I somehow missed this fantastic "Al'Queda is a scene" roundup from NoteWorthy.

George Packer is simply essential. This is a long post because there is no way to boil this down.

"After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It's about human social networks and the way that they operate."

That's David Kilcullen, an Australian lieutenant colonel who may just be our last best hope in the long war.

"The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’"

“People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks."

In the 1 December issue of Jane's Intelligence Review, John Horgan writes (sub req'd):

People who leave terrorist groups or move away from violent roles do so for a multitude of reasons. Horgan explains why greater understanding of the motivations behind this so-called 'disengagement' will help in developing successful anti-terrorism initiatives.

The reality is that actual attacks represent only the tip of an iceberg of activity.

Here's the abstract of a recent RAND working paper:

In the battle of ideas that has come to characterize the struggle against jihadist terrorism, a sometimes neglected dimension is the personal motivations of those drawn into the movement. This paper reports the results of a workshop held in September 2005 and sponsored by RAND’s Center for Middle East Public Policy and the Initiative for Middle East Youth. Workshop participants discussed the issue of why young people enter into jihadist groups and what might be done to prevent it or to disengage members of such groups once they have joined.

Now, back to the Packer piece:

The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy." ... “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection.” Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance.

You may recall the speculation that Bush would produce bin Laden's he... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Knowing the Enemy | George Packer in The New Yorker

Sacramento's homeless rate is rising quickly as people lose their homes and their jobs.

The sea of tents along Sacramento's American River is growing by the day. But here, there are no rules and no regulations. Here, at Tent City, you are on your own.

First world shanty towns.

No property taxes! No homeowner associations! No pre-approval necessary! The property values can only go up! Strong job growth in the local underground economy! Get in while the gettin' is good!

CBS13 Investigates: Sacramento 'Tent City' - cbs13.com

This whole situation is quite interesting to me. Several years ago I gave a talk at PhreakNIC about how security researchers can make themselves a hard target to silence. Ironically, the video recorder malfunctioned about an hour before my talk, so there isn't a record of it.

From the looks of it, these guys planned this out well.. Verisign is just spinning this so they don't look like idiots. Don't see a valid argument that the security researchers were in any way unethical. I think concerns about Verisign attempting to obtain some kind of prior restraint on the researchers was completely warranted. Beyond that, given that the problem could be fixed long before their research could be replicated, no actual vulnerability was created by their disclosure.

Here is more information and commentary from Decius:

I previously commented on Verisign's incredulity at the fact that the researchers who produced a phoney SSL certificate didn't put them in the loop prior to public disclosure of their research.

It appears this incredulity has produced a bit of a debate. I'm linking Rob Graham who weighed in the subject:

The researchers behaved perfectly and responsibly. Their worry about being suppressed was justified, and their secrecy was an appropriate response. The very fact that Versign could quickly fix the problem in a day, but malicious hackers would need at least a month to replicate the feat, means that notifying Verisign ahead of time wasn't needed.

He links to a post from Alexander Sotirov who also took issue with Verisign's position:

In a recent post on his company blog, Verisign's vice president of marketing Tim Callan commented on the disclosure of our MD5 collision attack:

VeriSign did not receive any of [the] information ahead of the actual presentation, rendering it impossible for us to begin work on mitigating this issue prior to this morning.

I feel that this statement is inaccurate. Not only did we contact Verisign before our presentation to let them know about our research, we also strongly advised them to stop using MD5 as soon as possible and were given a chance to review their mitigation plans.

Callan responded in the thread on his blog.

Here are the facts as I understand them.

- The "trusted intermediary" was under a strict NDA with you and didn't feel it could reveal anything that was actually actionable or useful. Your NDA prevented the intermediary from telling us what would be announced, by whom, or when.

- You... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Errata Security: Versign's Bad Response to the MD5-SSL Crisis

one must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-911 mentality. - Decius

I just wanted to make sure this quote was taken out of context and forever remembered...

The State and Your Garbage

This collection is very interesting. Don't miss part 2 and part 3.

The year 2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3) - The Big Picture - Boston.com

For some reason, the government did not appear to make the argument invited by the Supreme Court by its rulings in the FedEx and dog-sniff cases. The government could have argued that -- if the EnCase scan for a particular MD5 hash matches -- that the search is constitutionally permissible without a warrant because it revealed nothing except the existence of contraband. And, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in contraband, the government might argue, a search which only reveals the existence of contraband invades no legitimate privacy right.

In the Crist case, however, the court never addressed that critical issue, because it never had to. The government merely argued that an automated search was no search at all.

This unanswered question -- whether a scan of hash values looking for contraband is a permissible search -- is really the rub.

If the government may conduct warrantless searches as long as they only reveal the presence of contraband, then they could lawfully put automated sniffers on any computer, searching for the presence of files for which the MD5 hash matched that of contraband. While the software categorizing the files might be considered to be conducting a search -- and I think it is -- the contents of this search are not revealed unless the program believes it is contraband.

Acidus:

... ... How did I not see this earlier? Pretty sure this is the same guy writing about how data stored "in the cloud" can be legally searched without a warrant because you have involved a 3rd party who can consent to the search.

And don't think about kiddie porn. Think about the MPAA.

This is a HUGE question that will be one of the defining civil liberties battles of the next decade. I wrote about this case here.

The bottom line becomes, any technology that we can develop to collect information about crimes is A-OK so long as it never provides any information to a human being unless an actual crime has been committed...

Eventually in the distant future, you reach a point... where you've replaced your human police officers with robots... These robots are artificially intelligent and never report the results of their investigations to humans unless a crime has been committed.

Under this analysis I cannot see how the Constitution would prohibit these robots from doing all of the tyrannical things that the 4th amendment was intended to prevent the police from doing, and I don't see how this state of affairs would be materially different from not having any 4th amendment at all.

Therefore, if the 4th amendment is to have any meaning at all, there must be some reason that this kind of automated search is not reasonable.

Scalia offered the following in reference to Caballes: "This is not a new technology. This is a dog." I find that explanation extremely unsatisfying.

Its not a 'Search.' Its just a search.

Girls hang on Virgil Griffith. This is no exaggeration. At parties, they cling to the arms of the 25-year-old hacker whose reason for being, he says, is to “make the Internet a better and more interesting place.” The founder of a data-mining tool called WikiScanner, Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where “complex systems” are studied. He was once charged, wide-eyed rumor has it, with sedition. No wonder girls whisper secrets in his ear and laugh merrily at his arcane jokes. null

Virgil is, without a doubt, a hacker rock star.

Virgil Griffith, Internet Man of Mystery

An Iranian blogger has been arrested in Iran and charged with spying for Israel. He could face the death penalty if found guilty.

Hossein Derakhshan, known around the world as the father of the Iranian blogosphere, was recently arrested upon returning to Iran from Canada.

Jahan News, an Iranian website affiliated with Iran’s intelligence community, reported on Monday that he admitted to spying for Israel.

Hoder has been discussed on MemeStreams before.

Hoder was on a round table event in Nashville at the 1st Amendment Center that Decius and I participated in.

Hoder arrested in Iran, faces death penalty

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against the NSA, President Bush and Vice President Cheney on behalf of AT&T's customers to fight illegal wiretapping.

I know this is totally beside the point, but don't you wish that this actually was the NSA logo?

EFF sues Cheney, Bush, and the NSA to stop illegal wiretapping - Boing Boing

Stay current on the issue. More here.

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?