http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=6478
San Jose Cops Will Wear Body Cameras
December 21, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Surveillance, Workplace
Laura Glendinning reports:
San Jose knows the way. . . to get it all on camera. 18 helmet cameras are being put into use in San Jose in a test program aimed at reducing escalating violence in arrests and general public interactions. The department has been under fire for a number of alleged abuses of force. Patrol officers in the experiment will be turning on the cameras every time they talk with anyone. [What happens if they fail to turn a camera on? Bob] The cameras look a lot like bluetooth earpieces, and are attached via headband. A mini computer rides on the officer’s belt. Every shift will end with a data download. [Unlikely there will be a review unless a complaint is lodged. Bob]
[...]
The American Civil Liberties Union has come out strongly against police cameras, seeing them as a violation of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, but courts have held that citizens have little expectation of privacy in public spaces. Disclosure that a citizen is being recorded is required of all body camera-wearing officers.
Read more on Yes, But, However.
Fourth Amendment lawyer John Wesley Hall, Jr. comments on the story:
It says that the ACLU claims that recording an interaction is an invasion of privacy. How? What is the privacy interest in what a cop sees?
You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that the police-citizen interaction was recorded. Either my client or the cop was lying. Just show me which one.
Hall’s comment makes sense, but since the device, AXON, records both video and audio, what happens when the officer forgets to shut off the recording and is caught making personal comments or other comments that perhaps, were best left unsaid or unrecorded? Will these recordings be restricted in their use to criminal complaints and complaints of citizen abuse? And how long will they be retained for?
Everything is legal if you're a government.
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=8980
(follow-up) France stands by use of stolen bank data
December 21, 2009 by admin Filed under Financial Sector
France’s use of HSBC client data stolen by a former HSBC employer continues to create international tension. France maintains that they have obtained the information legally and can use it, while HSBC and the Swiss government do not see the data as having been legally obtained. Peggy Hollinger reports
France said yesterday that it had committed no crime in using a stolen list of Swiss bank accounts to track French tax evaders as a row between Bern and Paris over banking secrecy intensified.
“France is committing no fraud, the tax evaders are,” said Eric Woerth, budget minister, in an interview on Canal Plus. “What counts is that we obtained [the information] legally.”
Switzerland has threatened to suspend ratification of a new bilateral tax treaty agreed with France in September over the decision by French fiscal authorities to use a list stolen from HSBC in Geneva by a former employee.
Read more on Financial Times.
Reuters reports that in an interview with the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung, Alexandre Zeller, CEO of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) said:
“The person, who we employed for eight years, took the data from various systems and tried to put them together like a puzzle. It is difficult to evaluate this data both from a technical and legal point of view.”
HSBC confirmed earlier this month that an ex-employee stole client data from its Swiss private bank in 2006 and 2007. [Former HSBC IT specialist Herve] iFalciani later identified himself as that ex-employee.
(Related) When governments start censoring their critics, you have to ask yourself what is next.
AU Authority Moves To Censor Net Filtering Protest Site
Posted by kdawson on Monday December 21, @01:17AM from the shortcutting-the-udrp dept.
An anonymous reader writes
"On Friday the Sydney Morning Herald reported that an Internet censorship protest site had been set up under the banner 'Stephen Conroy: Minister for Fascism' and was ironically registered under the very name of the Australian Communications Minister responsible for trying to mandate the compulsory filtering scheme in federal law, stephenconroy.com.au. Within hours of the story being published, auDA, the Australian Domain Name Authority, had shut down the site, giving the owners only 3 hours to respond to a request to justify their eligibility for the domain. Normally auDA would allow several days to weeks for this process. An appeal to request an extension was denied, with no reason given. The site was quickly moved to a US domain, stephen-conroy.com in order to stay active while the dispute with auDA is resolved."
Amusing eDiscovery request. Is the time you are connected to Facebook an indication that you are able to perform your job functions? How about if you were connected, but not entering data? (Not sure how detailed Facebook's logs are.)
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=6467
Canadian court orders litigant to request her Facebook records from ISP
December 20, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Court, Internet, Non-U.S.
Toronto attorney Dan Michaluk blogs:
On December 2nd, the New Brunswick Court of Queen’s bench ordered a plaintiff in a disability insurance claim to obtain “a history of her computer account use” from her ISP and “request” her ISP to generate a record accounting for her FaceBook use.
The case is Carter v. Connors, 2009 NBQB 317 (pdf), and from the court filing, the background is:
The Applicant-Defendant has brought a motion for an order that the Plaintiff, who is currently undergoing discovery examination by the Applicant’s counsel, provide an undertaking to have her Internet Service Provider, Bell-Aliant, disclose the history of her Internet use at her home from the date of a motor vehicle accident in 2004 until today. Included in that request is a specific ancillary request that, in the event the motion succeeds, the technician that assembles the Internet use record segregate as a discrete record, if possible, the time spent on the Internet social network site Facebook that may be disclosed in the Plaintiff’s Internet use account record. The Plaintiff has conceded in her examination that she also has an account on the social networking site Facebook. The motion is brought pursuant to Rule 33.12 of The Rules of Court but, practically speaking, under the auspices of Rule 32.06 and 33.08(3) of The Rules of Court.
At issue:
Does the law of civil discovery in New Brunswick allow a party to compel production of Internet and Facebook usage records from the service provider of a Plaintiff who held an administrative clerk position prior to a motor vehicle accident when the basis of the claim filed by her is a soft tissue injury that is claimed to have resulted from the accident that prevents her from resuming full time work?
The decision lays out the legal precedent and reasoning as to whether such a request in the context of private litigation violates any Charter rights or expectation of privacy and then concludes:
In this instance I believe that the probative value of the information requested is of such a level that its disclosure will not infringe upon a reasonable expectation of privacy. That is so because the information sought is not, at least at this stage of proceedings, information that could qualify as revealing very personal information over which most right thinking Canadians would expect a reasonable expectation of privacy. Put another way, it does not reveal: “intimate details of the lifestyle and personal choices of the individual.”
Having said that, it appears clear that this may be only the first of more questioning by The Defendant’s counsel, Mr. Morrison, of the Plaintiff with respect to her general Internet and specific Facebook usage at the examination for discovery. If the questioning attempts to delve deeper into the Plaintiffs lifestyle as it pertains to these subjects, relevancy and privacy, it will require a re-examination of the reasonable limits of such questioning. For example, included in that assessment will be the extent to which an individual may claim a reasonable expectation of privacy in the use of social networking site electronic data.
Read more on All About Information. Hat-tip, Canadian Privacy Law Blog.
Now this could be fun (and depressing) I can see case studies in law, ethics, corporate governance, and lots of other areas. Perhaps we should just send it to WikiLeaks right now?
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/20/138226
Call To "Open Source" AIG Investigation
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 20, @09:33AM from the still-looking-for-somebody-to-crucify dept.
VValdo writes
"As you may recall, the citizens of the US shelled out about $85 billion to bail out AIG and its creditors (Goldman Sachs in particular) last year. But as 80% owners of AIG, we still don't know what happened, exactly. That may change. In a new op-ed piece, former prosecutors (including former NY governor Eliot Spitzer) are calling for the US Treasury to force AIG to release its treasure-trove of emails to the public before allowing AIG to 'break free' of our control. As the prosecutors put it, 'By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of "open source" investigation. Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story.' Good idea?"
For your Security Manager if you process Credit Cards.
Attack Of The RAM Scrapers
Beware of malware aimed at grabbing valuable data from volatile memory in point-of-sale systems
Dec 18, 2009 | 02:33 PM By Keith Ferrell DarkReading
The inclusion of RAM scrapers in a recent Verizon Business list of the top data breach attack vectors has prompted a bit of buzz about what exactly RAM scraping is and how much of a threat it poses.
A RAM scraper as identified in the Verizon Business Data Breach Investigation report is a piece of customized malware created to grab credit card, PIN, and other confidential information out of a system's volatile memory. The RAM-scraping breaches in Verizon's report occurred in point-of-sale (POS) servers.
… Why go after the data in RAM? Because in many ways it's easier to grab there. Current PCI compliance standards require the end-to-end encryption of sensitive payment card data when being transmitted, received, or stored. Data then is exposed at the endpoints, during processing, when the unencrypted credit card data is resident in the POS device's RAM. That's where the RAM scraper can cherry-pick the data being processed, capturing only those strings related to card identifiers rather than performing bulk data grabs. This minimizes the scraper's presence and, far from incidentally, reduces the prospects of its being detected as a result of dramatically increased server traffic or other illicit activity flags.
… RAM scrapers have to get to the RAM in order to access valuable data. POS RAM scrapers enter systems that are either insufficiently protected, such as those that use default credentials or get compromised by trusted partners, according to the Verizon report.
… The best way to detect a RAM scraper is via regular traffic and critical file monitoring and log analysis, experts say. Following are eight tips for protecting against RAM scraping, gleaned from the Verizon report:
Now this is interesting.
Yelp Walks Away From Google Deal, And Half A Billion Dollars
by Michael Arrington on December 20, 2009
Jeremy Stoppleman, the CEO of Yelp, has walked away from an all-but-signed deal to be acquired by Google for more than half a billion dollars.
The deal was, as we wrote late last week, in the later stages of negotiation. The two companies had agreed on a price – around $550 million plus earnouts – and were working through the final details of the acquisition.
Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources.
For my Statistics class. Be careful what you measure. Is this truly the “7 and under” group or is Dad sneaking onto the kids computer to surf for porn check that the blocking software still works? (Is no one concerned that Symantec knows what your children are doing online?)
http://mashable.com/2009/12/19/porn-toddlers/
“Porn” Among Top Search Terms for Kids
December 19th, 2009 by Pete Cashmore
In a somewhat worrying piece of news, security firm Symantec has released the top search terms by kids in 2009. Topping the lists: “YouTube”, “Google”, “Facebook”, “sex” and “porn”.
While that result set might not be surprising in the teen search rankings, it’s interesting to note that “porn” ranks 4th in the “7 and under” category, receiving more searches than “Club Penguin” and “Webkinz“.
… The data was compiled from 14.6 million searches made using Symantec’s OnlineFamily.Norton, which lets parents track their kids’ online activity.
Free is good!
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/ebooksread-read-over-200000-free-ebooks/
eBooksRead: Read Over 200,000 Free eBooks
By TehseenBaweja on Dec. 15th, 2009
… eBooksRead is an online library where you can read and download over 240,000 ebooks for free. These eBooks can be searched by book title or author name. You can also browse through the alphabetical listing of authors to find the book you need. All the books are available in txt format while some are also available in PDF.
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