Should make an interesting case study.
How important is it to “know” what happened?
One month after it became aware that
some faculty members had become victims of tax refund fraud, Arkansas
State University still hasn’t figured out whether the breach was of
their system or a third-party vendor’s. By now, 150 employees have
reported problems. KAIT8
has the story.
Maury
Nichols ran
across this one...
Federal
appeals court raises standard for border inspections of laptops
The
US Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit [official website] ruled Friday that Homeland
Security's border agents must
demonstrate reasonable suspicion [opinion, PDF] of wrongdoing
before conducting forensic analysis of laptop computers and
electronic devices. "Laptop computers, iPads and the like are
simultaneously offices and personal diaries. They contain the most
intimate details of our lives," wrote Judge M Margaret McKeown.
"A person's digital life ought not be hijacked simply by
crossing a border." Border searches are an exception to the
Fourth Amendment's warrant preference, but this holding serves to
narrow the exception. The case concerned a 2007 search of a
traveler's laptop which resulted in the discovery of child
pornography. The Ninth Circuit found that reasonable suspicion was
justified in this case due to the defendant's history of sex offenses
and password-protected files.
The
Ninth Circuit's heightening of border inspections for laptops follows
several previous decisions on the subject. In 2010 the American
Civil Liberties Union challenged the government's ability to search
electronic devices without reasonable suspicion [JURIST report].
In 2009 Barry Steinhard, Senior Advisor of Privacy International,
discussed why reasonable
suspicion should be required [JURIST comment] for laptop
searches. Also in 2009, John Wesley Hall, Jr., Former President of
the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, discussed why
reasonable
suspicion should be involved [JURIST comment] in border
inspections of laptops. Also that year the Department of Homeland
Security announced
new restrictions on controversial searches of laptops [JURIST
report].
(Related) No reason to “strip
search” my computer at the border unless you think I'm stupid
enough to carry incriminating evidence that I could easily
email to myself...
Last Friday the
Ninth Circuit decided United
States v. Cotterman, a case on the border search exception
to the Fourth Amendment. The en banc court held that manually
searching for files through a computer is allowed at the border, but
that “forensic examination” at the border requires reasonable
suspicion.
[...] the
Cotterman opinion raises some interesting questions about
where the lines are here. In particular, here are three questions I
have:
1) Are there any
limits on how much manual searching agents can conduct without
reasonable suspicion? Can the agents do anything as long as they do
it manually? Or are they limited to only “reasonable” manual
searches? And if the latter, what is the line between a “reasonable”
manual search and an “unreasonable” manual search? Does the
amount of time taken matter? The type of files viewed using the
manual search?
2) Imagine the
agents are conducting a manual search at the border and they come
across password-protected files. They lack reasonable suspicion, and
as a result they are not allowed to use forensic software to gain
access to those password-protected files. But are they allowed to
guess passwords to try to view the files? Imagine the electronic
device is an iPhone that has a passcode lock on it. The agents guess
the 4-digit code correctly — say, 1-2-3-4 — and they then view
the information on the phone. Is that permitted without reasonable
suspicion because it is still only a manual search? Or is that not
permitted because password-protection usually blocks manual access?
3) Can law
enforcement make an image of the hard drive and then mount the hard
drive on a separate machine and then search it manually? The major
reason investigators make images and search only the images is to
maintain evidentiary integrity: Searching a computer can alter
the evidence on it, so agents work off an image in order to retain
the original as original. Are they still allowed to do that
without reasonable suspicion? Or is making an image part of the
“computer forensic examination” for purposes of the Fourth
Amendment?
Read more on The
Volokh Conspiracy.
This could be very interesting. What
do we know about non-obvious threats? Will this lead to autonomous
killer drones?
Navy
Wants You to Write Algorithms That Automatically ID Threats
It remains the dream of military
imagery analysts who stare at surveillance footage all day: sensors
and cameras that alert their human masters to looming threats. The
Navy’s next research program wants to make it an overdue reality.
It actually wants to do much more than
that, according to a Monday research announcement. But at a minimum,
the Navy’s mad scientists want you to help them write stronger,
more robust algorithms that can fold different data sets from
different sensor systems into a single, unified picture that gives
sailors a deeper understanding of the dangers they face.
Or, as the Navy puts it, better
algorithms that can enable the development of “key technologies
that will enable rapid, accurate decision making by autonomous
processes in complex, time varying highly dynamic environments that
are probed with heterogeneous sensors and supported by open source
data,” according to a new call for papers from the Office of Naval
Research.
Important?
The Forensic students in my Stat class might find it amusing...
It
may now be possible for anyone, even if they follow rigorous privacy
and anonymity practices, to be identified by DNA data from people
they do not even know.
A paper published
in January in the journal Science describes a process by which it’s
possible to identify by name the donors of DNA samples, even without
any demographic or personal information. The technique was developed
by a team of geneticists at MIT’s Whitehead Institute for
Biomedical Research and is intended to demonstrate that science and
technology have surpassed the techniques and laws currently in place
for safeguarding private medical data, according to Yaniv Erlich, a
fellow at Whitehead and member of the research team.
Read more on IDG
News/Computerworld. The headline is misleading as there’s no
hacking involved at all.
[From
the article:
The
technique relies on the custom of passing family names down through
the fathers family. By statistically modeling the distribution of
family names, the researchers were able to narrow the list of
possible contributors of DNA samples. They then pinpointed
individuals using a range of other publicly available sources, none
of which were directly connected to the original donors and none of
which included protected personal data.
… There
is a risk to more than just donors, however. Even people who have
never contributed a DNA sample could be identified and genetically
typed if a relative has ever donated DNA. That scenario is becoming
more likely as recreational genetic genealogy sites gain popularity.
These sites trace family trees in part through a genetic componentand
they make contributed genetic information available to members of the
public, often without the same level of controls used by research or
medical institutions
For my students doing research...
March 11, 2013
Pogo
Blog - 5 Great Online Tools for Mining Public Records
Lili Shirley: "Thanks to our open
records laws, you can find a treasure
trove of information on the web—everything from details about
publically traded companies to where stimulus funds are going. You
can even submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests online.
Take some time this week to educate yourself about the information
and data available from government websites. Below are five great
online tools that you can use to help hold government accountable."
With the price of 3D printers dropping
(because you can print your own) this could be handy. After all,
youcan download the plans for printing assault rifles, but you might
need to sketch your own “main battle tank”
3D modelling software is amazingly
powerful but often very complicated, and so it’s refreshing to see
a tool like 123D Design from Autodesk simplifying the process.
Available as desktop software for Mac and PC computers, a web app in
your browser and as a tablet app for the Apple iPad, 123D Design aims
to bring 3D modelling to the masses, and make those models printable
to boot.
For my Website studnets...
Monday, March 11, 2013
Hosted blogging services like Blogger
and WordPress.com can be great for teachers who want to quickly
create classroom blogs. Through a hosted service you can have a blog
up and running in minutes. Hosted services also manage all of the
back-end things like software updates that most teachers don't want
to spend time fussing with. But if you blog long enough there may
come a time when you want to have more customization options on your
blog. That's when you might turn to self-hosting a WordPress blog.
In fact, that's what I'm doing with iPad
Apps for School, Android
4 Schools, and Practical
Ed Tech.
When I started self-hosting WordPress
blogs I learned a lot by trial and error. I also learned a ton from
consulting WPBeginner.
WPBeginner offer free video and written tutorials for all of the
basics and then some. On WP Beginner you can find everything
from how
to change your default font size to the
pros and cons of theme frameworks to how
to create a forum within your WordPress blog.
For the Computer Labs...
Monday, March 11, 2013
Later this week I am going to be a
virtual guest in a class at the University
of the Philippines, Diliman. The topic I've been invited to
speak about is using Google Chrome extensions and apps in education.
In preparation for my virtual visit I've created this list of some of
my favorite apps and extensions.
The Daum
Equation Editor is a free, online tool for quickly writing
equations that you can save as text or images to use in documents.
You can use the equation editor by typing on your keyboard and or
selecting symbols from the Daum Equation Editor's menu.
Magic
Scroll is a Chrome web app that you can use to read ePub files on
your desktop or laptop even if you do not have an internet
connection.
Select
and Speak is a simple text to speech browser extension. Select
and Speak installs with just one click and does not require a browser
re-start. Once Select and Speak is installed just highlight any text
on a webpage, click the Select and Speak icon in your browser, and
listen to the reading of the text.
Announcify
is a free text to speech application that is available as a Chrome
browser extension. With Announcify installed in your browser any
time you're viewing a webpage you can simply click on the Announcify
icon in your browser and have that page read to you. A bonus aspect
of using Announcify is that in order to make a webpage easier to read
it enlarges the text of the webpage and removes all sidebar content.
Webpage
Screenshot is another good one to add to the list. Webpage
Screenshot is a Chrome extension that you can use to capture all or
part of webpage. You can draw and type on screenshots you make with
Webpage Screenshot. One feature of Webpage Screenshot that is quite
helpful is the option to capture the entire content of webpage even
if it doesn't appear in your current view of the webpage. Webpage
Screenshot images can be saved in your Google Drive account.
The EasyBib
Chrome extension serves two purposes. The first purpose is to
evaluate webpages for credibility. The credibility ranking is based
on criteria outlined in this
guide. The extension simply says whether the site is credible,
has credibility issues, or if the source has not been evaluated. The
second purpose of the EasyBib
Chrome extension is to provide a quick way to add
citations to your bibliographies. Click the bookmarklet
to create a properly formatted citation and add it to your EasyBib
account.
A
Cleaner Internet is an extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
The extension allows you to search YouTube and view YouTube videos
without viewing the "related" content, advertisements, and
comments that appear on YouTube.
QRreader
(beta) is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to use your
browser to decode QR codes. With QRreader installed when you come to
a QR code on the web you can simply right-click on it to decode it.
If the QR code is for a webpage, the page will open in a new tab. If
the QR code is for text, it will open in a text dialogue box.
You can search
Google using your voice, but once you get to a site then you're back
to typing. Oweb
Voice Input is a free Chrome extension that enables you to use
your voice to search on websites. With Oweb Voice Input installed
anytime that you see a search box on a website you can speak your
query. On some sites Oweb Voice Input can be used to complete forms
too.
Read
& Write is a free Google Chrome Web App that increases the
accessibility of the text of documents in your Google Drive account.
After installing the app you will see a Read & Write tab appear
at the top of your browser window whenever you have a document open
in Google Drive. Clicking that Read & Write tab will open a menu
of accessibility options. Some of the accessibility options include
a picture dictionary and a talking dictionary. To use either
dictionary just highlight a word then click on the dictionary that
you want to use. The dictionary that you select will pop-up in your
document. Read
& Write will also read the text of your documents aloud. In
the settings menu you can select from nine voices and three playback
speeds.
Using the Chrome
Remote Desktop App you can grant access to your computer to
another person who also has the Chrome Remote Desktop App installed.
If you want to share your desktop just click "share now"
and Chrome Remote Desktop will generate an access code to give to the
person who will access your computer. To access and control another
person's computer you just need to enter the access code that they
provide to you.
Printliminator
is a handy little bookmarklet for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
Printliminator
allows you to highlight a webpage and select only the elements which
you wish to print. You can install Printliminator
in seconds by just clicking and dragging it into your browser's
toolbar.
Clearly
comes to us from the producers of Evernote. Clearly strips the
sidebar content of a webpage. You can send the cleaned-up version
directly to your Evernote account for easy reading whenever you open
your Evernote account. You can print the cleaned-up article from
your Evernote account.
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