Reuters editor charged with hacking: I was fired

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A social media editor who has worked for two of the nation's largest news-gathering organizations is scheduled to appear in federal court Tuesday to face charges that he conspired with hackers to deface the website of the Los Angeles Times. The attorney for 26-year-old Matthew Keys said he will plead not guilty during the arraignment in Sacramento, his first court appearance since charges were filed last month. On Monday, Keys said via his Twitter account that he had been fired by his most recent employer, the Reuters news agency. The federal charges stem from an incident that occurred before he was employed by the company.

Keys is charged with giving the hacking group Anonymous the log-in credentials to the computer system of The Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and other media properties. He was fired by a Sacramento television station owned by Tribune two months before the Times' website was hacked. The charging documents say a hacker identified as "Sharpie" used information Keys supplied in an Internet chat room to access the Times' web system and alter a headline on a December 2010 story. The headline was changed to read "Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337," an apparent reference to another hacking group.

Keys, of Secaucus, N.J., said in a Facebook posting last month that he did not provide the log-in information. He "absolutely, 100 percent ... denies these allegations," said Keys' Ventura-based attorney, Jay Leiderman. He said his client is not talking to reporters. Prosecutors say Keys encouraged Anonymous members to hack into the Tribune's website and applauded their success. "Anyone can use any nickname in any chat room at any time," Leiderman said. "If in fact those things were said, they were not said by him."

Keys is charged with two counts that each carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison — transmitting and attempting to transmit information with the intent of damaging a protected computer. He faces a third count of conspiring to transmit that information, which carries a maximum sentence of five years. Legal experts say Keys likely would spend far less time in prison if convicted, especially if he has no prior criminal history. The indictment fed an ongoing debate over when an online prank becomes an Internet crime and whether the government is going too far in punishing the perpetrator.

The debate was sparked by the suicide in January of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet activist who was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment as he awaited trial on allegations that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles and helped post millions of court documents on the Internet. Tribune employees spent 333 hours responding to the 2010 hacking that Keys is charged with orchestrating, costing the company of $17,650 in labor costs alone, according to an October 2012 search warrant affidavit filed by the FBI. The FBI searched Keys' three-bedroom, two bathroom apartment looking for computer equipment. In the affidavit, FBI Special Agent Gabriel Andrews said there is probable cause to believe that Keys broke into the Tribune Media computer system after he was fired in October 2010 by the Tribune-owned FOX affiliate KTXL-TV in Sacramento. He stole an email list of FOX 40's customers, then "offered to sell this list to members of Anonymous," according to the affidavit.

"Keys also used this list to send spurious emails to FOX 40's customers and to disrupt the business operations of FOX 40," the affidavit said. Leiderman, his attorney, denied the allegations. The television station told the FBI that Keys also changed the passwords to the station's Twitter and Facebook accounts after he was fired. He deleted 6,000 followers from the station's Twitter account and posted news headlines from the station's competitors during the four days he had unauthorized control of the accounts, according to the affidavit. Leiderman said that involved "a dispute over ownership" of personal accounts Keys had been using on behalf of the station.

Keys was not charged with any of the alleged incidents involving FOX 40. The station referred requests for comment to Tribune Corp. spokesman Gary Weitman, who declined comment. Keys was working at Thomson Reuters Corp.'s New York office at the time the charges were announced and was suspended with pay. A company spokesman on Monday would not elaborate on why it no longer employed Keys, but the social media editor said in a Twitter posting that it was not because of the indictment. Rather, Keys tweeted a copy of a "final written warning" he said he received from Reuters in October, which admonished him for unprofessional behavior after he mocked a Google executive from a fake Twitter account. Keys said his union, the Newspaper Guild, would file a grievance on his behalf.

Share This on Twitter | Share This Link on Facebook | Share This on Linkedin

Google chairman talks about internet revolution in new book

Some illuminating books already have been written about Google's catalytic role in a technological upheaval that is redefining the way people work, play, learn, shop and communicate. Until now, though, there hasn't been a book providing an unfiltered look from inside Google's brain trust. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company's CEO, shares his visions of digitally driven change and of a radically different future in " The New Digital Age," a book that goes on sale on Tuesday. 

It's a technology treatise that Schmidt wrote with another ruminator,Jared Cohen, a former State Department adviser who now runs Google Ideas, the internet company's version of a thinktank. The book is an exercise in "brainstorming the future," as Schmidt put it in a recent post on Twitter - just one example of a cultural phenomenon that didn't exist a decade ago. The ability for anyone with an internet-connected device to broadcast revelatory information and video is one of the reasons why Schmidt and Cohen wrote the book. The two met in Baghdad in 2009 and were both struck by how Iraqis were finding resourceful ways to use internet services to improve their lives, despite war-zone conditions. 

They decided it was time to delve into how the internet and mobile devices are empowering people, roiling autocratic governments and forcing long-established companies to make dramatic changes. The three years they spent researching the book took them around the world, including North Korea in January over the objections of the US State Department. They interviewed an eclectic group that included former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Mexican mogul Carlos Slim Helu, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the former prime ministers of Mongolia and Pakistan. They also drew on the insights of a long list of Google employees, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. 

The resulting book is an exploration into the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead as the lines blur between the physical world around us and the virtual realm of the internet. Schmidt and Cohen also examine the loss of personal privacy as prominent companies such as Google and lesser-known data warehouses such as Acxiom compile digital dossiers about our electronic interactions on computers, smartphones and at check-out stands. "This will be the first generation of humans to have an indelible record," Schmidt and Cohen predict. To minimise the chances of youthful indiscretions stamping children with "digital scarlet letters" that they carry for years, online privacy education will become just as important, if not more so than sex education, according to Schmidt and Cohen. They argue parents should consider having a "privacy talk" with their kids well before they become curious about sex. 

Not surprisingly, the book doesn't dwell on Google's own practices, including privacy lapses that have gotten the company in trouble with regulators around the world. Among other things, Google has exposed the contact lists of its email users while trying to build a now-defunct social network called Buzz. It scooped up people's passwords and other sensitive information from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Last year, Google was caught circumventing privacy controls on Safari Web browsers, resulting in a record $22.5 million fine by the US Federal Trade Commission. European regulators have a broad investigation open. 

Google apologised for those incidents without acknowledging wrongdoing. Schmidt and Cohen suggest that is an inevitable part of digital life. "The possibility that one's personal content will be published and become known one day - either by mistake or through criminal interference, will always exist," they write. The book doesn't offer any concrete solutions for protecting personal privacy, though the authors suspect that calls for tougher penalties and more stringent regulations will increase as more people realise how much of their lives are now in a state of "near-permanent storage." "The option to 'delete' data is largely an illusion," Schmidt and Cohen write. 

People can choose not to put any of their information online, but those that eschew the internet risk become irrelevant as online identities become increasingly important, the book asserts. Schmidt and Cohen foresee an option that will allow all of a person's online accounts - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix and various other subscriptions, to be merged together into a "constellation" that will serve as a one-stop profile. If this book is right, there is no turning back from the revolution that is making internet access as vital as oxygen and mobile devices as important as our lungs. As much disruption as there already has been since Google's inception in 1998, Schmidt and Cohen contend that the most jarring changes are still to come as reductions in the cost of technology bring online another 5 billion people, mostly in less developed countries. At the same time, the combination of more powerful microprocessors, much-faster internet connections and entrepreneurial ingenuity will turn the stuff of science fiction into reality. 

Schmidt and Cohen are convinced that holograms will enable people to make virtual getaways to exotic beaches whenever they feel the need. Nasal implants will alert us to the first signs of a cold. Virtual assistants - the kind Google is developing with Google Now and Apple with Siri, will become constant companions that influence when we shop and what we buy. Those assistants will generally steer us in directions drawn from an analyses of our personal preferences vacuumed off the internet and stored in vast databases.These aren't far-out concepts to the tech cognoscenti, or even younger generations who can barely remember what it was like to surf the web on a dial-up modem, let alone use a typewriter. The ideas will be more unnerving to older generations still trying to figure out all the things that their smartphone can do. 

Schmidt, who will turn 58 on Saturday, can remember the days before there were personal computers. But he has been studying tech trends for decades, long before he became Google's CEO in 2001 and became a mentor and confidant to company co-founders Page and Brin. That collaboration established him as one of the world's best-known executives and minted him as a multibillionaire. Before joining Google, he was chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems and CEO of software maker Novell. Many of the book's themes expand upon topics that Schmidt regularly mused about in speeches and interviews that he gave as Google's CEO. Some of his past remarks, particularly about the loss of privacy, rankled critics who believe Google had become too aggressive in trying to learn more about people's individual interests so it could sell more ads, its chief source of revenue. 

Schmidt also won plenty of admirers in powerful places, including president Barack Obama, who called upon Schmidt's advice during his 2008 campaign. Political pundits once considered Schmidt to be a leading candidate to join Obama's cabinet, though Schmidt has said he never had any interest in a government job. Schmidt relinquished the CEO job to Page two years ago, freeing him to devote more time traveling to meet government leaders around the world. Cohen, 31, is regarded as a rising star in tech circles, though he isn't as well-known as his co-author. Time magazine just named Cohen as one of the world's 100 most influential people in its annual list. Cohen worked on State Department policy planning and counter-terrorism in both the Bush and Obama administrations. 

Schmidt and Cohen emerged from their research convinced that most governments don't fully understand the implications of ubiquitous internet access and mobile computing. They expect repressive regimes to do everything in their power control the flow of information and to abuse databases to spy on citizens. They also foresee smaller countries waging computer-based attacks on countries they would never target with troops and weapons. Even as they address the dark sides of technology, Schmidt and Cohen hypothesise that the world ultimately will be better off as more people spend more time connected to each other on the Internet. Societies will be more democratic, governments will become less corrupt as their transgressions are exposed and people will become smarter and better informed. "Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips," Schmidt and Cohen assert.

Share This on Twitter | Share This Link on Facebook | Share This on Linkedin

Eric Schmidt and WikiLeaks founder talk “radicalization of internet educated youth”

As the book “The New Digital World” is published this week by Google’s Eric Schmidt and co-author Jared Cohen, a transcript of a “secret” meeting held between the two men and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has come to light. The transcript of this meeting – as well as the audio (uploaded this week) has been being mined by the public, revealing notes such as the one appearing today involving “internet educated youth” as spoken about by both Assange and Cohen.

While the original intent of those involved in this meeting was the exchange comments which would eventually be used in the book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future, it would appear that it wasn’t Schmidt or Assange that approved of the transcript of the meeting being published by WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks team is part of the subject being spoken about, this youth which is becoming radicalized in our modern internet age.

Jared Cohen: I am just wondering, on the human side of this, you have such experience of the world you described earlier. …some combination of technical and altruistic people and what amounts to a kind of subculture that you’ve been in for some 15 years now.. So you know about how the subculture works. And that subculture needs to either I guess stay the same or expand in order to do the work that you are describing, and so since our book is about ten years away…

Julian Assange: It’s dramatically expanded…

JC: What are the patterns there in terms of the people part, rather than the…?

JA: That’s the most optimistic thing that is happening. The radicalization of internet educated youth. People who are receiving their values from the internet… and then as they find them to be compatible echoing them back. The echo back is now so strong that it drowns the original statements Completely. The people I’ve dealt with from the 1960s radicals who helped liberate Greece and.. Salazar. They are saying that this moment in time is the most similar to what happened in this period of liberation movements in the 1960s, that they have seen.

Assange continued by expanding on the idea that young people are changing the way our society acts and thinks with the tools they’ve created for themselves with the internet. This age we’re in now, he says, is one in which the technical generation that created the internet – and those that are coming in with the web as a given – are becoming politically educated. JA: This is the political education of apolitical technical people. It is extraordinary, in the same way that the young… Lisa Shields: A-political? Do you mean one word?

JA: One word. People are going from… young people are going from apolitical to political. It is a very very interesting transition to see. Lisa Shields is another of the very few people in the room during this conversation, she having been mentioned in our first short glimpse into this environment last week. This isn’t the last time we’ll be jumping in to this set of ideas being explored by Schmidt and Cohen – now that the book is out, we’ll be leaping in all week long! Eric Schmidt and WikiLeaks founder talk “radicalization of internet educated youth” is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.

US, China agree to work together on cyber security

China and the United States will set up a working group on cyber-security, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday, as the two sides moved to ease months of tensions and mutual accusations of hacking and Internet theft. Speaking to reporters in Beijing during a visit to China, Kerry said the United States and China had agreed on the need to speed up action on cyber security, an area that Washington says is its top national security concern.

Cyber security, Kerry said "affects the financial sector, banks, financial transactions, every aspect of nations in modern times are affected by the use of cyber networking and obviously all of us - every nation - has an interest in protecting its people, protecting its rights, protecting its infrastructure". Earlier, China's official Xinhua news agency quoted Foreign Minister Wang Yi as telling Kerry in their meeting that China and the United States should make joint efforts to safeguard cyberspace.

Cyberspace should be an area where the two countries can increase mutual trust and cooperation, Wang told Kerry, according to Xinhua. Beijing and Washington have traded accusations in recent months of massive cyber intrusions. The United States says hacking attacks emanating from China have targeted U.S. government and corporate computer networks among others, stealing government and commercial data.

A U.S. computer security firm released a report in February saying a secretive Chinese military unit is believed to be behind a wave of hacking attacks against the United States.

China claims it is the victim of large-scale cyber attacks from the United States, though it has given few details. Wang repeated to Kerry the Chinese government's oft-stated position that it opposes any form of hacking. The working group announcement follows other recent calls for dialogue and cooperation. Officials and business executives attending a China-U.S. Internet Industry Forum in Beijing this week sought to find common ground.

"It's important to have a dialogue on this, but it's also important that the dialogue be a means to an end, and the end is really ending these practices," Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Robert Hormats, who spoke at the forum, told Reuters in an interview. Last month China's premier, Li Keqiang called for both sides to stop the war of words over hacking.

Share This on Twitter | Share This Link on Facebook | Share This on Linkedin

Assad sympathisers hacked FIFA Twitter accounts

Two of FIFA's Twitter accounts were hacked on Monday in the latest wave of cyberattacks claimed by Syrian government sympathisers.

Zurich: Two of FIFA's Twitter accounts were hacked on Monday in the latest wave of cyberattacks claimed by Syrian government sympathisers. A series of corruption allegations were made on the official accounts of FIFA President Sepp Blatter and the World Cup, some linked to 2022 World Cup host Qatar, including one libelous post about the Emir of Qatar. "It was decided that the president Sepp Blatter is to step down due to corruption charges," the hackers posted using the (at)FifaWorldCup account. With FIFA unable to regain control of either account, which have more than 500,000 followers combined, the media department confirmed by e-mail that they had been hacked.

"We are looking at this issue at the moment," FIFA said in a statement. "In the meantime, to avoid any doubt, we kindly ask you to verify and check any statements that you see on a FIFA twitter account with the FIFA Media department." The Syrian Electronic Army — hackers sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar Assad — posted messages claiming it had posted the tweets. The group also recently claimed to have hacked the Twitter accounts of the BBC Arabic service and broadcaster Al-Jazeera.

One message Monday also taunted Twitter, which has shut down other SEA accounts. "Twitter (hashtag)Failure... You can't stop us!" read one of 14 rogue posts on the official World Cup account. The hackers also reminded FIFA that the Syria national team was kicked out of the 2014 World Cup qualifying tournament in 2011 for fielding an ineligible player. "The decision to disqualify the Syrian team on a technicality was found to be politically based," one message read.

Share This on Twitter | Share This Link on Facebook | Share This on Linkedin