"GPS, a Weak Link in Cybersecurity?" on the Truman National Security Project

The news last month that LightSquared, a company attempting to deliver broadband internet via satellite, had filed for bankruptcy, settled a long-simmering but little noticed debate with far-reaching impacts on militaries, governments, businesses—and plain old folks like you and me.

Why? Because the global positioning system—better known as GPS—industry feared that LightSquared’s technology would interfere with the GPS signal, a service on which the world has become increasingly dependent but which it also takes almost completely taken for granted. The LIghtSquared decision a pretty big deal in and of itself—but it also opens a window into the larger debate on cyber security which is now being argued both inside the Beltway and around the world.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

"Securing America's Business" on the Truman National Security Project

As the debate on the future of cybersecurity in America continues to heat up, I’d like to take a moment to address one of the critical cybersecurity issues facing our country today:

My mother just bought a smart phone.

Why? Because they are new, and someone else she knows has one, and this person recently asked her if she sends text messages, and apparently this kind of peer pressure works at any age. And also because there was a sale at the Verizon store and like most Americans my mother can’t resist a sale. So despite the fact that my mother had gotten by perfectly well on a 200 minute a month senior plan on a “dumb” phone, she upgraded.

And that’s when the questions started.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

"Climate Studies Show: Somali Pirates Take Summer Vacations, Too" on Wired's Danger Room

It’s the first full week of summer, and most of us are probably thinking about how to get away to escape the heat, relax, and maybe hit a wave or two. Well, it turns out that Somali pirates take a summer break, too — but for different reasons.

A recent report produced by researchers of the New Zealand Defense Force and the Royal Australian Navy (Climatic controls on piracy in the Horn of Africa region, 2010–2011) proposes a new spin on the observed temporal pattern of attacks by Somali pirates based on weather, or more specifically the monsoons that occur in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea during the summer and winter.

Read the full post at Danger Room.

"Cyber Sensibility" on the Truman National Security Project

While in-the-loop intelligence and defense insiders have been preaching about the dangers of cyberwar for more than a decade (think Richard Clarke) most of the world is just starting to catch up.

And they are scared.

Because even though it’s great to think about cyberwar when you might be on the winning side (Stuxnet? What’s a Stuxnet?), it’s terrifying when you might be on the losing side (which is maybe why Iran has reportedly taken some of its oil terminals from the internet in the wake of a possible cyberattack). And the problem is that no one seems to know if they are winning or losing.

A major reason for this is that cyberattack, cyberwar, cybercrime—cybereverything—have taken on the character of a modern day Frankenstein monster. This thing called the internet has gotten out of hand, and just like Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein, once its done tap dancing we want to hunt it down with pitchforks.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

"Chaff": A continuing project to not be found

For a number of years now I have engaged in various (mostly futile) strategies to maintain my privacy and anonymity on the internet. These continue as semi-serious projects, but are also things I would like to develop further as art pieces.

The latest iteration of these projects is a Facebook project loosely titled "Chaff". Chaff in this sense not just being the stuff you have to wade through to get to wheat, but also the term for a kind of active countermeasure developed in the Second World War to confuse radar.

In this iteration of the project, every month I perform the following actions:

1) I generate 20 random two word phrases (adjective, noun) using http://watchout4snakes.com/CreativityTools/RandomWord/RandomPhrase.aspx
2) I enter each phrase into Google Image Search http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi
3) I download the first image that comes up in search (or in some cases a funny image from the first page of results)
4) I upload the resulting 20 images to Facebook
5) I tag each image as myself

The intent of this is to jam Facebook's facial recognition algorithms with so much bad data that they are unable to detect pictures of me on Facebook or elsewhere. Or at least make that process a lot harder.

A few results from my latest round follow.