Sunday, November 3, 2013

Officials: Israeli airstrike inside Syria

(AP) — Officials say Israeli warplanes attacked a military target inside Syria.

An Obama administration official confirmed the attack happened overnight Thursday but provided no details.

Another security official said that the attack occurred in the Syrian port city of Latakia and that the target was Russian-made SA-125 missiles.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the attack.

At least twice earlier this year Israel launched airstrikes on shipments of missiles inside Syria.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-10-31-Israel-Syria/id-5a6cc20020384bbf9b70b6a3ee8e60dd
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Officials: Israeli airstrike inside Syria

(AP) — Officials say Israeli warplanes attacked a military target inside Syria.

An Obama administration official confirmed the attack happened overnight Thursday but provided no details.

Another security official said that the attack occurred in the Syrian port city of Latakia and that the target was Russian-made SA-125 missiles.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the attack.

At least twice earlier this year Israel launched airstrikes on shipments of missiles inside Syria.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-10-31-Israel-Syria/id-5a6cc20020384bbf9b70b6a3ee8e60dd
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Why spy on allies? Even good friends keep secrets

FILE - In this Sept. 6, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama walks with Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel toward a group photo outside of the Konstantin Palace in St. Petersburg. In geopolitics just as on the local playground, even best friends don't tell each other everything. And everybody's dying to know what the other guy knows. Revelations that the U.S. was monitoring the cellphone calls of up to 35 world leaders, including close allies, have brought into high relief the open-yet-often-unspoken secret _ and suggested the incredible reach of new-millennium technology. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)







FILE - In this Sept. 6, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama walks with Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel toward a group photo outside of the Konstantin Palace in St. Petersburg. In geopolitics just as on the local playground, even best friends don't tell each other everything. And everybody's dying to know what the other guy knows. Revelations that the U.S. was monitoring the cellphone calls of up to 35 world leaders, including close allies, have brought into high relief the open-yet-often-unspoken secret _ and suggested the incredible reach of new-millennium technology. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)







FILE This Oct. 29, 2013 file photo shows Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pausing while testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington. In geopolitics just as on the local playground, even best friends don't tell each other everything. And everybody's dying to know what the other guy knows. Revelations that the U.S. was monitoring the cellphone calls of up to 35 world leaders, including close allies, have brought into high relief the open-yet-often-unspoken secret _ and suggested the incredible reach of new-millennium technology. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File)







This photo provided by The Guardian Newspaper in London shows Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, on Sunday, June 9, 2013, in Hong Kong. In geopolitics just as on the local playground, even best friends don't tell each other everything. And everybody's dying to know what the other guy knows. Revelations that the U.S. was monitoring the cellphone calls of up to 35 world leaders, including close allies, have brought into high relief the open-yet-often-unspoken secret _ and suggested the incredible reach of new-millennium technology. (AP Photo/The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras)







FILE - In this Friday, May 15, 1998 file photo, Jonathan Pollard speaks during an interview in a conference room at the Federal Correction Institution in Butner, N.C. In geopolitics just as on the local playground, even best friends don't tell each other everything. And everybody's dying to know what the other guy knows. Revelations that the U.S. was monitoring the cellphone calls of up to 35 world leaders, including close allies, have brought into high relief the open-yet-often-unspoken secret _ and suggested the incredible reach of new-millennium technology. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker, File)







In geopolitics, just as on the playground, even best friends don't tell each other everything. And everybody's dying to know what the other guy knows.

Revelations that the U.S. has been monitoring the cellphone calls of up to 35 world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have brought into high relief the open-yet-often-unspoken secret that even close allies keep things from one another — and work every angle to find out what's being held back.

So it is that the Israelis recruited American naval analyst Jonathan Pollard to pass along U.S. secrets including satellite photos and data on Soviet weaponry in the 1980s. And the British were accused of spying on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the lead-up to the Iraq War. And the French, Germans, Japanese, Israelis and South Koreans have been accused of engaging in economic espionage against the United States.

But now the technology revealed by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden has underscored the incredible new-millennium reach of the U.S. spy agency. And it is raising the question for some allies: Is this still OK?

National Intelligence Director James Clapper, for his part, testified this week that it is a "basic tenet" of the intelligence business to find out whether the public statements of world leaders jibe with what's being said behind closed doors.

What might the Americans have wanted to know from Merkel's private conversations, for example? Ripe topics could well include her thinking on European economic strategy and Germany's plans for talks with world powers about Iran's nuclear program.

There is both motive and opportunity driving the trust-but-verify dynamic in friend-on-friend espionage: Allies often have diverging interests, and the explosion of digital and wireless communication keeps creating new avenues for spying on one another. Further, shifting alliances mean that today's good friends may be on the outs sometime soon.

"It was not all that many years ago when we were bombing German citizens and dropping the atomic bomb on the Japanese," says Peter Earnest, a 35-year veteran of the CIA and now executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington.

News that the U.S. has tapped foreign leaders' phones was an eye-opener to many — the White House claims that even President Barack Obama wasn't aware of the extent of the surveillance — and has prompted loud complaints from German, French and Spanish officials, among others.

It's all possible because "an explosion in different kinds of digital information tools makes it possible for intelligence agencies to vacuum up a vast quantity of data," says Charles Kupchan, a former Clinton administration official and now a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. "When you add together the Internet, wireless communications, cellphones, satellites, drones and human intelligence, you have many, many sources of acquiring intelligence."

"The magnitude of the eavesdropping is what shocked us," former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a radio interview. "Let's be honest, we eavesdrop, too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we don't have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous."

Protests aside, diplomats the world around know the gist of the game.

"I am persuaded that everyone knew everything or suspected everything," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said of the reports of U.S. monitoring.

And while prime ministers and lawmakers across Europe and Asia say they are outraged, Clapper told Congress that other countries' own spy agencies helped the NSA collect data on millions of phone calls as part of cooperative counterterror agreements.

Robert Eatinger, the CIA's senior deputy general counsel, told an American Bar Association conference on Thursday that European spy services have stayed quiet throughout the recent controversy because they also spy on the U.S.

"The services have an understanding," Eatinger said. "That's why there wasn't the hue and cry from them."

And another intelligence counsel says the White House can reasonably deny it knows everything about the U.S. spying that's going on.

"We don't reveal to the president or the intelligence committees all of the human sources we are recruiting. ... They understand what the programs are, and the president and chairs of the intelligence committees both knew we were seeking information about leadership intentions," said Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "They both saw reporting indicating what we were getting if not indicating the source."

Still, Claude Moraes, a British Labor Party politician and member of the European Union delegation that traveled to Washington this week for talks about U.S. surveillance, was troubled by the broad net being cast by U.S. intelligence.

"Friend-upon-friend spying is not something that is easily tolerable if it doesn't have a clear purpose," he said. "There needs to be some kind of justification. ... There is also a question of proportionality and scale."

Obama has promised a review of U.S. intelligence efforts in other countries, an idea that has attracted bipartisan support in Congress.

The United States already has a written intelligence-sharing agreement with Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand known as "Five Eyes," and France and Germany might be interested in a similar arrangement.

Paul Pillar, a professor at Georgetown University and former CIA official, worries that a backlash "runs the risk of restrictions leaving the United States more blind than it otherwise would have been" to overseas developments.

The effort to strike the right balance between surveillance and privacy is hardly new.

University of Notre Dame political science professor Michael Desch, an expert on international security and American foreign and defense policies, says the ambivalence is epitomized by Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson's famous line, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Stimson, who served under President Herbert Hoover, shut down the State Department's cryptanalytic office in 1929.

"Leaks about NSA surveillance of even friendly countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and now France make clear that we no longer share Stimson's reticence on this score," Desch said. "While such revelations are a public relations embarrassment, they also reflect the reality that in this day in age, gentlemen do read each other's mail all of the time, even when they are allies."

In fact, a database maintained by the Defense Personnel Security Research Center covering Americans who committed espionage against the U.S. includes activity on behalf of a wide swath of neutral or allied countries since the late 1940s. U.S. citizens have been arrested for conducting espionage on behalf of South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Israel, the Netherlands, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Ghana, Liberia, South Africa, El Salvador and Ecuador, according to the database.

___

Associated Press Writers Deb Riechmann and Kimberly Dozier contributed to this report.

___

Follow Nancy Benac on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nbenac

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-10-31-Why%20Spy%20on%20Allies/id-a6331f33c99d43f4b2e81f7b7c685ebb
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Twitter making tweets more 'visual' with overhaul


San Francisco (AFP) - Twitter said Tuesday it overhauled its user display to make the messaging service "more visual," as it ramps up competition against photo-sharing services like Instagram.

"So many of the great moments you share on Twitter are made even better with photos or with videos from Vine," Twitter's Michael Sippey said in a blog post.

"These rich tweets can bring your followers closer to what's happening, and make them feel like they are right there with you."

Sippey said that "starting today, timelines on Twitter will be more visual and more engaging: previews of Twitter photos and videos from Vine will be front and center in tweets."

Some Twitter users noticed the change, which makes pictures, graphics and videos more prominent.

The company said it was incorporating the changes in Twitter on the Internet and its Android and iPhone apps.

The shift comes as Twitter is preparing its stock market debut, possibly as early as next week.

While Twitter has amassed more than 200 million users and a strong core of celebrities, journalists and political leaders, some critics say the service lacks the visual appeal of photo-centric services like Pinterest or Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook last year.

Twitter is seeking to raise some $1.6 billion in its IPO, valuing the company in the range of $9.3 billion and $11.1 billion.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-making-tweets-more-visual-overhaul-215012667.html
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Wanted: Adoring Female Students

Young women sitting on a college campus lawn
Some male professors make you wonder if they're more interested in teaching their subject or appearing cool to young ladies.

Photo by Thinkstock
















The intellectual and physical seduction of young female students by older, male professors—usually in the humanities, and in the throes of midlife crises—is so common in movies and books that it’s become a cliché.










But a recent Twitter thread started by a popular feminist blogger examines a dark side of that cliché in real-life academe, one in which professors’ advances—intellectual and otherwise—feed a need for validation and flattery, and at times cross the line into sexual harassment.












“Please share with me all your stories of the male professors you had in college who thrived upon and demanded female admiration to function,” Mallory Ortberg, editor of the website the Toast, tweeted. She soon followed up with a humor piece imagining a conversation between two male professors bemoaning diminishing adulation from the new generation of female pupils.










“Just yesterday, in one of my intro classes, I used the word ‘problematic’ in a sentence—real casual, just to let them know I’m one of the good guys—and not one of them stayed after the lecture to ask me just what I meant by that or to see if they could borrow the conspicuously dog-eared copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed I like to leave on my desk in case any female students want to borrow it,” one imaginary professor says.










He continues, later, after some bottle-passing: “That copy has my phone number in it. You know, the old ‘write your phone number on the front page of a copy you lend to female students only under the “IF LOST PLEASE RETURN TO” bubble’ gag?”










Almost immediately after her original tweet, Ortberg’s Twitter followers began to respond with their experiences with such professors, some humorous and others less so. A sampling:










@hallleloujah: “had one who called everything sexy in a weirdly drawn out, British way. Also started a rumor he was undercover for CIA (he wasn't).”










@kitalita: “one kept conveniently ‘forgetting’ my graded assignments in his office and specifically told me he was divorced (he wasn't).”










@AmyRosary: “Let's talk about the English department chair I got fired for harassing EACH AND EVERY female English major. He liked to insist [continued in a separate tweet] upon meeting girls in his office and serenading them with Bob Dylan covers with the door closed, or ‘accidentally’ putting on porn.”










@kellieherson: “Providing a validation space for those men is the only reason university administrators allow the humanities to continue to exist.”










Another follower cited a proclivity for flirting among her theater professors, one of whom bragged about once trying to meet women with actor Pat Morita. One said her professor had emailed her to tell her that not doing her homework was “not sexy”; yet another fended off a request for her to model for a professor who said he was an amateur photographer.










Jaya Saxena, a web editor for the New-York Historical Society and writer who studied English and political science at Tulane University, said: “Lots of [him] inviting classes to his house for pizza and making sure to corner the girls and talk about his art collection.” That professor also once hit on her in a bar, she posted.











“If your job is to command the attention of a room and instill knowledge into people, then you're probably going to thrive on receiving that attention. That just comes with the work, right?”










In an email, Saxena said she enjoyed close relationships with several of her professors, and that in New Orleans, seeing faculty members out at a bar was not outside the norm. But the “line gets drawn when you're throwing your arms around your students and drunkenly saying they look hot when they dance!”










Saxena said she never took classes from the professor mentioned, and therefore felt less intimidated than awkward following the incident.










That wasn’t the case for Tamara Johnson, who tweeted about an English professor who told her as an undergraduate that “female students were like fishing lures, drawing male instructors into deep waters.”  He also made inappropriate remarks about rape, vaguely in relation to a lecture, soon after, she said—making her feel highly uncomfortable.










Johnson, who has her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from San Diego State, said she saw male professors seeking sexual attention from their female students as the rule, not the exception. Saxena, by contrast, said there were several “attractive” male professors in her department who reacted to the attention from students in different ways. And while male professors did seem to bask more in that attention than did female professors, she said, “I never saw the ‘attention-needing male professor’ as a rule.”


















Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2013/10/male_professors_female_students_a_tricky_power_dynamic.html
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Suspect in LAX shooting spree targeted TSA

This photo provided by the FBI shows Paul Ciancia, 23. Accused of opening fire inside the Los Angeles airport, Ciancia was determined to lash out at the Transportation Security Administration, saying in a note that he wanted to kill at least one TSA officer and didn’t care which one, authorities said Saturday, Nov. 2, 2013. (AP Photo/FBI)







This photo provided by the FBI shows Paul Ciancia, 23. Accused of opening fire inside the Los Angeles airport, Ciancia was determined to lash out at the Transportation Security Administration, saying in a note that he wanted to kill at least one TSA officer and didn’t care which one, authorities said Saturday, Nov. 2, 2013. (AP Photo/FBI)







ALTERNATE HORIZONTAL CROP - This June, 2013 photo released by the Hernandez family Saturday, Nov. 2, 2013, shows Transportation Security Administration officer Gerardo Hernandez. Hernandez, 39, was shot to death and several others wounded by a gunman who went on a shooting rampage in Terminal 3 at Los Angeles International Airport Friday. (AP Photo/Courtesy Hernandez Family)







John S. Pistole, left, Administrator of Transportation Security Administration and Ana Fernandez, center, wife of TSA agent Gerardo Fernandez, victim at LAX shooting, before a press conference in Porter Ranch, Calif. on Saturday Nov. 2, 2013. A gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday, killing a Transportation Security Administration employee and wounding two other people in an attack that frightened passengers and disrupted flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)







Transportation Security Administration employees classify the luggage to return to passengers at Los Angeles International Airport's Terminal 3 on Saturday, Nov. 2, 2013. A gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire at the airport on Friday, killing a Transportation Security Administration employee and wounding two other people in an attack that frightened passengers and disrupted flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)







From left to right, FBI Special Agent in Charge David L. Bowdich, United States Attorney Andre Birotte Jr., and Los Angeles Police Department Commander Andrew Smith in press conference to provide an update on the investigation of the shooting incident at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), on Saturday Nov. 2, 2013 at Westwood Federal Building in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)







LOS ANGELES (AP) — Seeking to stir fear in "traitorous minds," a man suspected of a shooting spree at Los Angeles airport allegedly set out to kill employees of the Transportation Security Administration in the attack that left one person dead and others wounded, authorities said.

At a news conference Saturday announcing charges against Paul Ciancia, U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr. spelled out a chilling chain of events at LAX that began when he strode into Terminal 3 Friday morning, pulled a Smith & Wesson .223-caliber assault rifle from his duffel bag and fired repeatedly at point-blank range at a TSA officer. The officer was checking IDs and boarding passes at the base of an escalator leading to the main screening area.

After shooting a TSA officer and going up an escalator, Ciancia turned back to see the officer move and returned to finish him off, according to surveillance video reviewed by investigators.

Investigators said Ciancia, an unemployed motorcycle mechanic, fired on at least two other uniformed TSA employees and an airline passenger, who were all wounded. Airport police eventually shot him as panicked passengers cowered in stores and restaurants.

Ciancia, 23, remained hospitalized Saturday after being hit four times and wounded in the mouth and leg. The FBI said he was unresponsive and they had not been able to interview him.

The duffel bag also contained a handwritten letter signed by Ciancia stating he'd "made the conscious decision to try to kill" multiple TSA employees and that he wanted to "instill fear in their traitorous minds" said FBI Agent in Charge David L. Bowdich.

Federal prosecutors filed charges of first-degree murder of a federal officer and committing violence at an international airport. The charges could qualify him for the death penalty.

The FBI was still looking into Ciancia's past, but investigators said they had not found evidence of previous crimes or any run-ins with the TSA. They said he had never applied for a job with the agency.

Authorities believe someone dropped Ciancia off at the airport. Agents were reviewing surveillance tapes to piece together the sequence of events.

"We are really going to draw a picture of who this person was, his background, his history. That will help us explain why he chose to do what he did," Bowdich said. "At this point, I don't have the answer on that."

The note found in the duffel bag suggested Ciancia was willing to kill almost any TSA officer.

"Black, white, yellow, brown, I don't discriminate," the note read, according to a paraphrase by a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The screed also mentioned "fiat currency" and "NWO," possible references to the New World Order, a conspiracy theory that foresees a totalitarian one-world government.

When searched, the suspect had five 30-round magazines, and his bag contained hundreds more rounds in boxes, the law-enforcement official said.

Terminal 3, the area where the shooting happened, reopened Saturday. Passengers who had abandoned luggage to escape Friday's gunfire were allowed to return to collect their bags.

The TSA planned to review its security policies in the wake of the attack. Administrator John Pistole did not say if that would mean arming officers.

As airport operations returned to normal, a few more details trickled out about Ciancia, who by all accounts was reserved and solitary.

Former classmates barely remember him and even a recent roommate could say little about the young man who moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles less than two years ago. A former classmate at Salesianum School in Wilmington, Del., said Ciancia was incredibly quiet.

"He kept to himself and ate lunch alone a lot," David Hamilton told the Los Angeles Times. "I really don't remember any one person who was close to him .... In four years, I never heard a word out of his mouth."

On Friday, Ciancia's father called police in New Jersey, worried about his son in L.A. The young man had sent texts to his family that suggested he might be in trouble, at one point even saying goodbye.

The call came too late. Ten minutes earlier, police said, he had walked into the airport.

In the worrisome messages, the younger Ciancia did not mention suicide or hurting others, but his father had heard from a friend that his son may have had a gun, said Allen Cummings, police chief in Pennsville, a small blue-collar town near the Delaware River where Ciancia grew up.

The police chief called Los Angeles police, who sent a patrol car to Ciancia's apartment. There, two roommates said that they had seen him a day earlier and he had appeared to be fine.

But by that time, gunfire was already breaking out at the airport.

"There's nothing we could do to stop him," Cummings said.

The police chief said he learned from Ciancia's father that the young man had attended a technical school in Florida, then moved to Los Angeles in 2012 hoping to get a job as a motorcycle mechanic. He was having trouble finding work.

Ciancia graduated in December 2011 from Motorcycle Mechanics Institute in Orlando, Fla., said Tina Miller, a spokeswoman for Universal Technical Institute, the Scottsdale, Ariz., company that runs the school.

A basic motorcycle mechanic course takes about a year, she said.

On Friday, as swarms of passengers dropped to the ground or ran for their lives, the gunman seemed to ignore anyone except TSA targets.

Leon Saryan of Milwaukee had just passed through security and was looking for a place to put his shoes and belt back on when he heard gunfire. He managed to hide in a store. As he was cowering in the corner, the shooter approached.

"He looked at me and asked, 'TSA?' I shook my head no, and he continued on down toward the gate," Saryan said.

Authorities identified the dead TSA officer as Gerardo I. Hernandez, 39, the first official in the agency's 12-year history to be killed in the line of duty.

Friends remembered him as a doting father and a good neighbor who went door-to-door warning neighbors to be careful after his home was burglarized.

In brief remarks outside the couple's house, his widow, Ana Hernandez, said Saturday that her husband came to the U.S. from El Salvador at age 15.

"He took pride in his duty for the American public and for the TSA mission," she said.

___

Associated Press writers Alicia Chang in Los Angeles and Geoff Mulvihill in New Jersey contributed to this report.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-11-03-US-LAX-Shooting/id-2478a1ed496840c383cdfccd7440fe06
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Email goes 'Dark' -- encrypted, that is



In the light of a seemingly endless series of revelations about the NSA's multi-faceted infiltrations of just about every network there is, including the private fiber used by Google and Yahoo, more and more folks are stepping up to offer possible solutions.


But because both the Internet and encryption aren't as singular or straightforward as they could be, it isn't likely to be something that can be delivered as a single product anytime soon.


The most common analogy used about email security is that it's no better than a postcard written in pencil and sent via conventional mail. To do something about it, two big names in security, Lavabit and Silent Circle, are joining forces to create a project they call the Dark Mail Alliance.


Silent Circle, a provider of both encrypted email and phone solutions, and Lavabit, a secure email provider, both made headlines earlier this year when they voluntarily shut down their email services in the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks about NSA actions against ISPs, rather than be a party to such spying. Their plan is to help create a new email system that is as resistant as technologically possible to spying.


The idea isn't to offer a product per se, but rather to create an open standard that could be freely implemented by themselves or by third parties. "1,000 Lavabits all around the world," was how Jon Callas, CTO and founder of Silent Circle, described it in a discussion with Infoworld.


This decentralized plan is both the best and worst thing about the project: Best in the sense that no one person has explicit control over it, but worst in the sense that it's also not possible to guarantee how consistently it can be delivered if it's an open project.


The technical details of Dark Mail involve taking existing email clients -- Outlook and Exchange were cited as possible targets -- and outfitting them with add-ons that would use the XMPP Web messaging protocol in conjunction with another encryption protocol developed by Silent Circle, named, appropriately enough, SCIMP, or Silent Circle Instant Message Protocol. Encryption keys are held on the end user's system and not managed by the email providers themselves, so a court order against the ISP will yield nothing. Both the message's contents and metadata (e.g., to/from headers) are encrypted.


The thing is, the technical details of encrypted email aren't themselves the real obstacle. The difficulties tend to be social -- that is, getting people to use the existing standards and projects in the first place. Many existing packages, such as Enigmail, already allow you to equip email clients with encryption without too much difficulty. But few non-technical users bother with them, in big part because in order to send someone else an encrypted message, they have to be running the same software. The lack of a common implementation, as common as a web browser, is a big stumbling block, but end user indifference is ultimately the biggest reason why most email isn't encrypted.


The other issue is something Silent Circle and Lavabit are at least attempting to tackle: Participation from common email providers. If Gmail supported the Dark Mail standard, for instance, that would provide a great many existing email users with a near-seamless way to make use of it, but so far, no third-party mail providers have piped up. That might well be a defensive measure: If they announced early on they were working on such a thing, it would give attackers all the more time to try and plan a way to subvert it.


The Snowden papers have also showed how even those who do take the pains to encrypt can have their privacy subverted by attackers who simply perform an end-run around the encryption and intercept information either before or after it's ever encrypted. Unfortunately, the only way to prevent such a thing is via such extreme measures as an air-gapped system.


So what can we expect from Dark Mail? If it's ever implemented as its creators intend, it ought to serve two functions: Give end users a way to casually encrypt email without going through a whole hassle, and make them that much more conscious of how, on the current Internet, there may not be any safe places at all.


This story, "Email goes 'Dark' -- encrypted, that is," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.


Source: http://www.infoworld.com/t/encryption/email-goes-dark-encrypted-229947
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