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Donate- Computers belonging to South Korean government officials have been infiltrated by targeted malware in email. Chinese hackers are suspected. Contrary to what this article says, I'm betting that the attachments were PDFs, which are currently the document of choice when attempting to infect journalists' machines.
- Another intriguing academic paper, this time on the structure of the Russian political blogosphere. Commentators continue to post mostly on the LiveJournal platform and are less politically divided than the United States.
- Russian police investigate the Russian-language Wikipedia on suspicion of hosting extremist materials.
- The United Kingdom renews plans to centrally store every source and destination of every email, phone call and website visit for "at least a year"...
- ...while India's home ministry has told mobile phone companies to store every SMS text message for six months. Currently the companies keep messages for just for two days.
Committee to Protect Journalists
CPJ Internet Channel
Defending Free Expression Online
India
The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has announced a research project to analyze the global infrastructure of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. It's looking for BlackBerry users from any country to take part--especially those in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Russia and China.
All of these countries have at some point demanded that RIM make their BlackBerry network more surveillance-friendly. Some have threatened to ban BlackBerry services outright if their demands are not met. Other reports suggest that RIM has made concessions to some of these countries' demands.
One possible concession RIM might make is to move its Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) servers to locations within those countries' jurisdictions. BIS servers are the bridges between the internal BlackBerry network and the wider Internet. A locally-hosted BIS server would make it easier for domestic security services to monitor BlackBerry users' general Web traffic.
RIM has kept quiet about what agreements, if any, it has made with any government. Nevertheless, it is theoretically possible to work out the location of these BIS servers externally. If you're a journalist who uses a BlackBerry, all you have to do to help with this project is to visit the RimCheck website using your BlackBerry device and fill out a short form. The site will record the IP address of the machine your request comes from, and will attempt to determine where in the world that server could be located.
The conclusions that the RIM Check project draws from this study will be published when the group has collected enough data. Concrete statistics like this will mean
we'll finally be able to see if BlackBerry's send their data
exclusively through Canadian servers
as some believe or whether RIM has distributed these servers
globally--potentially allowing users' unencrypted Net traffic to be as
monitorable as that sent through a local Internet service
provider.
The discussions between Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and governments such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and India continue to hit the headlines. In each case, disagreements center on providing customer communications to security and law enforcement services. The rumblings from these nations over monitoring powers aren't just limited to RIM: India has announced its intention to put the same pressure on Google (for Gmail), and Skype (for its IM and telephony services).
The United Arab Emirates' Telecommunications Regulation Authority (TRA) announced on Sunday that it would be suspending BlackBerry "messenger, e-mail and Web-browsing services" in the country from October 11, until these "applications were in full compliance with UAE regulations." Given the popularity of the BlackBerry platform in the country (an estimated 500,000 users from a population of 4.5 million) one can only assume that we are seeing a form of brinkmanship--with the privacy of e-mails, IMs, and website visits at stake.
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