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  1. #1
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    Along with dozens of other civil liberties organizations, Freedom of the Press Foundation has signed on to two letters strongly opposing the dangerous “cybersecurity” bills making their way through Congress and expected to be voted on sometime in the next week.

    The bills are little more than new surveillance powers wrapped in a cheap disguise, and you can read the full letters that describe the bill’s deficiencies here and here.


    If passed, the bills will adversely affect all Americans’ privacy, but they have particularly critical consequences for journalists and whistleblowers, so we wanted to highlight those concerns that the letters did not fully cover.
    First, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported on Monday, the bills “could create the first brand-new exemption to the Freedom of Information Act in nearly half a century.” The bills aim to allow private companies to share large swaths of private information with the government with no legal process whatsoever, essentially carving a giant hole in the country’s myriad privacy laws. But worse, the proposed FOIA exemption would prevent the public from ever being able to find out what type or amount of information these companies handed over.


    Gerstein explains the multiple ways the bills attempts to cut off transparency and accountability:


    A bill approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee last month would add a new tenth exemption to FOIA, covering all "information shared with or provided to the Federal Government" under the new measure.
    Another provision in the legislation would require that "cyber threat indicators and defensive measures" which companies or individuals share with the federal government be "withheld, without discretion, from the public." The Senate bill, which is expected to come to the floor soon, also seeks to shut off any access to that information under state or local freedom of information laws.

    There are extremely troubling parts of the bill relating to whistleblowers and journalistic sources as well. Dozens of organizations protested a variety of draconian provisions last year in a letter to Congress, and while some whistleblower protections have been added, as Open the Government described a couple months ago, the bill still has huge problems:


    [T]he bill still allows cybersecurity information to be used to investigate and prosecute whistleblowers or journalists under the Espionage Act. As the Sunshine in Government Initiative noted last summer, CISA’s broad definitions “would grant the federal government the authority to engage in the warrantless collection of journalists’ communications records…if the government deems the journalists, or the confidential sources they work with, ‘security vulnerabilities’ or ‘cybersecurity threats’ potentially ‘adversely impacting’ the confidentiality of information stored on government computers."

  2. #2
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    The mere idea of regaining privacy sends law enforcement into a tizzy

    The prospect of security awareness and actual cryptography in the hands of regular citizens has the disturbing habit of sending agents of the state into all manner of silly name calling.

    Long before Australia's chief law officer decided that he was able to determine whether Edward Snowden was a traitor to the United States -- which, the argument goes, led directly to the need for Australia to implement a mandatory data-retention scheme -- encryption was going to destroy the ability for police and spy agencies to do their work.

    In one of the best talks from Linux.conf.au this year, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center Eben Moglen recalled the debate that surrounded introducing PGP in the 1990s.


    "People have been made afraid that if you let communications be secure, the villains will win," he said. "I must tell you that I heard a lot of that in the early '90s over PGP too.
    "I had a bet with a reporter ... whether it was going to be pedophilia or nuclear terrorism of which I was first going to be accused in every public meeting."

    Fast forward 20 years, and not only are a number of tech firms now "friendly to terrorists", they are also ignoring their "corporate social responsibility" by making it harder for authorities to get access to data, Reuters reported Mark Rowley, London Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner for specialist crime and operations, as saying last week.


    "It can be set up in a way which is friendly to terrorists and helps them ... and creates challenges for law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Or it can be set up in a way which doesn't do that." Rowley reportedly said.


    http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-mer...tag=TRE17cfd61



  3. #3
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    Surveillance, warrantless

    Motel Decides It Should Just Start Faxing All Guest Info To Local Police Every Night

    The Third Party Doctrine is ridiculous. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies routinely exploit this loophole to warrantlessly access all sorts of data because of the stupid assertion that anything you "voluntarily" turn over to a third party carries no expectation of privacy. The agencies blow right past the reality of the situation: that any "voluntary" exchange of personal data for services is anything but voluntary. Service providers won't provide you with an internet connection or cell phone service without collecting massive amounts of usage data. Hotels and motels won't rent you a room unless you tell them who you are and provide do entation to back up your claims.

    So, it's stupid all over and no one's in any hurry to fix it because drugs need to be warred againstand terrorists must be handcrafted by FBI undercover agents and the rest of whatever. The courts have generally refused to stretch the Fourth Amendment to cover the data created by these involuntary exchanges. That's a problem and one that is only very slowly being addressed.

    Motel 6 has just decided to make it worse. While warrantless access to motel records is being challenged in the Supreme Court, the chain has decided to preemptively strip away any privacy expectations that may result from court rulings and just hand it all over to law enforcement because sometimes criminals stay in motel rooms.

    City police have arrested four people staying at the Motel 6 on Jefferson Boulevard as a result of the hotel chain's agreement to provide police with a daily guest list, Mayor Scott Avedisian said Tuesday.


    The names of Motel 6 guests, which police then check for outstanding warrants, is one of five steps Motel 6 corporate managers agreed to take in response to a string of high-profile incidents and concerns the establishment was becoming a haven for passing criminals.

    Everything about this is pure bootlicking ishness. See if you can finish reading this statement without looking for something to wipe all the "smug" off you.

    "We know everyone who is staying in the hotel tonight," [Mayor Scott] Avedisian said in a phone interview after a meeting with Motel 6 executives that also included Warwick police chief Col. Stephen M. McCartney and Seekonk, Mass., Town Administrator Shawn E. Cadime.

    Great. And that's your business why? Oh, because some arrests were made. A modi of successful law enforcement cures all privacy ills, etc.


    Motel 6's spokesmouths aren't exactly coming across as champions of the people either.

    As of now, guests who check-in at Warwick’s Motel 6 will not be told their names are on a list that goes to the police station every night.


    Alerting motel guests that local police know their whereabouts "is not a normal process of our check-in,” said Victor Glover, a vice president of safety and security for G6 Hospitality, the parent company for Motel 6. “I don’t know that we have any plans of ins uting that as we move forward.”

    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ry-night.shtml




  4. #4
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    Iris scanners can now identify us from 40 feet away




    The latest development in this field is the scanning of irises from a distance of up to 40 feet (12 metres) away. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in the US demonstrated they were able to use their iris recognition technology to identify drivers from an image of their eye captured from their vehicle's side mirror.

    http://phys.org/news/2015-05-iris-scanners-feet.html

  5. #5
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    Over the past decade, in the United States alone, more than $100 billion has been spent on cyber-security at the federal level. An additional $4 billion was allocated to various government agencies for “enhancing cyber-security” each of the past ten years as a part of the intelligence black budget. This spending has been justified by the need to bolster defenses against an amorphous set of cyber-criminals and cyber-attackers.


    Why then was the Office of Personnel Management warned in their Federal Information Security Management Act audit last year that the, “material weakness related to information security governance has been upgraded to a significant deficiency." Why was it that, in 2013, only half of federal agencies reported using a federally approved encryption service?


    Following the money tells a story of why cyber-security has not improved, despite so much investment over the past two decades.


    Rather than defense, a significant proportion of these funds have actually been used to develop sophisticated offensive cyber-capabilities, in other words, state-sponsored hacking.


    That billions of dollars earmarked for defense could be spent on offense shouldn’t be surprising. This is the predicable result of the political-economic dynamics that have characterized the military-industrial complex since the 1950s. Today, a military-internet (or cyber-industrial) complex has instead emerged. The government agencies tasked with cyber policy and their private contractor partners have ac ulated huge economic and political power, which has then been used to lobby for more cyber-policy. This strategy is not cost-effective, not supported by results, and ultimately self-defeating.


    What is at stake is more than just these outlays of taxpayer funds, which could instead be used to address countless other public policy problems. Collateral damage is everywhere and seen most clearly by individuals who cannot secure their personal information due to persistently poor cyber-security standards; systems are undermined by the very agencies supposed to be protecting them.
    http://www.mantlethought.org/other/p...ecurity-policy

  6. #6
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    "systems are undermined by the very agencies supposed to be protecting them"

    undermining is the whole point, not protecting.

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