Experts plan to fix King Tut mask after glue gaffe

Experts plan to fix King Tut mask after glue gaff

The head of the conservation department at the Egyptian Museum was demoted to a low-profile post in the wake of an inappropriate restoration of the 3,000 year-old funerary mask of King Tutankhamun using household epoxy glue.

Elham Abdelrahman, who supervised restoration work at the museum of over 180,000 artifacts, was transferred to the Royal Carriages Museum in the Citadel of Saladin, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty announced Thursday.

Damaty also referred other conservators involved in the irresponsible repair of the golden mask to investigations, and stressed that legal proceedings would follow.

Abdelrahman was replaced by Saeed Abdel Hamed, who was head of restoration department at the Coptic Museum.




 Images of the mask showing conspicuous globs of glue around the gap between the braided beard and the chin recently circulated on social media and drew sharp criticism.

Last week, media outlets reported the mask’s beard broke off in 2014 and was hastily glued back on by conservation staff. Moreover, the piece was reattached with epoxy, which, while sometimes used, is considered a debatable material among conservators.

Damaty said in a press conference Sunday that Tutankhamun’s mask is safe and the reaction to the incident was “overexcited and unjustified” and would have a negative impact for Egypt’s reputation and tourism sector.

#Muslim woman attacked on Vienna train

A 37-year-old Muslim woman from Vienna has complained to police after being attacked by a woman whilst travelling on Vienna’s metro.

Zeliha Cicek

She believes that the woman, who hit her in the face, did so because she was wearing a headscarf. Police said they believed the attacker was “disturbed”.

Zeliha Cicek is the third Muslim to have been assaulted in Vienna in the last month.

Cicek, a school teacher and mother of three children, is ethnically Turkish. She said she was talking to her sister on an U3 underground train on her mobile phone when the woman started shouting at her in English. “I calmly told her she could speak to me in German and suddenly she stood up and slapped me in the face. I dropped my phone and it broke, I was so shocked,” she said.

An English man came to Cicek’s aid but the angry woman scratched his face. She got out of the train at Stephansplatz – and despite Cicek screaming that she had attacked her the woman was able to flee without being stopped.

Cicek told the Kurier newspaper that she didn’t believe that the woman was drunk or mad. “The English man also thought that she had a problem with me wearing the headscarf,” she said.

In August two elderly Muslim ladies wearing headscarves were attacked in Favoritenstraße. Police were reportedly slow to respond to this incident, and only began questioning suspects days after.

Austria’s Islamic Religious Community Association said that Muslims often experience discrimination in Austria but that “it is not well documented”. Spokeswoman Carla Amina Baghajati said that the association plans to start collecting data on all religiously motivated incidents. However, she said she did not believe that the police lacked sensitivity to the issue.

Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner again warned against the “spread of hatred and incitement by populists. They become complicit when it comes to attacks on innocent people.”

Central African Republic in Massacre against #Muslims

(RNS) Churches in Central African Republic are caring for thousands of Muslims who have been trapped in a cycle of revenge attacks, perpetrated by a pro-Christian militia.

Since December, Anti-Balaka militias have been emptying Muslim quarters and avenging earlier attacks by the Seleka, an Islamist militia. The Seleka rampaged through the country in early 2013, terrorizing Christians and ransacking churches, hospitals and shops.

Now that the Muslim president Michel Djotodia has stepped down, Seleka is being forced to withdraw from its strongholds, as the center of power shifts, amid a mass exodus and displacement of Muslims.

In Baoro, a town in the northwest, a Roman Catholic parish is caring for more than 2,000 Muslims who can’t flee. A group of Catholic sisters in the town of Bossemptele is sheltering more than 500 Muslims, providing food, water and medicine.

“Now is the time for [people] of good will to stand up and prove the strength and quality of their faith,” the Rev. Xavier Fagba, a priest in Baoro, told the BBC.

One reason Muslims are able to take shelter in churches is because the country’s religious leaders believe this is a nonreligious conflict, said the Rev. Nicolas Guerekoyame-Gbango, president of the Alliance of Evangelical Churches in the Central African Republic.

“We have been traveling to the provinces telling people to understand this is not a religious conflict,” said Guerekonyame-Gbango. “This is contributing some tolerance, although many people, including Christians, have taken up arms. This is regrettable.”

 

Roman Catholic Archbishop Dieudonne Nzapalainga of the Bangui Archdiocese has welcomed Imam Omar Kobine Layama, president of the country’s Islamic Community, to live with him in the church compound.

“I live alongside him and I ask Christians to do likewise,” Nzapalainga said in a statement Tuesday (Feb. 18) for Caritas, the international relief organization. “Love should be a characteristic of Christians. You can’t call yourself a Christian if you kill your brother. You can’t call yourself a Christian when you hunt him down.”

Last week, CAR interim President Catherine Samba-Panza said she was “going to war” with the Anti-Balaka, who she described as having replaced a “sense of their mission” with warfare and killings.

#Egypt Cuts Diplomatic Ties to #Syria #Morsi

The Egyptian government has announced it’s severing all ties to the Syrian government and backing the rebel fight seeking to oust Bashar al-Assad. On Saturday, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi told supporters he’s closing the Syrian embassy in Cairo and recalling his government’s envoy from Damascus.

--> Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi: "The Syrian people are facing a campaign of extermination and planned ethnic cleansing, fed by regional and international states who do not care for the Syrian citizen. The people of Egypt support the struggle of the Syrian people, materially and morally. And Egypt — its nation, leadership and army — will not abandon the Syrian people until it achieves its rights and dignity."

In his comments, Morsi also

 called on the international community to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria and urged all Hezbollah members fighting alongside Assad’s forces to return to Lebanon. In response, the Syrian government said Morsi has joined the "conspiracy and incitement led by the United States and Israel against Syria." The U.S. has denied pressuring Egypt on Syria.

World Press Freedom Day

Journalists who have died while pursuing their trade have been remembered on the 20th annual World Press Freedom day.

In Mexico supporters rallied for crime reporter Regina Martinez. The correspondent for news magazine Proceso was found beaten and strangled to death in her home in Xalapa, in eastern Veracruz state in 2012.

Last month, Jorge Antonio Hernandez Silva was sentenced to 38-years in prison for her murder during an apparent botched robery.

But colleagues of Ms Martinez maintain that she was killed because of her journalistic work.

Meanwhile American Marie Colvin and Mika Yamamoto of Japan have been named “World Press Freedom Heroes” by the International Press Institute.

They are among 39 journalists killed in the Syrian conflict last year.

Those who have been incarcerated because of their work by authoritarian regimes are also being remembered, such as the 16 journalists kidnapped in Iran recently.

UN secretary General Ban Ki-moon, praised members of the media and spoke of a new inter-governmental plan to protect them: “There is more that we can do, including greater protections through the rule of law. I urge all involved to do their utmost to translate the words of the plan into actions on the ground that will create a safer environment for the press.”

There have been some good news stories for press freedom however.

For example, since last month people in Myanmar have access to private daily newspapers for the first time in half a century.

A practical guide to protecting your identity and security when using mobile phones

Many activists have been tracked via their mobile phones, and some countries conduct surveillance more extensively than others. You need to assess the risk for your own activities given the practices used in your country, how high-profile your work is, and what others in your community have experienced.

Phone companies have the capability to track and collect information about your use of mobile phones, including your location, and may share that information with the government if so requested. There is also the possibility of installing surveillance software on a phone that runs in the background without the user noticing. There is a risk of this, if your handset has been physically out of your hands for a period of time.

When your phone is on, it is constantly communicating the following information with towers nearby:

• The IMEI number – a number that uniquely identifies your phone’s hardware
• The IMSI number – a number that uniquely identifies the SIM card - this is what your phone number is tied to.
• The TMSI number, a temporary number that is re-assigned regularly according to location or coverage changes but can be tracked by commercially available eavesdropping systems.
• The network cell in which the phone is currently located. Cells can cover any area from a few meters to several kilometers, with much smaller cells in urban areas and even small cells in buildings that use a repeater aerial to improve signal indoors.
• The location of the subscriber within that cell, determined by triangulating the signal from nearby masts. Again, location accuracy depends on the size of the cell - the more masts in the area, the more accurate the positioning.

Because of this, when your phone is on and communicating with the network towers, it can be used as a surveillance device for those with access to the information that telecoms collect, including:

• Your phone calls received and sent
• Your SMS received and sent, including the information of senders and recipients
• Any data services you use (e.g., web browsing activities if not using HTTPS, unsecured instant messaging) as well as the volume of data transferred e.g., “did you upload to YouTube”)
• Your approximate location (from within a few meters to a few km depending upon density of towers)

It is important to note that if you think you are being tracked, it is not always enough to switch SIM cards, as you can be tracked by the ID (IMEI) of your mobile device/handset alone. There is also a lot of information on your phone that may be used against you if the phone is confiscated or taken from you. All mobile phones have a small amount of storage space on the SIM card, as well as internal phone memory. (In addition, some phones have a SD (or microSD) storage card for multimedia files.) In general, storing data on the SIM card and SD card (if available) is better than storing internally on the phone, because you can more easily remove and destroy

Data stored on your SIM, internal phone memory, and SD storage card (if present) include:

• Your phone book - contact names and telephone number
• Your call history - who you called, who called you, and what time the call was placed
• SMS you have sent or received
• Data from any applications you use, such as a calendar or to-do list
• Photos or video that you have taken using the phone camera, if your phones has one. Most phones store the time the photo was taken, and may also include location information.

For phones that allow web browsing, you should also consider how much of your browsing history is stored on the phone. If possible, do not keep a browsing history. Emails are a further potential danger should an attacker obtain access to the SIM card or phone memory.

Like the hard drive in a computer, the SIM memory of your mobile phone keeps any data ever saved on it until it is full, when old data gets written over. This means that even deleted SMS, call records and contacts can potentially be recovered from the SIM. (There is a free application to do this using a smartcard reader). The same applies to phones that have additional memory, either built into the phone or using a memory card. As a rule, the more storage a phone has, the longer deleted items will be retrievable.

So what does this mean for you?

Mobile phones can be powerful tools for activists, but they can also be incredible liabilities if the government or security forces are actively working with telecoms to track you. If you are in a country that uses mobiles extensively for surveillance, especially if you think you are being closely watched for high-profile activities, it’s recommended that you don’t use mobile phones to communicate. Conduct meetings face-to-face.

Ultimately, the risks you take are up to you: if you don’t think you’re being targeted as a high- profile activist or as part of a larger surveillance campaign and want to use your phone to communicate with fellow activists, record photos and video, or pass on information, you can use the following tactics:

• Create and use a code word system to communicate with fellow activists. Use “beeping” as a system for communication with fellow activists (calling once or twice and hanging up in order to let someone know you’ve arrived at a location, are safe, etc.)
• Don’t use the real names for fellow activists in your address book; give them numbers or pseudonyms. This way if your phone or SIM card is taken by security forces, they don’t have your entire network of fellow activists in hand.
• Bring back-up SIM cards with you to protests if you know they are being confiscated and it’s important that you have a working cell phone with you at an event. If you have to get rid of a SIM card, try to physically destroy it.
• If your phone can be locked with a password, use it. This can also be your SIM card’s PIN number: SIM cards comes with a default PIN number; if you can, change the default PIN number and enable PIN locking on your SIM. You’ll then be required to enter a password (your PIN number) each time you use your phone.
• If you think a protest is going to meet with an increased crackdown by security forces, you may want to put it in airplane mode while at an event; you won’t be able to send or receive calls, but you can still capture video and photographs and upload them to online sites later. This tactic is also useful if you think security forces are cracking down on everyone with a cell phone at an event. Later on the government can request call/SMS or data records for all individuals who were in a particular location at a particular time in order to perform mass arrests.
• Turn off location tracking and geotagging for various applications unless you are using this feature as part of a targeted project to geotag certain media at an event as part of an action. If you are using your cell phone to stream video live, turn off the GPS/geotagging option (Directions for Bambuser.)
• If you have a phone that runs on the Android Operating System, you can use a number of tools to encrypt web browsing, instant messaging, SMS, and voice calls via the tools created by the Guardian Project and Whispersys. When using your mobile device to browse the web, use HTTPS whenever possible.

Note for BlackBerry users:

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) provides two types of accounts with corresponding levels of encryption. For ordinary individual consumers, there has never been true end-to-end encryption on your BlackBerry communications – RIM or your mobile provider can always intercept your calls, emails, SMS, web browsing, etc. By way of contrast, enterprise users whose company uses a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) will have end-to- end encryption on their email, messenger (BBM), and web browsing. However, if you’re an Enterprise user, keep in mind that whoever runs your company’s server, typically your IT admin, has the means to decrypt all of your communications, and there are a variety of legal (and not so legal) processes which a government can use to get your decrypted communications. Recently the UAE tried to force Research in Motion to give them the mechanism to decrypt all BlackBerry communications, but RIM has refused to do so. BlackBerry users should keep up to date on any news of negotiations between their government and RIM on these issues. They should also be aware of other attempts to intercept encrypted BlackBerry communications. In 2009, UAE’s Etisalat sent BlackBerry users an unofficial “update” that allowed the telecom to receive copies of all users’ messages. RIM soon sent users an update that removed the fraudulent software, but BlackBerry users should be aware of any suspicious software updates that do not come directly from RIM.

This article is an extract of Access Now handbook, A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO PROTECTING YOUR IDENTITY AND SECURITY ONLINE AND WHEN USING MOBILE PHONES. It was written for citizens in the Middle East and North Africa who want to use technology safely to communicate, organize, and share data (news reports, information, media, etc.) – but it can be used by anyone online anywhere who wants to protect their privacy and security. Download the complete handbook English, Russian, Vietnamese, Korean, Polski, Indonesian.

More resources

• Tactical Tech’s Mobiles in a Box (English)
• MobileActive’s Mobile Security Risks Primer (English)
• Jhack.info (English, French)

Files: 

protecting-security-online-english.pdf

protecting-security-online-russian.pdf

protecting-security-online-vietnamese.pdf

protecting-security-online-indonesian.pdf

protecting-security-online-korean.pdf

protecting-security-online-polski.pdf