Friday, April 26, 2013

The problem with drawing a line in the sand is, you must act when someone crosses it. The problem with failing to draw a line is, that same someone assumes you don't really care. I find this interesting because we have many areas (CyberWar) that have no clearly defined lines of any kind.
Seeing Red
If Syria has used chemical weapons against its own people and crossed Obama’s red line, how should the president respond?
It seemed for a moment today that we might soon be at war with Syria.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told reporters that, according to new intelligence analyses, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has likely used chemical weapons, specifically sarin, against rebel forces.


Interesting question. My guess is that this will go away when everything is on your smartphone. (and that too will hold unencrypted data as you lose the phone in even more places.)
OptiNose US Inc. has been notifying some of its consultants that their names and Social Security numbers were on a laptop stolen from an employee’s car.
The laptop was stolen on March 26 in a Philadelphia suburb, and OptiNose started sending out notification letters on April 16. The letter did not inform recipients that the laptop was stolen from an unattended vehicle. The letter states that OptiNose “has no information that any personal data has been accessed by an unauthorized party.” They do not state whether there was any software on the laptop that would even provide such information.
OptiNose offered those affected credit monitoring at the firm’s expense, but get this – enrollees have to pay for the service and then submit a request for reimbursement.
The notification letter does not indicate whether the employee was disciplined at all or what steps OptiNose is taking to prevent this from ever happening again.
If you get the sense that I am unimpressed with their handling of this breach, you’re right.
The incident was reported to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office on April 16 and the Vermont Attorney General’s Office on April 23.


The Total Information Awareness (TIA) project was dropped due to public backlash. The part of that effort that pulled together public data would have been called the “PIA” – and that is what they are attempting here. (I'm sure it's just a concidence that Privacy Impact Assessment has the same initials) NOTE: Appendix A lists the sites monitered. Appendix B lists the search terms followed.
April 25, 2013
Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Update
Privacy Impact Assessment for the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning - Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative, DHS, Update April 1, 2013
  • "To monitor social media, National Operations Center Media Monitoring analysts only use publicly available search engines, content aggregators, and site-specific search tools to find items of potential interest to DHS. Once the analysts determine an item or event is of sufficient value to DHS to be reported, they extract only the pertinent, authorized information, [Authorized by whom? Bob] and put it into a specific web application (Media Monitoring Capability (MMC) application) to build and format their reports. The unused information for each item of interest is not stored or filed for reference and is lost when the webpage is closed or deleted. [They delete your Facebook page? I think not! Bob] The MMC application also facilitates tracking previous reports to help avoid duplicative reporting and ensures further development of reporting on ongoing issues. It allows analysts to electronically document details using a customized user interface, and disseminate relevant information in a standardized format. Using the MMC application, NOC MMC analysts can efficiently and effectively catalog the information by adding meta - tags such as location, category, critical information requirement, image files, and source information. The application empowers NOC MMC analysts to have a better grasp of the common operating picture by providing the means to quickly search for an item of interest using any of the above - mentioned meta-tags as well as enabling them to respond to requests for information from other collaborating entities in a timely fashion."

(Related) Monitoring search terms and social media for fun and profit. More for my Statistics students.
Google, as many researchers know well, is more than a search engine—it’s a remarkably comprehensive barometer of public opinion and the state of the world at any given time. By using Google Trends, which tracks the frequency particular search terms are entered into Google over time, scientists have found seasonal patterns, for example, in searches for information about mental illnesses and detected a link between searching behavior and a country’s GDP.
A number of people have also had the idea to use these trends to try achieving a more basic desire: making money. Several studies in recent years have looked at the number of times investors searched for particular stock names and symbols and created relatively successful investing strategies based on this data.
A new study published today in Scientific Reports by a team of British researchers, though, harnesses Google Trends data to produce investing strategies in a more nuanced way. Instead of looking at the frequency that the names of stocks or companies were searched, they analyzed a broad range of 98 commonly used words—everything from “unemployment” to “marriage” to “car” to “water”—and simulated investing strategies based on week-by-week changes in the frequencies of each of these words as search terms by American internet users.
The changes in the frequency of some of these words, it turns out, are very useful predictors of whether the market as a whole—in this case, the Dow Jones Industrial Average—will go down or up (the Dow is a broad index commonly considered a benchmark of the overall performance of the U.S. stock market).


For my WolframAlpha using Statistics students.
April 25, 2013
Datascience of the Facebook World via Wolfram|Alpha Blog
"More than a million people have now used our Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook. And as part of our latest update, in addition to collecting some anonymized statistics, we launched a Data Donor program that allows people to contribute detailed data to us for research purposes. A few weeks ago we decided to start analyzing all this data. And I have to say that if nothing else it’s been a terrific example of the power of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language for doing data science. We’d always planned to use the data we collect to enhance our Personal Analytics system. But I couldn’t resist also trying to do some basic science with it... So a first quantitative question to ask is: How big are these networks usually? In other words, how many friends do people typically have on Facebook? Well, at least for our users, that’s easy to answer. The median is 342—and here’s a histogram showing the distribution (there’s a cutoff at 5000 because that’s the maximum number of friends for a personal Facebook page)..."


Because in some countries, some types of information are banned...
Google Sees More Government Requests to Remove Content 'Than Ever Before'
In the latest edition of its Transparency Report, released this morning, Google revealed that the final six months of 2012 saw an increase in government requests to remove content -- often YouTube videos. All told, Google received 2,285 such requests (compared with 1,811 during the first half of 2012) that named a total of 24,179 pieces of content for removal (compared with 18,070 in the preceding period).
… The number of content-removal requests from various American government agencies and courts has steadily increased in recent years, totaling 321 (second only to Brazil) for the most recent period.


I requested this from my local library. I certainly don't need to buy it.
"Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen begin their new nonfiction book, The New Digital Age, with a rather bold pronouncement: 'The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.' Subsequent chapters deal with how that experiment will alter life in decades to come, as more and more people around the world connect to the Internet via cheap mobile phones and other devices."

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