Search
Counting Electronic Votes in Secret - Via Freedom to Tinker:
Things are not looking good for open government when it comes to observing poll workers on Election Night. Our state election laws, written for the old lever machines, now apply to Sequoia electronic voting machines. Andrew Appel and I have been asking a straightforward question: Can ordinary members of the public watch the procedures used by poll workers to count the votes?
I submitted a formal request to the Board of Elections of Mercer County (where Princeton University is located), seeking permission to watch the poll workers when they close the polls (on Sequoia AVC Advantage voting computers) and announce the results. They said no!
The Election Board said this election is “too important” to permit extra people in the polling place. read more »
Verizon plays fast and loose with the wrong 1,200 e-mail addresses - Via NetworkWorld.com Community:
This should be a vendor's first rule when inviting 1,200 IT pros to a seminar about securing data and protecting personal information: Make sure you protect the personal information of the 1,200 professionals you're trying to impress.
How did Verizon do in that regard on Tuesday? They failed miserably ... and not just once.
David Williams, technology coordinator for a Texas school district, alerted me to the situation because he had read my recent post -- "Run-amok Verizon robo-caller torments 1,400 customers" -- which recounted the nine phone calls in 24 hours that were received at my house last month.
"I had something similar occur today," Williams writes. "In a period of three hours I received 14 e-mails promoting Verizon's 'Secure the Information. Secure the Infrastructure' webinar series, and three e-mails promoting their '2008 Data Breach Investigations Report Road Show.' "
The excessive volume of e-mail wasn't the half of it, though. 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 »
Piracy Statistics and the Importance of Journalistic Skepticism - Via Freedom to Tinker:
If you've paid attention to copyright debates in recent years, you've probably seen advocates for more restrictive copyright laws claim that "counterfeiting and piracy" cost the US economy as much as $250 billion. When pressed, those who make these kinds of claims are inevitably vague about exactly where these figures come from. For example, I contacted Thomas Sydnor, the author of the paper I linked above, and he was able to point me to a 2002 press release from the FBI, which claims that "losses to counterfeiting are estimated at $200-250 billion a year in U.S. business losses."
There are a couple of things that are notable about this. In the first place, notice that the press release says counterfeiting, which is an entirely different issue from copyright infringement. Passing stronger copyright legislation in order to stop counterfeiting is a non-sequitur.
But the more serious issue is that the FBI can't actually explain how it arrived at these figures. And indeed, it appears that nobody knows who came up with these figures and how they were computed. Julian Sanchez has done some sleuthing and found that these figures have literally been floating around inside the beltway for decades. Julian contacted the FBI, which wasn't able to point to any specific source. Further investigation led him to a 1993 Forbes article: read more »
Lessons from the Fall of NebuAd - Via Freedom to Tinker:
With three Congressional hearings held within the past four months, U.S. legislators have expressed increased concern about the handling of private online information. As Paul Ohm mentioned yesterday, the recent scrutiny has focused mainly on the ability of ISPs to intercept and analyze the online traffic of its users-- in a word, surveillance. One of the goals of surveillance for ISPs is to yield new sources of revenue; so when a Silicon Valley startup called NebuAd approached ISPs last spring with its behavioral advertising technology, many were quick to sign on. But by summer's end, the company had lost all of its ISP partners, their CEO had resigned, and they announced their intention to pursue "more traditional" advertising channels.
How did this happen and what can we learn from this episode? 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.
The Presidency & the Courts [Ashbrook Center & Federalist Soc.] - Via JURIST - Video Monitor:
Conference on the Presidency and the Courts with keynote address by President George W. Bush, Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs & Federalist Society, October 6, 2008. Microsoft Silverlight, 136 minutes. Watch recorded video.
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 »
Government Painfully Fuzzy on the Effects of Infringement - Via EFF.org Updates:
Last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged President Bush to sign the PRO-IP Act, claiming that "counterfeiting and piracy of [intellectual property] is a growing problem that costs U.S. businesses nearly $250 billion in revenue each year [and] has already caused the loss of an estimated 750,000 American jobs..." Both figures, $250 billion and 750,000 jobs, are cartoonishly large and have activated the investigatory instincts of some smart reporters. What have they found? read more »
Judge's Top Secret Decision Blocks Sale of DVD-Copying Software - Via Threat Level:
A federal judge has issued a secret, interim order blocking the sale of RealNetworks' DVD-copying software, RealDVD, two sources said Monday.
In an unusual move, the judge presiding over the MPAA's federal copyright lawsuit against RealNetworks also instructed both parties not to disclose the existence of the restraining order to the public.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who previously presided over the original Napster litigation, issued the tentative decision late Friday, the sources said. As of this writing, the electronic court docket does not reflect a sealed decision in the case, although RealNetworks informed consumers on its websitethat, "Due to recent legal action taken by the Hollywood movie studios against us, RealDVD is temporarily unavailable." 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 »
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Google
Yahoo
Technorati