Think about what had to happen here.
This isn't a case of clicking “Reply All” rather than “Reply.”
This took some serious screwing up to accomplish.
James Moore reports:
The Serious Fraud
Office is engulfed by a new scandal after it admitted that thousands
of pages of evidence as well as tapes and data files from 58 separate
sources were sent back to the wrong owner.
The enormous
volume of evidence related to its long-running corruption
investigation into defence giant BAE Systems which finally ended in
2010 with the company agreeing to pay almost £300m in the US and UK.
Read more on The
Independent.
[From the article:
The data constituted fully 3 per cent
of the total evidence accumulated as part of the case, and included
32,000 document pages and 81 audio tapes in addition to electronic
media.
Frantic efforts were underway to
contact the sources of that evidence and other people who might be
affected by the leak, which occurred between May and
October last year. [Suggesting more than one incident? Suggesting it
took them several months to notice? Bob]
The Independent understands
that the information was leaked to an unnamed
individual, rather than an organisation.
On a broader scale...
The Information Commissioner’s Office
has provided an interesting breakdown of breach reports for the first
quarter of their fiscal year. The data are provided by incident type
and sector, here.
Not surprisingly, the
largest incident type was “disclosed in error.” The
healthcare sector and local government reported the most breaches,
but then, not every entity has to report breaches, so their numbers
may be a bit misleading in terms of relative losses.
Did they tell the court they wanted to
do the same thing Google was doing to gMail? Computer scanning it
for keywords? Google is looking to place appropriate ads, NSA is
looking to place appropriate Mavrick missiles.
emptywheel writes:
Finally! The
backdoor!
The Guardian today
confirms
what Ron Wyden and, before him, Russ Feingold have warned about for
years. In a glossary updated in June 2012, the NSA claims that
minimization rules “approved” on October 3, 2011 “now allow for
use of certain United States person names and identifiers as query
terms.”
[...]
But the Guardian
is missing one critical part of this story.
The FISC Court
didn’t just “approve” minimization procedures on October 3,
2011. In fact, that was the day that it declared
that part of the program — precisely pertaining to minimization
procedures — violated the Fourth Amendment.
So where the
glossary says minimization procedures approved on that date “now
allow” for querying US person data, it almost certainly means that
on October 3, 2011, the FISC court ruled the querying the government
had already been doing violated the Fourth Amendment, and sent it
away to generate “an effective oversight process,” even while
approving the idea in general.
Read more of this fascinating post
here.
(Related)
TRAC
– New Information on FISA Judges
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on August 9, 2013
“Central to the growing dispute about
the legality and value of the very extensive electronic surveillance
by the National Security Agency (NSA) is the secret federal court
that approves the search warrants authorizing the NSA’s world-wide
efforts. While the operations of both the NSA and the decisions of
what is now incorrectly called the Federal Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) court are highly classified, information
about the backgrounds of the judges — including their sentencing
patterns over the past five years — has just been released by the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse
University. Read
the report. The sentencing information about named judges —
which compares each judge’s record with those of his/her colleagues
in their home districts — was developed earlier this year using
information TRAC obtained and analyzed. With the information in
TRAC’s report, you can obtain the median and average sentences the
judges imposed for all the matters they handled. You can also drill
down into details on specific program areas, such as those cases
classified by the Justice Department as involving drugs or white
collar crime violations.”
(Related) Does the UK have a FISC
Court?
James Ball reports:
BT and Vodafone
are among seven large telecoms firms which could be pulled into a
legal challenge under human rights law for cooperating with GCHQ’s
large-scale internet surveillance programs.
Lawyers for the
group Privacy International, whose mission is to defend the right to
privacy, have written to the chief executives of the telecoms
companies identified last week by the German paper Süddeutsche and
the Guardian as collaborating in GCHQ’s Tempora program.
Tempora is an
internet buffer that lets analysts search vast databases of metadata
on internet traffic crossing the UK, for up to 30 days after data is
sent. Content of communications is retained for up to three days.
Read more on The
Guardian.
(Related) Cheaper than fighting it in
court?
First it was LavaBit. Now it’s Silent
Circle shuttering its e-mail service. In a “To Our Customers”
post on their blog, Joncallas explains:
Email that uses
standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees
that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of
information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols
themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP
cannot be secure.
And yet, many
people wanted it. Silent Mail has similar security guarantees to
other secure email systems, and with full disclosure, we thought it
would be valuable.
However, we have
reconsidered this position. We’ve been thinking about this for
some time, whether it was a good idea at all. Today, another secure
email provider, Lavabit, shut down their system lest they “be
complicit in crimes against the American people.” We see the
writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut
down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants,
security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why
we are acting now.
Their Silent Phone, Silent Text, and
Silent Eyes services will continue.
And so our government’s surveillance
of its own citizens continues to take a toll on innovation in
technology and will drive more customers to EUropean companies and
businesses. President Obama may try to claim there is no “domestic
spying” program, but he is just playing word games.
“Let's see if they buy this...”
In conjunction with President Obama’s
press conference today on privacy and surveillance concerns, the
White House released a white paper, Bulk
Collection of Telephony Metadata Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT
Act.
This white paper
explains the Government’s legal basis for an intelligence
collection program under which the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) obtains court orders directing certain telecommunications
service providers to produce telephony metadata in bulk. The bulk
metadata is stored, queried and analyzed by the National Security
Agency (NSA) for counterterrorism purposes. The Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (“the FISC” or “the Court”) authorizes
this program under the “business records” provision of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), 50 U.S.C. § 1861,
enacted as section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Section 215). The
Court first authorized the program in 2006, and it has since been
renewed thirty-four times under orders issued by fourteen different
FISC judges. This paper explains why the telephony metadata
collection program, subject to the restrictions imposed by the Court,
is consistent with the Constitution and the standards set forth by
Congress in Section 215. Because aspects of this program remain
classified, there are limits to what can be said publicly about the
facts underlying its legal authorization. This paper is an effort to
provide as much information as possible to the public concerning the
legal authority for this program, consistent with the need to protect
national security, including intelligence sources and methods. While
this paper summarizes the legal basis for the program, it is not
intended to be an exhaustive analysis of the program or the legal
arguments or authorities in support of it.
Read the full paper (23 pp.) here.
I’ll update this post with links to articles about it as they
become available.
Update1: The Washington Post has a
transcript
of his opening remarks at the press conference.
Might be useful for my Statistics
students.
NY
Fed Commentary – Historical Use of Graphics
Historical
Echoes: Off the Charts! by Kathleen McKiernan
“The visual representation of
information, knowledge, or data has been around since the time of the
caveman. But it wasn’t until 1786, when William
Playfair, a Scottish engineer, published The Commercial and
Political Atlas, illustrating for the first time how economic
data could be represented by charts. Playfair’s work preceded that
of Florence
Nightingale—broadly acknowledged as the founder of modern
nursing—who used information graphics in the 1850s to convince
Queen Victoria that reform was needed in the British military health
service. Nightingale developed the Coxcomb
chart—a combination of stacked pie and bar charts—to assess
mortality among soldiers during the Crimean War. Excerpted below
from a report by the Committee
for Economic Development, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit
think-tank, this 1943
chart presents a long-range record of booms and depressions (the
chart is available through the Federal Reserve Archival System for
Economic Research, or FRASER).
It offers a picture of the more important events that have tended to
shape our economic and fiscal curves since 1775. Business activity,
price inflation, federal debt, national income, and stock and bond
yields are traced in a single spread. The study of “postwar
periods” is spotlighted in this edition. (A 1947 release features
a special section, “How Much Is One Billion Dollars?”)”
Far more amusing than it should be...
… The Third Circuit Court of
Appeals has ruled
that a Pennsylvania school district’s ban on wearing cancer
awareness bracelets that read “I
♥ boobies” violated students’
First Amendment
free speech rights. [They ran into another “zero
tolerance” rule Bob]
… The National
Science Foundation has cancelled
its political science grant funding for the rest of the year, blaming
Congress which passed a law requiring that political science research
grants benefit either national security or the economy.
… Google’s app store Google
Play now
offers textbooks for rent or for purchase.
For my students. As we get more into
Cloud Computing and Mobile Apps, these are even more fun.
… While ChallengePost doesn’t
make the headlines all that often, the site was covered by Wired,
Mashable,
and a bunch of other tech news sources you already know. In other
words, this is a service with a pretty serious footprint. It already
carried challenges by Samsung,
Evernote (a MakeUseOf
favorite), and even the White
House. You’ll note that all of these challenges have their own
unique domain names, but the ChallengePost interface remains largely
unchanged within the challenge itself.
If you’re just looking for an
interesting opportunity, though, you’ll want to start from the
ChallengePost homepage:
The homepage itself carries just five
featured challenges. At the time of this writing, all challenges
featured on the homepage carry monetary prizes, with the lowest being
$1,200 for the Chart.js
Personal Dashboard Challenge and the highest being $50,000 for
the Kii Cloud App Challenge.
Note that it’s usually not a “winner-takes-all” affair: The
Kii challenge, for example, awards $16,900 to the first-place winner,
$12,700 to the runner-up, $9,200 to the third-place winner, and
$11,700 to a “Popular Choice Award” winner.
If none of the featured challenges
captures your imagination, don’t fret: Simply continue to the
Discover Challenges
page, where you may view a full list of challenges, as well as filter
and search for particular types of challenges. The selection is
truly impressive, from a challenge calling you to Gamify
Asthma and help asthma-suffering kids with tech, to one for
developing new ways to
discover books, with lots of challenges in-between.
For my students. You can't MindMap
much easier than this...
Text2Mindmap
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