Russian authorities searched the Moscow offices of Human Rights Watch and three other prominent advocacy groups on Wednesday, part of a wave of hundreds of inspections that activists say is a campaign to silence criticism of President Vladimir Putin.

Since returning to the Kremlin in May, Putin has tightened controls on non-governmental organisations (NGOs), requiring those with foreign funding to register as “foreign agents” – a term echoing, for some, Stalin-era political repressions and Cold War spying.

The Kremlin says it is working to prevent foreign governments meddling in Russian politics, but activists see the visits by prosecutors and other authorities ranging from tax officials to fire inspectors as harassment.

“This is part of a massive, unprecedented in its scale wave of inspections of NGOs throughout Russia… covering hundreds and hundreds of groups,” said Rachel Denber, Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch.

“Most immediately it is an effort to intimidate. More broadly it’s part of an effort to discredit ideas about human rights and civil society, to somehow tar them as foreign and suspect,” she said by telephone from New York, where Human Rights Watch is based.

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“NGOs, exile organizations, political movements, and other public interest coalitions have for many years encountered serious and persistent cyber assaults. Such threats — politically motivated and often with strong links to authoritarian regimes — include website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, targeted malware attacks, and cyber espionage. For every Fortune 500 company that’s breached, for every blueprint or confidential trade secret stolen, it’s a safe bet that at least one NGO or activist has been compromised in a similar fashion, with highly sensitive information such as networks of contacts exfiltrated.”

Read the article.

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The “forced disappearance” of Lao activist Sombath Somphone is a blow to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), rights groups said Tuesday, as members of parliament across Asia and Europe urged the Laotian Prime minister to order an “urgent” investigation into his case.

The unresolved case of Sombath, who has been missing since leaving the office of his antipoverty training center on Dec. 15, represents a “threat to human rights” in the region, the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) said.

“From the perspective of human rights, it can be construed that Sombath Somphone is a defender of human rights, of resources—he protects people in his locality,” Pratabjit Neelapaijit, a representative of the Philippines-based rights group, told RFA’s Lao Service.

“Therefore the involuntary disappearance of Sombath Somphone amounts to a forced disappearance—an attack against human rights workers,” Neelapaijit said during a seminar by rights groups and nongovernmental organizations to discuss the missing activist’s case at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand on Tuesday.

For the full article, see here.

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The arrests of at least 15 journalists in Tehran over the course of three days this week, just a few months before the June presidential election, has come as a shock to members of the Iranian press. Most of those detained work for pro-reform publications and many other reformist journalists fear they may be next.

“We have to stay up all night tonight,” said a journalist based in Tehran. “They could raid our homes.”. An art critic felt compelled to delete files: “I wiped out all the history on my laptop and deleted all my Word files.”

Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic has not had a good relationship with non-conformist journalists, who have been harassed and detained on a regular basis for the past three decades. According to political tradition, however, more leeway had generally been granted in the months leading up to national elections to help create a “cheerful” atmosphere and attract voters to the polls.

In 2009, the two leading reformist candidates for president, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, each had their own official newspapers – respectively Kalameh (The Word) and Etemad Melli (Public Credence) – in which they stated their positions and ran unabashed criticisms of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration. Other dailies were also able to embrace a pro-reform line with relative freedom. Not a single journalist was harassed during the months preceding the election that June.

For the full article, see here.

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Access is pleased to announce the winners of its first annual Access Innovation Prize. Programmers, human rights activists, journalists, and Access members mixed and mingled at the crowded awards ceremony Monday night.

The Access Innovation Prize gave $100,000 across 5 categories to individuals, organizations and networks who submitted the best actionable ideas on how to use information technology to promote and enable human rights and deliver social good. The prize is designed to discover and reward ideas that demonstrate unique promise, opportunity, and possibility.

The mood was energetic and lively during the award ceremony at Access’ Manhattan office. Before a packed crowd, Brett Solomon, Access Executive Director, emphasized that the funding is only the beginning of the story, as Access plans to work with each group to implement, improve, and expand the human rights potential of these innovative technologies and ideas.

For the full article, see here.

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A prominent activist from the UAE has been targeted by surveillance malware likely to have been created by an Italian company, with a French exploit seller implicated too, according to researchers.

Ahmed Mansoor, a blogger and part of the UAE Five, a group of Emirati activists who were imprisoned from April to November 2011 on charges of insult, was targeted by surveillance malware, according to Citizen Lab.

Mansoor was sent an email with a malicious attachment, which appeared to be a Microsoft Word file called ‘veryimportant.doc’, but was really an RTF file containing an exploit which allows the execution of code that downloads surveillance malware.

The exploit, which causes a buffer overflow in the RTF format to let the malware’s code be written onto a system’s memory, has been linked to the French exploit seller VUPEN.

The malware has been linked to Italian firm Hacking Team, which was implicated in creating a Mac OS Trojan, which was allegedly based on its Da Vinci cyber espionage tool.

“This information indicates that the sample matching ‘veryimportant.doc’ may be a demo copy of the Hacking Team RCS [Remote Control System] backdoor,” the researchers said. They pointed to promotional materials for the backdoor, which claim to offer surveillance on various communications, including email, instant messaging and Skype.

For the full article, see here.

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On a Monday in July, Ahmed Mansoor sat in his study in Dubai and made the mistake of clicking on a Microsoft Word attachment that arrived in an e-mail, labeled “very important” in Arabic, from a sender he thought he recognized.

With that click, the pro-democracy activist unwittingly downloaded spyware that seized on a flaw in the Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) program to take over his computer and record every keystroke. The hackers infiltrated his digital life so deeply they still accessed his personal e-mail even after he changed his password.

Since then, Mansoor, 42, an electrical engineer and father of four, says he has suffered two beatings by thugs in September during his campaign for citizens’ civil rights in the Persian Gulf federation of the United Arab Emirates. While those assailants remain unknown, researchers say they’ve figured out what was behind the virtual assault.

The spyware that penetrated his laptop appears to be a Western-made surveillance tool sold to police and intelligence agencies that’s so powerful it can turn on webcams and microphones and grab documents off hard drives, according to the findings of a study being published today by the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs’ Citizen Lab.

For the full article, see here.

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Human-rights groups reacted with condemnation following a ruling by Bahrain’s highest court on Monday rejecting the last appeals and upholding the convictions of nine medics for their role in the 2011 uprising in the capital Manama.

“Large numbers of Bahrainis have aired their criticisms of the government through peaceful protests. While some protesters have used violence, the overarching climate has been one of nonviolent criticism of the government of Bahrain,” Sanjeev Bery, Amnesty International USA advocacy director for Middle East/North Africa affairs, told IPS.

“Unfortunately, the government of Bahrain has responded with torture, violence, and arrests. It is time for Bahraini government officials to stop attempting to silence political speech through the repression of the state,” he said. The medics were arrested after tending to wounded pro-democracy protesters.

The upheld sentences, announced in mid-June of this year, range from one month to five years in prison. The verdict includes plotting to overthrow the monarchy and gathering illegally, charges that have been strongly denounced by many human-rights groups, which said the rulings violate basic rights such as free assembly and dismissed them as politically aimed.

For the full article, see here.

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Hungary is a country on the edge. In the last twelve months it has undergone profound political reform and economic collapse but has been given almost no profile in Britain.

The Constitution has been amended ten times in one year and then replaced all together. The Constitutional Court has been expanded and packed with allies of the Prime Minister. 200 judges have been forced to retire whilst a former party official now gets to decide which judge hears which case.

Election boundaries have been redrawn to ensure the ruling party would have won the last three elections (even the two they lost). Abortion and gay marriage is banned, whilst 238 churches were “de-recognised”, leaving only 14 behind. The multi-party Election Commission has been removed and replaced with five party officials. An ominous Media Board has been given draconian powers to keep the press in check and impose vast fines for ambiguous offences.

To top it all, the President’s private bodyguard is now the head of a new “anti-terror” force with unlimited powers to conduct secret surveillance, demand financial and medical records, and listen into phone calls without a warrant. All of this in contravention of a landmark 1989 court ruling that marked the end of the Communist secret state.

It was a cold dark day in late December and the clocks were striking thirteen.

In the name of tackling government inefficiency and the legacy of Communism, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s constitutional reforms undid two decades of democratic progress on 1st January 2012. In the heart of Europe, the rights and norms that underpinned the politics settlement have changed beyond recognition.

For the full article, see

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It’s no secret that Shodan has turned up some interesting findings over the past few years – everything from critical infrastructure devices, to VoIP phones, solar and wind farms, HVAC systems, even a online crematorium.

Now, we can add surveillance devices like BlueCoat Proxy and PacketShaper boxes, Cisco routers running Lawful Intercept code and various vendors’ CALEA Mediation Devices into what Shodan has pre-scanned and savvy researchers searching Shodan can find.

Clearly, this kind of exposure can and should be very disconcerting for some organizations and possibly even nation states. This is especially the case given the amount of recent news coverage and scrutiny given to high-surveillance of nations, both the questionable acquisition of these surveillance devices, and their use against domestic populations.

And it’s worth mentioning that security researchers have focused on lawful intercept, notably Tom Cross’ BlackHat 2010 presentation “Exploiting Lawful Intercept to Wiretap the Internet”

For the full article, see here.

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