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A Meaner, Nastier TSA Just in time for Thanksgiving’s travelling throngs, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has agreed to "introduce ‘more aggressive, visible and unpredictable security measures’" at airports. Apparently, molesting the handicapped, groping grandmothers, and killing passengers don’t suffice. CBS News fears that "...a team of terrorists working together could easily beat the system. ‘If you start to break up all the components [of an IED or IID] over several different people, and you bring them in in different ways, on your person, in your carry-on luggage, how is a TSA screener supposed to put all those pieces together?’ says CBS News security analyst Paul Kurtz." But the Feds take a contrary lesson from the TSA’s inability to detect "components": screeners should abuse us serfs more "aggressively" and "unpredictably." Why is it that every time the TSA fails, passengers pay the price? This is only the latest of the agency’s scandals. Its incompetence and chicanery have been hogging headlines for weeks now. In October, USA Today "obtained" a "classified report." It said screeners’ "failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers" in 60% of the tests run at Chicago O’Hare last year and in 75% of those at Los Angeles International. Such jaw-dropping scores are about average for the TSA: screeners routinely miss most of what agents try to smuggle. And that’s despite cheating. Though they aren’t supposed to know that they’re being tested, let alone the investigators’ identities, what contraband they’re carrying and where they’ve stashed it, screeners are often alerted to all those details. And have been for years. But only recently did we learn who’s cluing them in. Earlier this month, NBC News reported that "those tipoffs may have come from high officials" at the TSA – specifically, from Mike Restovich, Assistant Administrator of Security Operations. On April 28, 2006, he emailed "Federal Security Directors" at airports nationwide a "NOTICE OF POSSIBLE SECURITY TEST." Mike advised that "This information is provided for your situational awareness."....
Lawyer Groups to Flag Cases Needing Review Two umbrella groups for criminal defense lawyers announced yesterday that they will independently review cases nationwide where the FBI used a discredited bullet-matching science and will try to assist defendants who might have been wrongly convicted. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Network said they were creating a task force of lawyers in response to a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes." That investigation, published yesterday and today, found that the FBI has not taken steps to alert hundreds of defendants that they may have been convicted through the use of comparative bullet-lead analysis, a forensic tool that was discarded two years ago. The FBI decided late last week to begin its own nationwide review of cases over the last three decades in which its experts matched bullets by checking lead content. It has promised to alert prosecutors to any instance of misleading testimony. The two legal groups said they will assist the FBI in identifying cases that need testimony reviews....
Agents' pardon urged of Bush Top conservatives have joined ranking House leaders in their bid to pressure the president to pardon two Border Patrol agents imprisoned for the nonfatal shooting of a Mexican drug smuggler in El Paso, Texas, in 2005. In a letter that was delivered today to the White House, 31 major conservative petitioners joined a campaign led by Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican and presidential candidate, asking President Bush to pardon Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean before Thanksgiving. The letter comes on the heels of the arrest of admitted drug smuggler Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila on charges of trafficking marijuana while he was profiting from the federal immunity deal as the star witness in the shooting case against the agents. "History has proven that the mere words and deeds of a president can change the course of history and profoundly affect both the tone and direction of the nation's moral character for generations to come," said the letter signed by 31 petitioners, mostly from Christian conservative groups and national-security organizations. "The impact of a president's silence can have the same dramatic and devastating results. That is why we find your continued silence on the issue of a presidential pardon for Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean of great concern," it said....
Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry about a new random-number standard that includes an algorithm that is slow, badly designed and just might contain a backdoor for the National Security Agency. The NSA has always been intimately involved in U.S. cryptography standards -- it is, after all, expert in making and breaking secret codes. So the agency's participation in the NIST (the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology) standard is not sinister in itself. It's only when you look under the hood at the NSA's contribution that questions arise. But today there's an even bigger stink brewing around Dual_EC_DRBG. In an informal presentation (.pdf) at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described a backdoor. This is how it works....