Okay, it’s just one month until our 2nd round stories are due for the @jccutthroatfiction competition.  In honor of what is sure to be another fantastic set of stories (and our impending deadline), I’d like to invite my fellow competitors/comrades to share a line or a snippet from their WIP entry.  Here’s mine!

Kathryn shouldn’t have been there while he was away.  She shouldn’t have unlocked his door and snuck inside and been prying around for clues as to where he could have gone, and yet there she was, in the middle of the night, stalking through his apartment by moonlight like a prowler looking for something to steal.  

This is ridiculous, she thought.  “Computer, lights at maximum.”

“Now.  I’m here to find my black dress.  It’s my favorite.  And I might need it later this week,” she said out loud.  “Besides.  I’m dating the man that lives here.  He’s been at my right hand for eight years.  He invited me to live with him not two weeks ago.  If that doesn’t allow me access to his apartment, then what does?”

Chakotay’s plants did not answer.

She walked to the window and drew his blinds closed.

In every way, the place felt like him.  From the lingering aroma of tea and sandlewood incense (inhaled deeply and savored with eyes closed), to the woven blanket that had followed him home from Voyager laid over his favorite armchair (it was oh, so soft against her cheek); from the books on his shelves (yes, she noticed a few were missing), to the freshly pressed shirts in his closet (which she absolutely did not thumb through just to feel the fabric under her fingertips).  

From the way his comforter was arranged so perfectly (folded at the top and tucked neat around the sides), to the feel of his pillow under her own head (and to be sure, it still smelled like him), the apartment was Chakotay and she was attracted to it all like a moth to a flame.

Kathryn wasn’t going to do it.  She told herself before coming here that she would not, under any circumstances, stay more than ten minutes trying to figure out where he had gone and why – under the guise of looking for a dress, of course - and she certainly would not lay down on that well-made bed, snuggle deep into his pillow and drift off into a blissful slumber like she had wanted, but refused to do, so many times before.

And yet.

When the door chimed at 0545 hours, his bed was exactly where she woke with a start.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Star Trek: Voyager Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway, Tom Paris/B'Elanna Torres Characters: Chakotay (Star Trek), Kathryn Janeway, Original Female Character, A few other favorites... Additional Tags: Prompt Fic, J/C Cutthroat Fiction, Song fic, 20+ years later, Reflection Summary:

On the eve of what should be a happy occasion, Chakotay takes a moment to reflect.

I am SO excited to finally be posting this!!  This is my entry in the J/C Cutthroat Fiction Competition.  Thanks @talsi74656 for hosting!

By Craig Timberg, Washington Post, August 11, 2014

The secrets of one of the world’s most prominent surveillance companies, Gamma Group, spilled onto the Internet last week, courtesy of an anonymous leaker who appears to have gained access to sensitive corporate documents. And while they provide illuminating details about the capabilities of Gamma’s many spy tools, perhaps the most surprising revelation is about something the company is unable to do: It can’t hack into your typical iPhone.

Android phones, some Blackberries and phones running older Microsoft operating systems all are vulnerable to Gamma’s spyware, called FinSpy, which can turn your smart phone into a potent surveillance device. Users of the spyware are capable of listening to calls on targeted devices, stealing contacts, activating the microphone, tracking your location and more. But for FinSpy to hack into an iPhone, its owner must have already stripped away much of its built-in security through a process called “jailbreaking.” No jailbreak, no FinSpy on your iPhone, at least according to a leaked Gamma document dated April 2014.

This is good news for people with iPhones, and perhaps for Apple as well. But at a time of rising concern about government surveillance powers, it’s ironic that a different mobile operating system--Google’s Android--has emerged as the global standard, with a dominant share of the world market. Android phones have more features. They come in more shapes, sizes and colors. And they’re cheaper. But, it’s increasingly clear, they are more vulnerable to the Gammas of the world, and from the police and intelligence services that use their tools.

The result is what might be called a growing “Surveillance Gap.” Some civil libertarians have begun pointing out that the people on the safer side of that gap--with stronger protections against the potential for government abuse--are the relatively affluent people who already favor Apple products. Those willing to pay a premium for an iPhone or iPad, perhaps for their design elegance or ease of use, are also getting disk encryption by default, an instant messaging system that resists eavesdropping and an operating system that even powerful surveillance companies have trouble cracking.

Such features don’t tend to star in Apple’s glossy marketing campaigns because most shoppers likely think little about security when choosing their consumer electronics. Yet the consequences can be serious if a government anywhere in the world decides to target you with FinSpy, or if a police officer or border patrol agent attempts to browse through your smartphone--or worse still, copy its entire contents for later examination.

“Technology can protect you from your own government. It can protect you from somebody else’s government. If you live in an authoritarian country, the disk encryption feature built into the [operating system] may be the thing keeping you safe,” Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the ACLU, said in a speech last month. “It may be the thing keeping you from being beaten by the secret police. So it’s vital that these features reach average users.”

The Gamma Group, with headquarters in Germany and the United Kingdom, did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment and has kept quiet generally in the week since a Twitter account--with the obviously bogus name “Phineas Fisher@GammaGroupPR”--first appeared online. (Many of the documents also are posted on Netzpolitik.org, a German site the promotes digital civil rights.)

The files include prices lists for various surveillance products--FinSpy can cost governments nearly $4 million--as well as detailed descriptions of other spy tools and a 126-page user manual for FinSpy. Researchers and journalists combing through some of the leaked documents also have found evidence that FinSpy had been used against lawyers and activists in Bahrain. ProPublica reported it has been deployed on computers in the United States, Britain, Russia and many other countries as well.

Yet the user manual and other documents make clear that even powerful, expensive spyware such as FinSpy have their limits.

That’s why the choice of smartphones matters. Android phones are, by design, open-source systems that give programmers a wide range of powers in making apps work to work how they want them to. Apple, by contrast, controls the development of the hardware and operating system, and it manages what’s available in the App Store more aggressively than Google does for its Play store.

“Android is infinitely more exploitable than” Apple’s operating system, said Bart Stidham, a longtime telecommunications system architect based in Virginia. “Apple is the most vertically integrated technology company in the world. That means they have the ability to control every aspect of their devices, including the security... There are just huge swaths of Android that are outside the control of Google.”

There are nuances to all this. Savvy users can activate disk encryption on Android phones by changing the settings. And all Android phones are much safer when users get their apps only from Google’s Play store rather than third-party stores, which are more likely to contain malicious software.

By Nicole Perlroth, NY Times, March 13, 2013 Last May, two security researchers volunteered to look at a few suspicious e-mails sent to some Bahraini activists. Almost one year later, the two have uncovered evidence that some 25 governments, many with questionable records on human rights, may be using off-the-shelf surveillance software to spy on their own citizens.

Morgan Marquis-Boire, a security researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, and Bill Marczak, a computer science doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the e-mails contained surveillance software that could grab images off computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes. The word "FinSpy" appeared in the spyware code. FinSpy is spyware sold by the Gamma Group, a British company that says it sells monitoring software to governments solely for criminal investigations.

Now, one year later, Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak have found evidence that FinSpy is being run off servers in 25 countries, including Ethiopia and Serbia, without oversight.

Until Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak stumbled upon FinSpy last May, security researchers had tried, unsuccessfully, for a year to track it down. FinSpy gained notoriety in March 2011 after protesters raided Egypt's state security headquarters and discovered a document that appeared to be a proposal by the Gamma Group to sell FinSpy to the government of President Hosni Mubarak .

Martin J. Muench, a Gamma Group managing director, has said his company does not disclose its customers but that Gamma Group sold its technology to governments only to monitor criminals. He said that it was most frequently used "against pedophiles, terrorists, organized crime, kidnapping and human trafficking."

But evidence suggests the software is being sold to governments where the potential for abuse is high. "If you look at the list of countries that Gamma is selling to, many do not have a robust rule of law," Mr. Marquis-Boire said. "Rather than catching kidnappers and drug dealers, it looks more likely that it is being used for politically motivated surveillance."

As of last year, Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak, with other researchers at Rapid7, CrowdStrike and others, had found command-and-control servers running the spyware in just over a dozen countries. They have since scanned the entire Internet for FinSpy.

In Ethiopia, FinSpy was disguised in e-mails that were specifically aimed at political dissidents. The e-mails lured targets to click on pictures of members of Ginbot 7, an Ethiopian opposition group. When they clicked on the pictures, FinSpy downloaded to their machines and their computers began communicating with a local server in Ethiopia.

A Turkmenistan server running the software belonged to a range of I.P. addresses specifically assigned to the ministry of communications. Turkmenistan is the first clear-cut case of a government running the spyware off its own computer system. Human Rights Watch has called Turkmenistan one of the world's "most repressive countries" and warned that dissidents faced "constant threat of government reprisal."

The sale of surveillance technology is still largely unregulated, but Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak's findings have prompted greater scrutiny. Responding to their findings last fall, Germany's foreign minister Guido Westerwelle called for an Europe­wide ban on the export of surveillance technology to repressive regimes. And last month, Privacy International and other groups filed complaints with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development against Gamma Group and Trovicor GmbH, a German company that also sells surveillance software.

Kaspersky experts say that the recently patched Flash Player zero-day exploit is being used to install a piece of spyware on the computers of political dissidents and human rights activists from around the world.

Gamma Group’s surveillance application FinFisher is not the only piece of malware that’s advertised as being legitimate when in reality it’s used by totalitarian regimes to closely monitor the masses.

By Nicole Perlroth, NY Times, August 30, 2012 SAN FRANCISCO--Morgan Marquis-Boire works as a Google engineer and Bill Marczak is earning a Ph.D. in computer science. But this summer, the two men have been moonlighting as detectives, chasing an elusive surveillance tool from Bahrain across five continents.

What they found was the widespread use of sophisticated, off-the-shelf computer espionage software by governments with questionable records on human rights. While the software is supposedly sold for use only in criminal investigations, the two came across evidence that it was being used to target political dissidents.

The software proved to be the stuff of a spy film: it can grab images of computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes. The two men said they discovered mobile versions of the spyware customized for all major mobile phones.

But what made the software especially sophisticated was how well it avoided detection. Its creators specifically engineered it to elude antivirus software made by Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, F-Secure and others.

The software has been identified as FinSpy, one of the more elusive spyware tools sold in the growing market of off-the-shelf computer surveillance technologies that give governments a sophisticated plug-in monitoring operation. Research now links it to servers in more than a dozen countries, including Turkmenistan, Brunei and Bahrain, although no government acknowledges using the software for surveillance purposes.

The market for such technologies has grown to $5 billion a year from "nothing 10 years ago," said Jerry Lucas, president of TeleStrategies, the company behind ISS World, an annual surveillance show where law enforcement agents view the latest computer spyware.

FinSpy is made by the Gamma Group, a British company that says it sells monitoring software to governments solely for criminal investigations.

"This is dual-use equipment," said Eva Galperin, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group. "If you sell it to a country that obeys the rule of law, they may use it for law enforcement. If you sell it to a country where the rule of law is not so strong, it will be used to monitor journalists and dissidents."

Until Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak stumbled upon FinSpy last May, security researchers had tried, unsuccessfully, for a year to track it down. FinSpy gained notoriety in March 2011 after protesters raided Egypt's state security headquarters and discovered a document that appeared to be a proposal by the Gamma Group to sell FinSpy to the government of President Hosni Mubarak for $353,000. It is unclear whether that transaction was ever completed.

Martin J. Muench, a Gamma Group managing director, said his company did not disclose its customers. In an e-mail, he said the Gamma Group sold FinSpy to governments only to monitor criminals and that it was most frequently used "against pedophiles, terrorists, organized crime, kidnapping and human trafficking."

In May, Mr. Marquis-Boire, 32, of San Francisco, and Mr. Marczak, 24, of Berkeley, Calif., volunteered to analyze some suspicious e-mails sent to three Bahraini activists. They discovered all the e-mails contained spyware that reported back to the same command-and-control server in Bahrain. The apparent use of the spyware to monitor Bahraini activists, none of whom had any criminal history, suggested that it had been used more broadly.

Bahrain has been increasingly criticized for human rights abuses. This month, a 16-year-old Bahraini protester was killed in what activists said was a brutal attack by security forces, but which Bahrain's government framed as self-defense.

The findings of the two men came as no surprise to those in the field. "There has been a clear increase in the availability of penetrating cyberattack tools," said Sameer Bhalotra, President Obama's former senior director for cybersecurity who now serves as the chief operating officer of Impermium, a computer security firm. "These were once the realm of the black market and intelligence agencies. Now they are emerging more and more. The problem is that it only requires small changes to apply a surveillance tool for attack, and in this case it looks like dissidents were targeted."

Since publishing their findings, Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak have started receiving malware samples from other security researchers and from activist groups that suspected they may have been targets. In several cases, the two found that the samples reported back to Web sites run by the Gamma Group. But other samples appeared to be actively snooping for foreign governments.

A second set of researchers from Rapid7, of Boston, scoured the Internet for links to the software and discovered it running in 10 more countries. Indeed, the spyware was running off EC2, an Amazon.com cloud storage service. Amazon did not return requests for clarification, but Mr. Marczak and Mr. Marquis-Boire said the server appeared to be a proxy, a way to conceal traffic.

Mr. Marquis-Boire said a Turkmenistan server running the software belonged to a range of I.P. addresses specifically assigned to the ministry of communications. It is the first clear-cut case of a government running the spyware off its own computer system. Human Rights Watch recently called Turkmenistan one of the "world's most repressive countries" and warned that dissidents faced "constant threat of government reprisal."

Ms. Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, "Nobody in their right mind would claim it is O.K. to sell surveillance to Turkmenistan."