Notes from Cyberia
German justice officials under fire
over loosing of hobgoblin spyware
Amid ballooning public suspicion, the German justice minister tried to put a positive spin on a hacker group's expose of a police spyware program that, the group said, was so flawed that it could be captured and used by "anyone on the internet."

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the minister, told news magazine Focus on Sunday that Chaos Computer Club members were "not anarchists, but experts," who had brought an important debate into the public sphere.

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger also said the assessments of the IT technicians had rarely been so important to lawmakers.

The minister added that the legal gray area surrounding use of spyware by police needed to removed, and it was time for a single legal framework for federal and state investigators to be established.

"Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet," the hackers charged.

The hacker club announced that it had "reverse engineered" and analyzed a Trojan horse malware program used by authorities to record keystrokes, activate cameras and take control of electronic communications equipment of police targets.

"The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs," the hacker group said.

British internet filter panned on privacy
The Electronic Frontier Foundation sharply criticized Britain's internet filter, saying it "lacks transparency," and is "vague in nature." Persons who opt out are likely to be monitored anyway, EFF said.

Working with the religious organization Mothers' Union, British Prime Minister David Cameron has decided to implement a plan with four of Britain's major ISPs—BT, TalkTalk, Virgin, and Sky—to block access to pornography, gambling, self-harm, and other blacklisted websites, EFF said in a statement. Though the filtering is not mandatory, there are extensive problems with the plan, EFF said.

The plan "lacks transparency," the group said, noting: "The blocked categories are vague in nature, and the list's origins unknown. Not only do the categories contain legal content in some cases, but there is significant room for overblocking. For example, one filtering tool used by several Middle Eastern governments categorizes Tumblr.com as pornography, because several pornographic blogs are hosted on the platform."

Also, EFF quoted Richard Clayton, a security expert at Cambridge University, as saying that customers of ISP TalkTalk who opt out are still monitored. In May, Clayton cited a series of privacy concerns relating to TalkTalk's use of the HomeSafe system, the same system the ISP intends to use for filtering, EFF said.

Clayton is quoted as saying that "the company scans all web addresses that its customers visit regardless of whether they have opted-in to the service."

And "opt-in services create privacy concerns," EFF said, arguing: "Users who choose to opt out of the 'bad' content filter are then on one list. The plan does not include privacy protections for the people who choose to opt out. The list could potentially be made public, shaming users who would prefer their Internet with its pornography, gambling, and self-harm websites intact."

The group argued that the decision by Cameron and Mother's Union is based on the Bailey Report, a British Education Department report that relied heavily on phone surveys with parents, input from religious organizations, and a Murdoch-funded Australia Institute report entitled "Youth, Sex, and the Internet."

"Time and time again, filtering based on blacklists has proven to be overbroad, blocking access to some offensive websites at the cost of many legitimate ones," the group said. "Parents have plenty of Internet filtering options which they can implement by installing software on their computers at home without having to resort to filtering at the ISP level, especially given the potential privacy risks this plan may pose for Internet users throughout the UK."

EFF noted that three months ago, the group had expressed disappointment with Australia's two largest Internet service providers (ISPs), Telstra and Optus, for agreeing to implement a filtering scheme after a filtering bill from the Australian government failed to pass.

Comment: This reporter recalls having news sites, such as the Washington Post, blocked by a filtering program used by the Nashville, Tennessee, public library. The computer screens at the time did not tell users they had an opt-out option that could be implemented by a librarian.

Times urges new review of anthrax probe
The New York Times, citing forensic skepticism about the FBI's investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, is calling for a re-examination of the FBI case.

In an editorial today, the paper said, "Federal investigators insist that there is a vast amount of evidence supporting their conclusion" that biowar expert Dr. Bruce Ivins  was the lone, deranged culprit." But, in light of disclosures by journalists and concerns of scientists, the Government Accountability Office "needs to dig deeply into classified materials to judge how well the evidence holds up."

Otherwise, the editorial said, "Congress ought to commission an independent assessment to be sure there are no culprits still at large."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/who-mailed-the-anthrax-letters.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/science/10anthrax.html?_r=2

http://www.propublica.org/article/did-ivins-give-the-fbi-a-fake-sample-of-his-own-anthrax

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/05/19/114467/fbi-lab-reports-on-anthrax-attacks.html

Comment: If the FBI's work on the anthrax poisonings is open to question, should not its work on the 9/11 attacks also come under increased scrutiny? After all, the anthrax case was only officially "decoupled" from the 9/11 attacks when an enterprising reporter disclosed that the lethal anthrax was of a type grown at the Pentagon's biowar defense facility at Fort Detrick, Md.

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