Tech News
Russia bringing 'PRISM on steroids' to Sochi Olympics
Russian President Vladimir Putin (c.) smiles as he lights the Olympic flame at Red Square in Moscow on Sunday. (Ivan Sekretarev/AP) Visitors to the upcoming Sochi Winter Games will be able to access Internet services that are faster and more widely…
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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Internet for all: Tech alliance seeks affordable web access for the poor
Accessing the Internet in the developing world is unnecessarily expensive, partly due to government policies that hinder competition and should be scrapped, a new alliance backed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft said Monday.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet, which launched in Nigeria's capital, said it will push for an "open, competitive and innovative broadband market" to boost access, especially in Africa, where only 16 percent of the population is online.
Other members of the alliance include the British and US development agencies, as well as Facebook and the inventor of the World Wide Web, Britain's Tim Berners-Lee.
"There is simply no good reason for the digital divide to continue," Berners-Lee said in a statement, arguing that the infrastructure and technology needed to fully connect poorer countries was increasingly in place.
"The real bottleneck now is anti-competitive policies and regulations that keep prices unaffordable. The alliance is about removing that barrier," he added.
The initiative's executive director, Sonia Jorge, told AFP that Ethiopia's telecommunication policy "is an example of exactly what you don't want to see."
The state operator, Ethio Telecom, holds a near monopoly as a broadband service provider and the cost of connection is among the highest in the world when compared to monthly income, according to the US watchdog Freedom House.
Despite its roughly 90 million people, Ethiopia had only 27,000 broadband subscriptions in 2011. Significant price reductions were announced last year in an effort to boost access, however.
The alliance said its goal is to reduce the cost of access to below five percent of monthly income worldwide.
In developed countries, people in 2012 spent on average 1.7 percent of monthly income for broadband while in the developing world the figure was 30.1 percent, according to the new group.
Prices have gone down in several areas, in part due to infrastructure improvements, including under-sea cables.
Following its Monday launch in Nigeria, the group will begin working in four countries, campaigning for liberal, open-market policies where private firms freely compete to provide lower cost broadband services.
"It is important that the playing field is level," Jorge told AFP.
In some African countries, despite a flurry of new players in the market offering a range of services many feel "that prices haven't really changed that much," Jorge said, adding the competition policies may need to be refined so that people actually "reap the benefit."
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Russia plans to spy on Olympic athletes and visitors, analysts say
Russia has installed an all-encompassing surveillance system at the site of next year's Winter Olympic Games in Sochi that will allow security services to listen in on athletes and visitors, security analysts said on Monday.
The surveillance system was first developed by the Soviet-era KGB, predecessor of the FSB special services, in the mid-1980s and updated in recent years, said prominent security analyst Andrei Soldatov.
Dubbed SORM, the system will give Russian security services free access to all phone and Internet communications at the Olympic Games in February without the providers' knowledge, according to research by Soldatov and his colleague Irina Borogan.
Telecom providers are required to pay for the SORM equipment and its installation, but law enforcement agencies will be able to wiretap without having to show providers court orders allowing the eavesdropping, the analysts said.
"Operators do not know what and when the FSB is monitoring," Soldatov told AFP.
Citing research based on documents published by the Russian government procurement agency and other government records, the analysts said the authorities have been installing the surveillance devices in the Black Sea resort of Sochi since 2010.
Russia has pulled out all the stops to get the subtropic region ready for the Games, spending more than $50 billion in state and corporate money on infrastructure improvements including mobile networks.
"There is a promise that visitors will have access to the fastest WiFi networks in Olympic history, for free," the researchers said on their website agentura.ru.
But at the same time, the analysts said, national telecom provider Rostelecom is installing DPI (deep packet inspection) systems on all its mobile networks, technology which will allow the FSB not only to monitor all traffic but also to filter it.
While many Olympic host countries take steps to monitor communications for security reasons, Russia will take surveillance to a new level, said Soldatov, adding the government will also deploy drones and sonars to detect submarines.
"The most unique feature of this system is its totality," said Soldatov, adding he was astonished to learn that the defence ministry bought the sonars especially for the Olympic Games.
['Female Office Worker Working On Her Laptop Computer While Corporate Spying' via Shutterstock]
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Google wants to patent how to split a restaurant check
Splitting a check after a big group meal can be a pain-in-the-neck problem. But is it a Google-level conundrum?
A handful of Google engineers appear to think so. According to a patent application made public Thursday, six New York-area Google employees want a patent on a method for "tracking and managing group expenditures."
The patent application at times "reads like the plot for a Seinfeld episode," opined Todd Bishop at GeekWire. The filing contains several hypothetical examples of the use of their method. "assume that Users A-C have drinks at a bar and User B pays a bill of $45 for the drinks User B adds the payment transaction as an expenditure of the group and allocates $15 of the transaction to User A, $20 to User B, $10 to User C. In this example, the balance module 308 would update the individual balances of Users A-C to indicate that User B now owes $115 to User A ($130-$15) and User C owes $10 to User B ($0+$10)."
No word on whether the patent will become the culinary equivalent of Google Glass -- stare at your food hand enough and it will tell you how much you owe if you're too drunk to do math.
But the patent application itself may be a serious-enough event for companies in the emerging mobile payment space like Square or PayPal to sit up and take notice.
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Your body is the next frontier in cybercrime
If you think it’s enough of a chore trying to stop thieves stealing your credit card details and hacking your Facebook, imagine trying to stop them getting into your pancreas. Advances in healthcare mean that in-body…
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New Snowden leak: NSA attempted to crack online anonymity tool used by dissidents and activists
The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.
Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency's current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets' computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity.
But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled 'Tor Stinks', states: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users," and says the agency has had "no success de-anonymizing a user in response" to a specific request.
Another top-secret presentation calls Tor "the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity".
Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users' internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls "relays" or "nodes", to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.
It is relied upon by journalists, activists and campaigners in the US and Europe as well as in China, Iran and Syria, to maintain the privacy of their communications and avoid reprisals from government. To this end, it receives around 60% of its funding from the US government, primarily the State Department and the Department of Defense – which houses the NSA.
Despite Tor's importance to dissidents and human rights organizations, however, the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ have devoted considerable efforts to attacking the service, which law enforcement agencies say is also used by people engaged in terrorism, the trade of child abuse images, and online drug dealing.
Privacy and human rights groups have been concerned about the security of Tor following revelations in the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica about widespread NSA efforts to undermine privacy and security software. A report by Brazilian newspaper Globo also contained hints that the agencies had capabilities against the network.
While it seems that the NSA has not compromised the core security of the Tor software or network, the documents detail proof-of-concept attacks, including several relying on the large-scale online surveillance systems maintained by the NSA and GCHQ through internet cable taps.
One such technique is based on trying to spot patterns in the signals entering and leaving the Tor network, to try to de-anonymise its users. The effort was based on a long-discussed theoretical weakness of the network: that if one agency controlled a large number of the "exits" from the Tor network, they could identify a large amount of the traffic passing through it.
The proof-of-concept attack demonstrated in the documents would rely on the NSA's cable-tapping operation, and the agency secretly operating computers, or 'nodes', in the Tor system. However, one presentation stated that the success of this technique was "negligible" because the NSA has "access to very few nodes" and that it is "difficult to combine meaningfully with passive Sigint".
While the documents confirm the NSA does indeed operate and collect traffic from some nodes in the Tor network, they contain no detail as to how many, and there are no indications that the proposed de-anonymization technique was ever implemented.
Other efforts mounted by the agencies include attempting to direct traffic toward NSA-operated servers, or attacking other software used by Tor users. One presentation, titled 'Tor: Overview of Existing Techniques', also refers to making efforts to "shape", or influence, the future development of Tor, in conjunction with GCHQ.
Another effort involves measuring the timings of messages going in and out of the network to try to identify users. A third attempts to degrade or disrupt the Tor service, forcing users to abandon the anonymity protection.
Such efforts to target or undermine Tor are likely to raise legal and policy concerns for the intelligence agencies.
Foremost among those concerns is whether the NSA has acted, deliberately or inadvertently, against internet users in the US when attacking Tor. One of the functions of the anonymity service is to hide the country of all of its users, meaning any attack could be hitting members of Tor's substantial US user base.
Several attacks result in implanting malicious code on the computer of Tor users who visit particular websites. The agencies say they are targeting terrorists or organized criminals visiting particular discussion boards, but these attacks could also hit journalists, researchers, or those who accidentally stumble upon a targeted site.
The efforts could also raise concerns in the State Department and other US government agencies that provide funding to increase Tor's security – as part of the Obama administration's internet freedom agenda to help citizens of repressive regimes – circumvent online restrictions.
Material published online for a discussion event held by the State Department, for example, described the importance of tools such as Tor.
"[T]he technologies of internet repression, monitoring and control continue to advance and spread as the tools that oppressive governments use to restrict internet access and to track citizen online activities grow more sophisticated. Sophisticated, secure, and scalable technologies are needed to continue to advance internet freedom."
The Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency whose mission is to "inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy" through networks such as Voice of America, also supports Tor's development, and uses it to ensure its broadcasts reach people in countries such as Iran and China.
The governments of both these countries have attempted to curtail Tor's use: China has tried on multiple occasions to block Tor entirely, while one of the motives behind Iranian efforts to create a "national internet" entirely under government control was to prevent circumvention of those controls.
The NSA's own documents acknowledge the service's wide use in countries where the internet is routinely surveilled or censored. One presentation notes that among uses of Tor for "general privacy" and "non-attribution", it can be used for "circumvention of nation state internet policies" – and is used by "dissidents" in "Iran, China, etc".
Yet GCHQ documents show a disparaging attitude towards Tor users. One presentation acknowledges Tor was "created by the US government" and is "now maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)", a US freedom of expression group. In reality, Tor is maintained by an independent foundation, though has in the past received funding from the EFF.
The presentation continues by noting that "EFF will tell you there are many pseudo-legitimate uses for Tor", but says "we're interested as bad people use Tor". Another presentation remarks: "Very naughty people use Tor".
The technique developed by the NSA to attack Tor users through vulnerable software on their computers has the codename EgotisticalGiraffe, the documents show. It involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs, designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. Among these is a version of the Firefox web browser.
The trick, detailed in a top-secret presentation titled 'Peeling back the layers of Tor with EgotisticalGiraffe', identified website visitors who were using the protective software and only executed its attack – which took advantage of vulnerabilities in an older version of Firefox – against those people. Under this approach, the NSA does not attack the Tor system directly. Rather, targets are identified as Tor users and then the NSA attacks their browsers.
According to the documents provided by Snowden, the particular vulnerabilities used in this type of attack were inadvertently fixed by Mozilla Corporation in Firefox 17, released in November 2012 – a fix the NSA had not circumvented by January 2013 when the documents were written.
The older exploits would, however, still be usable against many Tor users who had not kept their software up to date.
A similar but less-complex exploit against the Tor network was revealed by security researchers in July this year. Details of the exploit, including its purpose and which servers it passed on victims' details to, led to speculation it had been built by the FBI or another US agency.
At the time, the FBI refused to comment on whether it was behind the attack, but subsequently admitted in a hearing in an Irish court that it had operated the malware to target an alleged host of images of child abuse – though the attack did also hit numerous unconnected services on the Tor network.
Roger Dingledine, the president of the Tor project, said the NSA's efforts serve as a reminder that using Tor on it own is not sufficient to guarantee anonymity against intelligence agencies – but showed it also was a great aid in combating mass surveillance.
"The good news is that they went for a browser exploit, meaning there's no indication they can break the Tor protocol or do traffic analysis on the Tor network," Dingledine said. "Infecting the laptop, phone, or desktop is still the easiest way to learn about the human behind the keyboard.
"Tor still helps here: you can target individuals with browser exploits, but if you attack too many users somebody's going to notice. So even if the NSA aims to surveil everyone everywhere, they have to be a lot more selective about which Tor users they spy on."
But he added: "Just using Tor isn't enough to keep you safe in all cases. Browser exploits, large-scale surveillance, and general user security are all challenging topics for the average internet user. These attacks make it clear that we, the broader internet community, need to keep working on better security for browsers and other internet-facing applications."
The Guardian asked the NSA how it justified attacking a service funded by the US government, how it ensured that its attacks did not interfere with the secure browsing of law-abiding US users such as activists and journalists, and whether the agency was involved in the decision to fund Tor or efforts to "shape" its development.
The agency did not directly address those questions, instead providing a statement.
It read: "In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, NSA collects only those communications that it is authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence purposes, regardless of the technical means used by those targets or the means by which they may attempt to conceal their communications. NSA has unmatched technical capabilities to accomplish its lawful mission. "As such, it should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets' use of technologies to hide their communications. Throughout history, nations have used various methods to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others use technology to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that."
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Thirteen alleged members of Anonymous indicted on hacking charges
Thirteen alleged members of the loosely organized hacker collective known as Anonymous were indicted Thursday in connection with a series of online attacks on US companies and trade groups.
The indictment unsealed in Alexandria, Virginia, charged the 13 with attacks between September 2010 and January 2011 on the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America and others.
The defendants were charged with organizing denial of service attacks aimed at shutting down the websites of the targets known as "Operation Payback."
The targets were chosen for their stand on piracy and copyright enforcement after the discontinuation of Pirate Bay, and the financial institutions later for ending transactions that allowed funds to be raised for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
The 13 "planned and executed a coordinated series of cyber-attacks against victim websites by flooding those websites with a huge volume of irrelevant Internet traffic with the intent to make the resources on the websites unavailable to customers and users of those websites," the indictment said.
Those named in the indictment were Dennis Owen Collins, Jeremy Leroy Heller, Chen Zhiwei, Joshua Phy, Ryan Russel Gubele, Robert Audubon Whitfield, Anthony Tadros, Geoffrey Kenneth Commander, Austen Stamm, Timothy Robert McLain, Wade Carl Williams and Thomas Bell.
Anonymous is a loose-knit group hacker activists, or "hacktivists," who have taken credit for scores of online attacks over the past few years.
The attacks range from the nuisance-like -- the FBI and Justice Department websites were back up within a few hours -- to the truly damaging involving the loss of data and the exposure of private financial information.
[<em>Image via AFP</em>]
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Millions of credit card numbers and passwords stolen in Adobe hack
Adobe announced late Thursday that it suffered a major security breach that jeopardizes the personal information of approximately three million customers.
Adobe's chief security officer, Brad Arkin, wrote that "[o]ur investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We also believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders."
Arkin argued for calm, noting that "[a]t this time, we do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers from our systems." Federal law enforcement has been informed, as have its banking and payment partners. The company will reset some of the compromised passwords and ask customers to re-verify their credit information in the coming weeks.
They company also said that it will offer a year's free membership in a credit monitoring service to any customer whose information was compromised in this breach.
["A frightened hacker" on Shutterstock]
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Silk Road, notorious haven for illegal online commerce, seized by U.S. authorities
There is a dark side to the Internet, and it can be used for evil as well as for good.
A massive online bazaar hawking narcotics, weapons, forgeries, and other illicit items or services operated openly for years by relying on tools designed to safeguard privacy or foster a new world of Internet commerce.
Underground website Silk Road was seized by US authorities this week and its accused mastermind Ross William Ulbricht is to appear in federal court in San Francisco on Friday to determine whether he should remain in custody while the criminal case against him proceeds.
"Every technology has almost immediately been used to do bad things," said Alex Stamos, chief technology officer at Artemis Internet, which specializes in online security.
"People are going to do illegal stuff, but it turns out that it is really tough to run an eBay for drugs and not get caught."
Silk Road thrived on the principle that assurances of anonymity would free sellers and buyers to engage in transactions barred by law or frowned upon by society.
To accomplish this, Silk Road combined a Tor network for being invisible online with Bitcoin digital currency that can be as difficult to trace as cash trading hands in a dark alley.
"Part of the reason for the site's longevity is that it was hosted as a hidden service on the Tor network," Trend Micro security threat researcher Robert McArdle explained in a blog post.
Free Tor software lets people wrap data such as messages, website visits, or online transactions in layers of protection including encryption and then bounce it about machines in a worldwide peer-to-peer network to cover trails.
Each machine along the way only peels back a slight layer; enough to send the data to its next point in a journey
Tor community members volunteer their computers to provide relay points and the resulting network makes it a challenge to trace Internet activities.
"Tor is not only used for criminal and dubious purposes, but is also commonly used by those who wish to have a sense of anonymity online or who live in countries where access to the Internet is restricted," McArdle said.
Encrypting data and obscuring online identities has been highlighted by a scandal about US spy agencies snooping on the Internet in the name of fighting terrorism.
"It is very difficult to be anonymous on the Internet," Stamos said. "You basically have to be perfect. You screw up once and you are doing something illegal, and you are toast."
Along with giving buyers and sellers promises that none would know who they are in the real world, Silk Road required deals to be consummated with Bitcoins, an Internet Age version of cash. The four-year old currency is increasingly used to make payments in online transactions.
Bitcoins are created or exchanged using complex software protocols that have resulted in them being referred to as "cryptocurrency." While cash tends to be paper or metal, Bitcoins are snippets of code given value by scarcity and the faith that they can be traded for goods or services online.
Owners tuck the digital currency away in Bitcoin "wallets," programs that safeguard the valuable code and allow it to be exchanged with other Bitcoin wallets.
There are a variety of "wallets" ranging from digital pouches tailored for smartphones to "vaults" hosted on secure servers online and backed up to prevent loss.
Bitcoin owners have private software "keys" needed to spend the digital currency, and transactions are publicly logged in what is called a "block chain" to help ensure the integrity of the process.
"It is not actually anonymous; it is pseudo-anonymous," Stamos said of using Bitcoins. "Every transaction is publicly viewable."
Silk Road tadded "Bitcoin Tumbler" software that jumbled data to make it even harder to determine which wallets digital currency came from.
The FBI reportedly confiscated approximately $3.6 million worth of Bitcoins from Silk Road.
While investigators did not release details regarding the seizure, they could do so by getting hold of devices or servers containing the Bitcoins or by breaking into wallets, which are typically password protected.
Ulbricht was arrested while using a laptop at a San Francisco library on Tuesday, and if he was logged into his account FBI agents could have gotten easy access to his stash of Bitcoins.
"People who do Bitcoins now, almost always crypto-geeks, get ripped off all the time and there is no way to undo a transaction," Stamos said. "It's a world where everyone keeps loads of cash and the only way to have Bitcoins is to be very well armed to protect them."
There is an estimated $1.5 billion in bitcoins on the market and the digital currency can be transferred directly between smartphones or any other type of computers, raising concerns by regulators it will be used for criminal or terrorist activities.
["Materialistic Girl With Money" on Shutterstock]
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An electric car -- the Model S -- tops registrations in Norway for first time
An electric car model has topped the list of new car registrations in Norway for the first time, a car industry group said Thursday.
In the month of September there were 616 registrations of the high-end US-made Tesla S, accounting for 5.1 percent of the total, according to Opplysningsraadet for Veitrafikken(OFV) which compiles data on Norwegian car sales.
Overall, electric cars took 8.6 percent of the market in September, compared to 5.2 percent a year ago.
The figures illustrate strong interest in electric cars in a country ranked among the world's top ten petrol exporters.
Norway has encouraged electric car sales with tax incentives, congestion charge exemptions, access to public transport lanes and free parking.
However the recent spike in new registrations may be a short-lived phenomenon, caused by the grouping together of deliveries made over several months, said Oeyvind Solberg Thorsen at OFV.
"But I have no doubt that electric cars will increase their share of the market again in the coming months, and particularly next year with the arrival of several new models," he told AFP.
In September hybrid cars, which do not enjoy the same incentives as electric vehicles, took 7.3 percent of the market.
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Justice Department rejects tech industry's call for transparency
A request by major technology firms to disclose more about US intelligence services' data requests would "cause serious harm to national security," the government said in a court filing Wednesday.
The Justice Department, responding to petitions from major US Internet firms, said it opposes the move for more transparency in the role of the companies in vast data collection programs.
The requests "would permit damaging disclosures that would reveal sources and methods of surveillance potentially nationwide," said the filing to the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a special body which handles secret government requests.
Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft are among the firms which have asked for permission to publish the numbers of national security data requests they receive, hoping this would reassure customers that the role of the firms is limited.
But the Justice Department's 33-page brief, which included heavy redactions in the public version to delete specific names, said the government has taken steps to be more transparent but that some information must remain classified and secret.
It said the government agreed to publish an annual report which includes an aggregate number of requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
But this will not be broken down on a company basis, and accordingly "will not provide our adversaries with a roadmap to the existence or extent of government surveillance of any particular provide or communications platform."
It added that "revealing FISA data on a company by company basis would cause serious harm to national security," and that this is the reason it is classified.
The brief also disputed claims that the companies have a constitutional right to publish the information, saying such restrictions on classified information are "well-settled."
At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, the top US intelligence official reiterated these concerns.
James Clapper, director of national intelligence, said the government has no objection to the release of the total number of government requests but that a company-by-company breakdown "gives the adversaries, the terrorists, the prerogative of shopping around for providers that aren't covered."
Google, Facebook and Yahoo are among major Internet companies identified as participants in the PRISM program, described as a vast surveillance operation aimed at finding foreigners who are threats to the government. Other firms in the program included Microsoft, Apple and AOL.
[Image: "Female Office Worker Working On Her Laptop Computer While Corporate Spying, Stealing Personal Or Business Information Or Employee Monitoring" on Shutterstock]
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NSA chief denies that the agency is spying on your Facebook profile
The head of the National Security Agency said Wednesday the secretive intelligence service does not compile data on Americans' use of social networks, dismissing a media report as "wrong."
General Keith Alexander told a Senate hearing that a New York Times article "jumped to the conclusion this was done on Americans, that's not true."
He told the Judiciary Committee that the NSA, which has been under fire following revelations about vast surveillance efforts which collect data on Americans, only uses social networks when it is investigating "someone who is part of a terrorist investigation."
"The fact that people assume that we're out there mapping the social networks of US persons is absolutely wrong. What we do go after is those that are the subject of a terrorist investigation or something like that."
Alexander said the agency can use social networks to "enrich" the information it has on a terrorist suspect.
"We don't have the Facebook and other stuff on those people here in the US. It would have to come from the foreign side," he said.
And if an investigation led back to an American, Alexander said, "then it would go over to the FBI. We are looking for the foreign nexus here, not the US part."
The New York Times reported Sunday that the NSA since 2010 has created sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, locations and other personal information.
The newspaper cited newly disclosed documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with officials.
The Senate panel called the hearing to consider the intelligence community's use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in light of the media revelations in recent months.
Committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy said, "When you have all these revelations, it's no surprise the intelligence community faces a trust deficit."
"I think it's time for a change," Leahy said in opening the hearing. "And I think additional transparency and oversight are important parts of that change."
Leahy has said he wants to end "bulk collection" of phone records along with other reforms affecting intelligence gathering.
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