You can find a good
laugh everywhere. (Who would you nominate?)
Stewart Baker writes:
It’s
time to recognize just how stupid privacy law is getting. And what
better way than by acknowledging the most dubious achievements of the
year in privacy law?
First
I should explain why I think privacy law so often produces results
that make no sense. After all, most of us think privacy is a good
thing. We teach our kids to respect the privacy of others, just as
we teach them good manners and restraint in drinking alcohol. At the
same time, no one wants courts and legislators to punish us for
rudeness or prohibit us from buying a drink. We’ve already tried
mandating abstinence from alcohol once. It didn’t work out so
well. And it’s unlikely that Prohibition would have worked better
if we’d made it illegal to drink to excess.
The
problem is, some rules just don’t translate well into law. We know
rude behavior when we see it, but no one wants a Good Manners
Protection Agency writing rudeness regulations – or setting broad
principles of good manners and then punishing a few really rude
people every year. The detailed regulations would never capture the
evolving nuances of manners, [interesting
phrase Bob] while selective prosecution of really rude
people would soon become a tool for punishing the unpopular for their
unpopularity. All that seems obvious in the case of drinking and
rudeness, but when it comes to privacy, proposals for new legal rules
seem endless. In fact, though, privacy is every bit as malleable and
context-sensitive as good manners, and efforts to protect it in law
are inevitably either so general that anyone can be prosecuted or so
ham-handedly specific that they rapidly fall out of date. Either
way, instead of serving the public interest, privacy laws often end
up encouraging official hypocrisy and protecting the privileges of
the powerful.
Read more on The
Volokh Conspiracy.
No problem reading
between the redacted lines.
Secrecy
News – Redacted Budget Book Provides a Window on NRO
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on December 11, 2013
“The National
Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates U.S. intelligence
satellites, has just released the
unclassified portions of its FY 2014 Congressional Budget
Justification, a detailed account of its budget request for the
current year. Although more than 90% of the 534-page document (dated
April 2013) was withheld from public release under the Freedom of
Information Act, some
substantive material was approved for public disclosure,
providing a rare glimpse of agency operations, future plans and
self-perceptions. Some examples:
- NRO says it recently achieved an “88 percent reduction in collection-to-analyst dissemination timelines,” facilitating the rapid dissemination of time-sensitive data.
- The 2014 budget request “represents the biggest restructure of the NRO portfolio in a decade.”
- The NRO research agenda includes “patterns of life.” [Automatically flags me when I DON'T stop for donuts in the morning. Bob] This refers to the “ability to take advantage of massive data sets, multiple data sources, and high-speed machine processing to identify patterns without a priori knowledge or pattern definition… to detect, characterize, and identify elusive targets.”
- Other research objectives include development of technologies for “collecting previously unknown or unobservable phenomena [X-ray sensors? Bob] and improving collection of known phenomena; providing persistent surveillance; reducing satellite vulnerability; … innovative adaptation of video game and IT technologies…” and more.
- “A primary responsibility of the NRO is ensuring that the entire NRO [satellite] constellation is replenished efficiently and in time to guarantee mission success.”
- The NRO’s implementation of the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE), an effort to establish a common IC-wide IT architecture, is discussed at some length. “The DNI’s IC ITE architecture paves the way for a fundamental shift toward operating as an IC Enterprise that uses common, secure, shared capabilities and services.”
- With respect to security, NRO employs “automated insider threat detection tools, analyzes collected data in conjunction with disparate data sources to produce investigative leads, [and] performs assessments to rule out malicious activity occurring on NRO networks.” NRO counterintelligence activities “concentrate on insider threat, traditional, and asymmetric methodologies.”
- The National Reconnaissance Office has an annual budget of approximately $10 billion ($10.4 billion in FY 2012), according to classified budget documents obtained by the Washington Post. It employs around 975 people.” [Covering 200,000,000 square miles. That's over 205,000 square miles per employee (assuming no managers) Bob] [Secrecy News Blog]
Another interesting
infographic (The NSA v. Total eMails statistic might be a bit off)
How
Safe Are Your Email Attachments?
http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/is-your-data-running-wild.jpg
For the day when my
students create their textbook as they go...
Three
Good Tools for Creating Multimedia Books Online
Twice this week I've
been asked for alternatives to iBooks Author that students can use to
create multimedia books. This is probably a good time to share the
three options that I usually recommend. These are listed in the
order in which I typically recommend them.
Simple
Booklet is a service offering free online booklet creation and
publishing. To create a book using Simple Booklet just sign-up for a
free account and click create. Select the layout template that suits
your needs. To add content click anywhere on the blank canvas and a
menu of options will appear. You can add text, images, audio files,
videos, and links to each page of your booklet. In the field for
adding text there is an option to copy from Word documents.
Each page of your
Simple
Booklet can have multiple elements on it. To include videos you
can upload your own files or select from a variety of provides
including SchoolTube, TeacherTube, YouTube, and others. To add audio
to your pages you can upload your own files or again select from the
online hosts Last.fm, Sound Cloud, or Mix Cloud. When you're done
building pages in your Simple
Booklet you can share it online by embedding it into a webpage or
you can share the unique link generated for your booklet.
Widbook
is a platform designed to help people collaboratively create
multimedia books. The service is part multimedia book authoring tool
and part social network. Mashable called it "the YouTube of
books." On Widbook you can create a digital book that contains
text, images, and videos. Widbook is collaborative because you can
invite others to make contributions to your books. To use Widbook
you have to create a profile on the service. The books that you
create become a part of your profile. If you allow it, other Widbook
users can add content and or comments to your books. Likewise, you
can search for others' books and make contributions to their books.
Glossi
is a service for creating digital magazines. Glossi magazines can
include images, videos, audio files, and links to external sources of
information. The magazines that you create are displayed with
page-turning effects. Your magazines can be embedded into your blog.
Learn more about Glossi in the video below.
The nominations are
done, so this is a very current list of useful blogs!
Dark, very dark. (an
excerpt)
Once
upon a database query, while I pondered weak security,
And many avenues of access via backdoor,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a wiretapping,
As of some one gently sniffing, sniffing at our server's door.
“‘Tis some hacker,” I muttered, “tapping at our server door
Or just a virus, nothing more.”
And many avenues of access via backdoor,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a wiretapping,
As of some one gently sniffing, sniffing at our server's door.
“‘Tis some hacker,” I muttered, “tapping at our server door
Or just a virus, nothing more.”
(Related)
I have to admit, most
of my students already get this, OR they wouldn't be MY students.
Why
Every Student Should Learn Computer Science
According to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, two of the fastest-growing occupations are in
computer science and related fields – expected to grow 53.4% by
2018. Nearly
90 percent of high school graduates say they’re
not interested in a career or a college major involving science,
technology, engineering or math, according to a survey of over
one million students who take the ACT test. The number of students
who want to pursue engineering or computer science jobs is
actually falling, precipitously, at just the
moment when the need for those workers is soaring. (Within five
years, there will be 2.4 million STEM job openings.)
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