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Lost Military Disks Had Personal Information

Monday, May 25th, 2009

LONDON - AN INTERNAL military memo published on Monday confirmed that computer disks lost at a British Royal Air Force base contained sensitive files on the private lives of senior officers, including answers to vetting questions about drug abuse, extramarital affairs and the use of prostitutes.
The memo was released to Britain’s The Guardian newspaper under freedom of information laws following the loss of data disks in September.

At the time of the theft from RAF Innsworth, about 113 miles west of London, Britain’s defense ministry said only that personal data such as bank details and addresses could have been lost.

But the memo confirms that the data included details of security vetting, potentially involving information on criminal convictions, debts, medical conditions and sexual activity.

‘This data provides an excellent target list for foreign intelligence services, investigative journalists and blackmailers,’ the memo stated.

Britain’s defense ministry declined Monday to confirm the details of the lost data, but said there is no evidence it is in the hands of criminals or enemy forces.

‘All individuals identified as being at risk received personal one-on-one interviews to alert them to the loss of data, to discuss potential threats and to provide them with advice on mitigating action,’ a ministry spokeswoman said, on condition of anonymity in line with policy. — AP

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Court orders activist released

Monday, May 25th, 2009

INDIA’S Supreme Court Monday ordered the release of a leading human rights activist held on charges of colluding with outlawed Maoist insurgents.
Judges said Binayak Sen must be released on bail from the jail in Chhattisgarh state where he has been imprisoned since his arrest in May 2007.

The court’s ruling came a year after 2,000 rights activists, doctors and authors, including American writer Noam Chomsky, petitioned the Indian government for Sen’s release.

Sen, a paediatrician by profession, denies all charges that he was linked to the Maoist guerrillas who control parts of Chhattisgarh.

The state’s chief minister, Raman Singh, said he would comply with the court’s orders.

Sen, 59, is a public health expert and also a senior member of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, a respected Indian human rights group.

He was working with poor people in Chhattisgarh when he was arrested.

India’s Maoists say they are fighting for the rights of neglected tribal people and landless farmers. — AFP

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Victims Families: 7/7 investigation a “whitewash”

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Families of victims of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London have denounced a parliamentary investigation into the events as a “whitewash”. They accuse Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which issued a report of its investigation last week, of covering up the failure of MI5 to stop the four suicide-bombers who killed 52 people and injured 700.

Sean Cassidy whose son Ciaran died on the London underground, said, “This is a complete whitewash. We now need a public inquiry. It is the only thing that will answer all the questions. It has to be independent. We are four years on and there are still no answers.”

Robert Webb, whose sister Laura died, said, “The ISC report seemed to give the benefit of the doubt to MI5 in a way the Hutton Report or the Butler Inquiry did to MI6 over Iraq… I feel I owe it to Laura to get some answers… We need a fair independent inquiry that asks robust questions of MI5 and the police into why decisions were made and looks at wider questions of why these men did what they did.”

Rachel North, who survived the July 7 bombings, accused MI5 of using “weasel words” over what they knew, adding, “It does look a lot like MI5 ran rings around the MPs” who sit on the ISC.

In the aftermath of the July 7 bombings, then Home Secretary Charles Clarke said the attacks came “out of the blue” and the four bombers—Mohammad Siddique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Germaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain—were “clean skins” with no known links to terrorism. Ministers and senior security officials insisted there was no warning of an imminent attack.

The ISC report confirms that, in reality, there was a wealth of information about the bombers, particularly Khan. “As we have delved deeper,” it declares, “we have uncovered new information that even the organisations involved had not connected together.” In relation to Khan the report reveals:

* He was cautioned by West Yorkshire Police for assault in 1993, a police record created and his photograph taken.

* In 2001, several months before the September 11 bombings in New York, Khan was one of 40 men filmed by West Yorkshire Police surveillance officers at a suspected terrorist training camp in Yorkshire, although he remained unidentified.

* In late March 2003, MI5 received intelligence that Mohammed Quayam Khan, from Luton, was the leader of an “Al-Qaida facilitation network”, which provided financial and logistical support to the organisation. MI5 launched an investigation called Operation Crevice, about which it informed the ISC.

* In April 2003, Siddique Khan was seen driving a car carrying an extremist suspect connected to another investigation.

* In July 2003, Quayam Khan’s mobile phone was found to contain the number of Siddique Khan’s phone, which was registered to an Islamist bookshop in Leeds.

* In January 2004, MI5 received intelligence that another individual in the network, Omar Khyam, was involved in an active bomb plot. Khyam became MI5’s “top priority” and Operation Crevice developed into “the largest operation they had ever run”. Khyam was under “consistent” surveillance and everyone he met and spoke to was “assessed”.

* On February 2, 2004, Khan met Khyam near Crawley and was followed and photographed on his way back to Leeds.

* On February 20, 2004, the same day that 600 kilograms of fertiliser was discovered in a warehouse, electronics expert Mohammed Momin Khawaja arrived from Canada to give advice to the Crevice group on remote detonation devices. The following day Khan attended a “farewell” meal with the group and Khawaja.

* On three occasions between February 28 and March 23, 2004 Khan drove to Crawley to meet Khyam and was heard talking about financial fraud, the “success of the Madrid bombings” and returning to “jihad” in Pakistan. Despite being followed home again on one occasion to Leeds, Khan still remained unidentified and classified as a “desirable” target for MI5 investigation (Khyam was classified as “essential”). MI5 told the ISC that they could easily have identified Khan, but did not because he was considered a “small-time fraudster” who had “minor contact” with the Crevice plotters.

* At the end of March 2004, Khyam and seven others in the Crevice group were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the fertiliser plot, tried and found guilty in April 2007.

* In May 2004, a detainee revealed that a man named “Ibrahim” had travelled to Pakistan in 2003 and met the future Crevice group members there.

* In June-July 2004, ten “extremely sensitive” emails are exchanged between West Yorkshire Police and MI5 about Khan and other Crevice contacts in the Leeds area. One of the emails was nine pages long and contained Khan’s 1993 photograph.

* On July 14, 2004, a check on the Police National Computer showed that there had been 21 enquiries about Khan’s car since August 2003.

* On February 9, 2005, Khan’s car was put on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system so that CCTV cameras around the country could track it.

* On April 12, 2005, following confirmation from another source that “Ibrahim” had been in Pakistan, MI5 launched Operation DO*** (the full name is redacted in the ISC report) to identify him. It was not until after the 7/7 bombings that Ibrahim was discovered to be Khan. Recent evidence suggests a fifth man was involved and remains at large.

Faced with these facts, the MPs on the ISC had no option but to express their astonishment. Their report declares, “even though Siddique/Sidique/Sadique Khan was not assessed to be significant it is nevertheless surprising, given the amount of information MI5 and the police had on him, that they said they had not identified Mohammed Siddique Khan prior to 7/7.”

However, the report concludes, “We cannot criticise the judgments made by MI5 and the police based on the information that they had and their priorities at the time.”

Throughout its 102 pages, the report strives to excuse the failure of the police and security services to identify the July 7 bombers by referring to “missed opportunities,” only made clear with the benefit of hindsight. It claims the different ways Siddique was spelt hampered the investigation!

The report also claims MI5 was hampered by lack of resources. MI5’s undisclosed budget has tripled since 2001 and the annual bill for all intelligence related activity stands at £2.5 billion a year.

The report brands as “astounding” the revelation that MI5 had been able to investigate only one in 20 terror suspects in 2004 and that 54 “essential” targets were not even being watched. The ISC states, “They had to prioritise even within this essential group. Therefore a “desirable” target did not even get close to attracting a share of the limited resources available.” The ISC report makes the outlandish statement that several hundred thousand MI5 officers would be needed to meet all eventualities, as opposed to the current 3,500.

The report also claims MI5 was overwhelmed by the vast amount of information it had to deal with, citing the tens of thousands of phone calls monitored between January and March 2004, of which 4,020 were connected to Operation Crevice.

Many of the key facts that would give a better assessment of Khan’s importance are redacted in the report on the grounds of national security. These include the number of networks being investigated, the number of people “housed” (followed back to their homes), or numbers travelling to Pakistan to attend terrorist training camps. More extraordinary is the revelation that the record of the targets deemed “essential” and “desirable” in 2004 is “no longer available” following update of MI5’s IT system.

Also redacted from the report are all details about specific warnings that Saudi Arabian intelligence had passed on to British and US intelligence in December 2004 about a terror plot by British-born Muslims, aimed at the London Underground or a nightclub. The ISC says it received no reply for requests for further information made to the Saudi Embassy or the French Embassy about statements made by the then French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. He said he had been told at the European Union terrorism meeting following the London bombings that some of the suspects were arrested in 2004 and then released in order to break a wider network.

The above facts are sufficient to justify a public inquiry into the UK’s worst mainland terrorist atrocity. The necessity is compounded by the recent not guilty verdict handed down to three men accused of helping to plan the July 7 bombings. After nearly four years and despite a massive police investigation costing some £100 million, they remain the only people to have faced any charges in relation to the London bombings.

Above all, the July 7 terror bombings in London were used to justify an unprecedented offensive against civil liberties, including the adoption of a shoot-to-kill policy by the police that claimed the life of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes. Only days after the bombings, Prime Minister Tony Blair rejected calls for a public inquiry, insisting that Britain faced a continuing threat. He seized on the bombings to bring in measures to drastically curtail free speech rights and expand the powers of the state to spy on the population. Powers were enacted to hold alleged terrorists and their supporters for long periods without charges, deport immigrants, close down mosques, and cordon off entire parts of major cities. New regional MI5 offices and regional police Counter-Terrorism Units were set up.

It is not possible to determine how much was and is really known about the perpetrators of the terror attacks in London, but a full inquiry is necessary. Such an investigation has to be entirely independent of the British government and probe the underlying causes of the bombings and their foundation in the Blair government’s participation in Washington’s illegal war against Iraq.

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How To Protect Your Privacy In IE8

Monday, May 25th, 2009

There will always be times when you don’t want other people to know which sites you’ve been visiting, whatever you use the Internet for. The problem is that we all leave a trail of evidence about our whereabouts and whimsies whenever we open a browser.

To save our blushes, the brand-new version of Internet Explorer – IE8 – features a new InPrivate Browsing mode. When it’s activated, Internet Explorer won’t record any URLs, cookies or temporary Internet files, leaving all other users clueless about what you’ve been up to.

While some people are quick to dub InPrivate mode ‘porn mode’, Microsoft is keen to point out that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to browse in private. If you sit down at a computer in a hostel, hotel or Internet cafe then it’s not unusual to come across the browsing history, email addresses and sometimes passwords of the previous user.

It previously took a few minutes of opening up the Security options and unticking checkboxes to ensure that your information didn’t go the same way. InPrivate mode is a one-click method of doing the same thing.

Not every reason for covering your tracks is smutty, either: you hardly want your partner to know about that perfect present before they open it on their birthday, after all.

Undercover surfing

To start surfing covertly, you’re going to need either the RTM or full-release version of Internet Explorer 8. It will overwrite other versions of Internet Explorer installed on your PC, but even the RTM version is post-beta, so it shouldn’t pose a problem.

To enter InPrivate mode, just find the Safety dropdown menu on the toolbar and choose ‘InPrivate Browsing’ from the list. A new window that has a symbol for private browsing marked on the address bar in a blue tab will then open. You’ll need to use this window for InPrivate browsing. To go back to normal browsing, just return to the first window.

Blocking vs browsing

Many Internet users aren’t that bothered about hiding their browsing history from their family. There is another benefit of InPrivate mode that can still be handy for these users, however. The websites that you visit can use your data to target you with advertising.

For some this is an acceptable way for websites to make money, but for many others it’s an invasion of privacy. The system works like this. Many websites add advertising code to their site from a single domain, such as Google Analytics.

This script effectively maps your progress across the Internet. You can then be targeted with related advertising as you browse, which – at least in advertising theory – makes those adverts more appealing.

Microsoft has built a separate InPrivate function into IE8 for those worried about their privacy: InPrivate Filtering. InPrivate Filtering spots instances of this type of code appearing across web pages and blocks information being transferred to them.

However, the tool is far from perfect, and it’ll only start filtering code after 10 instances are detected, so you should be aware that some data will already have been collected by the time it takes effect.

To use InPrivate Filtering, go to the Safety button on the toolbar and choose ‘InPrivate Filtering’. Unlike InPrivate Browsing mode, you won’t get a notification that it’s running, but it will be ticked in the Safety menu. InPrivate Filtering mode also collects data on the types of sites that are tracking you and the main perpetrators.

It’s interesting to see which companies are the biggest offenders in terms of tracking your progress around the Internet, but if you don’t want to be bothered by this, you can turn it off in the Privacy tab in Internet Options. You can also opt to allow some sites to track your web activity if you have a penchant for a particular service, rather than blanket banning them all.

The perfect alibi

No matter how well InPrivate Browsing hides your browsing history, it’s no help if your loved one creeps up and catches you with a suspicious browser window open. For this occasion we can turn to Ghostfox, an inspired application that hides Firefox and can even disguise your browser as an entirely innocent application.

First of all, grab Firefox. Next, grab the Ghostfox plug-in and install it via the website. Once installed, you’ll notice a small ‘ghost face’ icon displayed in the status bar at the bottom of each of your Firefox windows. To activate Ghost mode, simply click on the icon on the status bar.

This will make all evidence of your browser disappear, including its position on the taskbar – meaning that anyone looking over your shoulder will have no idea what you’re really doing. When Firefox is in Ghost mode, you can bring the window back by dragging the mouse to the left side of the screen, then over to the right side and finally back again.

The browser will then return, although it will disappear if you move your mouse away from the window. Click the Ghost icon to bring it back permanently. Ghostfox will also skin your browser contents, masking the pages within. The masking will be by default set to privacy level three, turning all text grey on white (a hard-to-snoop combination) and removing all images.

You can switch levels by accessing the Ghostfox preferences, which are available via the Add-ons menu. You can also go one step further and hide Firefox within existing applications, solving the problem of the active tab on the taskbar.

If you have a window maximised and activate Firefox using the mouse gesture, it will be rendered in the viewing area of the application. So you can pretend you were drawing a portrait of your spouse, rather than buying her a secret gift.

Going public

While private browsing features can hide your information from those in your own home, they do nothing to protect your data from those outside. This is a big misconception, and one that you need to be aware of.

Your router and firewall will give your home PC adequate protection if properly set up, but if you use your laptop at public hotspots then you must have security tools set up on your system. Private browsing modes will give you no protection at all.

We recommend using the free app Hotspot Shield. It creates a virtual private network (VPN) that sits between your PC and the public connection to stop snoopers from gaining access to your data. What’s more, it encrypts all of your Internet-bound data and gives you a different IP address.

Using Hotspot Shield is easy. When you’re next using a public hotspot, simply double-click the icon on your desktop after connecting to the Wi-Fi network. This creates the VPN and loads a new browser window. You can then browse safe in the knowledge that your data is secure.

If you want to check that your VPN is working, load up the command prompt and type ‘ipconfig’. You should notice that your IP address matches that shown in your browser window. This means that Hotspot Shield is running correctly.

Hotspot Shield becomes active for all Internet applications once it’s running – to switch it off, right-click on the taskbar icon and choose the appropriate option.

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10 Things You Might Not Know About ID Cards

Monday, May 25th, 2009

 

The government issued a little-reported document this month on ID cards. It was quietly published when the home secretary Jacqui Smith announced that some volunteer members of the public in Greater Manchester would be the first to receive ID cards in November.

These are 10 things from the document, “Identity Cards Act Secondary Legislation - An Impact Assessment”, which might not be generally known:

1. The ID Cards Act 2006 imposes on citizens a duty to update information held on them on the National Identity Register (NIR). Cardholders can receive civil penalty fines if they fail to update information held about them on the NIR or notify the Identity and Passport Service if their card is lost or stolen. Citizens may also be in breach of legislation if they fail to notify a change of address within three months. It is open to the government to charge a fee for updating the register.
2. An individual’s entry on the NIR can be given to “government departments or other public sector organisations without the consent of the individual provided they [departments and agencies] have been approved to do so by parliament under secondary legislation”. Secondary legislation does not need any specific parliament approval. The power to enact it has already been given under primary legislation.
3. The Home Office will allow ID cardholders to check the information held on them on the NIR. “Right from the beginning, individuals will be able to obtain a copy of what is held on their record in line with subject access rights under the Data Protection Act.” Much information about individuals will not be on the register itself but brought together from various databases when needed.
4. The NIR will keep a record of which organisations have checked an individual’s record and when, though not the reason or the outcome. The NIR audit trail will show the “specific branch” of a bank which had made a check, for example. The Home Office says this is necessary to “help ensure that inappropriate checks are not made against the NIR”. The NIR audit may be given to HM Revenue & Customs and other government departments “only where it is necessary for the prevention or detection of serious crime”.
5. The NIR will not hold a vast amount of “new kinds of data”, but the document does not explain what this phrase means.
6. Private sector organisations may be given information from the NIR with the individual’s consent. Insurance companies may make a condition of taking out a policy that you give your consent.
7. The ID cards scheme has not been subjected to a formal privacy impact assessment (PIA), as set out by the information commissioner. The PIA would have set out the scheme’s potential privacy issues and risks, as perceived by all stakeholders. The Home Office says that there has been no full PIA because the decision to roll out ID cards “was taken before these developments” - that is the introduction of the PIA. However, the information commissioner says that a PIA can be undertaken after a project has started.
8. 8) The initial £30 fee for an ID card will be reviewed “before the high volume roll-out of identity cards begins in 2012″. The review will take into account the fact that the Identity and Passport Service must cover its costs. The costs of ID cards and passports have been combined so it is possible that fee rises for new and replacement passports will subsidise the cost of ID cards.
9. The document says recent research “shows that 71% of those interviewed trust the Identity and Passport Service to look after their personal information”. This suggests that nearly a third do not trust the government with their ID data or do not know whether to trust it - a sizeable minority.
10. The cost to the public sector and businesses of equipment to read ID cards, integrate systems with the NIR, or obtain information from the register is put at £7bn. The figure is not broken down and, as it is over 30 years, it is unlikely those in the current administration will be in government in 2039 to be accountable for the figure.

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Related News

• The return of the ID card debate
• Do we trust government on ID cards?
• Call to scrap ID cards plan
• No trust in keeping our data
• MoD lost 11,000 military ID cards

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Contributions & Guests . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.