Entries Tagged "UK"

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Al Qaeda Recruiting Non-Muslims

This is an awful fear-mongering story about non-Muslims being recruited in the UK:

As many as 1,500 white Britons are believed to have converted to Islam for the purpose of funding, planning and carrying out surprise terror attacks inside the UK, according to one MI5 source.

This quote is particularly telling:

One British security source last night told Scotland on Sunday: “There could be anything up to 1,500 converts to the fundamentalist cause across Britain. They pose a real potential danger to our domestic security because, obviously, these people blend in and do not raise any flags.

Because the only “flag” that can possibly identify terrorists is that they’re Muslim, right?

Posted on January 24, 2008 at 8:55 AM • View Comments

Privacy International's 2007 Report

The 2007 International Privacy Ranking.

Canada comes in first.

Individual privacy is best protected in Canada but under threat in the United States and the European Union as governments introduce sweeping surveillance and information-gathering measures in the name of security and border control, an international rights group said in a report released Saturday.

Canada, Greece and Romania had the best privacy records of 47 countries surveyed by London-based watchdog Privacy International. Malaysia, Russia and China were ranked worst.

Both Britain and the United States fell into the lowest-performing group of “endemic surveillance societies.”

EDITED TO ADD (1/10): Actually, Canada comes in second.

Posted on January 10, 2008 at 6:01 AM • View Comments

How Well "See Something, Say Something" Actually Works

I’ve written about the “War on the Unexpected,” and how normal people can’t figure out what’s an actual threat and what isn’t:

All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

[…]

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.

Yesterday The New York Times wrote about New York City’s campaign:

Now, an overview of police data relating to calls to the hot line over the past two years reveals the answer and provides a unique snapshot of post-9/11 New York, part paranoia and part well-founded caution. Indeed, no terrorists were arrested, but a wide spectrum of other activity was reported.

[…]

In all, the hot line received 8,999 calls in 2006, including calls that were transferred from 911 and the 311 help line, Mr. Browne said. They included a significant number of calls about suspicious packages, many in the transit system. Most involved backpacks, briefcases or other items accidentally left behind by their owners. None of them, Mr. Browne said, were bombs.

There were, however, 816 calls to the hot line in 2006 that were deemed serious enough to require investigation by the department’s intelligence division or its joint terrorism task force with the F.B.I. Mr. Browne said that 109 of those calls had a connection to the transit system and included reports of suspicious people in tunnels and yards, and of people taking pictures of the tracks.

The hot line received many more calls in 2007, possibly because of the authority’s advertising campaign, Mr. Browne said. Through early December, the counterterrorism hot line received 13,473 calls, with 644 of those meriting investigation. Of that group, 45 calls were transit related.

Then there were the 11 calls about people counting.

Mr. Browne said several callers reported seeing men clicking hand-held counting devices while riding on subway trains or waiting on platforms.

The callers said that the men appeared to be Muslims and that they seemed to be counting the number of people boarding subway trains or the number of trains passing through a station. They feared the men might be collecting data to maximize the casualties in a terror attack.

But when the police looked into the claims, they determined that the men were counting prayers with the devices, essentially a modern version of rosary beads.

None of those calls led to arrests, but several others did. At least three calls resulted in arrests for trying to sell false identification, including driver’s licenses and Social Security cards. One informer told the police about a Staten Island man who was later found to have a cache of firearms. A Queens man was charged with having an illegal gun and with unlawful dealing in fireworks.

A Brooklyn man was charged with making anti-Semitic threats against his landlord and threatening to use sarin gas on him. At least two men arrested on tips from the hot line were turned over to immigration officials for deportation, Mr. Browne said.

And as long as we’re on the topic, read about the couple branded as terrorists in the UK for taking photographs in a mall. And this about a rail fan being branded a terrorist for trying to film a train. (Note that the member of the train’s crew was trying to incite the other passengers to do something about the filmer.) And about this Icelandic woman’s experience with U.S. customs because she overstayed a visa in 1995.

And lastly, this funny piece of (I trust) fiction.

Remember that every one of these incidents requires police resources to investigate, resources that almost certainly could be better spent keeping us actually safe.

Refuse to be terrorized!

Posted on January 8, 2008 at 7:53 AM • View Comments

War on Terror Over in the UK

The British Government changes their rhetoric:

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”

London is not a battlefield, he said.

“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

This is excellent. The only war has been rhetorical, and using that language only served to scare people and legitimize the terrorists. Someday the U.S. will follow suit.

Posted on January 2, 2008 at 12:59 PM • View Comments

Defeating the Shoe Scanning Machine at Heathrow Airport

For a while now, Heathrow Airport has had a unique setup for scanning shoes. Instead of taking your shoes off during the normal screening process, as you do in U.S. airports, you go through the metal detector with your shoes on. Then, later, there is a special shoe scanning X-ray machine. You take your shoes off, send them through the machine, and put them on at the other end.

It’s definitely faster, but it’s an easy system to defeat. The vulnerability is that no one verifies that the shoes you walked through the metal detector with are the same shoes you put on the scanning machine.

Here’s how the attack works. Assume that you have two pairs of shoes: a clean pair that passes all levels of screening, and a dangerous pair that doesn’t. (Ignore for a moment the ridiculousness of screening shoes in the first place, and assume that an X-ray machine can detect the dangerous pair.) Put the dangerous shoes on your feet and the clean shoes in your carry-on bag. Walk through the metal detector. Then, at the shoe X-ray machine, take the dangerous shoes off and put them in your bag, and take the clean shoes out of your bag and place them on the X-ray machine. You’ve now managed to get through security without having your shoes screened.

This works because the two security systems are decoupled. And the shoe screening machine is so crowded and chaotic, and so poorly manned, that no one notices the switch.

U.S. airports force people to put their shoes through the X-ray machine and walk through the metal detector shoeless, ensuring that all shoes get screened. That might be slower, but it works.

EDITED TO ADD (12/14): Heathrow Terminal 3, that is. The system wasn’t in place in Terminal 4, and I don’t know about Terminals 1 and 2.

Posted on December 14, 2007 at 5:43 AM • View Comments

MI5 Sounds Alarm on Internet Spying from China

Someone in MI5 is pissed off at China:

In an unprecedented alert, the Director-General of MI5 sent a confidential letter to 300 chief executives and security chiefs at banks, accountants and legal firms this week warning them that they were under attack from “Chinese state organisations.”

[…]

Firms known to have been compromised recently by Chinese attacks are one of Europe’s largest engineering companies and a large oil company, The Times has learnt. Another source familiar with the MI5 warning said, however, that known attacks had not been limited to large firms based in the City of London. Law firms and other businesses in the regions that deal even with only small parts of Chinese-linked deals are being probed as potential weak spots, he said.

A security expert who has also seen the letter said that among the techniques used by Chinese groups were “custom Trojans”, software designed to hack into the network of a particular firm and feed back confidential data. The MI5 letter includes a list of known “signatures” that can be used to identify Chinese Trojans and a list of internet addresses known to have been used to launch attacks.

A big study gave warning this week that Government and military computer systems in Britain are coming under sustained attack from China and other countries. It followed a report presented to the US Congress last month describing Chinese espionage in the US as so extensive that it represented “the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies.”

EDITED TO ADD (12/13): The Onion comments.

EDITED TO ADD (12/14): At first, I thought that someone in MI5 was pissed off at China. But now I think that someone in MI5 was pissed that he wasn’t getting any budget.

Posted on December 4, 2007 at 12:34 PM • View Comments

Animal Rights Activists Forced to Hand Over Encryption Keys

In the UK:

In early November about 30 animal rights activists are understood to have received letters from the Crown Prosecution Service in Hampshire inviting them to provide passwords that will decrypt material held on seized computers.

The letter is the first stage of a process set out under RIPA which governs how the authorities handle requests to examine encrypted material.

Once a request has been issued the authorities can then issue what is known as a Section 49 notice demanding that a person turn the data into an “intelligible” form or, under Section 51 hand over keys.

Although much of RIPA came into force many years ago, the part governing the handing over of keys only passed in to law on 1 October 2007. This is why the CPS is only now asking for access to files on the seized machines.

Alongside a S49 notice, the authorities can also issue a Section 54 notice that prevents a person revealing that they are subject to this part of RIPA.

Actually, we don’t know if the activists actually handed the police their encryption keys yet. More about the law here.

If you remember, this was sold to the public as essential for fighting terrorism. It’s already being misused.

Posted on November 28, 2007 at 12:12 PM • View Comments

UK's Privacy Chernobyl

I didn’t write about this story at first because we’ve seen it so many times before: a disk with lots of personal information is lost. Encryption is the simple and obvious solution, and that’s the end of it.

But the UK’s loss of 25 million child benefit records—including dates of birth, addresses, bank account information, and national insurance numbers—is turning into a privacy disaster, threatening to derail plans for a national ID card.

Why is it such a big deal? Certainly the scope: 40% of the British population. Also the data: bank account details; plus information about children. There’s already a larger debate on the issue of a database on kids that this feeds into. And it’s a demonstration of government incompetence (think Hurricane Katrina).

In any case, this issue isn’t going away anytime soon. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized. The head of the Revenue and Customs office has resigned. More is certainly coming.

And this is an easy security problem to solve! Disk and file encryption software is cheap, easy to use, and effective.

Posted on November 26, 2007 at 1:15 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.