My testimony today highlights five issues that we believe, based on our extensive audit and investigative work, constitute NASA’s most serious challenges in the admittedly difficult task of protecting the Agency’s information and systems from inadvertent loss or malicious theft. These challenges are:
• Lack of full awareness of Agency-wide IT security posture;
• Shortcomings in implementing a continuous monitoring approach to IT security;
• Slow pace of encryption for NASA laptop computers and other mobile devices;
• Ability to combat sophisticated cyber attacks; and
• Transition to cloud computing.
Kim Dotcom has compared the US department of justice charges against him and his Megaupload website to the weapons of mass destruction claims in the lead-up to the war against Iraq, accusing American prosecutors of doing the bidding of the US film industry to prop up its “outdated monopolistic business model”.
In his first substantial interview since being arrested at his mansion north of Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 January, Dotcom denied that he was a “piracy king” and said the attempt to extradite him to the US to face charges of copyright and racketeering rested on “fabrications and lies”.
“Where does piracy come from? Piracy comes from, you know, people, let’s say, in Europe who do not have access to movies at the same time that they are released in the US,” said Dotcom.
“If the business model would be one where everyone has access to this content at the same time, you know, you wouldn’t have a piracy problem. So it’s really, in my opinion, the government of the United States protecting an outdated monopolistic business model that doesn’t work in the age of the internet and that’s what it all boils down to.
“I’m no piracy king, I offered online storage and bandwidth to users and that’s it.”
Dubbed the “Fishbowl,” these devices make fully-encrypted calls that are secure enough to allow the discussion of even the most classified information. The handsets will rely on an unidentified VOIP app, similar to Skype, that routes calls through NSA servers (kind of like what they already do with everybody else’s).
The statutory instrument will make it possible for copyright holders to seek court injunctions against companies such as internet service providers or social networks whose systems are hosting copyright-infringing material.
The Department of Homeland Security has seized a domain name registered outside of the US, by individuals who are not American citizens, and who registered with a Canadian registrar.
What is unique about this case is that the American authorities did not get the domain’s registrar – a Canadian company – to pull the domain. Instead they went to Verisign, which operates the entirety of .com, and had them pull the glue records, the warrant states. Verisign hasn’t returned El Reg’s request for comment on its role.
After more than a year of investigations in the Member States, 37 child sex offenders have been identified. Among these offenders, 17 were arrested for child sexual molestation and production of illegal content. Moreover, 8 victims have been identified. In this respect, the investigation continues, to eventually identify further victims.
Analysis carried out by Europol revealed further links of several suspects to previous operations against child sex offenders. In this respect Europol produced five reports relating to nine targets. In particular, two targets were already members of the ‘Boylover’ network, tackled by the previous Europol-coordinated Operation Rescue. The remaining seven targets were members of other paedophile networks, still under investigation. The above investigative and reporting activities facilitated the identification process in the EU countries which led to the detection of a network of offenders that were producing and distributing images depicting the severe abuse of children, in some cases toddlers and infants. The investigative activity also led to the identification of child sex molesters and several victims who had been sexually abused by these criminals.
Operation Atlantic has been the first joint operation conducted by the FBI and Europol in the crime field of child sexual exploitation. The success of this case was remarked upon by Europol’s Director, Rob Wainwright, who said:
“Collaboration and cooperation between Europol and our international law enforcement partners such as the FBI is essential if we are to bring these child sex abuse networks to justice and prevent the distribution of child exploitation material across the internet. This is another excellent result in this crime area and Europol is ready and willing to support ongoing and future operations to infiltrate these networks.”
