MI5 are devoting the greatest amount of their casework to tracking jihadists leaving the UK for Syria - and returning, as Frank Gardner reports
WASHINGTON – House libertarians and liberals banded together for a surprise win in their fight against the secretive National Security Agency, securing support for new curbs on government spying a year after leaker Edward Snowden's disclosures about the bulk collection of millions of Americans' phone records.
Security in the north, where armed groups still operated, has deteriorated
Written By Andy Greenberg (Wired)
One year after the first revelations of Edward Snowden, cryptography has shifted from an obscure branch of computer science to an almost mainstream notion: It’s possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.
But it’s also possible to go a step closer toward true privacy online. Mere encryption hides the content of messages, but not who’s communicating. Use cryptographic anonymity tools to hide your identity, on the other hand, and network eavesdroppers may not even know where to find your communications, let alone snoop on them. “Hide in the network,” security guru Bruce Schneier made his first tip for evading the NSA. “The less obvious you are, the safer you are.”
Though it’s hardly the sole means of achieving online anonymity, the software known as Tor has become the most vouchsafed and developer-friendly method for using the Internet incognito. The free and open source program triple-encrypts your traffic and bounces it through computers around the globe, making tracing it vastly more difficult. Most Tor users know the program as a way to anonymously browse the Web. But it’s much more. In fact, Tor’s software runs in the background of your operating system and creates a proxy connection that links with the Tor network. A growing number of apps and even operating systems provide the option to route data over that connection, allowing you to obscure your identity for practically any kind of online service.
Some users are even experimenting with using Tor in almost all their communications. “It’s like being a vegetarian or a vegan,” says Runa Sandvik, a privacy activist and former developer for Tor. “You don’t eat certain types of food, and for me I choose to use Tor only. I like the idea that when I log onto a website, it doesn’t know where I’m located, and it can’t track me.”
Here’s how you can use the growing array of anonymity tools to protect more of your life online.
Web Browsing
The core application distributed for free by the non-profit Tor Project is the Tor Browser, a hardened, security-focused version of Firefox that pushes all of your Web traffic through Tor’s anonymizing network. Given the three encrypted jumps that traffic takes between computers around the world, it may be the closest thing to true anonymity on the Web. It’s also rather slow. But the Tor browser is getting faster, says Micah Lee, a privacy-focused technologist who has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation—one of the organizations that funds the Tor Project—and First Look Media. For the past month or so, he’s tried to use it as his main browser and only switch back to traditional browsers occasionally, mostly for flash sites and others that require plugins.
After about a week, he says, the switch was hardly noticeable. “It may not be entirely necessary, but I haven’t found it that inconvenient either,” Lee says. “And it does have real privacy benefits. Everyone gets tracked everywhere they go on the Web. You can opt of out of that.”
Email
The simplest way to anonymously send email is to use a webmail service in the Tor Browser. Of course, that requires signing up for a new webmail account without revealing any personal information, a difficult task given that Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail all require a phone number.
Runa Sandvik suggests Guerrilla Mail, a temporary, disposable email service. Guerrilla Mail lets you set up a new, random email address with only a click. Using it in the Tor Browser ensures that no one, not even Guerrilla Mail, can connect your IP address with that ephemeral email address.
Encrypting messages with webmail can be tough, however. It often requires the user to copy and paste messages into text windows and then use PGP to scramble and unscramble them. To avoid that problem, Lee instead suggests a different email setup, using a privacy-focused email host like Riseup.net, the Mozilla email app Thunderbird, the encryption plugin Enigmail, and another plugin called TorBirdy that routes its messages through Tor.
Instant Messaging
Adium and Pidgin, the most popular Mac and Windows instant messaging clients that support the encryption protocol OTR, also support Tor. (See how to enable Tor in Adium here and in Pidgin here.) But the Tor Project is working to create an IM program specifically designed to be more secure and anonymous. That Tor IM client, based on a program called Instant Bird, was slated for release in March but is behind schedule. Expect an early version in mid-July.
Large File Transfers
Google Drive and Dropbox don’t promise much in the way of privacy. So Lee created Onionshare, open-source software that lets anyone directly send big files via Tor. When you use it to share a file, the program creates what’s known as a Tor Hidden Service—a temporary, anonymous website—hosted on your computer. Give the recipient of the file the .onion address for that site, and they can securely and anonymously download it through their Tor Browser.
Mobile Devices
Anonymity tools for phones and tablets are far behind the desktop but catching up fast. The Guardian Project created an app called Orbot that runs Tor on Android. Web browsing, email and IM on the phone can all be set to use Orbot’s implementation of Tor as a proxy.
Apple users don’t yet have anything that compares. But a 99-cent app called Onion Browser in the iOS app store offers anonymous web access from iPhones and iPads. An audit by Tor developers in April revealed and helped fix some of the program’s vulnerabilities. But Sandvik suggests that prudent users should still wait for more testing. In fact, she argues that the most sensitive users should stick with better-tested desktop Tor implementations. “If I were in a situation where I needed anonymity, mobile is not a platform I’d rely on,” she says.
Everything Else
Even if you run Tor to anonymize every individual Internet application you use, your computer might still be leaking identifying info online. The NSA has even used unencrypted Windows error messages sent to Microsoft to finger users and track their identities. And an attacker can compromise a web page you visit and use it to deliver an exploit that breaks out of your browser and sends an unprotected message revealing your location.
So for the truly paranoid, Lee and Sandvik recommend using entire operating systems designed to send every scrap of information they communicate over Tor. The most popular Tor OS is Tails, or The Amnesiac Incognito Live System. Tails can boot from a USB stick or DVD so no trace of the session remains on the machine, and anonymizes all information. Snowden associates have said the NSA whistleblower is himself a fan of the software.
For the even more paranoid, there is a lesser-known Tor-enabled OS called Whonix. Whonix creates multiple “virtual machines” on the user’s computer—software versions of full computer operating systems that are designed to be indistinguishable from a full computer. Any attacker trying to compromise the user’s computer will be confined to that virtual machine.
That virtualization trick underlines an important point for would-be anonymous Internet users, Lee says: If your computer gets hacked, the game is over. Creating a virtual sandbox around your online communications is one way to keep the rest of your system protected.
“Tor is awesome and can make you anonymous. But if your endpoint gets compromised, your anonymity is compromised too,” he says. “If you really need to be anonymous, you also need to be really secure."
The Nigerian government’s 'Safe School Initiative' has received a boost of N3.2 billion.
The sum is made of two parts of N1.6 billion released by the federal government and another N1.6 billion donated by the private sector.
Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala made the disclosure on Tuesday after a meeting of stakeholders of the initiative with President Jonathan in Abuja.
The Safe School Initiative is expected to accommodate children displaced from their schools due to the present insurgency rocking the country. The over 200 girls who were kidnapped in Chibok two months ago are to benefit from these funds.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said, “We are intent on trying to make sure that our children in the states have an environment in which they can come back to school and not have their education truncated.”
Special Envoy to the UN Secretary General for Global Education, Gordon Brown said the reconstruction of the secondary school in Chibok is paramount to the United Nations.
“I am here to say that we wish as an international community to do everything we can to back up the efforts of President Goodluck Jonathan and the governors of the states to make sure these girls are returned to their families and at the same time to make sure, that every parent feels that they can send their children to school knowing that they will be safe in the future.”
Yobe and Borno governors said they are committed to making the initiative a huge success.
Ibrahim Geidam, Yobe state governor, said, “I promise to give him all the necessary cooperation to ensure that the programme succeeds.”
Kashim Shettima, Borno state governor, said, “Times like this calls for sobriety, for maturity, for unity of purpose. At the appropriate time we are going to play politics, but this is not time to play politics with the lives of the people.”
The federal government and the international community are bent on encouraging displaced students back to school.
The suspected ringleader of the September 2012 raid on a US diplomatic post in the Libyan city of Benghazi, which left four Americans dead, has been captured, the Pentagon says.
Ahmed Abu Khattala was taken into custody in a secret US military raid in Libya on 15 June.
He is now being held in a secure location outside the country, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed.
US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed in the attack.
"There were no civilian casualties related to this operation, and all US personnel involved in the operation have safely departed Libya," Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm John Kirby wrote in a statement.
He refused to give further details about the US raid, only to say it happened "near Benghazi" and on Sunday afternoon US east coast time.
Ahmed Abu Khattala
•Native of Benghazi in eastern Libya
•Construction worker by trade
•Spent several years in Col Muammar Gaddafi's notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli
•Formed his own small militia during the anti-Gaddafi uprising
•Denies any links to al-Qaeda but has expressed admiration for it
•Also denies any role in the attack on the US embassy in 2012, but eyewitnesses report him being there
•US state department says he is a senior leader in Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia
After the announcement, President Barack Obama praised the courage and professionalism of the military, law enforcement and intelligence personnel who tracked and captured Mr Abu Khattala, whom the US describes as a "key figure" in the attack.
"When Americans are attacked, no matter how long it takes we will find those responsible and we will bring them to justice," he said.
President Obama: "When Americans are attacked, no matter how long it takes, we will find those responsible and we will bring them to justice''
The FBI Director, James Comey, said his organisation would not stop searching until the other suspects were found.
"We never ever give up and we will work and work until justice is done. And I think this is a down payment on that statement."
Mr Abu Khattala has been charged in a federal court in Washington DC with killing a person in the course of an attack on a federal facility, providing material support to terrorists, and a firearms count, court records show.
He is currently being held on a US ship, Reuters reports. Some Republicans, including Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain, have argued he should be sent to the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay. But US officials rejected that move.
"We have not added a single person to the GTMO population since President Obama took office, and we have had substantial success delivering swift justice to terrorists through our federal court system," National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement.
Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time and been criticised by Republicans over the embassy's security arrangements, said questioning Khatalla could shed some light on what happened and why.
On 11 September 2012, gunmen stormed the US consulate in Benghazi and set it on fire.
In addition to Mr Stevens, information technology specialist Sean Smith and security workers and ex-Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed.
The White House initially said the attack stemmed from anti-American protests over a crude video produced in the US that was deemed insulting to Islam.
Analysis
Rana Jawad, BBC News, Libya
This is the second raid of its kind to be carried out by American special forces on Libyan territory.
Ahmed Abu Khattala is an Islamist militia commander who heads the Benghazi-based Ansar Al Sharia group. A source close to the hard-line Islamist group told the BBC they knew he was captured two days ago but were not aware the Americans were going to take him.
He claims Abu Khattala's capture was carried out by forces led by the renegade Gen Khalifa Hefter in Benghazi. This could not be independently confirmed.
Gen Hefter has been leading a paramilitary operation in Benghazi against Islamist militias for a month. On 15 June his spokesman claimed they had captured three senior Islamist figures in the city. In October, an American-led operation captured the alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Anas al-Libi from his home in Tripoli. He is now on trial in New York.
Government investigators soon determined it was an organised attack planned by local militias.
In subsequent years, the incident has become a political lightning rod, with Republicans accusing Mr Obama's administration of covering up the involvement of militant groups in the days after the attack in order to assist Mr Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
In May, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to establish what is believed to be the eighth inquiry on Benghazi.
Previous independent, cross-party and Republican-led inquiries have blamed the state department for inadequate security at the embassy.
