The US government "has agreed to destroy all data" Homeland Security agents obtained in a border search of a Bradley Manning supporter, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced yesterday.
The settlement (PDF) arises from a November 2010 search of David House when he was reentering the US after a vacation. House is a "human rights activist" who was working with an organization raising money for the legal defense of Manning, a US soldier who admitted to leaking documents to WikiLeaks, the ACLU said.
"Department of Homeland Security agents stopped House at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago and questioned him about his political activities and beliefs," the ACLU said. "They then confiscated his laptop, camera, and USB drive, which contained information identifying members and supporters of the Bradley Manning Support Network. The government copied House’s cell phone at the airport and held his laptop and other devices for 49 days. The data taken from House’s materials was then turned over to the US Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID), which concluded that it would not use the information."
Incredibly innovating concepts; I can't wait to experiment.
WebRTC is incredibly exciting, and is starting to see significant deployment: it’s available by default in Chrome and Firefox releases now. Most people think of WebRTC as an API for video calling, but there’s a general purpose method for directly sharing data between web browsers (even when they’re behind NAT) in there if you look harder. For example:
P does peer-to-peer mesh networking in JavaScript.
TowTruck allows you to add collaboration features (collaborative text editing, text chat, voice chat) to websites.
PeerCDN forms a network from a site’s visitors, and uses it to offload serving up static content away from the web server and on to the networked peers.
The Tor Project is interested in using WebRTC to enable volunteers with JavaScript-enabled web browsers to become on-ramps onto the Tor network for users under censorship, as part of the Flash Proxies project. The idea is that censoring organizations may block the public Tor relays directly, but they can’t easily block every random web browser who might route traffic for those relays over WebRTC, especially if each web browser’s proxy is short-lived.
All of this activity means that we might finally be close to solving — amongst other important world problems — the scourge of xkcd.com/949:
xkcd: File Transfer, used under CC-BY-NC 2.5.
I wanted to experiment with WebRTC and understand its datachannels better, and I also felt like the existing code examples I’ve seen are unsatisfying in a specific way: it’s a peer-to-peer protocol, but the first thing you do (for example, on sites like conversat.io) is have everyone go to the same web server to find each other (this is called “signaling” in WebRTC) and share connection information.
If we’re going to have a peer-to-peer protocol, can’t we use it without all visiting the same centralized website first? Could we instead make a WebRTC app that just runs out of a file:/// path on your local disk, even if it means you have to manually tell the person you’re trying to talk to how to connect to you?
It turns out that we can: I’ve created a serverless-webrtc project on GitHub that decouples the “signaling server” exchange of connection information from the WebRTC code itself. To run the app:
You’ll be asked whether you want to create or join a channel, and then you’re prompted to manually send the first party’s “WebRTC offer” to the second party (for example, over an instant message chat) and then to do the same thing with the second party’s “WebRTC answer” reply back. Once you’ve done that, the app provides text chat and file transfer between peers, all without any web server. (A STUN server is still used to find out your external IP for NAT-busting.)
There are open issues that I’d be particularly happy to receive pull requests for:
#1: The code doesn’t work on Chrome yet. Chrome is behind Firefox as far as DataChannels are concerned — Chrome doesn’t yet have support for binary transfers, or for “reliable” (TCP, not UDP) channels (Firefox does). These are both important for file transfers.
#2: Large file transfers often fail, or even hang the browser, but small transfers seem to work every time. I’m not sure whose code is at fault yet.
Thanks for reading this far! Here’s to the shared promise of actually being able to use the Internet to directly share files with each other some time soon.
Absolutely incredible. I wonder what ELSE the US government is doing in it's free time...
A former FBI counterterrorism agent acknowledged this week on CNN that every telephone conversation that takes place on American soil “is being captured as we speak.”
Tim Clemente’s spontaneous admission was made on the CNN show “Erin Burnett OutFront” on Wednesday in a discussion about phone calls between Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his 24-year-old wife, Katherine Russell. Those conversations have become a focus of the government’s investigation into the attack. The revelation came when Burnett asked whether investigators could gain access to the calls in the event Russell refuses to talk about them.
Here is the exchange between Clemente and Burnett:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not” [italics added].
As civil rights lawyer and national security writer Glenn Greenwald commented in The Guardian on Saturday, by “All of that stuff,” Clemente means that “every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant ‘is being captured as we speak.’ ”
Clemente reiterated his remarks on a Thursday night appearance with CNN host Carol Costello (see below), adding that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored. “No digital communication is secure,” he said, sighing.
Greenwald wants to make sure we understand the full meaning of Clemente’s comments. “ ‘[N]o digital communication is secure,’ ” Greenwald repeats, “by which [Clemente] means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications—meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like—are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact.
“To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is,” Greenwald adds.
That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).
I love the simplicity of Asian cooking. Time tested and tasteful. With 4 billion mouths to feed, Asia provides a huge testing ground for excellent recipes such as these.
Really, who among us hasn't secretly wished for an Asian grandmother at some point? I know I have, and it's usually been while staring in confusion at the burned contents of a hot wok or while wrestling with uncooperative homemade soba noodles. This book by Pat Tanumihardja is like discovering that I have a long lost relative who I can call on in these moments of culinary distress. Even better, this book contains the collective knowledge of many grandmothers from many different ethnic upbringings — a veritable encyclopedia of practical advice and time-tested recipes from Asian communities around the globe. More
