Irritado? Inbox a cero

microsiervos
1. Seleccionar todos los correos
2. Marcar como leídos
3. Archivar
4. Borrar
5. Eliminar cuenta
6. Tirar el ordenador por la ventana

– @porras

30-Second Tech Trick: How to Schedule Email to Be Sent Later

TIME

How to Unsend Email

TIME

EDWARD SNOWDEN: How To Make Sure The NSA Can't Read Your Email

businessinsider
Dylan Love

Article 12 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence."

It's that last one that's gotten everyone's attention lately. Just how private is your correspondence online?

Depending on your politics, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is either a vile turncoat or a revered hero, but either way he has advice on how to stay two steps ahead of the NSA.

He held an awesome "press conference" of sorts on The Guardian's website, taking written questions from readers and typing out his answers online.

We were most intrigued by his response to a question about encryption. If someone wants to stay off the NSA's radar, could he or she encrypt emails and send them without arousing any suspicion?

Snowden's response: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it."

A brief caveat before we dive in deeper with encryption. This whole "NSA domestic spying" news item is weird and scary, sure, but it has much more to do with the "connectivity matrix," or the relationship that exists between personal and commercial computers all around the world and the fact that the NSA can exploit it. Yes, your privacy matters, but the real issue raised here is that the NSA can basically use a "cheat code" to become all-powerful in the internet "video game."

That said, it's useful to know how to effectively encrypt your email. Let's talk about PGP encryption, one of the most popular ways of doing so.

PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy." It uses two "keys," one publicly viewable to the world, the other kept solely to yourself. You can generate PGP keys to your heart's content using the free tool at iGolder and a number of other services around the web.

Here's a sample public key:

Screenshot

This looks like a random string of numbers and letters to you, but to a computer, it's a set of instructions on how to properly encode a message. But this is only half of the recipe, because for every public key freely available to the world, there's a private key that the recipient keeps locked away.

Here's the private key that's tied to the public key above:

Screenshot

It's pretty much the same story here – random nonsense characters. But your computer looks at this and sees the instructions on how to properly decode any messages that were encoded using the public key above.

If we want to send the message "Hello world." to a recipient using our example public key, we use an encryption tool (also freely available at iGolder and elsewhere around the web). Copy and paste the recipient's public key into the appropriate box, then type out your message as you normally would.

Screenshot

The last step is easy. Just click on "Encrypt Message" and it spits out your very unreadable secret email:

Screenshot

Then copy and paste this into a new email and press send:

Screenshot

You've officially unleashed an encrypted message into the world. Since it looks like a bunch of nonsense, it contains no keywords that could trigger any alarms at the NSA. And if the message should somehow be intercepted, no one would have the first idea what to do with it.

Think of PGP encryption like a Star Trek transporter. Instead of disassembling a human being's atoms and reassembling them elsewhere, we're breaking down written language, emailing the "junk," and then having the recipient turn the junk into a readable email using his private key.

Nico Sell is the founder of Wickr, a mobile security app that boasts a slew of features like "self-destructing" messages that disappear after a preset amount of time. Its greatest strength (other than its "military-grade encryption") is how user-friendly it is. By bringing this PGP-style encryption method to your phone as a non-threatening and intuitive app, Wickr might just be the ticket to a world where even your technophobic uncle is sending you encoded emails.

Sell told Business Insider that both her three-year-old son and 70-year-old mother use Wickr all the time.

How well does PGP work? Well enough that it's been actively used since it was introduced in 1991, making for 22 years of active privacy-protecting service. And in internet time, this makes PGP a grizzled but fearsome veteran. Just take it from Sell, who told us: "When it comes to email, PGP's about as good as it gets."

Let's revisit the last half of Snowden's comment. He said: "endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it."

While "endpoint security" encompasses a lot of different ideas – everything from using strong unguessable passwords to setting up a firewall – we presume that Snowden is referring to the potential for someone to gain hardware-level access to your computer.

You've seen this happen before in cheesy thriller movies. A hacker sits down at a computer, whacks a few keys, and someone else's desktop appears on the minitor. The hacker reclines in his chair and watches everything this faraway other person does on his computer, every word typed, every website visited.

While we strongly doubt it's that casual, it's far from impossible and the NSA would be just the organization to gain hardware-level access to someone's computer. An uninvited guest watching you go about your business online would obviously be troublesome for anyone, but people who make heavy use of PGP encryption have their own set of worries here – what good is an encrypted message when someone watches you type it out in plaintext ahead of time?

We assume that authorities would only monitor someone's computer on the hardware level if that person made his way onto a watch list by engaging in suspicious behavior. So for the Regular Joes out there, PGP is a really solid bet on making sure that your sensitive message arrives safely to the intended recipient.

Anyone who'd like to give this a shot is welcome to email me using my own public key here.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-email-encryption-works-against-the-nsa-2013-6#ixzz2WVdQB6NB

Is This The Reasion Why The White House Will Not Release The Benghazi Emails?

War News Updates

Acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Elizabeth Jones told Libya's president one day after the Benghazi attack that Islamic terrorists had killed the U.S. Ambassador and reduced the compound to a burnt-out shell

Secret Email Reveals Top Official Told Libya's U.S. Abmassador That Terrorists Were Behind Benghazi Attack - Four Days BEFORE U.S. Ambassador To UN Said It Was A Spontaneous Attack -- Daily Mail

Sept. 11: Terrorists attack the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya
Sept. 12: State Dept. Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs tells Libya's President that Ansar al-Sharia was responsible
Sept. 13: CIA writes candid talking points for members of Congress
Sept. 15: White House deputies edit the talking points, removing all references to Islamic terrorism
Sept. 16: UN Ambassador Susan Rice, in five television interviews, blames the attack on a spontaneous mob angered by an anti-Islam YouTube video

A top State Department appointee told Libya's ambassador to the United States one day after the military-style assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that the terror group Ansar al-Shariah was responsible.

But four days later, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations said on television that it was the product of a spontaneous protest.

During a fiery and emotional congressional hearing on the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Rep. Trey Gowdy read aloud from an email dated Sept. 12, 2012 to senior State Department officers, from Elizabeth Jones, the acting Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

Read more >>

What Petraeus affair reveals about your emails

WND/ Steve Elwart*

gawker.com

“Hell has no wrath like a woman scorned.” The saying took on a new meaning, with wrath being source of the “Petraeus-gate” that started when a general’s mistress believed he was cheating her.

The fact that Jill Kelley, a friend of the Petraeus family, received what she felt were threatening emails was apparently enough to bring the FBI into the case, prodded along by an agent-friend of the recipient.

The FBI started the investigation under the authority of the 1986 United States Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The act allows for “government entities” to acquire a warrant to access email records less than 180 days old “if there is reasonable cause to believe a crime has been committed.” For email older than six months, a federal agency only needs to get a subpoena signed by a federal prosecutor, not a judge, to obtain the messages.

Because of the wording of the law, Americans have fewer privacy protections for their electronic emails than would for those same messages than if they were printed out and stuck in a drawer.

In the eyes of the law, email kept on an individual’s hard drive in their home computer has the same protection as one’s personal papers, which require a search warrant. Emails stored on a remote server “in the cloud” do not have the same protection.

The writers of the law also did not envision the cloud. Email stored in the cloud has the same legal protection as documents in a public warehouse: the government can obtain them with a simple subpoena; no court procedure is required.

To make things really confusing, the government’s interpretation of the ECPA was rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court that covers the western United States, including California, and the home to many online email companies and the servers that host their messages. As a result, the DOJ advises “Agents outside of the Ninth Circuit can therefore obtain such email (and other stored electronic or wire communications in ‘electronic storage’ more than 180 days) using a subpoena…” but reminds agents in the Ninth Circuit to get a warrant.

Cloud email servers use the power of many different servers across the Internet. It does not reside in one place. Mail services such as those offered by Google (gmail) will store email messages (from your inbox, draft, and deleted folders) long after you have forgotten them. FBI and other investigating agencies routinely gain access to electronic inboxes and information about email accounts offered by Google, and other Internet mail providers.

The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal report that Jill Kelley contacted the FBI about “five to ten” anonymous emails that started in May and reportedly warned Kelley to “stay away” from an unnamed man. In the resulting investigation, the FBI discovered electronic paper trail eventually led to an “anonymous” account that was used by Paula Broadwell and her husband.

In examining this and other accounts, agents uncovered sexually explicit emails that Broadwell exchanged with another party who also used what has been reported to be a Gmail account. Eventually, investigators were able to determine that the other party was CIA Director David Petraeus using an assumed name.

While it hasn’t been specified exactly how the FBI were able to track the emails back to Broadwell, anyone with knowledge of how email works can make an intelligent assessment.

Petraeus and Broadwell used anonymous accounts with fake names that they set up for the purpose of their illicit affair. While they knew enough to cover some of their tracks, they weren’t sophisticated enough to take sufficient steps to completely protect their identity.

There are some services, such as Tor Project that can hinder tracing attempts. Other services such as Hotspot Shield and LogMeIn Hamachi can create a virtual private network to help preserve privacy. But this system is not fool-proof. Many of these services still use U.S. based servers that may have logs that can be read by investigating agencies or hackers.

Any email messages that are sent leave a trail. Many email services contain hidden codes called “metadata” that will contain the IP address of the sender’s computer’s internet connection device called a “router.” Other services, such as Gmail, will only include the IP address and Internet name of the servers that pass along the email.

The FBI spent weeks tracing the route these messages took. The FBI cross-referenced the IP addresses of the email’s origins against hotel guest lists, looking for common names. The messages were traced back not only to the Broadwell home, but also to the hotels where she was staying while sending some of the messages. (The travel patterns revealed by the emails coincided with her travel to promote her biography of Petraeus.)

The FBI could also request email data from the email service without the knowledge of the user. In fact, the email service is prohibited by law in notifying the user that the records were accessed.

Google is routinely approached by investigating agencies for email information. In fact, they issue what they call a “Transparency Report” every six months, to provide users with statistics about government requests for data and takedowns. For the period of January to June 2012, Google fulfilled 35,000 government requests for email information, 16,000 from the United States alone. How many of these requests were accompanied by a warrant is never disclosed.

Armed with the metadata and information from the email service, the FBI now had Broadwell’s name and in the course of the investigation uncovered another disturbing element, the possibility that classified information was being sent to Broadwell, who is also a reporter.

Federal prosecutors now had the probable cause they needed to request a warrant to monitor Broadwell’s other email accounts. Through this warrant they were able to determine that Broadwell and another person had set up a private email account to exchange messages.

A little more digging uncovered that fact that anonymous person Broadwell was communicating with was Petraeus.

(In a bizarre twist, another Army general, John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was also caught up in the investigation, being suspected of exchanging 20,000 to 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate communications with Jill Kelley, the woman who sparked the investigation in the first place.)

The investigators also discovered that Broadwell and Petraeus had used a technique that is common among terrorist organizations and organized crime. They used the oft-neglected draft folder.

In this technique, one person will write a message and rather than send the message, they will save it to their draft folder. The other person will then log into the account, usually through a web browser and read the message in the folder.

Ironically, storing emails in a draft folder, rather than an inbox, may make it easier for the government to intercept their communications. This is because the Department of Justice has argued that emails in the “draft” or “sent mail” folder are not in “electronic storage” (as defined by the Stored Communications Act), and thus not deserving of warrant protection. Instead, the government has argued it should be able to get such messages with just subpoena rather than a warrant.

Some of the techniques the FBI user to track down Broadwell, Gen. Petraeus and later, Gen. Allen can also be utilized by any computer user.

For example, for a Gmail account, a person can see this metadata by doing the following:

1. Log into the Gmail account and open a message.
2. In the upper right corner of the message, next to the “reply” button, click on the “down” button.
3. Then click on the “Show original” selection.
4. A new window will open showing all the data that was hidden in the message.

A guide is available to download that will give instructions for looking at metadata for 19 different type of email accounts.

With this metadata, the IP address of the sender can be determined and then use an IP address locator such as WhatIsMyIPAddress to find out the ISP where the email account is registered as well as its geographic location. This is good information to have if a computer user is getting attacked by multiple spam messages coming from one sender.

It is also interesting to look up your own email address to see what information is available on you.

So far, the results of the investigation are varied: the distinguished military careers of two long-serving servicemen are effectively ended, three marriages damaged, perhaps irreparably, and the insecurity of our electronic communication has been exposed.

Congress is supposed to be looking into the antiquated communications law, but don’t hold your breath. The Justice Department has warned that updating that telephone-modem-era law would have an “adverse impact” on investigations. The White House, for its part, does not seem to be in a hurry to secure an individual’s rights against having their privacy violated.

Interestingly, in congressional testimony, James A. Baker, associate deputy attorney general for the Department of Justice, has suggested that people’s online privacy is enhanced if the government has easier access to private data. “By authorizing law enforcement officers to obtain evidence from communications providers, ECPA enables the government to investigate and prosecute hackers, identity thieves, and other online criminals. Pursuant to ECPA, the government obtains evidence critical to prosecuting these privacy-related crimes.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said, “With the explosion of cloud computing, social networking sites, and other new technologies, determining how best to bring this privacy law into the digital age will be one of Congress’s greatest challenges.”

That email invisibility cloak many Americans think they have is full of holes.

--------------------------------

* Steve Elwart, P.E., Ph.D., is the executive research analyst with the Koinonia Institute and a subject matter expert for the Department of Homeland Security.

When Will Our Email Betray Us? An Email Privacy Primer in Light of the Petraeus Saga

greenberg-art.com

As part of the unfolding scandal that led to the resignation of CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, the FBI read massive amounts of private email messages that uncovered an affair between Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell. We've received a lot of questions about how this works, and what legal process the FBI needs to conduct its email investigation. The short answer? Our email privacy laws are hopelessly out of date. If we learn nothing else from the Petraeus scandal, it should be that our private digital lives can become all too public when over-eager federal agents aren't held to rigorous legal standards. More on EFF>>

The tricky nature of investigating Gen. Allen's emails

Security Clearance/ By Barbara Starr

A U.S. official familiar with the content of the e-mails Gen. John Allen sent to Jill Kelley described them as "embarrassing" and warranting the investigation that has been launched.

"They are embarrassing. If they got out, John Allen would be very embarrassed by them," according to the official, who emphasized that there is no evidence of "physical contact between the two."

The official noted that the e-mails that are under investigation - which have been called "potentially inappropriate" - are from Allen. It is Allen's e-mails that are under investigation, and the official did not know the content of any of Kelley's e-mails to Allen.

"The e-mails are concerning enough to warrant an investigation," the official said.

A second U.S. official, who has had the e-mails described to him, characterized the content as "sexy," but emphasized he could not say whether they "crossed the line."

They "are not the type of e-mails you would want your wife to read," the second official explained.

But a senior official close to Allen told CNN's Nick Paton Walsh Tuesday that there was nothing pointing or referring to sex or an affair or anything of a romantic nature. Allen may have said, informally, "thanks sweetheart" in an e-mail, the official close to Allen insisted.

"Anyone who knows him knows his style - he has a habit of replying to every single e-mail (he is sent). Kelley would e-mail his business and personal accounts," that official said.

It will be up to the Defense Department’s inspector general to decide specifically if the content of the e-mails is so inappropriate that they would be considered conduct unbecoming an officer, according to a third source, a senior U.S. official. This official pointed out this may be a very difficult matter to decide because everyone has a personal definition of what is "affectionate, admiration, all the way to what some might define as sexting."

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: The inventor of e-mail

More >>

Prepare to Have Your #Email Read by the NSA

Adam Clark Estes
Atlantic Wire
June 18, 2011

With a new major hacking incident seemingly daily, the Department of Defense is scrambling to find the right shield against future for attacks. But why hide behind a shield when you can charge onto the battlefield underneath the invisible but ironclad cloak of the National Security Agency? That’s exactly how the DoD is mounting it’s first strike back at the hackers–a preemptive strike that will increase online surveillance at defense contractors by partnering with internet service providers for privileged access to the rivers of data flowing through their cables. AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink are all on board.

Giving the NSA more access to the same internet tubes that power your Gmail account sounds a little invasive. At least that’s what James X. Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the civil liberties watchdog group the Center for Democracy and Technology. “We wouldn’t want this to become a backdoor form of surveillance,” Dempsey told The Washington Post, referring to the pilot program that DoD insists will remain limited to the contractors working closely with the government.

Full story...