“We don't need no stinking constitution!” At least, that's their “interpretation”

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=28525

“Secret” interpretation of PATRIOT Act will remain secret – court

May 17, 2012 by Dissent

Damn and blast. The ACLU and New York Times have lost their lawsuit against the government that sought disclosure of the “secret interpretation” of the PATRIOT Act. District Judge William H. Pauley III of the Southern District of NY ruled that the government met its burden in claiming the requested memo was exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

So we, the people, remain in the dark about how the DOJ is interpreting Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act – a law passed by our representatives.

In light of this, maybe it’s time for Congress to amend Section 215 to rewrite it in such a way that it permits no other interpretation other than what they intend.

Was this also a poor “interpretation” or simply destruction of evidence?

US Justice Dept Defends Right To Record Police

"In recent times, it seems many Police Departments believe that recording them doing their work is an act of war with police officers, destroying the tapes, phones or cameras while arresting the folks doing it. But in a surprising twist, the U.S. Justice Department has sent letter (PDF) to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department — who have been quite heavy handed in enforcing their 'Don't record me bro!' mantra. The letter contains an awful lot of lawyer babble and lists many court cases and the like, although some sections are surprisingly clear: 'Policies should prohibit officers from destroying recording devices or cameras and deleting recordings or photographs under any circumstances. In addition to violating the First Amendment, police officers violate the core requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process clause when they irrevocably deprived individuals of their recordings without first providing notice and an opportunity to object.' There is a lot more and it certainly seems like a firm foothold in the right direction."

Talk about backward logic. “We had no reason to suspect this guy until we looked at everyone whose location data indicated they were nearby and selected him as 'suspect-du-jour'.”

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/geo-location-data-protection/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

To Warrant or Not to Warrant? ACLU, Police Clash Over Cellphone Location Data

A bill requiring law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant to collect an individual’s geolocation data from cellphone carriers would be burdensome to criminal investigators and prevent them from gathering the evidence they need to make a case, according to law enforcement witnesses at a hearing on Thursday.

Requiring agents to obtain such warrants is backward logic, since they often use geolocation data they’ve collected on an individual in order to then obtain a probable cause warrant for further collection of evidence, according to John Ramsey, national vice president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, who spoke to the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.

No other outcome was possible, given: “Your parents were wrong to allow you on to Facebook in the first place and they are not doing a proper job of monitoring your activity.”

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=28532

School officials’ Facebook rummaging prompts mom’s privacy crusade

May 18, 2012 by Dissent

Bob Sullivan reports:

A mother who says her middle-school daughter was forced to let school officials browse the 13-year-old girl’s private Facebook page is speaking out against the practice because, she says, “other parents are scared to talk about it.”

Pam Broviak, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Geneva, Ill., says her daughter was traumatized when the principal of Geneva Middle School South forced the child to log in to her Facebook account, then rummaged through the girl’s private information.

Read more on Red Tape.

A consequence of the BYOD trend?

Social Networking: The New Workplace Smoke Break

"J. Peter Bruzzese sees a solution for organizations seeking to cut down employee time spent on social networks at work: treat social networking like a smoke break. 'Try as you might to keep social networks at bay, mobile devices let people be in constant connection to their social networking vices over the cellular networks, which you can't block. Still, it's not completely impossible to stop social time-wasting over mobile: You can establish policies that, if enforced strongly enough, eliminate social networks from being accessed on company time. Treat it like smoking: Let employees take a 15-minute coffee/smoking/Facebook break and make them go to a designated area to do it.'"

A potential solution to the “jurisdiction” problem? Select blacklist or whitelist countries and define a network that excludes/includes them.

http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/05/cloud-offshoring/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

SDN Makes Cloud Offshoring More Attractive

Calligo may not be the first to take its cloud operations offshore, but in the age of software-defined networking (SDN), it could be the start of something bigger.

“It’s unclear if a small, niche player that offers the benefits having actual servers located on the Channel Islands can create a business that can compete with Amazon’s infrastructure as a service or the myriad private clouds people want to build, but the experiment is worth watching,” writes GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham.

… What’s so interesting is that the decision to go offshore is made easier in the age of SDN.

So by using whitebox networking gear, Calligo saves a bunch, the story goes. But here’s what stands out most, cloud watchers: “In many ways Calligo has built a software-defined data center….” Higginbotham writes.

Calligo says the Cayman Islands may be next, but the further offshore and with greater distances between centers comes latency, which wreaks havoc on cloud services.

What’s the big deal here? If it’s a demo of a abstracting from physical hardware and showcases software-defined data center, that’s great but why does it have to be on an island?

Eventually Box says Calligo plans to offer an offshore Dropbox-style personal storage account since many of the employees at its proposed customer base are leery of their employees using services like Dropbox given the sensitivity of having corporate data land on servers that could be located in the U.S.

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