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The Air Force's long-awaited GPS upgrade begins tomorrow (update)
It's been in the works for over a decade, but now the current Global Positioning System (GPS) is about to start getting its multibillion-dollar upgrade thanks to SpaceX's first-ever GPS satellite launch. After delays across the last four years, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to launch the United States Air Force's first Global Positioning System III space vehicle from from Cape Canaveral between 9:11AM ET and 9:37AM ET this morning (December 18th, 2018). However, the launch has been pushed to tomorrow morning at 9:07AM ET "due to an out of family reading on first stage sensors."
NSA leaker Reality Winner sentenced to 5 years in prison
Reality Winner, the whistleblower who leaked NSA election hacking data, pled guilty back in June to a single count of transmitting national defense information. Today, she was sentenced to 63 months in prison, which prosecutors called the longest sentence imposed for a federal crime related to unauthorized disclosure of classified info to the media.
What Trump means when he talks nukes at the State of the Union
President Donald Trump is expected to cover five main topics in his first State of the Union address tonight, including the economy, immigration, infrastructure and trade. The fifth topic, national security, will put the spotlight on North Korea and the erratic, ad hominem nuclear standoff between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Trump himself. The tension of this relationship has spilled over to Twitter, where Trump has lobbed insults and threats at Kim over the past year. Trump called Kim "little Rocket Man" and declared the US' "nuclear button" was "much bigger and more powerful" than Kim's. In August, Trump promised "fire and fury" if North Korea didn't stop testing nuclear weapons, and Kim later called Trump a "mentally deranged dotard." Meanwhile, North Korea carried out more than a dozen nuclear tests throughout 2017, including launching intercontinental ballistic missiles theoretically capable of striking the US mainland. Its most recent ICBM test was in November.
Facebook trying to find employees with national security clearance
Facebook's next attempt at clearing its name from any future political entanglements is apparently hiring people with national security clearances, according to Bloomberg. "Facebook plans to use these people -- and their ability to receive government information about potential threats -- in the company's attempt to search more proactively for questionable social media," the publication's source says. It makes sense, and given the role the social network played in he 2016 election, is a smart move.
Apple saw a jump in security requests at the end of 2016
Transparency reports are the main way that tech companies can tell us that the authorities have been asking to look at user data. In its report for the second half of 2016, Apple said that the number of national security requests spiked considerably. Between January and June, the company received around 3,000 of the requests, but between July and December, that number had leapt to closer to 6,000.
Senators ask for info on Trump's smartphone use
When he isn't addressing matters of national security amongst diners at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Donald Trump is reportedly using an unsecured Android phone for official communications. That's of great concern for more than a few reasons and two prominent Democrat lawmakers want the Department of Defense to address why it's happening.
Chinese man pleads guilty to stealing US aerospace secrets
Some two years after the United States charged Chinese national Su Bin as part of a conspiracy to steal aerospace info, he's pleaded guilty to the crime. For that he'll face a maximum sentence of five years behind bars and a $250,000 fine "or twice the gross gain or gross loss resulting from the offense;" whichever is a higher amount, according to the Department of Justice. Part of his deal entailed admitting that the data pilfered (including info from the U.S. Munitions list) was done so expressly for monetary gain.
Latest batch of Clinton emails may contain classified intel
The State Department announced on Monday that it will release an email from former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server that, according to members of the intelligence community, may contain classified information. The email is part of a nearly 8,000-page document dump scheduled for Monday. The State Department has already unveiled around 30,000 pages (of an estimated 54,000) since the scandal erupted in March.
Former US national security officials back end-to-end encryption
Three former US national security officials have given their support to end-to-end encryption and criticised claims that the government should have backdoor access or "duplicate" decryption keys. Mike McConnell, a former director of the National Security Agency and director of national intelligence, Michael Chertoff, a former homeland security secretary, and William Lynn, a former deputy defense secretary voiced their approval in the Washington Post. The trio argue that requiring companies to produce duplicate keys would only increase the risk of cyberattack. In short, the location or holder of the duplicate keys would simply create another potential point of vulnerability and attract hackers.
Twitter wants government permission to share specifics about national security requests
Twitter released a new transparency report this morning, and it's just as much about what the company can't disclose as what it can. You can check out the full data dump here, but in short Twitter received a total of 1,410 information requests between July 1 and December 31, 2013. That's a 66 percent bump in requests over the last two years, and it shouldn't come as a shock to hear that 833 of them came from the US government. Second and third place? Japan and Saudi Arabia, with 213 and 110 submitted requests, respectively. What you won't see Twitter talking about are the national security-related requests it's received from the US government, unlike what a handful of tech giants did after they reached an agreement with the Department of Justice. To hear Twitter Global Legal Policy Manager Jeremy Kessel tell it, the nebulous numbers those companies are able to share aren't specific enough to be meaningful. He may have a point. Yahoo, Google and Facebook all confirmed that they received somewhere between zero and 999 FISA requests during the first half of 2013. A little openness is better than none at all, but Twitter's position is that gag orders like this fly in the face of its "First Amendment right to free expression and [an] open discussion of government affairs." The company is weighing legal options in case the Justice Department doesn't quite see things its way. We'll have to wait and see how those plans pan out.
Canadian government blocked potential Lenovo bid for BlackBerry over security concerns
The BlackBerry of today could've been a Chinese-controlled company -- if the Canadian government hadn't put its foot down, that is. A report in The Globe and Mail, citing inside sources, claims the government feared a Lenovo takeover would compromise national security given how connected BlackBerry's business is with the country's communications infrastructure. Though Lenovo was apparently very serious about moving forward with acquisition talks, the government's objections were so strong that BlackBerry never bothered to submit a formal proposal for consideration. That and the fact that BlackBerry also desperately needed a speedy solution to stem its downward spiral; something a pending merger would only exacerbate. No matter now though, as BlackBerry's since abandoned takeover talks in favor of financing and ousting failed CEO Thorsten Heins.
Secret NSA project gathered American cellphone location data
The NSA's been rather busy over the past few years, tracking everything from your emails to phone calls, and now the New York Times is reporting that it even conducted a secret project to collect data about the location of American's cellphones in 2010 and 2011. The project was ultimately not implemented and only recently surfaced in a pre-written answer for the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, should the subject come up in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. According to the Times, details about the project are scarce, and Senator Ron Wyden said that "the real story" behind the project has yet to be declassified. The answer obtained by the paper reads:"In 2010 and 2011 N.S.A. received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format, but that data was not used for any other purpose and was never available for intelligence analysis purposes."
Dropbox backs petitions to disclose exact national security request numbers
The call for greater US government transparency just got louder: Dropbox has filed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court brief that endorses petitions to disclose exact national security request numbers. Much like LinkedIn, Dropbox believes that limiting disclosures to broad ranges hurts transparency by implying that smaller firms get as many requests as larger rivals. The ban on exact figures also violates a First Amendment right to publish specific information, according to the cloud storage provider. We likely won't know the effectiveness of the brief for some time -- or ever, if the court proceedings remain a secret -- but Dropbox can at least say that it made its case.
Microsoft follows Google's lead, files request to reveal more data about FISA orders
The Wall Street Journal reports that in a move similar to Google's request last week, Microsoft has submitted a motion to the secret FISA court to authorize the release of "aggregate data" about the requests it has received. Microsoft published the information it has so far been authorized to reveal a couple of weeks ago, lumping in national security related requests with stats for other criminal warrants and subpoenas. Google and Twitter have been among the loudest requesting the ability to separate national security-related requests like those at the center of the PRISM controversy, however it's been reported that several companies are negotiating for the ability to be more specific.
Google, Twitter push to reveal number of national security related requests separately
While Microsoft and Facebook have both published information tonight about how many requests for customer info the government made over a six month period, Google and Twitter are apparently hoping to take a different route. As Google told AllThingsD and Twitter legal director Benjamin Lee tweeted, "it's important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests-including FISA disclosures-separately." Google went further, claiming that lumping the number of National Security Letters together with criminal requests would be a "step backwards." Clearly this post-PRISM revelations battle for more transparency on just what the government is doing behind the scenes isn't over, we'll let you know if any of the parties involved have more information to share.
Facebook reveals government data request numbers, is first to include national security stats
Facebook lawyer Ted Ullyot revealed in a post tonight precisely how many user-data requests it receives from government entities, and that it's negotiated the ability to include national security-related (FISA and National Security Letters) inquiries in the report. Until now, the companies that receive such requests, whether through the recently uncovered PRISM program or not, have not been able to say anything about them, or report how many there are. Still, the stats it's able to release aren't specific, and include all requests from the last six months in a range, said to be between 9,000 and 10,000, covering between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. We still have no official reports on what those inquiries cover, how wide reaching a single one can be or what information has been passed along. Facebook however, is quick to point out that these cover "only a tiny fraction of one percent" of its 1.1 billion active user accounts. Along with Microsoft and Google, Facebook has publicly petitioned the government to let it be more transparent about the size and scope of the requests it receives, and Reuters reports tonight that "several" internet companies have struck an agreement to do so. Expect more reports to arrive soon in similar formats, however Ullyot states Facebook will continue to push the government to be "as transparent as possible." For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.
US Federal judge finds National Security Letters' gag provision unconstitutional
Woo, boy. You know those National Security Letters that the FBI has been issuing at its own discretion -- the ones Google has been doing its best to track? Judge Susan Illston of Federal District Court in San Francisco just found 'em unconstitutional. As the story goes, NSLs arrive from the factory with a gag order on the recipient, and as Illston sees it, forbidding the recipient from "disclosing that they had received such an order." So, she's suggesting that the whole thing should be banned under the First Amendment. Moreover, she's ordering the US government to stop enforcing the gag provision in any lingering cases, though she reportedly "stayed her order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals." Needless to say, the move comes as a blow to the existing administration's surveillance practices, but something tells us this isn't the last word we'll be hearing on the matter. Hit up the links below for a look at the decision.
Huawei complains about US spying allegations, implies McCarthy-style victimization
"We must remember always that accusation is not proof." So begins a report sponsored and published by Huawei, heavily quoting a 1954 US Senate report that condemned McCarthy and his anti-Communist hysteria. The document is a prelude to Huawei's forthcoming public testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee, and its message is clear: the Chinese manufacturer is tired of how it's being treated in America, where numerous telecoms contracts have been blocked over "national security concerns." Huawei wants to be seen as an "opportunity" rather than a "threat," claiming it has scope to expand its 140,000 workforce and would love to create more jobs in America -- if only the US government would remove its "roadblock." Many other arguments are put forward, but some of the most interesting paragraphs deal with the background of Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei. The document claims that Zhengfei has been "tragically misunderstood" and that his alleged roles in the People's Liberation Army and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are "unsubstantiated." The report doesn't deny those memberships ever existed, but instead downplays their significance -- for example by insisting that the CCP is now focused on promoting "private entrepreneurs" and "democratization." We admittedly stopped reading at that point, but if you'd like to continue then the full 78-page PDF, written by Dan Steinbock of the India, China and America Institute, is linked below.
Huawei 2011 financials: 20 million smartphones sold yet profit down 53 percent
Huawei's annual earnings report is out and it's a mixed bag, since while turnover increased by 11.7 percent to 203.9 RMB ($32.3 billion), profits plummeted 53 percent to 11.6 billion RMB ($1.8 billion). Revenue from overseas sales (138.4 billion RMB) equated for over half the company's total income and it boasted of having sold 150 million consumer devices, including 20 million smartphones in the year. The company didn't provide reasons for the drop in profit, emphasizing that it's increased R&D spending by 34.2 percent to 23.7 billion RMB ($3.75 billion) and that in any event, it's got around $30 billion of assets that can shoulder the brunt of a bad year. However, the company may not see a rosy 2012 either, after both America and Australia refused to give the company big infrastructure deals (Huawei's bread and butter) thanks to allegedly close relationships between the company and the Chinese government. It seems to be following a similar trajectory to rival ZTE, which also felt margins squeeze as it entered the global retail space and felt the heat when its political dealings were thrown in the spotlight.
Telecoms win immunity in wiretapping case, US court approves separate suit against the government
Looks like a case of good news-bad news for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its fight against warrantless wiretapping. A US appeals court upheld a 2008 ruling, granting telecoms such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint immunity for cooperating with the government in its surveillance activities. Still, Judge Margaret McKeown of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals insists that immunity only applies to telecoms, not the government, and that "the federal courts remain a forum to consider the constitutionality of the wiretapping scheme and other claims." Indeed, while the 9th Circuit upheld immunity for telecoms, it also gave the go-ahead for a separate suit against the NSA, former president George W. Bush, senior members of the Bush administration and President Obama for using AT&T's network to conduct "an unprecedented suspicionless general search," according to the filing. The court's decision to allow this suit to proceed marks a reversal of an earlier ruling, in which a lower court said the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to pursue the case. [Image courtesy PBS]
