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Old 17-06-22, 06:22 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 18th, 22

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June 18th, 2022




UAE Bans 'Lightyear' Film Screening Over Supposed Content Violation

The United Arab Emirates on Monday banned the public screening of the Walt Disney-Pixar animated feature film "Lightyear" in cinemas ahead of its release this week, a government body said.

The Ministry of Youth and Culture's Media Regulatory Office wrote on Twitter that the film violated the country's media content standards, without specifying the supposed violation.

The film, centred around the Buzz Lightyear action figure character from the popular Toy Story franchise series, had already been advertised for release in the UAE on June 16.

The movie reportedly includes a same-sex kiss between two women who are in a relationship. Like many other Middle East nations, same sex relationships are criminalised in the UAE.

An Arabic hashtag "Lightyear banned in the Emirates" was trending on Twitter calling for the film not to be shown ahead of the announcement by the government body.

The UAE's government media office and Disney (DIS.N) did not immediately respond to emailed Reuters questions on the ban.

Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle...on-2022-06-13/





Europe Cracks Down on Data Cap Exemptions in Update to Net Neutrality Rules

ISPs can't use zero-rating to exempt apps from data caps, EU agency says.
Jon Brodkin

European telecom regulator BEREC has updated its net neutrality guidelines to include a strict ban on zero-rating practices that exempt specific apps or categories of apps from data caps imposed by Internet service providers.

The document published Tuesday provides guidance to national regulatory authorities on their "obligations to closely monitor and ensure compliance with the rules to safeguard equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic in the provision of Internet access services and related end-users' rights." BEREC stands for Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications.

"Despite intense lobbying from big carriers and giant platforms, BEREC voted to clearly ban zero-rating offers that benefit select apps or categories of apps by exempting them from people's monthly data caps," Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick wrote. "The ban applies whether the app pays to be included or not, closing a loophole in the draft guidelines."

While Europe strengthens its net neutrality regime, the US hasn't had any federal net neutrality rules since they were removed under former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. The FCC won't be re-imposing net neutrality rules any time soon because it still has a 2-2 partisan deadlock, and President Biden's nomination of Gigi Sohn has languished in the Senate.

However, the European zero-rating ban is similar to one enforced in California. US-based Internet providers last month abandoned their attempt to block the California law after a string of court losses. When it comes to zero-rating, the California law is stricter than the FCC rules that Pai repealed.

ISPs took advantage of lax rules

The new BEREC guidelines came in response to a September 2021 Court of Justice ruling that "zero tariff" options that distinguish between types of Internet traffic "on the basis of commercial considerations" violate Europe's Open Internet rules requiring "equal treatment of traffic, without discrimination or interference."

In the new guidelines, BEREC said it "considers any differentiated pricing practices which are not application-agnostic to be inadmissible for IAS [Internet access service] offers, such as applying a zero price to ISPs' own applications or CAPs [content, applications, and services] subsidizing their own data." Additionally, a "price-differentiated offer where all applications are blocked (or slowed down) once the data cap is reached except for the application(s) for which zero price or a different price than all other traffic is applied would infringe" European rules, BEREC said. The rules apply to both mobile and fixed Internet service.

Van Schewick explained that "BEREC's previous net neutrality guidelines did not categorically ban selective zero-rating programs or category-based ones that, e.g., offer to zero-rate all music or video apps. So carriers across the EU took advantage and collectively launched hundreds of zero-rating programs. These often exempted the carriers' own services and disproportionately benefited big platforms like Apple, Google, and Facebook, while small companies and European startups were left out."

While "many European carriers offer plans that don't count the data you use on Facebook or WhatsApp against your data cap," van Schewick predicted that "carriers across the EU will soon end their discriminatory zero-rating plans and offer customers of those plans significantly more data for the same price."

Non-discriminatory zero-rating will still be allowed, meaning that a carrier can exempt all data usage from a cap "at certain times of day or as a promotion; it just can't force you to use that data on a specific site," van Schewick wrote.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...trality-rules/





Single Beaver Caused Mass Internet, Cell Service Outages in Northern B.C.
Kaitlyn Bailey

Officials have now identified a beaver as the cause of a June 7 outage which left many residents of northwestern B.C. without internet, landline and cellular service for more than eight hours.

The beaver gnawed its way through an aspen tree which then fell on both BC Hydro lines and a Telus fibre-optic cable line strung along BC Hydro poles between Topley and Houston.

The resulting power outage affected just 21 customers but the fibre optics damage affected Telus customers in Burns Lake, Granisle, Haida Gwaii, the Hazeltons, Kitimat, Prince George, Prince Rupert, Smithers, Terrace, Thornhill, Houston, Topley, Telkwa, Fraser Lake and Vanderhoof.

CityWest, the utilities company owned by the City of Prince Rupert, also had its customers affected because it uses the Telus fibre optics line.

BC Hydro official Bob Gammer said crews identified a beaver as the culprit because of chew marks at the bottom of the downed tree.

The lines are located in a swampy area and with the high water levels, there was some difficluty accessing the site, he added.

“It's unusual, but it does happen every once in a while,” Gammer said. “So I wouldn't be a rich man if I had a nickel for every beaver outage, but they do happen.”

He said it is not uncommon for utilities to share pole space.

The felled tree did result in a fire which was responded to by members of the Topley Volunteer Fire Department.

While some enjoyed the unconnected afternoon, the service outage created stress for others because many businesses could only accept cash.

“It was a real nuisance. Nobody usually carries cash anymore,” said Brett Johnson, auto technician at the Petro-Canada gas station located at the intersection of Highways 16 and 37 near Kitwanga.

“People turning north onto Highway 37 typically fill up at this gas station because the next one is two hours away,” he said.

During the outage there were some who didn't have cash and had to just “take a chance,” Johnson added.

Prince Rupert Mayor Lee Brain said cell service was affected because some of the cell towers use fibre connections allowing higher bandwidth.

And he said northwestern communities are vulnerable because there is just one fibre optics cable between Prince George and Prince Rupert.

But that will change because CityWest is laying a second fibre optics line, this one down the coast to connect to Vancouver.

“So if a tree goes down again, we will all still have internet through the line coming in from the ocean,” said Brain.

-With files from Jane Shrypnek
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/single-beaver-...-b-c-1.5944697





Why Rural Americans Keep Waiting for Fast Internet, Despite Billions Spent

Flaws in government programs have left some residents behind
Ryan Tracy and Anthony DeBarros

The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars on several rounds of programs to upgrade internet speeds in rural areas over the past decade. Despite those efforts, many residents are still stuck with service that isn’t fast enough to do video calls or stream movies—speeds that most take for granted.

Many communities have been targeted for broadband upgrades at least twice already, but flaws in the programs’ design have left residents wanting.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed 1.4 million largely rural census blocks that were included in a series of nationwide Federal Communications Commission broadband programs over the past decade.

In the latest program, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, rolled out in 2020, internet service providers won rights to public funding in about 750,000 census blocks, covering every state except Alaska.

The Journal's analysis found that more than half of those census blocks—areas with a combined population of 5.3 million people—had been fully or partially covered by at least one previous federal broadband program.

Most U.S. households today have access to internet download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 10 Mbps, according to government data. Although the FCC’s programs have made progress, some rural Americans still can’t get 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds—the level of service that was the federal standard in 2011.

The broadband saga around Heavener, Okla., illustrates some of the problems. Heavener, with a population of around 3,000, is surrounded by cattle pastures and forested hills. Today some buildings on the main streets have good broadband service, but the internet deteriorates outside town, residents say.

Much of the area, in Le Flore County, was slated for upgrades under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund in 2020—and some of those areas had already been part of prior programs.

In 2012, the FCC launched a program called the Connect America Fund, which, in the words of the commission’s then-chairman, “puts us on the path to get broadband to every American by the end of the decade.”

The new fund repurposed “universal service” fees on Americans’ phone bills to also subsidize broadband. The local phone company, Little Rock, Ark.-based Windstream Holdings Inc., received $716,782 to make broadband upgrades in and near Le Flore County between 2012 and 2014.

Windstream ran a new fiber cable from Heavener down U.S. Route 270.

If that fiber cable had turned off the highway and run past a cluster of homes on Timber Ridge Road, residents might not need an internet upgrade today.

Instead the cable stopped on the highway, where it connected to a new DSLAM—a large, box-shaped networking device for DSL service. Windstream said DSL service on the road can reach download speeds of 10 Mbps or higher. Fiber can provide much faster speeds of 1,000 Mbps.

Homes on Timber Ridge Road already had DSL running over their existing phone line. DSL’s speed diminishes with distance, and Windstream said that moving the fiber line closer to residents improved speeds available in the area. The company was complying with the FCC’s rules at the time, which required it to offer service with 4/1 Mbps download/upload speeds.

John Powell, 28, who grew up on Timber Ridge Road and lived there with his parents until earlier this year, said he remembers hardly any improvement to the family’s home internet during this time. He said the DSL service wouldn’t allow him to stream movies or get on a Zoom call. “It’s brutally, brutally bad,” he said.

Windstream later added wireless broadband service near Heavener, delivered via radio tower. The company said the service provides speeds of 25 Mbps—often faster than DSL, but still far slower than fiber.

The tower’s signal reaches some of the homes on Timber Ridge Road, but not the Powell home.

Funds for this new wireless service came from Windstream and not from public funds, the company said. At the same time, it was also taking public subsidies. Between 2015 and 2021, Windstream received an additional $7.8 million annually under the Connect America Fund’s second phase to bring 10/1 Mbps service to Oklahoma locations, including around Heavener.

FCC rules for those funds didn’t oblige Windstream to serve every customer equally, as long as it served a minimum number of locations statewide.

The company said the money covered roughly half of its operating and capital expenses in very high cost areas of the state where it might not be profitable to offer service without subsidies. It said it exceeded the terms of the FCC program by providing 10/1 Mbps service to more than the minimum required locations.

Current and former FCC officials said the agency’s broadband programs aim to provide ongoing support for rural service. The Journal’s findings that many areas were targeted multiple times, they said, might have occurred because one program ended and was replaced by a new one.

Officials said the Journal’s findings also reflect difficult trade-offs that the agency didn’t always get right.

“It’s clear we need to fix what came before and make changes,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.

In an effort to upgrade as many people as possible with limited funds, the FCC chose to subsidize incremental improvements. Many of those upgrades quickly became outdated as technology advanced and consumers wanted faster speeds.

In other cases, internet providers were allowed to pick which customers to upgrade. This helped ensure companies would participate. It also meant they could take public money while leaving pockets of homes and businesses without access.

“In retrospect it’s not surprising that companies made a business decision to do the bare minimum,” said Carol Mattey, an industry consultant and former senior FCC official.

Eddie Nelson, a former assistant principal at Heavener High School who now runs a local pizza parlor, saw how lackluster internet service affected residents when the pandemic closed schools in 2020. Many students couldn’t get online from home. Mr. Nelson said the school didn’t have enough Wi-Fi hot spot devices, and the ones it had worked erratically due to spotty cell service. The school beamed Wi-Fi into the parking lot for students to work in cars.

The FCC was rolling out its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund around the same time. Officials sought to apply lessons from previous experience to the program. It favored companies willing to build high-speed fiber networks. Service would have to be universal. To keep costs down and encourage competition, the FCC auctioned subsidies to the lowest bidder. In many parts of the country, the auction worked as intended and providers are breaking ground.

The funding around Heavener had an unexpected wrinkle.

Windstream participated in the auction. In its bid, the company offered to run fiber-optic cable to homes in the area. It mostly lost out to another company, LTD Broadband LLC, which offered the same deal at a lower price.

After the auction, Las-Vegas based LTD failed to file paperwork for certification in Oklahoma in time to meet an FCC deadline. The FCC found the company in default. That means that in areas where LTD won, neither LTD nor any other company will soon be getting the funds that were auctioned to upgrade service.

LTD’s chief executive, Corey Hauer, said his company delayed filing the paperwork because it didn’t want to give potential competitors time to lobby against its certification. He said the company still plans to offer fiber-to-the-home service in Oklahoma.

Last year, Congress enacted a $42.5 billion rural broadband program as part of a bipartisan infrastructure law. Companies taking those funds will have to provide service at faster speeds than previous federal programs, and the money will come through states instead of the FCC. Officials said they hope that will help identify which areas are most in need and which providers can best serve them.

Mr. Powell, who recently moved to Arkansas for a new job, said his parents began subscribing to a new home internet service from T-Mobile US Inc., which the company says uses extra network capacity from a cell tower about 3 miles away. A recent speed test registered a download speed of about 21 Mbps, he said. T-Mobile said download speeds for the service average 140 Mbps.

The Powells’ speed is a big improvement, but still slower than what most Americans can get.

“It’s like getting left behind,” Mr. Powell said.

Methodology: To analyze FCC broadband funding efforts, The Wall Street Journal compiled public data on federal programs that sought to improve internet access and speeds in largely rural areas. The Journal focused on programs where FCC data included geographic details at the census block level. These included the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), Connect America Fund Phase II Auction, Alternative Connect America Cost Model II, Connect America Phase II Model-Based Support, Connect America Phase I, and Rural Broadband Experiments. Additional programs where census block-level data weren’t available, such as the Alaska Plan, weren’t included.

For the analysis of RDOF, the Journal excluded about 20,000 census blocks that were partially eligible. It then counted census blocks that appeared in both RDOF and the various Connect America Fund programs. In rare cases, census blocks may have appeared in multiple programs due to changes in the boundaries served by a telecom provider, or because of imperfections in the FCC’s program data, according to the FCC.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-b...cc-11655300008





VPN Firms are Removing Servers in India to Avoid Customers Data Sharing Rule
Manish Singh

NordVPN, one of the most popular VPN providers, is the latest to confirm that it will be removing its servers in India ahead of the nation enacting new strict guidelines later this month.

The Lithuania-based firm, which counts General Catalyst and Novator among its backers and is valued at $1.6 billion, said on Tuesday that it doesn’t maintain any logs of its customers’ data, strings of information that New Delhi will soon require VPN providers to share.

“Moreover, we are committed to protecting the privacy of our customers. Therefore, we are no longer able to keep servers in India,” Laura Tyrylyte, head of public relations at NordVPN, told TechCrunch.

“Our Indian servers will remain until 26 June 2022. In order to ensure that our users are aware of this decision, we will send notifications with the full information via the NordVPN app starting 20 June. As digital privacy and security advocates, we are concerned about the possible effect this regulation may have on people’s data. From what it seems, the amount of stored private information will be drastically increased throughout hundreds or maybe thousands of different companies. It is hard to imagine that all, especially small and medium enterprises, will have the proper means to ensure the security of such data,” she added.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, the body appointed by the government to protect India’s information infrastructure, unveiled cybersecurity guidelines in late April that will require “virtual private server (VPS) providers, cloud service providers, VPN service providers, virtual asset service providers, virtual asset exchange providers, custodian wallet providers and government organisations” to store customers’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, know-your-customer records and financial transactions for a period of five years.

The new rules go into effect June 27.

NordVPN’s decision follows similar directions taken by ExpressVPN and SurfShark, both of which have removed servers in the country. It’s unclear how popular VPN services are in India, but on their sites the aforementioned firms say they are used by millions of users worldwide.

ProtonVPN, another popular VPN provider, has also said that it is committed to keeping its “no-logs policy.” Some VPN providers including ExpressVPN have said that they will continue to provide “virtual server locations” to Indian customers, but according to the new rules, such a bypass might still be in violation of the new guidelines.

NordVPN’s Tyrylyte told TechCrunch that the firm believes that it is “going to find a way to meet the requirements of all of our customers, regardless of their location.”

Lawmakers in India have made it clear that they have no intentions to relax the new rules.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the junior IT minister of India, said in a press conference last month that VPN providers who wish to conceal who uses their services “will have to pull out” of the country. The government, he said, will not be holding any public consultation on these rules.

The new rules also mandate firms to report incidents of security lapses such as data breaches within six hours of noticing such cases. Following pushback from advocacy groups, Chandrasekhar said last month that India was being “very generous” in giving firms six hours of time to report security incidents, pointing to nations such as Indonesia and Singapore that he said had stricter requirements.

“If you look at precedence all around the world — and understand that cybersecurity is a very complex issue, where situational awareness of multiple incidents allow us to understand the larger force behind it — reporting accurately, on time, and mandatorily is an absolute essential part of the ability of CERT and the government to ensure that the internet is always safe,” he said.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/14/vp...-of-new-rules/





Police Linked to Hacking Campaign to Frame Indian Activists

New details connect police in India to a plot to plant evidence on victims' computers that led to their arrest.
Andy Greenberg

Police forces around the world have increasingly used hacking tools to identify and track protesters, expose political dissidents’ secrets, and turn activists’ computers and phones into inescapable eavesdropping bugs. Now, new clues in a case in India connect law enforcement to a hacking campaign that used those tools to go an appalling step further: planting false incriminating files on targets’ computers that the same police then used as grounds to arrest and jail them.

More than a year ago, forensic analysts revealed that unidentified hackers fabricated evidence on the computers of at least two activists arrested in Pune, India, in 2018, both of whom have languished in jail and, along with 13 others, face terrorism charges. Researchers at security firm SentinelOne and nonprofits Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have since linked that evidence fabrication to a broader hacking operation that targeted hundreds of individuals over nearly a decade, using phishing emails to infect targeted computers with spyware, as well as smartphone hacking tools sold by the Israeli hacking contractor NSO Group. But only now have SentinelOne’s researchers revealed ties between the hackers and a government entity: none other than the very same Indian police agency in the city of Pune that arrested multiple activists based on the fabricated evidence.

“There’s a provable connection between the individuals who arrested these folks and the individuals who planted the evidence,” says Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a security researcher at SentinelOne who, along with fellow researcher Tom Hegel, will present findings at the Black Hat security conference in August. “This is beyond ethically compromised. It is beyond callous. So we’re trying to put as much data forward as we can in the hopes of helping these victims.”

SentinelOne’s new findings that link the Pune City Police to the long-running hacking campaign, which the company has called Modified Elephant, center on two particular targets of the campaign: Rona Wilson and Varvara Rao. Both men are activists and human rights defenders who were jailed in 2018 as part of a group called the Bhima Koregaon 16, named for the village where violence between Hindus and Dalits—the group once known as “untouchables”—broke out earlier that year. (One of those 16 defendants, 84-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, died in jail last year after contracting Covid-19. Rao, who is 81 years old and in poor health, has been released on medical bail, which expires next month. Of the other 14, only one has been granted bail.)

Early last year, Arsenal Consulting, a digital forensics firm working on behalf of the defendants, analyzed the contents of Wilson’s laptop, along with that of another defendant, human rights lawyer Surendra Gadling. Arsenal analysts found that evidence had clearly been fabricated on both machines. In Wilson’s case, a piece of malware known as NetWire had added 32 files to a folder of the computer’s hard drive, including a letter in which Wilson appeared to be conspiring with a banned Maoist group to assassinate Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The letter was, in fact, created with a version of Microsoft Word that Wilson had never used, and that had never even been installed on his computer. Arsenal also found that Wilson’s computer had been hacked to install the NetWire malware after he opened an attachment sent from Varvara Rao’s email account, which had itself been compromised by the same hackers. “This is one of the most serious cases involving evidence-tampering that Arsenal has ever encountered,” Arsenal’s president, Mark Spencer, wrote in his report to the Indian court.

In February, SentinelOne published a detailed report on Modified Elephant, analyzing the malware and server infrastructure used in the hacking campaign to show that the two cases of evidence fabrication Arsenal had analyzed were part of a much larger pattern: The hackers had targeted hundreds of activists, journalists, academics, and lawyers with phishing emails and malware since as early as 2012. But in that report, SentinelOne stopped short of identifying any individual or organization behind the Modified Elephant hackers, writing only that the “activity aligns sharply with Indian state interests.”

Now the researchers have gone further in nailing down the group’s affiliations. Working with a security analyst at a certain email provider—who also spoke to WIRED but asked that neither they nor their employer be named—SentinelOne learned that three of the victim email accounts compromised by the hackers in 2018 and 2019 had a recovery email address and phone number added as a backup mechanism. For those accounts, which belonged to Wilson, Rao, and an activist and professor at Delhi University named Hany Babu, the addition of a new recovery email and phone number appears to have been intended to allow the hacker to easily regain control of the accounts if their passwords were changed. To the researchers’ surprise, that recovery email on all three accounts included the full name of a police official in Pune who was closely involved in the Bhima Koregaon 16 case.

The three hacked accounts have other fingerprints that link them—and thus the Pune police—to the larger Modified Elephant hacking campaign: The email provider found that the hacked accounts were accessed from IP addresses that SentinelOne and Amnesty International had previously identified as those of Modified Elephant. In the case of Rona Wilson, the email provider security analyst says that Wilson’s email account received a phishing email in April 2018 and then appeared to be compromised by the hackers using those IPs, and at the same time the email and phone number linked to the Pune City Police were added as recovery contacts to the account. The analyst says Wilson’s email account was then itself used to send out other phishing emails to targets in the Bhima Koregaon case for at least two months before Wilson was arrested in June of 2018.

“We generally don’t tell people who targeted them, but I’m kind of tired of watching shit burn,” the security analyst at the email provider told WIRED of their decision to reveal the identifying evidence from the hacked accounts. “These guys are not going after terrorists. They’re going after human rights defenders and journalists. And it’s not right.”

To further confirm the link between the recovery email and phone number on the hacked accounts and the Pune City Police, WIRED turned to John Scott-Railton, a security researcher at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, who along with others at Amnesty International had earlier revealed the extent of the hacking campaign against the Bhima Koregaon 16 and shown that the NSO hacking tool Pegasus had been used to target some of their smartphones. To prove that the Pune City Police controlled the recovery contacts on the hacked accounts, Scott-Railton dug up entries in open source databases of Indian mobile phone numbers and emails for the recovery phone number that linked it to an email address ending in pune@ic.in, a suffix for other email addresses used by police in Pune. Scott-Railton found that the number is also linked in the database to the recovery email address connected to the hacked accounts for the same Pune police official.

Separately, security researcher Zeshan Aziz found the recovery email address and phone number tied to the Pune police official’s name in the leaked database of TrueCaller, a caller ID and call-blocking app, and found the phone number linked to his name in the leaked database of iimjobs.com, an Indian job recruitment website. Finally, Aziz found the recovery phone number listed with the official’s name on multiple archived web directories for Indian police, including on the website of the Pune City Police. (WIRED also verified that at the time the accounts were compromised, the email provider would have sent a confirmation link or text message to any recovery contact information added to an email account, which suggests that the police did, in fact, control that email address and phone number.)

Scott-Railton further found that the WhatsApp profile photo for the recovery phone number added to the hacked accounts displays a selfie photo of the police official—a man who appears to be the same officer at police press conferences and even in one news photograph taken at the arrest of Varvara Rao.

WIRED reached out in multiple emails and phone calls to the Pune City Police and the Pune police official whose personal details were linked to the hacked accounts and received no reply.

One Mumbai-based defense attorney representing several of the Bhima Koregaon 16, Mihir Desai, says he would need to independently corroborate the new evidence of the Pune police’s links to the hacking campaign. But taken at face value, he says, it appears “very damning.” He adds that he is hopeful it could help his clients, including Anand Teltumbde, who has been accused of terrorist connections based in part on an apparently fabricated document found on Rona Wilson’s computer. “We’ve known things have been planted, but the police could have always said, ‘we are not involved in all this,’” says Desai. “By showing the police did this, it would mean there was a conspiracy to arrest these people. It would show the police have acted in a vicious and deliberate manner knowing fully well this was false evidence.”

The conclusion that Pune police are tied to a hacking campaign that appears to have framed and jailed human rights activists presents a disturbing new example of the dangers of hacking tools in the hands of law enforcement—even in an ostensible democracy like India. SentinelOne’s Guerrero-Saade argues that it also raises questions about the validity of any evidence pulled from a computer that’s been hacked by a law enforcement surveillance operation. “This should invite a conversation about whether we can trust law enforcement with these sorts of malware operations at all,” says Guerrero-Saade. “What does it mean to have evidentiary integrity when you have a compromised device? What does it mean for somebody to hack a device for fact-finding in a law enforcement operation when they can also alter the contents of the device in question?”

Beyond any larger questions, Guerrero-Saade and his fellow SentinelOne researcher Tom Hegel say they’re focused on the fate of the victims in the Bhima Koregaon case, almost all of whom have remained in jail even as the evidence against them proves to be more corrupt with every year. Ultimately, the researchers hope their findings can not only demonstrate police wrongdoing in the case, but win those activists and human rights defenders their freedom. “The real concern here is the folks languishing in prison,” says Guerrero-Saade. “We’re hoping this leads to some form of justice.”
https://www.wired.com/story/modified...acking-police/

















Until next week,

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