Official: U.S. foes 'eating our lunch' online
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The man nominated to head public diplomacy at the State Department said Wednesday that al Qaeda is doing a better job than the Bush administration in winning friends over the Internet.
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ON THE NET: An Associated Press survey of file transfer protocol servers run by several government agencies and contractors affiliated with the military found dozens of documents that officials deemed sensitive to U.S. troops.
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The FBI is investigating whether a mid-level Pentagon official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Larry Franklin, passed classified material regarding internal policy deliberations on Iran to two staffers at the American Israel Public Affairs
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Analysis: President Bush invites the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan for a meal, hoping to force President Musharraf to once again choose between the West and the Taliban
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Officials call accusations of intrusions 'Cold War' thinking, according to reports.
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Washington, Dec 8 : An official US memo has described how American special operations task force abused prisoners in Iraq and then threatened the Defence Intelligence Agency agents, who witnessed the mistreatment, from reporting it.
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The United States is concerned over reports that Iranian-made weapons are crossing the Afghan border and reaching Islamist Taliban insurgents, a top U.S. diplomat said on Tuesday.
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The U.S. government has warned U.S. private financial services of an al Qaeda call for a cyber attack against U.S. online stock trading and banking Web sites beginning Friday, officials said.
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(InfoWorld) - Foreign Internet service and applications providers would be required to base inside the country the servers they use for U.S. customers, under a proposal from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ and its U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) division are taking that message to the U.S. Congress and asking lawmakers for a broad rewrite of U.S. wiretapping rules. However, some members of Congress have ripped into the Chinese government for a similar law requiring Internet providers to locate their servers inside its borders. U.S. lawmakers have criticized the Chinese law because it allows the government to censor and monitor Internet traffic. The DOJ proposal, which would amend a 1994 telephone wiretapping law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), aims to allow the U.S. government easier access to servers so it, too, can monitor communications. The proposed law, not yet introduced in Congress, would likely set off an arms race in which other countries that want to conduct online surveillance require U.S. companies such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to locate servers inside their borders, said John Morris, director of the Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group. "There are countries around the world that would like nothing more than have the United States set the example, to say, 'you have to have a point of presence in my country,'" Morris said. The CDT included the DOJ proposal, pitched to lawmakers during the last couple of months,Â on its list of "dangerous" tech proposalsÂ in Congress. The CDT listÂ wasÂ released Thursday. The CDT is concerned that Congress could take up the proposal yet this year as lawmakers look for ways to attract voters before the November general election, CDT officials said. The DOJ press office did not return a phone call seeking comment on the proposal. In February, members of the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee scolded Google, Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. officials for allegedly cooperating with the Chinese government's censorship efforts. A day after that hearing, Representative Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, introduced a bill that would bar U.S. Internet companies from locating Web servers inside "Internet-restricting" countries such as China and Vietnam, with penalties of up to five years in prison and a US$2 million fine for officers of companies that willfully violate the restrictions Smith's Global Online Freedom Act is awaiting action in the committee. Morris called the DOJ proposal "embarrassing" after lawmakers objected strongly to the Chinese law earlier this year. "The proposal has some horrendous provisions," he said. "The point-of-presence proposal itself would be devastating to the American economy." The DOJ proposal would force vendors of any Internet communications applications to redesign their products to allow wiretapping, Morris said. "The harm to innovation that would follow ... is hard to underestimate," he said.
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The State Department entered the crowded blogosphere Wednesday with the launch of &quot;Dipnote,&quot; an Internet chat forum designed to shed cyber-light on US foreign policy.
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Each Tuesday, the US Department of Defense provides an online update of American military casualties (the number of wounded or dead) from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
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The United States said it was releasing documents to the independent panel probing the United Nations' scandal-plagued Iraq oil-for-food program, after the inquiry's chief complained about Washington's cooperation.
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B y the time Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) took his turn early yesterday afternoon, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker had been seated at the witness table for well over three hours. Most members of the Foreign Relations Committee had already left for lunch. Even the war protesters...
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(InfoWorld) - Security vendors are warning that two U.S. Department of State Web sites based in Russia could contain malware and should be avoided. The most serious compromise was on the Web site for the U.S. Consulate General for St. Petersburg. About a week ago, researchers at Sophos PLC discovered that the site had been hacked and was apparently serving up malicious software to visitors. The compromise seems to have been short-lived. By the time researchers were able to check the site manually, the infection had been cleaned up. By looking at a cached version of the page in question, however, they were able to find the malicious code in question. A State Department spokeswoman said she was unaware of any breach. As of Thursday, Sophos customers were still being blocked from accessing the St. Petersburg consulate Web server, which is hosted on the stpetersburg.usconsulate.gov and www.stpetersburg-usconsulate.ru domains. The St. Petersburg consulate site was probably not deliberately targeted because it was one of about 400 sites infected by the criminals behind the hack, said Ron O'Brien, a senior security analyst with Sophos." The malware writer was looking for vulnerable sites and happened upon that site," he said. Attackers were using these compromised servers to install Trojan software on victim's computers, O'Brien said. "It was a malware that allowed for remote access and it also attempted to download additional malware from a remote server." These type of Web-based attacks have become increasingly common over the past years as criminals have created a number of kits, designed to lure victims to compromised Web sites and where unauthorized software is installed on their PCs. Webattacker is the best-known of these kits. Separately, McAfee's SiteAdvisor software is now warning Web surfers not to visit the State Department's Moscow embassy Web site. According to a SiteAdvisor alert, this site has been associated with e-mail messages that contained computer viruses. "After entering our e-mail address on this site ... we received two e-mails that contained a virus," McAfee said in the alert.
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BAQUBAH, Iraq -- The US commander meets with a former general in Saddam Hussein's army over lunch, promises weapons, and wishes him a return to high office. For both men, the conversation comes at great risk, and neither knows whether the other is an ally or an enemy.
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We'll need a whole bunch of expensive stuff Sources in Washington have indicated that the cyber attack last June which targeted the office of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was conducted by the Chinese military.â¦
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U.S. intelligence officials are cautioning that popular Internet services that enable computer users to adopt cartoon-like personas in three-dimensional online spaces also are creating security vulnerabilities by opening novel ways for terrorists and criminals to move money, organize and conduct...