Freedomshift

Now that the government has taken over the internet in order to treat it like a water company, we find within the 400 pages of regulations some gems such as this:    Low-income consumers may be set to have essentially free, taxpayer-subsidized Internet service, similar to the notorious Obamaphone, following the federal government’s takeover of the web. All three democrat members of the Federal Communications Commission have openly announced intentions to provide broadband Internet subsidies for the poor through the government’s Lifeline Assistance Program, started under President Ronald Reagan more than 30 years ago. Lifeline, originally intended to help the poor attain landline phones, eventually morphed with the times to provide prepaid wireless service (Obamaphones) and now seems destined for Internet reform. “I have… been vocal about my call to modernize the Lifeline program, which has been stuck in an MC Hammer, parachute-pants time warp since ...

If the FBI’s revelations on Wednesday about the sloppiness of North Korea’s hackers was meant to silence critics who doubt the government’s attribution for what happened to Sony, it failed. Despite assertions from FBI Director James Comey that he has very high confidence in the attribution to North Korea and a statement by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that North Korean General Kim Youn Choi was directly responsible for ordering the attack , security experts still doubt the veracity of the claims based on the evidence provided so far. Read more: here

FBI agents investigating the Sony Pictures hack were briefed Monday by a security firm that says its research points to laid-off Sony staff, not North Korea, as the perpetrator — another example of the continuing whodunit blame game around the devastating attack. Even the unprecedented decision to release details of an ongoing FBI investigation and President Barack Obama publicly blaming the hermit authoritarian regime hasn’t quieted a chorus of well-qualified skeptics who say the evidence just doesn’t add up. Researchers from the cyber intelligence company Norse have said their own investigation into the data on the Sony attack doesn’t point to North Korea at all and instead indicates some combination of a disgruntled employee and hackers for piracy groups is at fault. Read more: here

North Korea is  continuing to deny any involvement with the devastating cyber attack on Sony Pictures. But the entire affair just got even stranger: foreign ministry officials have announced through the government's state-run news agency that "we propose a joint investigation with [the US] into this incident." The government then warned that there will be "grave consequences" if the US continues its "groundless slander" of North Korea and rejects its proposal of a joint investigation. Officials also added, "Without resorting to such tortures as were used by the CIA, we have means to prove that this incident has nothing to do with us." Read more: here

After weeks of rumors and speculation, it looked like the mystery surrounding the hackers who hit and embarassed Sony Pictures in the last few weeks may have finally been solved: North Korea did it, according to anonymous U.S. officials quoted in various news reports on Wednesday. "We have found linkage to the North Korean government," said one of the anonymous sources. See also: Sony ends 'The Interview' and hands hackers a terrifying new script But despite government officials pointing the finger at North Korea — behind the comfort and safety of anonymous quotes — there is still little evidence linking the Sony hackers to the regime led by Kim Jong-un, and cybersecurity experts are just as unconvinced of this theory as they were more than two weeks ago .  Read more: here

Even after the Federal Bureau of Investigation 's official statement that North Korea was behind the Sony attack, many cybersecurity experts are still skeptical the hermit nation is truly the culprit, citing a lack of new and more convincing evidence. “It’s mostly a repeat of information that has been in the public before,” Rob Graham, chief executive officer of research firm Errata Security, said of the FBI's statement issued Friday. Many prominent names in the field, Graham and others, took to Twitter to express their concern. "I'm completely underwhelmed by the FBI's 'proof' attributing Sony attack to North Korea," Graham tweeted from his @ErrataRob account.  Read more: here

Today Sony canceled the premiere of “The Interview” and its entire Christmas-Day release of the movie because of fears that terrorists might attack theaters showing the film. The actions show just how much power the attackers behind the Sony hack have amassed in a short time. But who exactly are they? 1 The New York Times reported this evening that North Korea is “centrally involved” in the hack, citing unnamed U.S. intelligence officials. It’s unclear from the Times report what “centrally involved” means and whether the intelligence officials are saying the hackers were state-sponsored or actually agents of the state. The Times also notes that “It is not clear how the United States came to its determination that the North Korean regime played a central role in the Sony attacks.” The public evidence pointing at the Hermit Kingdom is flimsy. Other theories of attribution focus on hacktivists—motivated by ideology, politics or something else—or disgruntled insiders who ...

A new study released by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute finds that new technology development that has been encouraged through the use of federal grants has served to threaten children’s privacy by allowing the collection of data on every child. Authors of the study Emmett McGroarty, Joy Pullmann, and Jane Robbins make the case that by means of the nationalized Common Core standards, which states were lured into adopting through competitive grants in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) stimulus program in 2009, the federal government has used grant funds to induce states to build identical, increasingly sophisticated student data systems. McGroarty, executive director of the Education Project at the American Principles Project (APP), said the study, entitled “ Cogs in the Machine: Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing ,” exposes “an idea that dates back to the Progressive era.” Read more: Here

After Lavabit was forced to halt operations or violate their user's trust, Silentmail also chooses to shut down. Lavabit's statement from lavabit.com: "My Fellow Users, I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests. What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Const...

Kim Dotcom really is his name these days. He had it legally changed. The federal government shut down his enormously profitable file-sharing business in 2011. It won’t shut down his latest version of file-sharing.His new company, Mega, offers 100% encryption. His company can’t crack it. The U.S. government can’t crack it – not at a price it can afford, anyway. So people can post movies, songs, or anything else on his site. You get 50 megabytes of free storage to start out. His lawyers can now say this: “Our company will cooperate with the governments of the world. But, sorry, we have no idea what people are putting into their accounts.” The federal government opened a gigantic can of worms when it did Hollywood’s bidding and shut him down. It made him mad. He decided to get revenge. Read more: here

The US government is already fighting wars on several fronts, including the perpetual War on Terror. "War is the health of the state," as Randolph Bourne stated, and the state has never been healthier , using this variety of opponents as excuses to increase surveillance, curtail rights and expand power. Bruce Schneier highlights a piece written by Molly Sauter for the Atlantic which poses the question, " If hackers didn't exist, would the government have to invent them? " The government certainly seems to need some sort of existential hacker threat in order to justify more broadly/badly written laws (on top of the outdated and overbroad CFAA). But the government's portrayal of hackers as "malicious, adolescent techno-wizards, willing and able to do great harm to innocent civilians and society at large," is largely false. If teen techno-wizards aren't taking down site after site, how is all this personal information ending up in hac...