Since the publication of that report, there have been several new developments which provide further evidence that Blue Coat technologies are in use in the Burma. These new findings are documented in a new Citizen Lab blog post, Behind Blue Coat: An Update from Burma.

In recent weeks, users of Burmese ISP Yatanarpon Teleport have been presented with a network status message in their web browser which refers to Blue Coat systems. This message is consistent with the manner in which Blue Coat devices present notification messages to users. These findings contribute further evidence that Blue Coat devices are actively in use in Burma.

The Citizen Lab continues to call on Blue Coat to investigate these claims and take action to prevent the further use of its technology in Syria and Burma.

Click here to read the full update.

Do #occupywallstreet and its siblings across the globe represent a new type of social mobilization? What is the role of social media in the organization, unfolding, and diffusion of the protests? Here I argue that, as a result of the diffusion of social media, we have now entered the age of cloud protesting, where individuals and networked collective action have taken central stage.

In computing, “cloud” indicates the delivery of services such as storage space and software over a network, typically the Internet. Services can be customized with overall reduction of costs for the end user. Everything, from databases to personal document folders, is online, and organizations can reach their resources stored remotely through a web interface.

What has the cloud to do with protesting? Contemporary protest is best described as a cloud where a set of ingredients enabling mobilization coexist: identities, narratives, frames and meanings, know-how, and other “soft” resources. They are fundamentally different from the “old” pre-packaged ideals and beliefs soaked in ideology, because they can be customized by and for individuals. Resources are in the cloud to be shared in a ‘pick and choose’ fashion, allowing each individual to tailor his or her participation. Anyone can join anytime; one can bring along his or her identity, cultural and political background, grievances and claims, and even groups of friends. Anyone fits in the broad narrative of the cloud, anyone can contribute. Identities, resources, narratives are negotiated on and offline, but they mostly “live” online. They are mediated by the web interface offered by commercial social media.

How have organizational patterns changed: From organizations to informal groups to individuals

Focusing our attention on organizational patterns, we can identify three phases in Western social mobilization after WWII. During the mass protests in the 1960s, people took the streets under the aegis of students groups, anti-war organizations, identity-based or church groups – all of them characterized by a strong sense of belonging and clear-cut membership. The so-called social movement organizations steered the crowds, and monopolized the symbolic production of the movement(s), managing resources like funding and championing a joint narrative. They were the voice and the entrepreneurs of social movements, providing a collective identity and leadership. They also served as access points for journalists and news media. In short, formal groupings had organizational control over the movement.

In the second half of the 1990s new organizational patterns emerged, spurred by the diffusion of the Internet, which became the backbone and metaphor of new ways of organizing. Informal groups and networks characterized by multiple and flexible identities, temporary nodes and horizontal leadership, staged noisy protests and disruptive actions against global summits and multilateral institutions. Easily mobilized and connected across borders through the Internet, the movement(s) became transnational. What was new was the informal character of most of the actions, still however anchored to (informal) groups and collectives. The cultural and normative production of the movement(s), a crucial step towards norm change, which all movements seek, was no longer monopolized by resource-rich large-scale organizations, but the different nodes would voice their claims and build their narratives in a number of scattered websites and online self-organized platforms, bypassing mainstream media.

Partially inspired by the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, protesters are now back to the streets. They protest against financial inequality; express disaffection towards institutions of all kinds; reclaim recognition and participation. But organizational patterns have changed again. Activists seem to reject pre-packaged non-negotiable identities and organizations. Movement networks are no longer the exclusive terrain of membership-based organizations or loosely organized groups, but many of the nodes are individuals. The cloud reduces the costs of mobilization by offering resources that can be accessed and enjoyed independently by individual activists: solidarity networks, a relaxed affiliation working on an individual basis, the option to reclaim and reinvent a collective space (both virtual and real), an occasion for self-expression, and the possibility to customize one’s own participation and narrative. The cloud is also the platform where the cultural and symbolic production of the movement takes place. There is no need for (and no means of) organizational control over the collective narrative of the protest, as the cloud ‘votes’ and collectively determines what fits and what does not. The cloud is the group: it provides a (perhaps loose) sense of belonging but less responsibility – in short, the cloud has no strings attached.

Why this wouldn’t be possible without social media

Social technologies and platforms are at the core of cloud protesting.

First, social media enables speed in protest organization and diffusion: rallies and sit-ins are called for and organized through Twitter and Facebook, and using smartphones. They unfold on these same platforms as much as they take place in real life. This allows for high-impact disruptive actions that look rather improvised and that can easily make the news. (Yet, this is nothing new – already back in the 1990s scholars observed how the Internet had accelerated the pace at which people organized and protested.)

Second, the cloud is grounded on everyday technology that any of the digital natives, and many of the newbies to social technologies, have right in their pockets. And, as in cloud computing, the user is not expected to have any knowledge of the system, as the friendly interface makes it easy for everyone to participate. It fits resource-poor activists, who would otherwise lack the resources to organize a grand protest.

Third, the cloud has the power to deeply influence not only the nature of the protest, but also the tactics adopted by activists (up to now, mostly peaceful if noisy sit-ins). Essentially, so far the #occupy protests have been about “being there” and making it visible over the Internet. In a sort of late techno-determinist fashion, the visibility offered by social media (and the current fascination of news media for such platforms and their social implications) has enabled the protest to maintain a low profile, and yet be under the mainstream media spotlight.

The fourth and main contribution of social media to the protest is to be found is their ability to enable the creation of a customizable narrative and a tailored collective identity that virtually fit all. Social media allow activists to shape in first person the meanings attached to collective action. This is made possible by two socio-techno-mediatic dynamics at play in contemporary mobilizations: firstly, through social media, protesters actively participate in building a collective identity (in other words, the ‘us’ of the protests). By taking part in the protests and making it visible via, for example, Twitter, each individual becomes the hero of the story. Each participant defines herself, and by extension the mobilization, by means of posts, tweets, links, pictures, short videos. She selects other similar material posted on the web by fellow co-protesters and passes it on (e.g., re-tweets) what she believes is exciting, interesting, appropriate to the collective representation of “who we are”. In addition, anyone can easily identify with the network of individuals engaged in the protests as the collective identity is built on minimum common denominators and ephemeral 140-character slogans rather than ideological strongholds. Secondly, social media give voice and visibility to personalized yet universal narratives, whereby everyone participates in building the collective plot. This hashtag-style collective narrative (a tag is a keyword assigned to a piece of information to make sense of it by assigning it to categories) is flexible, real-time, and crowd-controlled. It connects individual stories into a broader context that gives them meaning. This is not very different from the role played by “real-life” groups in relation to individual participation in a movement. In turn, it scores very low in organizational control – thus, the cloud leaves little room for “classical” social movement organizations.

To conclude, the #occupy protests do represent a new type of social mobilization which has brought individuals (and their individualized media) to the forefront of dissent. These protests might even represent the nucleus of an embryonic new social movement wave. It is worth observing how they will develop in the near future to trace if and how the specific socio-technological configuration of the protest, the cloud, influences the mobilization outcomes and the future tactical choices of activists.

It is also worth observing the evolution of the perception of risks and benefits associated with social media platforms. Cloud protesting is an indication of a (relatively) new awareness for the role of digital and mobile technology not only as a tool for networking and organizing, but as backbone of the cultural and normative production of the movement. Unfortunately, protesters seem to be disconnected from earlier generations of computer-savvy activists who would be wary of relying on commercial platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Groups. There seems to be still little awareness of the risks in terms of cybersurveillance and repression of dissent these technologies and platforms expose activists to, and many people seem to ignore that social media can also become a tool of social control.

¶40. (U) Worldwide – Has “GhostNet” been seen within the USG?

¶41. (S//REL TO USA, FVEY) Key highlights:
o Canadian researchers recently identified a “cyber-espionage” network.
o Domain names identified in the IWM report have been identified during previous BH activity.
o Tenuous connections were made between the reported hostile domains and the PLA First TRB.
o The Gh0st RAT tool used in Tibetan attacks has also been detected in incidents involving a DoS LES in Japan.

¶42. (U) Source paragraph: “A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded. … The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.”

For the full cable, see here.

Chinese computer hackers, some linked to the military, engaged in an aggressive international campaign of electronic espionage through the Internet from 2003 through at least 2009, according to documents obtained by Inside the Ring.

The electronic spying campaign targeted large amounts of data and information from U.S. government and private sector networks, as well as from the French and German governments, other states and international organizations.

The documents, labeled “secret,” provide some of the first details to be made public on Chinese cyberspying and reveal a U.S. government program to monitor and halt the activity that was code-named “Byzantine Hades.”

The disclosure is the first official U.S. government report linking global computer hacking to China’s military.

For the full article, see here.

According to an official DOJ report, the use of “emergency”, warrantless requests to ISPs for customer communications content has skyrocketed over 400% in a single year.

The 2009 report, which was recently obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request (it took DOJ 11 months to give the two-page report), reveals that law enforcement agencies within the Department of Justice sought and obtained communications content for 91 accounts. This number is a significant increase over previous years: 17 accounts in 2008, 9 accounts in 2007, and 17 accounts in 2006.

For the full article, see here.

The Pentagon has plans to tap social networking websites to secure information, to detect and track the spread of ideas, enabling them to counter any upcoming threats.

According to the Washington Post, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the Pentagon, has announced that the authorities are looking for people proficient in social networking that could help them research and build strategic programs accordingly.

The DARPA has revealed that the organisation is willing to spend $42 million on the research and development program, as the US defense agency is looking to reach a new level with its intelligence division by keeping a track on the millions using social media.

A hypothetical situation was put forward in its solicitation by the DARPA to illustrate the sort of situation which might arise: “Rumors about the location of a certain individual began to spread in social media space and calls for storming the rumored location reached a fever pitch. By chance, responsible authorities were monitoring the social media, detected the crisis building, sent out effective messaging to dispel the rumors and averted a physical attack on the rumored location.”

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For full original article, see here

The Pentagon is developing plans to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as both a resource and a weapon in future conflicts. Its research and development agency is offering $42 million in funding to anyone who can help.

Social media will change the nature of warfare just as surely as the telegraph, the radio and the telephone did, and the Pentagon is fearful of being caught short. Some of its goals were laid out in a document being circulated among potential researchers and is to be presented at a briefing on Tuesday in Arlington, Va., at the offices of the military contractor System Planning Corporation.

As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale.

For the full article, see here.

Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.

The good news? It hasn’t gone before the full House yet.

The bad news: it already made it through committee. And history shows that in times of moral panic, overly broad legislation has a way of becoming law. In fact, a particular moment comes to mind.

In the early 20th Century, a different moral panic gripped the United States: a rural nation was rapidly moving to anonymous cities, sexual mores were changing, and Americans became convinced that an epidemic of white female slavery was sweeping the land. Thus a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport any person across state lines for prostitution “or for any other immoral purpose.” Suddenly premarital sex and adultery had been criminalized, as scam artists would quickly figure out. “Women would lure male conventioneers across a state line, say from New York to Atlantic City, New Jersey,” David Langum* explains, “and then threaten to expose them to the prosecutors for violation” unless paid off. Inveighing against the law, the New York Times noted that, though it was officially called the White Slave Traffic Act (aka The Mann Act), a more apt name would’ve been “the Encouragement of Blackmail Act.”

For full original article, see here.

Hackers flying the AntiSec banner today released what they said was 400 megabytes of internal data from a government cybersecurity contractor, ManTech, as part of their campaign to embarrass the FBI every Friday, as well as target other government agencies and their partners.

“Today is Friday and we will be following the tradition of humiliating our friends from the FBI once again. This time we hit one of their biggest contractors for cyber security: Mantech International Corporation,” the hackers said in a statement on PirateBay.

“What ManTech has to do with the FBI? Well, quite simple: In Summer 2010 the FBI had the glorious idea to outsource their Cybersecurity to ManTech. Value of the contract: 100 Million US-Dollar,” the statement said. The batch of documents mostly involves NATO, another ManTech client, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. military branches, and the State and Justice departments, according to the hackers. There was a rumor on Twitter that one of the files in the data release contains a Trojan horse, but another Twitter post said that was a false positive.

ManTech representatives did not return a call seeking comment earlier in the day when the hackers had merely threatened to release ManTech data, and its Fairfax, Va., office was closed when the data was released in the afternoon.

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For full original article, see here

U.S. government cyber security experts are warning that the Stuxnet virus could become more menacing, more than a year after it surfaced in an attack believed to be targeted against Iran’s nuclear program.

The Department of Homeland Security has spent the past year studying the sophisticated malicious software, the first of its type designed to attack computer systems that control industrial processes, two officials said in testimony prepared for a congressional hearing.

Stuxnet targeted industrial control systems sold by Siemens that are widely used around the globe to manage everything from nuclear power generators and chemical factories to water distribution systems and pharmaceuticals plants.

“This code can automatically enter a system, steal the formula for the product being manufactured, alter the ingredients being mixed in the product, and indicate to the operator and the operator’s anti-virus software that everything is functioning normally,” the officials said. (For full written testimony click: http://bit.ly/mQxhFU )

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For full original article, see here