26,240 research outputs found
Frankenstein: The United States in Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s
For nearly the past quarter century, the United States has been involved in covert operations in a region of the world that most people could not locate on a map. Invisible wars being fought by the United States and other foreign intelligence agencies in Afghanistan sowed the seeds for the attacks on September 11, 2001. From the Soviet invasion in 1979 to the summer of 2001, intelligence agencies from around the globe have had a stake in supplying, training, and funding the very same people who carried out those terrible attacks. In the middle of this chaotic time period, Osama bin Laden used political manipulation to devise a plan that would leave a scar on the face of a nation for many years to come. This research will give a history of the U.S. governmentâs involvement in Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda would rise from the ashes of the Soviet conflict to become the new enemy of America. To combat these new faceless adversaries, historians need to look at the mistakes made in the past to prevent similar tragedies in the future
The insider on the outside: a novel system for the detection of information leakers in social networks
Confidential information is all too easily leaked by naive users posting comments. In this paper we introduce DUIL, a system for Detecting Unintentional Information Leakers. The value of DUIL is in its ability to detect those responsible for information leakage that occurs through comments posted on news articles in a public environment, when those articles have withheld material non-public information. DUIL is comprised of several artefacts, each designed to analyse a different aspect of this challenge: the information, the user(s) who posted the information, and the user(s) who may be involved in the dissemination of information. We present a design science analysis of DUIL as an information system artefact comprised of social, information, and technology artefacts. We demonstrate the performance of DUIL on real data crawled from several Facebook news pages spanning two years of news articles
Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications
Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted
surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require
indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between
anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a
design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers
indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active
adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by
subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour
of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing
behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image
sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully
overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant
restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional
social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we
propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world
dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring
low-volume unobservable communication.Comment: 13 Page
Undermining:social engineering using open source intelligence gathering
Digital deposits are undergoing exponential growth. These may in turn be exploited to support cyber security initiatives through open source intelligence gathering. Open source intelligence itself is a doubleedged sword as the data may be harnessed not only by intelligence services to counter cyber-crime and terrorist activity but also by the perpetrator of criminal activity who use them to socially engineer online activity and undermine their victims. Our preliminary case study shows how the security of any company can be surreptitiously compromised by covertly gathering the open source personal data of the companyâs employees and exploiting these in a cyber attack. Our method uses tools that can search, drill down and visualise open source intelligence structurally. It then exploits these data to organise creative spear phishing attacks on the unsuspecting victims who unknowingly activate the malware necessary to compromise the companyâs computer systems. The entire process is the covert and virtual equivalent of overtly stealing someoneâs password âover the shoulderâ. A more sophisticated development of this case study will provide a seamless sequence of interoperable computing processes from the initial gathering of employee names to the successful penetration of security measures
The streetcorner press: worker intelligence networks in Lourenço Marques, 1900â1962
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2
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âSoftware agents and haunted media : the twitter bot as political actor"
This report examines the rhetorical construction of Twitter bots as nonhuman political agents in press coverage of the 2016 U.S. election. It takes the rhetorical framing of âthe Twitter botâ as a case study to argue that Twitter bots are a contemporary example of what media historian Jeffrey Sconce calls âhaunted mediaâ -- a communication technology that has been culturally ascribed an âuncannyâ âagency.â First, this report provides a comparative close reading of two pieces from The Atlantic and The New York Times as examples of mainstream press coverage of bots shortly before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Second, drawing on Sconceâs analysis of nineteenth and twentieth century media ecologies, it argues that âthe Twitter botâ has been rhetorically constructed as haunted media through discourses that are inseparable from larger political narratives. The third and final section speculates on possible theoretical frameworks to expand this project in further inquiries. This report aims to demonstrate that haunted media narratives predate and persist beyond a specific election cycle or medium, and to argue that the construction of âhaunted mediaâ occurs alongside constructed concepts of democracy in our technologically mediated society. In doing so, this report contributes to the field of rhetoric of digital technology by bringing it further into conversation with political rhetoric.Englis
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