Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3
3
==
|=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=|
|=------------------------=[ Phrack World News ]=------------------------=|
|=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=|
|=-----------------------=[ by the Phrack staff ]=-----------------------=|
|=-------------------------=[ staff@phrack.org ]=------------------------=|
|=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=|
Wow, 4 years have passed! One of the possible positive outcomes of slow-
paced releases of Phrack is that Phrack World News gives us the opportunity
to look back on a few years worth of happenings and ponder about the bigger
picture for a moment. First of all: Snowden. It feels like ages ago now,
but, for anyone living under a rock, in 2013 Edward Snowden [1] leveraged
his position working at the United States National Security Agency to copy
and later leak [2] classified documents on NSA's global surveillance
operations. If the very previous issue of PWN [3] prophetically warned
about the massification of surveillance as a threat to our civil
liberties, the Snowden leaks only proved what hackers and conspiracy
theorists had believed and proclaimed for a long time: the US government
unlawfully spies on its own citizens as well as everyone else's.
But indeed, it seems that some of the efforts on designing and implementing
better crypto systems paid off and governments are starting to have their
monitoring and investigative capabilities limited by evolving security. One
indication of that is the growing insistence of various nations on the mind
-boggling hopelessly insane push for crypto backdoors [4]. The sad and
unfortunate wave of terrorism the world has been dealing with is repeatedly
and shamelessly used to support the lobbying for less information security.
Another (at the moment) ongoing instance of this is the significant dispute
between the FBI and Apple [5], which refuses to provide the FBI with a way
to bypass the lock screen of a terrorist's (and everyone else's) iPhone.
Lastly, and with a heart heavier than any of the topics above could ever
cause us, Phrack would like to say goodbye to a few illustrious members of
our community that have sadly passed away. Since it's been 4 years we
are not going to attempt to list out every instance, however we can
easily say that as a community we have lost some incredibly talented,
charismatic and fantastic people, and we feel the loss greatly.
Live free,
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
[2] - http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-leaks-timeline-2014-6
[3] - http://phrack.org/issues/68/3.html
[4] - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/18/
us-europe-reignite-debate-back-door-encryption-paris-attacks
[5] - http://www.wired.com/2016/02/apple-brief-fbi-response-iphone/
[6] - http://www.wired.com/2016/01/
nsa-hacker-chief-explains-how-to-keep-him-out-of-your-system/
[7] - http://www.wired.com/2013/02/chinese-army-linked-to-hacks/
[8] - http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/
why-the-biggest-government-hack-ever-got-past-opm-dhs-and-nsa/
[9] - http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/05/some-notes-about-wassenaar.html
[10] - http://www.zdnet.com/article/
top-govt-spyware-company-hacked-gammas-finfisher-leaked/
[11] - http://www.wired.com/2015/07/
hacking-team-breach-shows-global-spying-firm-run-amok/