Meet the Con Man Who Pulled Off a Federal Sting That Cost Google $500 Million

May 14, 2013 by

ON FEBRUARY 25, 2009, a then 34-year-old career con man named David Anthony Whitaker left the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and slid into the backseat of an unmarked government car. He was dressed in traditional prison garb—khaki pants, brown shirt, handcuffs, leg irons. A federal agent sat beside him. A second car followed to make sure nobody trailed them or attempted an ambush. Not that anyone expected trouble. This was merely standard procedure when transporting a government cooperator.

That’s what Whitaker was now: a cooperator. It felt surreal. One year ago he was in Mexico, living the most fulfilling life he’d ever known in his chaotic, troubled years on the planet. He had been bringing in obscene amounts of money by selling black-market steroids and human growth hormone online. He had a multimillion-dollar apartment in a country club in Guadalajara. He had a cabin in the mountain town of Mazamitla. He had lots of cars—an orange 4Runner, a BMW, a Jeep. He’d even funded the construction of a local hospital. Sure, he had to live under an alias and was on the run from US Secret Service agents who were trying to nail him for a long-standing multicount fraud complaint. But he had a lawyer on retainer, and at least the local cops were easy to pay off.

That life ended on March 19, 2008, when a Mexican immigration agent nabbed Whitaker and brought him back to LAX, where the Secret Service promptly arrested him. He was facing a potential sentence of 65 years in prison. Sixty-five years. That meant spending the rest of his life behind bars. The thought was unbearable.

Whitaker began thinking of ways to knock years off his sentence. He considered providing the names of the drug users, pushers, and doctors who had patronized his online steroid business. They were mostly easy marks, and Whitaker was quick to take advantage of them. For a while he bottled sterile water in 1-milliliter vials, marketed it as a steroid called Dutchminnie, and sold it for $1,000 a pop. Not only did clients fall for the scam, they sent back photos showing how they’d bulked up after using the “drug.”

But he quickly realized that he could offer the government much more than the names of a few juicers. At one point during a meeting with Whitaker and his lawyer, the Feds asked him how he had grown his online enterprise. Whitaker’s answer was immediate: He had used Google AdWords. In fact, he claimed, Google employees had actively helped him advertise his business, even though he had made no attempt to hide its illegal nature. It was reasonable to assume, Whitaker said, that Google was helping other rogue Internet pharmacies too.

If true, this would be a bombshell. This was Google, after all. Since its founding, the search giant had prided itself on being a different kind of corporation, the “don’t be evil” company. And for almost as long, its open-to-all-comers ad policy had come under scrutiny. Online pharmacies were a particular sticking point; in 2003, three separate congressional committees initiated inquiries into the matter. On July 22, 2004, a month before Google went public, Sheryl Sandberg—at the time Google vice president of global online sales and operations—testified before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Legislators had proposed two bills that would regulate online pharmaceutical sales, but Sandberg argued that the measures would be unduly burdensome. She said that Google employed a third-party verification service to vet online pharmacies. She also described Google’s own automated monitoring system and the creation of a team of Google employees dedicated to enforcing all of the company’s pharmaceutical ad policies. “Google has taken strong voluntarily [sic] measures—going beyond existing legal requirements—to ensure that our advertising services protect our users by providing access to safe and reliable information,” she testified. Neither bill made it out of committee. (Sandberg, now Facebook’s chief operating officer, declined to comment or be interviewed for this story.)

The agents seemed skeptical of Whitaker’s claims and spent the next 10 months following up on them. But they apparently found the story plausible, because now Whitaker was being driven to a Providence, Rhode Island, postal inspector’s office to launch the US government’s undercover investigation into one of the world’s most admired, profitable, and powerful companies.

As soon as they entered the postal inspector’s office, the Feds explained the ground rules. Whitaker had to be completely honest with them; one lie and any possible deal was off. From now on, he would be known as Jason Corriente, the fictional CEO of a fake Rhode Island–based marketing firm called Maxwell and Associates. The FDA had already secured an 800 number, a bank account, and an answering service. His job: to buy advertising for SportsDrugs.net, a website that sold HGH and steroids from Mexico, no doctor’s prescription required.

With his talent for prevarication, Whitaker was well suited to the task. Throughout his checkered past, he had assumed false identities, sold nonexistent products, and written bad checks. But he’d never faced such high stakes. If he couldn’t somehow lead Google into breaking the law again, he’d probably die in prison.

An agent handed Whitaker a list of phone numbers of Google employees and a phone hooked up to a recorder, then told him to dial.

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Law Requiring Warrants for E-Mail Wins Senate Committee Approval

April 28, 2013 by

A Senate committee today backed sweeping privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the package on a voice vote after about 30 minutes of debate, and sent the measure to the Senate floor, where it faces an uncertain future.

The legislation, (.pdf) sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the committee’s chair, and Michael S. Lee (R-Utah) nullifies a provision of federal law allowing the authorities to acquire a suspect’s e-mail or other stored content from an internet service provider without showing probable cause that a crime was committed if the content is 180 days or older.

Under the current law, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the government can obtain e-mail without a warrant as long as the data has been stored on a third-party server — the cloud — for 180 days or more. The government only needs to show, often via an administrative subpoena, that it has “reasonable grounds to believe” the information would be useful to an investigation.

Initially, ECPA provided privacy to users, but that privacy protection eroded as technology advanced and people began storing e-mail and documents on servers for longer periods, sometimes indefinitely. The act was adopted at a time when e-mail wasn’t stored on servers for a long time, but instead was held briefly on its way to the recipient’s inbox. E-mail more than 6 months old was assumed abandoned.

“I think Americans are very concerned about unwarranted intrusions into our cyber lives,” Leahy said ahead of the vote.

The bill enjoys backing from a wide range of lobbying interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Judiciary Committee approved a nearly identical version of the bill in November. But it died a quiet death and, in Washington fashion, mutated into a package granting the public the right to automatically display on their Facebook feeds what they’re watching on Netflix.

What the President Barack Obama administration thinks of the measure is a mixed bag. The Justice Department testified in March at House committee that the 180-day rule “no longer made sense.” (.pdf)

But that doesn’t mean the agency is on board with the change.

“The harder question is how to update those outdated rules and the statute in light of new and changing technologies while maintaining protections for privacy and adequately providing for public safety and other law enforcement imperatives,” said Elana Tyrangiel, an acting assistant attorney general.

And on Thursday, Mary Jo White, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new chair, wrote the Senate Judiciary Committee that the bill’s passage would hinder the government’s “ability to protect investors.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) said Thursday that federal authorities may simply abandon terrorism cases if they have to spent time comporting with the Fourth Amendment.

“Terrorism cases,” he said during the committee hearing, “may never be followed up on just because of that burden.”

The measure allows the authorities to bypass the warrant requirement for national security issues and emergencies. It also demands that the targets of warrants be immediately notified about the warrant.

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Here’s a Good Reason to Encrypt Your Data

April 27, 2013 by

There’s many reasons to password-protect — or encrypt — one’s digital data. Foremost among them is to protect it during a security breach.

Another top reason is to keep the government out of your hard drive.

The issue is front and center as a federal magistrate is refusing to order a Wisconsin computer scientist to decrypt his data that the authorities seized from kiddie-porn suspect Jeffrey Feldman. The reason is simple: The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination protects even those suspected of unsavory crimes, according to U.S. Magistrate William Callahan Jr. of Wisconsin, who wrote:

This is a close call, but I conclude that Feldman’s act of production, which would necessarily require his using a password of some type to decrypt the storage device, would be tantamount to telling the government something it does not already know with ‘reasonably particularity’—namely, that Feldman has personal access to and control over the encrypted storage devices. Accordingly, in my opinion, Fifth Amendment protection is available to Feldman. Stated another way, ordering Feldman to decrypt the storage devices would be in violation of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. (.pdf)

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, stressed that the decision was important, and not because it might hinder a kiddie-porn prosecution.

“This isn’t just about child porn. It’s about anything on your computer that prosecutors or government officials may want,” he said in a telephone interview.

Federal prosecutors did not immediately respond for comment, but said in court papers they have spent months trying to decrypt the data.

“The FBI is performing admirable in the digital arms race between those seeking to hide evidence of their wrongdoing through encryption and law enforcement officers seeking to uncover that evidence; but the expense in time and resources in investigating cases like this one is beginning to inhibit the provision of justice,” the government said (.pdf) in seeking the magistrate to compel the suspect to unlock the data.

The suspect was not immediately reachable.

To be sure, decryption orders are rare, and they have never been squarely addressed by the Supreme Court despite varying opinions in the lower courts.

Just last year, for example, a federal appeals court rejected an appeal from a bank-fraud defendant who has been ordered to decrypt her laptop so its contents could be used in her criminal case. The issue was later mooted for defendant Romano Fricosu as a co-defendant eventually supplied a password.

Contrary to the Wisconsin child pornography case, however, the Fricosu matter was distinguishable because the authorities had evidence that her hard drive might contain evidence against her, meaning the court felt her Fifth Amendment rights were not at issue. That’s because the authorities had recorded a jailhouse conversation between her and a co-defendant, in which the laptop’s contents were discussed.

It’s worth noting that encryption is not 100 percent effective.

And failing to comply with a judge’s decryption order — or any order for that matter — might result in a contempt charge and land you in jail pending compliance. Alleging you forgot your encryption password is another story.

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Is the CIA Getting Out of the Drone Business?

March 20, 2013 by

Daniel Klaidman of The Daily Beast reports that the White House will soon take the power to launch lethal drone strikes away from the CIA and make the program the exclusive domain of the Defense Department. Because the military and intelligence services operate under a different set of rules, the move would consolidate all drone operations under a single command and a single set of procedure. It could also (potentially) add new layers of transparency and accountability to what has become one of the government’s most controversial operations.

The shift may not change much in the real world of missile strikes and terrorist hunting, as drones will continue to be a major tool in the U.S. arsenal. However, it could signal a major shift in the legal and diplomatic basis for the program. For example, one of the most important distinctions between CIA operations and military ones is the difference between “covert” and “clandestine.” The military can keep its “clandestine” activities classified or secret—like say a SEAL team raid to kill a wanted terrorist. But if Congress or a judge asks, they can’t pretend they didn’t happen. The CIA, on the other hand, is allowed to declare certain missions to be “covert.” (Like say, sneaking American citizens out of a hostile country.) That means that, legally, they can deny that program even exists, shielding those responsible from accountability and hiding them from the public.

That extra layer of accountbility matters a lot when making life or death decisions. Currently, the CIA has the power to decide on its own if a terorist is going to be targeted, and in certain circumstances can carry out an attack without further authorization. The most notable exception is Pakistan, where the Armed Forces require presidential authorization to carry out a mission within its borders, but the CIA doesn’t.

As far back as last fall it was reported that John Brennan, who was then the President’s chief counterterrorism advisor, was already looking to consolidate drone operations under the umbrella of Pentagon, believing that the military was better suited to handle armed drone operations. He seemed to be growing more uncomfortable with the idea of the Central Intelligence Agency morphing from a spy outfit into a lethal fighting force, especially one that decides on its own who deserves the “lethal” part. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has much stricter requirements that must be met before carrying out a military operation in a foreign country, the White House and Congress have more power over generals (and their budgets) than they do secret agents, and international law and diplomacy helps to keep uniformed soliders on a tighter leash.

It’s interesting to see that even though Brennan is now in charge of the CIA he hasn’t changed his mind about dumping drones from his portfolio, and is legitimately committed to seeing the agency focus more on its spying roots. Giving the power to strike overseas solely to the president may not ease everyone’s fears about the drone program, but at least it makes it slightly easier to keep an eye on it.

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Lawyers: Jackson Jr., wife intend to plead guilty to charges

February 16, 2013 by

Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife Sandi intend to plead guilty to federal charges alleging the former congressman misused $750,000 in campaign funds while she understated their income on tax returns for six years, their lawyers say.

Jackson Jr., 47, a Democrat from Chicago, was charged in a criminal information Friday with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and false statements. He faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and other penalties.

Sandi Jackson was charged with one count of filing false tax returns. She faces up to three years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and other penalties.

Jackson Jr. is accused of diverting $750,000 in campaign funds for personal use.

Federal authorities allege that Jackson Jr. used campaign funds to purchase a $43,350 men’s gold-plated Rolex watch, $5,150 worth of fur capes and parkas, and $9,588 in children’s furniture. The purchases were made between 2007 and 2009, according to the criminal information, which authorities noted is not evidence of guilt.

Other expenditures listed by prosecutors include $10,105 on Bruce Lee memorabilia, $11,130 on Martin Luther King memorabilia and $22,700 on Michael Jackson items, including $4,600 for a “Michael Jackson fedora.”

The government also alleged that Jackson Jr. made false statements to the House of Representatives because he did not report approximately $28,500 in loans and gifts he received.

“He has accepted responsibility for his actions and I can confirm that he intends to plead guilty to the charge in the information,” Jackson Jr.’s attorney Brian Heberlig said.

Sandi Jackson is accused of filing incorrect joint tax returns with her husband for calendar years 2006 through 2011, reporting income “substantially less than the amount of income she and her husband received in each of the calendar years,” with a substantial additional tax due.

Her attorneys released a statement saying she has “reached an agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office to plead guilty to one count of tax fraud.”

Jackson Jr. stepped down from the House of Representatives on Nov. 21, citing both his poor health and an ongoing federal probe of his activities. In a statement then, he said he was doing his best to cooperate with federal investigators and to accept responsibility for his “mistakes.”

In a statement, Jackson Jr. said:

“Over the course of my life I have come to realize that none of us are immune from our share of shortcomings and human frailties. Still I offer no excuses for my conduct and I fully accept my responsibility for the improper decisions and mistakes I have made. To that end I want to offer my sincerest apologies to my family, my friends and all of my supporters for my errors in judgment and while my journey is not yet complete, it is my hope that I am remembered for the things that I did right.”

Sandi Jackson’s attorneys released a statement saying she “has accepted responsibility for her conduct, is deeply sorry for her actions, and looks forward to putting this matter behind her and her family. She is thankful for the support of her family and friends during this very difficult time.”

Jackson’s father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., said he wanted to attend President Barack Obama’s speech Friday at Hyde Park Academy in Chicago but traveled to Washington, D.C., instead, to be with family members while they waited for the federal charges to come down.

“This has been a difficult and painful ordeal for our family,” the civil rights leader said.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he would “leave it up to the courts system” to determine his son’s fate.

“We express our love for him as a family,” he said.

Jackson Jr.’s political fortunes sank beginning late in 2008, when he sought unsuccessfully to have Gov. Rod Blagojevich appoint him to the Senate seat that came open with the election of then-Sen. Barack Obama to the White House.

Jackson Jr. or an emissary reportedly offered to raise up to $6 million in campaign cash for Blagojevich, who now is in federal prison for crimes including trying to sell the Senate seat. Jackson Jr. was never charged in the case, which became the subject of an ethics probe in the House.

Last June, Jackson Jr. began a mysterious leave of absence for what originally was called “exhaustion” but later emerged as bipolar disorder. He spent months in treatment and won re-election Nov. 6 despite never returning to service in the House or staging a single campaign appearance.

A campaign to replace him is being conducted now in the 2nd Congressional District, which includes parts of the South Side and south suburbs.

Jackson Jr. was first elected to Congress in 1995. Sandi Jackson was a Chicago alderman until she resigned her post last month. They have two children.

Sandi Jackson’s firm, J. Donatella & Associates, has been paid at least $452,500 from her husband’s campaign committee since 2002, Federal Election Commission reports show.

The former congressman’s campaign committee reported $105,703 in cash on hand on last Nov. 26, FEC reports show. Leading up to the last election, it reported $1 million in contributions and $1.06 million in operating expenditures, reports show.

Once considered a potential candidate for mayor of Chicago, Jesse Jackson Jr.’s reputation has taken a hit in recent years because of the Blagojevich scandal and also because of news reports in 2010 that a suburban Chicago businessman told federal investigators he twice paid to fly a woman — a hostess from a Washington, D.C. bar — to Chicago at Jackson’s request.

In the wake of the reports, Jackson Jr. issued a statement calling the woman a “social acquaintance” and describing the matter as a “private and personal matter between me and my wife that was handled some time ago.”

Jackson Jr. subsequently told the Tribune editorial board he had apologized to “my absolute best friend, my wife.”

Still, he also acknowledged he asked longtime supporter Raghuveer Nayak to pay to fly the woman from Washington to Chicago. House ethics rules prohibit members from soliciting gifts of personal benefit. Jackson said Nayak’s purchase was “a friendly gesture” by “a close and dear friend of mine, one who knows members of my family, has worked with members of my family, has been a friend of our family’s for a number of years.”

The woman’s travel was “not a personal benefit to me, I don’t believe, under the House rules. A benefit to the person for whom he bought the ticket. He didn’t buy tickets for me. Did I direct him? I did.”

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Lawmakers reintroduce cyberthreat information-sharing bill

February 14, 2013 by

Two U.S. lawmakers have reintroduced a controversial cyberthreat information-sharing bill over the objections of some privacy advocates and digital rights groups.

As promised, Representatives Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, and C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat, have reintroduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that would allow private companies to share a wide range of cyberthreat information with U.S. government agencies.

New legislation is needed to protect the U.S. from cyberattacks coming from Iran and other countries, said Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. Cyberattacks have “exploded into what is an epidemic,” he said during a briefing on the bill. “We are in a cyberwar—most Americans don’t know it, most folks in the world probably don’t know it—and at this point, we’re losing.”

The bill can help U.S. agencies and businesses address their toughest cybersecurity problems, Rogers said. “It’s not a surveillance program, it’s in real time, at the speed of light, exchanging zeros and ones when it comes to malicious software to catch it and stop it,” he said.

Several privacy and digital rights groups have said the bill allows companies to share too much private information with government agencies, without sufficient oversight. The U.S. House of Representatives passed CISPA last April, but the legislation failed to advance in the Senate after the White House threatened a veto over privacy concerns.

The privacy protections in the new bill are “woefully inadequate,” Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior policy counsel at civil liberties group the Constitution Project, said in an email. “If passed in its current form, it would allow companies that hold sensitive personal information to share it with the federal government, including with agencies that have a history of domestic spying, which could then potentially use the information for purposes totally unrelated to cybersecurity,” she added..

Rogers and Ruppersberger said they’ve addressed privacy concerns in the new bill, although several privacy groups still voiced opposition to CISPA. The lawmakers have worked with privacy groups and will work with the White House as the bill moves forward, Ruppersberger said.

The two sponsors engaged in “lengthy negotiations” on privacy concerns, Ruppersberger said. The new bill has narrowed the definition of information that can be shared and sets strict restrictions on the government’s use and searching of the data, the sponsors said.

The two lawmakers introduced CISPA a day after President Barack Obama signed an executive order focused on allowing federal agencies to share cyberthreat information with U.S. businesses and on creating voluntary cybersecurity standards for operators of critical infrastructure.

The bill is needed in addition to the executive order to enable wider sharing of cyberthreat information than the order allows, Rogers said. While Obama’s order allows federal agencies to share cyberthreat information with companies, the bill would allow agencies to share classified information and would allow U.S. businesses to share cyberthreat information with each other and with government agencies.

CISPA also protects businesses that share cyberthreat information from lawsuits.

Some tech companies and trade groups, including Verizon Communications and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, praised the bill. The sharing of cyberthreat information is a “critical missing link in our efforts to detect and deter cyberattacks,” Michael Powell, NCTA’s president and CEO, wrote in a letter to the sponsors.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and Demand Progress, a digital rights group, both repeated their opposition to CISPA.

“CISPA does not require companies to make reasonable efforts to protect their customers’ privacy and then allows the government to use that data for undefined national-security purposes and without any minimization procedures, which have been in effect in other security statutes for decades,” the ACLU said in a statement.

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New York Has Gun Deal, With Focus on Mental Ills

January 15, 2013 by

Gov.Andrew M. Cuomo and lawmakers agreed on Monday to a broad package of changes to gun laws that would expand the state’s ban on assault weapons and would include new measures to keep guns away from people with mental illnesses.

The state Senate, controlled by a coalition of Republicans and a handful of Democrats, approved the legislative package just after 11 p.m. by a lopsided vote of 43 to 18. The Assembly, where Democrats who have been strongly supportive of gun control have an overwhelming majority, planned to vote on the measure Tuesday.

Approval of the legislation would make New York the first state to act in response to the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., last month.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, had pressed lawmakers to move quickly in response to Newtown, saying, “the people of this state are crying out for help.” And the Legislature proceeded with unusual haste: Monday was the first full day of this year’s legislative session.

“We don’t need another tragedy to point out the problems in the system,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference.

“Enough people have lost their lives,” he added. “Let’s act.”

The expanded ban on assault weapons would broaden the definition of such weapons, banning semiautomatic pistols and rifles with detachable magazines and one military-style feature, as well as semiautomatic shotguns with one military-style feature. New Yorkers who already own such guns could keep them but would be required to register them with the state.

“The message out there is so clear after Newtown,” said the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Democrat from Manhattan. “To basically eradicate assault weapons from our streets in New York as quickly as possible is something the people of this state want.”

In an acknowledgment that many people have suggested that part of the solution to gun violence is a better government response to mental illness, the legislation includes not only new restrictions on gun ownership, but also efforts to limit access to guns by the mentally ill.

The most significant new proposal would require mental health professionals to report to local mental health officials when they believe that patients are likely to harm themselves or others. Law enforcement would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by a dangerous patient; therapists would not be sanctioned for a failure to report such patients if they acted “in good faith.”

“People who have mental health issues should not have guns,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters. “They could hurt themselves, they could hurt other people.”

But such a requirement “represents a major change in the presumption of confidentiality that has been inherent in mental health treatment,” said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, the director of the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, who said the Legislature should hold hearings on possible consequences of the proposal.

“The prospect of being reported to the local authorities, even if they do not have weapons, may be enough to discourage patients with suicidal or homicidal thoughts from seeking treatment or from being honest about their impulses,” he said.

The legislation would extend and expand Kendra’s Law, which empowers judges to order mentally ill patients to receive outpatient treatment.

And it would require gun owners to keep weapons inaccessible in homes where a resident has been involuntarily committed, convicted of a crime or is the subject of an order of protection.

The legislative package, which Mr. Cuomo said he believed would be “the most comprehensive package in the nation,” would ban any gun magazine that can hold over 7 rounds of ammunition — the current limit is 10 rounds. It would also require background checks of ammunition buyers and automated alerts to law enforcement of high-volume purchases.

The legislation would increase penalties for multiple crimes committed with guns, would require background checks for most private gun sales, and create a statewide gun-registration database.

Senator Jeffrey D. Klein of the Bronx, the leader of an independent faction of Democrats who have allied with the Republicans to control the Senate, said the measure met the goals of many lawmakers.

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Disruptions: Smart Guns Can’t Kill in the Wrong Hands

January 7, 2013 by

Gun owners and advocates are fond of saying, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

This might be a more useful aphorism: Smart-guns don’t kill the wrong people.

Technology exists, or could exist, that would make guns safer. The idea of a safe gun might seem to be the ultimate oxymoron: guns are designed to kill. But something missing from the gun-control debate that has followed the killing of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., is the role of technology in preventing or at least limiting gun deaths.

Biometrics and grip pattern detection can sense the registered owner of a gun and allow only that person to fire it. For example, the iGun, made by Mossberg Group, cannot be fired unless its owner is wearing a ring with a chip that activates the gun.

But you would be hard pressed to find this technology on many weapons sold in stores. “The gun industry has no interest in making smart-guns. There is no incentive for them,” said Robert J. Spitzer, a professor of political science at SUNY Cortland and the author of four books on gun policy. “There is also no appetite by the government to press ahead with any kind of regulation requiring smart-guns.”

Why can we open our front doors with our iPhones and have cars that drive themselves, but we can’t make a gun that doesn’t fire unless its registered owner is using it?

“We can,” Dr. Spitzer said. “These safety options exist today. This is not Buck Rogers type of stuff.” But gun advocates are staunchly against these technologies, partly because so many guns are bought not in gun shops, but in private sales. “Many guns are bought and sold on the secondary market without background checks, and that kind of sale would be inhibited with fingerprinting-safety technologies in guns,” he said.

I called several major gun makers and the National Rifle Association. No one thinks a smart-gun will stop a determined killer. But I thought Smith & Wesson and Remington, for instance, would want to discuss how technology might help reduce accidental shootings, which killed 600 people and injured more than 14,000 in the United States in 2010. The gunmakers did not respond, and neither did the N.R.A.

A Wired magazine article from 2002 gives a glimpse of the N.R.A.’s thinking. “Mere mention of ‘smart-gun’ technology elicited sneers and snickers faster than a speeding bullet,” the magazine wrote. It quoted the N.R.A.’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, as saying, “Tragic victims couldn’t have been saved by trigger locks or magazine bans or ‘smart-gun’ technology, or some new government commission running our firearms companies.”

After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in December, Mr. LaPierre created a new aphorism: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” He said violent video games and movies were part of the problem, but he didn’t mention smart-guns as a solution.

TriggerSmart, an Irish company, has patented a childproof smart-gun. One feature is a “safe zone” that can be installed in schools and acts as a force field, disabling any TriggerSmart gun that enters a designated area. Robert McNamara, the company’s founder, has been trying to persuade gun makers to adopt the technology. He isn’t having much luck. “One gun manufacturer told us if we put this technology in one particular gun and some kid gets shot with another gun, then they will have to put them in all guns,” he said.

“We believe we could have helped prevent the Newtown massacre.”

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Anonymous: ‘Expect us 2013′

January 2, 2013 by

The hacking group issues a statement boasting of its cyberattacks against the U.S., Syrian, and Israeli governments in 2012, while warning people to continue to expect this type of activity.

The hacking collective Anonymous has clarified that it has no plans to fade away in the New Year. It issued a statement over the weekend that warned the world to “Expect us 2013.”

Along with the statement, the group created a video that boasts of its campaigns and exploits carried out in 2012. The video details the group’s temporary shutdown of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music, and the Motion Picture Association of America’s Web sites in protest of the U.S. government’s indictment of the operators of popular file-hosting site MegaUpload.

The video also shows newsreels of Anonymous’ campaign against Syrian government Web sites because of that government’s alleged shutdown of the Internet, along with Anonymous’ “cyberwar” against the Israeli government in protest of government attacks on Gaza. The group also recounts its hack into the Web site of the Westboro Baptist Church in response to plans by the controversial church to picket the funerals of those massacred at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

“The operations which are listed in the video are only examples, there are far more operations,” Anonymous wrote in the statement. “Some of them still running, like Operation Syria. We are still here.”

Despite the hacking group’s threats, some believe that the collective may not actually make a big impact in the online world in the coming year. Security firm McAfee Labs released its “2013 Threat Predictions” last week and claimed the decline of Anonymous.

The firm argued that a lack of structure and organization, false claims, and hacking for the simple joy of it has affected the group’s reputation. McAfee also said, however, that higher-level professional hacking groups may take up the slack, and promote a rise in military, religious, political, and “extreme” campaign attacks.

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Four security trends defined 2012, will impact 2013

December 23, 2012 by

Mobile and Mac malware burbles noxiously, data breaches and data mining will cause more havoc with your privacy, and the Web will continue to suffer the ignominy of poorly-written, Swiss-cheesed code as security experts predict lessons from 2012 go unlearned in 2013.

The Internet is slowly changing, and security experts say that today’s security issues will continue to be major players in driving that change. Here are four trends that dominated headlines in 2012, and will continue to play a major role in 2013.

The Internet as governmental tool

The collective realization by governments around the world that the Internet is an excellent network for conducting surveillance, monitoring, espionage, and war, says Finnish computer security firm F-Secure’s Chief Technical Officer Mikko Hypponen, may not come to full fruition in 2013. But the foundation for that change is already underway.

“There will be more operations along the lines of Olympic Games, also from other sources than US and Israel. Later on, we might look back at these first 20 years of the Web as the Golden Days, when the net was still free,” he wrote in an e-mail to CNET. “Olympic Games” is the covert inter-government project that reportedly birthed Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame.

Information security expert Chris Wysopal agreed that “cyber-warfare” is becoming commonplace. “When there’s a political or actual war event, we’re seeing cyber-attacks parallel that. It does seem to be more pronounced. It’s almost not newsworthy, as if we expect it to happen alongside a political event.”

Take that in for a moment. Government-sponsored, computer-based attacks, as “almost not newsworthy,” he said.

But just because these attacks are becoming more frequent doesn’t mean that they don’t stymie security researchers. Tomer Teller, a security evangelist and researcher at Check Point, said that he was surprised this year by the rise of “precision-targeted attacks.”

“We saw that with Gauss this year, from the Stuxnet family. It had an encrypted payload, and researchers couldn’t decrypt it,” Teller said.

Tim Rains, the director of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing division, pointed out that these governmental actions have consequences beyond the nuclear reactors of Iran and other industrial targets.

“Eighty-five percent of the exploits against operating systems tried to take advantage of one of the vulnerabilities that Stuxnet used. A very small fraction of malware uses “zero-days,” so we’re seeing commodity malware writers benefits from the research of professionals,” he said. “It was a trend in 2012, and we’ll continue to see that in the next year.”

More mobile devices, bigger targets

Experts have been talking up mobile security for several years now, and as mobile device proliferation continues, so will the security problems associated with them. Because the problems are mobile and always-connected in nature, the security challenges will become more complex in 2013, experts told me.

Lookout Mobile Security’s senior product manager, Derek Halliday, noted two interesting trends that his company saw in 2012. Lookout predicted and saw in 2012, “only a few dominant kinds of mobile malware,” he said.

Microsoft’s Rains agreed. “[The Looter exploit] is responsible for the second-most highest number of mobile threats we saw.”

Halliday added, “The other thing was how geographic specific these threats were. We were surprised by the stark contrast between the U.S. and say Russia or China. If you try to run a toll fraud application at scale in the U.S., you’ll encounter some problems — a double-opt in message, government intervention,” he said.

Another point Halliday made was that while Android 4.2 is the most secure yet, with numerous security improvements, operating system fragmentation will prevent it from reaching most people until late 2013.

On the other hand, said Wysopal, the impact of mobile malware is definitely growing. “In 2012, half a percent of all mobile users got hurt by mobile malware in the U.S. That’s a million people, not an insignificant number. It’s a trend that is happening slower than expected, but it’s not going to go away.”

The malware problem is likely to remain isolated from Apple’s iOS, according to Hypponen. “There’s still no iPhone malware. Five years after shipping one of the most popular systems, they have no malware problem at all. That’s a major accomplishment by Apple. Job well done.”

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