Tag: Journalists

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When ‘Contact Us’ Forms Becomes Life Threatening

Journalists targeted by security services can write about relatively banal subjects. They might report on the amount and quality of food available in markets. They might write about the slow construction of roads. They might write about dismal housing conditions. They might even just include comments about a politician that are seen as unfavourable, such as the politician wiped sweat from their brow before answering a question. Risky reporting from extremely hostile environments needn’t involve writing about government surveillance, policing, or corruption: far, far less ‘sensitive’ reporting can be enough for a government to cast a reporter as an enemy of the state.

The rationale for such hyper-vigilance on the part of dictatorships and authoritarian countries is that such governments regularly depend on international relief funds or the international community’s decision to not harshly impede the country’s access to global markets. Negative press coverage could cut off relief funds or monies from international organizations following a realization that the country lacks the ‘freedoms’ and ‘progress’ the government and most media publicly report on. If the international community realizes that the country in question is grossly violating human rights it might also limit the country’s access to capital markets. In either situation, limiting funds available to the government can endanger the reigning government or hinder leaders from stockpiling stolen wealth.

Calling for Help

Reaching out to international journalism protection organizations, or to foreign governments that might offer asylum, can raise serious negative publicity concerns for dictatorial or authoritarian governments. If a country’s journalists are fleeing because they believe they are in danger, and that fact rises to public attention, it could negatively affect a leader’s public image and the government’s access to funds. On this basis governments may place particular journalists under surveillance and punish them should they do anything to threaten the public image of the leader or country. Such surveillance is also utilized when reporters who are in a country are covering, and writing about, facts that stand in contravention to government propaganda.

The potential for electronic surveillance is particularly high, and serious, when the major telecommunications providers in a country tend to fully comply with, or willingly provide assistance to, state security and intelligence services. This degree of surveillance makes contacting international organizations that assist journalists risky; when a foreign organization does not encrypt communications sent to it, the organization’ security practices may further endanger a journalist calling for help. One of the many journalists covered in Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship who feared his life was in danger by the Rwandan government stated,

[h]e had written to the Committee to Protect Journalists, in New York, but someone in the president’s office had then shown him the application that he had filled out online. He didn’t trust people living abroad any longer.” (Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, 83-4)

Such surveillance could have taken place in a few different ways: the local network or computer the journalist used to prepare and send the application might have been compromised. Alternately, the national network might have been subject to surveillance for ‘sensitive’ materials. Though the former case is a prevalent problem (e.g., Internet cafes being compromised by state actors) it’s not one that international journalist organizations are well suited to fix. The latter situation, however, where the national network itself is hostile, is something that media organizations can address.

Network inspection technologies can be configured to look for particular pieces of metadata and content that are of interest to government monitors. By sorting for certain kinds of metadata, such as websites visited, content selection can be applied relatively efficiently and automated analysis of that content subsequently be employed. That content analysis, however, depends on the government in question having access to plaintext communications.

Many journalism organizations historically have had ‘contact us’ pages on their websites, and many continue to have and use these pages. Some organizations secure their contact forms by using SSL encryption. But many organizations do not, including organizations that actively assert they will provide assistance to international journalists in need. These latter organizations make it trivial for states that are hostile to journalists to monitor in-country journalists who are making requests or issuing claims using these insecure contact forms.

Mitigating Threats

One way that journalism protection organizations can somewhat mitigate the risk of government surveillance is to implement SSL on their websites, which encrypts communications sent to the organization’s web server. It is still apparent to network monitors what website was visited but not which pages. And if the journalist sends a message using a ‘contact us’ form the data communicated will be encrypted, thus preventing network snoops from figuring out what is being said.

SSL isn’t a bulletproof solution to stopping governments from monitoring messages sent using contact forms. But it raises the difficulty of intercepting, decrypting, and analyzing the calls for help sent by at-risk journalists. And adding such security is relatively trivial to implement with the advent of free SSL encryption projects like ‘Let’s Encrypt’.

Ideally journalism organizations would either add SSL to their websites — to inhibit adversarial states from reading messages sent to these organizations — or only provide alternate means of communicating with them. That might mandate email, and list hosts that provide service-to-service encryption (i.e. those that have implemented STARTSSL), messaging applications that provide sufficient security to evade most state actors (everything from WhatsApp or Signal, to even Hangouts if the US Government and NSA aren’t the actors you’re hiding from), or any other kind of secure communications channel that should be secure from non-Five Eyes surveillance countries.

No organization wants to be responsible for putting people at risk, especially when those people are just trying to find help in dangerous situations. Organizations that exist to, in part, protect journalists thus need to do the bare minimum and ensure their baseline contact forms are secured. Doing anything else is just enabling state surveillance of at-risk journalists, and stands as antithetical to the organizations’ missions.

NOTE: This post was previously published on Medium.

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Police surveillance scandal: Quebec tightens rules for monitoring journalists

From the Montreal Gazette:

Mark Bantey, a specialist in media law (who is also the Montreal Gazette’s lawyer), said he was stunned by the scope of the warrant involved in the Lagacé case. He said it seems the police were more worried about who was leaking information to the press than the actual crime.

“It sure looks like they (the police) have gone overboard because they’re not out there investigating a crime, but trying to determine who in the police department is leaking information to the press. You can’t use search warrants to get that sort of information,” Bantey said in an interview Tuesday. “There’s an obligation to exhaust all other possible sources of information before targeting the media.”

As for Couillard’s new directive about obtaining search warrants, he called it a first step that was unlikely to bring an immediate change to police practices. A better solution might be to adopt new legislation — a shield law — that protects media sources, he said.

Legislation to protect journalists from police surveillance is a good idea…until you ask a question of ‘who constitutes a journalist’?

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Why DDoS attacks matter for journalists

Two reasons that journalists should be concerned about DDoS attacks:

First, while the use of common household devices to execute the attacks against Krebs and Dyn was novel, the hackers got control of those devices using one of the oldest and easiest methods out there: bad passwords, a vulnerability most journalists share.

…

The second reason journalists should attend to these attacks is that strategic use of both DDoS attacks (for example, recent attacks on Newsweek and the BBC) and DNS manipulation are common tools for censorship. This is in part because they are cheap, easy (the software credited with Friday’s attack was posted openly just a few weeks ago), and highly effective in preventing some or all internet users from accessing the content they target.

We’re at the edge of a particularly bad security chasm we’re just about to fall into (if we haven’t already!). The question is whether we can actually avoid the fall or whether the best we can do right now is lessen the hurt on the way down.

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Police Using Journalists’ Metadata to Hunt Down Whistleblowers

Police Using Journalists’ Metadata to Hunt Down Whistleblowers:

In the past year, the Australian Federal Police has been asked to investigate a piece in The Australian about the Government’s’ leaked Draft Defence White Paper, and a Fairfax Media story on a proposal to reform to citizenship laws.

Just last week, police raided Parliament House in an attempt to track down the source of an embarrassing leak about the National Broadband Network. It’s feared that these investigations, along with increased penalties for whistleblowers, are hindering the ability of journalists to hold policymakers to account.

It was with this in mind that the Opposition eventually voted for the amendments that created the Journalist Information Warrant scheme, and allowed the Data Retention laws to pass last year. In a last minute effort to shore up support for the legislation, the Government agreed to add provisions for ‘safeguards’ that would, in theory, prevent the scheme being used to target journalists’ sources. However, a closer look at the scheme reveals its flaws.

When a democracy creates warranting schemes solely to determine who is willing to speak with journalists, the democracy is demonstrably in danger of slipping free of the grasp of the citizenry.

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Quotations

2013.5.21

In 2010 and 2011, many discounted and differentiated Julian Assange from mainstream journalists by comparing him to a spy or foreign agent, despite the fact that he was just doing what every major US journalism organization does: publishing leaked classified information in the public interest.

Well, the government alleges in Rosen’s case that he acted “much like an intelligence officer would run a clandestine intelligence source” and communicated his “clandestine communications plan.” This is reminiscent of a disturbing House Judiciary hearing last year where the committee’s lead witness compared the New York Times’ David Sanger to a spy, saying he “systematically penetrating the Obama White House as effectively as any foreign agent.”

By that language, the government is arguing journalism is now akin to spying, no matter if its WikiLeaks or the mainstream press.

Trevor Timm, “Virtually Everything the Government Did to WikiLeaks is Now Being Done to Mainstream US Reporters”
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Attacks on the Press: A Moving Target – Committee to Protect Journalists:

While not every journalist is an international war correspondent, every journalist’s cellphone is untrustworthy. Mobile phones, and in particular Internet-enabled smartphones, are used by reporters around the world to gather and transmit news. But mobile phones also make journalists easier to locate and intimidate, and confidential sources easier to uncover. Cellular systems can pinpoint individual users within a few meters, and cellphone providers record months, even years, of individual movements and calls. Western cellphone companies like TeliaSonera and France Telecom have been accused by investigative journalists in their home countries of complicity in tracking reporters, while mobile spying tools built for law enforcement in Western countries have, according to computer security researchers working with human rights activists, been exported for use against journalists working under repressive regimes in Ethiopia, Bahrain, and elsewhere.

 

“Reporters need to understand that mobile communications are inherently insecure and expose you to risks that are not easy to detect or overcome,” says Katrin Verclas of the National Democratic Institute. Activists such as Verclas have been working on sites like SaferMobile, which give basic advice for journalists to protect themselves. CPJ recently published a security guide that addresses the use of satellite phones and digital mobile technologies. But repressive governments don’t need to keep up with all the tricks of mobile computing; they can merely set aside budget and strip away privacy laws to get all the power they need. Unless regulators, technology companies, and media personnel step up their own defenses of press freedom, the cellphone will become journalists’ most treacherous tool.

Network surveillance is a very real problem that journalists and, by extension, their sources have to account for. The problem is that many of the security tools that are used to protect confidential communications are awkward to use, provide to sources, and use correctly without network censors detecting the communication. Worst is when journalists simply externalize risk, putting sources at risk in the service of ‘getting the story’ in order to ‘spread the word.’ Such externalization is unfortunately common and generates fear and distrust in journalists.

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Social Media Used to Target Advocate/Journalist

While it comes as no surprise that police monitored Facebook during last year’s Occupy protests, in the case of Occupy Miami an advocate/journalist was specifically targeted after his Facebook profile was subjected to police surveillance. An email produced in the court case revealed:

the police had been monitoring Miller’s Facebook page and had sent out a notice warning officers in charge of evicting the Occupy Miami protestors that Miller was planning to cover the process.

Significantly, the police tried to destroy evidence showing that they had unlawfully targeted the advocate, footage that (after having been forensically recovered) revealed that the charges laid against the advocate were blatantly false. That authorities conduct such surveillance – often without the targets of surveillance knowing that they have been targeted or, when targeted, why – matters for the general population because lawfully exercising one’s rights increasingly leads to citizens being punished for doing so. Moreover, when the surveillance is accompanied by deliberate attempts to undermine citizens’ capacities to respond to unlawful detentions and false charges, we have a very, very real problem that can affect any citizen.

We know from academic research conducted by scholars such as Jeffrey Monaghan and Kevin Walby that Canadian authorities use broad catch-all caricatures during major events to identify ‘problem populations.’ We also know that many of the suspects that are identified during such events are identically labeled regardless of actually belonging in the caricature population. The capacity to ‘effectively’ sort in a way resembling fact or reality is marginal at best. Consequently, we can’t just say that the case of Occupy surveillance is an ‘American thing’: Canadian authorities do the same thing to Canadian citizens of all ages, be they high school or university students, employed middle-aged citizens, or the elderly. These are surveillance and sorting processes that are widely adopted with relatively poor regulation or oversight. These processes speak to the significant expansion of what constitutes general policing as well as speaking to the state-born risks of citizens even in ‘safe’ countries using social media in an unreflective manner.

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US Government’s Harassment Made Visible

When your government behaves in such a way that innocent citizens are forced to act as a spies to keep safe, then it’s evident that something has gone terribly awry. Laura Poitras, an American citizen and journalist, now lives like a spy: under the constant pressure of potential government harassment and surveillance of herself, her sources, and anyone that is particularly close to her.

Her crime? Being an award winning filmmaker who has produced films addressing the negative impacts of American imperialism abroad.

Glenn Greenwald has a terrific piece that unpacks what it means to be a prominent journalist, activist, or simple government contrarian who is willing to take entirely legal actions against the American state. Actions like speaking up or otherwise exercising basic civil rights. I won’t lie: it’s a long piece, probably not something you can skim in 2-3 minutes. But if you only read one thing that holds your attention for 10-15 minutes today, go read Glenn’s piece. It’s eye opening.

As a teaser:

In many instances, DHS agents also detain and interrogate her in the foreign airport before her return, on one trip telling her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home, only to let her board at the last minute. When she arrived at JFK Airport on Thanksgiving weekend of 2010, she was told by one DHS agent — after she asserted her privileges as a journalist to refuse to answer questions about the individuals with whom she met on her trip — that he “finds it very suspicious that you’re not willing to help your country by answering our questions.” They sometimes keep her detained for three to four hours (all while telling her that she will be released more quickly if she answers all their questions and consents to full searches).

Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work — to ensure that she can engage in her journalism and produce her films without the U.S. Government intruding into everything she is doing. She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work — raw film and interview notes — to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the U.S., she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear — obviously well-grounded — that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.

(Read More)