This chilling paragraph is in a comprehensive Brookings report about the use of tech to deport people from the US: The administration has also adapted its methods of social media surveillance. Though agencies like the State Department have gathered millions of handles and monitored political discussions online, the Trump …
Article. Report. [...]
New report: “ Scam GPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud.” This primer maps what we currently know about generative AI’s role in scams, the communities most at risk, and the broader economic and cultural shifts that are making people more willing to take risks, more vulnerable to deception …
The Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: “ Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market.” Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items: First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the past …
The NSA and GCHQ have jointly published a history of World War II SIGINT: “ Secret Messengers: Disseminating SIGINT in the Second World War.” This is the story of the British SLUs (Special Liaison Units) and the American SSOs (Special Security Officers). [...]
“Who’s winning on the internet, the attackers or the defenders?” I’m asked this all the time, and I can only ever give a qualitative hand-wavy answer. But Jason Healey and Tarang Jain’s latest Lawfare piece has amassed data. The essay provides the first framework for metrics …
The Cambridge Cybercrime Conference was held on 23 June. Summaries of the presentations are here. [...]
Once you build a surveillance system, you can’t control who will use it: A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in …
One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain. A new study found that many commercials VPNS are (often surreptitiously) owned by …
In response to a FOIA request, the NSA released “ Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937-1987),” by Glenn F. Stahly, with a lot of redactions. Weirdly, this is the second time the NSA has declassified the document. John Young got a copy in 2019. This one has a few less …
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre just released its white paper on “Advanced Cryptography,” which it defines as “cryptographic techniques for processing encrypted data, providing enhanced functionality over and above that provided by traditional cryptography.” It includes things like homomorphic encryption, attribute-based encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and secure multiparty …
Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware: Key Findings: Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group and other …