U.S., Japan to hold official talks on nuclear umbrella/US officials eye North Korea in cyber attack/

US officials eye North Korea in cyber attack
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press Writer – Thu Jul 9, 12:40 am ET
WASHINGTON – U.S. authorities on Wednesday eyed North Korea as the origin of the widespread cyber attack that overwhelmed government Web sites in the United States and South Korea, although they warned it would be difficult to definitively identify the attackers quickly.
The powerful attack that targeted dozens of government and private sites underscored how unevenly prepared the U.S. government is to blocksuch multipronged assaults.
While Treasury Department and Federal Trade Commission Web sites were shut down by the software attack, which lasted for days over the holiday weekend, others such as the Pentagon and the White House were able to fend it off with little disruption.
The North Korea link, described by three officials, more firmly connected the U.S. attacks to another wave of cyber assaults that hit government agencies Tuesday in South Korea. The officials said that while Internet addresses have been traced to North Korea, that does not necessarily mean the attack involved the Pyongyang government.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
South Korea intelligence officials have identified North Korea as a suspect in those attacks and said that the sophistication of the assault suggested it was carried out at a higher level that just rogue or individual hackers.
U.S. officials would not go that far and declined to discuss publicly who may have instigated the intrusion or how it was done.
In an Associated Press interview, Philip Reitinger, deputy under secretary at the Homeland Security Department, said the far-reaching attacks demonstrate the importance of cybersecurity as a critical national security issue.
The fact that a series of computers were involved in an attack, Reitinger said, "doesn't say anything about the ultimate source of the attack."
"What it says is that those computers were as much a target of the attack as the eventual Web sites that are targets," said Reitinger, who heads DHS cybersecurity operations. "They're just zombies that are being used by some unseen third party to launch attacks against government and nongovernment Web sites."
Targets of the most widespread cyber offensive of recent years also included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department and State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post, according to an early analysis of the software used in the attacks.
The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attacks. They provided the list on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.
Other experts in cyber assaults said the incident shined a harsh light on the U.S. government's efforts to protect all of its agencies against Web-based attacks.
James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the fact that both the White House and Defense Department were attacked but didn't go down points to the need for coordinated government network defenses.
"It says that they were ready and the other guys weren't ready," he said. "We are disorganized. In the event of an attack, some places aren't going to be able to defend themselves."
The wave of cyber assaults are known as "denial of service" attacks. Such attacks against Web sites are not uncommon and are caused when sites are so deluged with Internet traffic that they are effectively taken off-line. Mounting such an attack can be relatively easy and inexpensive, using widely available hacking programs, and they become far more serious if hackers infect and tie thousands of computers together into "botnets."
Joe Stewart, director of malware research for the counterthreat unit of SecureWorks Inc., said there's no indication yet of a claim of responsibility hidden anywhere in the program behind the attacks. Stewart and other researchers are analyzing the code for clues about the attacker's identity.
Stewart noted that the attacks on U.S. government sites appeared to expand after the initial assaults over the holiday weekend failed to generate any publicity. He said the "target list" contained in the program's code only had five U.S. government sites on it on July 5, but were broadened the next day to include nongovernment sites inside the U.S.
The following day, the South Korean Web sites were added.
"It seems to me they thought the first round wasn't successful ... they felt they weren't getting enough attention because nobody was talking about their attacks," Stewart said.
The cyber assault on the White House site had "absolutely no effect on the White House's day-to-day operations," said spokesman Nick Shapiro. He said that preventive measures kept whitehouse.gov stable and available to the general public but that Internet visitors from Asia may have experienced problems.
All federal Web sites were back up and running, Shapiro said. A State Department spokesman said the agency's site was up but still experiencing problems. A Web site for the U.S. Secret Service had experienced access problems but did not crash, the agency's spokesman said.
The cyber attack did not appear, at least at the outset, to target internal or classified files or systems, but instead aimed at agencies' public sites, creating a nuisance both for officials and the Web consumers who use them.
Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.
Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.
According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was "100 percent down" for two days, so that no Internet users could get through. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.
Dale Meyerrose, former chief information officer for the U.S. intelligence community, said that at least one of the federal agency Web sites got saturated with as many as 1 million hits per second per attack — amounting to 4 billion Internet hits at once. He would not identify the agency, but he said the Web site is generally capable of handling a level of about 25,000 users.
Meyerrose, who is now vice president at Harris Corp., said the characteristics of the attack suggest the involvement of between 30,000 to 60,000 computers.
The widespread attack was "loud and clumsy," which suggests it was carried out by an unsophisticated organization, said Amit Yoran, chief executive at NetWitness Corp. and the former U.S. government cybersecurity chief. "This is not the elegance we would expect from sophisticated adversaries."
Officials agreed, however, that the incident brings to the forefront a key 21st century threat.
"It tells you that cyber attacks are real. It's a very serious problem and one of the more serious facing us, along with terrorism, and China and Russia are the main threats," said Rep. Dutch Ruppersburger, D-Md., who was briefed on the incident.
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Associated Press writers Lara Jakes and Pamela Hess in Washington; Jordan Robertson in San Jose; Hyung-Jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea; and Andrew Vanacore in New York contributed to this report.
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U.S., Japan to hold official talks on nuclear umbrella
Thursday 09th July, 03:40 AM JST
WASHINGTON —
The United States and Japan are arranging to hold official talks possibly later this month on a broad range of security issues including the U.S. nuclear umbrella—a topic usually off the agenda, U.S.-Japan relations sources said Tuesday.
Involving director general-level officials from the U.S. State and Defense departments and their Japanese counterparts, the talks are aimed at enhancing the bilateral alliance in light of North Korean nuclear and missile threats and China’s military buildup, the sources said.
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Week Ending July 5, 2009: All Michael, All The Time
Posted Wed Jul 8, 2009 11:47am PDT by Paul Grein in Chart Watch


Michael Jackson has three of the five best-selling albums in the U.S. for the second week in a row. Number Ones sold 339,000 copies this week and would have held at #1 on The Billboard 200 if catalog albums were eligible to compete on that chart. (The 2003 compilation sold a little more than twice as many copies this week as NOW 31, the album that holds the #1 spot.) Thriller sold 187,000 copies and would have jumped from #3 to #2 if catalog albums were invited to the party. The Essential Michael Jackson sold 125,000 copies and would have dropped from #2 to #5. (Billboard excludes catalog albums from the big chart on the theory that new albums need the spotlight the chart provides more than past hits do.)
Jackson's catalog of solo albums sold 800,000 copies this week, up from 422,000 copies last week. (This was the first full week following Jackson's death on June 25. Last week's total reflected just four days of sales.) Billboard reports that 82% of the Jackson albums sold this week were CDs (vs. digital downloads). Last week, 43% of the Jackson albums sold were CDs. I think this shows that on a special album, people want the CD as a keepsake. (What a retro concept!)
Jackson's total song download sales this week, including hits with his brothers, stand at 2.2 million downloads, down just a little from 2.6 million last week. A total of 47 songs that feature Jackson are listed on the Hot Digital Songs chart. (This is down just a bit from last week's eye-popping total of 50.)
Number Ones racked up the biggest weekly sales total in Nielsen/SoundScan history for a catalog album (excluding Christmas albums). Jackson also held the old record, which he set in February 2008, when Thriller 25 sold 166,000 copies in its first week. Number Ones also posted the biggest one-week sales tally for an album by a deceased performer since the Notorious B.I.G.'s Duets: The Final Chapter debuted in December 2005 with first-week sales of 438,000.
Number Ones has sold 564,000 copies so far this year, which puts it at #18 on Nielsen/SoundScan's running list of the best-selling albums of 2009. If it keeps going like this, it could topple Taylor Swift's Fearless as the #1 album for the year-to-date. (Fearless has sold 1,352,000 copies since Jan. 1.) This will (in all likelihood) be only the third time in Nielsen/SoundScan history that an album by a deceased performer has ranked among the year's top 10. 2Pac's All Eyez On Me was the #6 album of 1996 (he died on Sept. 13 of that year). The Notorious B.I.G.'s Life After Death was the #6 album of 1997 (he died on March 9 of that year).
Number Ones holds at #1 on the Catalog Albums chart. (Catalog albums are albums that are more than 18 months old, have fallen below #100 on The Billboard 200 and don't have a current radio single.) Jackson owns the entire top 10 this week, counting a Jackson 5 album. The Essential Michael Jackson holds at #1 on the Digital Albums chart. The collection sold 53,000 digital copies this week. This is the third time that Thriller has posted sales of 100,000 or more units in a week in the Nielsen/SoundScan era (which dates to 1991). As noted above, the album sold 166,000 copies when a 25th anniversary edition was released in February 2008. It sold 101,000 last week, in the aftermath of Jackson's death. Thriller is the only the second catalog album (again, excluding Christmas albums) to top the 100,000 sales mark more than once since 1992. It follows the Grease soundtrack, a 1978 blockbuster that came back strong in the mid-1990s. The John Travolta/Olivia Newton-John tune-fest topped the 100,000 sales mark twice in December 1996 and again in April 1998, when the movie was re-released theatrically.
Jackson has five songs in the top 10 on Hot Digital Songs this week: "Man In The Mirror" at #2, "Billie Jean" at #4, "Thriller" at #5, "The Way You Make Me Feel" at #7 and "Beat It" at #10. Later today, I'll post a Chart Watch Extra in which I count down Jackson's 40 most songs with the most cumulative paid downloads. The list shows which of Jackson's songs have best stood the test of time-and which haven't.
Pop Quiz: To get you in the mood, here's a good (but seriously tough) Jackson trivia question. What do these three songs have in common: "Rock With You," "Human Nature" and "Man In The Mirror." Answer below.
Jackson is selling around the world. In the U.K., The Essential Michael Jackson moves up to #1, dethroning Number Ones (which drops to #3). In Japan, King Of Pop vaults from #43 to #6.
In a Chart Watch Extra (here's the link), I told you that Michael Jackson has had 17 #1 hits on the Hot 100 (combining Jackson 5 and solo records). Let me add that he has also had five #2 hits. Twice, he peaked at #2 behind hits that went on to be Billboard's #1 single of the year. That was the fate of the J5's "Never Can Say Goodbye" (which got stuck behind Three Dog Night's "Joy To The World," the top hit of 1971) and his own "Rockin' Robin" (which ran up against Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," the top hit of 1972). The J5's "Mama's Pearl" peaked at #2 behind the Osmonds' "One Bad Apple," which was created in the mold of the early J5 hits. His other #2 hits were the J5's "Dancing Machine" and his duet with Paul McCartney, "The Girl Is Mine."
Quiz Answer: Those were the first "outside songs" (songs that Jackson didn't write) to be released as singles from his three most famous albums, Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad. (I told you it was tough!)
In non-Jackson news (there actually is such a thing!), the Black Eyed Peas this week becomes the first act to hold the #1 spot on Hot Digital Songs for 14 consecutive weeks since the inception of the chart in 2004. The Peas surpass Flo Rida featuring T-Pain, who held tight for 13 straight weeks in 2007-2008 with "Low." The Peas, of course, needed two records to break Flo Rida's record. "Boom Boom Pow" was #1 for 10 weeks, followed immediately by "I Gotta Feelin,'" which sits tight in its fourth week at #1. The song sold 215,000 downloads this week, bringing its four-week total to 899,000.
Lady GaGa has two reasons to celebrate this week. Her debut album, The Fame, logs its 20th week in the top 10, and it becomes only the fourth album to sell 1 million copies in 2009. (It sold an additional 150,000 copies in late 2008.) Lady GaGa got to the 1 million mark before the much-heralded U2 album, which has sold 944,000 copies. Lady GaGa is the only artist to have three songs sell more than 1 million copies each in 2009.
Here's the low-down on this week's top 10 albums.
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ACLU: Racial Profiling "Widespread and Pervasive"
By Haider Rizvi, IPS News. Posted July 2, 2009.
Millions of U.S. citizens continue to face discrimination at the hands of law enforcement just because they are not white. UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 (IPS) -- Millions of U.S. citizens continue to face discrimination at the hands of police and other law enforcement agencies just because they are not white, although the country's new leader in the White House is himself of African descent on his father's side.

"Racial profiling remains a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the U.S," said Chandra Bhatnagar of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), lead author of a new report sent to a U.N. rights body this week.

The report submitted to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) describes past U.S. government policies as "a major cause of the disproportionate stopping and searching" of racial minorities by law enforcement agencies.

"Racial profiling is impacting the lives of millions of people in the African American, Asian, Latino, South Asian, Arab and Muslim communities," Bhatnagar, an attorney who specializes in human rights law, added in a statement.

For example, in one federal program called "Operation Front Line," designed to "detect, deter and disrupt terror operations" among immigrants during the months leading up to the presidential election in November 2004, foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries were 1,280 times more likely to be targeted than similarly situated individuals from other countries.

Not a single terrorism-related conviction resulted from the interviews conducted under the program.

In its report to CERD, the ACLU noted that despite the change of administration in Washington, this and other types of profiling were still happening in all parts of the United States because the policies adopted by the previous administration have not changed.

Like many other U.S.-based rights advocacy groups, the ACLU holds that the U.S. is guilty of violating the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which it is a signatory.

About two years ago, a number of rights groups, including the ACLU, concerned about the growing cases of racial discrimination took their case to CERD in Geneva amid calls for scrutiny of the rights situation in the United States.

CERD, an independent panel of experts who are responsible for monitoring global compliance with the 1969 convention, examined the U.S. case, and after considering the written and oral response from the U.S., ruled that Washington was failing to meet its treaty obligations.

In explaining its findings, the 18-member CERD panel said there were "stark racial disparities in U.S. institutions, including its criminal justice system."

Last January, shortly before the end of the George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials submitted a report to CERD defending the policy on racial discrimination, which, critics say they found to be full of "omissions, deficiencies and mischaracterisations".

In a bid to prove that there was nothing wrong with the U.S. policy on racial discrimination and that the administration was in full compliance with the treaty, U.S. officials cited the Justice Department’s "Guidelines Regarding Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agents."

Legal experts think the Bush administration’s attempt to justify its policies was simply misleading because the document did not cover profiling based on religion or national origin. They want CERD to take a critical look at the Justice Department’s guidelines.

"It doesn’t apply to state or local law enforcement agencies, nor does it include any mechanism for enforcement or punishment for violating the recommendations," said Bhatnagar. "It also contains a blanket exception to the recommendations in cases of ‘national security’ and border integrity.’"

The ACLU report suggests that as a result of the Bush policies, people of color have been disproportionately victimised through various government initiatives, including FBI surveillance and questioning, special registration, border stops, immigration enforcement, and the "no fly lists".

Margaret Huang, executive director of Rights Working Group, a broad coalition of a number of rights advocacy organizations, agrees with Bhatnagar.

"The overboard national security and border integrity exceptions have promoted profiling and creates justification for law enforcement agents to profile those who are or appear to be Arab, Muslim, South Asian, or Latino," said Huang, whose group made a joint effort in reaching out to CERD.

Both Huang and Bhatnagar said they want the U.S. government to take "urgent, direct action to rid the nation of the scourge of racial and ethnic profiling and bring this country into conformity with both the Constitution and international human rights obligations."

Though the Obama administration seems willing to change course, it is not clear when it will take concrete steps. Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that ending racial profiling was a "priority" and that profiling is "simply not good law enforcement".

Bhatnagar told IPS that he was "cautiously optimistic" about the Obama administration’s response to his and other rights groups' call for a reversal of the Bush policies on racial profiling.


The ACLU and other groups are also urging Congress to endorse the "End Racial Profiling Act", a legislative proposal that would require authorities to avoid arrest and search activities, as well as to break down data collection by race.

The CERD members are due to meet in Geneva next month. Among other issues, the committee is expected to look into whether or not the U.S. is in compliance with the treaty.
(Courtesy:AlterNet)
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