Does your phone company
have your bank account numbers?
Richard Weiss reports:
An
intruder hacked into a Vodafone
Group Plc (VOD) server in Germany,
gaining access to 2 million customers’ personal details and banking
information.
A
person with insider knowledge stole data including names, addresses,
birth dates, and bank account information, the world’s
second-biggest mobile-phone carrier said in a statement
today. The hacker had no access to credit-card information,
passwords, PIN numbers or mobile-phone numbers, Vodafone said.
Read more on Bloomberg
News. via @Cyber_War_News
No doubt the end of the
world...
So much for DNI
Clapper’s blathering on about how he was
releasing documents consistent with the President’s directive.
Trevor Timm of EFF writes:
The
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) just today released hundreds
of pages of documents related to the government’s secret
interpretation of Patriot Act Section 215 and the NSA’s (mis)use of
its massive database of every American’s phone records. The
documents were released as a result of EFF’s
ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
We
have all
the documents posted here. The government also
posted
many of the documents here.
Our
legal team is currently poring over them and will have much more
analysis soon, but intelligence officials held a call with reporters
about the content of the documents this morning, and made several
revealing comments.
First,
intelligence officials said they were releasing this information in
response to the presidential directive on transparency surrounding
the NSA. That statement is misleading. They are releasing
this information because a
court ordered them to as part of EFF’s
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed almost two years ago on the
tenth anniversary of the Patriot Act.
In
fact, up until the Snowden revelations started a couple months ago,
the government was
fighting tooth and nail to not only avoid
releasing the content of the government’s secret interpretation of
the Patriot Act, but even the number of pages that were
involved. The government argued releasing a single word of today’s
release would cause “serious and exceptionally grave damage to the
national security of the United States.”
[More...
(Related) No doubt the
senators will claim full credit.
So we learned more
today, but according
to Senators Wyden and Udall, there’s still
much more to be learned:
One of the many
problems with secret court orders is that I never know how concerned
I should be. Do they impact me? I s my privacy at risk? Can I
count on the court to secretly protect my non-secret rights?
Lavabit’s
Owner Appeals Secret Surveillance Order That Led Him to Shutter Site
The owner of the
encrypted email company Lavabit has formally appealed the secret
surveillance order that led him to defiantly shutter the site last
month. But the details of the case were immediately placed under
seal in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, records show.
The Texas-based email
service shut down on August 8, blaming a court battle it had been
fighting, and losing, in secret. The closure
occurred about a month after news reports revealed that NSA leaker
Edward Snowden was using a Lavabit email account to communicate from
Russia.
In a statement
announcing the closure, and in subsequent interviews, Lavabit owner
Ladar Levison complained that he’s prevented from revealing exactly
what the government asked him to do, or who it was targeting. The
circumstances
suggest Lavabit had been ordered to actively
circumvent its own security, either by providing the government with
its private SSL certificate — allowing its users to be wiretapped —
or by modifying its software to store a user’s private encryption
keys.
You can't tell the
players without a scorecard...
Mark Jaycox writes:
The
veil of secrecy around the government’s illegal and
unconstitutional use of both Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is
being lifted. As a result, Congress has seen a
flurry of legislation to try and fix the problems; however, as we’ve
been saying
since June there are far more questions than
answers about the spying. And Congress must
create a special investigative committee to
find out the answers. Right now, the current
investigations are unable to provide the
American public with the information it needs.
For
now, here’s a quick summary of the bills in Congress drafted after
the June leaks that have a chance to go forward.
Read more on EFF.
So if every Friday I
drive 83 miles, most of it at highway speed, I might be going to my
ski shack for the weekend.
Yes,
those “pay as you drive” programs used by insurance companies to
record your driving habits sometimes can be used to accurately infer
your destination — a long-time concern of privacy advocates.
That’s
what four University of Denver computer scientists found in an
experiment.
“With
access to simple features such as driving speed and distance
travelled, inferring the destinations of driving trips is possible,”
they write in a paper published in the proceedings of the 2013 ACM
Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society in November. “Privacy
advocates have presumed the existence of location privacy threats in
non-tracking telematics data collection practices. Our work shows
that the threats are real.”
Read more on Science
Daily.
[From
the article:
That's what four
University of Denver computer scientists found in an
experiment.
… The scientists,
Rinku Dewri, Prasad Annadata, Wisam Eltarjarnan and Ramakrishna
Thurimella, developed an algorithm and applied it to data from 30
routine trips made in and around the Denver area. In 18 of the trips,
the algorithm was able to place the actual destination within the top
three projected destinations.
… The University of
Denver scientists, however, working through the Colorado Research
Institute for Security and Privacy, found that a mixture of
"quasi-identifiers" can be used to infer destinations even
without GPS data. "Quasi-identifiers" are driving data
that are non-tracking by themselves but can be used to infer driving
routes when used in combination.
In addition to
measuring driving speed and distance travelled, they tracked traffic
stops and turns. They matched this information to road maps to
determine the potential destinations of a trip, and then ranked them
to deduce the most likely destination.
… Their paper is
titled, "Inferring Trip Destinations from Driving Habits Data."
Trivial or significant.
I wonder what my students will say?
Orin Kerr writes:
Here’s
an oddball Fourth Amendment case involving an issue I have never seen
litigated: How does the Fourth Amendment apply to deleting a picture
from a digital camera? In Burch v. City of Florence, Ala.,
913 F.Supp.2d 1221 (N.D.Ala. 2012), the police had received various
complaints that the plaintiff was causing concern because he was
taking pictures of lots of people and cars in town. He would
apparently follow people and take lots of pictures of them, all
without any apparent reason. A police officer who knew about
the complaints spotted the plaintiff and pulled him over for a
traffic violation. When the car was stopped, the officer saw the
camera in the car. The officer grabbed the camera and started
looking through its pictures. When the officer found a picture of
the officer’s own license plate (of his personal car), the officer
deleted the picture from the camera. The officer then let the
plaintiff go. The plaintiff then filed a pro se civil suit under the
Fourth Amendment, claiming that searching the camera and deleting the
image violated his Fourth Amendment.
Read more on The
Volokh Conspiracy.
(Related) Again, the
police don't like it...
Victoria Kim reports
that a California judge denied an attempt from the union representing
the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to block the L.A. Times from
reporting on sheriff’s deputies. The union had alleged that the
Times and a reporter were unlawfully in possession of – and would
use – background investigation files containing personal
information of about 500 deputies and possibly their families.
Los
Angeles County Superior Court Judge Joanne O’Donnell denied the
union’s motion, writing in her ruling that the union failed to
present “the evidence most critical to the showing of irreparable
harm or immediate danger.”
“The
court declines to issue [an order] imposing a prior restraint on
defendants’ free speech based on the speculative
hearsay testimony of anonymous witnesses,” she wrote.
Read more on the Los
Angeles Times.
For all my students.
Back
To School? How To Organize Your Classroom Work With Evernote
School time can become
stressful for both students and teachers, especially in high school
and later in college. Therefore, it’s absolutely crucial that you
stay as organized as possible so that you know where to find the
information you need and make things as easy as possible for
yourself. Evernote is a fantastic tool to take care of all of this
as there
are many reasons to use Evernote, so here are a
few tips which you can use to get an advantage in school.
Another “all
students” tool.
– to turn any
connected device into a full-blown, fully featured communication
device offering free IM, text messaging, voice and video calling.
Unlimited Free texting and calling to any phone.
Get a free personal phone number and voicemail. Send and receive
pictures and videos for free. Keep in touch with your friends and
enjoy the group chat and video call feature.
For me and any students
what gots kulture...
Resources
for Teaching and Learning About Classical Music
Open
Culture recently published an article about
Musopen's
collection of free recordings of performances
of the works of more than 150 composers. You can
stream the music from Musopen for free. You can also
download five recordings per day for free from Musopen. The
recordings could be useful in a music appreciation course. Looking
at the Musopen
collection prompted me to look at some other
resources for teaching about classical music.
Keeping
Score is a comprehensive website full of
educational materials about composers, scores, musical techniques,
and symphonies. There are two elements of Keeping Score that should
be of particular interest to educators. The most immediately
accessible section of Keeping Score is the interactive education
elements that contain videos, images, and texts that tell the stories
of composers. The interactive section also features explanations of
musical techniques, the history of notable events and themes in the
symphonic world, and analysis of various scores. The second section
of Keeping Score that teachers will be drawn to is the lesson plan
library. In the lesson plan library teachers will find lesson plans
developed to incorporate elements of the Keeping Score website.
Classics
for Kids, produced by Cincinnati Public Radio,
offers lesson plans, podcasts, and games for teaching kids about
classical music. The lesson plans are designed for use in K-5
settings. All of the lesson plans are available as PDFs. Activity
sheets are also available as accompaniments to recordings of
classical composers. In the games section of Classics for Kids
students can develop their own compositions or practice identifying
music and composers. As a reference for students, Classics for Kids
offers a dictionary of music terms.
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