Do political campaigns have an exemption from notifying potential Identity Theft victims?
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2008/04/obamas_allentowngate_laptops_m.html
Obama's Allentowngate? Laptops missing
Posted April 19, 2008 9:00 PM by Josh Drobnyk
Barack Obama's Allentown office was burglarized this week, and multiple laptops and cell phones were stolen, an Obama campaign aide said today. A police spokesman confirmed the incident, but couldn't provide details today because reports are kept in the department's records depository, which is closed weekends. [Sounds fishy to me... Bob]
An Obama aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "a couple" field laptops were taken out of the office at 1233 Linden St. The computers have demographic information that the campaign uses to target voters. [At minimum, voter registration information. Bob] "A couple" cell phones were also taken, the aide said.
Police spokesman Capt. James Stephens confirmed the break-in, but could not confirm details of what was taken because the records office is closed on weekends. When and how the break-in occurred also remained unclear. Stephens would only say that it happened "a couple days ago." The Obama campaign declined to comment officially on the incident.
Both campaigns have had their share of incidents at field offices during the race. Obama field offices in California and Iowa have also been broken into. And late last year, a man took campaign workers hostage at a Hillary Clinton field office in Rochester, N.H.
Is this merely Identity Theft, or a way to make CyberWar pay its own way?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080420154901426
Kr: User Data Stolen From Top Auction Site and Sold (update)
Sunday, April 20 2008 @ 03:49 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
User data leaked from Auction.co.kr has been put up for sale on Chinese Web sites, raising alarm over potential damage from voice phishing or spam e-mail.
The personal information of 10.81 million users was stolen from the popular online shopping site in Korea.
A posting titled, “Buy Naver, Auction IDs at a good price,” was found on the China-based Internet portal site O2SKY. The posting was put up April 11 before being deleted nine days later, offering the e-mail address and phone number of the seller.
Source - dongA.com
This is a slight twist on the replacement of card scanning devices in US supermarkets. (It might explain why no one seemed to notice.)
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080420182810757
UK: Police break £1m credit card fraud linked to terrorism
Sunday, April 20 2008 @ 06:28 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
Police in Scotland have uncovered petrol station credit card frauds with a potential value of £1m, linked to international terrorism.
Banks, oil companies and police forces throughout the country are on alert after 5000 cards were copied and their details stolen at two Edinburgh filling stations. A further attempt on a filling station in Kilmarnock was discovered before card details were stolen.
Source - The Herald
[From the article:
The gang members approach petrol station employees, who often work alone on shift, and offer a large bribe to allow access to the station's card-reading terminal.
... A miniaturised interceptor inserted inside the terminal copies the information on the card's magnetic strip and picks up the pin.
... The Herald's investigations suggest that banks' early warning systems in place to protect customers do not work consistently - especially in Scotland.
One industry source said: "Some banks decide not to inform the customers until any attempts are made to actually use the compromised details."
While in England and Wales it is the banks' responsibility to notify the police of suspect locations, in Scotland the onus is on the customer to report a suspected fraud to the police.
...because...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080421063954293
Data “Dysprotection:” breaches reported last week
Monday, April 21 2008 @ 06:39 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
A recap of incidents or privacy breaches reported last week for those who enjoy shaking their head and muttering to themselves with their morning coffee.
Source - Chronicles of Dissent
Security as a commodity? (Remember, someone in the organization has to know what questions to ask the vendors.)
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/1524246&from=rss
Information Security Is Becoming Infrastructure
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday April 20, @12:25PM from the time-to-pay-your-monthly-security-bill dept.
Bruce Schneier has a story at Wired about his observations from the recent RSA conference. He noticed that the 350+ vendors who attended the conference were having difficulties selling their products or even communicating with potential buyers. Schneier suggests that the complexity of the security industry is forcing it away from end-users and into the hands of companies who can bundle it with the products that need it. Quoting: "When something becomes infrastructure -- power, water, cleaning service, tax preparation -- customers care less about details and more about results. Technological innovations become something the infrastructure providers pay attention to, and they package it for their customers. No one wants to buy security. They want to buy something truly useful -- database management systems, Web 2.0 collaboration tools, a company-wide network -- and they want it to be secure. They don't want to have to become IT security experts. They don't want to have to go to the RSA Conference."
Inevitable
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080421063410632
From DNA of Family, a Tool to Make Arrests
Monday, April 21 2008 @ 06:34 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Other Privacy News
He was a church-going father of two, and for more than 30 years Dennis Rader eluded police in the Wichita area, killing 10 people and signing taunting letters with a self-styled monogram: BTK, for Bind Torture Kill. In the end, it was a DNA sample that tied BTK to his crimes. Not his own DNA. But his daughter's.
Investigators obtained a court order without the daughter's knowledge for a Pap smear specimen she had given five years earlier at a university medical clinic in Kansas. A DNA profile of the specimen almost perfectly matched the DNA evidence taken from several BTK crime scenes, leading detectives to conclude she was the child of the killer. That allowed police to secure an arrest warrant in February 2005 and end BTK's murderous career.
The BTK case was an early use of an emerging tool in law enforcement: analyzing the DNA of a suspect's relatives. Source - Washington Post
Related?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/1640237&from=rss
Google Invests In Genetic Indexing
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday April 20, @01:24PM from the get-a-NDA-for-your-DNA dept.
Bibek Paudel point us to a BusinessWeek report on Google's interest in the cataloging and analyzing of people's DNA. Google has recently invested in DNA screening firms Navigenics and 23andMe, which test customers' DNA for characteristics such as ancestry and predisposition for certain diseases. The customers are then able to give the information to their doctors. This is not Google's first foray into the medical industry. "Google wants to plant an early stake in a potentially large new market around genetic data. 'We are interested in supporting companies and making investments in companies that [bolster] our mission statement, which is organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful,' Google spokesman Andrew Pederson says. 'We felt it was important to get involved now, at the early stage, to better understand the information generated by this fast-moving field.'"
This works! I tested it on my favorite DU Law professor and found him (and some guy in St. Paul.)
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/018148.html
April 20, 2008
Google News Adds New Quotes Feature
Google News Blog: "As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information, we've been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics. To access these new features, first search for a person's name on Google News. If we have a recent quote, we'll show it above the search results."
Pity the poor lawyers who must now un-learn all that stuff they paid big bucks to learn...
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/2232220&from=rss
Court Finds Part of Copyright Act Unconstitutional
Posted by timothy on Sunday April 20, @09:14PM from the small-favors dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes
"A US District Court in the Southern District of California has found the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act to be unconstitutional. That act is what removes the sovereign immunity for infringement that state workers have in their official capacity, something many argued would jeopardize universities with liability for faculty infringement, not to mention other state agencies. In a rather dense legal ruling (PDF), the Court found that the Clarification Act was not a valid exercise of congressional power under the 14th Amendment. For those of you who have absolutely no idea what I just said, I recommend either being glad that a small piece of copyright law may soon bite the dust, or hoping that NYCL will explain this better."
This could be quite useful. (for my web site class)
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/Feed2Mobilekaywacom---Making-Mobile-Feeds/
Feed2Mobile.kaywa.com - Making Mobile Feeds
... You can make your web content accessible on your mobile device by using Feed2Mobile’s converter to create a mobile feed. It is quite simple, copy and paste the URL of your RSS feed into the blank spot where stated and your mobile feed with be generated.
A couple for the e-discovery wizards...
http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1208169988197
Keeping Your Firm's E-Discovery In-House
There are arguments for managing e-discovery in-house instead of outsourcing it, but it takes a special breed of employee
By Dale Buss Corporate Counsel April 15, 2008
and this one.
NEW ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY TEAMS, ROLES, AND FUNCTIONS
Eric Friedberg
For my Statistics class
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/018147.html
April 20, 2008
Households using the Internet in and outside the home, by selected characteristics
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA): Households using the Internet in and outside the home, by selected characteristics: Total, Urban, Rural, Principal City, October 2007
Ditto
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/018141.html
April 20, 2008
Census Bureau - 2008 Elections
News release, 2008 Elections: "A look at the population, selected characteristics and 2004 voting percentage of each state as it approaches its 2008 primary or caucus."
I like lists (it's an addiction)
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27057
25 leading-edge IT research projects
Submitted by Alpha Doggs on Fri, 04/18/2008 – 4:51pm.
For my Computer Security students
http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/antiphishing_phil/
Anti-Phishing Phil
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