Andrew Auernheimer, also known as “Weev”, was convicted of identify fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization last week for using a script to collect the email addresses of 114,000 iPad AT&T left (albeit accidentally) unencrypted on the internet and available to anyone with a web browser. Auernheimer is the opposite of a traditionally sympathetic character: He’s a self professed troll and hacker who once headed a group with an incredibly racist and homophobic name, spouts anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and comes across as a delusional fabulist in a recent profile by Gawker’s Adrian Chen.

 

And yet his conviction has spread a creeping chill through the cybersecurity community, largely due the possible threat it poses to its future. Many security researchers spend countless hours hunting for vulnerabilities to exploit in exchange for cred from their peers or bounty cash from vendors, living in delicate symbiosis with the companies whose flaws they uncover. Security researcher Matt Blaze sums up the situation nicely in an opinion piece about the Auernheimer case for Wired:

“Because computer science has yet to discover a systematic way to find and fix all the vulnerabilities in real-world systems before they get deployed, independent security researchers who discover and report weaknesses have become an essential part of the security ecosystem. Continually poking at systems to seek out hidden flaws is the only hope we have of staying ahead of the bad guys, and the software industry has largely come to recognize that the motley assortment of academics, consultants, and hackers who look for security holes are a community to be cultivated and encouraged – even if the proof of vulnerability they bring may sometimes be painful and embarrassing.”

Now, Auernheimer is by no means a pillar of responsibility in the hacker community. He went straight to the press with the vulnerability rather than notifying AT&T, and chat logs show him apparently gleeful at the prospect of making AT&T’s life difficult. But when anyone, even someone who has burned as many bridges as Auernheimer, is convicted for the same day-to-day activities members of the cybersecurity community do in their line of work, of course it raises concerns, particularly because Blaze and many others in the community credit AT&T’s pain and embarrassment over their security faux pas with Auernheimer’s conviction — not malice or wrongdoing on his part. After all, the information he was convicted for obtaining wasn’t actually secured in anyway, some experts have even compared it to the crawling of sites done by Google.

By going after Auernheimer, the government sent a signal to the hacker community that even if you don’t do anything nefarious in your exploits they can and will take you down — and that threat to the community is bad for security in the long term because if the “good guys” don’t feel they can ply their trade without the risk of prosecution, it leaves more vulnerabilities waiting for people who would rather exploit than expose them. Certainly, one of the last high profile cases involving someone being arrested for exposing a vulnerability, United States v. ElcomSoft and Sklyarov, didn’t work out well for anyone involved, including the company trying to protect its assets. Who knows how many security researchers will lay low this time, waiting to see how the Auernheimer case shakes out? They may not have to wait long, Auernheimer is appealing.

The list of former Israeli officials in support of direct negotiations between the U.S. and Iran on the nuclear issue continues to grow as Yoel Guzansky, a former Iran adviser for the Israeli Prime Minister, and Oded Eran, a former Israeli ambassador to the European Union, in an Israeli newspaper earlier this month endorsed bilateral talks.

In October, the New York Times reported on an agreement “in principle” for negotiations between Iran and the U.S. after the U.S. elections. Both the administration and Iran subsequently denied the agreement’s existence.

Yesterday, Al-Monitor translated Guzansky and Eran’s piece which originally ran on November 15, which highlighted the need for Israel to support a diplomatic approach:

“Israel can contribute to the efforts to solve the Iranian issue [via diplomacy] by reaching an understanding with the United States on the time frame for direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran, if indeed the opportunity arises for conducting such direct talks, as well as on the political elements of any agreement reached and on the room for maneuver allowed with respect to any of these constituent elements.”

Amos Yadlin, a former high-level Israeli military official, recently embraced Iran-U.S. talks, writing that it is significant that the Iranians are considering direct negotiations:

“This degree of backpedalling, a complete U-turn from its official policy, is indicative of the effectiveness of the pressure exerted on Iran, and a signal of its capacity to bring about real change in the country’s policy.”

Still others, like Israel’s current Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, have indicated a willingness to back talks, saying earlier this month that there “could be direct negotiations with Iran.” Efraim Halevy, the former director of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, lent his support to negotiations as well:

“I realized that dialogue with an enemy is essential. There is nothing to lose. Although the claim was, if you talk to them, you legitimize them. But by not talking to them, you don’t de-legitimate them. So this convinced me, that we all have been very superficial in dealing with our enemies. Not everything you try succeeds. But you have to be willing to try.”

The Obama administration has pursued a diplomatic approach to Iran, believing that such a strategy provides “the best and most permanent” route to a solution to the nuclear issue. An attack on Iran, as some former Israeli officials have pointed out, could actually push Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. Though the U.S. finds a nuclear armed Iran an unacceptable threat to global security, the opportunity for diplomacy remains as the U.S., Israel, and U.N. have repeatedly stated that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Emerging from talks with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, Senate Republicans have a new line of attack on Libya: if it was unclear what happened in Benghazi, why say anything at all in the aftermath?

The newest salvo comes from Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) after a very short-lived detente with the Obama administration on the response to the Sept. 11 assault in Libya.

The three met with Rice behind closed doors on Capitol Hill today and emerged with a new attack campaign, declaring that they only had “more questions” about what the administration knew and when.

“The American people got bad information on Sept. 16,” Graham said during a press conference today, referring to Rice’s Sept. 16 appearances on the Sunday talk shows. “And the question is ‘Should they have been giving information at all?’ If you can give nothing but bad information, isn’t it better to give no information?”

Rather than acknowledging that the intelligence community had vetted and aided in the drafting of Rice’s unclassified talking points that day, the senators in the post-meeting press conference instead chose to fault Rice for not only failing to be more critical of the assessment she was given but for not potentially revealing classified information:

AYOTTE: What troubles me also, the changes made to the unclassified talking points were misleading. But just to be clear, when you have a position where you’re Ambassador to the United Nations, you go well beyond unclassified talking points in your daily preparation and responsibilities for that job. And that’s troubling to me as well, why she wouldn’t have asked “I’m the person that doesn’t know about this, I’m going on every single show?” But in addition, it’s not just the talking points that were unclassified, but clearly it was part of her responsibility as Ambassador to the United Nations to review much more than that.

Ayotte’s determination echoes a growing belief among the right-wing that Rice should have “known better” than to take the talking points provided by the intelligence community at face value or that she should have divulged material that was classified at the time to the American people.

But this brand-new determination that Rice should have strayed from the talking points given to her on Sept. 16 has already spread among the GOP. Senate Minority Whip John Kyl (R-AZ) called Rice a “puppet” of the administration in an interview with National Review Online:

“Is she such a puppet that she had no questions about the information she was given?” Kyl asks, in an interview at Newseum, where he is participating in the Foreign Policy Initiative’s annual forum. “What she said was deceptive, misleading, and wrong.”

However, during the five interviews she gave on Sept. 16, Rice consistently made clear that what was being presented were only initial conclusions and could still change. While the facts continue to exonerate Rice and the Obama administration on this issue, in the face of continual shouting by conservatives that a conspiracy of some sort took place surrounding Benghazi, the majority of Americans believe that’s not the case.

Two of the Israeli government’s most reliable critics of an Iran strike were swept out of power during Monday’s Likud party primary, replaced by hard-right members of the Knesset (MKs) on both Iran and Israeli West Bank settlements. According to a Reuters report, the defeated members, Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, were staunch opponents of a strike on Iran, and “their likely ouster could point to a strategic shift closer to confrontation.” Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf notes that hardliners now make up almost all of the MK candidates in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party:

All the so-called Likud “moderates,” except for Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, were pushed out of the top seed and will probably be out of the Knesset; that includes ministers Benny Begin, Michael Eitan and Dan Meridor. The most vocal backbenchers – those behind attacks on the left, Arabs and human rights NGOs – won the day. The Likud looks right now like the Tea Party’s dream team.

Another analyst of Israeli politics, Michael Koplow, argues that the Likud primary “makes an Israeli strike on Iran a lot more likely” because the “security cabinet [may flip] from being divided down the middle to being nearly unanimous in favor of a strike.” Likud, which for the first time this year is forming a joint party with the conservative nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, is widely expected to be the big winners in Israel’s general election in January.

High-ranking Israeli officials have recently indicated that the pressure-and-negotiations approach currently employed by the Obama administration could lead to a successful diplomatic resolution of the nuclear crisis. There is some tentative evidence Iran might be open to a negotiated solution. Given the terrible consequences of war, the U.S. government believes diplomacy is “the best and most permanent” way to resolve the nuclear issue.

A new CNN poll has found that a majority of Americans do not think the Obama administration intentionally misled the public in explaining what happened in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks on U.S. assets in Benghazi, Libya in September.

Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and Fox News have been engaged in an all out attack campaign against U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and other Obama administration officials to try to convince Americans that the White House was trying to execute a Watergate-style cover up of the U.S. response to the Benghazi attacks. But the CNN poll has found that it failed:

On Libya, 54% of the country is dissatisfied with the administration’s response to the Benghazi attack, with only four in ten saying they’re satisfied with the way the White House handled the matter.

“But that dissatisfaction is not because Americans see a cover-up,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Only 40% believe that the inaccurate statements that administration officials initially made about the Benghazi attack were an attempt to deliberately mislead the public. Fifty-four percent think those inaccurate statements reflected what the White House believed to be true at the time.”

News of the CNN poll comes as Rice will meet today with McCain and two other Republican senators who have been most vocal in attacking the U.N. ambassador on Libya, Lindsey Graham (SC) and Kelly Ayotte (NH).

McCain vowed to block Rice’s potential nomination as the next Secretary of State but has since backed away from that pledge after facts emerged to undermine his claim that Rice and Obama administration officials lied about Benghazi. McCain said on Sunday that he would give Rice the “benefit” of explaining her position. But the Washington Post reports that Ayotte is still holding out . “I would hold the [Rice] nomination until I got sufficient answers,” Ayotte said.