Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing.

“There is no cyberwar,” Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

“I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.”

Instead, Schmidt said the government needs to focus its cybersecurity efforts to fight online crime and espionage.

His stance contradicts Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence who made headlines last week when he testified to Congress that the country was already in the midst of a cyberwar — and was losing it.

Threat Level: White House Cyber Czar: ‘There Is No Cyberwar’

See also:

Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet

Cyber warfare: don’t inflate it, don’t underestimate it

Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative

Horrifying:

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

Boing Boing: School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home

Last July TAT (“The Astonishing Tribe“) posted a concept video of their augmented social face-card system (okay, I made that term up, what else should we call it?). The video tickled the imagination with over 400,000 views.

TAT has since teamed up with Polar Rose, a leading computer vision services company, to turn that concept into a reality. The TAT Cascades system combined with Polar Rose’s FaceLib gives us this prototype called Recognizr.

Read More – Games Alfresco: Your Face Is A Social Business Card

(via Bruce Sterling)

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions (“How much security do you need?” … “NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country” or “MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse”). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of “freesites” available: “Iran News”, “Horny Kate”, “The Terrorist’s Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists”, “How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]“, “Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more”, “Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists”. There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs (“Welcome to my first Freenet site. I’m not here because of kiddie porn … [but] I might post some images of naked women”) and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: “If you’re reading this now, then you’re on the darkweb.”

Guardian: The dark side of the internet

(via Atom Jack)

I haven’t looked at Freenet in years, but it’s certain relevant to the discussion here about darknets.

The Obama administration has told Congress it supports renewing three provisions of the Patriot Act due to expire at year’s end, measures making it easier for the government to spy within the United States.

In a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said the administration might consider “modifications” to the act in order to protect civil liberties.

“The administration is willing to consider such ideas, provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities,” Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general, wrote to Leahy, (.pdf) whose committee is expected to consider renewing the three expiring Patriot Act provisions next week. The government disclosed the letter Tuesday.

Full Story: Threat Level

Programmer Joey Hess found that Palm Pre’s operating system webOS sends his GPS location back to Palm every day. Hess also found code that sends Palm data on which webOS apps he has used each day, and for how long he used each one.

“I was surprised by this,” Hess, who bought the Pre about a month ago, told Wired.com. “I had location services turned off though I had GPS still on because I wanted it to geotag photos. Still I didn’t expect Palm to collect this level of information.” [...]

Palm’s actions trigger questions about consumer privacy and the extent to which handset makers and developers are gathering and using data about buyers’ behavior. In this case, some of the concerns may be overblown, says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Golvin cites Sun CEO Scott McNealy, who said in 1999: “You have zero privacy. Get over it.” Says Golvin, “While that is certainly overstated, it is also true. Consumers, in general are concerned about privacy but look at the number of people who are willing to give up every detail of their personal lives for the opportunity to win a big screen TV.”

Wired: Palm Pre Snoops on Users by Phoning Data Home

Increasingly, small cameras are being embedded in video screens in malls, health clubs, and grocery stores both to determine who is watching and to customize what is displayed to the audience.

Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly.

That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.

And even if the ads don’t shift based on which people are watching, the technology’s ability to determine the viewers’ demographics is golden for advertisers who want to know how effectively they’re reaching their target audience.

While the technology remains in limited use for now, advertising industry analysts say it is finally beginning to live up to its promise. The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined.

The full article can be found here, but I was most interested by the links at the bottom of the article showing the players in this area:

Quividi: http://quividi.com

TruMedia Technologies: http://trumedia.co.il

Studio IMC: http://www.studioimc.com

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

“The National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications — faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications,” Tice claimed. “It didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.”

Full Story: Raw Story

Using data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the ACLU has determined that nearly 2/3 of the entire US population (197.4 million people) live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders.

The government is assuming extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within this zone. This is not just about the border: This ” Constitution-Free Zone” includes most of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.

Full Story: ACLU

(via OVO)

Terrible idea for so many reasons…

“As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system.”

According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax. [...]

A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.

Full Story: Albany Democrat Herald

(via Cryptogon)

The Internet is responsible for the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. There’s an enormous difference in the way the older and younger generations use the Internet, and that’s healthy. We can look in horror at some things the younger generation is doing, but you’re looking at the future.

It’s not that young people don’t care about privacy, they just have a different socialization. They want to have control over their data: What upsets them is if something happens to their data—say, their photos—that they don’t want. We as the older generation are morally obligated to build systems that will allow the younger generation to communicate, to contribute and be part of society without forcing them into particular boxes that we think is required of them.

Full Story: CIO Insight

Twitchboard represents the emerging class of cloud agents that will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. Our connections are getting too dense and the data we’re working with is growing far too big for us humans to handle manually. We need subroutines customized to our interests, affiliations, businesses, and collaborations that can do the heavy data lifting for us while we focus on the meaningful expressions these agents will create for us from the noise.

Increasingly we’ll have swarms of such agents running across our digital lives doing our bidding and the bidding of numerous marketing and security agencies as well. These tools will have particular value across the enterprise where they will monitor workflows & financial movements, gather market data from clouds, and sift through productivity metrics to formulate valuable business intel. Agents will tell us about our lives and our health delivering colorful abstracts with pretty animated datasets showing how much we drove this week, how many miles we walked, tasks completed vs. outstanding, and much more feedback based on an array of scripts & sensors.

Full Story: URBEINGRECORDED

I did my Five potential business models for Twitter article without searching the web for other ideas deliberately, mostly as an exercis. So now that it’s done I’ve spent some time researching other ideas. Mostly the same old things: ads or selling the company. Here are a couple other ideas I liked:

Charge for having more than 1,000 followers

Charge for business use of the API.

I still like the payment system idea the best.

Twitter has famously decided to create a giant user base before even coming up with a business model. This is a hazardous plan, and one that’s earned them a lot of mockery. But one advantage to growing a platform, with an open API, first and retrofitting a business model later is the opportunity to observe how users use and hack the system themselves. Twitter has paid attention to how users use the system, such as using @ signs for replies and hashtags for topic tagging and implemented them into the system.

Additionally, hundreds of Twitter clients and applications have been built. Companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple have long looked to 3rd party developers for innovation. There’s quite an opportunity to steal implement some of the ideas already in use and build revenue streams from them.

I’ll start off with a couple of obvious ones that have been discussed, and move into less obvious, and in my opinion, more lucrative ideas.

Ads on search pages

This is something Twitter’s talked about doing before. Twitter is rightly cautious about serving ads on their pages, but they could probably get away with selling PPC ads on search results pages. They could build their own platform, or use someone else’s. If I were Chitika or Yahoo!, I’d be courting Twitter for this contract right now.

Premium services for business users

This is has been specifically mentioned by Evan Williams before. So here’s a”sub top five” of specific services they could offer.

1. Validated account names to prevent public embarrassment. Also, mirror accounts for variants on a name (ie, @exxon, @exxonmobil, @exxonsucks, @exxonrules, @XOM, etc.)

2. Cross posting – Allow users to post the same tweet across multiple accounts (ie, post to both @sergeybrin and @google at the same time). This can be done now with various clients.

3. Autofollow users who follow you. This can be done with bots, but it’s just one of those things that would be nice to have included in a premium package. This should be done across accounts as well (such as the @sergeybrin and @google example noted above).

4. Filtering. Let business users, who will be following thousands of people, trim their lists to read only who they want. This can be done with TweetDeck now but LiveJournal style filterting is sorely needed. (Really, this feature should just be added for free for everyone.)

5. Geo-locative services – Yes, the idea of sending a coupon to someone’s mobile as they pass a store is now cliche. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t money to be made doing it. Twitter should add some geo-locative features for GPS users eventually, and it would only make sense for them to allow opt-in location based promotions.

Premium services for users

This is my least favorite idea, mostly because I think it’s hard to convince consumers to pay for web services, especially when they can get these services for free. That said, there are some opportunities.

1. Charge for text message delivery. One of Twitter’s biggest costs is sending tweets out as text messages. There’s an opportunity to change this expense into a revenue stream.

2. Limit number of tweets per day, and charge for anything over. This will probably sound horrible to most Twitterers, but it could work out. Craig’s List charges for certain types of ads. This has the dual effect of creating a revenue stream while preventing abuse of the ad system. Metafilter charges $5 for a lifetime membership to keep out the riff-raff. So charging people a small fee before they can flood your Twitter feed with up to the second details about their laundry washing might actually benefit everyone.

3. Filters and protected tweets. Same as the possible package for business users. But again, I definitely think this should be free. Currently, Twitter only gives you the option of having all tweets hidden except to people you follow, or having all tweets visible to everyone. I’d like LJ-esque granularity here.

Professional services: license the technology to companies and government agencies

Twitter could build custom microblogging applications for businesses, and perhaps more lucratively, government agencies. Twitter’s use for emergency coordination and disaster relief is much touted – they should capitalize on this. They can offer secure microblogging services behind the firewall, custom tailored to an organizations needs. Competition: Laconica, an open source Twitter clone that powers identi.ca.

Digital payment system

This is my favorite: compete head-on with PayPal. There are a few PayPal competitors out there (ePassporte, Revolution Money Exchange, Google Checkout), but Twitter seems like the perfect platform for a payment system. There’s already a third party solution trying to do this: TwitPay. I’m not ready to hand my bank account info over to TwitPay, but I would to Twitter. If Twitter can make it easier to transfer money amongst users, and take a little off the top, this could be their killer revenue stream.

Crazy idea: Twitter could become a virtual free bank, offering their own digital currency that can be traded through Twitter. Give a certain amount of starting credits to verified users, and let the market determine the actual value. Hey, maybe if they limit the number of tweets per day they could make “tweet credits” tradable – a la cell phone minutes in Africa.

Related: Four other Big Brothers

(BTW, you can follow me on Twitter at: @klintron)

A survey of 1,280 teenagers (users age 13-19) and young adults (age 20-26) conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com has revealed that one out of five (20 percent) teens overall have posted nude photos or video of themselves on the Internet—that number goes up to a third when young adults are included. While 71 percent of teen girls and 67 percent of teen guys who have sent these photos say they’ve sent them to a boyfriend or girlfriend, 15 percent overall said they’ve sent nude photos to people they only “knew” online. For women, that percentage stays the same when they turn into young adults, although the percentage of young adult men goes up to 23 percent.

This is, of course, despite the fact that almost three quarters of all teens and young adults surveyed say that sending sexually-suggestive content “can have serious negative consequences.” Clearly, this is an issue of “do as I say, not as I do.” And don’t for a minute think that your sexy recipient is necessarily keeping your photos private—a quarter of teen girls and a third of teen boys said that they’ve had nude images originally meant for someone else shared with them. Perhaps unsurprisingly (to me, anyway), that number stays about the same for young adult women, but 40 percent of young adult men say they’ve had images meant for someone else shared with them. Nothing, especially on the Internet, is sacred.

Full Story: ars technica

(via OVO)

Justice Department attorney Carl Nichols didn’t get through his first full sentence defending the constitutionality of retroactive immunity for spying telecom carriers before U.S. district judge Vaughn Walker interrupted to ask about President-elect Barack Obama.

“We are going to have new attorney general,” Walker interjected in Tuesday morning’s hearing in a San Francisco courthouse. “Why shouldn’t the court wait to see what the new attorney general will do?”

At issue in the latest hearing in the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for alleged complicity in illegal wiretapping is whether Congress has the right to free the nation’s telecoms from the lawsuits pending against them.

Nichols is arguing that Obama’s Justice Department will continue to defend the immunity statute. (Obama voted for the bill but held his nose on the immunity provisions.)

“The Department of Justice rarely, if ever, declines to defend the constitutionality of a statute,” Nichols said. “It’s very, very unlikely for a future DOJ to decline to defend the constitutionality of this statute.”

Obama Will Fight For Wiretap Immunity, Bush Lawyer Tells Judge | Threat Level from Wired.com.