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Report: Data Mining Ineffective Anti-Terrorist Tool - Via CDT - PolicyBeta:
A new National Research Council report cautions that government data mining programs cannot effectively identify patterns of terrorist activity. Pattern-based or predictive data mining was singled out as likely to generate huge numbers of useless leads. Because of this, the authors warned, pattern-based data mining should not be used to deny a person rights and liberties. This mirrors past conclusions that CDT and others have drawn about data mining efficacy.
The Committee that drafted the October 7th report, entitled “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,” recommended that all U.S. data mining programs be re-evaluated according to criteria set forth in the 376-page document. The authors – which included former Secretary of Defense William Perry – made the case that even well-managed data mining efforts are of only limited usefulness and can infringe on Americans’ privacy. read more »
World Bank Under Cyber Siege in 'Unprecedented Crisis' - Via FOXNews.com :
The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned.
It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July.
In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month. read more »
NSA Spying on Americans in the Green Zone - Via Center for Democracy and Technology:
The National Security Agency is intercepting and retaining communications of innocent Americans in Iraq's so-called "Green Zone"; agency workers even pass around the most titillating conversations, according to explosive allegations made by two NSA whistleblowers in an ABC News segment airing tonight. According to the report, collection of telephone conversations U.S. soldiers and aid workers in Iraq had with their families in the U.S. continued even after NSA analysts knew that the telephone numbers on which they were eavesdropping belonged to Americans who had no ties to terrorism. The report calls into question assurances the NSA and Justice Department repeatedly gave Congress that internally enforced "minimization procedures" are adequate to protect the private conversations of Americans.
(Read Original Article - Via Center for Democracy and Technology.)
NSA Snooped on Innocent Americans' Private Calls from Iraq, Former Operators Charge - Via Threat Level:
The National Security Agency routinely listened in on the intimate and innocent phone calls of Americans in Iraq, including government personnel, journalists and aid workers, as they called back into the United States, according to two former NSA operators who spoke to ABC News.
The accusations that the NSA routinely listened in on Americans' phone calls contradicts the Administration's repeated claims that its secret spying did not listen to any Americans other than suspected terrorists.
The conduct also appears to violate the rules that govern when the NSA can listen in to Americans' making calls overseas-- which then required high-level approval for each target. read more »
Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans - Tonight on Nightline - Via ABC News: Nightline :
U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia. read more »
Satellite-Surveillance Program to Begin Despite Privacy Concerns - WSJ.com - Via Wall Street Journal / WSJ.com :
The Department of Homeland Security will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn't yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.
Congress provided partial funding for the program in a little-debated $634 billion spending measure that will fund the government until early March. For the past year, the Bush administration had been fighting Democratic lawmakers over the spy program, known as the National Applications Office.
The program is designed to provide federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery -- but no eavesdropping -- to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.
Since the department proposed the program a year ago, several Democratic lawmakers have said that turning the spy lens on America could violate Americans' privacy and civil liberties unless adequate safeguards were required. read more »
I don't see anything on their site yet, but the closing comments on tonights Nightline says that Thursdays show will include interviews with ex-employees who listened to those wiretaps of phone calls that supposedly did not include innocent US citizens.
Maryland Cops Put 53 Non-Violent Activists on Terrorist List - Via Threat Level:
Maryland State police placed the names of 53 left-leaning political activists into federal and state databases, labeling them as terrorists, the state's police chief admitted Tuesday.
Evidence that the state police had been infiltrating anti-war and anti-death penalty groups first came to light in July following a government sunshine lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of a prominent peace activist named Max Obuszewski.
Police added Obuszewski and others to a federal database called the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, The nation's main terrorist watch list is built from nominations from federal databases, but Maryland's current police superintendent told Maryland lawmakers that he didn't think the activists made their way onto that list, according to the Washington Post.
The Maryland spying on peace groups took place in 2005 and 2006, under the leadership of then-police superintendent Thomas Hutchins.
Hutchins defended the spying and the use of undercover informants in anti-war planning meetings, the Post reported. read more »
Freedom Not Fear 2008 - Via EFF.org Updates:
Freedom Not Fear is the world's ongoing demonstration against the encroachment of civil liberties by anti-terrorist laws -- particularly in the online world. This year the protests take place this Saturday, October 11th in nearly thirty countries, including the very first events in the Americas.
The origin of the campaign comes from Europeans' anger at the EU's 2006 data retention directive, a pan-European law that requires ISPs to log email and web traffic data for a minimum of six months, and often more. Terabytes of personal data on millions of innocent Europeans are now being collated, paid for by customers and taxpayers, and open for access by any criminal or civil investigation, no matter how trivial.
Freedom Not Fear has since evolved into a more general warning: showing how fundamental freedoms like privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic participation lose when reactionary surveillance systems penetrate our open networks, justified by a hyperbolic rhetoric of fear. read more »
Beyond the Bailout: Congress Passes a Flurry of ‘Child Safety’ Bills - Via CDT - PolicyBeta:
While the public’s attention was focused on the drama unfolding around the economic bailout, it was actually a busy time for other bills to get pushed – sometimes under the cover of the bailout darkness. Just before recess, Congress considered parts of four “child safety” bills, acted on three, and sent two to the White House. While not all the provisions in these bills raise red flags, some language gives free expression advocates plenty to worry about.
One bill that is awaiting a Presidential signature confronts child pornography head on in a constructive way is S. 1738, the “PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008. Among the important and positive steps taken in this new law are (a) a dramatic increase in funding for fighting child pornography, (b) a mandate to the Department of Justice that it develop a real strategy to fight such material, and (c) the provision of new forensic and other resources to help state law enforcement protect kids. These provisions should – if the bailout leaves any money to actually spend on law enforcement – really help in the fight against child pornography.
Congress should have stopped there; it didn’t. Some in Congress insisted that the core parts of S. 519 – the “SAFE Act” – be added to S. 1738 before passage. Among the most problematic provisions in S.519 – which was never publicly debated by any committee–is the outsourcing of significant law enforcement investigative functions to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which as a non-governmental entity operates outside of the core constitutional and legal protections that govern (or should govern) our criminal justice system (such as the 4th Amendment, the Privacy Act, the Freedom of Information Act, etc.). Although NCMEC makes valuable contributions in the child safety arena, the growing trend in Congress to outsource law enforcement functions to a nominally private group—without any serious oversight or procedural protections— takes us down a dangerous path. read more »
China to make foreign firms reveal secret info - Via DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri):
The Chinese government plans to introduce a new system requiring foreign firms to disclose secret information about digital household appliances and other products starting from May, sources said Thursday.
The envisaged system is likely to target products such as IC cards, digital copiers and possibly flat-panel TVs.
If a company refuses to disclose such information, the Chinese government plans to ban the firm from exporting the product to the Chinese market, as well as bar production and sales in the country, according to the sources.
Critics worry that such a system risks seeing the intellectual property of foreign firms passed onto their Chinese competitors. read more »
California Governor Signs Off On New Protections for Free Speech - Via EFF.org Updates:
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday signed Assembly Bill 2433 and filled a significant gap in protection for anonymous speech online. Authored by Assemblymember Paul Krekorian and co-sponsored by EFF, the California Anti-SLAPP Project and the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the new law allows speakers who successfully oppose the use of bogus out-of-state litigation to obtain their identities to recover attorneys' fees. Assemblymembers Sally Lieber and Anthony Portantino co-authored the bill.
One of the most pernicious threats to anonymity is the filing of trumped-up lawsuits as an excuse to force ISPs to reveal speakers’ identities. Once such a lawsuit is filed, speakers who want to protect their anonymity must find a way to pay a lawyer to go to court and prevent disclosure of their personal information. That can be a real hardship—in fact, even the threat of having to go to court may discourage many people from speaking out in the first place. read more »
Judge Suppresses Report on Voting Machine Security - Via Freedom to Tinker:
A judge of the New Jersey Superior Court has prohibited the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. Last June, Judge Linda Feinberg ordered Sequoia Voting Systems to turn over its source code to me (serving as an expert witness, assisted by a team of computer scientists) for a thorough examination. At that time she also ordered that we could publish our report 30 days after delivering it to the Court--which should have been today.
Three weeks after we delivered the report, on September 24th Judge Feinberg ordered us not to release it. This is part of a lawsuit filed by the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, seeking to decommission of all of New Jersey's voting computers. New Jersey mostly uses Sequoia AVC Advantage direct-recording electronic (DRE) models. None of those DREs can be audited: they do not produce a voter verified paper ballot that permit each voter to create a durable paper record of her electoral choices before casting her ballot electronically on a DRE. The legal basis for the lawsuit is quite simple: because there is no way to know whether the DRE voting computer is actually counting votes as cast, there is no proof that the voting computers comply with the constitution or with statutory law that require that all votes be counted as cast. read more »
Chinese Skype Client Hands Confidential Communications to Eavesdroppers - Via EFF.org Updates:
This Wednesday, Information Warfare Monitor published damning evidence showing that TOM-Skype, the version of the voice and chat program distributed in China not only blocks keywords from chat conversations, but also spies on and remotely reports the contents of Skype users' private text conversations. This directly contradicts Skype's previous assurances that "full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people’s privacy", even on the customized Chinese client.
This special breached version of Skype, distributed by the Chinese portal company TOM Online, has long been known to block certain contentious phrases from instant message conversations. IWM's Nart Villeneuve's research shows that when these keywords are mentioned in conversations, the client software also sends an encrypted message to one of eight remote servers hosted in China.
Due to poor security on these servers, Villeneuve was able to uncover what was being sent: extensive logs on user activity, including archives of more than 166,000 censored messages from 44,000 users. read more »
On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset - Via michaelzimmer.org :
A group of researchers have released a dataset of Facebook profile information from a group of college students for research purposes, which I know a lot of people will find quite valuable. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for bringing it to my attention.)
Here is the description from the Berkman Center’s announcement:
The dataset comprises machine-readable files of virtually all the information posted on approximately 1,700 FB profiles by an entire cohort of students at an anonymous, northeastern American university. Profiles were sampled at one-year intervals, beginning in 2006. This first wave covers first-year profiles, and three additional waves of data will be added over time, one for each year of the cohort’s college career. read more »
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