Iran Bans Banks From Sending Statements To ‘Foreign’ E-Mail Addresses

Many Iranians have complained of disruptions to Gmail and other “foreign” e-mail services in recent months.

May 08, 2012

Iran’s minister of communications and information technology, Reza Taghipour, has sent a letter to the head of the country’s Central Bank, Mahmud Bahmani, asking him to instruct banks to refrain from sending bank statements to e-mail addresses administered by foreign providers.
In his letter, Taghipour says that banned foreign e-mail providers include Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, and MSN.
The communications minister has called on banks to only accept national e-mail addresses from customers when they open accounts.
Taghipour has requested that banks provide access to the Internet for customers to be able to create national e-mail accounts at their premises.
The move appears to be aimed at forcing citizens to join the national e-mail system, which many Iranians have been reluctant to use.
Some Iranian websites have reported that the use of the national e-mail is obligatory for those working for the government and state institutions.

Any Given Friday

A woman stands in the middle of a busy Damascus street. Yellow cabs honk and weave around her. Her red dress, splattered with white paint, flows in the wind along with a red fabric banner held up above her head like a translucent shield. A group of people gathers on the sidewalk to observe as she turns side to side, for all to see. As we watch them watching her through our computer screens, we hear a new sound — not a familiar chant of the revolution, but loud claps of extended applause. When she faces the camera, we finally read her words: “Stop the killing. We want to build a country for all Syrians.”

Her name is Rima Dali, and she stood in protest alone, armed with a red scarf and a powerful message, in front of the Syrian Parliament on April 8. She would be detained for two days for her dissent.

Dali’s action, while brave, would have been easy to disregard as a fleeting incident if it hadn’t happened again, a few days later, in front of the Palace of Justice. And again a few days after that, when more people occupied Dali’s place and even more onlookers clapped from the sidewalk.

Activists like Dali, who had a strong presence at the beginning of the uprising, are trying to rewind Syria‘s clock to the early months of the revolution, when the message of selmiyeh — peaceful — dominated the streets. During the past two weeks, despite the regime’s relentless violence, Syria protested like it was 2011 again.

During the 10-day lull between the announcement of U.N. and Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan’s six-point plan for a ceasefire and its implementation on April 10, violence sharply escalated in Syria — as it usually does before every international ultimatum directed at President Bashar al-Assad. But since then, while shelling and government attacks have continued in certain flashpoints, the daily death toll has decreased significantly. Within opposition circles, another sentiment was brewing even before the ceasefire: a realization that it’s time to reclaim the revolution in order to reclaim the country.

For months, the civic and social activism of these peaceful protesters have been rendered obsolete next to the physical heroics of the Free Syrian Army‘s (FSA) military operations against the regime’s brutality. Peaceful protests in city squares not only seemed impossible, but utterly useless against tanks, shells, and snipers. As armed resistance took its place within the revolution, the nonviolent activists slowly became passive pacifists. In recent days, however, that has changed.

Operation White North: Anonymous Demands Public Safety Minister Vic Toews Resign, E-Snooping Bill C-30 Scrapped

The Huffington Post Canada   Lauren Strapagiel

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Vikileaks has been shut down, but Public Safety Minister Vic Toews isn’t out of hot water yet.

Hacker group Anonymous has posted a video demanding the resignation of Toews and calling for the controversial online surveillance bill C-30 to be scrapped.

The video’s message targets Toews for reintroducing bill C-30 despite backlash from internet users and privacy advocates.

MCIS Yearbook 2012

These case studies underscore the ability of social networking to do three things: (a) reflect opinion trends and channel mass political action; (b) provide actionable tactical intelligence; and (c) enable highly effective —and highly controversial— security operations against targeted groups. The paper is published in the 2012 Intelligence Studies Yearbook

http://www.rieas.gr/images/mcis2012.pdf

Twitter users are being tricked into joining in cyber attacks on U.S. government – and could be jailed

• Links turn any PC into an unwitting part of attack
• Part of ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous‘s cyber attacks
• Retaliation for U.S. strike at file-sharing site

Last updated at 3:17 PM on 20th January 2012

Links being forwarded via Twitter actually make people’s PCs part of Anonymous’s ‘denial of service’ attacks against U.S. government sites and anti-piracy organisations

Hacker group Anonymous have become a cult hit on Twitter, with 249,000 followers – but security experts Sophos warn that fans, are being tricked into taking part in its attacks.

Links being forwarded via Twitter actually make people’s PCs part of Anonymous’s ‘denial of service’ attacks against U.S. government sites and anti-piracy organisations.

The links are being forwarded as part of Anonymous’s recent ‘Operation Megaupload’ – a retaliation for the U.S. government ‘taking down’ a file-sharing site.

They look like ordinary web links, but launch cyber attacks from whatever PC you access them on.

People who click the links unwittingly become part of Anonymous’s attacks – and hit any website that the ‘hacktivist’ group chooses.

It’s a change of tactics for Anonymous – and security experts warn that claiming you clicked on a link by accident may not be a defense.

The attacks, a ‘denial of service’ attack, rely on thousands of PCs sending information to sites at once to crash them.

Social media isn’t a major path to radicalization – Nextgov

Image by Amir Farshad Ebrahimi via Flickr

By Joseph Marks 12/07/2011

Al Qaeda and other Muslim extremist groups are active on Facebook, YouTube and other social media, but that doesn’t mean they’re making much impact, experts testified before a House panel Tuesday.

Internet discussions are a poor replacement for in-person extremist recruiting because they lack the same level of intimidation and peer pressure, Brian Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation testified before the Homeland Security subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.

“Before the Internet people had to actually meet each other face to face and that plays an important role,” Jenkins said. “The Internet doesn’t have the same power because you can turn it off whenever you want to. You can play at jihadism but not be propelled into it by that face-to-face peer pressure.”

“The internet is not a vector of Al Qaeda infections,” he said. “People come to it because they’re searching for something. They’re looking for sites and they find sites that resonate with their beliefs . . . It will reinforce their radicalization but, by itself, the Internet doesn’t get them all the way there.”

The subcommittee’s ranking member Jackie Speier, D-Calif., asked about the case of five Alexandria, Va.-area Americans who were convicted by a Pakistani court in 2010 of traveling to that country to commit terrorist acts. Pakistani officials claim those men visited numerous jihadi websites before their trip.

Be careful what you Tweet

Image via Wikipedia

Sep 14th 2011, 19:25 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

SAYING what you think in print has always carried a risk for journalists. Between 2006 and 2010, at least 37 media workers were killed or went missing in Mexico. In some places the risks have become so great that the print and television media have stopped reporting on the drug war. Last year in Ciudad Juárez, El Diario ran a front-page editorial asking the drug traffickers: “What do you want from us?”

In the face of a news vacuum in the traditional media, citizens have turned to the safety and anonymity of the internet. Last year we reported from Reynosa that the city government had started using its Twitter account as a means of warning citizens when gunfights were going on. Anonymous blogs print details that newspapers fear to reveal. Twitter, Facebook and the like provide a forum to swap information and gossip.