot of resources into online coverage of the first event. (photo courtesy Billy Johnson)
Ashley and Lee hinted at some specific improvements for the second edition.
Sometime later this month the Millionaire Chess web site will undergo a "major overhaul." The revamped site will still have important logistics liks standings and registration, but will also be "dynamic" and "user friendly."
They also plan to add a "Global Satellite Program" which would allow local organizers to have events that qualify chess players for Millionaire Chess. The lowest entry fee for the first event was $1,000 so these satellite tournaments would allow people to essentially win their entry fee at a reduced cost. The structure is similar to what poker tournaments have done for years with high-entry-fee events.
"I'm looking forward to our second tournament," Ashley told Chess.com. "With our Global Satellite Program and more robust prizes below the top four places, I think folks are going to be excited about Millionaire Chess like never before!"
Millionaire Chess is clearly borrowing some of the initiatives of poker's success. On the left is FM Ylon Schwartz, 4th place finisher in the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event. He was back in Vegas for Millionaire Chess in October. (photo courtesy Billy Johnson)
About 550 players attended the first edition, well below what was needed for the tournament to be financially solvent. Ashley and Lee were quoted in the New York Times that they expected to lose money on the first edition but that Millionaire Chess is part of a multiyear plan.
GM Wesley So (right) and GM Ray Robson, being interviewed by Teryn Schaefer of Fox Sports Midwest at the 2014 Sinquefield Cup. A month later, So and Robson would go 1-2 at Millionaire Chess.
One player who plans to return is FM Kazim Gulamaliwinner of the $40,000 1st prize for 2350-2499.
"Vegas is pretty ideal," Gulamali said. "When you walk around you're not surrounded by chess. I like that. It's night and day. When I'm in [big] cities I enjoy it more."
He said he would have also played in Orlando in the Spring and that for him twice per year is not too often.
GM Wesley So and his big winner's check. (photo courtesy Billy Johnson)
How did he win the big prize this past October? Blissful ignorance. Going into round seven, the final game for players not competing in Millionaire Monday, Gulamali was unaware this was his final round.
"I thought the format was nine rounds," he said. "It worked out perfectly. In my round seven game I was down two pieces in a crazy position. I was just focusing on the game."
He will likely be more aware of the format this time around. Another improvement on his part: he will be registering early for this one. Last time he missed the early deadline and paid $1,500 to participate
Referer to

Chano Garcia, Un pelotero de ayer que vivio el odio racial

Jugo en  Almendares Park y en las ligas negras norteamericanas.
Aquella tarde en que Sussini mato' de un batazo a Le Blanc...
Participo' en el desafi'o de menos recaudacio'n. cuando Cocai'na debuto', Chano estaba en el campo corto almendarista


Por Elio Mene'ndez


Di'as atra's fue visita de esta redaccion la señora Ai'da Pedroso, viuda de Crescencio Chano Garci'a un expelotero profesional fallecido recientemente en esta capital, a la edad de 83 años.

Vengo a pedirle escriba algo sobre Chano para que los jovenes lo conozcan..
-Pero, es que yo muy poco de la actividadbolebolera de Cha'no, a quien no tuve' oportunidad de verlo jugar.

-No importa que usted no lo haya visto, en este album hay bastante sobre el.

Y pone en mis manos, o mejor, sobre mis rodillas, el albultado libro de amarillento recortes y paginas desprendidas que cautelozamente comienzo ojear.

A medida que lo leo hago apuntes en una cuartilla de papel aparte, y segun me adentro en el album me indentifico con Chano, quien efectivamente fue un bune pelotero que se destacio alla por la decada del 20, años en los que jugo beisbol profesional en Cuba y en los Estados Unidos.

Los recortes de periodicos dicen de su gran habilidad defensiva y versatilidad para desempeñarse en el cuadro (ss, 2b,3b0, y por lo que se aprecia en numerosos box scores se embasaba con frecuencia, pues regularmente aparece como primero o segundo bate en la alineacion.

Luego de debutar en los Almendares, de Joseito Rodriguez en 1922, jugo al siguiente año con los propios azules, bajo la tutela de Adolfo Luque, posteriormente lo hizo con el Habana, de Miguel Angel Gonzalez y en 1925 con el Marianao.

Por esa epoca, Chano jugo tambien en la Liga Profesional del Oriente junto a los mejores peloteros de cubanos y del besibol negro de Estados Unidos que participaban en las contiendas de la Liga Profesional Cubana, alternando con estrellas del calibre de Marcel, Dreke, Duncan, Oms, Lundy, Sam LLoyd, Charleston, Dihigo, Mayari, Cando Lopez y tantas otras figuras estelares

-----sera continuado

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