Dire warnings of a holiday attack this weekend, your Unfilter show gets to the bottom of this week’s latest scare! The NSA’s vacuums are back to full, we’ll explain why, Russia turns off the gas, the Supreme court makes their big decision & we’re tracking the latest claimed threats from ISIS.

Plus IRS emails recovered, the situation in Greece, some Red Book follow up & more!

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— Episode Links —

• XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications
• Emails show US officials knew of Clinton’s private email address – CSMonitor.com
• WikiLeaks Reveals List of German Officials Spied Upon by NSA, Confirms Merkel Had Calls Intercepted | Firedoglake
• IMF: austerity measures would still leave Greece with unsustainable debt | World news | The Guardian
• ​Gazprom halts gas deliveries to Kiev – CEO Miller — RT Business
• OPM hit by $1 billion class-action suit following personnel hack
• Now We Know Why Huge TPP Trade Deal Is Kept Secret From the Public | Dave Johnson
• Greece crisis: How has Greece spent its money and who does it still owe €242.8bn to? – Business News – Business – The Independent
• Leaked: What’s in Obama’s trade deal
• Everett closer to enacting a permanent pot ordinance | HeraldNet.com – Local News
• Oregon Legalizes Recreational Marijuana! Here’s What That Means.

The post Terror for the 4th | Unfilter 149 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Google’s datacenter secrets are finally being revealed & we’ll share the best bits. Why The US Government is in no position to teach anyone about Cyber Security, how you can still get hacked offline, A batch of great questions, a huge round up & much, much more!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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— Show Notes: —

After years of wondering, we can finally find out about Google’s Data Center Secrets

• “Google has long been a pioneer in distributed computing and data processing, from Google File System to MapReduce to Bigtable and to Borg. From the beginning, we’ve known that great computing infrastructure like this requires great datacenter networking technology.”
• “For the past decade, we have been building our own network hardware and software to connect all of the servers in our datacenters together, powering our distributed computing and storage systems. Now, we have opened up this powerful and transformative infrastructure for use by external developers through Google Cloud Platform.”
• ““We could not buy, for any price, a data-center network that would meet the requirements of our distributed systems,” Vahdat said. Managing 1,000 individual network boxes made Google’s operations more complex, and replacing a whole data center’s network was too disruptive. So the company started building its own networks using generic hardware, centrally controlled by software. It used a so-called Clos topology, a mesh architecture with multiple paths between devices, and equipment built with merchant silicon, the kinds of chips that generic white-box vendors use. The software stack that controls it is Google’s own but works through the open-source OpenFlow protocol.“
• “At the 2015 Open Network Summit, we are revealing for the first time the details of five generations of our in-house network technology.”
• “Our current generation — Jupiter fabrics — can deliver more than 1 Petabit/sec of total bisection bandwidth. To put this in perspective, such capacity would be enough for 100,000 servers to exchange information at 10Gb/s each, enough to read the entire scanned contents of the Library of Congress in less than 1/10th of a second.”
• “We use a centralized software control stack to manage thousands of switches within the data center, making them effectively act as one large fabric, arranged in a Clos topology”
• “We build our own software and hardware using silicon from vendors, relying less on standard Internet protocols and more on custom protocols tailored to the data center”
• “Putting all of this together, our datacenter networks deliver unprecedented speed at the scale of entire buildings. They are built for modularity, constantly upgraded to meet the insatiable bandwidth demands of the latest generation of our servers. They are managed for availability, meeting the uptime requirements of some of the most demanding Internet services and customers. Most importantly, our datacenter networks are shared infrastructure. This means that the same networks that power all of Google’s internal infrastructure and services also power Google Cloud Platform. We are most excited about opening this capability up to developers across the world so that the next great Internet service or platform can leverage world-class network infrastructure without having to invent it.”
• ““The amount of bandwidth that we have to deliver to our servers is outpacing even Moore’s Law,” Vahdat said. Over the past six years, it’s grown by a factor of 50. In addition to keeping up with computing power, the networks will need ever higher performance to take advantage of fast storage technologies using flash and non-volatile memory, he said.”
• “For full details you’ll have to wait for a paper we’ll publish at SIGCOMM 2015 in August”
• Official Google Cloud Platform Blog Post

The US Government is in no position to teach anyone about Cyber Security

• “Why should anyone trust what the US government says on cybersecurity when they can’t secure the systems they have full control over?”
• “IRS employees can use ‘password’ as a password? No wonder they get hacked”
• As I have long said, you have to assume the worst until you can prove otherwise: “The effects of the massive hack of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) continue to ripple through Washington DC, as it seems every day we get more information about how the theft of millions of government workers’ most private information is somehow worse than it seemed the day before. (New rule: if you read about a hack of a government or corporate database that sounds pretty bad, you can guarantee it be followed shortly thereafter by another story detailing how the same hack was actually much, much “worse than previously admitted.”)”
• “It’d be one thing if this incompetence was exclusively an OPM problem, but despite the government trying to scare private citizens with warnings of a “cyber-Armageddon” or “cyber-Pearl Harbor” for years, they failed to take even the most basic steps to prevent massive data loss on their own systems. As OTI’s Robyn Greene writes, 80-90% of cyber-attacks could be prevented or mitigated with basic steps like “encrypting data, updating software and setting strong passwords.””
• Of course, using Multi-Factor Authentication would help a lot too
• “The agency that has been singled out for some of the worst criticism in recent years is the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that is supposedly in charge of securing all other government systems. The New York Times reported this weekend that the IRS’s systems still allow users to set their passwords to “password,” along with other hilariously terrible mistakes. “
• “Instead of addressing their own problems and writing a bill that would force the government to upgrade all its legacy systems, implement stronger encryption across federal agencies and implement basic cybersecurity best practices immediately, members of both parties have been pushing dangerous “info-sharing” legislation that will end with much more of citizens’ private data in the hands of the government. And the FBI wants tech companies to install “backdoors” that would give the government access to all encrypted communications – thereby leaving everyone more vulnerable to hackers, not less. Two “solutions” that won’t fix any of the glaring problems staring them in the face, and which may make things a lot worse for ordinary people.”
• There are plenty of examples of large networks that are fairly well secured, so it isn’t impossible to secure a large network. However, the number of insecure government and corporate networks suggests that more needs to be done.
• The solution isn’t something sold by a vendor, it is the same stuff security experts have been preaching for decades:
  • Need to know — Only those who actually need data should have access to it. Lets not just store everything in a giant shared network drive with everyone having read/write access to it
  • Patching — Software has flaws. These flaws get fixed and then become public (sometimes the other way around, the dreaded Zero-Day flaw). If you do not patch your software quickly, you increase the chance of the flaw being used against you
  • Strong Authentication — Password complexity requirements can be annoying, because they are often too vague. Requiring a number, a lower case letter, an upper case letter, and a symbol isn’t necessarily as secure as a passphrase which is longer. Worse, many systems do not securely store the passwords, making them less secure
  • Multi-Factor Authentication — Requiring more than one factor, to ensure that if an attacker does shoulder surf, key log, phish, or otherwise gain access to someones password, that they cannot access the secure data
  • Encryption — This one is hard, as many solutions turn out to not be good enough. “The harddrive on my laptop is encrypted”, this is fine, except if the attacker gets access while your machine is powered on and logged in. Sensitive data should be offlined when it is not in use, rather than being readily accessible in its decrypted form
  • Logging — Knowing who accessed what, and when is useful after-the-fact. Having an intelligence system that looks for anomalies in this data can help you detect a breach sooner, and maybe stop it before the baddies make off with your data
  • Auditing — A security appliance like the FUDO to only allow access to secure systems when such access is recorded. This way the actions of all contractors and administrators are recorded on video, and there is no way to access the protected systems except through the FUDO.
• As we discussed before in TechSNAP 214, there are other techniques that can be used to help safeguard systems, including whitelisting software, and only allowing approved applications on sensitive systems. The key is deciding which protections to use where, while generating the least amount of ‘user resistance’

Google Project Zero researcher discloses 15 new vulnerabilities

• Researcher Mateusz Jurczyk has disclosed 15 new remote code execution vulnerabilities
• The most interesting of these including a flaw in Adobe Reader and Windows that appears to get past all known exploit defenses.
• “The extremely powerful primitive provided by the vulnerability, together with the fact that it affected all supported versions of both Adobe Reader and Microsoft Windows (32-bit) – thus making it possible to create an exploit chain leading to a full system compromise with just a single bug – makes it one of the most interesting security issues I have discovered so far.”
• “Any of the 15 vulnerabilities Jurczyk pulled from this old but seemingly unexplored area could trigger remote code execution or privilege escalation in Adobe Reader or the Windows kernel.”
• Researcher Blog
• Video of Exploit
• PDF of Slides
• Project Zero has also published some other interesting vulnerabilities recently
• Owning Internet Printing — A Case Study in Modern Software Exploitation
• Microsoft’s MemoryProtector feature actually counters Microsoft’s new extended ASLR protections
• “It is possible to use a timing attack on MemoryProtector to reveal the offset used by High-Entropy Bottom-Up Randomization, thus completely bypassing it.”
• Analysis and Exploitation of an ESET Vulnerability — Do we understand the risk vs. benefit trade-offs of security software?
  
• In-Console-Able — Developing a sandbox escape chain for Chrome

Feedback:

• Somewhat nervous: how to mitigate Samsung SSD firmware + Linux major corruption risk?

• To delta sync or not to delta sync

• Changing domain registrars and want to maximize email up-time

• Keys

Round Up:

• Samsung deliberately disabling Windows Update
• Adobe issues out-of-band patch for Flash Player after zero-day exploit is discovered being used in the wild
• Google reveals that it was forced to hand over journalist’s data during wikileaks grand jury investigation
• As many as 1 in 3 servers in data centers are powered on but not doing anything
• Chinese may have had access to US Security Clearance data for over a year
• Bruce Schneier: China and Russia Almost Definitely Have the Snowden Docs
• Default Authorized SSH key found in many Cisco security appliances
• Richard Bejtlich: If you can’t keep hackers out, find and remove them faster
• Snowden leak shows NSA and GCHQ attacked security software vendors
• Stealing your GPG private key using a cell phone and an AM radio
• Secunia will block access to vulnerabilities less than 9 months old for non-members after they “frequently encounter organizations engaged in wrongful use of Secunia Advisories”
• Great tool for building regular expressions, better than most in that it supports lookbehind, which most basic javascript implementations do not
• Many Android apps do HTTPS wrong, or not at all
• US Navy Warfare Systems command paid $9.1 million to get security updates for 100,000 Windows XP and 2003 computers. Contract could be worth up to $30 million and extend to 2017
• Sony has killed off the Aibo robots, making replacement parts hard to come by. This raises questions about the next generation of robots. Softbank is soon to release a “Child” robot called Pepper. What will people do when spare parts for their child can only be gotten by cannibalizing other children?
• Google, Mozilla, Webkit, and Microsoft team up to launch ‘Webassembly’ a new binary format for web applications
• HP’s Adventures with the Zero-Day Initiative and bug bounties
• 5 intrusion vectors that cannot be spotted by going offline
• Cryptography jokes

The post Homeland Insecurity | TechSNAP 220 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

This week, how hard lessons learned in 1982 could be apply to 2015’s security breaches, hacking for hire goes big & a savage sentient car that needs better programming.

Plus some fantastic questions, a rocking round-up & much more!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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— Show Notes: —

Cyber Security and the Tylenol Murders

• “When a criminal started lacing Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly sprang into action to ensure consumer safety. It increased its internal production controls, recalled the capsules, offered an exchange for tablets, and within two months started using triple-seal tamper-resistant packaging. The company focused on fixing weak points in their supply chain so that users could be sure that no one had interfered with the product before they purchased it.”
• “This story is taught in business schools as an example of how a company chose to be proactive to protect its users. The FDA also passed regulations requiring increased security and Congress ultimately passed an anti-tampering law. But the focus of the response from both the private and the public sector was on ensuring that consumers remained safe and secure, rather than on catching the perpetrator. Indeed, the person who did the tampering was never caught.”
• If only we could learn from this example in the case of Internet Security, or even just security in general
• “To folks who understand computer security and networks, it’s plain that the key problem are our vulnerable infrastructure and weak computer security, much like the vulnerabilities in Johnson & Johnson’s supply chain in the 1980s. As then, the failure to secure our networks, the services we rely upon, and our individual computers makes it easy for bad actors to step in and “poison” our information.”
• “So if we were to approach this as a safety problem, the way forward is clear: We need better incentives for companies who store our data to keep it secure. In fact, there is broad agreement that we can easily raise the bar against cyberthieves and spies. Known vulnerabilities frequently go unpatched. For instance, The New York Times reported that the J.P. Morgan hack occurred due to an un-updated server. Information is too often stored in the clear rather than in encrypted form and many devices like smart phones or tablets, that increasingly store our entire lives, don’t even allow for key security upgrades.”
• “Not only is Congress failing to address the need for increased computer and network security, key parts of the government are working to undermine our safety. The FBI continues to demonize strong cryptography, trying instead to sell the public on “technologically stupid” strategy that will make us all less safe. Equally outrageous, the recent Logjam vulnerabilities show that the NSA has been spending billions of our tax dollars to exploit weaknesses in our computer security—weaknesses caused by the government’s own ill-advised regulation of cryptography in the 1990s—rather than helping us strengthen our systems.”
• So how can we actually solve the problem?
• “We need to ensure that companies to whom we entrust our data have clear, enforceable obligations to keep it safe from bad guys. This includes those who handle it it directly and those who build the tools we use to store or otherwise handle it ourselves. In the case of Johnson & Johnson, products liability law makes the company responsible for the harm that comes to us due to the behavior of others if safer designs are available, and the attack was foreseeable. Similarly, hotels and restaurants that open their doors to the public have obligations under the law of premises liability to take reasonable steps to keep us safe, even if the danger comes from others. People who hold your physical stuff for you—the law calls them bailees—also have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to protect it against external forces.”
• “Looking at the Congressional debate, it’s as if the answer for Americans after the Tylenol incident was not to put on tamper-evident seals, or increase the security of the supply chain, but only to require Tylenol to “share” its customer lists with the government and with the folks over at Bayer aspirin. We wouldn’t have stood for such a wrongheaded response in 1982, and we shouldn’t do so now.”
• Additional Coverage: USNews — A cybersecurity bill with White House support may weaken both network security and privacy
• Additional Coverage: PBS — How the Tylenol Murders changed how we consume medication

IRS reports thieves stole tax data on over 100,000 people

• “Sophisticated criminals used an online service run by the IRS to access personal tax information from more than 100,000 taxpayers, part of an elaborate scheme to steal identities and claim fraudulent tax refunds, the IRS said Tuesday.”
• They used the “Get Transcript” feature to steal the data
• The criminals already had most of the sensitive data about the users, including their SSN, Date of Birth, and Address
• This data was used to attempt to file fraudulent tax returns
• The IRS is careful to note that this was not a breach, the data was not stolen in a hack, but rather, Criminals used the sensitive data they had already collected to impersonal each of the 100,000 affected people, an access their IRS account “legitimately”
• “The agency estimates it paid out $5.8 billion in fraudulent refunds to identity thieves in 2013”
• The thieves tried to access over 200,000 accounts, but were only successful in about half of the cases. The IRS will notify all those who had attempts against their accounts, in the cases where they were successful, the IRS will provide credit monitoring. The users of the accounts that had attempts but were not compromised, should also consider carefully monitoring their credit reports, as it is likely the thieves already have most of your sensitive data to make the attempts in the first place
• This attack may actually be a symptom of another breach, where this data was stolen in bulk from somewhere else, and then used against the IRS
• It will be interesting to see if there are any commonalities between all of the 200,000 victims
• It also suggests that the IRS’ online system doesn’t have a very good IDS (Intrusion Detection System), if a small set of IP addresses are attempting to access 200,000 accounts, this should set off alarms. Especially if half of the attempts are failures, but even if they are not.

CaaS: Crime as a Service — The cybercrime service economy

• “In 2013, a pair of private investigators in the Bay Area embarked on a fairly run-of-the-mill case surrounding poached employees. But according to a federal indictment unsealed in February, their tactics sounded less like a California noir and something more like sci-fi: To spy on the clients’ adversaries, prosecutors say, they hired a pair of hackers.”
• “Nathan Moser and Peter Siragusa were working on behalf of Internet marketing company ViSalus to investigate a competitor, which ViSalus had sued for poaching some of its former employees. Next, the government alleges, Moser and Siragusa—a retired, 29-year veteran of the San Francisco police department—recruited two hackers to break into the email and Skype accounts of the competing firm. To cover their tracks, they communicated by leaving messages in the draft folder of the Gmail account “krowten.a.lortnoc”—”control a network” in reverse, according to the indictment.”
• “The California case sheds light on a burgeoning cybercrime market, where freelance hackers, both on public forums and in black markets, cater to everyone from cheating students and jealous boyfriends to law firms and executives”
• Some call it Espionage as a Service (EaaS), but it is really just Crime as a Service.
• “While it is difficult to verify the legitimacy or the quality of the hacker postings on a half-dozen online exchanges that Fast Company examined, some sites boast eBay-like feedback mechanisms that let users vouch for reliable sellers and warn each other of scams. Carr describes a range of expertise, from amateur teenagers wielding off-the-shelf spyware who may charge up to $300 for a single operation, to sophisticated industrial espionage services that make tens of thousands of dollars or more smuggling intellectual property across international lines. “The threat landscape is very complex,” he says. “A hacker group will sell to whoever wants to pay.””
• “At Hackers List, for instance, hackers bid on projects in a manner similar to other contract-work marketplaces like Elance. Those in the market for hackers can post jobs for free, or pay extra to have their listings displayed more prominently. Hackers generally pay a $3 fee to bid on projects, and users are also charged for sending messages. The site provides an escrow mechanism to ensure vendors get paid only when the hacking’s done.”
• How much do you trust a site selling an illegal service?
• “In a report released in March, Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement arm, predicts online networking sites and anonymous cash-transfer mechanisms like cryptocurrencies will continue to contribute to the growth of “crime as a service” and to criminals who “work on a freelance basis . . . facilitated by social networking online with its ability to provide a relatively secure environment to easily and anonymously communicate.””
• “The environment isn’t always secure. Earlier this month, one security sleuth unmasked the apparent owner of Hackers List as Charles Tendell, a Denver-based security expert. Soon after, Stanford legal scholar Jonathan Mayer crawled the site’s data, revealing the identities of thousands of the site’s visitors and their requests for hacks.”
• “Mayer found only 21 satisfied requests, including “i need hack account facebook of my girlfriend,” completed for $90 in January, “need access to a g mail account,” finished for $350 in February, and “I need [a database hacked] because I need it for doxing,” done for $350 in April. A majority of requests on the service involve compromising Facebook (expressly referenced in 23% of projects) and Google (14%), and are sparked by a business dispute, jilted romance, or the desire to artificially improve grades, with targets including the University of California, UConn, and the City College of New York.”
• Dell Research: Chart
• It will be interesting to see what happens in this area, I expect the more serious hacking forums to go further underground, and the more obvious ones to be infiltrated by researchers and law enforcement. I also expect to see lots of scams.
• Additional Coverage: WebPolicy.org

Feedback:

• ZFS pools: swimmingly brilliant or a sink hole for randomly sized disks?

• Honeypots

• Deploying PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails with Docker

• Backup Paranoia melts my face off

Round Up:

• Hunting for Hackers, N.S.A. Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border
• Tests show robotic surgery is not that sensitive to Internet latency, surgery from 1200 miles away becomes possible. 200ms: no problem, 300-500: gets harder, if it is just bursts of lag, surgeons just pause and wait for it to resolve. Only at 600ms did they become unconfortable with continuing
• Bank of England accidently emails top secret “brexit” plan to news paper
• Linux systems with hwclock SUID root vulnerable, allows unprivleged users to execute arbitrary commands as root
• Official list of features that will be removed as you upgrade from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10
• Insurance company refuses to pay out after breach at Cottage Health, cites lax security practises
• Volvo self-parking car runs people over if owner doesn’t pay for extra “Pedestrian Detection” feature
• Funny email I got, that looked promising at first
• Researchers show how tor hidden services can easily be de-anonymized
• Intel releases its new “Kernel Guard Technology” — Installation instructions: curl | bash…
• New Russian billboard detects uniforms and insignias, and hides adverts for banned items
• x86 emulator for ARM extends support to older ARMv6 platforms including the original Raspberry Pi. Now both Pi and Pi2 can run unmodified x86 apps
• Is security really stuck in the dark ages?
• Researchers write a secure online voting system, only problem is, it is hard to use. Neither the vote device, nor your computer, can determine how you voted though. Paper
• GitHub Commit Crawler is a tool that looks for people’s public commits and parses those commits for keywords/regexes that may contain sensitive information

The post Hacking Henchmen for Hire | TechSNAP 218 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

There is some major smoke around the Google I/O fire, we dig into an in depth discussion about the big Google Picture. Plus Vox buys up Re/Code in a move that consolidates tech news & OnePlus teases us with a new device!

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Show Notes:

Vox Media Adds ReCode to Its Stable of Websites – NYTimes.com

• Comcast, investor in Vox Media and Recode, could end up buying them both – Quartz

One reason for the renewed discussions may be Comcast’s role in encouraging Vox Media’s acquisition of Recode, the technology news site with a small audience but growing events business. Sources say Comcast, which owns minority stakes in both companies, gave its blessing to the deal several months ago. David Zilberman, a managing director of Comcast Ventures, its venture capital arm, sits on Vox Media’s board. He didn’t reply to a message seeking comment.

APNewsBreak: IRS says thieves stole tax info from 100,000

The thieves accessed a system called “Get Transcript,” where taxpayers can get tax returns and other filings from previous years. In order to access the information, the thieves cleared a security screen that required knowledge about the taxpayer, including Social Security number, date of birth, tax filing status and street address, the IRS said.

Microsoft partners with LG, Sony, other OEMs to sell Android tablets featuring Office, OneDrive, Skype

In total, Microsoft has now partnered with 31 global and local OEMs (11 in March and 20 today) to preinstall its apps onto Android devices throughout this year. Only time will tell if Microsoft’s apps end up actually being used more because of these deals.

OnePlus teases next smartphone announcement on Twitter

OnePlus says it is “Time to change” in its latest tweet, teasing a possible smartphone announcement for June 1. Chinese smartphone maker, OnePlus, relies heavily on Twitter for making announcements and promoting products and now the company would like to shake things up according to its latest tweet.

Update on Extension Signing and New Developer Agreement

Next week, we will activate two new features on AMO: signing of new add-on versions after they are reviewed, and add-on submission for developers who wish to have their add-ons signed but don’t want them listed on AMO. We will post another update once this happens. When this is done, all extension developers will be able to have their extensions signed, with enough time to update their users before signing becomes a requirement in release versions of Firefox.

Google I/O 2015 Preview: We’re doubling down on Android M, Chrome, Wear and more

Obviously Android M(arshmallow?), Wear updates including the next Moto 360 are at the top of the list. I’ve been hearing whispers that the new 360 is smaller, uses more modern/efficient SoC and a better OLED display. I’m praying to the robot dog overlords at Google that they have these as developer demo units (read: presents) at I/O. Use on iOS as has been found in code would also be nice for us who use both platforms. I’ve heard Samsung might have something round for us to feast on soon, and who knows, maybe we’ll see a $1,400 Tag Heuer Watch somehow with Intel Inside.

The post Google's Tech Tease | Tech Talk Today 176 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Terror ALERT! The Obama Administration claims to have intercepted significant chatter warning them to an impending attack from terrorist. Forcing the US to shutter nearly two dozen diplomatic posts and evacuate personnel around the world.

The convenient emergency arises during major new revelations of domestic spying abuse.

The Drug Enforcement Administration is using intelligence gathered by the NSA to investigate US citizens for domestic crimes, a and then covers it up. We’ve got the details.

Plus: Snowden leaves the airport , your feedback, our follow up, and much much more…

On this week’s Unfilter.

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— Show Notes —

Where in the World is Edward Snowden?

• Obama cancels Putin meeting over Snowden asylum

“We have reached the conclusion that there is not enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda with Russia to hold a US-Russia Summit,” the White House said in a statement.

In addition to Russia’s “disappointing decision” to grant Mr Snowden temporary asylum, the White House cited a lack of progress on issues ranging from missile defence to human rights.

“We believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda,” the White House said.

• Senator Schumer: Putin is behaving like a schoolyard bully

Charles Schumer, the U.S. Senate’s third ranking Democrat and a close Obama ally, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to antagonize the United States by granting American fugitive Edward Snowden asylum for one year.

“President Putin is behaving like a schoolyard bully,” Schumer said on the CBS television talk show “Face the Nation.” “In my experience, I’ve learned unless you stand up to that bully, they ask for more and more and more.”

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World Wide Terror Alert

• Intercepted al Qaeda message led to closing embassies, consulates – CNN.com

Officials shuttered 22 U.S. embassies and consulates for the day on Sunday amid fears of an al Qaeda attack. On Sunday afternoon, the State Department said it had extended embassy and consulate closures in 15 of the locations until Friday and added four other posts to the list.

• Reps. Peter King and Dutch Ruppersberger on ‘This Week’

The House Intelligence Committee members weigh in the latest terror threat and the NSA.

• Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) – Terrorist Groups

Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is a Sunni extremist group based in Yemen that has orchestrated numerous high-profile terrorist attacks. One of the most notable of these operations occurred when AQAP dispatched Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to detonate an explosive device aboard a Northwest Airlines flight on 25 December 2009

• Yemen – Saudi Arabia Oil conflict- Yemen Post English Newspaper Online

Egyptian newspaper, al-Masry al-Yom reported this week on what it is foreseeing will become Yemen – Saudi Arabia new Oil conflict.

Until 2012, Yemeni officials’ rhetoric revolve around the accepted belief that the poorest country of the Arabian Peninsula was running out of oil and gas.

It is important to note that experts’ discovery of large resources of petrol, most of which is said to be in basement (trap deep with earth pockets) were only made public in 2012, upon the departure from power of Yemen’s former President.

• Yemen says major al Qaeda plot thwarted as another suspected drone strike kills at least 6 militants – CBS News

“There were attempts to control key cities in Yemen like Mukala and Bawzeer,” Badi told the British broadcaster. “This would be coordinated with attacks by al Qaeda members on the gas facilities in Shebwa city and the blowing up of the gas pipe in Belhaf city.”

• The NSA Leaks Put Our ‘Methods’ At Risk, But Bragging About Monitoring Al Qaeda Emails Doesn’t?

the NY Times has already revealed details of the email intercepts by the US:

_The Obama administration’s decision last week to close nearly two dozen diplomatic missions and issue a worldwide travel alert resulted from intercepted electronic communications in which the head of Al Qaeda in Pakistan ordered the leader of its affiliate in Yemen, the terrorist organization’s most lethal branch, to carry out an attack as early as this past Sunday, according to American officials.

The intercepted conversations last week between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of the global terrorist group, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, revealed one of the most serious plots against American and other Western interests since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, American intelligence officials and lawmakers have said.
_

So… revealing that we collect data on everyone somehow turns Snowden into a traitor, while having officials in the government tell the NY Times that we directly intercepted emails between Al Qaeda’s top leaders is somehow perfectly fine? How does that work?

SOD, The DEA’s Information Sharing Program

• US drug agency unit to be investigated for wiretapping, lying about evidence sources — RT USA

Reuters published a Monday report revealing that a shadowy
DEA unit known as the Special Operative Division (SOD) – made up
of officials from the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and Department of
Homeland Security – funnels information gathered by the DEA to
those and other police agencies. Information from DEA wiretaps,
informants, and the database of telephone records is passed on,
often to investigations bearing no relevance to national
security.

According to documents viewed by Reuters, SOD federal agents are then trained to “recreate” the source of the investigation to cover up how they discovered a particular bit of information. That method, law experts say, violates an individual’s constitutional right to a fair trial because their defense attorney would be unable to examine details that could turn up evidence of biased witnesses or police malpractice.

A former federal agent who worked with the SOD said that police would find an excuse to stop a vehicle which they had prior information on and then have drug dogs search the car. Upon making the arrest, officers would fabricate a traffic violation that permitted the initial stop in order to hide that they were acting on an SOD tip.

NSA is Crazy

• German justice minister proposes ban for US firms that don’t abide privacy laws | Ars Technica

German High Court Justice Hans-Jürgen Papier defended the German government’s relationship with the American spy services. He said that a country has a “basic responsibility to protect its citizens from the attacks of foreign powers” but noted that a state “can only be responsible for doing things that it has the legal power, and is able, to do.”

TOP VOTED: The TSA Expands

• T.S.A. Expands Duties Beyond Airport Security

With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals.

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• More than just the US?

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The DOJ’s investigations into journalists has expanded, who is the target, and how far is the US government willing to go? We dig into the details.

Ripped apart from a massive tornado Moore Oklahoma, begins their recovery. The media on the other hand has gone into full exploitation mode, we’ll rip them up.

Then Russia outs another CIA operative, Tim Cook Testified in the senate, the flawed Media Shield Law, a BIG drone update, and much much more.

On this week’s Unfilter.

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— Show Notes —

Oklahoma Twister

• Dad drives through storm to get son as tornado hits – YouTube

Jeff Lechus talks about driving to pick up his son from school as a tornado hit the area.

• Majority thinks global warming, clean energy should be priorities – latimes.com

70% of American adults say global warming should be a priority for the nation’s leaders, while 87% say leaders should make it a priority to develop sources of clean energy. Those support levels have dropped by 7% and 5% respectively since fall.

Tim Cook Testifies to Senate Committee

• Apple’s Tim Cook: U.S. Tax Code Handicaps Companies – YouTube

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., said the iPhone maker doesn’t use “gimmicks” to avoid taxes. Cook, testifying before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in Washington, said the current U.S. tax code “handicaps” American companies. (This is an excerpt from the hearing. Source: Bloomberg)

• Apple CEO makes no apology for company’s tax strategy – Yahoo! Finance

In Ireland, where low corporate taxes have been an economic development tool for many years, the government said it had not made a special tax deal with Apple. If Apple’s tax rate was too low, it was the fault of other countries, deputy prime minister Eamon Gilmore told national broadcaster RTE on Tuesday.

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IRS Targets “Tea Party” Groups

• IRS official refuses to answer questions at scandal hearing

“I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any congressional committee,” she said. “Because I am asserting my right not to testify, I know that some people will assume that I have done something wrong. I have not.”

DOJ Targeted Fox News as Well as AP

• Fox News Reporter James Rosen Had DoJ Target – Business Insider

The Department of Justice heavily tracked Fox News reporter James Rosen during a 2009 leak probe, according to a report from Ann E. Marimow in the Washington Post.

Media Shield Law has Flaws

• White House asks Schumer to introduce press shield law – POLITICO.com

The White House has asked Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to reintroduce a press shield law, White House officials said Wednesday.

The move comes after questions were raised about the seizure of Associated Press phone records by the Justice Department as part of a national security leak investigation.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that Obama welcomes the reintroduction of the shield bill.

• Obama’s media shield law makes prosecuting journalists even easier

“As a Senator, Obama was a vocal supporter of a robust shield
law; he co-sponsored a bill in 2007 and campaigned on the issue in
2008,” Timm wrote. “But when the Senate moved to pass the
bill as soon as Obama came into office, his administration abruptly
changed course and opposed the bill, unless the Senate carved out
an exception for all national security reporters.”

For the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Timm wrote this week
that the latest version of the shield law wouldn’t do much more.
Under the Sept. 2009 request sent from the White House, the shield
law once supported by Pres. Obama would include an exception where
journalists could be subpoenaed if it means national security is at
risk.

“Now, it’s important to remember: virtually the only time the
government subpoenas reporters, it involves leak investigations
into stories by national security reporters. So it’s hard to see
how this bill will significantly help improve press freedom,”
wrote Timm. “Worse, there’s a strong argument that passing the
bill as it ended in 2010 will weaken rights reporters already have
and make it easier for the government to get sources from
reporters.”

“The difference is that instead of DOJ unilaterally making
that determination,” the Justice Department would "have to
convince a judge that this was the case," University of
Minnesota Law Professor Jane Kirtley explained to the Post.

Friend of the Boston Bomber Older Brother Killed by FBI

• Man killed by FBI agent knew Tsarnaevs, official says – CNN.com

Ibragim Todashev, the man shot dead last night by an FBI agent in Orlando, Florida, had been acquainted with deceased Boston Marathon attacker Tamerlan Tsarnaev at a mixed martial arts center near Boston, according to a source briefed on the ongoing marathon bombing investigation. Todashev had Tsarnaev’s phone number in his cell phone, the source said.

• Man with ties to Boston bombing suspect admits role in 2011 murders; shot during FBI questioning – U.S. News

Dead Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and another man — who was killed by the FBI on Wednesday — murdered three people in Massachusetts after a drug deal went wrong in 2011, law enforcement sources tell NBC News.

SPIED HARD

• Russian Official Names CIA Station Chief In Moscow

Breaching protocol, a Russian official let a name slip during an interview with Interfax, the state news agency.

The FSB agent told the news agency that last year, another embassy secretary was expelled from Russia for recruiting attempts. That case wasn’t made public, the agent said, but the U.S. was warned.
“We hoped our American colleagues would hear us, given that we also presented to them precise information about CIA officers making recruitment attempts in Moscow and who exactly was doing that,” the FSB agent said.
*

Drone Update

• Meet Cyro, The US Navy’s 170 Pound Underwater Jellyfish Drone – Girls Just Wanna Have Guns

Meet Cyro, the Virginia Tech College of Engineering underwater life-like jellyfish drone in development for US Navy surveillance.

• Pentagon absorbs portion of CIA’s drone program – YouTube

The Obama administration is handing control of some of its counterterrorism operations that previously fell into the hands of the CIA over to the Pentagon. The controversial drone program used by the CIA to target suspected terrorists has attracted a fair share of criticism as of late, and moving some of its operations over to the Department of Defense will allow Congress to have some oversight. Drone strikes in Yemen will fall into the hands of the Armed Forces while those that occur in Pakistan will continue to be controlled by the CIA.

• U.S. Acknowledges Killing 4 Americans in Drone Strikes – NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — One day before President Obama is due to deliver a major speech on national security, his administration on Wednesday formally acknowledged that the United States had killed four American citizens in drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan.

The letter also said that the United States had killed three other Americans: Samir Khan, who was killed in the same strike; Mr. Awlaki’s son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was also killed in Yemen; and Jude Mohammed, who was killed in a strike in Pakistan.

“These individuals were not specifically targeted by the United States,” Mr. Holder wrote.

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The IRS has admitted it was targeting conservative groups with thug style politics.

And the Associated Press has just discovered the Justice Department has been monitoring their phones for two months, as the president of the A.P stated this now provides the Obama Administration with a “road map” to its whole news-gathering operation.

Plus Russia claims to have busted a CIA operative, but we’re a little skeptical, your feedback, and much much more.

On this week’s episode of, Unfilter

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— Show Notes —

Cold War Knock Off

• Russia orders expulsion of U.S. diplomat accused of being CIA agent – CNN.com

The diplomat in question, Ryan Fogle, third secretary of the Political Department of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, was declared “persona non grata” Tuesday.

• Russia to expel US diplomat accused of spying – YouTube

Russia has ordered the expulsion of an American diplomat it says is a CIA spy.
The Russian security services say they caught Ryan Fogle trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer.
The US State Department is not commenting on the issue.

• Report: Moscow spy saga tied to Boston bombings case

The U.S. diplomat expelled for allegedly spying for the CIA was trying to recruit a senior Russian intelligence officer involved with fighting terrorism in the North Caucasus, the region linked to the suspects in the Boston bombing case, the Russian newspaper _Kommersan _reported, quoting Russian security service sources.

• Russia’s CIA spy bust ‘was linked to Boston Bombing’: U.S diplomat was trying to recruit Dagestan expert who travelled to terrorist¿s home town when he was arrested | Mail Online

Today sources revealed the man Mr Fogle was trying to ‘recruit’ was an FSB agent who specialised in Islamic extremism in Russia and may even have travelled to the region where the
bombing suspects came from.

• Timed for Maximum Impact

The unveiling of their ‘catch’ appeared to be timed for maximum impact,
breaking simultaneously across all arms of state media just as Michael
McFaul, the US ambassador to Moscow, was beginning a question and answer
session on Twitter.

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IRS Targets “Tea Party” Groups

• Holder faces grilling at Capitol Hill hearing | Fox News

On Monday, AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt disclosed the government’s action in a letter to Holder that was made public. In it, Pruitt called the collection of phone records at four AP bureaus a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” of the news agency’s freedom of press rights granted under the U.S. Constitution.

The AP case immediately sparked bipartisan outrage, leading members of both parties to publicly question the government’s actions.

Under Holder’s command, the Justice Department has prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I-era Espionage Act than all of the AGs who came before him – combined.

• IRS, Justice Department controversies suggest Obama ‘not a fairytale’ – YouTube

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass says the recent scandals surrounding the Internal Revenue Service, as well as the Justice Department and Associated Press, prove politics remain a ruthless business.

• IRS Has Long History of Dirty Tricks

• IRS Demanded Tea Party Reading Lists, Facebook Posts

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) demanded that limited government and tea party groups produce Facebook posts, donor lists, and even what books group members were reading, reports Politico.

AP Tapped

• Spying on The Associated Press – NYTimes.com

The Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification for secretly combing through the phone records of reporters and editors at The Associated Press in what looks like a fishing expedition for sources and an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers.

The records covered 20 phone lines, including main office phones in New York City, Washington, Hartford, and the Congressional press gallery. The guidelines for such subpoenas, first enacted in 1972, require that requests for media information be narrow. The reporters’ committee said this action is so broad that it allowed prosecutors to “plunder two months of news-gathering materials to seek information that might interest them.”

Mr. Holder said the leak under scrutiny, believed to be about the foiling of a terrorist plot in Yemen a year ago, “put the American people at risk,” although he did not say how, and the records sweep went far beyond any one news article. Gary Pruitt, the president of The A.P., said two months’ worth of records could provide a “road map” to its whole news-gathering operation.

• Holder cites recusal in saying little about AP probe – CNN.com

“I don’t know what happened there with the intersection between the AP and the Justice Department,” Holder told the House Judiciary Committee. “I was recused from the case.”

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