Ubiwar . conflict in n dimensions. Space. Grande-Bretagne: caméras partout, résultats nulle part. Goéland et caméra de vidéosurveillance (Môsieur J. /Flickr). « La vidéosurveillance est inefficace », affirment les criminologues britanniques depuis maintenant plus de dix ans. La Grande-Bretagne, qui compte 4 millions de caméras, constitue un terrain privilégié pour les chercheurs. Problèmes de positionnement des caméras (trop près, ou trop loin, d’une source de lumière la nuit, par exemple), manque de formation des opérateurs, faible nombre d’écrans de visionnage par caméra (ce qui revient à dire que la plupart des images transmises ne sont tout simplement jamais affichées), les raisons ne manquent pas pour expliquer le bilan calamiteux de la vidéosurveillance.
Paradoxalement cependant, c’est surtout le fait de prêter à la vidéosurveillance une efficacité automatique qui la rend complètement inopérante. Une trop grande quantité d’informations à traiter Le rapport final du programme de recherche Européen « Urbaneye » résume ainsi la situation : Alors, inoffensives, les caméras ? CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police | UK news | The. Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned.
Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe. The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include: · A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders. · Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month. · Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects.
"CCTV operators need feedback. Jihadis Search for Intelligence Penetration on Jihadi Website Fo. Publication: Terrorism Monitor Volume: 7 Issue: 25 August 13, 2009 02:52 PM Age: 5 yrs Category: Terrorism Monitor, Global Terrorism Analysis, Home Page, Military/Security, Terrorism Periodically jihadi internet gatherings raise concerns about scrutiny of their forums by security services. Investigations into the identity of forum members and their promotion and initiation of sensitive jihadi issues trigger these concerns.
A recent posting entitled “The top seven Arab countries that intrude on or penetrate the Forums” accused some Western security services of monitoring jihadi forums and suggested ways to identify security agents who may be active in the forums (muslm.net, July 29-August 3). A forum participant, nicknamed al-Taer al-Maymoon, warns that the secret services of seven Arab countries have a permanent presence in jihadi forums in general and in muslm.net in particular. . • The Zionist State (i.e. . • China: Preparing an infrastructure to understand the Islamic mindset. OMG! ZOG Is Watching! The recent edition of the Jamestown Foundation's [ pdf ] contains an article by Abdul Hameed Bakier, ' Jihadis Search for Intelligence Penetration on Jihadi Website Forums '.
Citing directly from members of the muslm.net forum, Bakier describes just how paranoid the pyjamahideen are about infiltration by a wide variety of intelligence agencies. In the Arab world, almost everyone is apparently monitoring the forums for operational intelligence or for material they can exchange with Western countries 'waging war on Islam'. Bizarrely, the Palestinian National Authority is accused of selling intel to the 'Zionists'. There is also a surprisingly short list of non-Arab states: UK, US, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, China and, of course, Israel. Forumite al-Taer al-Maymoon provides a handy checklist of telltale signs to identify infiltrating agents.
[h/t Thoughts of a Technocrat ] Cyber security moves up the terrorism agenda. Cyber Terrorism Premiums. In 2007, John Robb wrote a short book, (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.), which has been largely ignored in mainstream terrorism literature. Elsewhere, it has received a lot of attention, principally amongst students of fourth-generation warfare (4GW: 'networks against states) and fifth-generation warfare (5GW: 'networks against networks). This includes a lot of military thinkers, particularly in the US. At one point in the book, Robb talks about 'urban takedowns' (pp.108-110), in which he describes how cities―as the hubs of modern economies―operate effectively through market equilibria of costs and benefits.
If disruption occurs―such as in the form of terrorism―the costs may begin to outweigh the benefits, and the effect of this might be viewed as a form of tax (based on an idea by Harrigan & Martin ): I have nothing profound to offer in response to this. Political Hacking, State Responses? Just in the last month or so, there has been a spate of reports illustrating the offensive use of the internet by politically or religiously motivated hackers.
In China, the Uighur ‘Spy HackerZ’ group is suspected of defacing a number of local government websites, leaving messages in support of Uighurs and Muslims. Indonesian hackers claim to haveattacked dozens of Malaysian websites on Malaysia’s independence day, calling it payback for Malays ‘stealing’ their culture. Islamist hackers are thought to be behind a more serious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)attack on Kosavar newspaper, The Express, in response to the paper’s coverage of the US trial of Hysen Sherifi, an ethnic Albanian accused of terrorism offences. Disruptions to Armenian government and high-profile private websites have been blamed on Azeri and Turkish hackers, and are probably related to the long-running dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.
What News of the UK Cyber Strategy? The first, an Office of Cyber Security (OCS), would oversee the whole of the Government’s cyber security strategy and foreign co-operation, working from within the Cabinet Office. The second, a Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), would be based at GCHQ in Cheltenham, hub of the UK’s SIGINT capability. This would monitor internet ‘health’, conduct attack analysis, and develop appropriate responses, as well as inform the public and industry about online security risks. Both were supposed to be established this month, in order to be operational by March 2010.
So, what’s happened so far? Anything from the Cabinet Office on its progress with the OCS? In fact, try as I might, I can find no reliable information about either unit published after June 2009. Yesterday, the Centre for Secure Information Studies (CSIT) was opened at Queen’s University Belfast to lead the way in the UK’s fight against cyber crime, but this initiative is separate from the Cyber Security Strategy. 'Crystal Clear' Emails. Not. Richard Hermer QC, for XC, criticised the case against his client and said it contained “not one jot of evidence” linking him to bomb-making.
The Government’s evidence file was made up of eight emails sent or received between December last year and April, markings on an A-Z, and observations of XC meeting with friends, he said. Analysis by the Security Service (MI5) of the emails suggested the words “weak and difficult to convince” referred to a low-concentration explosive liquid, and “crystal clear” to other chemicals – despite being used in the context of a normal conversation about women, Mr Hermer said. In putting such an interpretation on “entirely innocuous” emails, the Government was guilty of imposing a hidden meaning where there was none, Mr Hermer said. “If you look for meaning and that’s the purpose for which you do it, that’s bias.
What’s missing is any consideration of the evidence as to whether there is a totally benign explanation for the messages.” Well, quite. Is the UK Safer Now, Or Not? I was sitting in a Home Office seminar yesterday when someone mentioned in offhand fashion that the UK’s terrorism threat level had changed. MI5 and the cross-agency Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) have reduced the threat level from ‘severe’ – where an attack is deemed highly likely – to ‘substantial’, where an attack is considered a strong possibility. This might seem like linguistic tweaking but has evidently been the result of a significant intelligence assessment. The ‘severe’ assessment is the lowest the national security footing has been at since 9/11 – the threat level has oscillated between severe and critical since August 2006, when it was first made public.
Alan Johnson, current Home Secretary, had this to say: ‘The change in the threat level to substantial does not mean the overall threat has gone away – there remains a real and serious threat against the United Kingdom and I would ask that the public remain vigilant.’ The question is a straw man. Rehabilitating the Hacker for National Security P. LAS VEGAS, Nevada – The City of Lights is permanently bathed in a wash of flickering neon but over at the Riviera Hotel and Casino the air is charged with electronic transfers of a different kind, in an atmosphere the hosts gleefully describe as ‘hostile’.
Welcome to DEFCON 17, the 2009 incarnation of the world’s largest and most prestigious hackers’ convention, running annually since 1993. Your correspondent is no hacker, he freely admits. My netbook remains locked away at my hotel, many blocks from the mischievous Riviera airwaves. It was with some trepidation that I took my Blackberry through the gilt doors even. At any given time there are probably several thousand hackers attending talks and giving demonstrations of the newest and best ways to exploit networked information systems and hardware. As well as computer-based activities, talk is turning in the hacker community as to how to hack the human organism and biology in general.
But this is exactly the situation here. Online Radicalisation 'Down Under' Australia has been one of the most proactive democracies in the world in implementing network-level filtering of a variety of content types. Although the Rudd government has stuck to its line in invoking child protection and ‘offensive’ material as the raison d’être for its widely-criticised policy, there is little doubt that, as we suggested would happen with such a system, the filtering techniques deployed in trials have blocked access to a lot of other types of material also. It was therefore quite refreshing to read the ASPI transcripts and see that they suggest that filtering is not the way forward in interdicting access to ‘extremist’ material online.
They also recommend caution in adopting legalistic approaches, citing difficulties with human rights, and extant and problematic anti-terrorism laws. ASPI argue that freedom of speech is a far more powerful tool in countering radicalisation than its suppression. Conflict and the Cloud. Although the ‘cloud’ is a catch-all term for an amorphous assemblage of computing resources it essentially refers to the transfer of products and services from the desktop to the network.
In this model, your computer would effectively be a browser from which you access all the resources we usually associate with the desktop. The logical extension of this is a computer with minimal processing power, used to access all the software and storage which is run from distant servers. To deploy a common example: a home Outlook email client runs on your desktop as a stand-alone software package, whereas Gmail is accessed through your browser. Gmail is in the cloud, Outlook is not. Gmail is a good example of where the cloud might be heading – although the cloud will initially be distributed, commercial interests and practical considerations will probably lead to the formation of information hubs, like the Gmail servers. The Other Obama Speech. The speech launched the highly anticipated Cyberspace Policy Review: Assuring a Trusted and Resilient Information and Communications Infrastructure, a document with much to commend it.
The US administration seems to have grasped the idea that security need not compromise human rights, a concept sorely lacking during the Bush years and, one might add, the New Labour years in the UK also. In particular, Obama had this to say: Let me also be clear about what we will not do. Our pursuit of cybersecurity will not – I repeat, will not include – monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans. Indeed, I remain firmly committed to net neutrality so we can keep the Internet as it should be – open and free.
I applaud the sentiment but the internet, through a combination of political and commercial interests, is demonstrably not open or free. Pull the plug on Hezbollah TV. Hezbollah TV Still OK in Australia. There’s a minor row brewing in Australia over radicalisation, terrorism and the internet. Oz telecom watchdogs, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) have declared that Hezbollah’s al-Manar television station does not contravene ACMA’s own anti-terrorism regulations. It’s unclear from the coverage of this issue exactly how Australians are accessing al-Manar, but we must assume that the internet is the principal vehicle. Al-Manar also comes bundled with other obscure channels as part of subscription packages (by Indonesian provider, PT Indosat ). It certainly isn’t available as standard.
The complaint of lobby groups and others is that in the same week as Australia came face-to-face with its own homegrown terrorists , ACMA found that a proscribed terrorist organisation’s ‘public service’ output did not fall foul of Australian media guidelines. It may be true that ACMA’s sample was too small. I’m not in favour of quangos determining what people can and cannot view. G8 Declaration on Counter Terrorism July 2009 « The Lift – Legal. G8 on Countering Online Radicalisation. Defense Secretary Orders Cyberspace Command -- Cybersecurity -- Initiative aims to unify offense and defense in cyberspace under U.S. military command and enable responses "in Internet time rather than bureaucratic time. " Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday issued an order establishing the U.S. Cyber Command to oversee military cyberspace operations. "Cyberspace and its associated technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to the United States and are vital to our nation's security and, by extension, to all aspects of military operations," the memo says.
"Yet our increasing dependency on cyberspace, alongside a growing array of cyberthreats and vulnerabilities, adds a new element of risk to our national security. " To address that risk, the memo continues, the Department of Defense must have a command focused on cyberspace that can coordinate online military operations around the globe while also supporting civil authorities and international partners. Gates' order wasn't unexpected. Cybercom – Militarising Your Cyberspace?