In the wake of the Paris attack, intelligence officials and sympathizers upset by the Edward Snowden leaks and the spread of encrypted communications havetried to blame Snowden for the terrorists’ ability to keep their plans secret from law enforcement.
Yet news emerging from Paris — as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted.
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Visualizing Impact launched Onlinecensorship.org today, a new platform to document the who, what, and why of content takedowns on social media sites. The project, made possible by a 2014 Knight News Challenge award, will address how social media sites moderate user-generated content and how free expression is affected across the globe.
ISIS documents obtained by US researchers detail the security measures recruits should take to avoid surveillance, though not all of them follow the advice.
If the Paris attackers weren’t using crypto, the next ones will, and so should you
Lots of law enforcement agencies hate crypto, because the technology that helps us protect our communications from criminals and griefers and stalkers and spies also helps criminals keep secrets from cops. With each terrorist attack there’s a fresh round of doom-talk from spooks and cops about the criminals “going dark” — as though the present situation, in which the names and personal information of everyone who talks to everyone else, all the time, where they are then they talk, where they go and who they talk to next, is somehow lesssurveillant than the past, when cops could sometimes use analog tape-recorders to wiretap the very few conversations that took place on landlines. (more…)
The Global Voices community demands justice for seven free expression advocates who are facing trial in Morocco due to their advocacy.
The seven advocates have sought to defend human rights, hold authorities accountable to the public, and uphold rule of law in their country. Five have been charged with “threatening the internal security of the State” and two face charges of “receiving foreign funding without notifying the General Secretariat of the government.” We call on the Moroccan government to stand by its commitments to international human rights agreements and drop all charges against these seven individuals.
People born after 1995, referred to as Generation Z, always have their faces buried in their mobile devices. Or do they?
A recent study by market research firm Wildness found that nine out of 10 members of Generation Z take occasional breaks from their mobile devices, with 54 percent doing so on a daily basis.
This truly is the year of the emoji.
For the first time, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year is … not a word. The organization selected the “face with tears of joy” emoji as the word of the year.
This emoji beat out words (and phrases) such as sharing economy, they, on fleek,ad blocker and lumbersexual.
Oxford explained the logic in a blog post:
Anonymous is crowdsourcing #OpParis, publishes ‘noob guide’ to hacking
In the 24 hours since Anonymous declared “total war” on Islamic State, the loose-knit hacktivist collective has claimed its first victims by way of leaked information of suspected extremists. If future follows past, Anonymous will no doubt try to win this war through a series of coordinated attacks on IS websites as well as doxxing its leadership, identifying and removing social media accounts used for recruiting and just generally causing mayhem designed to slow the spread of communication between IS cells. Anonymous is also training the next generation of hacktivists by calling upon the crowd to get involved. Three guides were posted…
After restating its intention to wage war on Islamic State following the attacks in Paris, online vigilante group Anonymous has begun leaking more details of communication channels it says are linked to the network, according to the Independent. It’s not clear what the newspaper’s source is for this latest update, but the reason for keeping it to themselves is the suggestion that it contains the physical addresses of some of the accused. An Anonymous ‘RedCult’ branch looks to have taken the lead on posting takedown lists online, with around 1,000 Facebook and Twitter accounts, along with email and IP addresses, posted on Pastebin back in February.…
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