Chinese military leaders call automation the great equalizer, since its enemies heavily depend upon computers. An effective attack upon their enemy’s IT infrastructure provides an immediate and disproportionate impact which is the core concept of asymmetric warfare.

This asymmetry benefits the attacker, regardless of his motives or methods.

1. Create a Google account while being discrete with the information you put in the profile.
2. Log on to your Google account and in the top left of the screen go to more then down to even more and select Alerts, which appears as the first link on the More Google Products page. Set up a number of these alerts for “news” and “blogs” based on your search terms. Set each of these to “as-it-happens” to e-mail you with a link to the article.
3. Set up your smart phone to receive these alerts, and code the incoming messages with a special sound. You’ll then get a specific sound on your smart phone with each Google Alert.
4. Establish a  Google Reader account. Subscribe to all the blogs you can find on your topics of interest. Google Reader includes a search bar to help search through the dross to find the good stuff. You now have an online central location from which you can manage your information intake.
5. Over time, add more and more RSS feeds.  Intelligence agencies have them, and so should you.  You will be surprised Google Reader and the Google Alerts you will consistently outperform major news organizations in bring actionable intelligence to your attention. The may give you a competitive edge.
6. Check your favorite blogs and and those that they are linking to consistently. Add these RSS feeds to your reader. Check the blog rolls of the blogs to which you subscribe  and add all of their RSS feeds to your reader. To vet these new sources, use the reader’s search facility.

I really like the new features of reporting world rankings for data like life expectancy. Another new feature is the “Field Listing” icon that gives you an alphabetical listing of countries for that field so that you can do your own comparison of data that can’t be ranked.

This is a timely resource — it is updated every two weeks and the updates are logged on a special page. Though I wish either the country entries or data fields indicated the last update, but that might be asking too much.

If you want to avoid all the Flash content use the text-only version. I’m not a big fan of Flash, but this is a very well executed use of it that makes the World Factbook more useful.

Border Guard

The first was when the Border Guards took away a client’s mobile phone to ensure that it was “legal” in the country he was entering. They returned it a few minutes later saying it was “legal”.

In the car on his way to the hotel our client took off the battery and removed the chip. He didn’t use or carry the phone for the rest of his trip. Upon his return home he had the phone examined. The battery had been swapped for one that turned it into a mobile bug and tracking device.

Industrial Espionage

The second client had similar alterations done to his phone while he was having a shower in his hotel room. Later, he remembered that it was on the wrong side of the night stand when he retrieved it before going to dinner.

The tampering was discovered by his corporate security staff while he was in a meeting. The Security Guard took the battery out and placed the phone on the table in front of him at the entrance of the meeting room. Without anything to do, the bored Guard was staring at the batteries of two identical phones and noticed that a label was on upside-down on one battery. This prompted him to have both phones examined.

This client now knows why things had not been going well with his project during the weeks since his overseas trip to meet with a potential supplier.

Tin Foil Hat

Now some mobile telephones like the iPhone have an integral battery that can’t be changed, but these  smartphones can be loaded-up with malicious software. It has been suggest that you fashion a tin foil hat for your cell phone to thwart tracking and eavesdropping.

Faraday Cage Cell Phone Wallet

A Faraday Cage is a grounded metal cage with holes that are smaller that the RF wave length from which you wish to be shielded.  A tin foil wallet might shield the cell phone and prevent it from receiving or sending signals.

I haven’t tried this but it might work with a a little tinkering, even though it isn’t grounded, due to the week signal strength of cell phones.

Detecting a Cell Phone Bug

The following video about cell phone bugs, and related topics, begins by listing some ways to detect a mobile telephone altered to become a surveillance device.

For example, the  news media acknowledged that Wikipedia was the clearing house for information about the Virginia Tech shooting. Over 8000 amendments to the Wikipedia article were posted in 2 weeks. A former director of the National Security Agency told  congress  in 2002, “Al-Qaida did not need to develop a telecommunication system. All it had to do was harvest the products of a three trillion dollar a year telecommunications industry; an industry that had made communications signals varied, global, instantaneous, complex, and encrypted.”

Open sources, open systems, and advanced telecommunications technology are changing how any form of intelligence collection and reporting is done. These developments have also changed how we have to look at the Intelligence Cycle. The decision-makers and intelligence professionals must now come together within the same space and time to focus on the target in a collaborative model using easily configurable open systems. ( An open system, in management science, is a system that is capable of self-maintenance on the basis of throughput of resources from the environment and usually operated on  a computer system that provides a  combination of interoperability, portability, and open software standards.)  In effect, contributors, analysts, and end-users must employ every tool available simultaneously. There is no time for the traditional Intelligence Cycle to function. Clark’s [asa link]1933116935[/asa] and  the “fusion cells” in Iraq may offer models for this more focused, collaborative, and time-compressed intelligence process.

This presents management difficulties associated with the resistance to change, training, organisational structure, the introduction of new technology, and outsourcing. Contractors will collect and fact-check data before entering it into an open system for further processing. Portions of intelligence projects will be managed by outside contractors who compile data from many sources and then feed the results into the open system. Contractors will create chronologies, social network maps, link diagrams, and databases, all of which will be available through an open system. Everybody involved with collection will have some contact with the end user or project manager.

These changes are starting to happen in the public sector. If you do competitive intelligence or complex investigations in the private sector, then you need to start changing your work processes or be left behind by your competitors.  Adapt, or become a fossil.

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption, or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement… DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies — which apply to anyone entering the country, including US citizens — are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism… The policies cover ‘any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,’ including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover ‘all papers and other written documentation,’ including books, pamphlets and ‘written materials commonly referred to as “pocket trash…”

It seems the best thing is to keep encrypted files on a network drive at home, and download the needed encrypted data  after crossing the border.

Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful Home Affairs select committee told the BBC: “Such confidential documents should be locked away…they should not be read on trains.”

This should be a reminder to the private sector regarding trade secrets.

Trade Secrets

A trade secret is not protected by a Patent, Trademark, or Industrial Design. A trade secret is confidential and proprietary information that you protect because of its commercial value and the competitive advantage that it produces for your company.

Competitive Intelligence

Exposing a trade secret in public by working on a critical document on an airplane, leaving a trade secret on a commuter train, or exposing it in an proposal, may eliminate the confidential nature of the data, and once you do that, you have, by definition, given up protecting it, therefore, it is not a trade secret that you can claim as proprietary — your former trade secret moves into the public domain for all to see and use.

As a competitive intelligence practitioner, I often find former trade secrets loose in the public domain due to irresponsible security practices. If the owner does not protect the trade secret, it ceases to be confidential and proprietary data, and is likely to become somebody else’s competitive advantage, or worse still, it might become a standard practice for an entire industry.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB “thumb drive” that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer’s Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.

Microsoft did not develop the tools:

COFEE, according to forensic folk who have used it, is simply a suite of 150 bundled off-the-shelf forensic tools that run from a script. None of the tools are new or were created by Microsoft. Microsoft simply combined existing programs into a portable tool that can be used in the field before agents bring a computer back to their forensic lab.Microsoft wouldn’t disclose which tools are in the suite other than that they’re all publicly available, but a forensic expert told me that when he tested the product last year it included standard forensic products like Windows Forensic Toolchest (WFT) and RootkitRevealer.

With COFEE, a forensic agent can select, through the interface, which of the 150 investigative tools he wants to run on a targeted machine. COFEE creates a script and copies it to the USB device which is then plugged into the targeted machine. The advantage is that instead of having to run each tool separately, a forensic investigator can run them all through the script much more quickly and can also grab information (such as data temporarily stored in RAM or network connection information) that might otherwise be lost if he had to disconnect a machine and drag it to a forensics lab before he could examine it.

But given that a U.S. Federal court has ruled that U.S. border guards can search laptop computers without cause, this tool might see wider use than Microsoft anticipated.