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Over a 24-hour period, top U.S. cyber defenders engaged in a pitched battle with Russian hackers who had breached the unclassified State Department computer system and displayed an unprecedented level of aggression that experts warn is likely to be turned against the private sector.

Whenever National Security Agency hackers cut the attackers' link between their command and control server and the malware in the U.S. system, the Russians set up a new one, current and former U.S. officials said.

The new details about the November 2014 incident emerged recently in the wake of a senior NSA official's warning that the heightened aggression has security implications for firms and organizations unable to fight back.

"It was hand-to-hand combat," said NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett, who described the incident at a recent cyber forum, but did not name the nation behind it. The culprit was identified by other current and former officials. Ledgett said the attackers' thrust-and-parry moves inside the network while defenders were trying to kick them out amounted to "a new level of interaction between a cyber attacker and a defender."

But Russia is not the only top-tier cyber power flexing its muscles in this way, said other current and former senior officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

In recent years, China and to a lesser extent Iran have become more aggressive in their efforts to break into U.S. computer systems, giving fight to defenders from within the network and refusing to slink away when identified, the current and former officials said.

Ledgett, speaking at the Aspen Institute last month, placed the State Department incident in late 2015. But officials at the NSA, which defends the government's national security computer systems, clarified that it took place in 2014.

Fortunately, Ledgett said, the NSA, whose hackers penetrate foreign adversaries' systems to glean intelligence, was able to spy on the attackers' tools and tactics. "So we were able to see them teeing up new things to do," Ledgett said. "That's a really useful capability to have."

The State Department had to shut down its unclassified email system for a weekend, ostensibly for maintenance purposes. That was a "cover story," to avoid tipping off the Russians that the government was about to try to kick them out, said one former U.S. official.

The NSA defenders, aided by the FBI, prevailed over the intruders, who were working for a Russian spy agency. Private sector analysts have given the hacking group various names, including Cozy Bear, APT29 and The Dukes. That group also compromised unclassified systems at the White House and in Congress, current and former officials said.

The NSA was alerted to the compromises by a Western intelligence agency. The ally had managed to hack not only the Russians' computers, but also the surveillance cameras inside their workspace, according to the former officials. They monitored the hackers as they maneuvered inside the U.S. systems and as they walked in and out of the workspace, and were able to see faces, the officials said.

The Russians' heightened belligerence is aimed not just at collecting intelligence, but also confronting the United States, said one former senior administration official. "They're sending a message that we have capabilities and that you are not the only player in town," said the official.

The operation was also an attempt to probe U.S. capabilities, said a second former senior official. "If they can test you in an unclassified network, they can start to test you in a classified network," he said. "They want to see, is the U.S. government willing to escalate against us? It's all tactics and looking at responses - not just of an organization. It's what is the U.S. government willing to do?"

Ledgett said he is concerned that the private sector will not be able to defend itself without greater intelligence being shared from places like the NSA. "We need to figure out, how do we leverage the private sector in a way that equips them with information that we have to make that a fair fight between them and the attacker?" he said.

Michael Daniel, the former White House cybersecurity coordinator and now president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit group, said the issue also highlights how the government and private sector "are going to have to figure out some way to do triage, so that the federal government is focused on the highest threat actors against the highest threat assets."

Moscow's assertiveness in 2014 and 2015 reflected a general shift to become more aggressive in its use of cyber tools. In 2015 and 2016, Russian spy agencies hacked the Democratic National Committee's computers and launched an "active measures" campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

China was also stepping up its hacking game in traditional espionage even as it was ratcheting back its operations in commercial cyber theft, the officials said. In September 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged at the White House that his government's hackers would not conduct hacking for commercial advantage. Senior U.S. officials have said Beijing appears to have diminished its activity in that realm.

However, as Ledgett noted in an interview at the NSA last month, the agreement applied only to cyber economic espionage. Hacking for political espionage continues. That is "legitimate foreign intelligence," said Ledgett - something that all countries do, including the United States.

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Details emerge about 2014 Russian hack of State Department: It was 'hand-to-hand combat' - Chicago Tribune

By Lonnie Brown Ledger correspondent

You might have noticed that my email address appears each week at the end of this computer column. I have been an AOL user even before there was an America Online: I was a subscriber of Quantum Link, an Internet provider formed in 1985 specifically for Commodore 64 computers. Thirty years ago, Commodore was the top-selling computer in America, and it's what I used to write the computer column back in those days.

Quantum Link grew, and in 1991 changed its name to America Online and gave the Quantum Link users a lifetime membership in the newly named company.

I stuck with AOL all those years. It was easy to use then, and still is. At one point, that free membership was worth $20 a month, when computer users who wanted to get online had to "dial up" a phone number and connect with AOL.

Today, there are still dial-up customers left in mostly remote areas of the country, but the majority use their telephone or cable company to get online. If that's the method you use, AOL has a free "bring your own Internet connection" that allows non-AOL members to use AOL services, including reading their AOL emails.

Once again, AOL is about to change its business model. If you use AOL software to access your email, or use its chat rooms or other features, that software will cease to work on April 7.

To use AOL after that date, you'll need to download the new AOL Desktop Gold and subscribe to the service for $4 a month.

What about email? Desktop Gold will have it, of course. But even if you don't subscribe to the new service, emails will still be available from the AOL website: http://www.aol.com. Just click on "Mail" and use your screen name and password to sign in. You will not lose your AOL screen name if you don't advance to Desktop Gold.

Speaking of screen names: Each primary account user can have six other screen names under his or her primary account. With AOL Desktop Gold, "Each account can have seven screen names," said Natalie Azzoli, AOL's communications director. "Nothing has changed."

If those users want to continue under a primary account, they will need to download Desktop Gold and also obtain the primary user's confirmation email to activate the Desktop Gold connection.

So what does the less-than-$1-a-week fee get you?

"What we will provide as a value service is that if you ever have questions or need support with AOL Desktop Gold, live AOL experts are available to help by phone or chat messages 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Azzoli. "You can get assistance with anything from installation to toolbar customization, desktop connectivity and more, right when you need it. We believe this will be helpful to our users."

I know there are readers out there whose parents use AOL. And those readers are thinking: "Oh thank goodness. If they sign up, they can call AOL instead of calling me." As one offspring wrote on a message board recently: "I would like to have them stop using AOL but they're in their 80s, they have used the service for 25 years, and it's not going to happen."

So when those parents call up, keep the AOL help-line number handy.

Desktop Gold users won't get it immediately, but Azzoli said that "anti-phishing and anti-keylogging are currently on the roadmap to be part of Desktop Gold in the near future." And the current chat rooms on AOL's older desktop versions won't be immediately available, but will be added to Desktop Gold within the next several weeks.

AOL Desktop Gold will automatically update itself with new versions, and updates will be installed faster. It will keep the look and feel of current AOL desktop versions.

Also new is a two-step verification feature that should make accounts much harder to hack. "Plus, added encryption makes the personal information youve stored in AOL Desktop unreadable to anyone attempting to steal it," Azzoli noted.

There is a 30-day free trial for the software, but you'll have to notify AOL when the end of the trial date approaches or you will continue to be billed for it. The new desktop will automatically transfer usernames, passwords, icons, mail, contacts and mailing lists from the old desktop.

To learn more, visit this AOL website for questions and answers: http://www.tinyurl.com/AOLDesktopGold.

Contact Lonnie Brown at ledgerdatabase@aol.com.

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Gadget Daddy: If you use AOL, free software is going away - News ... - News Chief

Good policymaking requires an evenhanded approach. The proposed changes to the Stand Your Ground Law that recently passed the Florida Senate are anything but evenhanded.

The bill pushes back on a majority decision by the court that ruled that individuals who claim self-defense under the Stand Your Ground statute must prove in a pretrial immunity hearing that they met deadly force with deadly force in fear for their lives.

Under the bill, the burden of proof shifts to the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual is not entitled to claim stand your ground immunity.

While beyond a reasonable doubt sounds like what prosecutors ordinarily should do, consider that in the hearing that they must prove what someone is not entitled to.

Likely the victim is no longer living and the witness list is either grossly short or non-existent.

Further, a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that even the law as it currently exists is associated with a spike of over 30 percent in Floridas firearm-related homicide rate since its passage in 2005. This is despite a national decline in homicides since the early 1990s.

Another study, conducted by the Tampa Bay Times, found that one-third of defendants initiated the confrontation, shot or pursued an unarmed victim and went free.

Given what we know, and what the court apparently understands, the political badminton on this issue should stop and the scales should not be pushed away from fairness and justice.

Valuing the life of individuals should reign over a need to play whos boss, and the court should be able to operate in its appropriate space.

The Senate bill now waits as the House companion, I hope, goes through enough committees to give it proper vetting with more opportunity for public testimony that exposes the fatal flaw of victims never getting their side of the story told because they are no longer able to talk.

And people are able to walk away from a potential murder scene.

State Sen. Audrey Gibson,

Jacksonville

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Tuesday's Lead Letter: Change to Stand Your Ground Law is ... - Florida Times-Union

As the only independent, state-based gun violence prevention organization in Minnesota, Protect Minnesota strongly opposes the passage of Stand Your Ground legislation.

This bill is unnecessary. Minnesota law allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense from grievous bodily harm or death. There is nothing confusing about it: Minnesotans can already use deadly force in self-defense. However, current law establishes an objective standard: the shooter is required to prove the shooting was justified.

This bill removes the obligation to retreat in all situations and gives the presumption of innocence to the shooter, setting a completely subjective standard. All the shooter must do to justify killing another human being is claim that he felt threatened, whether or not the threat was real.

The bill also authorizes use of deadly force when responding to any attempted felony on private property -- in effect establishing the death sentence for attempting to steal a high-end bike out of a garage.

This bill would not make Minnesota safer. Minnesota's gun death rate is 6.6 per 100,000 people. The average gun death rate in the 24 states with Stand Your Ground laws is 14.3 per 100,000 more than twice Minnesota's rate, according to the Kaiser Foundation. A study of states that have enacted such laws showed no evidence of crime deterrence -- rates of burglary, robbery, and aggravated assault have not been affected. On the other hand, homicides in those states have increased by around 8 percent, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

This bill would put Minnesotans at risk. The implementation of Florida's Stand Your Ground law was associated with a 24.4 percent increase in homicide and a 31.6 percent increase in firearm-related homicide, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. On average, Stand Your Ground states have experienced a 53 percent increase in homicides deemed legally "justifiable" in the years following passage of the law, compared to a 5 percent decrease in states without the laws, according to the National Urban League.

Stand Your Ground represents a particular threat to people of color and immigrants, who are often met with suspicion by Minnesotans. If it passes, almost any shooting could be justified because the shooter "felt threatened," even if the "threat" was a hoodie or a hijab. Racial bias and inconsistency in the implementation of these laws is a widespread phenomenon. In Stand Your Ground states, white killers are 354 percent more likely to be found innocent if the victim is black than if the victim is white, according to FBI data cited by the PBS news program "Frontline."

This bill also puts anyone whose behavior is unusual at risk, such as those who suffer from mental illness or autism. Although the gun lobby would like us to believe that the mentally ill are the primary perpetrators of gun violence, in actuality they much more likely to be victims. Their behavior can seem "scary" and this bill gives Minnesotans the right to shoot "scary" people.

The same is true for home health care workers, meter readers, pizza deliverers, repair people, census takers, and kids whose Frisbee ends up in a neighbor's garden -- anyone who has to cross a property line or knock on a stranger's front door would be put at risk if someone in the home felt "threatened" by their presence.

To sum up, Stand Your Ground is unnecessary, won't make Minnesota safer, and will put Minnesotans at risk. This "shoot on sight" legislation does not align with Minnesota Nice nor Minnesota values. We urge state law makers to keep House File 239 from moving forward.

The Rev. Nancy Nord Bence is executive director of

, which is based in St. Paul.

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Bence: Stand Your Ground law makes no one safer - Post-Bulletin

Gun-control advocates often argue that gun-control laws must be more restrictive than the original meaning of the Second Amendment would allow, because modern firearms are so different from the firearms of the late 18th century. This argument is based on ignorance of the history of firearms. It is true that in 1791 the most common firearms were handguns or long guns that had to be reloaded after every shot. But it is not true that repeating arms, which can fire multiple times without reloading, were unimagined in 1791. To the contrary, repeating arms long predate the 1606 founding of the first English colony in America. As of 1791, repeating arms were available but expensive.

This article explains why the price of repeating arms declined so steeply. Then it describes some of the repeating arms that were already in use when the Second Amendment was ratified, including the 22-shot rifle that was later carried on the Lewis andClark expedition.

One of the men to credit for why repeating arms became much less expensive during the 19th century is James Madison, author of the Second Amendment. During Madisons presidency (1809-17), Secretary of War James Monroe (who would succeed Madison as president), successfully promoted legislation to foster the development of firearms technology. In particular, the federal armories at Springfield, Mass., and Harpers Ferry, Va., were ordered to invent the means of producing firearms with interchangeable parts.

To function reliably, repeating firearms must have internal components that fit together very precisely much more precisely than is necessary for single-shot firearms. Before President Madison and Secretary Monroe started the manufacturing revolution, firearms were built one at a time by craftsmen. Making a repeating arm required much more time and expertise than making a single-shot firearm.Howto make repeating arms was well-known, but making them at a labor cost the average person could afford was impossible.

Thanks to the technology innovation labs created at Springfield and Harpers Ferry, inventors found ways to manufacture firearms components at a higher rate, and with more consistency for each part. Instead of every part being made by hand, parts were manufactured with machine tools (tools that make other tools). For example, the wooden stocks for rifles could be repetitively manufactured with such precision that any stock from a factory would fit any rifle from the factory, with no need for craftsmen to shave or adjust the stock.

In New England, the Springfield Armory worked with emerging machinists for other consumer products; the exchange of information in this technology network led directly to the Connecticut River Valley becoming a center of American consumer firearms manufacture, and to rapid improvements in the manufacture of many other consumer durables. The story is told in: Ross Thomson, Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States 1790-1865 (2009);Alexander Rose, American Rifle: A Biography (2008); David R. Meyer, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America (2006); David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (1985); Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (1977);Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Economic Development of the Small Arms Industry, 1798-1870 (1948). By the 1830s, manufacturing uniformity was sufficiently advanced that repeating arms were becoming widely affordable, and no longer just for the wealthy.

What kind of repeating arms were available before1815, when the Madison-Monroe mass production innovation program began? The state of the art was theGirandoni air rifle, invented around 1779 for Austrian army sharpshooters. Lewis and Clark would carry a Girandoni on their famous expedition, during the Jefferson administration. The Girandoni could shoot 21 or 22 bullets in .46 or .49 caliber without reloading. Ballistically equal to a firearm, a single shot from the Girandoni could penetrate a one-inch wood plank, or take an elk. (For more on the Girandoni, see my article The History of Firearms Magazines and Magazine Prohibitions, 88 Albany L. Rev. 849, 852-53 (2015).)

The first repeaters had been invented about three centuries before. The earliest-known model is a German breech-loading matchlock arquebus from around 1490-1530 with a 10-shot revolving cylinder.M.L. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology, 1492-1792, 50 (1980). Henry VIII had a long gun that used a revolving cylinder (a revolver) for multiple shots.W.W. Greener, The Gun and Its Development, 81-82 (9th ed. 1910). A 16-round wheel lock dates from about 1580.Kopel, at 852.

Production of repeaters continued in the seventeenth century. Brown, at 105-6 (four-barreled wheel-lock pistol could fire 15 shots in a few seconds); John Nigel George, English Guns and Rifles, 55-58 (1947) (English breech-loading lever-action repeater, and a revolver, made no later than the British Civil War, and perhaps earlier, by an English gun maker).

The first repeaters to be built in large quantities appear to be the 1646 Danish flintlocks that used a pair of tubular magazines, and could fire 30 shots without reloading. Like a modern lever-action rifle, the next shot was made ready by a simple two-step motion of the trigger guard. These guns were produced for the Danish and Dutch armies. Brown, at 106-7.

In Colonial America, repeating arms wereavailable for people who could afford them, or who were skilled enough to make their own. For example, in September 1722, John Pim of Boston entertained some Indians by demonstrating a firearm he had made. Although loaded but once, it was discharged eleven times following, with bullets in the space of two minutes each which went through a double door at fifty yards distance. Samuel Niles, A Summary Historical Narrative of the Wars in New England, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 4th ser., vol. 5, 347 (1837). Pims gun may have been a type of the repeating flintlock that became popular in England from the third quarter of the 17th century, and was manufactured in Massachusetts starting in the early eighteenth. Harold L. Peterson, Arms and Armor in Colonial America 1526-1783, 215-17(Dover reprint 2000) (Smithsonian Institution 1956). Another repeating flintlock, invented by Philadelphias Joseph Belton, could fire eight shots in three seconds. Idem,217. Pim also owned a .52 caliber six-shot flintlock revolver, similar to the revolvers that had been made in England since the turn of the century. Brown, 255.A variety of multi-shot pistols from the late eighteenth century have been preserved, holding two to four rounds. Charles Winthrop Sawyer, Firearms in American History: 1600 to 1800, 194-98, 215-16 (1910).

The repeaters described above werenotthe most common arms. It would take two decades for the program begun by President Madison to result in repeating arms beginning to become affordable to the middle class. So in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a person who could not afford an expensive repeater, but who wanted to be able to fire more than one bullet without reloading, would often buy ablunderbuss. The blunderbuss was the size of a very large handgun. Its muzzle flared outward slightly, like a bell. This made it easier to load while bouncing in a stagecoach, or on a swaying ship. The blunderbuss could fire either one large projectile, or several at once. Most often it was loaded with about 20 large pellets, and so it was devastating at short range. The name seems an adaptation of the Dutch donder-buse or thunder gun.

Excellent for self-defense at close quarters, the blunderbuss was of little use for anything else, having an effective range of about 20 yards. Militarily, it was used by sailors to repel boarders. Stagecoach guards and travelers carried blunderbusses, and it was also a common arm for home defense.For more on the blunderbuss, see Brown and George, above.

No one would dispute that modern arms are much improved from 1791 in terms of reliability, accuracy, range and affordability. But the gap from the 22-shot Girandoni (powerful enough to take an elk) to a modern firearm is pretty small compared withthe changes in technology of the press. Compared to the one-sheet-at-a-time printing presses of 1791, the steam and rotary presses invented in the 19th century made printing vastly faster a speed improvement that dwarfs the speed improvement in firearms in the last 500 years. When the First Amendment was written, a skilled printer could produce 250 sheets in two hours. Today, a modern newspaper printing press can produce 70,000 copies of a newspaper (consisting of dozens of sheets) in an hour. Now, with digital publishing, a newspaper article can be read globally within minutes after it is written.

This means that irresponsible media can cause far more harm today than they could in 1791. For example, in 2005, Newsweek magazine published a false story claiming that American personnel at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated Korans belonging to prisoners there. Eventually, Newsweek retracted the story. But the phony story had already spread worldwide, setting off riots in six countries, in which over 30 people were killed.Had Newsweek been using 18th-century printing presses, the false story would have mostly been read by several thousand people in the New York City area, where Newsweek is based. It would been months if ever before the Newsweek issue with the false story was read by anyone in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

We do not limit any constitutional right to the technology that existed in 1791. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the court observed:

Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, e.g., Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U. S. 844, 849 (1997), and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, e.g., Kyllo v. United States, 533 U. S. 27, 35-36 (2001), the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.

This is an accurate statement of constitutional law, but it understates how truly frivolous the argument against modern firearms is. The people who ratified the Bill of Rights certainly didnot anticipate the invention centuries later of the Internet or of thermal imaging sensors. The American people of 1791 did not have to anticipate the invention of repeating arms, because such arms had been in existence for centuries.

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Firearms technology and the original meaning of the Second Amendment - Washington Post