That's a much larger percentage than I
would have guessed. Think of all the things they DON'T want to
intercept and analyze, including downloads of almost anything. Just
to jog your memory, take a look at this
(http://designtaxi.com/news/359660/Infographic-The-Amount-Of-Online-Activity-That-Goes-On-Every-60-Seconds/)
and figure what the NSA could live without.
HuffPost reports:
On the day
President
Barack Obama proposed reforms to the secret Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, the National Security Agency shared a paper
claiming legal authority for its spying and revealing that it
“touches”
1.6 percent of Internet information.
The memo says that
after the 2001 terror attacks, “Several programs were developed to
address the U.S. Government’s need to connect the dots of
information available to the intelligence community and to strengthen
the coordination between foreign intelligence and domestic law
enforcement agencies,” including the bulk collection of telephone
and email records.
The
memo included an outline of the “Scope and Scale of NSA
Collection:”
Read more on Huffington
Post. Click
here to read the full NSA document.
(Related) Just because it's a tiny
percentage does not mean it isn't Big Data!
Cory
Doctorow: privacy, oversharing and government surveillance
Cory
Doctorow: “The European Parliament is currently involved in a
wrangle over the new General
Data Protection Regulation. At stake are the future rules
for online privacy, data mining, big data, governmental spying (by
proxy), to name a few. Hundreds of amendments and proposals are on
the table, including some that speak of relaxing the rules on sharing
data that has been “anonymised” (had identifying information
removed) or “pseudonymised” (had identifiers replaced with
pseudonyms). This is, however, a very difficult business, with
researchers showing how relatively simple techniques can be used to
re-identify the data in large anonymised data sets, by picking out
the elements of each record that make them unique. For example, a
recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports showed how the “anonymised”
data from a European phone company could be re-identified with 95%
accuracy, given only four points of data about each person. To those
who say that privacy is dead anyway, I would point out that the
reason anonymisation and pseudonymisation are being contemplated in
the proposed Regulation is because its authors say doing this will
protect privacy – and that means that they’re implying privacy is
worth preserving. Indeed, the whole premise of “Big
Data” is at odds with the idea that data can be anonymised. After
all, Big Data promises that with very large data-sets, subtle
relationships can be teased out.”
(Related)
Former Deputy Chief of Staff for
Senator Ron Wyden, Jennifer Hoelzer, has a post on TechDirt
that makes clear how, despite his rhetoric yesterday, the
administration and members of Congress did everything they could to
actually stifle meaningful debate about NSA programs.
Now they wake up? Looks more like
marketing to me.
Germany’s three
biggest email providers announced on Friday a partnership to bolster
the security of messages sent between them in the wake of revelations
of US online surveillance scandal.
Telecommunications
giant Deutsche Telekom as well as GMX and Web.de, both subsidiaries
of Germany’s United Internet, will automatically
encrypt their email traffic from now on.
Read more on The
Local.
If your job is making laws, perhaps you
could make one that removes obsticles? Just a suggestion...
Peter Wallsten reports:
The Obama
administration points to checks and balances from Congress as a key
rationale for supporting bulk collection of Americans’ telephone
communications data, but several lawmakers responsible for overseeing
the program in recent years say that they felt
limited in their ability to challenge its scope and legality.
Read more on Washington
Post.
There’s a lot of fingerpointing going
on here between the intel community and Congress as to whether
Congress was given sufficient information and an opportunity to
really debate concerns. Some of the concerns raised by members of
Congress appear to be systemic and it would be useful for Congress to
debate how to conduct meaningful oversight when details or materials
are classified. One needs only to consider that some members of
Congress, like Senator Wyden, were trying to get a debate about
massive collection programs and were seemingly stymied at every turn.
That shouldn’t be.
Do you suppose the Supremes remember
their old law school professors fondly?
Professors
call data collection under Verizon order illegal, dangerous in
Supreme Court amicus brief
Leading professors of privacy and
surveillance law today urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the
secret order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
authorizing the NSA to collect “all call detail records or
‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon,” including calls
wholly within the U.S. and calls between the U.S. and abroad.
The order has been in place since May
2006 and has been reauthorized by the court approximately every 90
days since, most recently on July 19, 2013. The order first came to
public attention when The Guardian published it on June 5, 2013.
In a brief written by Fred H. Cate,
from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, the experts argue
that the Verizon order is deeply flawed and poses a serious threat to
personal privacy.
[…]
Both the amicus
brief and the original EPIC
petition are available online.
Cate is a Distinguished Professor and
the C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer
School of Law. He serves as director of the university’s Center
for Applied Cybersecurity Research and can be reached at 812-855-1161
or fcate@indiana.edu.
SOURCE: Indiana University
(Related) You should never believe
your own retoric...
DJ Pangburn writes:
While people are
fixated on former NSA and CIA chief Michael
Hayden’s Tuesday comments that the NSA’s sifting through
metadata is “really good news,” they should be far more concerned
about how he characterized pro-Snowden, pro-privacy activists and
hackers.
In a Bipartisan
Policy Center cybersecurity speech, Hayden invoked a century’s
worth of terror descriptors, calling Snowden supporters and privacy
proponents “nihilists, anarchists… twentysomethings who haven’t
talked to the opposite sex in a five or six years.”
Read more on MotherBoard.
For the record, Mr. Hayden, I am a
card-carrying member of the AARP. I talk to my husband every day, and
I was raised to respect others’ rights to their opinions, even if
they don’t agree with my own. It’s a shame you weren’t raised
to respect others, too.
For my Ethical Hackers: Do we need to
update the Wiki?
A reader sent in a link to this
description of 25
apps that you may want to know about.
PogoWasRight.org does not endorse any
apps. The link is provided for informational purposes only.
Hopefully, my informed readership will check out every app carefully
before downloading it. And if you have any comments or knowledge of
these apps you’d like to share with others, please feel free to use
the Comments section below.
Dilbert explains why software licenses
are seldom reviewed...
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