April 2014

The Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is hosting a workshop April 17, 2014, on the impact of technology transition on public safety.

Representatives from public safety agencies, service providers, technology vendors, and other stakeholders will participate in roundtable discussions to explore the impact of the retirement of switched telecommunications service (PSTN, TDM), the anticipated interdependencies and new failure modalities for IP transport, copper to fiber transition and copper to wireless transition.

The workshop will identify areas of risk associated with the planned IP Transition and determine risk factors for key public safety, emergency response, and national security functions.

Mission-critical satellite communications relied on by Western militaries and international aeronautics and maritime systems are susceptible to interception, tampering, or blocking by attackers who exploit easy-to-find backdoors, software bugs, and similar high-risk vulnerabilities, a researcher warned.

Ground-, sea-, and air-based satellite terminals from a broad spectrum of manufacturers -- including Iridium, Cobham, Hughes, Harris, and Thuraya -- can be hijacked by adversaries who send them booby-trapped SMS text messages and use other techniques, according to a 25-page white paper published by penetration testing firm IOActive. Once a malicious hacker has remotely gained control of the devices, which are used to communicate with satellites orbiting in space, the adversary can completely disrupt mission-critical satellite communications (SATCOM).

Other malicious actions include reporting false emergencies or misleading geographic locations of ships, planes, or ground crews; suppressing reports of actual emergencies; or obtaining the coordinates of devices and other potentially confidential information.

"If one of these affected devices can be compromised, the entire SATCOM infrastructure could be at risk," wrote Ruben Santamarta, IOActive's principal security consultant. "Ships, aircraft, military personnel, emergency services, media services, and industrial facilities (oil rigs, gas pipelines, water treatment plants, wind turbines, substations, etc.) could all be impacted by these vulnerabilities."

FreedomWorks has paid more than $6 million in recent years to have Beck promote the group, its initiatives and events.

The FreedomWorks-Beck relationship is just one example of a powerful and profitable alliance between the conservative movement’s most aggressive groups and the most popular radio hosts. The details of the arrangements are little-known, but they have been lucrative for the recipients, and, in turn, have helped ensure that the groups get coveted airtime from hosts with a demonstrated ability to leverage their tens of millions of listeners to shape American politics.

It’s an alliance that helped spawn the anti-establishment tea party and power Republicans to landslide victories in the 2010 midterms. It’s also exacerbated congressional gridlock by pushing a hard line on the budget, immigration and Obamacare, and it is roiling the Republican Party headed into critical midterm elections.

The preliminary charge brought against Bob Dylan in Paris for what a Croatian organization said was hate speech comparing Croats to Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan has been dropped by a French court.

The charge was filed by the French government after the Representative Council of the Croatian Community and Institutions in France complained about comments Dylan made in a September 2012 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

In the interview Dylan was discussing racism in the United States, and noted that American blacks could sense whether whites had slave-master blood “just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.” At the time, Ivan Jurasinovic, a lawyer for the organization, said that the French Croats were not seeking money or punishment, but hoped that Dylan, whom he described as “a singer who is liked and respected in Croatia,” would apologize.

But it was not quite that simple: under French hate speech laws, he could have been sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of up to €45,000 ($62,000). The case was dismissed on a technicality: Dylan, the judge ruled, had not authorized the publication of the comments in France.