History > 2015 > USA > Internet / Web (I)

Virginia Shooting Gone Viral,

in a Well-Planned Rollout

on Social Media

AUG. 26, 2015

The New York Times

Personal Tech

Farhad Manjoo

In one sad sense there was nothing new, or even very unusual, about the televised killing of two journalists in Virginia on Wednesday morning.

Death on TV has occurred with frightening regularity ever since the advent of the medium: Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963; and the Sept. 11, 2001, fall of the World Trade Center. The prospect of death appearing suddenly on our screens is as common as it is ghoulish.

Yet in another way, the video of the Virginia shootings posted by Bryce Williams, whose real name is Vester Lee Flanagan and who is thought to be the gunman who killed two of his former co-workers at the television station WDBJ, is a frightful twist in an age of online sharing and ubiquitous video documentation.

The killings appear to have been skillfully engineered for maximum distribution, and to sow maximum dread, over Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones. The video Mr. Flanagan shows is an up-close, first-person execution. It was posted only after his social media accounts had become widely known, while the police were in pursuit of the killer. And unlike previous televised deaths, these were not merely broadcast, but widely and virally distributed, playing out with the complicity of thousands, perhaps millions, of social networking users who could not help watching and sharing.

The horror was the dawning realization, as the video spread across the networks, that the killer had anticipated the moves — that he had been counting on the mechanics of these services and on our inability to resist passing on what he had posted. For many, that realization came too late. On these services, the killer knew, you often hit retweet, like or share before you realize just quite what you have done.

Twitter and Facebook moved quickly to suspend the accounts of Mr. Flanagan. But not quickly enough. By the time his social presence had come down, his videos had been shared widely by journalists and ordinary users, jumping beyond the Internet onto morning TV broadcasts, and downloaded and reposted across the Internet — where, with some searching, they will most likely remain accessible indefinitely.

Also found after the killings was a demo reel posted to YouTube, showing Mr. Flanagan’s various appearances as a TV news anchor and reporter. It is unsurprising, given his familiarity with the subject, that he appeared well versed with what has become the media ritual of killing.

He seems to have known, for instance, that in a nation in which tens of thousands of people are killed by firearms every year, the shooting of two people would not become international news if it was not filmed: as is commonly said online, “Pics, or it didn’t happen.” So he waited until WDBJ’s cameras were broadcasting live before he acted.

But as a newshound, he seems also to have understood the morbid irresistibility of the citizen-produced video — the shaky, point-of-view, ground level, continuously looped recording of any incident that has become a commonplace spectacle on television news. Thus, he made sure to produce his own video as well. In the practice of our mobile age, he held his camera vertically, in one hand, allowing him to hold his gun in the other.

He might have anticipated, too, that in any widely covered shooting, reporters now rush to do an Internet search on the killer as soon as a name leaks out. Mr. Flanagan was ready, his social accounts prepared with a professional picture and childhood photos. Then, as soon as his name began to be mentioned online, he appeared to have logged in to Twitter and Facebook to begin posting the outlines of a defense and an explanation, as well as his own clip of the killings.

There was initially some doubt on Twitter about the authenticity of the killer’s account — justified skepticism, because the quickly pulled-together profile of a shooter has also become a hallmark of the ritual in which these incidents are covered. But then the killer’s account, @bryce_williams7, began updating live, erasing all doubt.

Over the course of 20 minutes on Twitter, the shooter updated his status a half-dozen times, culminating in a post showing the video of the killings. He quickly amassed a following of thousands, the sort of rapturous social media welcoming that is usually reserved for pop stars and heads of state.

There was uncertainty in the sharing. Users expressed reservations as they passed on the gunman’s profile and his tweets. People were calling on Twitter and Facebook to act quickly to pull down his accounts. There were questions about the journalistic ethics of posting WDBJ’s live shot and the killer’s own document of the shooting, given that it was exactly what he had been expecting.

But these questions didn’t really slow anything down, a testament to the power of these networks to tap into each of our subconscious, automatic desires to witness and to share. The videos got out widely, forging a new path for nihilists to gain a moment in the media spotlight: an example that, given its success at garnering wide publicity, will most likely be followed by others.
 

Email: farhad.manjoo@nytimes.com; Twitter: @fmanjoo

A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Violence Gone Viral, in a Well-Planned Social Media Rollout.

Virginia Shooting Gone Viral, in a Well-Planned Rollout on Social Media,
NYT,
AUGUST 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/technology/personaltech/
violence-gone-viral-in-a-well-planned-rollout-on-social-media.html

Can Wikipedia Survive?

JUNE 20, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Opinion

By ANDREW LIH

WASHINGTON — WIKIPEDIA has come a long way since it started in 2001. With around 70,000 volunteers editing in over 100 languages, it is by far the world’s most popular reference site. Its future is also uncertain.

One of the biggest threats it faces is the rise of smartphones as the dominant personal computing device. A recent Pew Research Center report found that 39 of the top 50 news sites received more traffic from mobile devices than from desktop and laptop computers, sales of which have declined for years.

This is a challenge for Wikipedia, which has always depended on contributors hunched over keyboards searching references, discussing changes and writing articles using a special markup code. Even before smartphones were widespread, studies consistently showed that these are daunting tasks for newcomers. “Not even our youngest and most computer-savvy participants accomplished these tasks with ease,” a 2009 user test concluded. The difficulty of bringing on new volunteers has resulted in seven straight years of declining editor participation.

In 2005, during Wikipedia’s peak years, there were months when more than 60 editors were made administrator — a position with special privileges in editing the English-language edition. For the past year, it has sometimes struggled to promote even one per month.

The pool of potential Wikipedia editors could dry up as the number of mobile users keeps growing; it’s simply too hard to manipulate complex code on a tiny screen.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia’s operations but is not directly involved in content, is investigating solutions. Some ideas include touch-screen tools that would let Wikipedia editors sift through information and share content from their phones.

What has not suffered is fund-raising. The foundation, based in San Francisco, has a budget of roughly $60 million. How to fairly distribute resources has long been a topic of debate. How much should go to regional chapters and affiliates, or to groups devoted to non-English languages? How much should stay in the foundation to develop software, create mobile apps and maintain infrastructure?

These tensions run through the community. Last year the foundation took the unprecedented step of forcing the installation of new software on the German-language Wikipedia. The German editors had shown their independent streak by resisting an earlier update to the site’s user interface. Against the wishes of veteran editors, the foundation installed a new way to view multimedia content and then set up an Orwellian-sounding “superprotect” feature to block obstinate administrators from changing it back.

The latest clash had repercussions in the election this year for seats to the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees — the most influential positions that volunteers can hold. The election — a record 5,000 voters turned out, nearly three times the number from the previous election — was a rebuke to the status quo; all three incumbents up for re-election were defeated, replaced by critics of the superprotect measures. Two other members will leave the 10-member board at the end of this year. Meanwhile, the foundation’s new executive director, Lila Tretikov, has been hiring developers from the world of open-source technology, and their lack of experience with Wikipedia content has concerned some veterans.

Could the pressure from mobile, and the internal tensions, tear Wikipedia apart? A world without it seems unimaginable, but consider the fate of other online communities. Founded in 1985, at the dawn of the Internet, the Well, the self-proclaimed “birthplace of the online community movement,” hosted an influential cast of dot-com luminaries on its electronic bulletin board discussion forums. By 1995, it was in steep decline, and today it is a shell of its former self. Blogging, celebrated a decade ago as pioneering an exciting new form of personal writing, has decreased significantly in the social-media age.

These are existential challenges, but they can still be addressed. There is no other significant alternative to Wikipedia, and good will toward the project — a remarkable feat of altruism — could hardly be higher. If the foundation needed more donations, it could surely raise them.

The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes — the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in — and to design a mobile-oriented editing environment. One board member, María Sefidari, warned that “some communities have become so change-resistant and innovation-averse” that they risk staying “stuck in 2006 while the rest of the Internet is thinking about 2020 and the next three billion users.”

For the last few years, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives and other world-class institutions, libraries and museums have collaborated with Wikipedia’s volunteers to improve accuracy, quality of references and depth of multimedia on article pages. This movement dates from 2010, when the British Museum saw that Wikipedia’s visitor traffic to articles about its artifacts was five times greater than that of the museum’s own website. Grasping the power of Wikipedia to amplify its reach, the museum invited a Wikipedia editor to work with its curatorial staff. Since then, similar parternships have been set up with groups like the Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit organization that focuses on evidence-based health care, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These are vital opportunities for Wikipedia to tap external expertise and enlarge its base of editors. It is also the most promising way to solve the considerable and often-noted gender gap among Wikipedia editors; in 2011, less than 15 percent were women.

The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making meaningful reforms.

No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into the hands of so many — a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of websites is worth saving.

Andrew Lih is an associate professor of journalism at American University and the author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.”

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 21, 2015, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Can Wikipedia Survive?.

Can Wikipedia Survive?,
NYT, JUNE 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html

Hackers Can Be Fought

Without Violating Americans’ Rights

 

JUNE 6, 2015

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The scope and sophistication of recent cyberattacks on American government, business and personal accounts are chilling. The latest, a breach of federal personnel records that could affect more than four million current and former employees, is a reminder that enhancing the nation’s cyberdefenses has to be an urgent priority.

Yet, in tailoring new programs and policies to fight hackers, members of Congress and the Obama administration should not allow a siege mentality to take hold.

The disclosures by Edward Snowden about the abuses of the National Security Agency have led to important reforms that have sought to prevent the government from collecting information about Americans in unlawful ways and to strengthen privacy safeguards. But that process still has a long way to go, and it would be unwise to let the rising threat of cyberattacks snarl it or roll it back.

This week, The New York Times and ProPublica, relying on documents leaked by Mr. Snowden, reported that the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. have cooperated closely on cyberthreat investigations in recent years.

The partnership, which has eroded a firewall that once kept criminal and intelligence probes separate, raises serious privacy concerns. As the N.S.A. sweeps up information from suspected hackers abroad under the authority of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it may be gathering large amounts of data about American citizens. Currently, such data, which could include copies of stolen emails and financial records, can be stored in databases. Law enforcement personnel may query it to build criminal cases against Americans that are unrelated to tracking down hackers.

Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican and former judge, has been among the outspoken critics of the practice, known as “backdoor searches,” which he sees as a breach of constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. “The line is very muddy,” Mr. Poe said, referring to the collaboration between the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. “I’m very suspicious about how they work together on issues that cross the line.”

Cooperation between the N.S.A. and law enforcement agencies should not be inherently suspect, and will no doubt be crucial to enhancing protections against cyberattacks. It must, however, be done in a manner that is clearly lawful and that safeguards the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens.

The powers granted to intelligence agencies under Section 702, which were billed primarily as terrorism-fighting tools, expire in December 2017. Lawmakers should not wait until then to demand a fuller and clearer accounting of how the government has interpreted those authorities. It remains unclear, for instance, just how much information about Americans the N.S.A. sweeps up in the course of cyberinvestigations and later makes available to other government agencies. Also unclear is how routinely that data is searched by law enforcement personnel, and under what guidelines.

Experience has shown that Americans cannot count on intelligence agencies to be judicious, or the Obama administration to be forthcoming, so lawmakers should create tighter rules that ensure that intelligence programs have the robust privacy and civil liberty safeguards that the law and the Constitution require.

A cybersecurity bill currently before lawmakers, which sets ground rules for cooperation between the government and the private sector, may be an appropriate vehicle for that debate. Alternatively, reforms to Section 702 could be made in appropriations bills.

While the recent changes to the Patriot Act were insufficient, it is encouraging, at least, that more members of Congress from both parties have begun championing privacy in debates about national security. “It wasn’t really something Congress was engaged in in a bipartisan way,” Mr. Poe said.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on June 7, 2015, on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Sensible Response to Cyberattacks.

Hackers Can Be Fought Without Violating Americans’ Rights,
NYT, JUNE 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/
hackers-can-be-fought-without-violating-americans-rights.html

Preparing for Warfare in Cyberspace

APRIL 28, 2015

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Pentagon’s new 33-page cybersecurity strategy is an important evolution in how America proposes to address a top national security threat. It is intended to warn adversaries — especially China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — that the United States is prepared to retaliate, if necessary, against cyberattacks and is developing the weapons to do so.

As The Times recently reported, Russian hackers swept up some of President Obama’s email correspondence last year. Although the breach apparently affected only the White House’s unclassified computers, it was more intrusive and worrisome than publicly acknowledged and is a chilling example of how determined adversaries can penetrate the government system.

The United States’ cybersecurity efforts have typically focused on defending computer networks against hackers, criminals and foreign governments. Playing defense is still important, and the Obama administration has started to push Silicon Valley’s software companies to join in that fight. But the focus has shifted to developing the malware and other technologies that would give the United States offensive weapons should circumstances require disrupting an adversary’s network.

The strategy document provides some overdue transparency about a military program that is expected to increase to 6,200 workers in a few years and costs billions of dollars annually. Officials apparently hope talking more openly about America’s plans will deter adversaries who view cyberattacks as a cheap way to gather intelligence from more destructive operations.

The cyberthreat is “increasing in severity and sophistication,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said last week. Recent attacks — Russian intrusions against the Pentagon, State Department and White House as well as North Korea’s 2014 attack on Sony Pictures — have driven home that point. One worry is that investing in offensive tools and planning could militarize cyberspace and create a new front for conflict. More than a dozen other countries are making similar investments.

The new strategy, though overly broad in some of its language, begins to lay out the conditions under which the United States would use cyberweapons. Detecting and fending off routine attacks on American assets, like theft of intellectual property, would be the responsibility of private companies, which control 90 percent of the cybernetworks. In complex cases, the Department of Homeland Security would be responsible for detecting attacks and helping the private sector defend against them.

The government would have a “limited and specific role” in defending against the most serious attacks (estimated at about 2 percent of all attacks), described as involving “loss of life, significant damage to property, serious adverse U.S. foreign policy consequences or serious economic impact on the United States.”

At first, the government would use network defenses, and law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I. would respond. Then, if ordered by the president, the military could conduct operations to counter “an imminent or ongoing attack against the U.S. homeland or U.S. interests in cyberspace.”

It is essential that the laws of armed conflict that govern conventional warfare, which call for proportional response and reducing harm to civilians, are followed in any offensive cyberoperations. With so many government agencies involved in cybersecurity — the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon — the potential for turf fights and duplication is high.

The new strategy is the latest evidence that President Obama, having given up on Congress, is putting together his own response to the challenge. Since this is a global issue, still needed are international understandings about what constitutes cyberaggression and how governments should respond.
 

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A version of this editorial appears in print on April 28, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Preparing for Warfare in Cyberspace.

Preparing for Warfare in Cyberspace,
NYT, APRIL 28, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/opinion/preparing-for-warfare-in-cyberspace.html

N.S.A. Tapped

Into North Korean Networks

Before Sony Attack, Officials Say

 

JAN. 18, 2015

The New York Times

By DAVID E. SANGER

and MARTIN FACKLER

WASHINGTON — The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.

Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South Korea and other American allies, according to former United States and foreign officials, computer experts later briefed on the operations and a newly disclosed N.S.A. document.

A classified security agency program expanded into an ambitious effort, officials said, to place malware that could track the internal workings of many of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers, a force that South Korea’s military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people. Most are commanded by the country’s main intelligence service, called the Reconnaissance General Bureau, and Bureau 121, its secretive hacking unit, with a large outpost in China.

The evidence gathered by the “early warning radar” of software painstakingly hidden to monitor North Korea’s activities proved critical in persuading President Obama to accuse the government of Kim Jong-un of ordering the Sony attack, according to the officials and experts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified N.S.A. operation.

Mr. Obama’s decision to accuse North Korea of ordering the largest destructive attack against an American target — and to promise retaliation, which has begun in the form of new economic sanctions — was highly unusual: The United States had never explicitly charged another government with mounting a cyberattack on American targets.

Mr. Obama is cautious in drawing stark conclusions from intelligence, aides say. But in this case “he had no doubt,” according to one senior American military official.

“Attributing where attacks come from is incredibly difficult and slow,” said James A. Lewis, a cyberwarfare expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The speed and certainty with which the United States made its determinations about North Korea told you that something was different here — that they had some kind of inside view.”

For about a decade, the United States has implanted “beacons,” which can map a computer network, along with surveillance software and occasionally even destructive malware in the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The government spends billions of dollars on the technology, which was crucial to the American and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear program, and documents previously disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former security agency contractor, demonstrated how widely they have been deployed against China.

But fearing the exposure of its methods in a country that remains a black hole for intelligence gathering, American officials have declined to talk publicly about the role the technology played in Washington’s assessment that the North Korean government had ordered the attack on Sony.

The extensive American penetration of the North Korean system also raises questions about why the United States was not able to alert Sony as the attacks took shape last fall, even though the North had warned, as early as June, that the release of the movie “The Interview,” a crude comedy about a C.I.A. plot to assassinate the North’s leader, would be “an act of war.”

 

Dinner in Pyongyang

The N.S.A.’s success in getting into North Korea’s systems in recent years should have allowed the agency to see the first “spear phishing” attacks on Sony — the use of emails that put malicious code into a computer system if an unknowing user clicks on a link — when the attacks began in early September, according to two American officials.

But those attacks did not look unusual. Only in retrospect did investigators determine that the North had stolen the “credentials” of a Sony systems administrator, which allowed the hackers to roam freely inside Sony’s systems.

In recent weeks, investigators have concluded that the hackers spent more than two months, from mid-September to mid-November, mapping Sony’s computer systems, identifying critical files and planning how to destroy computers and servers.

“They were incredibly careful, and patient,” said one person briefed on the investigation. But he added that even with their view into the North’s activities, American intelligence agencies “couldn’t really understand the severity” of the destruction that was coming when the attacks began Nov. 24.

In fact, when, Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, had an impromptu dinner in early November with his North Korean counterpart during a secret mission to Pyongyang to secure the release of two imprisoned Americans, he made no mention of Sony or the North’s growing hacking campaigns, officials say.

In a recent speech at Fordham University in New York, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that the commander of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, Kim Yong-chol, with whom he traded barbs over the 12-course dinner, was “later responsible for overseeing the attack against Sony.” (General Clapper praised the food; his hosts later presented him with a bill for his share of the meal.)

Asked about General Clapper’s knowledge of the Sony attacks from the North when he attended the dinner, Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said that the director did not know he would meet his intelligence counterpart and that the purpose of his trip to North Korea “was solely to secure the release of the two detained U.S. citizens.”

“Because of the sensitivities surrounding the effort” to win the Americans’ release, Mr. Hale said, “the D.N.I. was focused on the task and did not want to derail any progress by discussing other matters.” But he said General Clapper was acutely aware of the North’s growing capabilities.

Jang Sae-yul, a former North Korean army programmer who defected in 2007, speaking in an interview in Seoul, said: “They have built up formidable hacking skills. They have spent almost 30 years getting ready, learning how to do this and this alone, how to target specific countries.”

Still, the sophistication of the Sony hack was such that many experts say they are skeptical that North Korea was the culprit, or the lone culprit. They have suggested it was an insider, a disgruntled Sony ex-employee or an outside group cleverly mimicking North Korean hackers. Many remain unconvinced by the efforts of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to answer critics by disclosing some of the American evidence.

Mr. Comey told the same Fordham conference that the North Koreans got “sloppy” in hiding their tracks, and that hackers periodically “connected directly and we could see them.”

“And we could see that the I.P. addresses that were being used to post and to send the emails were coming from I.P.s that were exclusively used by the North Koreans,” he said. Some of those addresses appear to be in China, experts say.

The skeptics say, however, that it would not be that difficult for hackers who wanted to appear to be North Korean to fake their whereabouts. Mr. Comey said there was other evidence he could not discuss. So did Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the N.S.A. director, who told the Fordham conference that after reviewing the classified data he had “high confidence” the North had ordered the action.

 

A Growing Capability

North Korea built its first computer with vacuum tubes in 1965, with engineers trained in France. For a brief time, it appeared ahead of South Korea and of China, which not only caught up but also came to build major elements of their economic success on their hardware and software.

Defectors say that the Internet was first viewed by North Korea’s leadership as a threat, something that could taint its citizens with outside ideas.

But Kim Heung-kwang, a defector who said in an interview that he helped train many of the North’s first cyberspies, recalled that in the early 1990s a group of North Korean computer experts came back from China with a “very strange new idea”: Use the Internet to steal secrets and attack the government’s enemies. “The Chinese are already doing it,” he quoted one of the experts as saying.

Defectors report that the North Korean military was interested. So was the ruling Workers’ Party, which in 1994 sent 15 North Koreans to a military academy in Beijing to learn about hacking. When they returned, they formed the core of the External Information Intelligence Office, which hacked into websites, penetrated fire walls and stole information abroad. Because the North had so few connections to the outside world, the hackers did much of their work in China and Japan.

While perhaps a coincidence, the failure, which lasted about 10 hours, began after President Obama said the U.S. would respond to an act of “cybervandalism” against Sony Pictures.
Chinese Annoyance With North Korea Bubbles to the Surface
Chinese Annoyance With North Korea Bubbles to the Surface

A retired general’s scathing account of North Korea as a recalcitrant ally headed for collapse and unworthy of China’s support revealed how far relations between the two countries have sunk.

According to Mr. Kim, the military began training computer “warriors” in earnest in 1996 and two years later opened Bureau 121, now the primary cyberattack unit. Members were dispatched for two years of training in China and Russia. Mr. Jang said they were envied, in part because of their freedom to travel.

“They used to come back with exotic foreign clothes and expensive electronics like rice cookers and cameras,” he said. His friends told him that Bureau 121 was divided into different groups, each targeting a specific country or region, especially the United States, South Korea and the North’s one ally, China.

“They spend those two years not attacking, but just learning about their target country’s Internet,” said Mr. Jang, 46, who was a first lieutenant in a different army unit that wrote software for war game simulations.

Mr. Jang said that as time went on, the North began diverting high school students with the best math skills into a handful of top universities, including a military school specializing in computer-based warfare called Mirim University, which he attended as a young army officer.

Others were deployed to an “attack base” in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, where there are many North Korean-run hotels and restaurants. Unlike the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, the cyberforces can be used to harass South Korea and the United States without risking a devastating response.

“Cyberwarfare is simply the modern chapter in North Korea’s long history of asymmetrical warfare,” said a security research report in August by Hewlett-Packard.

 

An Attack in Seoul

When the Americans first gained access to the North Korean networks and computers in 2010, their surveillance focused on the North’s nuclear program and its leadership, as well as efforts to detect attacks aimed at United States military forces in South Korea, said one former American official. (The German magazine Der Spiegel published an N.S.A. document on Saturday that provides some details of South Korea’s help in spying on the North.) Then a highly destructive attack in 2013 on South Korean banks and media companies suggested that North Korea was becoming a greater threat, and the focus shifted.

“The big target was the hackers,” the official said.

That attack knocked out almost 50,000 computers and servers in South Korea for several days at five banks and television broadcasters.

The hackers were patient, spending nine months probing the South Korean systems. But they also made the mistake seen in the Sony hack, at one point revealing what South Korean analysts believe to have been their true I.P. addresses. Lim Jong-in, dean of the Graduate School of Information Security at Korea University, said those addresses were traced back to Shenyang, and fell within a spectrum of I.P. addresses linked to North Korean companies.

The attack was studied by American intelligence agencies. But after the North issued its warnings about Sony’s movie last June, American officials appear to have made no reference to the risk in their discussions with Sony executives. Even when the spear-phishing attacks began in September — against Sony and other targets — “it didn’t set off alarm bells,” according to one person involved in the investigation.

The result is that American officials began to focus on North Korea only after the destructive attacks began in November, when pictures of skulls and gruesome images of Sony executives appeared on the screens of company employees. (That propaganda move by the hackers may have worked to Sony’s benefit: Some employees unplugged their computers immediately, saving some data from destruction.)

It did not take long for American officials to conclude that the source of the attack was North Korea, officials say. “Figuring out how to respond was a lot harder,” one White House official said.
 

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Martin Fackler from Seoul, South Korea. Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting from San Francisco.

N.S.A. Tapped Into North Korean Networks Before Sony Attack, Officials Say,
JAN. 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/world/asia/nsa-tapped-into-north-korean-networks-before-sony-attack-officials-say.html

Web Freedom Is Seen to Be Growing

as a Global Issue in 2015

 

JAN. 1, 2015

By VINDU GOEL

and ANDREW E. KRAMER

SAN FRANCISCO — Government censorship of the Internet is a cat-and-mouse game. And despite more aggressive tactics in recent months, the cats have been largely frustrated while the mice wriggle away.

But this year, the challenges for Silicon Valley will mount, with Russia and Turkey in particular trying to tighten controls on foreign-based Internet companies. Major American companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google are increasingly being put in the tricky position of figuring out which laws and orders to comply with around the world — and which to ignore or contest.

On Wednesday, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, signed the latest version of a personal data law that will require companies to store data about Russian users on computers inside the country, where it will be easier for the government to get access to it. With few companies expected to comply with the law, which goes into effect Sept. 1, a confrontation may well erupt.

The clumsiness of current censorship efforts was apparent in mid-December, when Russia’s Internet regulator demanded that Facebook remove a page that was promoting an anti-government rally. After Facebook blocked the page for its 10 million or so Russian users, dozens of copycat pages popped up and the word spread on other social networks like Twitter. That created even more publicity for the planned Jan. 15 event, intended to protest the sentencing of Aleksei A. Navalny, a leading opposition figure.

Anton Nosik, a prominent Russian blogger whose work has been censored by regulators, said it was absurd for a government to think it could easily stamp out an article or video when it can be copied or found elsewhere with a few clicks. “The reader wants to see what he was prevented from seeing,” Mr. Nosik said in an interview. “All that blocking doesn’t work.”

Instead, that prompted the government to switch tactics, moving Mr. Navalny’s sentencing to Dec. 30 with little notice in an attempt to diminish protests.

The Turkish government faced similar embarrassment when it tried to stop the dissemination of leaked documents and audio recordings on Twitter in March. The administration of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was then prime minister and is now president, ordered the shutdown of Twitter within Turkey after the company refused to block the posts, which implicated government officials in a corruption investigation.

Not only did the government lose a court fight on the issue, but while Twitter was blocked, legions of Turkish users taught one another technical tricks to evade the ban, even spray-painting the instructions on the walls of buildings.

“We all became hackers,” Asli Tunc, a professor of communication at Istanbul Bilgi University, said in a phone interview. “And we all got on Twitter.”

Despite such victories for free-speech advocates, governments around the world are stepping up their efforts to control the Internet, escalating the confrontation.

“The trendlines are consistent,” Colin Crowell, Twitter’s global vice president of public policy, said in a phone interview. “There are more and more requests for removal of information.”

Pakistan, for example, bombarded Facebook with nearly 1,800 requests to take down content in the first half of 2014, according to the company’s most recent transparency report. Google’s YouTube video service has long been blocked there. And the government briefly succeeding in getting Twitter to block certain “blasphemous” or “unethical” tweets last year until the company re-examined Pakistani law and determined the requests didn’t meet legal requirements.

It’s not just autocratic regimes that are pressing for limits on free speech. In the European Union, a court ruling last year established a “right to be forgotten,” allowing residents to ask search engines like Google to remove links to negative material about them. Now privacy regulators want Google to also delete the links from search results on the non-European versions of its service because anyone in Europe can easily get access to the alternate sites.

Free-speech activists view Facebook, the world’s largest social network with 1.35 billion monthly users, as the company most inclined to work with governments and do whatever is necessary to keep its service up and running.

Last spring, while Twitter was blocked in Turkey and YouTube was shut down, Facebook removed contested content and continued to operate. It has a dedicated team of outside lawyers who field censorship requests from the Turkish government and then recommend to corporate officials whether content should be blocked.

“Facebook can be quite important to the people who use it, so we try to make sure it remains accessible,” a company spokesman said. “We aggressively push back on unlawful or overly broad government requests.”

Twitter, which has about 284 million monthly users, styles itself as the world’s town square and a global champion of free speech, conforming to the letter of censorship laws while winking at workaround strategies, like users changing the location listed on their profile to evade specific blocks that apply in a particular country.

For Turkey’s opposition movement, Professor Tunc said, Twitter “basically created an opening, a refreshing alternative, especially during the protests. And they know that. They act like a defender of freedom.”

As the biggest player, Google, whose YouTube service seems to draw the particular ire of foreign governments, has been forced into fights on many fronts. It is still viewed by many as a hero for its decision to pull out of China in 2010 rather than continue to censor search results there.

The company explained its philosophy at that time: “We have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression. We are driven by a belief that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.”

While China remains a thorn in the side of most Western Internet companies — Facebook and Twitter are basically blocked there — Russia is the current flash point in the censorship wars.

Over the summer, the Russian government began demanding that anyone with at least 3,000 daily visitors follow rules similar to those applying to a media company and face content restrictions. So far, Twitter and Facebook are simply passing those requests along to their users without making sure anyone complies. Many do not, but so far the Russian government has not pressed the issue.

But the pressure may intensify later this year. Starting Sept. 1, foreign technology companies are supposed to store data about Russian users on computers located in Russia and make a software key available to the government that could be used to unscramble and monitor private Internet communications.

That would give the government leverage in showdowns with tech companies, since it could simply raid the facility or arrest local employees.

Most Western technology companies have no data centers in Russia and no plans to change that.

“Our data centers are all in the United States,” said Mr. Crowell of Twitter. “It’s unlikely that our first data center outside the United States will be in Russia.”

Google, whose search engine is the No. 2 player in Russia after the local Yandex service, has gone further, announcing recently that it will close its engineering offices in Russia. Although the company said it had been consolidating such offices globally, one factor in the closure is the risk of a raid by Russian authorities.

“If what’s going to happen is that Russians will show up and stick an AK-47 in an engineer’s nostril, Google is going to make sure that no one in Russia has a Google engineering logon,” said Ross J. Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University in Britain, who studies privacy and censorship issues and did some work for Google in the past.

A Google spokesman declined to comment on its Russia strategy, saying only, “We are deeply committed to our Russian users and customers and we have a dedicated team in Russia working to support them.”

Twitter and Facebook have more room to maneuver. With far fewer users in Russia and virtually no advertising there, they can resist the government’s demands with fewer repercussions.

Robert Shlegel, a member of the Russian Parliament active in shaping the Kremlin’s Internet policies, said in a phone interview that the Russian regulations were in many ways a response to the revelations of the former American intelligence contractor, Edward J. Snowden, about American government spying through Silicon Valley companies.

“This problem was created by the United States,” Mr. Shlegel said. Mr. Snowden lives in Russia, which granted him residency as the United States government sought to arrest him for his leaks.

Russia’s first preference, Mr. Shlegel said, is to persuade other nations to form a common, international set of rules for social networking sites and crowdsourced news, clarifying when countries could block pages to comply with national laws.

He said that Russian authorities had no intention of blocking American Internet companies for failing to follow the data storage law. “What we need to do is have a dialogue,” he said.

And given Western sanctions and the collapse in the ruble’s value, Russia needs foreign business support, at least in part to prevent its online economy from grinding to a halt. If strictly enforced, the personal data law, for example, would close most Internet hotel and airline bookings, sending Russians to stand in line at travel agencies instead.

Mr. Nosik, the Russian blogger, said that the country’s Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, was unlikely to ban American companies like Facebook, if only for fear that millions of Russians who suddenly lost access to years of photographs, family memories, love letters and contacts with friends would blame the Kremlin.

Only Mr. Putin could decide to cut off access, he said. “The moment Putin wants it done, it will be done within minutes and no law will be required,” Mr. Nosik said. “On the other hand, so long as Putin doesn’t give the command to block them, they will not be blocked.”
 

Vindu Goel reported from San Francisco and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow.

A version of this article appears in print on January 2, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Web Freedom Seen Growing as an Issue.

Web Freedom Is Seen to Be Growing as a Global Issue in 2015,
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/02/business/international/
web-freedom-is-seen-to-be-growing-as-a-global-issue-in-2015.html