Finally! There’s something that apparently virtually all governments around the world can actually agree upon. Unfortunately, it’s on par conceptually with handing out hydrogen bombs as lottery prizes.

If the drumbeat isn’t actually coordinated, it might as well be. Around the world, in testimony before national legislatures and in countless interviews with media, government officials and their surrogates are proclaiming the immediate need to “do something” about encryption that law enforcement and other government agencies can’t read on demand.

Here in the U.S., it’s a nearly constant harangue over on FOX News (nightmarishly, where most Americans apparently get their “news” these days). On CNN, it’s almost as pervasive (though anti-crypto tirades on CNN must share space with primetime reruns of a globetrotting celebrity chef and crime “reality” shows).

It’s much the same if you survey media around the world. The names and officials vary, but the message is the same — it’s not just terrorism that’s the enemy, it’s encryption itself.

That argument is a direct corollary to governments’ decidedly mixed feelings about social media on the Internet. On one hand, they’re ecstatic over the ability to monitor the public postings of criminal organizations like ISIL (or ISIS, or Islamic State, or Daesh — just different labels for the same fanatical lunatics) that sprung forth from the disastrously misguided policies of Bush 1 and Bush 2 era right-wing neocons — who not only set the stage for the resurrection of long-suppressed religious rivalries, but ultimately provided them with billions of dollars worth of U.S. weaponry as well. Great job there, guys.

Since it’s also the typical role of governments to conflate and confuse issues whenever possible for political advantage, when we dig deeper into their views on social media and encryption we really go down the rabbit hole.

While governments love their theoretical ability to track pretty much every looney who posts publicly on Twitter or Facebook or Google+, governments simultaneously bemoan the fact that it’s possible for uncontrolled communications — especially international communications — to take place at all in these contexts.

In particular, it’s the ability of radical nutcases overseas to recruit ignorant (especially so-called “lone wolf”) nutcases in other countries that is said to be of especial concern, notably when these communications suddenly “go dark” off the public threads and into private, securely encrypted channels.

“Go dark” — by the way — is now the government code phrase for crypto they can’t read on demand. Dark threads, dark sites, dark links. You get the idea.

One would be remiss to not admit that these radical recruiting efforts are of significant concern.

But where governments’ analysis breaks down massively is with the direction of their proposed solutions, which aren’t aimed at addressing the root causes of fanatical religious terrorism, but rather appear almost entirely based on preventing secure communications — for anybody! — in the first place.

Naturally they don’t phrase this goal in quite those words. Rather, they continue to push (to blankly nodding politicians, journalists, and cable anchors) the tired and utterly discredited concept of “key escrow” cryptography, where governments would have “backdoor” keys to unlock encrypted communications, supposedly only when absolutely necessary and with due legal process.

Rewind 20 years or so and it’s like “Groundhog Day” all over again, back in the early to mid 90s when NSA was pushing their “Clipper Chip” hardware concept for key escrowed encryption, an idea that was mercilessly buried in relatively short order.

But like a vampire entombed without appropriate rituals, the old key escrow concepts have returned to the land of the living, all the uglier and more dangerous after their decades festering in the backrooms of governments.

The hardware Clipper concept dates to a time well before the founding of Twitter or Facebook, and a few years before Google’s arrival. Apple existed back then, but centralized social media as we know it today wasn’t yet even really a glimmer in anyone’s eye.

While governments generally seem to realize that stopping all crypto that they can’t access on demand is not practical, they also realize that the big social media platforms (of which I’ve named only a few) — where most users do most of their social communicating — are the obvious targets for legislative, political, and other pressures.

And this is why we see governments subtly (and often, not so subtly) demonizing these firms as being uncooperative or somehow uncaring about fighting evil, about fighting crime, about fighting terrorism. How dare they — authorities repeat as a mantra — implement encryption systems that governments cannot access at the click of a mouse, or sometimes access at all under any conditions.

Well, welcome to the 21st century, because the encryption genie isn’t going back into his bottle, no matter how hard you push.

Strong crypto is critical to our communications, to our infrastructures, to our economies, and increasingly to many other aspects of our lives.

Strong crypto is simply not possible — let’s say that once more with feeling — not possible, given key escrow or other government backdoors designed into these systems. There is no practical or even theoretically accepted means for including such mechanisms without fatally weakening the entire associated encryption ecosystem, and opening it up to all manner of unauthorized access via hacking and various subversions of the key escrow process.

But governments just don’t seem willing to accept the science and reality of this, and keep pushing the key escrow meme. It’s like the old joke about the would-be astronaut who wanted to travel to the sun, and when reminded that he’d burn up, replied that it wasn’t a problem, because he’d go at night. Right.

Notably, just as we had governments who ignored realistic advice and unleashed the monsters of religious fanatical terrorism, we now have many of the same governments on the cusp of trying to hobble, undermine, and decimate the strong encryption systems that are so very vital.

There’s every reason to believe that we’d experience a similarly disastrous outcome in the encryption context as well, especially if social media firms were required to deploy only weak crypto — putting the vast populations of innocent users at risk — while driving the bad guys even further underground and out of view.

If we don’t vigorously fight back against government efforts to weaken encryption, we’re all going to be badly burned.

Published by Lauren Weinstein on vortex.com

WILLIAMSON, W.V. – Students and parents are rallying to the defense of a teacher who is accused of violating federal school snack rules.

The Williamson PreK-8 teacher, who was not identified, would give her students “wrapped candy” as a reward for their hard work and good behavior.

Because the practice was an alleged violation of the federal rules championed by first lady Michelle Obama, Mingo County Schools Director of Child Nutrition Kay Maynard “placed a call to officials at the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) to report the incident,” the Williamson Daily News reports.

Maynard also spoke to Williamson PreK-8 principal Shannon Blackburn, telling him about the possibility of a monetary fine for the teacher.

When news spread, parents and student mobilized, collecting pennies to pay the potential fine on the teacher’s behalf.

Administrators at the WVDE decided the teacher’s violation was not a “deliberate attempt” to break Michelle Obama’s rules and said instead of fining the teacher, they required the department to “develop a corrective action plan to include training on child nutrition policies.”

By participating in the National School Lunch Program, the school district must adhere to edicts handed down from Washington, D.C.

Those rules state that food, such as “wrapped candy,” cannot be used as “a reward and it cannot be withheld as a punishment.”

Administrators with Mingo County Schools claim the federal rules were developed “to help educators encourage students to make healthy decisions.”

If they’re not strictly followed, schools can be required to return federal school lunch money, be penalized for state and federal food service programs, or make all schools in the county vulnerable to similar punishment.

by Virgil Vaduva

It’s a web of mistrust, accusations and outrage. It all started earlier this year when the Department of Homeland Security send Reddit a subpoena for the identities of some members of the DarkNetMarkets subreddit, an online community where users share information and discuss various online markets located on the “dark net,” which is an euphemism used to describe services, sites and machines using anonymizing protocols such as TOR.

This is the current relationship between members of the DarkNetMarkets subreddit and the Bitcoin wallet hosting service, Coinbase.

On May 2nd, a Coinbase customer posted an ominous warning on Reddit, accompanied by screenshots, demonstrating that Coinbase is actively monitoring customer transactions. This particular user claims to have made a donation to Gwern Branwen, who is a researcher and the moderator of the DarkNetMarkets subreddit.

The complain went on to state:

“When I donated to gwern, I hadn’t made any other transactions with Coinbase for two weeks or more. The only transaction in Coinbase for the last two weeks until right now is the gwern donation. It’s no coincidence.”

A second user followed with a post a day later stating,

“Last friday a user posted that after donating to one of Gwern’s wallets coinbase sent him an email shortly after confirmed. Me being an inquisitive person and supporter of /u/gwern decided to give the theory a go and donated 5 dollars to the account. Well pics or it didn’t happen right? Proof: http://imgur.com/XrzWwo4“

Then, after another day, a third user wrote about an even a worse experience; he claims in his post that he made a payment to a dark net market from his Coinbase account and local cops showed up at his house in an attempt to interview him about onine activities:

“I wasn’t home yet from work, but my wife tells me local LE showed up and wanted to have a “chat”. Asked if I or anone had ever ordered anything illicit in the mail. Said “nobody’s in trouble, we’re just following up on something that might be nothing””

Many more Reddit users have been railing against Coinbase and speculating about the reasons behind what appears to be clear monitoring of transactions, especially to wallet addresses associated with dark net markets or researchers, activists or dissidents.

A Coinbase spokesperson e-mailed a comment to The Daily Dot and said, “We don’t comment on specific cases, however, Coinbase is required to monitor activity on its platform in accordance with the Bank Secrecy Act and other regulation governing all Money Service Businesses.”

It was unclear how donations made to specific users constitute a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.

Until Coinbase explains their monitoring activities in more detail, my recommendation would be to either stay away from their services or practice more caution when using them to make donations to people like Gwern Branwen, Edward Snowden or Ross Ulbricht.

Also, do not send Bitcoin to questionable address directly from your Coinbase account as Coinbase has a physical address for all their customers; if you do need to make anonymous donations or payments to certain individuals, withdraw all your Bitcoin from Coinbase and then make use of a Bitcoin mixing service like bitmixer.io.

Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology which can facilitate anonymous and safe transactions, but it is not anonymous by default. Learn about it and use it correctly before assuming anonymity.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak.  He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

In what sounds like a story from another realm, a government employee in Arizona is doing what government employees usually do: assess authority in order to terrorize peaceful people, in this case school children.

Video was released this morning of an Arizona bus driver who opted to lock the doors of the bus he was driving, rather than let students disembark into their parents’ waiting arms. He claims the kids were misbehaving, so he decided to turn a bus of screaming, crying children around and drive back to school — away from their waiting parents.

Oh, HELL no.

Here’s the video:

The scene looks like complete chaos, and some of the children may well have been misbehaving – but this bus driver is totally out of line. Screaming, “Your kid will get off the bus when I’m done with them” to waiting parents? I would have been terrified to see my child crying on a bus while a bus driver who had clearly lost it was yelling. It only makes things worse that he drove away from the parents and back to school.

CBS News reports nearly 40 children were inside the bus. Some parents tried to pry open the doors, some called 911. A parent is heard on a 911 dispatch tape saying, “They’ve been sitting there for ten minutes and he won’t let any of our kids out. The kids are crying. He’s screaming at us. He’s actually driving away with all our kids. He’s got all our kids on the bus.”

Parents were understandably panicked to see the bus driver heading off back to school with their kids still on the bus. They claim he was driving erratically and by the looks of the video, most of the kids were still standing.

The superintendent of the school said it was not the driver’s usual route.

Many of the comments on the story are slamming parents for not disciplining their kids and making someone else do it for them. But the bus was at the stop, and parents were waiting to receive their children: let them do the disciplining. There has to be a better way to deal with rowdy children on a bus than locking doors, screaming at children, and essentially losing it. If there were rowdy children on the bus causing issues, take that up with the school the next day — don’t terrify the rest of the kids.

It’s no doubt a hard job. But, no. Refusing to release children to their parents is not okay.

Originally published by scarymommy.com

If you are an activist and are using a printer to print out flyers to hand out on the street or any other documents that go out into the public, the police and government agents can easily track the document back to the printer you used, or even back to you, thanks to a technology pioneered by Canon and Xerox.

Virtually all modern and quality color laser printers and color copiers are designed to print invisible tracking “codes” across every single printed page of their output. These codes reveal which device produced a document and, in some cases, a timestamp for when the document was printed or copied.

Pattern of yellow dots on each printout can be used to track the document back to the device used and eventually find the person who made the copies

According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden dots to supposedly track currency counterfeiters.

Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, said his company’s laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the “serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots” in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

“It’s a trail back to you, like a license plate,” Crean says.

The dots’ minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light–say, from a keychain laser flashlight–on your page and use a magnifier.

Laser-printing technology makes it incredibly easy to counterfeit money and documents, and Crean says the dots, in use in some printers for decades, allow law enforcement to identify and track down counterfeiters.

However, they could also be employed to track a document back to any person or business that printed it. Although the technology has existed for a long time, printer companies have not been required to notify customers of the feature.

Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeiting specialist with the U.S. Secret Service, stresses that the government uses the embedded serial numbers only when alerted to a forgery. “The only time any information is gained from these documents is purely in [the case of] a criminal act,” she says.

John Morris, a lawyer for The Center for Democracy and Technology , says, “That type of assurance doesn’t really assure me at all, unless there’s some type of statute.” He adds, “At a bare minimum, there needs to be a notice to consumers.”

If the practice disturbs you, don’t bother trying to disable the encoding mechanism–you’ll probably just break your printer.

Crean describes the device as a chip located “way in the machine, right near the laser” that embeds the dots when the document “is about 20 billionths of a second” from printing.

“Standard mischief won’t get you around it,” Crean adds.

Neither Crean nor Pagano has an estimate of how many laser printers, copiers, and multifunction devices track documents, but they say that the practice is commonplace among major printer companies.

“The industry absolutely has been extraordinarily helpful [to law enforcement],” Pagano says.

According to Pagano, counterfeiting cases are brought to the Secret Service, which checks the documents, determines the brand and serial number of the printer, and contacts the company. Some, like Xerox, have a customer database, and they share the information with the government.

Crean says Xerox and the government have a good relationship. “The U.S. government had been on board all along–they would actually come out to our labs,” Crean says.

Unlike ink jet printers, laser printers, fax machines, and copiers fire a laser through a mirror and series of lenses to embed the document or image on a page. Such devices range from a little over $100 to more than $1000, and are designed for both home and office.

Crean says Xerox pioneered this technology about 20 years ago, to assuage fears that their color copiers could easily be used to counterfeit bills.

“We developed the first (encoding mechanism) in house because several countries had expressed concern about allowing us to sell the printers in their country,” Crean says.

Since then, he says, many other companies have adopted the practice.

In the video below, the good people from the Electronic Frontier Foundation describe three different ways to see the tracking dots your printer produces: with a blue light, with a microscope, or with a scanner. If you don’t have the necessary equipment for a particular step, go on to the next one.