Wow! The things we say
when our brains are disengaged... Sort of the elected official's
version of “I was just following orders!” In this case, “I
didn't tell them to do it! My underlings just followed their written
procedures.”
Dan Roberts, Spencer
Ackerman, and Paul Lewis report:
John
Kerry, the US secretary of state, conceded on Thursday that some of
the country’s surveillance activities had gone too far, saying that
certain practices had occurred “on autopilot” without
the knowledge of senior officials in the Obama administration.
In
the most stark comments yet by a senior administration official,
Kerry promised that a previously announced review of surveillance
practices would be thorough and that some activities would end
altogether.
Read more on The
Guardian.
Truly good encryption
is indistinguishable from random gibberish. So are attempts at
encryption that fail in the middle of the process. What happens when
the court insists I must “decrypt” a file that I can not decrypt?
OR I do decrypt a file and it is the archive of correspondence with
my lawyers? (How much evidence can I poison at once?)
Kate Crockford writes:
Can
the government force you to decrypt your hard drive? Do the Fifth
Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article 12 of the
Massachusetts Declaration of Rights protect us from being compelled
to disclose or enter our encryption keys, and thereby potentially
incriminate ourselves? The answer to these questions in
Massachusetts hinges on the Supreme Judicial Court’s upcoming
decision about whether decrypting a computer is like giving someone a
key or a combination to a safe, or instead, if it’s like
translating words from one language to another.
Read more on ACLU’s
blog.
A really interesting
description of LinkdIn's new “service.” If you or your
colleagues use LinkedIn, you should read this and perhaps reconsider.
Disassembling
the privacy implications of LinkedIn Intro
LinkedIn
Intro has already become known by many names: A
dream for attackers, A
nightmare for email security and privacy and A
spectacularly bad idea to mention but a few. Harsh words. The
general consensus of people I’ve spoken to is that it’s
fundamentally stupid and about the worst thing you could consider
doing with your privacy. It looks like this:
Kind of an overview.
Should be a lot more detail available somewhere.
Somini Sengupta
reports:
State
legislatures around the country, facing growing public concern about
the collection and trade of personal data, have rushed to propose a
series of privacy laws, from limiting how schools can collect student
data to deciding whether the police need a warrant to track cellphone
locations.
Read more on The
New York Times.
I'm seeing more
companies at least designate a part-time Privacy guru. Would a
“C-level” officer be responsible for all privacy failures?
Sheila Kaplan
(@EducationNY) testified before the NYS Senate Standing Committee
Hearing on Public Education this week. You can read her written
testimony here
(pdf).
Here’s part of her testimony:
In
order to address these challenges comprehensively, each state would
benefit from a Chief Privacy Officer in its Department of Education.
The broad goal of a CPO is to promote the implementation of fair
information practices for privacy and security of personally
identifiable information (PII). Working with privacy experts, I
drafted the model bill Chief Privacy Officer for Education Act
that can easily be adapted to meet states’ needs. [See
Exhibit 4, Chief Privacy Officer for Education Act; attached.]
Under
the proposed model bill, the CPO would advise students, parents and
other individuals about options and actions that they can take to
protect the privacy and security of PII; make recommendations on
privacy and security to the governor, state legislatures and
agencies, schools, parents and students; and conduct oversight of
privacy and security activities of organizations handling and storing
student data.
Read more here
or watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR5LHNqqkFg
What are my students
interested in?
How
to Create Google Scholar Alerts
Google
Scholar, like Google Books, is one of the research tools that
high school students often overlook. Searching on Google Scholar is
not like searching on Google.com or searching in any other public
search engine.
Google
Scholar indexes scholarly, peer-reviewed academic papers,
journals, theses, books, and court opinions. These are
materials that students usually won't find through Google.com, Bing,
or Yahoo search. Just they can do for Google.com searches, students
can create Google Scholar alerts. Google Scholar alerts notify
students when new materials related to their search queries appear on
Google Scholar. The screenshots below offer directions for creating
Google Scholar alerts. (Click the images to view them in full size).
Clever App!
How
to Hear Sign Language
So if I use my
Statistics and Computer Science skills to Mine and Analyze your data,
will I get rich?
Will
the Next Nate Silver Please Stand Up?
Ever since Nate Silver
made a splash with his freakishly accurate election predictions, all
sorts of companies have been looking for their own rock-star data
scientists. The trouble is that these people are hard to come by —
few can blend computer science with applied mathematics in a way that
produces truly effective data science — and for many companies,
it’s not even clear that they really need this kind of expertise.
Shashi Upadhyay, CEO of
analytics outfit Lattice
Engines, which helps companies tackle data science, has seen this
issue firsthand. “Customers ask us: do we need to hire data
scientists?” he says. “It’s a question that’s been debated a
lot: should the chief marketing officer of the future be a data
scientist?”
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