Is this a case of needing to “appear”
concerned, or were they actually surprised by this?
EPIC
– European Commissioner Asks Attorney General to Explain US Spying
“European Justice Commissioner
Viviane Reding has demanded
that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder explain the scope of US data
collection about EU citizens. “Direct access of US law enforcement
to the data of EU citizens on servers of US companies should be
excluded unless in clearly defined, exceptional and judicially
reviewable situations,” the Commissioner wrote. The Commissioner’s
request is similar to that made by other European officials, such as
German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who also
stated
that “all facts must be put on the table.” Recent reports
indicate that United States lobbied the European Commission to weaken
a comprehensive data
protection law now pending in the European Parliament. Earlier
this year, EPIC joined a coalition of leading US consumer and civil
liberties organizations that expressed
concern about the role of US officials in the development of
European privacy law. The letter stated that “without exception,”
members of the European Parliament reported that the US government
was “mounting an unprecedented lobbying campaign to limit the
protections that European law would provide.” For more
information, see EPIC:
EU Data Protection Regulation.”
Looks like the DNI got some good
scheduling advice... (Picture the senators yelling, “We don't need
no stinking facts!”)
Alexander Bolton reports:
A recent briefing
by senior intelligence officials on surveillance programs failed to
attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in
Congress for learning about classified security programs. [WATCH
VIDEO]
Many senators
elected to leave Washington early Thursday afternoon instead of
attending a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National
Intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security
Agency (NSA), and other officials.
Read more on The
Hill.
I don’t know about you, but I’d
call that dereliction of duty.
This seems remarkably quick to me.
Ted Ullyot, Facebook General Counsel,
writes:
… Since this
story [The PRISM alligations Bob] was
first reported, we’ve been in discussions with U.S. national
security authorities urging them to allow more transparency and
flexibility around national security-related orders we are required
to comply with. We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions,
we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national
security-related requests (including FISA as well as National
Security Letters) – which until now no company has been permitted
to do. As of today, the government will only authorize us to
communicate about these numbers in aggregate, and as a range. This
is progress, but we’re continuing to push for even more
transparency, so that our users around the world can
understand how infrequently we are asked [Infrequent? 9000 requests
in 180 days = 50 requests per day. Bob] to provide user
data on national security grounds.
For the six months
ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests
Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S.
(including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and
national security-related requests) – was between
9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from
things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a
federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department
investigating an assault, to a national security official
investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user
accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of
those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.
[...]
It’s nice to see Facebook being more
transparent, although it would be great to have more of a breakdown
as to how many were national security requests.
Stick a copy of this Infographic on
your office wall, but first age it a bit and stamp it TOP SECRET
NOFORN. When someone asks you can say “That's how we used to do it
years ago.”
With the assistance of semipr0 for the
graphics, Ashkan Soltani has come up with a description of how
PRISM might work. It’s well worth reading.
[From the article:
Specifically, how would this system
look if we took all the statements made at face value?
I've been asking that for years!
NSA-proof
encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?
Does this establish a precident that
would allow me to lie to the courts without penalty?
The government
assures us that it does not maintain a database of incidentally
collected information from non-targeted United States persons, and
there is no evidence to the contrary.
From United States Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court of Review No. 08-01 IN
RE: DIRECTIVES [redacted text]* August 22, 2008
So what’s the government’s
explanation now? That they didn’t lie to the court because the
database was intentionally compiled?
Why are there no meaningful
consequences for misleading the public, Congress, and apparently, the
courts?
Interesting and useful.
Without making a big deal about it,
Twitter has silently opened its analytics services to the general
public, letting any Twitter user view detailed account statistics for
free.
… Using the tool, any user can get
a daily graph of follows, unfollows, and mentions, as well as a
detailed per-tweet count of favorites, retweets and replies. The
service also offers a click count for every link which appears in
each tweet. As mentioned above, many of the features don’t work at
this time, probably due to higher than expected user volume.
Amusing...
… Maine picked HP
as its vendor of choice for the state’s 1:1 computer program. But
it doesn’t appear as though the schools agree, as the vast majority
are going with Apple instead. According to figures
released by the state’s DOE, “39,457 students and teachers
will get Apple’s iPad tablet with an annual cost of $266 per unit,
including networking, and 24,128 will get Apple’s MacBook Air with
a cost of $319. Only 5,474 will use the HP ProBook 4440 laptop,
equipped with Windows 7
… One of my favorite
startups, Desmos, keeps getting better as its free
online graphing calculator has added polar
axes to its graphing “paper.” All the better for drawing…
and, um, other mathematical applications, I’m sure.
… Anya Kamenetz’s
Edupunks’ Guide has been “mapped” to an
Edupunks’ Atlas. (I
think it looks more like a Periodic Table of Lifelong Learning
resources than an atlas, but maybe that’s just me.)
… One of the projects that came out
of the recent National Day of
Civic Hacking and thanks to the work of Justin Grimes, who works
with the Institute of Museum and Library Services: a
map of every library and museum in the US.
It's not “Falsifying,” it's
“Enhancing”
… The way the site works is
extremely simple: you need not even sign up for the new accounts.
The first step involves you selecting the right industry that your
resume is going to be targeting. In the second step, you paste the
copied text of your resume in a provided text field. The site
analyzes the pasted text and shows which keywords are already present
in your resume. You are shown all keywords for that particular
industry as checkboxes. Keywords with the marked checkboxes are
already present in your resume; you can see which keywords are absent
from your CV and try incorporating them in it when you draft it
another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment