Far be it for me to ever call an
attorney a worm, but when Snowden opened the can, this is one of many
things that crawled out.
In the wake of revelations about NSA
amassing phone records, a sharp defense lawyer filed a motion
to compel the government to turn over his client’s records that
might exonerate him.
Julia Filip reports:
Citing the NSA
telephone dragnet, a federal judge ordered
the United States government to deliver telephone records demanded by
a man on trial for an armored car robbery in which a Brink’s
employee was killed.
Read more on Courthouse
News.
[From the article:
In light of the recently revealed
National Security Agency surveillance program, Brown's attorneys
challenged the government's claim that it has no access to records of
Brown's phone calls.
Prosecutors claimed they were missing
records of calls to and from two of Brown's telephones before Sept.
1, 2010. They claimed Brown's service provider, MetroPCS, no longer
had the records. Prosecution relied on Moss's and other
co-conspirators' cell phone records to try to prove Brown's
involvement in the armed robberies.
...but of course, I don't use my
browser to read the articles. That's what RSS readers are for.
EFF
– How Dozens of Companies Know You’re Reading About Those NSA
Leaks
Follow up to previous postings
on NSA’s big data domestic
surveillance program via Micah
Lee: “Each time your browser makes a request it sends the
following information with it:
- Your IP address and the exact time of the request
- User-Agent string: which normally contains the web browser you’re using, your browser’s version, your operating system, processor information (32-bit, 64-bit), language settings, and other data
- Referrer: the URL of the website you’re coming from—in the case of the Facebook Like button example, your browser tells Facebook which website you’re viewing
- Other HTTP headers which contain potentially identifying information
- Sometimes tracking cookies
Every company has different practices,
but they generally log some or all of this information, perhaps
indefinitely. It takes very little information about
your web browser to build a unique fingerprint of it. See
EFF’s Panopticlick website
to see how unique and trackable your web browser is even without the
use of tracking cookies. You can read more in our Primer
on Information Theory and Privacy.”
I always wondered what the DMVs used
driver photos for, back before there was facial recognition software
and FBI terrorist searches.
EPIC
– FBI Performs Massive Virtual Line-up by Searching DMV Photos
“Through a Freedom of Information Act
request,
EPIC obtained a number of agreements
between the FBI and state DMVs. The agreements allow the FBI to use
facial recognition to compare subjects of FBI investigations with the
millions of license and identification photos retained by
participating state DMVs. EPIC also obtained the Standard
Operating Procedure for the program and a Privacy
Threshold Analysis that indicated that a Privacy Impact
Assessment must be performed, but it is not clear whether one has
been completed. EPIC is currently suing
the FBI to learn more about its development of a vast biometric
identification database. For more information, see EPIC:
Face Recognition and EPIC:
Biometric Identifiers.”
I still don't see the surveillance
programs discovering these people. Granted they help a lot after
they have been identified, but “Phone X called Phone Y” is just
data unless and until one of those phones are connected to a bad guy.
The
Four Times NSA Surveillance Programs Stopped An Attack
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, the government’s surveillance programs have helped thwart
a terrorist attack in more than 50 instances, according to Gen. Keith
Alexander, director of the National Security Agency. The
intelligence community has decided to disclose four of these cases.
Another rich target area for my Ethical
Hackers to protect? If I don't have to be an inventor, just an
application filer, accessing your paperwork is more valuable than
running a research lab.
Presentation
– The Race to the Patent Office – the Impact of the America
Invents Act
The
Race to the Patent Office – the Impact of the America Invents Act
– “The America Invents Act (Patent Reform Act) went into effect
on 16 March 2013. It switched the U.S. patent system from “first
to invent” to “first to file” and is the most significant
change to the system in nearly 60 years. The act has wide
ramifications concerning the kinds of innovations that are
patentable, who owns inventions, who can use inventions, and how
patents are challenged and defended. A panel of speakers discussed
how the act has affected the patent process and the dramatic and
unforeseen impacts they have seen since the law went into effect.”
[via Lorna Newman]
Better
late (accompanied by supportive news articles) than years ago when it
started?
Craig Timberg reports:
Google asked the
secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease
long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that
the company has a constitutional right to speak about information
it’s forced to give the government.
The legal
filing, which cites the First Amendment’s guarantee of free
speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to
protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about
sweeping National
Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic.
Read more on Washington
Post.
My
students might find this useful.
… On the web, ... the most popular
document file format is PDF. And if you have a bunch PDF files
(documents, books etc) on your computer which you would like to port
to your Kindle device, check out pdf4kindle. It is a web service
that lets you convert PDF files into MOBI format supported by Kindle.
To convert a file simply go to their website, click “Upload pdf
file” to select and upload PDF file from your computer. Wait while
it converts the file and once it is finished download the .mobi file
to your Kindle device.
Related tools – Total
PDF Converter, Epub2Mobi
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