Joseph S. Nye, Jr. has an opinion piece in the New York Times discussing cyberspace and its developing role in geopolitics and international security.
Andrei Soldatov has an opinion piece in the Moscow Times on how Moscow may respond to a wave of social media-based revolutionary fervor. An excerpt:
That is precisely how the FSB and Interior Ministry reacted to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt — by proposing Criminal Code amendments that would have made the owners of online social networks responsible for all content posted on their sites. Apparently, the idea is not to incriminate the owners of Facebook and Vkontakte of extremism personally, but to force them to pass responsibility on to individual users by requiring each to sign a contract that includes their passport information.
The National Academy of Science’s Computer Science and Technology Board has released a report entitled Wireless Technology Prospects and Policy Options which “describes key technology trends, their implications, and options for facilitating the introduction of enhanced and new services.” You can download the report for free here.
Andy Greenberg at Forbes’ Firewall reports on an upcoming paper written by Harvard professor Yochai Benkler in which the scholar criticizes the public and private sectors’ response to the Wikileaks affair. From the paper:
“The implicit alliance, a public-private partnership between the firms that operate the infrastructure and the government that encourages them to help in its war on terror, embodied by this particularly irritating organization, was able to achieve extra-legally much more than law would have allowed the state to do by itself.”
Jeff Hecht writing at the New Scientist reports on claims by Garmin engineers that 4G transmissions “will seriously damage GPS reception,” causing massive GPS signal jamming. Lightsquared, a company planning on building 40,000 new 4G base stations throughout the country, claims that the problem rests with GPS receivers and not the 4G signals.
Bill Gertz at the Washington Times reports that a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army” has claimed credit for hijacking the Voice of America’s website yesterday. The group is suspected to be linked to the Iranian government.
Gopal Ratnam and Rachael King writing for Bloomberg News report that the DOD is seeking $500 million for research in cyber security technologies, including seed money for private companies to develop dual use technologies that can support DOD cyber security efforts.
Greg Weston writing for the CBC reports on what is being called an “unprecedented cyber attack” against the Canadian government. The attack was traced to servers in China, but officials are reluctant to immediately assign blame to the Chinese given possibility that the attack may have been routed through those servers from another location.
Nick Miroff at the GlobalPost reports on the latest developments in the case of a US contractor who was arrested in Cuba back in 2009 for setting up “laptop-sized satellites” which would provide unrestricted Internet access for Cubans. A Cuban intelligence official compared Gross’s conduct to the Bay of Pigs, only with “other arms,” however US officials have characterized his actions as simply trying to provide a local community with better Internet access.
Michael Hickins writing at the WSJ’s Digits blog dicusses Cyber Security Coordinator Howard Schmidt’s defense of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), an initiative that would allow users to authenticate their online identities on certain websites, with a goal of stimulating the private sector to participate in the program.
Marvin Ammori 