Friday, May 17, 2013

“Oh, you noticed that, did you? We've been doing it for years, but apparently no one has ever explained in small words to you so-called lawyers that there might be some legal issues to be addressed here?”
Kim Zetter reports:
In the wake of the AP scandal, in which federal investigators obtained the phone records of journalists using only a subpoena, four lawmakers have introduced legislation in the House that would prevent federal agencies from seizing any phone records without a court order.
Currently, the Telephone Records Act allows the feds to demand phone records from service providers by using only an administrative subpoena to obtain basic subscriber information. Basic subscriber information can include a customer’s name, address, credit card number, and phone records.
The Telephone Records Protection Act consists of just one sentence amending that law (.pdf) and would force federal agencies to seek judicial review to obtain records in order to avoid a situation like the one that recently happened with the Associated Press.
Read more on Threat Level.
[The relevant part of the “Telephone Records Protection Act:
Subparagraph (C) of section 2703(c)(2) of title 18, United States Code, is repealed.

(Related) Were they “just following the law” or not?
Ryan Gallagher reports:
If you are a customer of Verizon Wireless, you might want to consider switching carriers in light of the Associated Press phone snooping scandal.
When the feds came knocking for AP journalists’ call records last year, Verizon apparently turned the data over with no questions asked. The New York Times, citing an AP employee, reported Tuesday that at least two of the reporters’ personal cellphone records “were provided to the government by Verizon Wireless without any attempt to obtain permission to tell them so the reporters could ask a court to quash the subpoena.”
Read more on Slate.


They literally changed only one word. What do they thing this achieves?
May 16, 2013
EPIC - Amendment to Immigration Bill Seeks to Limit Drone Surveillance on Border
EPIC: "The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved an Amendment to the immigration bill to limit the range of drones surveillance in the United States. The immigration bill grants the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection authority to operate surveillance drones continuously within the border region. Senator Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) Amendment reduces the patrol area of surveillance drones from 100 miles around the border to 25 miles. More than two-thirds of the US population lives within 100 miles of the border. In February 2013, EPIC petitioned the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection to suspend the border drone surveillance program pending the establishment of concrete privacy regulations. The petition followed the production of documents to EPIC under the Freedom of Information Act demonstrating that the border drones had the ability to intercept electronic communications and identify human targets. For more information, see EPIC: Domestic Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Drones."


Government is confusing. The lab was established in 1978 and only now (2013 – 1978 = ) 35 years later are they considering keeping records? Will this duplicate or replace the FBI fingerprint database?
ACTION
Notice Of Privacy Act System Of Records.
SUMMARY
In accordance with the Privacy Act of 1974, the Department of Homeland Security proposes to establish a new Department of Homeland Security system of records titled, “Department of Homeland Security/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—014 Homeland Security Investigations Forensic Laboratory System of Records.”
This system of records allows the Department of Homeland Security/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to collect and maintain records by the Homeland Security Investigations Forensic Laboratory (HSI-FL). The HSI-FL is a U.S. crime laboratory specializing in scientific authentication; forensic examination; research, analysis, and training related to travel and identity documents; latent and patent finger and palm prints; and audio and video files in support of law enforcement investigations and activities by DHS and other agencies. To facilitate forensic examinations and for use in forensic document training, research, and analysis, the HSI-FL maintains case files, a case management system, an electronic library of travel and identity documents (Imaged Documents and Exemplars Library), and a hard copy library referred to as the HSI-FL Library. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security is issuing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking elsewhere in theFederal Register to exempt this system of records from certain provisions of the Privacy Act. This newly established system will be included in the Department of Homeland Security’s inventory of record systems.
More information can be found in the Federal Register.


Typical government. Public outrage stopped them from doing this in one fell swoop, so they fell back to doing it bit by bit (mini-swoops)
Ben Grubb reports:
The federal government has been accused of sneaking mandatory web filtering through the back door after one of its agencies inadvertently [??? Bob] blocked 1200 websites using a little-known law.
Technology news website Delimiter this week revealed the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) last month used a telco law to ask major internet service providers (ISPs) to block a website it believed was defrauding Australians.
Read more on The Age.


There are already defensive patents with free licenses, aren't there?
"The tactic of patenting open source software to guard against patent trolls and the weaponization of corporate patent portfolios is gaining momentum in the FOSS community. Organizations including the Open Innovation Network, Google and Red Hat have built defensive patent portfolios (the latter two are defending their product lines). This approach has limitations. Penn State law professor Clark Asay writes in an Outercurve Foundation blog examining the trend, 'Patenting FOSS may help in some cases, but the nature of FOSS development itself may mean that patenting some collaboratively developed inventions is inherently more difficult, if not impossible, in many others. Consequently, strategies for mitigating patent risk that rely on FOSS communities patenting their technologies include inherent limitations. It's not entirely clear how best to reform patent law in order to better reconcile it with alternative models of innovation. But in the meantime, FOSS still presents certain advantages that, while dimmed by the prospect of patent suits, remain significant.'"


This is either groundbreaking or evidence of extreme ignorance...
"A young Irish man wrongly accused of jumping from a taxi without paying the fare has secured a judgement from an Irish court ordering the video removed from the entire Internet. Experts from Google, Youtube, Facebook, and others must tell the court in two weeks if this is technically possible. The thing is, the video is accurate, it is only a comment that wrongly identified Eoin McKeogh as the fare-jumper in the video that is inaccurate. It's not clear if the judge has made any orders about the comment."


This is both evidence of extreme greed and fender breaking. Remember, Florida gets a lot of its revenue from estate taxes, so making it easier to die in traffic ensures a revenur boost.
New submitter zlives writes in with news that Florida's DOT changed some language in their yellow light timing regulations, leading to a decrease in the yellow delay. Especially at lights with red light cameras.
"From the article: 'Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year in approximately 70 Florida communities, with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies. In 2013, the cameras are on pace to generate $120 million.' I wonder what the camera company cut is?"
At least one areas has promised to undo the reduction now that they have been caught.


I may pay to have the chairs electrified myself!
Electrical Brain Stimulation Helps People Learn Math Faster
… If only there were an easier way.
Now there may be, suggests a new study in which scientists stimulated volunteers’ brains with mild electric current [would a 220 line do better? Bob] while they learned new arithmetic operations based on made-up symbols. People who received brain stimulation during training sessions on five consecutive days learned two to five times faster than those who received sham stimulation, and they retained a 30 to 40 percent performance edge six months later.


I have some students who don't retain this much. Although I have to say, their summary of Don Quixote is exactly as I remember it.
Sometimes reading a 350-page novel is just too much work. And Cliff Notes can also be a pain, what with all the summaries and indexes and character maps. Geez, why does reading have to be so HARD?! It's like, "just give me the one-minute takeaway." Well, thankfully some geniuses created a Book-A-Minute Classics to quickly summarize all the classics in a minute or less. Sure, most of the details are missing, but the bare essentials are there.
Got a book report to do? Flip through our visual guide for these quick summaries.


New to me...
Snopes.com
The snopes.com … the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

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