We can, therefore we must! Does this
surprise anyone? Wait until you see what your cable box knows about
you. (Can I get this information to prove I was somewhere else when
a crime happened?)
ACLU
– Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
By Catherine
Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology
Project: “Automatic
license plate readers are the most widespread location tracking
technology you’ve probably never heard of. Mounted on patrol cars
or stationary objects like bridges, they snap photos of every passing
car, recording their plate numbers, times, and locations. At
first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of
cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons (to act on
arrest warrants, find stolen cars, etc.). But
increasingly, all of this data is being fed into massive databases
that contain the location information of many millions of innocent
Americans stretching back for months or even years.”
(Related)
Why
the Fourth Amendment Sucks (And Doesn’t Prevent Mass Electronic
Surveillance): A Factual History
A lengthy piece by Hamden Rice on Daily
Kos will be unpopular with those who don’t want to hear that
the NSA programs disclosed by Edward Snowden are constitutional, but
is well worth reading.
It's not as abstract as you might
think...
From the Office of the Information and
Privacy Commissioner:
Since the recent
revelations of the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of the public’s
metadata, the term “metadata” has been regularly used in the
media, frequently without any explanation of its meaning. Metadata’s
reach can be extensive – including information that reveals the
time and duration of a communication, the particular devices used,
email addresses, or numbers contacted, which kinds of communications
services were used, and at what geolocations. And since virtually
every device we use has a unique identifying number, our
communications and Internet activities may be linked and traced with
relative ease – ultimately back to the individuals involved.
All this metadata
is collected and retained by communications service providers for
varying periods of time and, for legitimate business purposes. Key
questions arise, however, including who else has access to all this
information, and for what purposes? Senior U.S. government officials
have been defending their sweeping and systemic seizure of the
public’s personal communications on the basis that it is “only
metadata.” They say it is neither sensitive nor privacy-invasive
since it does not access any of the content contained in the
associated communications.
A Primer on
Metadata: Separating Fact from Fiction, explains that metadata
can actually be more revealing than accessing the content of our
communications. The paper aims to provide a clear understanding of
metadata and disputes popular claims that the information being
captured is neither sensitive, nor privacy-invasive, since it
does not access any content. Given the implications for privacy and
freedom, it is critical that we all question the dated, but ever-so
prevalent either/or, zero-sum mindset to privacy vs. security.
Instead, what is needed are proactive measures designed to provide
for both security and privacy, in an accountable and transparent
manner.
Read: A
Primer on Metadata: Separating Fact from Fiction [The press
release]
So Canada gets it. Now why can’t our
Congress do something to protect our privacy from this bulk
collection?
I've been tracking 'do not track'
EPIC:
Working Group Rejects Industry Do Not Track Proposal
“The World Wide Web Consortium has
rejected
a Do Not Track standard proposed by the online advertising industry.
The industry proposal would have allowed advertising companies to
continue to collect data about the browsing activities of consumers,
but would have limited the way companies could characterize users
based on that data. The group stated that industry’s
proposal was “less protective of privacy and user choice than their
earlier initiatives.” Senator Rockefeller, the Commerce
Committee Chairman, has introduced legislation
to regulate the commercial surveillance of consumers online. EPIC
has previously recommended
to Congress that an effective Do Not Track initiative would need to
ensure that a consumer’s decision is “enforceable, persistent,
transparent, and simple.” For more information, see EPIC:
Online Tracking and Behavioral Profiling.”
Only 63?
Group
of tech giants to demand greater NSA transparency
… Apple, Google, Facebook, and
Microsoft are part of an alliance signing a letter to be published
Thursday that calls on President Barack Obama and Congress to allow
Internet and telecommunications companies to offer more details about
U.S. government requests for user information, according to an
AllThingsD
report. The alliance, which reportedly includes
63 companies, investors, and trade groups, will request
greater latitude in regularly reporting information about the number
of requests they receive; the number of individuals, accounts, or
devices; and the number of requests received for communications
content or subscriber information, according to the report.
Speaking of the NSA... (8 will get you
10 this will be retracted)
The
NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previously Revealed
As an aside during testimony on Capitol
Hill today, a National Security Agency representative rather casually
indicated that the government looks at data from a universe of far,
far more people than previously indicated.
Chris Inglis, the agency's deputy
director...
… Analysts look "two or three
hops" from terror suspects when evaluating terror activity,
Inglis revealed. Previously, the limit of how surveillance was
extended had
been described as two hops.
… For a sense of scale, researchers
at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the
Internet was, on average, 4.74
steps away from anyone else.
… Inglis' admission didn't register
among the members of Congress present, [Only people
with 'above room tempreture IQs' Bob] but immediately
resonated with privacy advocates online.
Even Maxwell Smart could have caught
these guys. Maybe they should watch a few more of those banned spy
movies. Read the article to see what passes for being sneaky in
North Korea.
How
Panama found a missile and a couple of fighter jets in a North Korean
freighter
This may be the most important tweet in
the history of arms control:
Panamá capturo
barco de bandera Norcoreana proveniente de cuba con cargamento bélico
no declarado pic.twitter.com/MdWGfbXvVJ
That’s Panama’s President Ricardo
Martinelli revealing missile parts concealed beneath a cargo of Cuban
sugar. The compartment was discovered in the North Korean freighter
Chong Chon Gang, homeward bound from Cuba. Law enforcement seized
the vessel as it traversed the Panama Canal, subdued
a rambunctious crew and a captain who reportedly preferred
suicide to capture, and discovered a load of what Cuba calls
“obsolete
weapons“—two anti-aircraft batteries, nine disassembled
rockets, and two MiG-21 aircraft,” apparently heading to North
Korea for repair. The sugar, some theorized, was a payment for the
work.
For my Computer Security students
Cyber-crime,
securities markets and systemic risk
Cyber-crime,
securities markets and systemic risk. Joint Staff Working Paper
of the IOSCO Research Department and World Federation of Exchanges.
Author: Rohini Tendulkar (IOSCO Research Department). Survey:
Grégoire Naacke (World Federation of Exchanges Office) and Rohini
Tendulkar.
“This report and
survey is intended as part of a series exploring perspectives and
experiences with cyber-crime across different groups of
securitiesmarket actors. The purpose of the series is predominantly
to : (1) deepen understanding around the extent of the cyber-crime
threat in securities markets; (2) highlight potential systemic risk
concerns that could be considered by securities market regulators and
market participants; and (3) capture and synthesize into one document
some of the key issues in terms of cyber-crime and securities markets
in order to increase general understanding and awareness.”
Something for my Statistics students?
Maybe my Data Analytics students too?
Plugging data into a spreadsheet
is simple. It might be a little tedious, and it is certainly not
fun, but it’s a job anyone can figure out how to do in a relatively
short amount of time. However, generating meaningful insights from
that data is a much more difficult thing to do. There is always
plenty of information that can be extrapolated from data, but just
looking at it and trying to find correlations is tough.
That’s where the website Statwing
comes into play. It looks at data uploaded and find useful
correlations from it.
To use Statwing, all you need to do is
upload a spreadsheet or csv, and it will scan the data for you.
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