The Freedom Watch

Filling the FATCA void

"The overwhelming consensus back in the early days of the last century, was, ‘Why would an American want to leave their country?’ Yet out of today’s seven million US expats who are abroad, over one thousand this year alone have also chucked away their national identity. They have done so due to the impending FATCA rules which threaten their own financial planning continuity, cutting off access to channels of advice and financial management. The reporting restrictions to the American taxman - the IRS - that FATCA places on all non-US companies dealing with US clients are now deemed far too complex and costly for large institutions to comply with." Continue reading →

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G20 countries to automatically share tax records to crack down on cheats

"Tax records will be shared around the world by 2015 as part of a G20 pledge to crack down on individual tax cheats and global corporations with complicated arrangements aimed at paying as little tax as possible. As business increasingly moves online and international, cash-strapped governments approved an aggressive timeline to adopt the automatic exchange of tax information among the G20. The deal was solidified after China, the last holdout, agreed to the plan just days before the summit in St. Petersburg. 'We are committed to automatic exchange of information as the new global standard,' states the G20 final communiqué." Continue reading →

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Bitcoin and Politics: What Could Go Wrong?

"Bitcoin, the alternative sort-of currency whose most ardent fans congregate in that part of the Venn diagram where 'tech' and 'libertarian' overlap, has always had a political flip-side. Other political organizations have already worked the Bitcoin vein, including candidates in North Dakota and Vermont. Darryl Perry, a libertarian candidate for president in 2016, sent an open letter to the FEC in April informing the commission that his campaign would 'not be accepting donations in currencies recognized by the federal legal tender laws.' Instead, Perry will 'only accept bitcoin, litecoin and precious metals.'" Continue reading →

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Bitcoin developer: Are bitcoin thieves revealing NSA back doors?

"Will bitcoin -- and the financial incentive to break bitcoin crypto -- reveal other NSA backdoors in ECDSA, SHA256, RIPEMD160, and other algorithms and libraries used by bitcoin? Thieves are likely to exploit any flaws immediately, and move stolen loot to another private key. The NSA, on the other hand, is likely to avoid exploiting any weaknesses until key moments. Thus, ironically, thieves are playing a role in securing bitcoin and associated algorithms from NSA, Chinese, Russian or mafia tampering. Was the SecureRandom() bug a now-revealed NSA backdoor? You can thank bitcoin for exposing the problem and leading to immediate fixes, and attention to weak RNG impact." Continue reading →

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Toshiba’s quantum cryptography network that even the NSA can’t hack

"A quantum network uses specially polarized photons to encode an encryption key—a very long series of numbers and letters that can unlock a digital file. The photons are then sent down a fiber optic cable until they reach their destination, a photon detector, which counts them, and delivers the key to the intended recipient. If the photons are interfered with, the individual packets of information are forever altered and the recipient can see the telltale signs of tampering. The next step toward mainstreaming quantum crypto is increasing the distance that photons can travel before they degrade—currently the record is 200 km (124 miles) using a dedicated fiber optic cable." Continue reading →

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Schneier on NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure

"Now that we have enough details about how the NSA eavesdrops on theinternet, including today's disclosures of the NSA's deliberate weakening of cryptographic systems, we can finally start to figure out how to protect ourselves. The NSA has turned the fabric of the internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They're limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible. Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That's how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA." Continue reading →

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What Exactly Are the NSA’s ‘Groundbreaking Cryptanalytic Capabilities’?

"Whatever the NSA has up its top-secret sleeves, the mathematics of cryptography will still be the most secure part of any encryption system. I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks. Those are where the real vulnerabilities are, and where the NSA spends the bulk of its efforts. While the NSA certainly has symmetric cryptanalysis capabilities that we in the academic world do not, converting that into practical attacks on the sorts of data it is likely to encounter seems so impossible as to be fanciful." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingWhat Exactly Are the NSA’s ‘Groundbreaking Cryptanalytic Capabilities’?

Schneier: US gov. has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back

"Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards. This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community." Continue reading →

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Putin: Syria chemical attack is ‘rebels’ provocation in hope of intervention’

"The alleged chemical weapons use in Syria is a provocation carried out by the rebels to attract a foreign-led strike, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the G20 summit. There was no 50/50 split of opinion on the notion of a military strike against the Syrian President Bashar Assad, Putin stressed refuting earlier assumptions. Only Turkey, Canada, Saudi Arabia and France joined the US push for intervention, he said, adding that the UK Prime Minister’s position was not supported by his citizens. Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Italy were among the major world’s economies clearly opposed to military intervention." Continue reading →

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