Michael Shermer on Anonymous protest of Scientology

Monday's Los Angeles Times featured a short op-ed piece by Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society about Anonymous' protests against Scientology, which is rightly both critical of Anonymous and Scientology.

Cayman Islands bank gets Wikileaks taken offline

As reported in Wired's blog:

Wikileaks, the whistleblower site that recently leaked documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, was taken offline last week by its U.S. host after posting documents that implicate a Cayman Islands bank in money laundering and tax evasion activities.

In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company and domain registrar for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." A judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court.

The Julius Baer Bank, a Swiss bank with a division in the Cayman Islands, took issue with documents that were published on Wikileaks by an unidentified whistleblower, whom the bank claims is the former vice president of its Cayman Islands operation, Rudolf Elmer. The documents purport to provide evidence that the Cayman Islands bank helps customers hide assets and wash funds.

After failing to convince Wikileaks to take down the documents, the bank went after its U.S. hosting service, which responded by agreeing not only to remove the Wikileaks account from Dyndadot's server but also to help prevent Wikileaks from moving its site to a different host.

Wikileaks is actually still online, even though its domain has been taken out of its control in this highly unusual and inappropriate move by the courts. Bank Julius Baer and its attorneys are making a huge mistake that is now going to drive far more attention to the documents in question than they would have received otherwise.

Wikileaks publishes the correspondence between the organization and the bank's attorneys, in which they refuse to identify their client or the specific documents that they take issue with.

Wikileaks board member Julian Assange (author of the security tool "strobe" and technical advisor and researcher for the excellent book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, by Suelette Dreyfus), has been quoted saying that Wikileaks will continue to publish:

"The order is clearly unconstitutional and exceeds its jurisdiction," Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange said in the e-mail statement issued from Paris on Monday. "Wikileaks will keep on publishing. In fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."

Wikileaks was set up primarily to allow the leaking and publishing of documents from non-Western authoritarian regimes, but it has gotten the most press for its earlier leak of the Guanatanomo Bay operating manual and now for this report of a Cayman Islands/Swiss bank's activities.

In my opinion, Wikileaks is subject to abuse--just like the Internet in general, as well as newspapers and other forms of publication--but that organizations which attempt to use trade secret and copyright law as a tool to conceal illegal or immoral activity should not be permitted to succeed. This particular case appears to be somewhat complex and based on a particular whistleblower's account, and if it only involves tax avoidance (as opposed to evasion), then it doesn't involve the violation of any laws. It is, however, clearly inappropriate for the entire site to be shut down just because of a few specific documents from one case--that would be like shutting down Wikipedia because of the content in one set of articles, or shutting down Blogger because of material posted on one blog. That's the kind of censorship we have seen from some authoritarian regimes in response to critical material, but it's not how the law should work in the United States.

UPDATE (March 4, 2008): Judge White wisely reversed his decision and Wikileaks.org is back at its own domain name.

Malware in digital photo frames

The Mocmex virus and other trojans have been found on digital photo frames from China sold at Target, Costco, Sam's Club, and Best Buy. The photo frames are connected to a computer via USB to load photographs; on a Windows machine this will cause an executable stored on the photo frame to run, infecting the computer.

The SANS Internet Storm Center has documented more details here and here.

As more and more devices have built-in storage and can be connected via USB to PCs, we'll see more and more attacks like this.

Spies who love you

Mark Fiore helps teach kids about the importance of warrantless wiretapping.

(Hat tip to Bob Hagen.)

FBI responds to "shoot to kill" claims about InfraGard

The FBI has issued an official response to Rothschild's Progressive article (PDF), which says, in part:

In short, the article's claims are patently false. For the record, the FBI has not deputized InfraGard, its members, businesses, or anything else in the program. The title, however catchy, is a complete fabrication. Moreover, InfraGard members have no extraordinary powers and have no greater right to "shoot to kill" than other civilians. The FBI encourages InfraGard members -- and all Americans -- to report crime and suspected terrorist activity to the appropriate authorities.

The FBI response also states that Rothschild has "refused even to identify when or where the claimed 'small meeting' occurred in which issues of martial law were discussed," and promises to follow up with further clarifying details if they get that information.

I've updated my own response to Rothschild to include the above information.

Pentagon-commissioned Rand report on Iraqi occupation

A Pentagon-commissioned study from the Rand Corporation on U.S. military occupation in the Middle East, titled "War by Other Means: Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency," argues that the U.S. military efforts are "at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible":

The United States should instead focus its priorities on improving "civil governance" and building "local security forces," according to the report, referring to those steps as "capabilities that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces," said David C. Gompert, the report's lead author and a senior fellow at Rand. "Because this threat is likely to persist and could grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not capable of adequately addressing the challenge."

The report argues for some of the things that have been done as part of the "surge," such as training and equipping local security forces, but maintains that this needs to be done by professional police trainers, not by the military. Building local governments, an efficient and fair justice system, and accessible mass education are also recommendations. A bullet list of recommendations:

American military forces can't keep up with training local militaries to match the growth of Muslim insurgent groups and that must improve. Police should be trained by professional police trainers.

American military prowess should focus "on border and coastal surveillance, technical intelligence collection, air mobility, large-scale logistics, and special operations against high-value targets."

A new information-sharing architecture should be created. This "Integrated Counterinsurgency Operating Network" would promote "universal cell phone use, 'wikis' and video monitoring." [They could call it InfraGard Iraq.]

"Pro-America" themes should be dropped "in favor of strengthening local government" and emphasizing the failure of jihadists to meet people's needs.

U.S. allies and international organizations, such as NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations could help the United States in areas such as "building education, health and justice systems, and training police and" military forces that perform civilian police duties.

Dave Bird, RIP

Noted Scientologist critic and tireless picketer of Scientology's London Org, Dave Bird, died on Sunday, the same day as the largest London Scientology picket that has ever occurred.

David Gerard has posted a nice couple of obituaries and some photos at his blog.

Dave Bird had a crazy mountain man look, and I thought his postings and tactics were sometimes over the top, but he also had a gift for showmanship and entertainment, as you can see from the photos of his props that he brought to protests. He was one of the protesters that Scientology took seriously enough to attack on their "Religious Freedom Watch" website (which seems to still be offline since being attacked by "Anonymous").

Chasing ghosts with joint terrorism task forces

The latest issue of Rolling Stone has an excellent article by Guy Lawson, "The Fear Factory," about how joint terrorism task forces across the U.S. are engaging in wild goose chases and exaggerating the terrorist threat to justify their existence.

A companion article, Tim Dickinson's "Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts," reports on the real stories behind repeated terror scares that have been used to elevate the DHS advisory system over the last five years.

Visual depictions of quantity in art

The picture is of a pair of breasts, composed of 32,000 Barbie dolls. 32,000 is the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. in 2006.

This picture, along with a partial zoom and closeup and other similar works by Chris Jordan, may be found at his website. The photos depict such things as 2 million discarded plastic bottles (the number used in the United States every five minutes), a skull made from images of 200,000 packs of cigarettes (the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months), a version of Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" made from 106,000 images of aluminum cans (the number used in the U.S. every 30 seconds), and so forth.

Hat tip to Barry Williams, who posted this on the SKEPTIC list.

UPDATE (June 11, 2009): Jordan gave a TED Talk about his work last year:

Niece of David Miscavige speaks out against Scientology

Jenna Hill, niece of David Miscavige, head of the Church of Scientology, left the church in 2005 (her parents left in 2000). Her main point in this Inside Edition clip is to confirm claims that the church has a policy of "disconnection" that cuts off Scientologists from critical family members outside the church. (I wasn't aware that the Church actually denied that it does this, as it's quite well documented.)

A NY Post story about Hill is a bit more informative than the clip.

UPDATE (April 24, 2008): Jenna Miscavige Hill is now one of the admins at the Ex-Scientology Kids website.