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The coming of widespread 5G technology promises more than just faster everything, enhanced capacity and greater reliability. Leading proponents of the wonders of 5G, such as the theoretical physicist and author Michio Kaku, paint a picture of a true technological paradigm shift, a game-changer.

The self-described futurist invites us to imagine a lightning-fast global communications network that will fuel dramatic advancements in societys productivity and ultimately enrich and empower our lives.

Every once in a while there is this technology which changes the entire landscape, he says in a video produced by wireless network operator T-Mobile. Much like the arrival of the Gutenberg printing press in the mid-1400s triggered a Renaissance of knowledge, he explains that 5G hold the promise to bring connectedness to the rest of the world for millions of people who currently lack easy access to broadband technology.

Lets hope he is correct. Because there is also no shortage of bright minds waving red flags about potential risks to health and online security. Many are warning that 5G also holds the power to enrich and empower high-speed malicious hackers, supercharging their ability to wreak untold havoc in the global cybercrime epidemic.

One of the fundamental challenges of 5G involves balancing its far-reaching potential for human progress against the significant new security risks presented by this extraordinary technological breakthrough, said cybersecurity expert Chuck Bane, academic director for the University of San Diegos online Master of Science in Cyber Security Engineering program and retired naval officer whose experience includes collaboration on cybersecurity projects with the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA and the DoD.

Remember when 4G promised to revolutionize data-based communication across the globe? That was so 2010. The G, of course, stands for generation meaning that 5G is the next (Read more...)

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The Cybersecurity Implications of 5G Technology - Security Boulevard

May 28th 2020

WASHINGTON, DC

COVID-19 HAS been a phishermans friend. Millions of professionals are at home and online, adjusting to new routines and anxious about their jobs. That makes them perfect marks: apt to click on an email that purports to be from their boss or a supplier asking for payment. Law-enforcement officials in many countries have reported a rise in cybercrime since the pandemic started.

But according to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, not all such attacks come from gangs or individuals looking to make a quick buck. On May 13th those agencies warned that cyber-actors affiliated with China were trying to steal covid-related data and intellectual property. China is not the only worry. Russian hackers may probe for weaknesses in American electoral systems; Iranians have targeted an American drugmaker; North Koreans have gone after cryptocurrency stores.

Just as the attacks of September 11th 2001 spurred America to change its counterterrorism strategy, repeated intrusions are doing the same for its cyber-security. Yet it first has to define the problem. Terrorist attacks tend to involve carnage, a political motive and an attribution. Cyber-assaults have a range of motives, including theft (North Koreas raids on banks), digital disruption (Russias NotPetya strikes on Ukrainian and other infrastructure), sabotage (the Stuxnet attacks on Irans nuclear programme, probably by America and Israel) and political warfare (Russias interference in Americas election in 2016). Sometimes states use non-state actors to carry out cyber-attacks, much as some use terrorist proxies. Attackers may target private-sector networks in banks, hospitals or payment systems, which often appeal to the government for protection.

Defence is difficult. Potential targets are many and diffuse. Attackers identities are often obscure. They make use of vulnerabilities often unknown until exploited.

The National Defence Authorisation Act of 2019, which sets the Pentagons budget, set up a commission to rethink cyber-defence. The Cyberspace Solarium Commission, named after Project Solarium, Dwight Eisenhowers effort in 1953 to create a durable cold-war strategy, and headed by Angus King, an independent senator from Maine, and Mike Gallagher, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, had the misfortune to release its recommendations on March 11th, just before America went into lockdown. The commission made its first public presentation to lawmakers via video conference on May 13th.

Americas cyber-defence, it argues, is hobbled by jurisdictional boundaries. Intruders are nimble; Americas defence is ponderous. Responsibilities are scattered among the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA, Americas signals-intelligence agency), the Pentagons Cyber Command, the Department for Homeland Security, the Cyber-security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and others.

The commission recommends creating a national cyber-director within the White House, a co-ordinating role much like that of director of national intelligence, which emerged from the 9/11 Commissions report. It also recommends permanent congressional cyber-security committees and a beefed-up CISA. Yet the White House is cool on a new Senate-confirmed cyber-security post, and creating new congressional committees would mean convincing current ones to surrender jurisdiction.

More important than government structure, however, is working closely with the private sector. The commission recommends declaring some private servers, such as those for the energy, financial and telecoms industries, critical infrastructure. They would receive enhanced government monitoring in exchange for meeting more stringent security standards.

It also recommends building a platform, managed by CISA with help from other agencies including the NSA, where government bodies and private firms can share information about threats. The NSAs British counterpart, GCHQ, has a similar system. Some companies may be reluctant to let an agency that has engaged in widespread, warrantless surveillance monitor their security, but Mr King believes the proposal will have support from industry.

If one way to halt cyber-attacks is to parry the blows, another is to punch back. After Russian electoral intervention in 2016, American officials grew convinced that their country was seen as a soft touch because it had not done so hard enough. They dont fear us, lamented General Paul Nakasone, head of both the NSA and Cyber Command, in early 2018. The commission accordingly urges American hackers to strike back with speed and agility.

In practice, though, Americas approach has already shifted from punishment to pre-emptionnot so much striking back as striking first. In April 2018 Cyber Command and the NSA announced a strategy built around persistent engagement and defend forward. The first of these reflects the belief that competition in cyberspace is not a series of set-piece battles, but a constant digital mle. The second embodies the principle that to prevent an attack, you should go to its source. Just as our naval forces do not defend by staying in port, says General Nakasone, our forces must operate against our enemies on their virtual territory as well. In August 2018 President Donald Trump rescinded Obama-era guidance and made it easier for Cyber Command to operate beyond Pentagon networks without presidential authorisation.

The more aggressive posture was road-tested during Americas mid-term elections. Cyber Command attacked servers belonging to Russias Internet Research Agency, the company that sowed social-media discord in 2016, and sent text and email messages to Russian operatives warning them that America was tracking themthe digital equivalent of a horses head in the bed. Were now opening the aperture, broadening the areas were prepared to act in, noted John Bolton, then national security adviser, last summer.

Yet taking the fight to rivals presents challenges. The internet has no clean front lines. Attacks from enemy-held cyberspace can be routed through the networks of allies, says Max Smeets of the Centre for Security Studies in Zurich. In 2016 Cyber Command irritated Germany by wiping Islamic State propaganda on German servers without asking for permission. Mr Smeets says adversaries might route attacks via particular countries in the hope of driving wedges between America and its friends.

Another problem is that if one defends far enough forward, it can look an awful lot like attacking. America is said to have secreted malicious code deep into Russian and Iranian infrastructure networks. The practice is akin to burying arms caches behind enemy lines for use in wartime: it makes it easier to strike back if Russia, which has probed Americas own power grids, crosses a line. But the same access can be used for unprovoked attack.

An alternative is to punch back by other means. America and several like-minded allies have grown bolder in publicly attributing major cyber-attacks to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. In 2014 the Obama administration indicted five members of Chinas armed forces for hacking into American companies. The Trump administration has brought similar charges against Iranian, Russian and North Korean hackers, including a dozen officers of the GRU, Russias military-intelligence agency, who intervened in the 2016 election. Though few American officials expect that foreign hackers will turn up in the dock, legal tools are still seen as useful for several reasons.

One is shame. Most countries do not like getting caught in the act. Second, Russian intelligence officers would rather avoid a sanctions listing that would cut off shopping trips to Paris and boarding schools in Britain. Third, the forensic evidence laid out within these indictmentseven down to Google searches conducted by individual GRU officersis a powerful way for America to hint at its reach.

Exposure also helps establish norms, defining what is considered beyond the pale in cyberspace. America and its allies argue that the existing laws of war, including ideas such as proportionality and distinctions between combatants and civilians, apply in the digital world (how this squares with suspected American attacks like Stuxnet is less clear). Russia, China, Cuba and others fear that this line of thinking might legitimise American retaliation.

Double standards abound. America indicted Russian officers for hacking the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, but the NSA has itself run riot in international institutions. And practical deals have not survived contact with reality. An agreement in 2015 between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, Chinas president, to ban commercial espionage is widely deemed to have fallen apart.

These divisions play out at the United Nations, where one group of experts, favoured by America and its allies, works parallel to a larger, Russian-dominated group. What weve really seen is a kind of a fracturing of the process, says Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations. There are some interesting ideas percolating through, but they will never be formalised or centralised in any important way. So cyberspace remains a Wild West.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Policing the Wild West"

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America rethinks its strategy in the Wild West of cyberspace - The Economist

In January 2013, the documentary film-maker Laura Poitras asked Barton Gellman if he wanted to grab a coffee. The venue was New York. Poitras told Gellman a former Washington Post reporter that a few days earlier a mysterious source had been in touch with her.

The person claimed to be from the US spy community. He had news: the NSA or National Security Agency Americas foremost signals intelligence outfit had built an unprecedented surveillance machine. It was secretly hoovering up data from hundreds of millions of people. The implications were terrifying. The correspondent said he could supply documents.

This sounded promising, but how could one be sure? Over the next few months Gellman held a series of encrypted chats with this strange informant, code name Verax. Verax was sizing up Gellman for a job of historic proportions, it turned out. He was to be co-recipient of a trove of ultra-secret national security files.

Dark Mirror is Gellmans account of his interactions with Edward Snowden a series of lively exchanges, fallings out and making ups. It is a fine and deeply considered portrait of the US-dominated 21st-century surveillance state. Snowdens story has already been told in books, a film and a play. The whistleblowers own memoir Permanent Record, written from Moscow, was published in September.

Gellman has waited seven years to give his version. He has spent the time well delving into some of the more abstruse programmes from the Snowden archive, and talking to sources from the tech and security worlds. Dark Mirror doesnt alter what we have known since 2013: that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ routinely sweep up virtually all of our communications. But it does provide new and scary technical detail. The original documents published by the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed that the NSA claims backdoor access into the servers of Google and other social media companies, and grabs phone records. Privacy advocates call this spying; GCHQ disagrees. Yes, it collects our metadata in bulk. But, it adds, it doesnt examine it without proper legal cause.

Gellman argues that the NSA has gone so far as to make this distinction meaningless. The agency has constructed a live social graph of who speaks to whom. This includes not just terrorists but everybody. This database is constantly updated. And is precomputed. That means it is ready to yield up the intimacies of a persons life at the touch of a button, Gellman writes romantic, professional, political.

The dark mirror is a metaphor for the modern surveillance state: the security agencies cant be seen, we can. This massive expansion of spying capability took place in the years after 9/11. Until Snowden came along giving material to Poitras, Gellman and the then Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald citizens had no idea of the scale of this operation, or its civic implications.

The Snowden who emerges from these pages is neither a hero nor a traitor. Gellman sketches him as fine company, funny and profane with a nimble mind and eclectic interests. He can also be stubborn, self-important and a scold. Gellman sees his role as that of a curious journalist, rather than advocate. Snowden isnt a Russian asset, he concludes, but may well have damaged national security a view Snowden rejects.

The most enthralling chapters cover the race to get the story out. Gellman had left the Post in 2010 and briefly contemplated going to a different paper. There are tense meetings with Post executives and lawyers. When he tells colleagues to get rid of their mobile phones several react as if theyve been told to peel off their socks.

Publication was made fraught by the fact that Snowden had left his NSA contractor job in Hawaii and fled to Hong Kong. He invited Poitras and Gellman to join him there. After agonising, Gellman decided not to go. This was the wrong call; he writes with honesty about his fear of arrest and prosecution. In June Poitras, Greenwald and the Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill interviewed Snowden in his Hong Kong hotel room.

Gellman is frank about the pressures of taking on the Obama administration. Someone tried to hack his iPhone and laptops. He bought a safe for his New York apartment, rode the subway using burner phones. All this had a cost in terms of time, mental energy and emotional equilibrium, he writes.

Yet his paranoia was justified. Foreign intelligence services sought to get their hands on the leak. A Russian emailed to ask if Gellman might share a copy of the NSAs black budget. Gellmans colleague Ashkan Soltani received multiple approaches from hot young women via the dating service OKCupid; their profiles subsequently vanished. When Gellman visited Snowden in Moscow in late 2013, he took elaborate precautions.

For a while after the Snowden publications, Gellmans top intelligence contacts snubbed him. This hostility ended once Donald Trump became president, and declared war on his own intelligence operatives.

Dark Mirror brings down the curtain with Snowden stuck in Moscow, apparently content with his lot. He is, Gellman writes, an indoor cat, who considers his mission accomplished. There is little prospect of Snowden returning to the US, where he faces espionage charges. The most consequential whistleblower of our times does not regret his costly moment of truth-telling.

Luke Hardings Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russias Remaking of the West will be published in July by Guardian Faber. Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State is published by Bodley Head (RRP 20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman review the rise of today's surveillance state - The Guardian

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter who documented the scope of the U.S. governments surveillance on its own citizens after receiving leaked National Security Agency documents from Edward Snowden told Yahoo News that he believes the former NSA contractor will not be pardoned in his lifetime.

Barton Gellman, now a staff writer at the Atlantic, was one of three reporters Snowden first approached in 2013 with the archive of documents showing mass surveillance of American citizens by their own government. Gellmans book about Snowden,Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State,was released Tuesday. Gellman, who is sympathetic to Snowden but raises questions about some of his actions, said Snowden will not be able to return to America in his lifetime unless he comes in handcuffs.

Getting pardoned is going to be a very, very big lift for any president, Gellman told Yahoo News Skullduggery podcast. The intelligence community, the national security community, loathes Snowden and have long memories for this sort of thing, and I dont think hell be pardoned in his lifetime.

Gellman has spent significant time with Snowden since first meeting him in 2013 and said his books title reflects his own view of the U.S. governments surveillance capabilities and efforts.

Were transparent to our government, our government is opaque to us, and that creates distortions in the balance of power, he said.

Still, Gellman is clear that his book is not meant to be a full-throated defense of Snowden, who remains in Russia, where he has been since shortly after Gellman and other Washington Post reporters first revealed the NSAs illegal mass data collection efforts thanks to Snowdens disclosures.

Snowden had been a Hawaii-based NSA contractor before he made the decision to give Gellman the trove of documents. Snowden then traveled to Hong Kong before continuing on to Moscow in what he has said was a bid to make his way to Ecuador, which has historically refused to extradite criminal suspects to the U.S. After the Guardian and Gellman at the Washington Post first published their stories, Snowden then sharedhighly classifiedmaterial with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post revealing NSA targets inside China, a revelation that seemed unrelated to his professed concern about wanting to protect the privacy of American citizens.When asked to explain why Snowden chose to leak information about U.S. intelligence gathering efforts in China to the South China Morning Post, Gellman said he would not defend what Snowden did.

Story continues

I have no defense of the South China Morning Post story; Snowdens view was that he was showing that even universities and hospitals that is, not defense facilities or foreign ministers were a target, Gellman said of the disclosures to a hostile foreign government. I would not have published that story, because I dont publish stories that warn specific foreign targets of legitimateforeign adversaries that theyre being spied on.

Download or subscribe on iTunes:Skullduggery from Yahoo News

Over the years, Gellman and Snowden have debated the surveillance state and its importance, sometimes ending up on opposite sides of the debate. Gellman said Snowden intrigues him in part because of how far he was willing to go to reveal sensitive and previously unknown NSA practices such as the illegal bulk collection of phone records. Congress outlawed the practice in 2015, a step that almost definitely would not have happened without Snowdens revelations.

Why do people like Snowden do what they do? Gellman asked. Most people are going to go along and get along. ... It requires a supreme confidence in your own sense of right and wrong, which Snowden does have. And it requires a sensibility that cant tolerate inaction.

Gellman said that despite speculation by others that Snowden is aRussian spy, he just doesnt believe it based on his experiences with the whistleblower. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Snowden reached out to Russian diplomats based in Hong Kong during the two weeks he spent there before the story broke, but Gellman said he spent significant time investigating Snowdens relationship with Russia and has concluded that Snowden is not a Russian asset.

Gellman pointed to the fact that Snowden ended up in Moscow when his passport was revoked en route to Cuba and then Ecuador Gellman said he has seen Snowdens plane ticket, which showed a final destination in Ecuador. And Snowden urged him not to bring any of the documents he shared with him on a trip to Russia, hardly a warning one would expect from a Russian intelligence operative hoping to access as much material as possible. As for what Putin said, Gellman concludes the Russian president may have wanted to leave a false trail or to poke the Americans.

Whatever Snowdens historical relationship with the Russian government, it is evident that Putin sees tremendous value in having Snowden remain in Moscow, where U.S. authorities cant touch him. Gellman said he believes Putin enjoys his role as international human rights defender protecting a whistleblower like Snowden. Even Snowden realizes he is a prize for Putin and is open about it, Gellman said.

Snowden has also acknowledged to me, and I thought it was very interesting, that Putin has reason to protect him, because although he is not in fact a Russian agent, he might look that way to other people and Putin does not want to discourage walk-ins by foreign intelligence officers of other countries, Gellman said. If he sent Snowden back, that would make people wary ... so Snowden says, Even though I am not a spy, he is treating me as though I were so that he doesnt blow chances with somebody else.

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Edward Snowden will not be pardoned in his lifetime, says author of new book on the NSA whistleblower - Yahoo News

The coronavirus may infect NSA whistleblower Reality Winner while she is incarcerated at a womens prison hospital. She has a history of respiratory illness that makes her exceptionally vulnerable. Yet, the United States government contends they have no record of Winner ever submitting a request for relief. Prosecutors further suggesteven if the warden for Federal Medical Center Carswell received a request for release from Winnerthat she did not follow the appropriate process so her appeal should be denied.

Winner pled guilty in 2018 to one count of violating the Espionage Act when she disclosed an NSA report to The Intercept. She believed the report contained evidence that Russian hackers targeted United States voter registration systems during the 2016 election.

She has served more than half of her 63-month sentence, and her attorneys urged a federal court to release her to home confinement to serve the remaining 19 months of her sentence.

But Judge Randal Hall sided with the Justice Department on April 24 and contended the medical prison, where Winner is incarcerated, is presumably better equipped than most to deal with any onset of COVID-19 in its inmates.

Hall refused to grant Winner a hearing to present specific evidence on the risks posed to her health by the coronavirus. In response to the U.S. government, Winners attorneys said [PDF] prosecutors presented no grounds to deny Winners request to treat her motion for compassionate release as the life-and-death matter it (and COVID-19) really is. Winners request for compassionate release presents compelling and extraordinary reasons to justify the relief she seeks, they added. Her good luck thus far is the only thing that separates her from the thousands of inmates in the Bureau of Prisons custody who have contracted COVID-19 on BOPs watch.Her attorneys point out 57 people in BOP custody died and paid the ultimate price for BOPs egregious mishandling. The manner in which the government is bureaucratically seeking to thwart Winners appeal does not bode well for prisoners seeking to invoke the First Step Act to win compassionate release. Prosecutors claim [PDF], Winner alleged, without documentary support, that on April 8, 2020, she submitted a written request to the warden of FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, asking that he petition the Bureau of Prisons for a reduction of her sentence. [Note: Part of this is quoted from Winners appeal, but the government didnt include an end quote.]The government insists it inquired, and the BOP never received any request. Only in her reply brief did Winner attempt to provide evidence showing she actually submitted a request. None of the documents though were Winners actual request or detailed what the basis of the request was. This is important because the date, as well as the content, of the request determines whether the defendant has appropriately exhausted her administrative remedies prior to filing in district court, the government added.As of May 1, according to BOP, seventy percent of the prisoners, who correctional staff choose to test, have tested positive for the coronavirus. Reuters special report, Death Sentence, which documented the hidden coronavirus toll in U.S. jails and prisons, called attention to figures compiled by the U.S. government, which appear to undercount the number of infections dramatically in correctional settings. Still, the government presses on. Because Winner did not include among her reply briefs exhibits a copy of her request to BOP, neither the district court nor this court can ascertain if she (as many inmates do) asked to be placed on home confinement rather than to be compassionately released. To this argument, Winners attorneys note they had Alison Grinter, one of Winners Texas-based attorneys, submit a statement to the appeals court under penalty of perjury that she helped Winner file a request not once, but twice. Realitys BOP correctional counselor Bill Pendergraft provided Reality with the form as emailed to him by Ms. Grinter, and BOP staff-member Mary Gruszka assured Reality that she would hand-deliver the completed form to the warden.

Finally (nearly a month later and after necessitating an appeal), the government acknowledges what Reality knew all alongthat BOP received the request(s) at least as of April 20, 2020. But the government claims it was not reviewed as a request for compassionate release. This is astounding given that the written request cited to the applicable compassionate release statute, Winners attorneys declare.If the BOP is not aware that Reality is seeking compassionate release under the First Step Act, members of the press have had no trouble following along, and the district court, Reality, and the government have all briefed the issue under the compassionate release statute.

The governments response fits in with a culture at the Justice Department under Attorney General Bill Barr, which has resulted in the release of only 1.8 percent of people in BOP custody during the pandemic. On May 26, ProPublica reported the Bureau of Prisons has a secret policy that made it harder for prisoners to qualify for release. A federal judge accused officials at the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Ohio the site of a deadly coronavirus outbreak cited by Barr in his order of moving too slowly to release inmates and thumbing their noses' at a directive Barr issued on releasing prisoners into home confinement. The judge instructed the government to expand the class of inmates eligible for home confinement by including inmates not only with minimum-risk scores, but also those said to have a low risk.The same day the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request from the Justice Department to halt the lower courts order. There are 837 medically vulnerable inmates potentially eligible for transfer.Aside from the game being played by the BOP and prosecutors, Winners attorneys suggest one of the reasons the government is able to shiftily claim they never received a request is because the district court did not hold a hearing on evidence relevant to the case. The court could have heard from stakeholders at BOP and FMC Carswell about the BOP response generally and specifically at FMC Carswell, her attorneys assert. Winners legal team could have introduced via subpoenaed documents or testimony Realitys more recent medical records, which are (of course) in the possession, custody, and control of the government. All of this is critical evidence the district court needed in order to actually, appropriately, and effectively exercise its discretion. Unfortunately, Judge Randal Hall was largely uninterested in exercising discretion and deferred to the arguments of prosecutors. He did not verify statements prosecutors made about the BOPs coronavirus response. Billie Winner-Davis, who is Realitys mother, remains deeply concerned about the irreparable damage that is being done to her daughters mental state.

I have heard my daughter tell me, Mom, I am not okay, and as her mother, this tears me apart.

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DOJ Tries To Thwart Reality Winner's Appeal For Release From Prison - Shadowproof