Saturday, December 08, 2012

Following up on my post on November 5th about houses on the highway in New Jersey, John Soma found this article. After all my stories of growing up in New Jersey, I think he thought someone had simply stolen the house. Not true. Housing prices are still down. But the contents?
Man returns to Jersey shore to find home missing


This sounds wrong. This would have been considered as a possible intelligence gathering action prior to an attack. It would (should) not have been ignored.
Secret Service under investigation over loss of sensitive files on Metro
December 7, 2012 by admin
Jana Winter of Fox News reports that the Secret Service - the agency that is often involved in investigations of data breaches – had its own breach back in 2008 that is now (finally?) under investigation:
The Secret Service is the target of an investigation into an “immense breach” involving the loss of two backup computer tapes left on a Washington, D.C., Metro train that contained sensitive personal information about all agency employees, contacts and overseas informants, according to multiple law enforcement and congressional sources.
[...]
Sources said the tapes were lost on the Red Line of the Metro in 2008 by a young, low-level associate of a private contracting company that had been hired to transport them from Secret Service’s Investigative Resources Management division at the agency’s headquarters in the Penn Quarter section of Washington, D.C., to a secure vault in Olney, Md., where government agencies store contingency plans, documents and other backup material. The employee had volunteered to deliver the tapes because he lived near the location of the vault, but got off at the Glenmont, Md., Metro stop without the tapes, according to sources.
Sources said the “personally identifiable information” — or “PII,” in government-speak — on the tapes includes combinations of the following: Social Security Numbers; home addresses; information about family members; phone numbers; dates of birth; medical information; bank account numbers; employment information; driver’s license numbers; passport numbers; and any biometric information on file with the Secret Service.
Did the Secret Service handle this breach properly or did it fail to provide adequate disclosure and notice to those affected? It depends on whom you ask, as Fox reports, and hopefully the investigation by Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General will get to the bottom of this one.
Disturbingly, this breach might never had been made public were it not for the recent Secret Service scandal involving the conduct of agents. It was that investigation that led to the investigation of this other matter as part of looking into the culture of the Secret Service.


Not shocking to those of us who have been following this topic. I'll have to ask my students to get a more balanced perspective.
Which Websites Are Sharing Your Personal Details?
December 7, 2012 by Dissent
For an article coming out Saturday, the Wall Street Journal tested 71 popular websites that request a login and found that more than a quarter of the time, the sites passed along a user’s real name, email address or other personal details, such as username, to third-party companies.
[Don't miss the graphics:


Send in the drones! Any limitation on drones is likely to impact many groups. Not only manufacturers, but consider airspace limit impact on helicopters...
Aviation Industry to FAA: “Ignore Privacy”
December 7, 2012 by Dissent
From EPIC.org:
Aviation groups have asked the Federal Aviation Administration to ignore the privacy implications of increased drone use in the United States. The letter follows the FAA statement that domestic drones “raises privacy issues [that] will need to be addressed.” Earlier this year, EPIC warned Congress, “there are substantial legal and constitutional issues involved in the deployment of aerial drones by federal agencies.” EPIC, joined by over 100 organizations, experts, and members of the public, has petitioned the FAA to to establish privacy safeguards. For more information, see EPIC: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Drones
And no, EPIC isn’t exaggerating. The letter says, in part:
It is our belief that for FAA to succeed, the agency must remain focused on safety rather than privacy issues, where the FAA has no statutory standing or technical expertise.
And if the FAA were foolishly thinking of restricting air space because of privacy-related or other concerns, the industry says fergeddaboutit: [How can you misspell a simple New Jersey word like “Fuhgeddaboudit?” Bob]
Additionally, as a goal the FAA should ensure that the introduction of UAS into the NAS not limit access to airspace or require modifications to the existing fleet of aircraft flying in the NAS beyond what is already currently anticipated to accommodate NextGen. The importance of airspace access cannot be overstated and FAA must aggressively protect its preeminent role as manager of the national airspace system.


I might work this into a Compouter Security or Homeland Security class...
Warrantless Surveillance 101: Introducing EFF’s New NSA Domestic Spying Guide
December 7, 2012 by Dissent
Mark M. Jaycox and Trevor Timm write:
On December 14th, EFF is back in federal court challenging the NSA’s domestic spying program in our long-running case Jewel v. NSA. In anticipation of our court appearance, we’ve launched a new section of our website to give everyone a clear understanding how the NSA warrantless wiretapping program works and why we’re challenging it as unconstitutional.
While the government claims the NSA’s infamous program is too secret to be litigated, it isn’t a secret—and we’ve catalogued the trove of information that has become public since it was first revealed by the New York Times in 2005. This including declarations under oath by an AT&T whistleblower and three NSA whistleblowers, sworn testimony before Congress, investigations by government Inspectors General and stories by major media organizations based on highly placed sources, along with public admissions by government officials.
You can now view our NSA domestic spying timeline, an explanation of how the NSA conducts the spying, a history of the controversial ‘state secrets’ privilege (which the government is invoking in an attempt to have our lawsuit dismissed), and a breakdown of how the government uses word games when talking about the program to hide what they’re doing.
Read more on EFF.


...and I'll need to check back every few months.
Deep Dive: ECPA and the Future of Electronic Privacy
December 7, 2012 by Dissent
From EFF:
In most issues of EFFector, we give an overview of all the work we’re doing at EFF right now. Today, we’re trying something new: doing a deep dive into a single issue. If our readers find this valuable, we’ll try to give you an EFFector Deep Dive every few months.
Yesterday was a watershed moment in the fight for electronic privacy: the Senate Judiciary Committee overwhelmingly passed an amendment that mandates the government get a probable cause warrant before reading our emails. The battle isn’t over — the reform, championed by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), still needs to pass the rest of the Senate and the House, and be signed by the President to become a law. But yesterday, thanks to thousands of people speaking out, we were able to begin the process of overhauling our archaic privacy laws into alignment with modern technology.
It was a big win for us, even if it was only the first step in the process of reforming privacy law to keep the government out of our inboxes. So we’re dedicating this EFFector to the battle to reform outdated privacy law: what the government can get, what the law ought to be, and what we’re doing to fix the gaping loopholes that leave users vulnerable to government snooping.
The Fourth Amendment and Electronic Privacy
The Fourth Amendment protects us from unreasonable government searches and seizures. In practical terms, this means that law enforcement has to get a warrant — demonstrating to a judge that it has probable cause to believe it will find evidence of a crime — in order to search a place or seize an item. In deciding whether the Fourth Amendment applies, courts always look to see whether people have both a subjective expectation of privacy in the place to be searched, and whether society would recognize that expectation of privacy as reasonable. The Supreme Court made this point clear in a landmark 1967 case, Katz v. United States, when it ruled that a warrantless wiretap of a public payphone violated the Fourth Amendment.
The Third Party Doctrine, or How the Supreme Court Got Us Into This Mess
In 1979, the Supreme Court created a crack in our Fourth Amendment protections. In Smith v. Maryland, the Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment didn’t protect the privacy of the numbers we dialed on our phones because we had voluntarily shared those numbers with the phone company when we dialed them. This principle — known as the Third Party Doctrine — basically suggests that when we share data with a communications service provider like a telephone company or an email provider, we know our data is being handed to someone else and so we can’t reasonably expect it to be private anymore.
The government took this small opening created by Smith v. Maryland and blew it wide open. It argued that this narrow 1979 decision about phone dialing applied to the vast amount of data we now share with online service providers — everything from email to cell phone location records to social media. This is bogus and dangerous. When we hand an email message to Gmail to deliver on our behalf, we do so with an intention that our private communications will be respected and kept in strict confidence, and that no human being or computer will review the message other than the intended recipient. But the government argues that because we handed our communications to a service provider, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t require them to get a warrant before snooping around our inbox.
Luckily, the courts are beginning to agree with us. In a leading case where EFF participated as amicus, United States v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with us that people had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email, even if it is stored with a service provider, and therefore the government needed a search warrant to access it. And in the recent Supreme Court case, United States v. Jones, Justice Sotomayor said that she thought the Third Party Doctrine was outdated, while she and four other Justices — including Justice Alito — raised concerns about the information gathered by our cellphones.
Read more on EFF.


It's like yelling “Failure” in a crowded Internet? Will courts have to stay current on the impact of each technology?
Yelp Reviewer Gets SLAPPed With 750K Lawsuit And Order To Alter Comments
A woman is facing a $750,000 defamation lawsuit and has been ordered to alter a negative Yelp review of a home contractor after police found that her claims didn’t add up.
Dietz Development is claiming that Jane Perez’s scathing review has cost them new customers and, on Wednesday, a judge ordered a preliminary injunction for her to edit the post. Yelp and legal critics are worried that Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP)-related lawsuits could chill free speech, but business owners say that legal intervention is necessary in an age when online reviews can make or break a company. As the Internet gives the average citizen a greater voice, courts appear to be willing to hold their exercise of free speech to higher standards.
… Yelp itself is protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and cannot be held liable for any inane, slanderous, or downright mean things people say on the site.
Yet, all that could change as recent large-scale research finds that Yelp reviews can significantly impact businesses: A meager half-star increase on Yelp’s 5-star rating makes it 30 to 49 percent more likely that restaurants will sell out their evening seats.


For my Statistics (and Contingency Planning) students. Is the “Normal Curve” moving, flatening, or in need of replacement? What will be the impact on the Insurance industry?
2/3 of Sandy-Damaged Homes in N.Y. Were Outside the 100-Year Flood Zone
… Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that fully two-thirds of the houses damaged by Sandy were outside the 100-year flood zone. As their headline put it, "Sandy Alters 'Reality."
Which is a fascinating way to look at it: reality, for some intents and purposes, is a bureaucratic fiction based on the way things were, institutional necessity, and accepted statistical practices. That reality influences housing prices, guides maintenance spending, and sets the boundaries for emergency planning.


Freebies for my students.
BitDefender launched a new weapon for fighting viruses and malware on Wednesday with the release of their 60-second virus scanner for PCs. The software which comes in the form of a tiny 160KB Windows executable aims to scan your Windows machine for problems in record time while providing real-time cloud protection and alerts. According to the company the software can be run alongside users’ existing anti-virus software for added security.
… Download BitDefender 60-Second Scanner @ BitDefender.com

Ditto Also for my website students, since it can be integrated to fill fields on web pages... Chrome only, so far.
Online Dictation is a free to use web tool that converts your speech into text. All you have to do is visit the site and click on the microphone icon on the homepage, next to the page’s title. Next you speak a sentence into your microphone; the speech is processed, converted to text, and displayed. Any errors can be manually removed by clicking on the text and making it editable. You can also copy the text and use it somewhere else by pasting it.

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