Will Raj Rajaratnam Testify?

Rajaratnam on Trial - CNBC.com

Rajaratnam on Trial - CNBC.com

The Galleon Fund

Andrew Michaelson, one of the principal SEC lawyers investigating the case, testified that in September 2006 the agency launched an insider-trading probe of Sedna Capital Management LLC, a fund operated by Rengan Rajaratnam, a former Galleon employee.

Michaelson, now a member of the prosecution team, said the SEC deposed Sedna and Galleon employees, reviewed millions of pages of documents and reviewed every single e-mail and instant message of Raj Rajaratnam’s for 2006. Soon regulators had another target, he said

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House Extends Controversial Parts of Patriot Act

A Federal Agent Can Seize Your Corporate Emails Without A Search Warrant or Judicial Review. Confidential Corporate Communications Are Under Attack From "Internet Security Firms", Governments, and Opportunistic In-House IT Employees




Secure Email

SCIE

Senate Approves Short-Term Extension of Patriot Act

Your Confidential Corporate Emails Are Subject To Confiscation Without Warrant or Cause.



Secure Email

SCIE

Glenn Greenwald Explains HBGary/ChamberLeaks

Which "Security Firm" Will Be (has been) Retained to Obtain Your Company's Confidential Communications?

Who Wants Your Inside Information and Why?



SCIE

Anonymous victim HBGary goes to ground

The computer security company hacked by members of activist group Anonymous has gone to ground as further revelations about its activites leak online.

HBGary has cancelled its appearances at public events, saying that members of staff had been threatened.

It follows the release of internal documents which appear to show the firm offered to smear Wikileaks' supporters.

HBGary officials said the online messages could have been altered prior to publication.

The company's founder, Greg Hoglund had been scheduled to give a talk at the RSA Security conference in San Francisco this week, but pulled out at the last minute.

The company also withdrew from an associated exhibition.

"In an effort to protect our employees, customers and the RSA Conference community, HBGary has decided to remove our booth and cancel all talks," it said in a statement posted on its website.

According to e-mails that Anonymous claims to have taken from HBGary's servers, the company had proposed a plan to undermine Wikileaks.

At the time, the whistleblowing website was planning to release documents relating to Bank of America.

The leaked emails also suggest that HBGary had discovered evidence that US officials were attempting to monitor visitors to websites affiliated to al Qaeda.

These messages have been posted online via the Anonymous-supported site Anonleaks.ru.

Government payload

In a message to colleagues, dated 16 November 2009, Mr Hoglund allegedly wrote that he had obtained a document taken from a jihadist website.

"I think it has a US govvy payload buried inside," the e-mail said.

The note also urges colleagues not to open the programme unless they were in a locked-down environment.

"Don't let it fone (sic) home unless you want black suits landing on your front acre," it adds.

In e-mails from early January 2011, it is claimed that Mr Hoglund sent out proposals to develop a spying program, known as a rootkit, that would run on Windows-based computers.

"There isn't anything like this publicly," the proposal stated. It would be "almost impossible to remove" or detect.

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SCIE

Newly Released Documents detail FBI's Plan to Expand Federal Surveillance Laws

EFF just received documents in response to a 2-year old FOIA request for information on the FBI’s "Going Dark" program, an initiative to increase the FBI's authority in response to problems the FBI says it's having implementing wiretap and pen register/trap and trace orders on new communications technologies. The documents detail a fully-formed and well-coordinated plan to expand existing surveillance laws and develop new ones. And although they represent only a small fraction of the documents we expect to receive in response to this and a more recent FOIA request, they were released just in time to provide important background information for the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing tomorrow on the Going Dark program.
We first heard about the FBI’s Going Dark program in 2009, when the agency’s Congressional budget request included an additional $9 million to fund the program (on top of the $233.9 million it already received). Late last year, the New York Times linked the program to a plan to expand federal surveillance laws like the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). We issued FOIA requests to the FBI in 2009 for information on Going Dark and in 2010 for information on the agency’s plans to update CALEA. These are the first documents we’ve received since we filed our lawsuit against the agency late last year. The documents provide rare insight into the agency’s multi-year strategy to increase its power to surveil our communications.

Here’s What the Documents Show:

What is the "Going Dark" Program?

The name "Going Dark" is cryptic, and the FBI’s public statements about the program are even more so. Nevertheless, FBI’s Operational Technology Division states that the program is one of the FBI’s "top initiatives" and has "gotten attention so far from high ranking officials in other federal, state, and local agencies and from industry." (GD4, p. 110).1 The FBI has told reporters in emails that Going Dark is:

the program name given to the FBI’s efforts to utilize innovative technology; foster cooperation with industry; and assist our state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners in a collaborative effort to close the growing gap between lawful interception requirements and our capabilities.

(GD2, p1). The FBI has also said that the term "Going Dark" does not refer to a specific capability,

but is a program name for the part of the FBI, Operational Technology Division's (OTD) lawful interception program which is shared with other law enforcement agencies. The term applies to the research and development of new tools, technical support and training initiatives.

(GD2, p 8). Behind this rhetoric, the documents detail a program set up to address the FBI’s allegations that communications providers’ technologies prevent the agency from implementing wiretap and pen register/trap and trace orders – essentially, the FBI alleges it is "'in the dark' by the loss of evidence, that [it] would be lawfully entitled to, due to advances in technology, antiquated ELSUR laws, and or lack of resources, training, [and] personnel," (GD4, p. 120), and the FBI needs new laws and new tools to bring this evidence into the light

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Secure Client Information Exchange

India still demanding RIM BES email access

The Indian government has not blocked BlackBerry Enterprise Server services within the country, even though Research In Motion did not meet the 31 January deadline to comply with its demands.

The Indian authorities are still demanding that the BlackBerry maker provide access to corporate email services that use BlackBerry Enterprise Server, according to The Economic Times of India.

In a bid to appease Indian officials, RIM provided access to its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service and BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) email in January. However, the authorities are reportedly not satisfied with the concession and are pushing for full corporate email access.

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Secure Client Information Exchange

secure email

In The United States Business Emails Are Not Confidential

You May Want To Save The Government Time & Expense.



Simply CC The F.B.I. On All Of Your Confidential Business Emails.





SCIE System

Revenge Still Sweet As Anonymous Posts 27,000 More HBGary E-Mails

An act of revenge has turned into a high-minded campaign against unscrupulous corporate and government activities–that is if you believe a group of elite, hot-tempered hackers supporting Anonymous, the online campaign group that stands up for free speech by, among other things, attacking Web sites.

A week after publishing more than 50,000 private emails of Aaron Barr, CEO of digital intelligence firm HBGary Federal who had publicly claimed to have penetrated Anonymous’ ranks, the group this morning republished those emails with another 27,606 from Greg Hoglund, the chief executive of sister company HBGary for other Anonymous supporters and journalists to pour over.

And instead of just uploading the email packet to bittorrent site Pirate Bay, they’ve created on online reader for easy perusing. It sets the stage for the launch of Anonymous’ latest venture, AnonLeaks. While the group has said little about AnonLeaks so far, it will presumably be a brazen addition to the growth of whistleblower sites like WikiLeaks.

The group said in a statement that it had taken “the game to the next level” and that HBGary’s leaked emails had revealed it was “entangled in highly dubious and most likely illegal activities, including a smear campaign against WikiLeaks, its supportive journalists, and adversaries of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America. Evidence even suggests this was done with full knowledge of the U.S. Department of Justice.”
The original emails had indeed revealed a report by HBGary looking at ways to sabotage WikiLeaks in collaboration with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies. The emails also show that Bank of America, a potential target of WikiLeaks, was to hear the proposal via its outside law firm Hunton & Williams. The proposal’s recommendations included a disinformation campaign against WikiLeaks and cyber attacks on its Web site.

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HBGary CEO Also Suggested Tracking, Intimidating WikiLeaks’ Donors

WikiLeaks and its inner circle of supporters may not have been the only targets of a group of security firms that offered to take on the secret-spilling site on behalf of Bank of America. In an email conversation, the head of one of those firms also suggested going after the thousands of individuals who have donated to the group.

Last week the loose hacker group Anonymous released a set of more than 40,000 emails from HBGary Federal, the security firm whose servers it hacked earlier this month. One of the files in those emails was a PowerPoint presentation that described “the WikiLeaks Threat,” created by a group of three security firms that suggested Nixonesque tactics for sabotaging the site on behalf of Bank of America, including spreading misinformation, launching cyberattacks against it, and pressuring journalists.

Over the weekend, the loose hacker group Anonymous published another 27,000 emails from HBGary Federal’s sister company HBGary, and also created a search engine for those documents on its WikiLeaks-like site, Anonleaks.ru.
A quick search of the company’s WikiLeaks-related conversations shows that Aaron Barr, the HBGary chief executive who first caught the attention of Anonymous by boasting that he’d penetrated the group and identified its leaders, also suggested other tactics against WikiLeaks that weren’t included in that PowerPoint: namely, tracking and intimidating anyone who had given money to WikiLeaks. The security firms “need to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them,” he wrote in an email. “Transaction records are easily identifiable.”
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ChamberLeaks: Pro-Chamber Conspiracy Illicitly Scraped Facebook

ThinkProgress has previously revealed how Hunton & Williams — a top law firm working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — solicited three private security contractors to investigate political opponents of the Chamber. A key service that attracted the Chamber’s lawyers to the corporate spies — Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal — was the ability of HBGary’s CEO Aaron Barr to use computer programs to “scrape” personal information from the websites of Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites.

Leaked emails show that Berico, Palantir, and HBGary conspired to store information scraped from social media sites on Palantir’s servers. On November 11, Barr sent Facebook data about the supporters and leaders of Change To Win, CodePink, US Chamber Watch and other organizations to Berico, who then passed the “scrapes” with “mugshots” along to Palantir:

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Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001 - 2008

Excerpt:

......In response, the email service provider returned two CDs containing the full content of all emails in the accounts. The FBI eventually (and properly) sequestered the CDs, notified the email provider of the overproduction, and re-issued an NSL for the originally requested header information; but, in response to the second NSL, the email provider again provided the FBI with the full content of all emails in the accounts.

Compounding the service providers’ problematic over-disclosure, the scope of the FBI’s authority to issue NSLs for electronic transactional records rests on unsettled and unclear legal grounds. The FBI’s NSL authority under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) allows the government to issue NSLs to traditional telephone service providers for non-content subscriber information and toll billing records — essentially, the name, address, length of service, and local and long distance call records.30 ECPA also provides the authority to issue NSLs for "electronic communications transactional records." However, the exact scope of this remains unclear: according to the DOJ, "electronic communications transactional records" include "those categories of information parallel to . . . toll billing records for ordinary telephone service."31 What, exactly, "those categories of information" constitute — possibly including, for example, email "header" information, IP addresses, URLs, or other information — remains unclear.

Third-parties not only willingly cooperated with FBI NSLs when the legal justification was unclear, however: they responded to NSLs without any legal justification at all. In one instance, when requesting financial records from a bank under the Right to Financial Privacy Act, the FBI used language and statutory citations from ECPA — a statute entirely unrelated to financial records — for its legal authority; nevertheless, the financial institution complied with the FBI’s legally deficient request........

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As International Privacy Day is Celebrated, Governments Continue to Chip Away at Privacy Rights

"Effective data protection is vital for our democracies and underpins other fundamental rights and freedoms." - Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship.

Last Friday, privacy advocates and government officials in countries across the world celebrated the 5th annual International Privacy Day — even as individual privacy is threatened by surveillance proposals and security breaches worldwide. This day commemorates the first legally binding international agreement on data protection – the Council of Europe’s Convention 108- which was opened for signature on January 28th, 1981. Last week’s celebration marked the 30th anniversary of Convention 108, which has served as a foundation for many countries’ national data protection laws. It is an opportunity to raise public awareness about privacy threats and to urge governments to protect citizen's privacy rights.

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Renewing the Patriot Act While America Sleeps

Of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America.

--Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), voicing his concerns over Congress' passage of the USA Patriot Act (Oct. 25, 2001)

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Apple service briefly suspended in Saudi Arabia

The battle between governments and the internet took another turn yesterday when Saudi Arabia appeared to block access to Apple's MobileMe service. The Saudis gave no reason for the block, did not apply it to everyone in the country and lifted it within a few hours for at least some without an explanation.

Word of the government's block came from Apple World, a Saudi website.

MobileMe is Apple's cloud service, a conduit for email, contacts and calendar services, as well as storage for pictures, video and backups. It syncs with Macs, iPhones and iPads. Apple has a huge investment in MobileMe because of the growing interest in cloud computing, reportedly spending $1 billion to build a 4.6-hectare server farm in North Carolina for the service.

Last summer, the Saudi government threatened to shut down Blackberry services unless the Canadian company that runs Blackberries, Research in Motion (RIM), granted access to encrypted text and email messages sent from the devices. The Saudis claimed the step was necessary to hamper communication by terrorists. RIM worked out a settlement, agreeing to put a Blackberry server in Saudi Arabia and gave a government a key to the encryption code.

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