The end of President Trump’s time in office leaves his daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well-to-do refugees — but they appear to have plans in New Jersey.
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Tag Archives: Washington (DC)
The National Zoo’s Panda Cub Has a Name: Xiao Qi Ji
The cub had a live birth and a social media following — everything, it seemed, but a name. Until now.
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Audrey Pence, Daughter of Vice President, Marries
The vice president’s youngest child marries Daniel Tomanelli Nov. 1 in a small outdoor ceremony in Washington.
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Trump, Trying to Cling to Power, Fans Unrest and Conspiracies
The president’s refusal to concede has entered a more dangerous phase as he blocks his successor’s transition, withholding intelligence briefings, pandemic information and access to the government.
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Pope Francis Appoints First African-American Cardinal
Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, who led the Roman Catholic Church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis in the early 2000s, was among 13 new cardinals named on Sunday.
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The Women Behind the Million Man March
Behind every great feat in the public record lies an untold story of the unsung foot soldiers.
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Hearings, Protests and Rallies: Washington Grinds On Through the Pandemic
New York Times photographers captured a day of consequential events for all three branches of a government struggling to cope with the coronavirus.
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H.B.C.U. Homecomings Are Canceled, but Students and Alumni Will Feast Anyway
Brunch, a major part of homecoming at historically Black colleges and universities, is still on for this year, even if it has to be virtual.
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White House Ignores Local Mandates, Giving Virus a New Hold in D.C.
The outbreak at the White House and on Capitol Hill underscored how difficult it is for a city with almost no control over the federal government it houses to sustain progress.
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Overlooked No More: Lucy Diggs Slowe, Scholar Who Persisted Against Racism and Sexism
Impelled by her vision of the modern Black woman, Slowe nurtured a post-World War I generation at Howard University to be empowered, self-aware and globally conscious.
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D.C. Statehood Is Good for the Democrats, Good for Democracy
It has to be a priority.
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Applicants say a DC Bar website bug exposed their personal data and background checks
Lawyers applying for a license to practice law in Washington, D.C., say a security lapse by the bar association exposed their application files, including their government-issued IDs and background checks.
Applicants said the District of Columbia Bar, which oversees the admissions and licensing for lawyers practicing in the U.S. capital, was storing the applications in an unprotected directory on its website.
The DC Bar did not respond to multiple emailed requests and a voicemail requesting comment prior to publication.
The security lapse was first disclosed in an August 26 email, obtained by TechCrunch, by an unnamed whistleblower who said they “reported this issue on three separate occasions” to the DC Bar, but that their email was not returned nor was the issue fixed. The email said that documents contained personal information like names, phone numbers, and email addresses, as well as Social Security number, the applicant’s full employment history, previous home addresses, and any disciplinary records.
The whistleblower said they began notifying news outlets “in a good faith effort to notify affected users and ensure the issue is fixed.” TechCrunch obtained the email from a pseudonymous Twitter account that goes by the handle Bar Exam Tracker.
The email said that the security lapse meant that applicants could still access their uploaded application files from the DC Bar website, even after they logged out. But because the application files followed a consistent naming scheme, anyone could access the application files of other applicants by incrementally changing the web address.
“The documents are publicly accessible merely by opening their addresses in a web browser, and are not protected by any authentication system,” the whistleblower’s email wrote.
Word of the security lapse quickly spread among some bar applicants. Two applicants, who agreed to be quoted but asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told TechCrunch that they were able to access their application files after they had logged out.
“We did take some steps to verify it,” said one applicant, referring to the claims in the whistleblower’s email. “A colleague and I both were able to access our documents while not logged into the system through a new browser.”
“Several of us tried it, myself included, and found that it worked,” said another applicant.
The applicants also reported the issue to the DC Bar. Soon after, a notice on the application site said the DC Bar was “investigating some technical issues,” and asked applicants not to upload any files.
The security lapse was subsequently fixed, but the applicants say that the DC Bar has not yet disclosed the security incident.
“Truly can’t believe the bar didn’t notify us of the issue,” one of the applicants said.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia would not say if the DC Bar had notified the office of the security lapse.
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Coronavirus Tracers Beg Residents: Please Answer Your Phones
Spam calls and scammers are more than annoying; they’re hindering efforts to track the coronavirus.
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Barrett’s Record: A Conservative Who Would Push the Supreme Court to the Right
As an appeals court judge, her opinions have reflected those of her mentor, Justice Antonin Scalia, but with few of his occasional liberal rulings.
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A Supreme Court Fight Might Be Exactly What America Needs
From the courts to Congress, we might need fewer embalming norms and more room for victories and defeat.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg Will Lie in State on Friday. Here’s What That Means.
Justice Ginsburg will be the first woman to receive the posthumous tribute, joining a long list of representatives, senators and presidents.
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Outside the Supreme Court, Mourners Honor Ginsburg’s Legacy
People of all ages flocked on Saturday to the building in Washington, leaving flowers, posters and messages scrawled in chalk.
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Mourners Fill Supreme Court’s Plaza to Honor Ginsburg
At a spontaneous vigil in Washington, fans of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg celebrated her life and career, detached from the political moment.
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Eisenhower Memorial, Delayed by Design Disputes, Opens This Week
The memorial in Washington, D.C., pays tribute to the general who led the Allies to victory in Europe during World War II and the president who sought peace after it was over.
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How My 2-Year-Old Planted a Coronavirus Story Idea
After another child at my son’s day care tested positive, I ran into obstacle after obstacle trying to get him a test. I quickly learned I wasn’t alone among concerned parents of young children.
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Investigation of Medicare Chief Exposes Underside of Washington
A yearlong investigation into Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, showed the cozy relations that fuel the nation’s capital at taxpayer expense.
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Trump Moves to Cut Federal Funding From Democratic Cities
The president directed officials to identify “anarchist jurisdictions” and move to withhold funds as he tries to build his campaign around the unrest that has accompanied racial justice protests.
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‘They Stand on the Shoulders of Giants’: The Next Generation to March on Washington
Many protesters came to inspire their children and pass down a legacy of action against racial injustice.
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A Racial Justice March in Washington Hopes to Build on Its 1963 Inspiration
The Commitment March on Friday recalls the March on Washington and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But backers plan more than a commemoration.
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National Zoo Panda Gives Birth
Mei Xiang, a 22-year-old giant panda at the Smithsonian zoo in Washington, D.C., surprised everyone last week when she appeared pregnant.
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The Small, Black-Owned Record Label That Made a Big Impact in 1970s D.C.
A new compilation of music released on Black Fire Records is a vital link between jazz and go-go, the city’s official genre.
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At Least 1 Dead and 20 Wounded in Washington, D.C., Shooting
One person was in critical condition after multiple people opened fire on what appeared to be a block party, the police said.
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Former Saudi Official Accuses the Crown Prince of Trying to Kill Him
Saad Aljabri, a former top intelligence official, filed suit in Washington alleging that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent a team of agents to Canada to kill him.
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Nixon Also Called In the Military Against Protesters
Washington’s police chief took the blame. But Nixon was behind the decision.
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A new technique can detect newer 4G ‘stingray’ cell phone snooping
Security researchers say they have developed a new technique to detect modern cell-site simulators.
Cell site simulators, known as “stingrays,” impersonate cell towers and can capture information about any phone in its range — including in some cases calls, messages and data. Police secretly deploy stingrays hundreds of times a year across the United States, often capturing the data on innocent bystanders in the process.
Little is known about stingrays, because they are deliberately shrouded in secrecy. Developed by Harris Corp. and sold exclusively to police and law enforcement, stingrays are covered under strict nondisclosure agreements that prevent police from discussing how the technology works. But what we do know is that stingrays exploit flaws in the way that cell phones connect to 2G cell networks.
Most of those flaws are fixed in the newer, faster and more secure 4G networks, though not all. Newer cell site simulators, called “Hailstorm” devices, take advantage of similar flaws in 4G that let police snoop on newer phones and devices.
Some phone apps claim they can detect stingrays and other cell site simulators, but most produce wrong results.
But now researchers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have discovered a new technique that can detect Hailstorm devices.
Enter the EFF’s latest project, dubbed “Crocodile Hunter” — named after Australian nature conservationist Steve Irwin who was killed by a stingray’s barb in 2006 — helps detect cell site simulators and decodes nearby 4G signals to determine if a cell tower is legitimate or not.
Every time your phone connects to the 4G network, it runs through a checklist — known as a handshake — to make sure that the phone is allowed to connect to the network. It does this by exchanging a series of unencrypted messages with the cell tower, including unique details about the user’s phone — such as its IMSI number and its approximate location. These messages, known as the master information block (MIB) and the system information block (SIB), are broadcast by the cell tower to help the phone connect to the network.
“This is where the heart of all of the vulnerabilities lie in 4G,” said Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist at the EFF, who headed the research.
Quintin and fellow researcher Yomna Nasser, who authored the EFF’s technical paper on how cell site simulators work, found that collecting and decoding the MIB and SIB messages over the air can identify potentially illegitimate cell towers.
This became the foundation of the Crocodile Hunter project.
A rare public photo of a stingray, manufactured by Harris Corp. Image Credits: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Crocodile Hunter is open-source, allowing anyone to run it, but it requires a stack of both hardware and software to work. Once up and running, Crocodile Hunter scans for 4G cellular signals, begins decoding the tower data, and uses trilateration to visualize the towers on a map.
But the system does require some thought and human input to find anomalies that could identify a real cell site simulator. Those anomalies can look like cell towers appearing out of nowhere, towers that appear to move or don’t match known mappings of existing towers, or are broadcasting MIB and SIB messages that don’t seem to make sense.
That’s why verification is important, Quintin said, and stingray-detecting apps don’t do this.
“Just because we find an anomaly, doesn’t mean we found the cell site simulator. We actually need to go verify,” he said.
In one test, Quintin traced a suspicious-looking cell tower to a truck outside a conference center in San Francisco. It turned out to be a legitimate mobile cell tower, contracted to expand the cell capacity for a tech conference inside. “Cells on wheels are pretty common,” said Quintin. “But they have some interesting similarities to cell site simulators, namely in that they are a portable cell that isn’t usually there and suddenly it is, and then leaves.”
In another test carried out earlier this year at the ShmooCon security conference in Washington, D.C. where cell site simulators have been found before, Quintin found two suspicious cell towers using Crocodile Hunter: One tower that was broadcasting a mobile network identifier associated with a Bermuda cell network and another tower that didn’t appear to be associated with a cell network at all. Neither made much sense, given Washington, D.C. is nowhere near Bermuda.
Quintin said that the project was aimed at helping to detect cell site simulators, but conceded that police will continue to use cell site simulators for as long as the cell networks are vulnerable to their use, an effort that could take years to fix.
Instead, Quintin said that the phone makers could do more at the device level to prevent attacks by allowing users to switch off access to legacy 2G networks, effectively allowing users to opt-out of legacy stingray attacks. Meanwhile, cell networks and industry groups should work to fix the vulnerabilities that Hailstorm devices exploit.
“None of these solutions are going to be foolproof,” said Quintin. “But we’re not even doing the bare minimum yet.”
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Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon C.E.O.s Are Testifying Before Congress. Here’s What to Know.
The C.E.O.s are likely to argue before Congress that their companies aren’t anticompetitive. Here are the facts.
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House Votes to Create a National Museum of the American Latino
Plans for a museum devoted to the history and contributions of Latinos in the United States began forming in the 2000s, but legislation had not gained traction in Congress until now.
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Government Denies Cohen Was Imprisoned to Stop Trump Book
The denial came in response to a lawsuit filed by Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, that said he was being punished for speaking out.
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When China Met Iran
A growing partnership between America’s main Middle East adversary and Asia’s rising superpower bears careful watching in Washington.
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Dorothy Parker’s Ashes Could Be Moved. Again.
The writer’s ashes may be disinterred when the N.A.A.C.P. moves its headquarters to Washington from Baltimore. But where should they go?
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At the Hirshhorn, a Battle Over Plans for Its Sculpture Garden
The museum is going ahead with meetings on a design by the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto that preservationists say would undo key features of postwar landscape design by Lester Collins.
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Riots Long Ago, Luxury Living Today
High-end development has transformed some Black neighborhoods decades after they were scarred by unrest. And not by coincidence.
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When Washington Helped Small Business, Washington Was Helped
The loan program to help firms keep paying their workers had many beneficiaries. Among them was the capital’s permanent political class.
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Despite Coronavirus, Federal Workers Head to the Office
Federal employees are being ushered back to office buildings under inconsistent and conflicting reopening plans, against the wishes of leaders in the nation’s capital.
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I’m a Direct Descendant of Thomas Jefferson. Take Down His Memorial.
Monticello is shrine enough for a man who wrote that “all men are created equal” and yet never did much to make those words come true.
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FedEx Joins Push for Washington Redskins to Be Renamed
The shipping giant paid $205 million for the naming rights to FedEx Field under a sponsorship deal that began in 1999.
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Activists Push for Removal of Statue of Freed Slave Kneeling Before Lincoln
The Emancipation Memorial, intended to commemorate the end of slavery, has prompted a thorny debate over what the interaction between the two figures conveys.
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House Approves D.C. Statehood in Historic Vote
It is the first time a chamber of Congress has approved establishing the nation’s capital as the 51st state. The measure is all but certain to die in the Republican-led Senate.
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Inside Barr’s Effort to Undermine Prosecutors in N.Y.
The firing of the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan was foreshadowed by a disagreement over a case linked to President Trump.
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After Federal Crackdown on Protests, House Will Vote on Making D.C. a State
Democratic leaders announced a vote on June 26 on granting statehood to the District of Columbia, the first such action in more than 25 years.
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One Big Difference About George Floyd Protests: Many White Faces
Early demographic data shows a significant presence of white protesters.
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Washington, D.C., Deserves Statehood
Trump transformed my hometown into a war zone, underscoring the imperative that the capital should be the 51st state.
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‘You Have to Be Willing to Get a Bit Uncomfortable’: How a Reporter Covers a Protest
A lot of thought goes into how best to capture the scene and the individual stories behind it, but in the end, anything can happen.
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View Pictures of the George Floyd Protests Nationwide
George Floyd’s death continued to resonate far beyond Minneapolis, where he died. In Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Ferguson, Mo., Portland, Ore., Los Angeles and countless other cities, demonstrations raged.
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Bonfire of Trump’s Vanity
George Floyd. Say his name.
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