Hackszine.com: Government Archives

Archive: Government

May 4, 2008

Videos from past DEFCONs

I wasn't able to make it to last years DEFCON hacker/security conference, and DEFCON 16 isn't until later this summer. As you can imagine, I've been a little impatient for a good ol' info-security paranoia fix. Thankfully, it looks like a ton of videos from past conferences have been posted to the DEFCON site. This might be pretty interesting to even the die-hards in the crowd who religiously attend. Having been to a couple of these, it's pretty hard (read: impossible) to get into all the sessions you would like to hit.

The more recent content is encoded as mp4's. Unfortunately, you'll need Real Player to view much of the older content. It's better than nothing, though.

It also looks like there have been a number of sessions from DEFCON 15 encoded and uploaded to Google Video. I've included a link to a list of these below as well.

Defcon Media Archives: 1993 - Present
Links to DefCon 15 Session and Panel Videos on Google Video

February 28, 2008

Detecting forged photos algorithmically

John Graham-Cumming posted an automated tool for detecting "Clone Tool" Photoshop forgeries. Photojournalism ethics issues (LInk, Link) aside, John had some ulterior motives:

I was motivated to work on this program by greed (or at least my never-ending love of having a little flutter on things). Best of the Best runs spot-the-ball competitions in airports to win very expensive cars. But they also run the same competition online. That meant I could get my hands on the actual image used... could I process it to discover where the ball had been removed? (In reality, this isn't the right way to win because the actual ball position is not governed by where it actually was, but where a judge thinks it was).
Would it be cheating if I could? Apparently not, the competition rules say I should use my skill and judgment in determining the ball position. Surely, skill covers my programming ability.

So, I went looking for tampering algorithms and eventually came across Detection of Copy-Move Forgery in Digital Images written by Jessica Fridrich at SUNY Binghamton. The paper describes an algorithm for detecting just the sort of changes I thought I was looking for.

Essentially the algorithm cuts the image into a bunch of 16x16 chunks and runs each chunk through a discrete cosine transform. The DCTed chunks are compressed and sorted, and the algorithm looks for multiple matching chunks that were shifted the same direction and distance, highlighting the source image if a large number of matches are found.

Another blogger, jjwiseman, released a speed optimization for John's code, which he successfully used on the infamous Adnan Hajj Reuters images. While the algorithm is able to detect this style of manipulation, it's noted that it has a habit of returning false positives in images with a blurry background.

That said, it'd be pretty interesting to run this through a big database of news photos and see what turns up.

Detection of Copy-Move Forgery in Digital Images - Link (PDF)
John Graham-Cumming's Clone Tool Detector - Link
Protecting Journalistic Integrity Algorithmically (jjwiseman's update) - Link

January 29, 2007

10 Government Hacks

Be Government

U.S. government data is some of the most important open source information in the world. And, if you paid taxes in the U.S., you helped pay for this data. For his talk at OSCON last July, Carl Malamud explained a few hacks that provide the extra shove the government sometimes needs to make this information available. He's since posted his slides and notes for his presentation. Hack #1 is "Be Media":

Often, if you want to record audio or video or even just get in the door to some official function, you have to present your bona fides ahead of time. The trick to this hack is that they will always say no and you have to just keep asking until they realize you won't go away.

I've long had an interest in Internet [and] Governance, so when I heard the United Nations was throwing a big party called WSIS on the topic, I figured I'd go see how the pros did it. I'm not really a journalist, but I've played one on the Internet, so I got O'Reilly & Associates to name me their international tech reporter and applied for credentials. O'Reilly didn't make the cut as "bona fide media," so I reapplied as a stringer for the second-largest English-language newspaper in Bangkok.

I made it to Tunisia and covered the summit. It was not a pretty picture, as I reported for the Bangkok Post. A few months later, I was invited to give a talk on 10 ways to hack government at O'Reilly's OSCON conference, so I brought some footage of Tunisia with me to illustrate this hack, the moral of which was that they could easily have cancelled the whole summit and just given Nick the money to buy some laptops.

It's too bad to see that O'Reilly didn't qualify as bona fide media, but it's inspiring to see such detailed hacks for aspiring citizen journalists and grass-roots activists. Here's the whole list of hacks from Carl's talk:

Hack #1: Be Media (Internet Governance in Nutshell
Hack #2: Get Standing (Somebody Stole the Attic)
Hack #3: Be Government
Hack #4: Adopt the FCC
Hack #5: Enforce ODF by Proxy
Hack #6: Audit the Feds
Hack #7: Link Check the Feds (Link Check the Mayor)
Hack #8: Annotate Hearings
Hack #9: Hold Hearings
Hack #10: Map Spectrum (Summation)

(Thanks, Gordon!)

UPDATE

Over on the O'Reilly Radar, Tim O'Reilly provides great synopses of each hack, as well as pointing to Carl's summation:

The hacks all have a point, and that point is that government should be less about private interests and more about the public interest. The skills we use in the open source world are tools of civic engagement, tools of citizenship. And, if we apply those skills of engagement to our government, it is possible, at least sometimes, to drag the political system (kicking and screaming perhaps) towards the common good.