US to Introduce One Stop Identity Spying While Twitter Turns Over Wikileaks Userbase
Wikileaks revealed today that Twitter has been issued a subpoena to turn over logfiles showing access to the Wikileaks Twitter accounts of julian Assange, Bradley manning and key players in the Wikileaks secrets disclosures.
From the AP here:
Investigative documents in the WikiLeaks pointed to the Obama administration’s determination to assemble a criminal case no matter how long it takes and how far afield authorities have to go.
Tthe U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., demand details about the accounts of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning.
The others whose Twitter accounts are targeted in the prosecutors’ demand are Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator; Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp; and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum. Gonggrijp and Appelbaum have worked with WikiLeaks in the past.
I’m very surprised that the Federal Government didn’t simply subpoena the logs of everyone who ever followed the Wikileaks Twitter account. If they had that information they could simply cross check all the names of users who work with classified information and see if they had a hand in leaking secrets.
At the same time this story broke, Howard Schmidt, the Cyber Security Czar said that the Commerce Department, under the direction of Obama, was gearing up to enforce an Internet Identity System. If you shop online, the feds are supposedly too worried about you having to memorize passwords, so they want to back your credentials to ensure you don’t get ripped off or identity theived. They were gonna have the NSA monitor your identity, but that might have been too scary. So the Commerce department will do it instead.
From InfosecIsland here:
The Commerce Department will ultimately hold dominion over the creation and maintenance of trusted cyber identities, according to White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt.
Schmidt called the Commerce Department “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to concentrate efforts to produce a secure “identity ecosystem” for ensuring secure online transactions and reduce fraud.
As part of the Obama administration’s efforts, a second draft of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is due in a matter of months.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke described the initiative while speaking at the the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research:
“We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy, and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”
Are we really supposed to believe that the Feds want to make online shopping easier for us? On the one hand they grab the identities of everyone related to a Twitter feed, and in the next they want us to be branded with an identity to make it flawlessly easy for them to track our every online move? The article source goes on to say that users will still be able to have anonymity, but I don’t think so. Tax breaks and other incentives will force online shops to use ONLY federal identities, making it all the easier for the Feds to track every move you make in cyberspace.
Yes, identities need to be strengthened. But if the Federal Government can easily find everyone who checked out the twitter feed of Assange, why allow them to monitor your online activities so easily?
