Everyone Wants You To Have Security, But Not from Them →

...The reason the Internet is a worldwide mass-market phenomenon is that all the technological details are hidden from view. Someone else is taking care of it. We want strong security, but we also want companies to have access to our computers, smart devices, and data. We want someone else to manage our computers and smart phones, organize our e-mail and photos, and help us move data between our various devices.
Those "someones" will necessarily be able to violate our privacy, either by deliberately peeking at our data or by having such lax security that they're vulnerable to national intelligence agencies, cybercriminals, or both. Last week, we learned that the NSA broke into the Dutch company Gemalto andstole the encryption keys for billions ­ yes, billions ­ of cell phones worldwide. That was possible because we consumers don't want to do the work of securely generating those keys and setting up our own security when we get our phones; we want it done automatically by the phone manufacturers. We want our data to be secure, but we want someone to be able to recover it all when we forget our password.
We'll never solve these security problems as long as we're our own worst enemy. That's why I believe that any long-term security solution will not only be technological, but political as well...

Islamic State in Syria abducts at least 150 Christians →

A Syrian Christian group representing several NGOs inside and outside the country said it had verified at least 150 people missing, including women and the elderly, who had been kidnapped by the militants.

"We have verified at least 150 people who have been adducted from sources on the ground," Bassam Ishak, president of the Syriac National Council of Syria, whose family itself is from Hasaka, told Reuters from Amman.

Earlier the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 90 were abducted when the militants carried out dawn raids on rural villages inhabited by the ancient Christian minority west of Hasaka, a city mainly held by the Kurds.

The Next Attack on Voting Rights →

The last round of voter restrictions came after the 2010 Republican wave, when new GOP majorities passed voter identification laws and slashed ballot access in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Now, three months after the 2014 Republican wave, another class of state lawmakers are prepping another assault on voting rights under the same guise of “uniformity” and “ballot integrity.”
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It’s always worth noting the scant evidence for these moves. In Missouri, for instance, the Brennan Center found only four cases of in-person voter fraud, for a “documented fraud rate” of 0.0003 percent. There is no problem to solve; the policy rationale for limiting registration drives or requiring photo identification—instead of a standard-issue registration card—doesn’t exist. And if it did, there’s no reason for a restrictive approach; automatic registration and free ID cards are just as effective as anything proposed by state and federal Republicans.

Politically, however, there’s a lot to gain from these laws. Every new barrier to voting makes it harder for the most marginal voters to get to the polls. And given the demographics of voting—the least frequent voters are poorer, browner, and less educated than their most frequent counterparts—it’s in the Republican Party’s interest to shrink the electorate as much as possible.

Millennials don’t want to run for office →

A democratically elected government is only as good as those willing to stand for its offices. Yet polls suggest that many of us believe the country is a nearly hopeless mess — with trust in government at historical lows after steady decline over the past decade, and with Congress’ approval rating hovering around that of Nickleback and cockroaches.  There are many reasons for the sorry state of national politics. My research suggests one important reason: the reluctance of good candidates to run for office, particularly young people.

Young people’s views of government mirror the nation as a whole.  The Harvard IOP poll of 18- to 29-year-olds shows a 10-point decrease in trust of the federal government from 2000 to 2012. A majority of millennials (52 percent) now say they would choose to recall all members of Congress, were it possible. My research suggests that the problem goes even further: not only are capable young people are repelled by what they see of politics, they are extremely skeptical about politics as a way of effecting positive change.

Between 2011 and 2014, I surveyed over 750 young people well-positioned to run for office – those studying law and public policy at the graduate level in the Boston area. The views of one such person, whom I’ll call Charlotte, are illustrative. She said, “I’d hate [running].”  She elaborated: “I just feel I can effect a lot more change and do good work from the outside and find it much more satisfying.”

Other interviewees added heartfelt outbursts about the lack of privacy for public officials and their families, and burden of constant fund raising. Dave explained: “I… [would] risk capture by going into a political process as corrupted, and sclerotic, and generally putrescent as the American one, so full of money.”

Document Reveals Growth of Cyberwarfare Between the U.S. and Iran →

A newly disclosed National Security Agency document illustrates the striking acceleration of the use of cyberweapons by the United States and Iran against each other, both for spying and sabotage, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart met in Geneva to try to break a stalemate in the talks over Iran’s disputed nuclear program.

The document, which was written in April 2013 for Gen. Keith B. Alexander, then the director of the National Security Agency, described how Iranian officials had discovered new evidence the year before that the United States was preparing computer surveillance or cyberattacks on their networks.

It detailed how the United States and Britain had worked together to contain the damage from “Iran’s discovery of computer network exploitation tools” — the building blocks of cyberweapons. That was more than two years after the Stuxnet worm attack by the United States and Israel severely damaged the computer networks at Tehran’s nuclear enrichment plant.

The document, which was first reported this month by The Intercept, an online publication that grew out of the disclosures by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, did not describe the targets. But for the first time, the surveillance agency acknowledged that its attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a George W. Bush administration program, kicked off the cycle of retaliation and escalation that has come to mark the computer competition between the United States and Iran.

Negotiators Weigh Plan to Phase Out Nuclear Limits on Iran →

Iranian and American officials ended a round of high-level nuclear talks here on Monday considering a proposal that would strictly limit, for at least 10 years, Iran’s ability to produce nuclear material, but gradually ease restrictions on Tehran in the final years of any deal.

The proposed phasing out of restrictions is part of a broader effort to mollify critics in Tehran, where some hard-liners in the government and the military oppose any deal that would force Iran to forsake nuclear production for a generation, and Washington, where some members of Congress have objected to an agreement that would not impose lengthy restrictions on Iran’s program.

The question of how long any agreement would endure is a critical one: President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have said they will not sign an agreement that would give Iran the ability to produce enough fuel for a nuclear weapon in less than a year should it decide to “break out” of the accord...

A Whistleblower's Horror Story →

One man's story in particular highlights just about everything that can go wrong when you give evidence against your bosses in America: former Countrywide/Bank of America whistleblower Michael Winston.

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Two years ago this month, Winston was being celebrated in the news as a hero. He'd blown the whistle on Countrywide Financial, the bent mortgage lender that one could plausibly argue nearly blew up the global economy in the last decade with its reckless subprime lending practices.

He described Countrywide's crazy plan to give anyone who could breathe a mortgage in a memorable January, 2013 episode of Frontline called "The Untouchables," a show that caught the eyes of several influential politicians in Washington. The documentary inspired Senate hearings and even the crafting of new legislation to combat too-big-to-jail corruption in the financial world.

Winston was later featured in the New York Times as the man who "conquered Countrywide." David Dayen of Salon described Winston as "Wall Street's greatest enemy."

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He says he's spent over a million dollars fighting Countrywide (and the firm that acquired it, Bank of America) in court. At first, that fight proved a good gamble, as a jury granted him a multi-million-dollar award for retaliation and wrongful termination.

But after Winston won that case, an appellate judge not only wiped out that jury verdict, but allowed Bank of America to counterattack him with a vengeance.

Last summer, the bank vindictively put a lien on Winston's house (one he'd bought, ironically, with a Countrywide mortgage). The bank eventually beat him for nearly $98,000 in court costs.

That single transaction means a good guy in the crisis drama, Winston, had by the end of 2014 paid a larger individual penalty than virtually every wrongdoer connected with the financial collapse of 2008.