(via criminalwisdom)

• Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China.
• The attacks have also hit government and military institutions in the United States, where analysts said that the West had no effective response and that EU systems were especially vulnerable because most cyber security efforts were left to member states.
• Nato diplomatic sources told The Times: “Everyone has been made aware that the Chinese have become very active with cyber-attacks and we’re now getting regular warnings from the office for internal security.” The sources said that the number of attacks had increased significantly over the past 12 months, with China among the most active players.
• In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.
• Robert Mueller, FBI Director, has warned that, in addition to the danger of foreign states making cyber-attacks, al-Qaeda could in the future pose a similar threat. In a speech to a security conference last week, Mr Mueller said terrorist groups had used the internet to recruit members and to plan attacks, but added: “Terrorists have shown a clear interest in pursuing hacking skills and they will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders with an eye towards combining physical attacks with cyber-attacks.”
• He said that a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a “well-placed bomb”. Mr Mueller also accused “nation-state hackers” of seeking out US technology, intelligence, intellectual property and even military weapons and strategies…
• Dr Lewis said that neither the US nor any of its Western allies had formed an effective response to the Chinese threat, which has its origins in a massive boost to Chinese technology ordered by Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, in 1986. The West’s own cyber offensives have so far been directed largely at terrorists rather than nation states, giving China virtually free rein to penetrate Western systems with its own world-class hackers and increasingly popular Chinese-made components. “You almost have to admire them,” Dr Lewis said. “They have been very consistent in their goals.”

Related:

e9/11 Preparation: Bush Officials Plan Simulated Cyber-Attack

Pentagon-Backed Venture Aims for ‘Google Underground’

• The Department of Defense already has omnipresent eyes in the sky, underwater and, of course, on the ground. It’s only when you start going underground that the surveillance powers of the Pentagon begin to wane — at least until now.
• Just last month, the Pentagon’s risk-taking research arm, DARPA, announced plans for a program called ‘Transparent Earth’. They’re spending $4 million this year on preliminary plans for a digital, 3D map that would display “the physical, chemical and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 kilometer depth.”
• But Geospatial Corporation is already doing it. The company, started in 2005 by longtime water-pipeline manufacturer Mark Smith, uses a proprietary gadget called  ‘Smart Probe’ to map deep earth via underground pipes. The company’s probe can be inserted into pipes as small as 1 1/2 inches, and then travel their length while taking super-speedy coordinates — 800 per second — and saving them onto a USB key. The probe is removed, the data extracted, and a 3D map of the underground region is created. The probe can travel through pipes that are empty, or contain fluid or gas.

(nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide!)

• The 11th annual “Mad Scientist” Future Technology seminar from 20 – 23 January 2010 addressed the challenge of blended S&T surprise. Specifically, it brought together a dynamic group of scientists, science fiction writers, futurists, academicians and students from the private sector and government to look into the future and explore ideas about the “blending” of science and technology in ways that might challenge the United States. This executive summary provides an overview of the judgments, insights and implications from that seminar.

Robot wars, out of control nanotech, EMP bombs/guns, dark webs, Mad Scientist futures, all the good stuff.

• WASHINGTON – A California man killed in a shootout with Pentagon police drove cross-country and arrived outside the military headquarters armed with two semiautomatic weapons, authorities said Friday. The shooter apparently left behind angry, anti-government Internet postings airing suspicions about the 9/11 attacks.
• John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was named as the gunman in the Thursday evening attack. Authorities said he’d had previous run-ins with the law.
• “He came here from California,” Keevill said. “We were able to identify certain locations that he spent that last several weeks making his way from the West coast to the East coast.”
• Keevill said he did not know what motivated the shooting: “I have no idea what his intentions were.”
• On a Wikipedia page linked to Bedell, a user by the name JPatrickBedell revealed ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces.
• JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up. Sabow’s family has maintained that he was murdered because he was about to expose covert military operations in Central America involving drug smuggling.
• That posting can be linked to Bedell through court documents matching the shooter’s birth date but Keevill said Friday that authorities had not made “a final determination” that the shooter was the same Bedell.
• The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”
• That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., involving allegations of cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting.

The FederalJack Free Ebooks Archive.

Declassified Federal Docs, FOIA Requests, Fiction and Non-Fiction Books, Survival Manuals and more.

Stock up, 2010 is going to be a bumpy ride.

• A convict in the Netherlands has succeeded in breaking out of prison with an escape worthy of the movies: She tunneled her way out — with a spoon.
• The public prosecutor’s office confirmed Tuesday that the 35-year-old female prisoner had escaped through a tunnel from a prison in Breda in the southern Netherlands.
• The spectacular prison break was made possible because the convict was no longer housed in a regular cell, but in a separate building on the grounds of the detention center where long-term inmates are prepared for their release and are given more freedoms.
• The woman’s tunnel began in a cellar under the building’s kitchen, with its entrance concealed by a removable hatch. According to Dutch public broadcaster NOS, the police are assuming that the fugitive had at least one accomplice, who is believed to have loosened paving stones that were part of a sidewalk next to the detention center, allowing the prisoner to emerge from her tunnel.
• The convict was serving time for murder and still had another 22 months of her sentence to go, according to NOS. She was reported to still be on the loose on Tuesday.

((I think Criminal Wisdom will ‘dig’ this.))

• Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach. -via- WSJ Broad New Hacking Attack Detailed.

and the infographic above is how they did it.

‘Operation Titstorm’ a Success

• Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering Wednesday hours after the online prankster group, Anonymous, unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country’s evolution toward internet censorship.
• The group, which has brought down Scientology’s websites and undertaken a host of other online pranks, dubbed the attack “Operation Titstorm” to protest the government’s move to require the filtering of pornography hosting adult actors if they appeared under age. Other violent material targeting children is also to be censored.
• Anonymous, whose past targets include uncool virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a Neo-Nazi webcaster,  sent Australian media e-mail messages warning of the attack, the Sydney Morning Herald said.
• “No government should have the right to refuse its citizens access to information solely because they perceive it to be unwanted,” the e-mail said. “The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn. No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason.”
• At one point Thursday, Parliament’s website was felled after getting 7.5 million hits a second. Usually, it receives a few hundred a second.
• Flyers seeking recruits for Wednesday’s barrage said the group would follow the service attack with “a shitstorm of porn email, fax spam, black faxes and prank phone calls to government offices….”

New York Times: Americans think of the Canadian center as socialism.
Douglas Coupland: Pretty much. To have a healthy culture you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don’t have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
NYT: How would you define the current cultural moment?
DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
NYT: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
DC: They’re not great cultural megatrends like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in the culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.

• Ground breaking surveillance software, Vitamin D Video, is now available for sale at an impressively low price. I had a chance to review the program’s impressive object recognition and recording capabilities when I covered the beta launch a few months ago. This is a really cool application of limited artificial intelligence. Vitamin D Video uses algorithms based on human brain activity to quickly identify objects in a video feed. By setting the controls, you can specify events that will trigger a recording, an email alert, or an audio notice. Vitamin D not only acts like an electronic watchdog for your camera, it can take hours of monotonous footage and reduce it down to a highlight reel you want to watch. During the beta, testers used the program for some really cool applications you can read about on the VDV site. Interested in getting a copy for yourself? It’s free if you only want to use it on one camera. Two cameras and you’ll have to pay $50. Or you can pay $200 and use as many cameras as you like from one computer. That cheap price tag could launch Vitamin D Video to dominate the small business and home market.