It's that time of year
again. Rather than a heartfelt “Bah, Humbug!” allow me to offer
you..
POLITICALLY
CORRECT SEASONS GREETINGS
Please accept with no
obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an
environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress,
non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the northern hemisphere
winter solstice, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of
the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practice of your
choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or
traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or
secular traditions at all. And a fiscally successful, personally
fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the generally
accepted calendar year 2014, but not without due respect for the
calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society
have helped make our country great, and without regard to the race,
creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, sexual
orientation or choice of computer platform and operating system of
the wishee.
By accepting this
greeting, you are accepting these terms:
1.
The greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal.
2.
It is freely transferable with no alteration the original greeting.
3.
It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the
wishes for her/himself or others.
4.
It is void where prohibited by law, and
5.
It is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.
This wish is warranted
to perform as expected with the usual application of good tidings for
a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday
greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to
replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole
discretion of the wisher.
[This
is what happens when you hang out with lawyers. Bob]
Let me repeat. You
really don't need to know the names to establish that “Known
Terrorist #402” is repeatedly calling a cell phone in New Jersey
and that cell phone is then calling three other phones.
Research
– MetaPhone: The NSA’s Got Your Number
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on December 24, 2013
by
Jonathan Mayer, a grad student at Stanford - Co-authored with
Patrick Mutchler – via the Web Policy Blog
“MetaPhone is a
crowdsourced
study of phone metadata. If you own an Android smartphone,
please consider participating.
In earlier
posts,
we reported how automated analysis of call and text activity can
reveal private relationships, as well as how phone subscribers are
closely interconnected.
“You have my
telephone number connecting with your telephone number,” explained
President Obama in a PBS
interview. “[T]here are no names . . . in that database.”
Versions of this argument have appeared frequently in debates over
the NSA’s domestic phone metadata program. The factual premise is
that the NSA only compels disclosure of numbers, not names.
One might conclude, then, that there isn’t much cause for privacy
concern. This line of reasoning has drawn sharp criticism. In a
declaration
for the ACLU, Ed Felten noted:
“Although
officials have insisted that the orders issued under the telephony
metadata program do not compel the production of customers’ names,
it would be trivial for the government to correlate many telephone
numbers with subscriber names using publicly available sources. The
government also has available to it a number of legal tools to compel
service providers to produce their customer’s information,
including their names.”
When Judge Richard Leon
granted
a preliminary injunction against the program last week, he
expressed a similar view:
The
Government maintains that the metadata the NSA collects does not
contain personal identifying information associated with each phone
number, and in order to get that information the FBI must issue a
national security letter (“NSL”) to the phone company. . . . Of
course, NSLs do not require any judicial oversight . . .
meaning they are hardly a check on potential abuses of the metadata
collection. There is also nothing stopping the Government from
skipping the NSL step altogether and using public databases or any of
its other vast resources to match phone numbers with subscribers.
(Senator Dianne
Feinstein issued a statement
in response, reiterating that “no names” are coerced from the
phone companies in bulk.)
So,
just how easy is it to identify a phone number? Trivial, we found.
We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from our crowdsourced
MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and
Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those
three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the
numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684
(13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook. What about if
an organization were willing to put in some manpower? To
conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly sampled 100
numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on each. In under
an hour, we were able to associate an individual or a business with
60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three initial sources,
we were up to 73. How about if money were no object? We don’t
have the budget or credentials to access a premium data aggregator,
so we ran our 100 numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented
service. 74 matched. [The results we obtained from Intelius were
seemingly spottier than from Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook.]
Between Intelius, Google search, and our three initial sources, we
associated a name with 91 of the 100 numbers. If a few academic
researchers can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to
believe the NSA would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming
majority of American phone numbers.”
Is buying data stolen
from an individual (or an organization that individual deals with) a
Fourth Amendment violation? I would say it was clearly unethical,
yet we see it a lot. Both Germany and France paid for stolen Swiss
banking records, for example.
Fred Grimm comments:
Major
League Baseball, in its zeal to nail A-Rod and other accused juicers,
paid thousands for stolen medical records.
Not
that we don’t relish the prospect of overpaid jocks getting their
comeuppance, but there’s a small problem with trafficking in stolen
property. It’s stolen.
Florida
law’s not fuzzy about the legality of “dealing in stolen
property.” A state statute puts it bluntly. “Any person who
traffics in, or endeavors to traffic in, property that he or she
knows or should know was stolen shall be guilty of a felony of the
second degree.”
The
legislature, in writing the statute, failed to include an exception
for Major League Baseball. No worries. It has become apparent, as
this latest baseball doping scandal unfolded, that MLB investigators
are allowed to operate beyond legal restraints that hamper less
exalted elements of society.
Read more on Miami
Herald.
A discussion point for
my Intro to Business students.
… The most recent
standout in the class of “vaporgoods” is Coin,
which straddles the divide between software and hardware. If you
haven’t seen the promos yet, Coin is a new device that aggregates
all of your information from credit, debit, and even loyalty cards
and can be swiped just like a regular credit card. Coin’s makers
first launched a $50,000 crowdfunding campaign and, after
hitting their goal inside of 40 minutes, are continuing to take
pre-orders at half the future retail price. It’s unknown how
many units of the device have now been pre-sold. However, the real
success isn’t in the amount of cash Coin raises; it’s that the
minds behind Coin have proven there’s a market demand for
their product using the only research method that counts: the market
itself.
This could be very
handy for my next book. (My next one will be my first) Also for my
website students.
– is a free converter
tool for documents produced by Microsoft Word and similar office
software. Word to clean HTML strips out invalid or proprietary tags,
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the “convert to clean HTML” button.
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