Today, I was on BFM talking about Hacking Team, the audio for which is below, and more comments and thoughts below that.
This is my last ditch attempt to get a conversation started about the use of surveillance software by the Government—and these conversations should take place a the higher (and more powerful) levels of goverment. Talking about it to myself on this blog isn’t taking it anywhere.
Our spanking new, hand-picked Attorney-General is proposing life imprisonment for journalist who refuse to reveal their sources.
And surprisingly, my favorite Member of Parliament,Dato Azalina Othman, has supported the move, saying it was ‘high-time’ Malaysian did something. Fortunately, some calmer more rationale heads, like Dato Paul Low have criticized the A-G for his short-sighted stupidity.
Putting aside the fact that anonymity of sources is a core component of Press freedom, it’s easy to extrapolate how harsher punishment for journalists who keep their sources anonymous will back-fire spectacularly for the Government.
If sources know that Journalist will be pressured to reveal their identities, most sources will stop speaking journalist, thereby stemming the leakages from the government, and keeping the status quo.Or so the theory goes…
Next week, I’ll be on BFM for an interview about spyware, which will be my last Hail Mary play to get a conversation started about the use of surveillance software by the Government. If a radio interview on a popular station won’t do it, nothing on my blog will possibly be able to anyway :)
In any case, this post is a pre-emptive response to a slightly controversial idea that I cover (very briefly) in the interview, and hopefully it can be articulated better here than in a radio segment. To be honest, I haven’t fully thought this through, but I believe it at least some some aspects of truth that deserve further attention.
The Idea comes in 3 parts:
Malaysian rejoiced last month when Netflix announced that they would be coming to our shores. We were all salivating over the massive amount of content we would finally have access too…except that it wasn’t so massive.
Malaysia would enjoy less than 20% of what was available to Netflix users in the US or even in the UK, and that looked like an especially lousy deal since we were paying the same amount for our subscriptions.
I wasn’t that interested in the news, after all, I had already subscribed to Netflix for more than 2 years, and used a VPN to enjoy US and even UK content. I loved Netflix because it had a lot of interesting content, but what really sealed the deal for me was Pocoyo and Dora the explorer…I’m a father of a 2-year-old, and having a video on demand service that lets me address my toddlers demand was a life-saver.
Netflix was far more effective than youtube for videos for my kid, first of all, the content was pure, and I could be sure that nobody was messing with it or adding commentary, but more importantly, it had no adverts, and when you have a 2-year-old the last thing you want them to watch is adverts.
So the buzz around twitter is that Medium.com has been blocked by the Malaysian Authorities, and guess what? It’s true.
It was expected, after all Medium is where the ‘infamous’ Clare Rewcastle Brown uploads her articles to circumvent censorship of her own site, the equally diabolical SarawakReport.org.
Medium is like twitter without the character limits, and it's quite a cool site to just browse around and look for interesting articles to read, The platform claims to be "community of readers and writers offering unique perspectives on ideas large and small".
A lot of successful writers and bloggers have taken to Medium to host their content, including Stephen Levy, the author of In the Plex, one of my favorite books on Google. He's using it (and only it) to start a Tech Hub for his content, and placing it alongside millions of other articles contributed by both professional and amateur writers.So it made sense for SarawakReport to take their content to Medium. After all, most of their readership is Malaysian, and since Malaysian ISPs ‘censored’ their content, using a neutral ‘un-censored’ platform like Medium was a perfect solution—well almost perfect!
It’s a phenomenon called ‘collateral freedom’, and for a while SarawakReport readers, and Malaysian internet users enjoyed that collateral freedom, Medium was free and un-censored, which made Sarawark also free and un-censored as long as it was on the platform.
If you believe (as I do), that the government bought spyware, then here are some pertinent questions
The conversation should end here, as I don’t believe the PMO has any authority to use spyware, but the next question actually goes even further and ask if anyone has the legal authority to use it.
The MACC act, that governs the powers of the commission, specifically state that a the Public Prosecutor or Commissioner of the MACC can authorize the interception of communications if they ‘consider’ that the specific communication might help in an ongoing investigation. However, spyware from hacking team isn’t really ‘intercepting’ communications, because what is being communicated through the Internet is usually encrypted, Hacking team circumvents this by capturing the data before it is encrypted and then sends that captured data in a separate communication back to its control servers. Strictly speaking, this isn’t interception, its shoulder surfing on steroids.
More worrying, is that the spyware might take screen shots of diary entries and notes that the victim never intended to communicate with anyone, or draft e-mail entries that they later delete are also captured by this spyware. Obviously this falls into a different category than simple ‘interception’, but I’m not done yet.
[caption id=“attachment_5373” align=“aligncenter” width=“550”]
E-mail from Miliserv to Hacking team stipulating the end-customer as the Prime Ministers Department[/caption]
The Prime Ministers Department has denied (twice!) that it has ever procured surveillance software from Hacking Team. Even though hundreds of e-mails in the leaked Hacking Team archive point to it. The latest rebuttal, Datuk Azalina distanced her Ministry from other government agencies, encouraging reporters to seek official statement directly from other agencies accused of procuring the spyware.
In the mean-time though, we’ve now learnt that the MACC has made a ‘semi’ admission that they procured the spyware, and to clear any doubts there’s more proof at the end of this post. But in-spite of this, Datuk Seri Azalina has remained silent.
To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m merely reproducing what is already in the public domain, in the hopes of us taking this conversation further to address more pertinent points. We are frustratingly stuck on this issue of purchase (or lack thereof) because the Prime Ministers Department denies it bought spyware. I find it quite appalling that the Ministry would issue a simple denial without further clarification when I had furnished many documents, in other words they’ve provided an unsubstantiated denial to my substantiated claim.
So…here’s an e-mail (linked here), showing Miliserv requesting Hacking Team to register the Prime Ministers Department as the End User of the system in the Licensing agreement, and here’s another (below), showing Miliserv preparing to welcome 6 PMO staff to their headquarters in Milan for ‘advanced training’. I have removed the names of the PMO staff (red blocks) as I believe that employees shouldn’t be punished for mistakes their employers commit (but you can search for it online, it comes with passport numbers as well). Why send 6 staff to Milan for training if you didn’t buy the spyware?
The Government has denied buying spyware from hacking team, they really should have checked with me before issuing the statement.
On the 23rd of November 2015, Datuk Seri Azalina Othman Said denied that the Malaysian government had procured spyware from hacking team. In a formal response (in Parliament!!), the Minister simply stated “For your information, no such device was purchased by the Prime Minister’s Department”.
For YOUR information, dear Minister, I don’t like being lied to, and oh look there’s a flying pig by the window.Next time ask your PR guys to call me before you go setting your pants on fire.
Ok folks, here’s a step-by-step on why we can trust the hacking team leak, why there’s conclusive proof Malaysia bought this spyware, and why we should be worried about the manner in which it is being used. So let’s go.
I get annoyed when parent associations insist that the Government needs to teach science and maths in English. They argue that because English is the lingua-franca of science, teaching science in English will help students learn more effectively without needing them to translate scientific terms from the vernacular. They add that teaching Science and Maths in English is a great way to improve the standard of English in schools.
It would great if those points were true, but they’re not.
Instead, what children learn in school is so dated, that their initial publications were probably in Latin or Greek, with older text going back to Arabic, Chinese or even Indian origin. The most recent ‘findings’ your children learn in physics is Quantum Physics, which is roughly a hundred years old. Even then, they aren’t reading Einstein’s original paper on the Photoelectric effect, they’re reading a textbook that sufficiently distils and simplifies it for their consumption.
In fact, a vast majority of what children learn in Form 4 physics is derived from Principia, which is a collection of 3 books by Sir Isaac Newton who wrote them in Latin. The famous rhyme that “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction” may sound nice in English, but doesn’t exist in the original text, simply because it wasn’t written in English. Going further back in history, the algebra you loved in high school derives its name from a notoriously hard to pronounce book titled “kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala” , the highlighted al-gabr means the reunion of broken parts, and forms the origin of the word Algebra. The book itself was written by al-khwarizmi (who is the most important mathematician you never heard of), and whose name is where we get the word Algorithm from, obviously he didn’t write his works in English.
Of course, I use these ancient examples a bit unfairly, but the fact is that your children are learning ancient science in schools. It’s not irrelevant, it’s that you have to build the foundation of scientific literacy from these ancient roots before you can tackle modern day science of the Higgs-Boson. You can’t fly before you learn how to walk.
The point is, that if these ancient text were translated into English at some point, why can’t we do the same to Bahasa, or Mandarin, or Tamil..or whatever language you want to. Isn’t it easier to translate and contextualize these century old ideas into a language the next generation is comfortable with, rather than hope they suddenly develop a love and understanding of a foreign language like English?
When you say Lingua-franca of science, in the context of what children actually learn in primary and secondary school–it isn’t English.
From: jibby@Malaysia.gov Sent: 23 Dec 2015 To: orangbawah@Malaysia.gov Subject: Cybersecurity Year end message.
I want to use this year-end as an opportunity to discuss the important topic of Cybersecurity. This year was interesting for me personally, and for all Malaysians, and we need to be aware of cybersecurity issues in order to avoid situations where some people go bat crazy over a missing pendrive, or we’re struggling to interrogate a sysadmin in Thailand.
But let’s start with a Government Linked Company, Malaysian Airlines (MAS).
In February, MAS had their website hacked by a group calling themselves Lizard Squad, which appeared at the time to be affiliated with ISIS. However, I confirmed with my pal Badghdadi that Lizard squad are in no way related to our good friends at the Caliphate, and we should continue striving to be as brave as them.
Delving deeper into the hack, revealed it to be a domain registrar hijack, and was not a result of inadequate security from MAS. Essentially MAS registered their website with a registrar, and it was that registrar which was hacked, not MAS themselves. Let that be a lesson for us all, sometimes the responsibility of security rest not just with us, but with our IT vendors as well.
Another good example of IT vendors completely messing up is Miliserv.