The problem with drawing a line in the
sand is, you must act when someone crosses it. The problem with
failing to draw a line is, that same someone assumes you don't really
care. I find this interesting because we have many areas (CyberWar)
that have no clearly defined lines of any kind.
Seeing
Red
If Syria has used chemical weapons
against its own people and crossed Obama’s red line, how should the
president respond?
It seemed for a moment today that we
might soon be at war with Syria.
Secretary
of Defense Chuck Hagel told reporters that, according to new
intelligence analyses, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has likely
used chemical weapons, specifically sarin, against rebel forces.
Interesting question. My guess is that
this will go away when everything is on your smartphone. (and that
too will hold unencrypted data as you lose the phone in even more
places.)
OptiNose US Inc. has
been notifying some of its consultants that their names and Social
Security numbers were on a laptop stolen from an employee’s car.
The laptop was stolen on March 26 in a
Philadelphia suburb, and OptiNose started sending out notification
letters on April 16. The letter did not inform recipients that the
laptop was stolen from an unattended vehicle. The letter states that
OptiNose “has no information that any personal data has been
accessed by an unauthorized party.” They do not state whether
there was any software on the laptop that would even provide such
information.
OptiNose offered those affected credit
monitoring at the firm’s expense, but get this – enrollees have
to pay for the service and then submit a request for reimbursement.
The notification letter does not
indicate whether the employee was disciplined at all or what steps
OptiNose is taking to prevent this from ever happening again.
If you get the sense that I am
unimpressed with their handling of this breach, you’re right.
The incident was reported to the New
Hampshire Attorney General’s Office on April 16 and the Vermont
Attorney General’s Office on April 23.
The Total Information Awareness (TIA)
project was dropped due to public backlash. The part of that effort
that pulled together public data would have been called
the “PIA”
– and that is what they are attempting here. (I'm
sure it's just a concidence that Privacy Impact Assessment has the
same initials) NOTE: Appendix A lists the sites monitered. Appendix
B lists the search terms followed.
April 25, 2013
Publicly
Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness
Initiative Update
Privacy Impact Assessment for the
Office of Operations Coordination and Planning - Publicly
Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness
Initiative, DHS, Update April 1, 2013
- "To monitor social media, National Operations Center Media Monitoring analysts only use publicly available search engines, content aggregators, and site-specific search tools to find items of potential interest to DHS. Once the analysts determine an item or event is of sufficient value to DHS to be reported, they extract only the pertinent, authorized information, [Authorized by whom? Bob] and put it into a specific web application (Media Monitoring Capability (MMC) application) to build and format their reports. The unused information for each item of interest is not stored or filed for reference and is lost when the webpage is closed or deleted. [They delete your Facebook page? I think not! Bob] The MMC application also facilitates tracking previous reports to help avoid duplicative reporting and ensures further development of reporting on ongoing issues. It allows analysts to electronically document details using a customized user interface, and disseminate relevant information in a standardized format. Using the MMC application, NOC MMC analysts can efficiently and effectively catalog the information by adding meta - tags such as location, category, critical information requirement, image files, and source information. The application empowers NOC MMC analysts to have a better grasp of the common operating picture by providing the means to quickly search for an item of interest using any of the above - mentioned meta-tags as well as enabling them to respond to requests for information from other collaborating entities in a timely fashion."
(Related) Monitoring search terms and
social media for fun and profit. More for my Statistics students.
Google, as many researchers know well,
is more than a search engine—it’s a remarkably comprehensive
barometer of public opinion and the state of the world at any given
time. By using Google
Trends, which tracks the frequency particular search terms are
entered into Google over time, scientists have found seasonal
patterns, for example, in
searches for information about mental illnesses and detected a
link between searching behavior and a country’s GDP.
A number of people have also had the
idea to use these trends to try achieving a more basic desire: making
money. Several
studies
in recent years have looked at the number of times investors searched
for particular stock names and symbols and created relatively
successful investing strategies based on this data.
A new
study published today in Scientific Reports by a team of
British researchers, though, harnesses Google Trends data to produce
investing strategies in a more nuanced way. Instead of looking at
the frequency that the names of stocks or companies were searched,
they analyzed a broad range of 98 commonly used words—everything
from “unemployment” to “marriage” to “car” to “water”—and
simulated investing strategies based on week-by-week changes in the
frequencies of each of these words as search terms by American
internet users.
The changes in the frequency of some of
these words, it turns out, are very useful predictors of whether the
market as a whole—in this case, the Dow
Jones Industrial Average—will go down or up (the Dow is a broad
index commonly considered a benchmark of the overall performance of
the U.S. stock market).
For my WolframAlpha using Statistics
students.
April 25, 2013
Datascience
of the Facebook World via Wolfram|Alpha Blog
"More than a million people have
now used our Wolfram|Alpha
Personal Analytics for Facebook. And as part of our latest
update, in addition to collecting some anonymized statistics, we
launched a Data Donor program that allows people to contribute
detailed data to us for research purposes. A few weeks ago we
decided to start analyzing all this data. And I have to say that if
nothing else it’s been a terrific example of the power of
Mathematica
and the Wolfram Language for doing data science. We’d always
planned to use the data we collect to enhance our Personal
Analytics system. But I couldn’t resist also trying to do some
basic science with it... So a first quantitative question to ask is:
How big are these networks usually? In other words, how many friends
do people typically have on Facebook? Well, at least for our users,
that’s easy to answer. The median is 342—and here’s a
histogram showing the distribution (there’s a cutoff at 5000
because that’s the maximum number of friends for a personal
Facebook page)..."
Because in some countries, some types
of information are banned...
Google
Sees More Government Requests to Remove Content 'Than Ever Before'
In
the latest edition of its Transparency Report, released this
morning, Google revealed that the final six months of 2012 saw an
increase in government requests to remove content -- often YouTube
videos. All told, Google received 2,285 such requests (compared with
1,811 during the first half of 2012) that named a total of 24,179
pieces of content for removal (compared with 18,070 in the preceding
period).
… The number of content-removal
requests from various American government agencies and courts has
steadily increased in recent years, totaling 321 (second only to
Brazil) for the most recent period.
I requested this from my local library.
I certainly don't need to buy it.
"Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
begin their new nonfiction book, The New Digital Age,
with a rather bold pronouncement: 'The Internet is the largest
experiment involving anarchy in history.' Subsequent chapters deal
with how that experiment will alter life in decades to come, as more
and more people around the world connect to the Internet via cheap
mobile phones and other devices."
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