Tools & Techniques
for law enforcement.
FBI’s
search for ‘Mo,’ suspect in bomb threats, highlights use of
malware for surveillance
The man who called
himself “Mo” had dark hair, a foreign accent and — if the
pictures he e-mailed to federal investigators could be believed —
an Iranian military uniform. When he made a series of threats to
detonate bombs at universities and airports across a wide swath of
the United States last year, police had to scramble every time.
Mo remained elusive for
months, communicating via e-mail, video chat and an Internet-based
phone service without revealing his true identity or location, court
documents show. So with no house to search or telephone to tap,
investigators turned to a new kind of surveillance tool delivered
over the Internet.
The FBI’s elite
hacker team designed a piece of malicious software that was to be
delivered secretly when Mo signed on to his Yahoo e-mail account,
from any computer anywhere in the world, according to the documents.
… A federal
magistrate in Denver
approved sending surveillance software to Mo’s computer last year.
Not all such requests are welcomed by the courts: An FBI plan to send
surveillance
software to a suspect in a different case — one that involved
activating a suspect’s built-in computer camera — was rejected by
a federal magistrate in Houston, who ruled that it was “extremely
intrusive” and could violate the Fourth Amendment.
Are many countries
looking to “Snowden-proof” their data?
The Yomiuri Shimbun
reports:
The
House of Councillors has passed into law a divisive bill to protect
specially designated state secrets with a majority of support from
the ruling bloc, despite fierce resistance from the opposition camp.
[...]
Under
the law, which will take effect a year after its promulgation,
Cabinet members and others concerned will designate highly sensitive
information in four areas, including defense and foreign affairs, as
state secrets. Parties who leak such information will face a prison
term of up to 10 years, far harsher than the maximum penalty set
under the National Civil Service Law.
Read more on The
Japan News. The Japan
Times also covers the politically charged wrangling that went on.
I think “Free” will
win. How would you change your business model if you were Elsevier?
Old
school vs. new school as academic publishers brawl over Web
The competition for
prominence in academic publishing heated up this week as a
traditional company, Elsevier,
tangled with a Digital Era rival, Academia.edu.
Academia.edu publishes
research papers for free online after researchers upload them. On
Friday, the company took down some papers after receiving Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices from Elsevier, which
often charges for access to the articles.
"Academia.edu is
committed to enabling the transition to a world where there is open
access to academic literature. Elsevier takes a different view, and
is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing
their own papers online," Academia.edu told one researcher, Guy
Leonard, whose paper came down and who wasn't
alone in dealing with a takedown.
Elsevier responded in a
statement
that there are benefits to using its services as well as ways authors
can share, even if not necessarily as liberally as Academia.edu and
some of those paper authors would like:
[Much more]
Republicans repaired
the Healthcare website! What nice guys.
Give it a try!
They've
finally completed repairs on the Obamacare website. If you would
like to check it out, you can do that by first clicking here
— and once you're at the website — simply click on the "Apply
Now"
button to get started.
Thanks to Dilbert, I
now understand why my students only remember the cookies...
No comments:
Post a Comment