Tag Archive for: Edward Snowden

Cyber wrap

F-35A Lightning IIThe 2007 theft of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plans was this week officially linked to  China by German newspaper Der Spiegel. The classified US document, given to the paper by Edward Snowden, detailed the loss of ‘many terabytes of data’ relating to the development of the fifth-generation fighter. That China was behind the attack was one of the US Defense community’s more poorly kept secrets. But the release of the information is interesting given Edward Snowden’s previous reluctance to disclose information implicating countries such as China or Russia in online espionage.

China has claimed that it wasn’t behind the 2007 attacks, questioning the findings in the Snowden document, and reminding us that attribution is quite difficult due to the ‘complex nature’ of cyber-attacks.

The US and the UK recently announced a joint taskforce aimed at countering online threats. The ‘joint cell’—co-locating experts from GCHQ, MI5, the NSA and FBI across both countries—will facilitate the real-time sharing of threat data. The taskforce is also set to carry out cyber wargaming later in the year with scenarios built around attacks on the financial sector. Read more

What Indonesia and Australia share

Democracy in action

Indonesia can direct Australia’s regional dreams or dominate its nightmares. Just as Papua New Guinea shapes the way Australia thinks about the South Pacific, Indonesia frames Australia’s view of Southeast Asia.

In those key regional relationships, Australia’s strategists, diplomats and journos get plenty of mileage from the nightmares. Yet often things work out better than feared. The sun breaks through and the politicians can follow the natural inclination of the business types to gaze on the bright side.

Jokowi’s election is a fine moment to turn from the dark side to contemplate the dreams. As Natalie Sambhi argued, a Jokowin is a win for Australia. For all the nightmares Australia has had, this is another moment of great good fortune. Read more

ASPI suggests

A Staff Sergeant with the Royal Army Medical Corps, currently serving with the Afghan Female Engagement Team attached to 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment, talks to local civilians.

It was a big week for Defence with the Federal Budget handing down, on balance, a win for the portfolio. Check out Mark Thomson’s preliminary analysis of this year’s figures here. His always hotly anticipated Cost of Defence will be out on 29 May. For more on defence spending, see Peter Dean and Andrew Carr’s Centre of Gravity paper on why 2% of GDP isn’t the right formula for defence spending.

For watchers of the US defense spending, looming budget problems have once again been swept under the rug by the Congressional Armed Services Committee. In order to protect funding for future weapon systems, the US Air Force wanted to retire the U-2 and A-10 aircraft, while the US Navy wanted to mothball 11 surface combatants. But Congress was having none of it—which potentially makes the problem worse in coming years. Read more

Cyber wrap

‘Catastrophic is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11’, says Bruce Schneier of the Heartbleed bug that emerged since our last cyberwrap. Heartbleed has been revealed as a flaw in the OpenSSL code that, under normal conditions, encrypts and protects Internet traffic, like usernames, passwords, digital certificates, cookies and credit card numbers. The faulty code has been in place since March 2012 and affects a huge swathe of the Internet including big names like Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, Dropbox and Twitter. The bottom line seems to be change your passwords now and then again once the websites you use have patched the flaw. Mashable have put together a list of popular sites where password changes might be necessary. You can do your own searches here.

While Heartbleed has been kicking around for over two years, the fallout is as yet —and could remain— unknown. Aside from spurring fear and a flurry of password changes, the discovery shines a light on areas of the web that aren’t usually given much thought. OpenSSL code isn’t maintained by an esoteric tech business in Silicon Valley, but rather, by a handful of volunteers scattered across the globe. Recriminations have started as to the Australian government’s response to Heartbleed, with fingerpointing directed at the Attorney General’s Department for not equipping CERT Australia with a solid public response. Read more

Cyber wrap

Let’s kick things off at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, which brings together information security professionals and business leaders to discuss emerging cybersecurity trends. This year’s conference has drawn criticism from leading security experts as RSA Security—the network security company that manages the conference— has been accused of taking money from the National Security Agency to incorporate a flawed encryption algorithm into one of its security products.

As with many of today’s cyber conversations, the Snowden disclosures shaped the agenda at the EU-Brazil summit this week in Brussels. First up was the announcement of a new underwater communications cable to run between Portugal and Brazil. The €134 million project seeks to reduce reliance on US cables in order to insulate against American surveillance efforts. (Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has been less-than-successful in building her country’s cyber fortifications since it was revealed the NSA had been keeping tabs on her and her allies). Also out of the EU-Brazil summit is news of the grouping’s plan to hold a dialogue on international cyber policy. The first dialogue is set to occur on the sidelines of April’s Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (or NETmundial) in Sao Paulo. The US State Department has recently released their submission to conference organisers. Read more

Intelligence: actions and their meanings

Spy

In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke relates an incident when in 1993 he was attempting to persuade President Clinton to ‘snatch’ a terrorist (a practice nowadays known better by its more formal tag of ‘extraordinary rendition’). His proposal was encountering opposition from the White House Counsel, who argued that such a course of action would be a violation of international law. Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting and, upon hearing Clinton’s quick summary of the two sides of the argument observed, ‘That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.’

The message behind Clarke’s anecdote is that you should judge the merit of a government’s actions in large part by the policy that lies behind them, not by the acts themselves. In recent months, there has been considerable media discussion on the subject of intelligence, largely because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden’s protracted leaks, the ensuing debate about proper intelligence practices, and President Obama’s selective reforms. Since it’s unlikely we’ve seen the end of Snowden’s leaks, in this post I want to say a few basic things about intelligence and why it matters. No secrets will be revealed. But I think it’s important to put some context around the core issues.

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