George C. Dimitriou

The Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group is a special task force of international cyber cops; they met in London this month to fight cyber crime.
The global law enforcement community has been building operational partnerships as the need arose; this is just the latest initiative to share intelligence. The group was first formed in 2006.

Some of their activities and accomplishments:

• Collectively developed a comprehensive overview of the transnational cyber threat—including current and emerging trends, vulnerabilities, and strategic initiatives for the working group to pursue (note: the report is available only to law enforcement);
• Set up a special area on Law Enforcement Online, the FBI’s secure Internet portal, to share information and intelligence;
• Launched a series of information bulletins on emerging threats and trends (for example, we drafted a bulletin recently describing how peer-to-peer, or P2P, file sharing programs can inadvertently leak vast amounts of sensitive national security, financial, medical, and other information);
• Began exploring an exchange of cyber experts to serve on joint international task forces and to learn each other’s investigative techniques firsthand; and
• Shared training curriculums and provided targeted training to international cyber professionals.

A month has passed since Kosovo declared independence on 17 February 2008. Much has gone well, but there is a real risk, as made most evident with the violence on 17 March around the courthouse in north Mitrovica, that partition will harden at the Ibar River in the north, and Kosovo will become another frozen conflict.

Kosovo’s First Month Crisis Group Europe Briefing N°47

Last year the National Intelligence Council, a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, sponsored a conference in Ghana, from 4-6 October 2007, on democratization in Africa.

The purpose of the conference was to review and assess the trajectories of African states toward, or away, from increased institutionalization of democratic processes and practices. The conference was designed so that the review and assessment would be based on interactions among a diverse set of players.
The NIC has now published the proceedings, “Democratization in Africa: What Progress Toward Institutionalization?” of that conference for broad public consumption and consideration.

The creator of the web has said, in a BBC Interview, that consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the internet.

” Q. Lots of people are putting lots of information about themselves on sites like Facebook and Myspace. What would you say to those young people?

Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it’s all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.

The danger is when you put something into a public space in order to share it with a few friends and in fact you’ve forgotten that it’s actually a public space or that the list of friends is huge or that some of them can’t be trusted not to be put it somewhere else.”

More…

Ross Anderson, Rainer Böhme, Richard Clayton, and Tyler Moore have published a report on security and economics: “Security, Economics, and the Internal Market,” published by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

ENISA is an Agency of the European Union and was set up to enhance the capability of the European Union, the EU Member States and the business community to prevent, address and respond to network and information security problems.

Archive-It is a subscription service developed in 2005 by the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1996 to build an ‘Internet library’, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Internet Archive has the largest public web archive, compromising 85 billion pages, and over 65 million websites in 37 languages. In late 1999, the organization started to expand to include non born digital material. Now the Internet Archive includes over 200 terabytes of texts, audio, moving images, and software along with our web archive.