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Paul Merrell

Democrats unveil legislation forcing the FCC to ban Internet fast lanes - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...fcc-to-ban-internet-fast-lanes

net-neutrality legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Democratic lawmakers will unveil a piece of bicameral legislation Tuesday that would force the Federal Communications Commission to ban fast lanes on the Internet. The proposal, put forward by Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), requires the FCC to use whatever authority it sees fit to make sure that Internet providers don't speed up certain types of content (like Netflix videos) at the expense of others (like e-mail). It wouldn't give the commission new powers, but the bill — known as the Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act — would give the FCC crucial political cover to prohibit what consumer advocates say would harm startup companies and Internet services by requiring them to pay extra fees to ISPs. "Americans are speaking loud and clear," said Leahy, who is holding a hearing on net neutrality in Vermont this summer. "They want an Internet that is a platform for free expression and innovation, where the best ideas and services can reach consumers based on merit rather than based on a financial relationship with a broadband provider."
  • The Democratic bill is another sign that net neutrality is dividing lawmakers along partisan lines. In May, Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) introduced a bill that would prevent the FCC from reclassifying broadband. A Democratic aide conceded Monday that the Leahy-Matsui bill is unlikely to attract Republican cosponsors. The fact that Republicans control the House make it unlikely that the Leahy-Matsui bill will advance very far. Still, the politics of net neutrality are obscuring the underlying economics at stake, according to the aide, who asked not to be named because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.
  • "People are missing the point," the aide said. "The point is: Ban paid prioritization. Because that'll fundamentally change how the Internet works." FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said that he's reserving the reclassification option in case his existing plan fails to protect consumers. He has been reluctant to use that option so far, likely because it would be politically controversial. But increasingly, it seems net neutrality is divisive enough without him.
Paul Merrell

First Look Publishes Open Source Code To Advance Privacy, Security, and Journalism - Th... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...uments-create-warrant-canaries

surveillance state warrant-canaries First-Look Internet-fights-back

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • today we’re excited to contribute back to the open source community by launching First Look Code, the home for our own open source projects related to privacy, security, data, and journalism. To begin with, First Look Code is the new home for document sanitization software PDF Redact Tools, and we’ve launched a brand new anti-gag order project called AutoCanary.
  • AutoCanary A warrant canary is a regularly published statement that a company hasn’t received any legal orders that it’s not allowed to talk about, such as a national security letter. Canaries can help prevent web publishers from misleading visitors and prevent tech companies from misleading users when they share data with the government and are prevented from talking about it. One such situation arose — without a canary in place — in 2013, when the U.S. government sent Lavabit, a provider of encrypted email services apparently used by Snowden, a legal request to access Snowden’s email, thwarting some of the very privacy protections Lavabit had promised users. This request included a gag order, so the company was legally prohibited from talking about it. Rather than becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people,” in his words, Lavabit founder Ladar Levison, chose to shut down the service.
  • Warrant canaries are designed to help companies in this kind of situation. You can see a list of companies that publish warrant canary statements at Canary Watch. As of today, First Look Media is among the companies that publish canaries. We’re happy to announce the first version of AutoCanary, a desktop program for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that makes the process of generating machine-readable, digitally-signed warrant canary statements simpler. Read more about AutoCanary on its new website.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 May 15
     
    The internet continues to fight back against the Dark State. On the unsettled nature of the law in regard to use of warrant canaries in the U.S. see EFF's faq: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq (it needs a test case).
Paul Merrell

Mozilla Sets New Plans for Do Not Track Browser | Adweek - 0 views

www.adweek.com/...ad-do-not-track-browser-150487

privacy digital-privacy tracking-cookies Mozilla

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Much to the disappointment of the digital advertising establishment, Mozilla is going ahead with plans to automatically block third-party cookie tracking in its Firefox browser. Mozilla first announced its Do Not Track browser in February, only to back off in May saying it needed to do more testing. But that didn't stop a growing chorus of loud protests from the advertising community, which argued that the browser would choke off the ad-supported Internet. The Interactive Advertising Bureau's general counsel Mike Zaneis called Mozilla's browser nothing less than a "nuclear first strike" against the ad community. No date has been set for when Firefox will turn on the feature, but advertisers, which have been regularly meeting with Mozilla and were hopeful for a compromise, are already lashing back at Mozilla.
  • "It's troubling," said Lou Mastria, the managing director for the Digital Advertising Alliance, which manages an online self-regulatory program called Ad Choices that provides consumers with the choice to opt-out of targeted ads. "They're putting this under the cloak of privacy, but it's disrupting a business model," Mastria said. Advertisers are worried that Mozilla's plans could be the death knell to thousands of small Web publishers that depend on third-party targeted ads to stay in business. Nearly 1,000 signed a petition urging Mozilla to change its plans.  "One publisher said that 20 percent of their business would go away. That's huge," said Mastria. "Mozilla is really picking business model winners and losers."
  • Not all cookies will be blocked under Mozilla's latest plans for its proposed browser; there will be exceptions. Through a partnership with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, the two are launching a Cookie Clearinghouse. Overseen by a six-person panel, it will determine a list of undesirable cookies and then block those. "The Cookie Clearinghouse will create, maintain and publish objective information," Aleecia McDonald, director of privacy at CIS, said in a statement. "Web browser companies will be able to choose to adopt the lists we publish to provide new privacy options to their users." But others say the approach is far from objective. "What these organizations and the privacy groups that back them are really saying is 'let us choose for you because we know best,' " said Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. "The proponents of this model have claimed they are empowering users. ... This is basically Sarah Palin's 'Death Panels' but for the Internet."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Advertisers have so far resisted some of the Do Not Track proposals advocated by privacy groups arguing they are technological solutions that could quickly be rendered obsolete by the fast-moving Internet economy. When Micosoft launched its Do Not Track default browser, advertisers said they would not honor it. Meanwhile, members of the World Wide Web Consortium's tracking group, represented by advertisers, privacy groups and other stakeholders, have been unable to reach consensus about a universal Do Not Track browser solution. In Congress, where baseline privacy legislation has moved at a glacial pace, Mozilla's news gave Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) more ammunition for his Do Not Track Online Act. Introduced earlier this year, the bill hasn't gotten much traction and only has one co-sponsor, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). "With major Web browsers now starting to provide privacy protections by default, it's even more important to give businesses the regulatory certainty they need and consumers the privacy protections they deserve," Rockefeller said in a statement. "I hope this will end the emerging back and forth so we can act quickly to pass new legislation."
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jun 13
     
    Cookie Clearinghouse. Overseen by a six-person panel, it will determine a list of undesirable cookies and then block those.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

TTIP Transparency in Practice | SumOfUs.org - 0 views

act.sumofus.org/...ttip_transparency_infographic

TTIP transparency practice

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 03 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 03 Sep 15
     
    "TTIP or no TTIP -- our representatives in the European Parliament (MEPs) will play a crucial role when it comes to deciding whether this historic trade deal between the US and EU will become reality. With our democracy on the line and our health and environmental standards up for negotiation -- it couldn't be more vital for our MEPs to know exactly what they'll have to decide on. EU Commissioners say they're giving access to MEPs, but we know it's just not true. Share this infographic to make sure people all over Europe understand just how undemocratic this trade deal is."
Paul Merrell

Obama administration opts not to force firms to decrypt data - for now - The Washington... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-aa5b-f78a98956699_story.html

surveillance state encryption Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • After months of deliberation, the Obama administration has made a long-awaited decision on the thorny issue of how to deal with encrypted communications: It will not — for now — call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement. Rather, the administration will continue trying to persuade companies that have moved to encrypt their customers’ data to create a way for the government to still peer into people’s data when needed for criminal or terrorism investigations. “The administration has decided not to seek a legislative remedy now, but it makes sense to continue the conversations with industry,” FBI Director James B. Comey said at a Senate hearing Thursday of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
  • The decision, which essentially maintains the status quo, underscores the bind the administration is in — balancing competing pressures to help law enforcement and protect consumer privacy. The FBI says it is facing an increasing challenge posed by the encryption of communications of criminals, terrorists and spies. A growing number of companies have begun to offer encryption in which the only people who can read a message, for instance, are the person who sent it and the person who received it. Or, in the case of a device, only the device owner has access to the data. In such cases, the companies themselves lack “backdoors” or keys to decrypt the data for government investigators, even when served with search warrants or intercept orders.
  • The decision was made at a Cabinet meeting Oct. 1. “As the president has said, the United States will work to ensure that malicious actors can be held to account — without weakening our commitment to strong encryption,” National Security Council spokesman Mark Stroh said. “As part of those efforts, we are actively engaged with private companies to ensure they understand the public safety and national security risks that result from malicious actors’ use of their encrypted products and services.” But privacy advocates are concerned that the administration’s definition of strong encryption also could include a system in which a company holds a decryption key or can retrieve unencrypted communications from its servers for law enforcement. “The government should not erode the security of our devices or applications, pressure companies to keep and allow government access to our data, mandate implementation of vulnerabilities or backdoors into products, or have disproportionate access to the keys to private data,” said Savecrypto.org, a coalition of industry and privacy groups that has launched a campaign to petition the Obama administration.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • To Amie Stepanovich, the U.S. policy manager for Access, one of the groups signing the petition, the status quo isn’t good enough. “It’s really crucial that even if the government is not pursuing legislation, it’s also not pursuing policies that will weaken security through other methods,” she said. The FBI and Justice Department have been talking with tech companies for months. On Thursday, Comey said the conversations have been “increasingly productive.” He added: “People have stripped out a lot of the venom.” He said the tech executives “are all people who care about the safety of America and also care about privacy and civil liberties.” Comey said the issue afflicts not just federal law enforcement but also state and local agencies investigating child kidnappings and car crashes — “cops and sheriffs . . . [who are] increasingly encountering devices they can’t open with a search warrant.”
  • One senior administration official said the administration thinks it’s making enough progress with companies that seeking legislation now is unnecessary. “We feel optimistic,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. “We don’t think it’s a lost cause at this point.” Legislation, said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), is not a realistic option given the current political climate. He said he made a recent trip to Silicon Valley to talk to Twitter, Facebook and Google. “They quite uniformly are opposed to any mandate or pressure — and more than that, they don’t want to be asked to come up with a solution,” Schiff said. Law enforcement officials know that legislation is a tough sell now. But, one senior official stressed, “it’s still going to be in the mix.” On the other side of the debate, technology, diplomatic and commerce agencies were pressing for an outright statement by Obama to disavow a legislative mandate on companies. But their position did not prevail.
  • Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, said absent any new laws, either in the United States or abroad, “companies are in the driver’s seat.” He said that if another country tried to require companies to retain an ability to decrypt communications, “I suspect many tech companies would try to pull out.”
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 10 Oct 15
     
    # ! upcoming Elections...
Paul Merrell

NSA head: We need bulk collection | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...a-head-we-need-bulk-collection

surveillance state NSA Rogers Congress bulk-collection

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The head of the National Security Agency on Thursday told Senate lawmakers that preventing his agency from collecting Americans’ information in bulk would make it harder to do its job.Under questioning before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Adm. Michael Rogers agreed that ending bulk collection would “significantly reduce [his] operational capabilities.”ADVERTISEMENT“Right now, bulk collection gives us the ability ... to generate insights as to what’s going on,” Rogers told the committee.The NSA head also referenced a January report from the National Academy of Sciences that concluded there is “no software technique that will fully substitute for bulk collection” because of the ability to search through the storehouse of old information. “That independent, impartial, scientifically-founded body came back and said no, under the current structure there is no real replacement,” Rogers said.Rogers was questioned on Thursday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee who has become its most vocal privacy hawk.
  • In response to the NSA head’s comments, Wyden pointed to a 2013 White House review group, which found that one controversial NSA bulk collection program “was not essential to preventing attacks” and that the information obtained by the NSA “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using” other means.The debate follows on a congressional clash earlier this year over the NSA’s bulk collection of records about the phone calls of millions of Americans. The records contained information about whom people called and when but not what they talked about.
  • After a brief lapsing of some portions of the Patriot Act, Congress eventually reined in the NSA by forcing it to go through the courts to search private phone companies’ records for a narrower set of records. Many privacy advocates treated the new law, called the USA Freedom Act, as a significant victory, through national security hawks worried that it would make it harder for the NSA to track terrorists.Under the new system — which has not gone into effect yet — the amount of time it takes to obtain those records “is probably going to be longer I suspect,” Rogers said.Though the phone records database has been the NSA’s most prominent bulk collection program, it is not the only one. The agency’s collection of vast amounts of Internet data has alarmed many privacy advocates and is the target of a current lawsuit from Wikipedia and the American Civil Liberties Union. 
Paul Merrell

Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court's decision on spying | US news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...urt-surveillance-phone-records

surveillance state NSA Obama phone-metadata litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months. The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.
  • But Carlin asked the Fisa court to set aside a landmark declaration by the second circuit court of appeals. Decided on 7 May, the appeals court ruled that the government had erroneously interpreted the Patriot Act’s authorization of data collection as “relevant” to an ongoing investigation to permit bulk collection. Carlin, in his filing, wrote that the Patriot Act provision remained “in effect” during the transition period. “This court may certainly consider ACLU v Clapper as part of its evaluation of the government’s application, but second circuit rulings do not constitute controlling precedent for this court,” Carlin wrote in the 2 June application. Instead, the government asked the court to rely on its own body of once-secret precedent stretching back to 2006, which Carlin called “the better interpretation of the statute”.
  • But the Fisa court must first decide whether the new bulk-surveillance request is lawful. On Friday, the conservative group FreedomWorks filed a rare motion before the Fisa court, asking it to reject the government’s surveillance request as a violation of the fourth amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Fisa court judge Michael Moseman gave the justice department until this coming Friday to respond – and explicitly barred the government from arguing that FreedomWorks lacks the standing to petition the secret court.
Paul Merrell

Revealed: How DOJ Gagged Google over Surveillance of WikiLeaks Volunteer - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...appelbaum-google-investigation

surveillance state DoJ Appelbaum-email Wikileaks

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration fought a legal battle against Google to secretly obtain the email records of a security researcher and journalist associated with WikiLeaks. Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government. The surveillance of Appelbaum’s Gmail account was tied to the Justice Department’s long-running criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, which began in 2010 following the transparency group’s publication of a large cache of U.S. government diplomatic cables. According to the unsealed documents, the Justice Department first sought details from Google about a Gmail account operated by Appelbaum in January 2011, triggering a three-month dispute between the government and the tech giant. Government investigators demanded metadata records from the account showing email addresses of those with whom Appelbaum had corresponded between the period of November 2009 and early 2011; they also wanted to obtain information showing the unique IP addresses of the computers he had used to log in to the account.
  • The Justice Department argued in the case that Appelbaum had “no reasonable expectation of privacy” over his email records under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Rather than seeking a search warrant that would require it to show probable cause that he had committed a crime, the government instead sought and received an order to obtain the data under a lesser standard, requiring only “reasonable grounds” to believe that the records were “relevant and material” to an ongoing criminal investigation. Google repeatedly attempted to challenge the demand, and wanted to immediately notify Appelbaum that his records were being sought so he could have an opportunity to launch his own legal defense. Attorneys for the tech giant argued in a series of court filings that the government’s case raised “serious First Amendment concerns.” They noted that Appelbaum’s records “may implicate journalistic and academic freedom” because they could “reveal confidential sources or information about WikiLeaks’ purported journalistic or academic activities.” However, the Justice Department asserted that “journalists have no special privilege to resist compelled disclosure of their records, absent evidence that the government is acting in bad faith,” and refused to concede Appelbaum was in fact a journalist. It claimed it had acted in “good faith throughout this criminal investigation, and there is no evidence that either the investigation or the order is intended to harass the … subscriber or anyone else.” Google’s attempts to fight the surveillance gag order angered the government, with the Justice Department stating that the company’s “resistance to providing the records” had “frustrated the government’s ability to efficiently conduct a lawful criminal investigation.”
  • Google accused the government of hyperbole and argued that the backlash over the Twitter order did not justify secrecy related to the Gmail surveillance. “Rather than demonstrating how unsealing the order will harm its well-publicized investigation, the government lists a parade of horribles that have allegedly occurred since it unsealed the Twitter order, yet fails to establish how any of these developments could be further exacerbated by unsealing this order,” wrote Google’s attorneys. “The proverbial toothpaste is out of the tube, and continuing to seal a materially identical order will not change it.” But Google’s attempt to overturn the gag order was denied by magistrate judge Ivan D. Davis in February 2011. The company launched an appeal against that decision, but this too was rebuffed, in March 2011, by District Court judge Thomas Selby Ellis, III.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The Justice Department wanted to keep the surveillance secret largely because of an earlier public backlash over its WikiLeaks investigation. In January 2011, Appelbaum and other WikiLeaks volunteers’ – including Icelandic parlimentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir – were notified by Twitter that the Justice Department had obtained data about their accounts. This disclosure generated widepread news coverage and controversy; the government says in the unsealed court records that it “failed to anticipate the degree of  damage that would be caused” by the Twitter disclosure and did not want to “exacerbate this problem” when it went after Appelbaum’s Gmail data. The court documents show the Justice Department said the disclosure of its Twitter data grab “seriously jeopardized the [WikiLeaks] investigation” because it resulted in efforts to “conceal evidence” and put public pressure on other companies to resist similar surveillance orders. It also claimed that officials named in the subpeona ordering Twitter to turn over information were “harassed” after a copy was published by Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald at Salon in 2011. (The only specific evidence of the alleged harassment cited by the government is an email that was sent to an employee of the U.S. Attorney’s office that purportedly said: “You guys are fucking nazis trying to controll [sic] the whole fucking world. Well guess what. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. EXPECT US.”)
  • The government agreed to unseal some of the court records on Apr. 1 this year, and they were apparently turned over to Appelbaum on May 14 through a notification sent to his Gmail account. The files were released on condition that they would contain some redactions, which are bizarre and inconsistent, in some cases censoring the name of “WikiLeaks” from cited public news reports. Not all of the documents in the case – such as the original surveillance orders contested by Google – were released as part of the latest disclosure. Some contain “specific and sensitive details of the investigation” and “remain properly sealed while the grand jury investigation continues,” according to the court records from April this year. Appelbaum, an American citizen who is based in Berlin, called the case “a travesty that continues at a slow pace” and said he felt it was important to highlight “the absolute madness in these documents.”
  • He told The Intercept: “After five years, receiving such legal documents is neither a shock nor a needed confirmation. … Will we ever see the full documents about our respective cases? Will we even learn the names of those signing so-called legal orders against us in secret sealed documents? Certainly not in a timely manner and certainly not in a transparent, just manner.” The 32-year-old, who has recently collaborated with Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras to report revelations about National Security Agency surveillance for German news magazine Der Spiegel, said he plans to remain in Germany “in exile, rather than returning to the U.S. to experience more harassment of a less than legal kind.”
  • “My presence in Berlin ensures that the cost of physically harassing me or politically harassing me is much higher than when I last lived on U.S. soil,” Appelbaum said. “This allows me to work as a journalist freely from daily U.S. government interference. It also ensures that any further attempts to continue this will be forced into the open through [a Mutal Legal Assistance Treaty] and other international processes. The German goverment is less likely to allow the FBI to behave in Germany as they do on U.S. soil.” The Justice Department’s WikiLeaks investigaton is headed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. Since 2010, the secretive probe has seen activists affiliated with WikiLeaks compelled to appear before a grand jury and the FBI attempting to infiltrate the group with an informant. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the government had obtained the contents of three core WikiLeaks staffers’ Gmail accounts as part of the investigation.
Paul Merrell

InternetNews Realtime IT News - Novell Turns ICE Into Kablink - 0 views

www.internetnews.com/...ell+Turns+ICE+into+Kablink.htm

collaboration kablink novell sharepoint workflow

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jul 08 - Cached
  • The newly-renamed project is being expanded with workflow capabilities that Novell hopes will expand business usage. The Kablink project is Novell's effort to grow the market for open source collaboration solutions, and chip away at the hold that Microsoft's Sharepoint commands among small business users.
  • "We have a system inside of Kablink that allows developers to create business objects and these business objects model data," McConnell explained. "Then with the model of the data you can pass it views for forms and displaying the business model. So you can model a business object and then add collaboration items for that object." With the Kablink release, workflow capability is being added to the ICEcore collaboration features. A business user can now create a business workflow for a process -- be it approval, development or otherwise and attach that workflow to the business objects.
  • "We think our offering is unique; there are point solutions that have workflow embedded in them but the kind of social networking collaboration that we do, I don't know anyone that has a workflow component that can do the things that we can," McConnell claimed. "There are customers that have designed ISO 9000 processes with this, so it's a nifty thing to have, especially in an open source project."
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Jul 08
     
    See the video demo of the enterprise version at http://www.novell.com/products/teaming/demo.html Sourceforge project home page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/icecore/ Project home page at http://www.icecoreopen.org/ Reading related materials. This is open source crippleware. Enterprise version has features unavailable in open source version. Open source version packaged for SuSE, RHEL, and Windows, but clients only for Windows and SuSE (seems somewhat odd since the demo shows it running in Firefox). License is CPAL. Intra-corporate politics afoot? Seems like an X/K/Ubuntu package would be a natural for the Kablink product itself and drive uptake. OTOH, this is a new acquisition for Novell, so packaging may reflect what was done before Novell acquired. A lot of signs on the web site that the rebranding from ICEcore to Kablink was rushed, conceivably for OSCON, where it was announced.
  • anonymous on 02 Oct 13
     
    Most quality online stores. Know whether you are a trusted online retailer in the world. Whatever we can buy very good quality. and do not hesitate. Everything is very high quality. Including clothes, accessories, bags, cups. Highly recommended. This is one of the trusted online store in the world. View now www.retrostyler.com
Gary Edwards

Salesforce.com Aims to Grow Into a Utility Computing Power - 0 views

www.eweek.com/...Into-a-Utility-Computing-Power

cloud-computing force.com paas

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 08 - Cached
  • Gundotra said Google “believes in the vision of software as a service.” But the barrier to enabling enterprises to use cloud computing on an even greater scale is that the browsers have to become more powerful to have the full client computing capability of the PC platform. He noted that this is already starting to happen. Google, he said, is “thrilled” with the new features built into the Mozilla Firefox 3.0 browsers. Google said this is a sign that the next generation of browsers, including Internet Explorer, “will have very significant improvements” that will give the features they need for cloud computing.
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 08
     
    Google's Gundota comments on cloud-computing challenges stating tha tthe browser is not yet capable of delivering the power of the PC desktop
  • anonymous on 02 Oct 13
     
    Most quality online stores. Know whether you are a trusted online retailer in the world. Whatever we can buy very good quality. and do not hesitate. Everything is very high quality. Including clothes, accessories, bags, cups. Highly recommended. This is one of the trusted online store in the world. View now www.retrostyler.com
Paul Merrell

W3C releases Working Draft for Widgets 1.0: APIs and Events - 0 views

www.w3.org/...WD-widgets-apis-20090205

W3C widgets APIs events

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Feb 09 - Cached
  • This specification defines a set of APIs and events for the Widgets 1.0 Family of Specifications that enable baseline functionality for widgets. The APIs and Events defined by this specification defines, amongst other things, the means to:access the metadata declared in a widget's configuration document, receive events related to changes in the view state of a widget, determine the locale under which a widget is currently running, be notified of events relating to the widget being updated, invoke a widget to open a URL on the system's default browser, requests the user's attention in a device independent manner, and check if any additional APIs requested via the configuration document's feature element have successfully loaded.
  • This specification defines a set of APIs and events for widgets that enable baseline functionality for widgets. Widgets are full-fledged client-side applications that are authored using Web standards. They are typically downloaded and installed on a client machine or device where they typically run as stand-alone applications outside of a Web browser. Examples range from simple clocks, stock tickers, news casters, games and weather forecasters, to complex applications that pull data from multiple sources to be "mashed-up" and presented to a user in some interesting and useful way
  • This specification is part of the Widgets 1.0 family of specifications, which together standardize widgets as a whole. The Widgets 1.0: Packaging and Configuration [Widgets-Packaging] standardizes a Zip-based packaging format, an XML-based configuration document format and a series of steps that user agents follow when processing and verifying various aspects of widgets. The Widgets 1.0: Digital Signature [Widgets-DigSig] specification defines a means for widgets to be digitally signed using a custom profile of the XML-Signature Syntax and Processing Specification. The Widgets: 1.0: Automatic Updates [Widgets-Updates] specification defines a version control model that allows widgets to be kept up-to-date over [HTTP].
Gary Edwards

The real reason Google is making Chrome | Computerworld Blogs - 0 views

blogs.computerworld.com/reason_google_is_making_chrome

chrome msoffice ria webkit

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Sep 08
     
    Good analysis by Stephen Vaughan-Nichols. He gets it right. Sort of. Stephen believes that Chrome is desinged to kill MSOffice. Maybe, but i think it's way too late for that. IMHO, Chrome is designed to keep Google and the Open Web in the game. A game that Microsoft is likely to run away with. Microsoft has built an easy to use transiton bridge form MSOffice desktop centric "client/server" computing model to a Web centirc but proprietary RiA-WebStack-Cloud model. In short, there is an on going great transtion of traditional client/server apps to an emerging model we might call client/ WebStack-Cloud-RiA /server computing model. As the world shifts from a Web document model to one driven by Web Applications, there is i believe a complimentary shift towards the advantage Micorsoft holds via the desktop "client/server" monopoly. For Microsoft, this is just a transtion. Painful from a monopolist profitability view point - but unavoidably necessary. The transition is no doubt helped by the OOXML <> XAML "Fixed/flow" Silverlight ready conversion component. MS also has a WebStack-Cloud (Mesh) story that has become an unstoppable juggernaut (Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server as the WebSTack). WebKit based RiA challengers like Adobe Apollo, Google Chrome, and Apple SproutCore-Cocoa have to figure out how to crack into the great transition. MS has succeeded in protecting their MSOffice monopoly until such time as they had all the transtion pieces in place. They have a decided advantage here. It's also painfully obvious that the while the WebKit guys have incredible innovation on their side, they are still years behind the complete desktop to WebStack-RiA-Cloud to device to legacy servers application story Microsoft is now selling into the marketplace. They also are seriously lacking in developer tools. Still, the future of the Open Web hangs in the balance. Rather than trying to kill MSOffice, i would think a better approach would be that of trying to
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Sep 08
     
    There are five reasons why Google is doing this, and, if you read the comic book closely - yes, I'm serious - and you know technology you can see the reasons for yourself. These, in turn, lead to what I think is Google's real goal for Chrome.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 08
     
    I'm still keeping the door open on a suspicion that Microsoft may have planned to end the life of MS Office after the new fortress on the server side is ready. The code base is simply too brittle to have a competitive future in the feature wars. I can't get past my belief that if Microsoft saw any future in the traditional client-side office suite, it would have been building a new one a decade ago. Too many serious bugs too deeply buried in spaghetti code to fix; it's far easier to rebuild from the ground up. Word dates to 1984, Excel to 1985, Powerpoint to 1987, All were developed for the Mac, ported years later to Windows. At least Word is still running a deeply flawed 16-bit page layout engine. E.g., page breaks across subdocuments have been broken since Word 1.0. Technology designed to replace yet still largely defined by its predecessor, the IBM Correcting Selectric electro-mechanical typewriter. Mid-80s stand-alone, non-networked computer technology in the World Wide Web era? Where's the future in software architecture developed two decades ago, before the Connected World? I suspect Office's end is near. Microsoft's problem is migrating their locked-in customers to the new fortress on the server side. The bridge is OOXML. In other words, Google doesn't have to kill Office; Microsoft will do that itself. Giving the old cash cow a face lift and fresh coat of lipstick? That's the surest sign that the old cow's owner is keeping a close eye on prices in the commodity hamburger market while squeezing out the last few buckets of milk.
Paul Merrell

Yahoo! releases new calendar developed by Zimbra team - 0 views

ycorpblog.com/...time-for-a-calendar-revival

caldav calendar icalendar yahoo! zimbra

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 08 - Cached
  • Thanks to the powerful technology that our Zimbra team built, and our involvement with the online calendaring community, we’ve been able to add some much-improved technical functionality to the new Yahoo! Calendar. Now you can better connect with your friends and family –- even those who aren’t using Yahoo! Calendar. Our new calendar is interoperable with the other popular services, including those from Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Mozilla, and Google, so you can share your upcoming plans and important dates with friends.
  • Subscribe to any iCalendar-based public calendar and add upcoming events and show times to your Yahoo! Calendar.
  • So if you’re looking to be even more connected with your friends and family and never miss an important appointment, sign up for the Yahoo! Calendar beta at http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com. We’ll be adding users from this list over the next few weeks. And check out this screencast of the new Yahoo! Calendar, narrated by our product manager Herbert Wang.
Paul Merrell

Goggles turns Android into pocket translator - Google 24/7 - Fortune Tech - 2 views

tech.fortune.cnn.com/...android-into-pocket-translator

android google google goggles translations

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 May 10 - Cached
  • Google's Goggles mobile application has always been a fun tool.&nbsp; The idea is that if you snap a picture and upload it to Google (as well as your location/time), Google could present more about that object, and by extension, your surroundings.&nbsp; It isn't always terribly accurate in identifying what is in the picture, but the results are sometimes helpful, if not amusing. Today, Goggles got a very specific use feature that will help travelers and readers of foreign language texts immensely.&nbsp; Now you can point your Android camera at a sign, book, or any sort of foreign word, snap a picture,&nbsp; and get a translation.&nbsp; Google uses optical character recognition, or OCR, to turn the image into words, and then uses its translation services to turn those words into a language you recognize
Paul Merrell

Firefox, YouTube and WebM ✩ Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog - 1 views

hacks.mozilla.org/...firefox-youtube-and-webm

Mozilla Firefox VP8 WebM youtube codecs H.264

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 May 10 - Cached
  • 1. Google will be releasing VP8 under an open source and royalty-free basis. VP8 is a high-quality video codec that Google acquired when they purchased the company On2. The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264. 2. The VP8 codec will be combined with the Vorbis audio codec and a subset of the Matroska container format to build a new standard for Open Video on the web called WebM. You can find out more about the project at its new site: http://www.webmproject.org/. 3. We will include support for WebM in Firefox. You can get super-early WebM builds of Firefox 4 pre-alpha today. WebM will also be included in Google Chrome and Opera. 4. Every video on YouTube will be transcoded into WebM. They have about 1.2 million videos available today and will be working through their back catalog over time. But they have committed to supporting everything. 5. This is something that is supported by many partners, not just Google and others. Content providers like Brightcove have signed up to support WebM as part of a full HTML5 video solution. Hardware companies, encoding providers and other parts of the video stack are all part of the list of companies backing WebM. Even Adobe will be supporting WebM in Flash. Firefox, with its market share and principled leadership and YouTube, with its video reach are the most important partners in this solution, but we are only a small part of the larger ecosystem of video.
Paul Merrell

Memo to Potential Whistleblowers: If You See Something, Say Something | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5385860

transparency whistle-blowers resources ExposeFacts.org

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing creates a moral frequency that vast numbers of people are eager to hear. We don’t want our lives, communities, country and world continually damaged by the deadening silences of fear and conformity. I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage. Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge. “It took years of involvement with a mendacious war policy, evidence of which was apparent to me as early as 2003, before I found the courage to follow my conscience,” Matthew Hoh recalled this week.“It is not an easy or light decision for anyone to make, but we need members of our military, development, diplomatic and intelligence community to speak out if we are ever to have a just and sound foreign policy.”
  • Hoh describes his record this way: “After over 11 continuous years of service with the U.S. military and U.S. government, nearly six of those years overseas, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as positions within the Secretary of the Navy’s Office as a White House Liaison, and as a consultant for the State Department’s Iraq Desk, I resigned from my position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of war in 2009.” Another former Department of State official, the ex-diplomat and retired Army colonel Ann Wright, who resigned in protest of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, is crossing paths with Hoh on Friday as they do the honors at a ribbon-cutting — half a block from the State Department headquarters in Washington — for a billboard with a picture of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Big-lettered words begin by referring to the years he waited before releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. “Don’t do what I did,”&nbsp;Ellsberg says on the billboard.&nbsp; “Don’t wait until a new war has started, don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s worth of lives.
  • The&nbsp;billboard&nbsp;– sponsored by the ExposeFacts organization, which launched this week — will spread to other prominent locations in Washington and beyond. As an organizer for ExposeFacts, I’m glad to report that outreach to potential whistleblowers is just getting started. (For details, visit ExposeFacts.org.) We’re propelled by the kind of hopeful determination that Hoh expressed the day before the billboard ribbon-cutting when he said: “I trust ExposeFacts and its efforts will encourage others to follow their conscience and do what is right.” The journalist&nbsp;Kevin Gosztola, who has astutely covered a range of whistleblower issues for years, pointed this week to the imperative of opening up news media. “There is an important role for ExposeFacts to play in not only forcing more transparency, but also inspiring more media organizations to engage in adversarial journalism,” he&nbsp;wrote. “Such journalism is called for in the face of wars, environmental destruction, escalating poverty, egregious abuses in the justice system, corporate control of government, and national security state secrecy. Perhaps a truly successful organization could inspire U.S. media organizations to play much more of a watchdog role than a lapdog role when covering powerful institutions in government.”
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  • Overall, we desperately need to nurture and propagate a steadfast culture of outspoken whistleblowing. A central motto of the AIDS activist movement dating back to the 1980s –&nbsp;Silence = Death&nbsp;– remains urgently relevant in a vast array of realms. Whether the problems involve perpetual war, corporate malfeasance, climate change, institutionalized racism, patterns of sexual assault, toxic pollution or countless other ills, none can be alleviated without bringing grim realities into the light. “All governments lie,” Ellsberg says in a&nbsp;video statement&nbsp;released for the launch of ExposeFacts, “and they all like to work in the dark as far as the public is concerned, in terms of their own decision-making, their planning — and to be able to allege, falsely, unanimity in addressing their problems, as if no one who had knowledge of the full facts inside could disagree with the policy the president or the leader of the state is announcing.” Ellsberg adds: “A country that wants to be a democracy has to be able to penetrate that secrecy, with the help of conscientious individuals who understand in this country that their duty to the Constitution and to the civil liberties and to the welfare of this country definitely surmount their obligation to their bosses, to a given administration, or in some cases to their promise of secrecy.”
  • Right now, our potential for democracy owes a lot to people like NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Kirk Wiebe, and EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. When they spoke at the June 4&nbsp;news conference&nbsp;in Washington that launched ExposeFacts, their brave clarity was inspiring. Antidotes to the poisons of cynicism and passive despair can emerge from organizing to help create a better world. The process requires applying a single standard to the real actions of institutions and individuals, no matter how big their budgets or grand their power. What cannot withstand the light of day should not be suffered in silence. If you see something, say something.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    While some governments -- my own included -- attempt to impose an Orwellian Dark State of ubiquitous secret surveillance, secret wars, the rule of oligarchs, and public ignorance, the Edward Snowden leaks fanned the flames of the countering War on Ignorance that had been kept alive by civil libertarians. Only days after the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in a case where a reporter had been ordered to reveal his source of information for a book on the Dark State under the penalties for contempt of court (a long stretch in jail), a new web site is launched for communications between sources and journalists where the source's names never need to be revealed. This article is part of the publicity for that new weapon fielded by the civil libertarian side in the War Against Ignorance.  Hurrah!
Paul Merrell

UN Report Finds Mass Surveillance Violates International Treaties and Privacy Rights - ... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ort-condemns-mass-surveillance

surveillance state UN-report digital-privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The United Nations’ top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the “Special Rapporteur”) issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly today that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple&nbsp;treaties and conventions.&nbsp;“The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the Internet altogether,” the report concluded. Central to the Rapporteur’s findings is the distinction between “targeted surveillance” — which “depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization” — and “mass surveillance,” whereby&nbsp;“states with high levels of Internet penetration can []&nbsp;gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites.” In a system of “mass surveillance,” the report explained, “all of this is possible without any prior suspicion related to a specific individual or organization. The communications of literally every Internet user are potentially open for inspection by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the States concerned.”
  • Mass surveillance thus “amounts to&nbsp;a systematic interference with the right to respect for the privacy of communications,” it declared. As a result, “it is incompatible with existing concepts of privacy for States to collect all communications or metadata all the time indiscriminately.” In concluding that&nbsp;mass surveillance impinges core privacy rights, the report was primarily focused on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty enacted by the General Assembly in 1966, to which all of the members of the “Five Eyes” alliance are signatories. The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992, albeit with various reservations&nbsp;that allowed for the continuation of the death penalty and which rendered its domestic law supreme. With the exception of the U.S.’s Persian Gulf allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar), virtually every major country has signed the treaty. Article 17 of the Covenant guarantees the right of privacy, the defining&nbsp;protection&nbsp;of which, the report explained, is&nbsp;“that individuals have the right to share information and ideas with one another without interference by the State, secure in the knowledge that their communication will reach and be read by the intended recipients alone.”
  • The report’s key conclusion is that this core right is impinged&nbsp;by mass surveillance programs: “Bulk access technology is indiscriminately corrosive of online privacy and impinges on the very essence of the right guaranteed by article 17. In the absence of a formal derogation from States’ obligations under the Covenant, these programs pose a direct and ongoing challenge to an established norm of international law.” The report recognized that protecting citizens from terrorism attacks is a vital&nbsp;duty of every state, and that the right of privacy is not absolute, as it can be compromised when doing so is “necessary”&nbsp;to serve “compelling” purposes. It noted: “There may be a compelling counter-terrorism justification for the radical re-evaluation of Internet privacy rights that these practices necessitate. ” But the report was adamant that no such justifications have ever been demonstrated by any member state using mass surveillance:&nbsp;“The States engaging in mass surveillance have so far failed to provide a detailed and evidence-based public justification for its necessity, and almost no States have enacted explicit domestic legislation to authorize its use.”
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  • Instead, explained the Rapporteur, states have relied on vague claims whose validity cannot be assessed because of the secrecy behind which these programs are hidden: “The arguments in favor of a complete abrogation of the right to privacy on the Internet have not been made publicly by the States concerned or subjected to informed scrutiny and debate.” About the ongoing secrecy surrounding the programs, the report explained&nbsp;that&nbsp;“states deploying this technology retain a monopoly of information about its impact,” which is “a form of conceptual censorship …&nbsp;that precludes informed debate.”&nbsp;A June report from&nbsp;the High Commissioner for Human Rights&nbsp;similarly&nbsp;noted “the disturbing lack of governmental transparency associated with surveillance policies, laws and&nbsp;practices, which hinders any effort to assess their coherence with international human rights law and to ensure accountability.” The rejection of the “terrorism” justification for mass surveillance as devoid of evidence echoes virtually every other formal investigation into these programs.&nbsp;A federal judge last December found that the U.S. Government was unable to “cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack.” Later that month, President Obama’s own Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies&nbsp;concluded that mass surveillance “was not essential to preventing attacks” and information used to detect plots “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.”
  • Three Democratic Senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote in&nbsp;The New York Times that “the usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated” and “we have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security.” A study by the centrist New America Foundation found that mass metadata collection “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism” and, where plots were disrupted, “traditional law enforcement and investigative methods provided the tip or evidence to initiate the case.” It labeled the NSA’s claims to the contrary as “overblown and even misleading.” While worthless in counter-terrorism policies, the UN report warned that&nbsp;allowing mass surveillance to persist with no transparency creates “an ever present danger of ‘purpose creep,’ by which measures justified on counter-terrorism grounds are made available for use by public authorities for much less weighty public interest purposes.” Citing the UK as one example, the report warned that, already, “a wide range of public bodies have access to communications data, for a wide variety of purposes, often without judicial authorization or meaningful independent oversight.”
  • The report was most scathing in its rejection of&nbsp;a key argument often made by American defenders of the NSA: that mass surveillance is justified because&nbsp;Americans&nbsp;are given special protections (the requirement of a FISA court order for targeted surveillance) which non-Americans&nbsp;(95% of the world) do not enjoy. Not only does this scheme fail to render mass surveillance legal, but it itself constitutes a separate violation of international treaties (emphasis added): The Special Rapporteur concurs with the High Commissioner for Human Rights that where States penetrate infrastructure located outside their territorial jurisdiction, they remain bound by their obligations under the Covenant. Moreover, article 26 of the Covenant prohibits discrimination on grounds of, inter alia, nationality and citizenship. The Special Rapporteur thus considers that States are legally obliged to afford the same privacy protection for nationals and non-nationals and for those within and outside their jurisdiction. Asymmetrical privacy protection regimes are a clear violation of the requirements of the Covenant.
  • That principle — that the right of internet privacy belongs to all individuals, not just Americans — was invoked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden when he explained in a June, 2013 interview at The Guardian&nbsp;why he disclosed documents showing&nbsp;global surveillance rather than just the surveillance of Americans: “More fundamentally, the ‘US Persons’ protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%.” The U.N. Rapporteur was clear that these systematic privacy violations are the result of a union between governments and tech corporations: “States increasingly rely on the private sector to facilitate digital surveillance. This is not confined to the enactment of mandatory data retention legislation. Corporates [sic] have also been directly complicit in operationalizing bulk access technology through the design of communications infrastructure that facilitates mass surveillance. ”
  • The latest finding adds to the growing number of international formal rulings that the mass surveillance programs of the U.S. and its partners are&nbsp;illegal. In January, the&nbsp;European parliament’s civil liberties committee condemned such programs in “the strongest possible terms.” In April, the European Court of Justice ruled that European legislation on data retention contravened EU privacy rights. A top secret memo from the GCHQ, published last year by&nbsp;The Guardian, explicitly stated that one key reason for concealing these programs was fear of a “damaging public debate” and specifically “legal challenges against the current regime.” The report ended with a call for far greater transparency along with new protections for privacy in the digital age. Continuation of the status quo, it warned, imposes&nbsp;“a risk that systematic interference with the security of digital communications will continue to proliferate without any serious consideration being given to the implications of the wholesale abandonment of the right to online privacy.”&nbsp;The urgency of these reforms is underscored, explained the Rapporteur, by a conclusion of&nbsp;the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board&nbsp;that “permitting the government to routinely collect the calling records of the entire nation fundamentally shifts the balance of power between the state and its citizens.”
Paul Merrell

U.S. Says It Spied on 89,000 Targets Last Year, But the Number Is Deceptive | Threat Le... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...foreigners-targeted-for-spying

surveillance-state NSA FBI stats 2013

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • About 89,000 foreigners or organizations were targeted for spying under a U.S. surveillance order last year, according to a new transparency report. The report was released for the first time Friday by the Office of the Director of Intelligence, upon order of the president, in the wake of surveillance leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. But the report, which covers only surveillance orders issued in 2013, doesn’t tell the whole story about how many individuals the spying targeted or how many Americans were caught in the surveillance that targeted foreigners. Civil liberties groups say the real number is likely “orders of magnitude” larger than this. “Even if it was an honest definition of ‘target’—that is, an individual instead of a group—that also is not encompassing those who are ancillary to a target and are caught up in the dragnet,” says Kurt Opsahl, deputy general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  • The report, remarkably, shows that the government obtained just one order last year under Section 702 of FISA—which allows for bulk collection of data on foreigners—and that this one order covered 89,138 targets. But, as the report notes, “target” can refer to “an individual person, a group, an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information.” Furthermore, Section 702 orders are actually certificates issued by the FISA Court that can cover surveillance of an entire facility. And since, as the government points out in its report, the government cannot know how many people use a facility, the figure only “reflects an estimate of the number of known users of particular facilities (sometimes referred to as selectors) subject to intelligence collection under those Certifications,” the report notes.
  • “If you’re actually trying to get a sense of the number of human beings affected or the number of Americans affected, the number of people affected is vastly, vastly larger,” says Julian Sanchez, senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “And how many of those are Americans is impossible to say. But [although] you may not think you are routinely communicating with foreign persons, [this] is not any kind of assurance that your communications are not part of the traffic subject to interception.” Sanchez points out that each individual targeted is likely communicating with dozens or hundred of others, whose communications will be picked up in the surveillance. “And probably a lot of these targets are not individuals but entire web sites or companies. While [a company like the Chinese firm] Huawei might be a target, thousands of emails used by thousands of employees will be swept up.” How many of those employees might be American or communicating with Americans is unknown.
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  • Also revealed in today’s report is the number of times the government has queried the controversial phone records database it created by collecting the phone records of every subscriber from U.S. providers. According to the report, the government used 423 “selectors” to search its massive phone records database, which includes records going back to at least 2006 when the program began. A search involves querying a specific phone number or device ID that appears in the database. The government has long maintained that its collection of phone records isn’t a violation of its authority, since it only views the records of specific individuals targeted in an investigation. But such searches, even if targeted at phone numbers used by foreigners, would include calls made to and from Americans as well as calls exchanged with people two or three hops out from the targeted number.
  • In its report, the government indicated that the 423 selectors involved just 248 “known or presumed” Americans whose information was collected by the agency in the database. But Opsahl says that both of these numbers are deceptive given what we know about the database and how it’s been used. “We know it’s affecting millions of people,” he points out. But “then we have estimated numbers of affected people [that are just] in the three digits. That requires some effort [on the government's part] to find a way to do the definition of the number [in such a way] to make it as small as possible.”
  • One additional figure today’s report covers is the number of National Security Letters the government issued last year to businesses to obtain data on accountholders and users—19,212. NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited, and more. These letters are a powerful tool because they do not require court approval, and they come with a built-in gag order, preventing recipients from disclosing to anyone that they have received an NSL. An FBI agent looking into a possible anti-terrorism case can self-issue an NSL to a credit bureau, ISP, or phone company with only the sign-off of the Special Agent in Charge of their office. The FBI has merely to assert that the information is “relevant” to an investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.
  • The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs over the years and has been reprimanded for abusing them. Last year a federal judge ruled that the use of NSLs is unconstitutional, due to the gag order that accompanies them, and ordered the government to stop using them. Her ruling, however, was stayed pending the government’s appeal.
  • According to the government’s report today, the 19,000 NSLs issued last year involved more than 38,000 requests for information.
Paul Merrell

Obama to propose legislation to protect firms that share cyberthreat data - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html

surveillance state U.S. digital-privacy legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • President Obama plans to announce legislation Tuesday that would shield companies from lawsuits for sharing computer threat data with the government in an effort to prevent cyber­attacks. On the heels of a destructive attack at Sony Pictures Entertainment and major breaches at JPMorgan Chase and retail chains, Obama is intent on capitalizing on the heightened sense of urgency to improve the security of the nation’s networks, officials said. “He’s been doing everything he can within his executive authority to move the ball on this,” said a&nbsp;senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss legislation that has not yet been released. “We’ve got to get something in place that allows both industry and government to work more closely together.”
  • The legislation is part of a broader package, to be sent to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, that includes measures to help protect consumers and students against ­cyberattacks and to give law enforcement greater authority to combat cybercrime. The provision’s goal is to “enshrine in law liability protection for the private sector for them to share specific information — cyberthreat indicators — with the government,” the official said. Some analysts questioned the need for such legislation, saying there are adequate measures in place to enable sharing between companies and the government and among companies.
  • “We think the current information-sharing regime is adequate,” said Mark Jaycox, legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group. “More companies need to use it, but the idea of broad legal immunity isn’t needed right now.” The administration official disagreed. The lack of such immunity is what prevents many companies from greater sharing of data with the government, the official said. “We have heard that time and time again,” the official said. The proposal, which builds on a 2011 administration bill, grants liability protection to companies that provide indicators of cyberattacks and threats to the Department of Homeland Security.
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  • But in a provision likely to raise concerns from privacy advocates, the administration wants to require DHS to share that information “in as near real time as possible” with other government agencies that have a cybersecurity mission, the official said. Those include the National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s ­Cyber Command, the FBI and the Secret Service. “DHS needs to take an active lead role in ensuring that unnecessary personal information is not shared with intelligence authorities,” Jaycox said. The debates over government surveillance prompted by disclosures from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have shown that “the agencies already have a tremendous amount of unnecessary information,” he said.
  • It would reaffirm that federal racketeering law applies to cybercrimes and amends the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by ensuring that “insignificant conduct” does not fall within the scope of the statute. A third element of the package is legislation Obama proposed Monday to help protect consumers and students against cyberattacks. The theft of personal financial information “is a direct threat to the economic security of American families, and we’ve got to stop it,” Obama said. The plan, unveiled in a speech at the Federal Trade Commission, would require companies to notify customers within 30 days after the theft of personal information is discovered. Right now, data breaches are handled under a patchwork of state laws that the president said are confusing and costly to enforce. Obama’s plan would streamline those into one clear federal standard and bolster requirements for companies to notify customers. Obama is proposing closing loopholes to make it easier to track down cybercriminals overseas who steal and sell identities. “The more we do to protect consumer information and privacy, the harder it is for hackers to damage our businesses and hurt our economy,” he said.
  • Efforts to pass information-sharing legislation have stalled in the past five years, blocked primarily by privacy concerns. The package also contains provisions that would allow prosecution for the sale of botnets or access to armies of compromised computers that can be used to spread malware, would criminalize the overseas sale of stolen U.S. credit card and bank account numbers, would expand federal law enforcement authority to deter the sale of spyware used to stalk people or commit identity theft, and would give courts the authority to shut down botnets being used for criminal activity, such as denial-of-service attacks.
  • The administration official stressed that the legislation will require companies to remove unnecessary personal information before furnishing it to the government in order to qualify for liability protection. It also will impose limits on the use of the data for cybersecurity crimes and instances in which there is a threat of death or bodily harm, such as kidnapping, the official said. And it will require DHS and the attorney general to develop guidelines for the federal government’s use and retention of the data. It will not authorize a company to take offensive cyber-measures to defend itself, such as “hacking back” into a server or computer outside its own network to track a breach. The bill also will provide liability protection to companies that share data with private-sector-developed organizations set up specifically for that purpose. Called information sharing and analysis organizations, these groups often are set up by particular industries, such as banking, to facilitate the exchange of data and best practices.
  • In October, Obama signed an order to protect consumers from identity theft by strengthening security features in credit cards and the terminals that process them. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said there is concern that a federal standard would “preempt stronger state laws” about how and when companies have to notify consumers. The Student Digital Privacy Act would ensure that data entered would be used only for educational purposes. It would prohibit companies from selling student data to third-party companies for purposes other than education. Obama also plans to introduce a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. And the White House will host a summit on cybersecurity and consumer protection on Feb.&nbsp;13 at Stanford University.
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