The Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) is an initiative led by Microsoft Public Sector Developer Evangelism team. OGDI uses the
Azure Services Platform
to make it easier to publish and use a wide variety of public data from government
agencies. OGDI is also a free, open source ‘starter kit’ (coming soon) with code
that can be used to publish data on the Internet in a Web-friendly format with easy-to-use,
open API's. OGDI-based web API’s can be accessed from a variety of client technologies
such as Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, mapping web sites, etc.
Whether you are a business wishing to use government data, a government developer,
or a ‘citizen developer’, these open API's will enable you to build innovative applications,
visualizations and mash-ups that empower people through access to government information.
This site is built using the OGDI starter kit software assets and provides interactive
access to some publicly-available data sets along with sample code and resources
for writing applications using the OGDI API's.
Interesting discussion at Business Insider. I disagree with the Eric Krangel somewhat in that Oracle does benefit from working with Google Apps. Check the comments section for my response.
"If Google (GOOG) is going to get big companies to pay for its Google Apps service, plugging into other enterprise software is going to be helpful. So it's good news for Google that Oracle (ORCL) is willing to play along."
"This morning the two companies announced a new collaboration between Google Apps and Oracle's Siebel customer care/CRM software. With the new "Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps," it's now easier to port data between Oracle and Google Apps spreadsheets..........."
That gives Google a new selling point as it deploys salespeople to the enterprise in its bid to convert Microsoft Office users into paying Google Apps customers.
NSA spies need jobs, too. And that is why many covert programs could be hiding in plain sight.
Job websites such as LinkedIn and Indeed.com contain hundreds of profiles that reference classified NSA efforts, posted by everyone from career government employees to low-level IT workers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. They offer a rare glimpse into the intelligence community's projects and how they operate. Now some researchers are using the same kinds of big-data tools employed by the NSA to scrape public LinkedIn profiles for classified programs. But the presence of so much classified information in public view raises serious concerns about security — and about the intelligence industry as a whole.
“I’ve spent the past couple of years searching LinkedIn profiles for NSA programs,” said Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
On Aug. 3, The Wall Street Journal published a story about the FBI’s growing use of hacking to monitor suspects, based on information Soghoian provided. The next day, Soghoian spoke at the Defcon hacking conference about how he uncovered the existence of the FBI’s hacking team, known as the Remote Operations Unit (ROU), using the LinkedIn profiles of two employees at James Bimen Associates, with which the FBI contracts for hacking operations.
“Had it not been for the sloppy actions of a few contractors updating their LinkedIn profiles, we would have never known about this,” Soghoian said in his Defcon talk. Those two contractors were not the only ones being sloppy.
And there are many more. A quick search of Indeed.com using three code names unlikely to return false positives — Dishfire, XKeyscore and Pinwale — turned up 323 résumés. The same search on LinkedIn turned up 48 profiles mentioning Dishfire, 18 mentioning XKeyscore and 74 mentioning Pinwale. Almost all these people appear to work in the intelligence industry.
Network-mapping the data
Fabio Pietrosanti of the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights noticed all the code names on LinkedIn last December. While sitting with M.C. McGrath at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, Pietrosanti began searching the website for classified program names — and getting serious results. McGrath was already developing Transparency Toolkit, a Web application for investigative research, and knew he could improve on Pietrosanti’s off-the-cuff methods.
“I was, like, huh, maybe there’s more we can do with this — actually get a list of all these profiles that have these results and use that to analyze the structure of which companies are helping with which programs, which people are helping with which programs, try to figure out in what capacity, and learn more about things that we might not know about,” McGrath said.
He set up a computer program called a scraper to search LinkedIn for public profiles that mention known NSA programs, contractors or jargon — such as SIGINT, the agency’s term for “signals intelligence” gleaned from intercepted communications. Once the scraper found the name of an NSA program, it searched nearby for other words in all caps. That allowed McGrath to find the names of unknown programs, too.
Once McGrath had the raw data — thousands of profiles in all, with 70 to 80 different program names — he created a network graph that showed the relationships between specific government agencies, contractors and intelligence programs. Of course, the data are limited to what people are posting on their LinkedIn profiles. Still, the network graph gives a sense of which contractors work on several NSA programs, which ones work on just one or two, and even which programs military units in Iraq and Afghanistan are using. And that is just the beginning.
Click on the image to view an interactive network illustration of the relationships between specific national security surveillance programs in red, and government organizations or private contractors in blue.
What a giggle, public spying on NSA and its contractors using Big Data. The interactive network graph with its sidebar display of relevant data derived from LinkedIn profiles is just too delightful.
A Message from the Amazon Books Team
Dear Readers,
Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents — it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.
With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution — places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if "publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them." Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.
Well… history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Fast forward to today, and it's the e-book's turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette — a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate — are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there's no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market — e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.
Perhaps channeling Orwell's decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn't only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette's readers.
The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will "devalue books" and hurt "Arts and Letters." They're wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.
The main thing the Tox team is trying to do, besides provide encryption, is create a tool that requires no central servers whatsoever—not even ones that you would host yourself. It relies on the same technology that BitTorrent uses to provide direct connections between users, so there’s no central hub to snoop on or take down.
Tox is trying to roll both peer-to-peer and voice calling into one.
Actually, it’s going a bit further than that. Tox is actually just a protocol for encrypted peer-to-peer data transmission.
Tox is just a tunnel to another node that’s encrypted and secure,” says David Lohle, a spokesperson for the project. “What you want to send over that pipe is up to your imagination.”
For example, one developer is building an e-mail replacement with the protocol, and Lohle says someone else is building an open source alternative to BitTorrent Sync.
"The web forum 4chan is known mostly as a place to share juvenile and, to put it mildly, politically incorrect images. But it's also the birthplace of one of the latest attempts to subvert the NSA's mass surveillance program.
When whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that full extent of the NSA's activities last year, members of the site's tech forum started talking about the need for a more secure alternative to Skype. Soon, they'd opened a chat room to discuss the project and created an account on the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub and began uploading code.
Eventually, they settled on the name Tox, and you can already download prototypes of the surprisingly easy-to-use tool. The tool is part of a widespread effort to create secure online communication tools that are controlled not only by any one company, but by the world at large-a continued reaction to the Snowden revelations. This includes everything from instant messaging tools to email services.
It's too early to count on Tox to protect you from eavesdroppers and spies. Like so many other new tools, it's still in the early stages of development and has yet to receive the scrutiny that other security tools, such as the instant messaging encryption plugin Off The Record has. But it endeavors to carve a unique niche within the secure communications ecosystem."
YouTube has decided it's had enough of Adobe's perenially-p0wned Flash and will therefore now default to delivering video with the HTML5 <video> tag.
A post by the video vault's engineering and development team says the move is now possible, and sensible, because the industry has invented useful things like adaptive bitrates, encryption, new codecs and WebRTC that make the <video> usable work in the real world.
Those additions mean HTML5 is at least as functional – or more so – than Flash, and if YouTube detects you are running Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and beta versions of Firefox, it'll now deliver video using <video> and flush Flash.
YouTube's also decided to can what it calls the “'old style' of Flash
YouTube seems not to care a jot that its actions are inimical to Adobe, saying it's just doing what all the cool kids – Netflix, Apple, Microsoft and its competitor Vimeo – have already done.
Which is not to say that Flash is dead: those who don't run the browsers above will still get YouTube delivered by whatever technology works bes tin their environment. And that will often – perhaps too often* – be Flash. ®
Bootnote * Until they get p0wned, that is: Flash is so horridly buggy that Apple has just updated its plugin-blockers to foil versions of the product prior to 16.0.0.296 and 13.0.0.264.
The NSA and Britain's GCHQ hacked the world's biggest SIM card maker to harvest the encryption keys needed to silently and effortlessly eavesdrop on potentially millions of people.
That's according to documents obtained by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden and leaked to the web on Thursday.
"Wow. This is huge – it's one of the most significant findings of the Snowden files so far," computer security guru Bruce Schneier told The Register this afternoon.
"We always knew that they would occasionally steal SIM keys. But all of them? The odds that they just attacked this one firm are extraordinarily low and we know the NSA does like to steal keys where it can."
The damning slides, published by Snowden's chums at The Intercept, detail the activities of the as-yet unheard-of Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), run by the US and UK. The group targeted Gemalto, which churns out about two billion SIM cards each year for use around the world, and targeted it in an operation dubbed DAPINO GAMMA.
Gemalto's hacking may also bring into question some of its other security products as well. The company supplies chips for electronic passports issued by the US, Singapore, India, and many European states, and is also involved in the NFC and mobile banking sector.
It's important to note that this is useful for tracking the phone activity of a target, but the mobile user can still use encryption on the handset itself to ensure that some communications remain private.
"Ironically one of your best defenses against a hijacked SIM is to use software encryption," Jon Callas, CTO of encrypted chat biz Silent Circle told The Register. "In our case there's a TCP/IP cloud between Alice and Bob and that can deal with compromised routers along the path as well as SIM issues, and the same applies to similar mobile software."
On Wednesday the UK government admitted that its intelligence agencies had in fact broken the ECHR when spying on communications between lawyers and those suing the British state, so GCHQ might want to reconsider that statement.
Nearly 20 years after Congress passed the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (E-FOIA), only 40 percent of
agencies have followed the law's instruction for systematic posting of records released through FOIA in their electronic reading rooms, according to a new
FOIA Audit released today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org to mark Sunshine Week.
The Archive team audited all federal agencies with Chief FOIA Officers as well as agency components that handle more than 500 FOIA requests a year — 165
federal offices in all — and found only 67 with online libraries populated with significant numbers of released FOIA documents and regularly updated.
Congress called on agencies to embrace disclosure and the digital era nearly two decades ago, with the passage of the 1996 "E-FOIA" amendments. The law
mandated that agencies post key sets of records online, provide citizens with detailed guidance on making FOIA requests, and use new information technology
to post online proactively records of significant public interest, including those already processed in response to FOIA requests and "likely to become the
subject of subsequent requests."
Congress believed then, and openness advocates know now, that this kind of proactive disclosure, publishing online the results of FOIA requests as well as
agency records that might be requested in the future, is the only tenable solution to FOIA backlogs and delays. Thus the National Security
Archive chose to focus on the e-reading rooms of agencies in its latest audit.
Even though the majority of federal agencies have not yet embraced proactive disclosure of their FOIA releases, the Archive E-FOIA Audit did find that some
real "E-Stars" exist within the federal government, serving as examples to lagging agencies that technology can be harnessed to create state-of-the art
FOIA platforms. Unfortunately, our audit also found "E-Delinquents" whose abysmal web performance recalls the teletype era.
E-Delinquents include the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, which, despite being mandated to advise the President on technology
policy, does not embrace 21st century practices by posting any frequently requested records online. Another E-Delinquent, the Drug Enforcement
Administration, insults its website's viewers by claiming that it "does not maintain records appropriate for FOIA Library at this time."
"The presumption of openness requires the presumption of posting," said Archive director Tom Blanton. "For the new generation, if it's not online, it does not exist."
The National Security Archive has conducted fourteen FOIA Audits since 2002. Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state "FOI
Audits," the Archive's FOIA Audits use open-government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous
Archive FOIA Audits have led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction,
assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often
embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests. The surveys include:
The federal government has made some progress moving into the digital era. The National Security Archive's last E-FOIA Audit in 2007, " File Not Found," reported that only one in five federal agencies had put online all of the
specific requirements mentioned in the E-FOIA amendments, such as guidance on making requests, contact information, and processing regulations. The new
E-FOIA Audit finds the number of agencies that have checked those boxes is now much higher — 100 out of 165 — though many (66 in 165) have posted just the
bare minimum, especially when posting FOIA responses. An additional 33 agencies even now do not post these types of records at all, clearly thwarting the
law's intent.
The FOIAonline Members
(Department of Commerce, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Labor Relations Authority, Merit Systems Protection Board, National Archives and Records
Administration, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Department of the Navy, General Services Administration, Small Business Administration, U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Federal Communications Commission) won their "E-Star" by making past requests and releases searchable via
FOIAonline. FOIAonline also allows users to submit their FOIA requests digitally.
THE E-DELINQUENTS: WORST OVERALL AGENCIES
In alphabetical order
Key Findings
Excuses Agencies Give for Poor E-Performance
Justice Department guidance undermines the statute.
Currently, the FOIA stipulates that documents "likely to become the subject of subsequent requests" must be posted by agencies somewhere in their
electronic reading rooms. The Department of Justice's Office of Information Policy defines these records as "frequently requested records… or those which have been
released three or more times to FOIA requesters." Of course, it is time-consuming for agencies to develop a system that keeps track of how often a record
has been released, which is in part why agencies rarely do so and are often in breach of the law. Troublingly, both the current House and Senate FOIA bills include language that codifies the instructions from the Department of
Justice.
The National Security Archive believes the addition of this "three or more times" language actually harms the intent of the Freedom of Information Act as
it will give agencies an easy excuse ("not requested three times yet!") not to proactively post documents that agency FOIA offices have already spent time,
money, and energy processing. We have formally suggested alternate language requiring that agencies generally post "all records, regardless of form or
format that have been released in response to a FOIA request."
Disabilities Compliance.
Despite the E-FOIA Act, many government agencies do not embrace the idea of posting their FOIA responses online. The most common reason agencies give is that it
is difficult to post documents in a format that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, also referred to as being "508 compliant," and the 1998
Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act that require federal agencies "to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with
disabilities."
E-Star agencies, however, have proven that 508 compliance is no barrier when the agency has a will to post. All documents posted on FOIAonline are 508
compliant, as are the documents posted by the Department of Defense and the Department of State. In fact, every document created electronically by the US
government after 1998 should already be 508 compliant. Even old paper records that are scanned to be processed through FOIA can be made 508 compliant with
just a few clicks in Adobe Acrobat, according to
this Department of Homeland Security guide
(essentially OCRing the text, and including information about where non-textual fields appear). Even if agencies are insistent it is too difficult to OCR
older documents that were scanned from paper, they cannot use that excuse with digital records.
Privacy.
Another commonly articulated concern about posting FOIA releases online is that doing so could inadvertently disclose private information from "first
person" FOIA requests. This is a valid concern, and this subset of FOIA requests should not be posted online. (The Justice Department identified "first party" requester rights in 1989. Essentially agencies cannot use
the b(6) privacy exemption to redact information if a person requests it for him or herself. An example of a "first person" FOIA would be a person's
request for his own immigration file.)
Cost and Waste of Resources.
There is also a belief that there is little public interest in the majority of FOIA requests processed, and hence it is a waste of resources to post them.
This thinking runs counter to the governing principle of the Freedom of Information Act: that government information belongs to US citizens, not US
agencies. As such, the reason that a person requests information is immaterial as the agency processes the request; the "interest factor" of a document
should also be immaterial when an agency is required to post it online.
Some think that posting FOIA releases online is not cost effective. In fact, the opposite is true. It's not cost effective to spend tens (or
hundreds) of person hours to search for, review, and redact FOIA requests only to mail it to the requester and have them slip it into their desk drawer and
forget about it. That is a waste of resources. The released document should be posted online for any interested party to utilize. This will only become
easier as FOIA processing systems evolve to automatically post the documents they track. The State Department earned its "E-Star" status demonstrating this
very principle, and spent no new funds and did not hire contractors to build its Electronic Reading Room, instead it built a self-sustaining platform that
will save the agency time and money going forward.
Alleged leaked documents about the NSA's XKeyscore snooping software appear to show the paranoid agency is targeting Tor and Tails users, Linux Journal readers – and anyone else interested in online privacy.Apparently, this configuration file for XKeyscore is in the divulged data, which was obtained and studied by members of the Tor project and security specialists for German broadcasters NDR and WDR.
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In their analysis of the alleged top-secret documents, they claim the NSA is, among other things:Specifically targeting Tor directory servers
Reading email contents for mentions of Tor bridges
Logging IP addresses used to search for privacy-focused websites and software
And possibly breaking international law in doing so.
We already know from leaked Snowden documents that Western intelligence agents hate Tor for its anonymizing abilities. But what the aforementioned leaked source code, written in a rather strange custom language, shows is that not only is the NSA targeting the anonymizing network Tor specifically, it is also taking digital fingerprints of any netizens who are remotely interested in privacy.
These include readers of the Linux Journal site, anyone visiting the website for the Tor-powered Linux operating system Tails – described by the NSA as "a comsec mechanism advocated by extremists on extremist forums" – and anyone looking into combining Tails with the encryption tool Truecrypt.If something as innocuous as Linux Journal is on the NSA's hit list, it's a distinct possibility that El Reg is too, particularly in light of our recent exclusive report on GCHQ – which led to a Ministry of Defence advisor coming round our London office for a chat.
If you take even the slightest interest in online privacy or have Googled a Linux Journal article about a broken package, you are earmarked in an NSA database for further surveillance, according to these latest leaks.This is assuming the leaked file is genuine, of course.Other monitored sites, we're told, include HotSpotShield, FreeNet, Centurian, FreeProxies.org, MegaProxy, privacy.li and an anonymous email service called MixMinion. The IP address of computer users even looking at these sites is recorded and stored on the NSA's servers for further analysis, and it's up to the agency how long it keeps that data.The XKeyscore code, we're told, includes microplugins that target Tor servers in Germany, at MIT in the United States, in Sweden, in Austria, and in the Netherlands. In doing so it may not only fall foul of German law but also the US's Fourth Amendment.
The nine Tor directory servers receive especially close monitoring from the NSA's spying software, which states the "goal is to find potential Tor clients connecting to the Tor directory servers." Tor clients linking into the directory servers are also logged."This shows that Tor is working well enough that Tor has become a target for the intelligence services," said Sebastian Hahn, who runs one of the key Tor servers. "For me this means that I will definitely go ahead with the project.”
While the German reporting team has published part of the XKeyscore scripting code, it doesn't say where it comes from. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden would be a logical pick, but security experts are not so sure."I do not believe that this came from the Snowden documents," said security guru Bruce Schneier. "I also don't believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there's a second leaker out there."If so, the NSA is in for much more scrutiny than it ever expected.
"Today at the first annual Code Conference, Microsoft demonstrated its new real-time translation in Skype publicly for the first time. Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft's VP of Skype and Lync, compares the technology to Star Trek's Universal Translator. During the demonstration, Pall converses in English with a coworker in Germany who is speaking German. 'Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.'"
Haven't yet explored to see what's beneath the marketing hype. And I'm less than excited about the Skype with its NSA tendrils being the vehicle of audio translations of human languages. But given the progress in: [i] automated translations of human texts; [ii] audio screenreaders; and [iii] voice-to-text transcription, this is one we saw coming. Slap the three technologies together and wait until processing power catches up to what's needed to produce a marketable experience. After all, the StarTrek scriptwriters saw this coming too.
Ray Kurzweil, now at Google, should get a lot of the pioneer credit here. His revolutionary optical character recognition algorithms soon found themselves redeployed in text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology. From Wikipedia: "Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition."
Not bad for a guy the same age as my younger brother.
But Microsoft's announcement here may be more vaporware than hardware in production and lines of executable code. Microsoft has a long history of vaporware announcements to persuade potential customers to hold off on riding with the competition.
And the Softies undoubtedly know that Google's human language text translation capabilities are way out in front and that the voice to text and text to speech API methods have already found a comfortable home in Android and Chromebook.
What does Microsoft have that's ready to ship if anything? I'll check it out tomorrow.
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In 2012, The Guardian reported on Facebook’s arbitrary and ridiculous nudity and violence guidelines which allow images of crushed limbs but – dear god spare us the image of a woman breastfeeding. Still, people stayed – and Facebook grew. In 2014, Facebook admitted to mind control games via positive or negative emotional content tests on unknowing and unwilling platform users. Still, people stayed – and Facebook grew. Following the 2016 election, Facebook responded to the Harpie shrieks from the corporate Democrats bysetting up a so-called “fake news” task force to weed out those dastardly commies (or socialists or anarchists or leftists or libertarians or dissidents or…). And since then, I’ve watched my reach on Facebook drain like water in a bathtub – hard to notice at first and then a spastic swirl while people bicker about how to plug the drain.
And still, we stayed – and the censorship tightened. Roughly a year ago, my show Act Out! reported on both the censorship we were experiencing but also the cramped filter bubbling that Facebook employs in order to keep the undesirables out of everyone’s news feed. Still, I stayed – and the censorship tightened. 2017 into 2018 saw more and more activist organizers, particularly black and brown, thrown into Facebook jail for questioning systemic violence and demanding better. In August, puss bag ass hat in a human suit Alex Jones was banned from Facebook – YouTube, Apple and Twitter followed suit shortly thereafter. Some folks celebrated. Some others of us skipped the party because we could feel what was coming.
On Thursday, October 11th of this year, Facebook purged more than 800 pages including The Anti-Media, Police the Police, Free Thought Project and many other social justice and alternative media pages. Their explanation rested on the painfully flimsy foundation of “inauthentic behavior.” Meanwhile, their fake-news checking team is stacked with the likes of the Atlantic Council and the Weekly Standard, neocon junk organizations that peddle such drivel as “The Character Assassination of Brett Kavanaugh.” Soon after, on the Monday before the Midterm elections, Facebook blocked another 115 accounts citing once again, “inauthentic behavior.” Then, in mid November, a massive New York Times piece chronicled Facebook’s long road to not only save its image amid rising authoritarian behavior, but “to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros.” (I consistently find myself waiting for those Soros and Putin checks in the mail that just never appear.)
What we need is an open source, non-surveillance platform. And right now, that platform is Minds. Before you ask, I’m not being paid to write that.
Fashioned as an alternative to the closed and creepy Facebook behemoth, Minds advertises itself as “an open source and decentralized social network for Internet freedom.” Minds prides itself on being hands-off with regards to any content that falls in line with what’s permitted by law, which has elicited critiques from some on the left who say Minds is a safe haven for fascists and right-wing extremists. Yet, Ottman has himself stated openly that he wants ideas on content moderation and ways to make Minds a better place for social network users as well as radical content creators.
What a few fellow journos and I are calling #MindsShift is an important step in not only moving away from our gagged existence on Facebook but in building a social network that can serve up the real news folks are now aching for.
To be clear, we aren’t advocating that you delete your Facebook account – unless you want to. For many, Facebook is still an important tool and our goal is to add to the outreach toolkit, not suppress it.
We have set January 1st, 2019 as the ultimate date for this #MindsShift. Several outlets with a combined reach of millions of users will be making the move – and asking their readerships/viewerships to move with them. Along with fellow journalists, I am working with Minds to brainstorm new user-friendly functions and ways to make this #MindsShift a loud and powerful move. We ask that you, the reader, add to the conversation by joining the #MindsShift and spreading the word to your friends and family. (Join Minds via this link) We have created the #MindsShift open group on Minds.com so that you can join and offer up suggestions and ideas to make this platform a new home for radical and progressive media.
For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate
A growing number of leading left-wing websites have confirmed that their search traffic from Google has plunged in recent months, adding to evidence that Google, under the cover of a fraudulent campaign against fake news, is implementing a program of systematic and widespread censorship.
Truthout, a not-for-profit news website that focuses on political, social, and ecological developments from a left progressive standpoint, had its readership plunge by 35 percent since April. The Real News , a nonprofit video news and documentary service, has had its search traffic fall by 37 percent. Another site, Common Dreams , last week told the WSWS that its search traffic had fallen by up to 50 percent.
As extreme as these sudden drops in search traffic are, they do not equal the nearly 70 percent drop in traffic from Google seen by the WSWS.
“This is political censorship of the worst sort; it’s just an excuse to suppress political viewpoints,” said Robert Epstein, a former editor in chief of Psychology Today and noted expert on Google.
Epstein said that at this point, the question was whether the WSWS had been flagged specifically by human evaluators employed by the search giant, or whether those evaluators had influenced the Google Search engine to demote left-wing sites. “What you don’t know is whether this was the human evaluators who are demoting you, or whether it was the new algorithm they are training,” Epstein said.
Richard Stallman, the world-renowned technology pioneer and a leader of the free software movement, said he had read the WSWS’s coverage on Google’s censorship of left-wing sites. He warned about the immense control exercised by Google over the Internet, saying, “For people’s main way of finding articles about a topic to be run by a giant corporation creates an obvious potential for abuse.”
According to data from the search optimization tool SEMRush, search traffic to Mr. Stallman’s personal website, Stallman.org, fell by 24 percent, while traffic to gnu.org, operated by the Free Software Foundation, fell 19 percent.
Eric Maas, a search engine optimization consultant working in the San Francisco Bay area, said his team has surveyed a wide range of alternative news sites affected by changes in Google’s algorithms since April. “While the update may be targeting specific site functions, there is evidence that this update is promoting only large mainstream news organizations. What I find problematic with this is that it appears that some sites have been targeted and others have not.”
The massive drop in search traffic to the WSWS and other left-wing sites followed the implementation of changes in Google’s search evaluation protocols. In a statement issued on April 25, Ben Gomes, the company’s vice president for engineering, stated that Google’s update of its search engine would block access to “offensive” sites, while working to surface more “authoritative content.”
In a set of guidelines issued to Google evaluators in March, the company instructed its search evaluators to flag pages returning “conspiracy theories” or “upsetting” content unless “the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.”
For Facebook, journalism has been a pain in the neck from day one. Now, bogged down with the insoluble problems of fake news and bad PR, it’s clear that Facebook will gradually pull the plug on news. Publishers should stop whining and move on.Let’s admit that publishers have been screwed by Facebook. Not because Mark Zuckerberg is evil, but because he’s a pragmatist. His latest move should not come as a surprise. On Thursday, for the second time in six months, Facebook stated publicly that news (i.e., journalism) will appear further down in everyone’s newsfeed, in order to favor posts from friends, family and “groups.” Here is how Zuck defended the move:“The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they’re entertaining or informative — may not be as good. Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions”.Consider us notified. Facebook is done with journalism. It will happen, slowly, gradually, but the trend is here. In this context, the email sent yesterday by Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, who states “news remains a top priority for us,” rings hollow.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will include multiple forms of biometrics—from face recognition to DNA, data from questionable sources, and highly personal data on innocent people. It will be shared with federal agencies outside of DHS as well as state and local law enforcement and foreign governments. And yet, we still know very little about it.The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings. Other data DHS is planning to collect—including information about people’s “relationship patterns” and from officer “encounters” with the public—can be used to identify political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships. These data points are also frequently colored by conjecture and bias.
DHS currently collects a lot of data. Its legacy IDENT fingerprint database contains information on 220-million unique individuals and processes 350,000 fingerprint transactions every day. This is an exponential increase from 20 years ago when IDENT only contained information on 1.8-million people. Between IDENT and other DHS-managed databases, the agency manages over 10-billion biographic records and adds 10-15 million more each week.
DHS’s new HART database will allow the agency to vastly expand the types of records it can collect and store. HART will support at least seven types of biometric identifiers, including face and voice data, DNA, scars and tattoos, and a blanket category for “other modalities.” It will also include biographic information, like name, date of birth, physical descriptors, country of origin, and government ID numbers. And it will include data we know to by highly subjective, including information collected from officer “encounters” with the public and information about people’s “relationship patterns.”
DHS’s face recognition roll-out is especially concerning. The agency uses mobile biometric devices that can identify faces and capture face data in the field, allowing its ICE (immigration) and CBP (customs) officers to scan everyone with whom they come into contact, whether or not those people are suspected of any criminal activity or an immigration violation. DHS is also partnering with airlines and other third parties to collect face images from travelers entering and leaving the U.S. When combined with data from other government agencies, these troubling collection practices will allow DHS to build a database large enough to identify and track all people in public places, without their knowledge—not just in places the agency oversees, like airports, but anywhere there are cameras.Police abuse of facial recognition technology is not a theoretical issue: it’s happening today. Law enforcement has already used face recognition on public streets and at political protests. During the protests surrounding the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, Baltimore Police ran social media photos against a face recognition database to identify protesters and arrest them. Recent Amazon promotional videos encourage police agencies to acquire that company’s face “Rekognition” capabilities and use them with body cameras and smart cameras to track people throughout cities. At least two U.S. cities are already using Rekognition.DHS compounds face recognition’s threat to anonymity and free speech by planning to include “records related to the analysis of relationship patterns among individuals.” We don’t know where DHS or its external partners will be getting these “relationship pattern” records, but they could come from social media profiles and posts, which the government plans to track by collecting social media user names from all foreign travelers entering the country.
The Trump administration is considering the possibility of banning end-to-end encryption, as used by services like Apple’s Messages and FaceTime, as well as competing platforms like WhatsApp and Signal.
The topic was reportedly the main topic of a previously-unreported meeting of a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday …
NordVPN
Politico cites three sources for the story.
Senior Trump administration officials met on Wednesday to discuss whether to seek legislation prohibiting tech companies from using forms of encryption that law enforcement can’t break — a provocative step that would reopen a long-running feud between federal authorities and Silicon Valley.
The encryption challenge, which the government calls “going dark,” was the focus of a National Security Council meeting Wednesday morning that included the No. 2 officials from several key agencies, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The meeting reportedly discussed two options.
Senior officials debated whether to ask Congress to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data so that only its sender and recipient can read it […]
“The two paths were to either put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution, or to ask Congress for legislation,” said one of the people.
No decision was reached given strongly opposing views within the government.
After NBC News on Wednesday published a trove of leaked documents that show how Facebook "treated user data as a bargaining chip with external app developers," White House hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders declared that it is time "to break Facebook up."
When British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell first shared the trove of documents with a handful of media outlets including NBC News in April, journalists Olivia Solon and Cyrus Farivar reported that "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to consolidate the social network's power and control competitors by treating its users' data as a bargaining chip, while publicly proclaiming to be protecting that data."
With the publication Wednesday of nearly 7,000 pages of records—which include internal Facebook emails, web chats, notes, presentations, and spreadsheets—journalists and the public can now have a closer look at exactly how the company was using the vast amount of data it collects when it came to bargaining with third parties.
According to Solon and Farivar of NBC:
Taken together, they show how Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook users' data—including information about friends, relationships, and photos—as leverage over the companies it partnered with. In some cases, Facebook would reward partners by giving them preferential access to certain types of user data while denying the same access to rival companies.
For example, Facebook gave Amazon special access to user data because it was spending money on Facebook advertising. In another case the messaging app MessageMe was cut off from access to data because it had grown too popular and could compete with Facebook.
The document dump comes as Facebook and Zuckerberg are facing widespread criticism over the company's political advertising policy, which allows candidates for elected office to lie in the ads they pay to circulate on the platform. It also comes as 47 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, are investigating the social media giant for antitrust violations.
The call from Sanders (I-Vt.) Wednesday to break up Facebook follows similar but less definitive statements from the senator.
One of Sanders' rivals in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), released her plan to "Break Up Big Tech" in March. Zuckerberg is among the opponents of Warren's proposal, which also targets other major technology companies like Amazon and Google.
The elusive Shadow Brokers didn't have much luck selling the NSA's hacking tools, so they're giving more of the software away -- to everyone. In a Medium post, the mysterious team supplied the password for an encrypted file containing many of the Equation Group surveillance tools swiped back in 2016. Supposedly, the group posted the content in "protest" at President Trump turning his back on the people who voted for him. The leaked data appears to check out, according to researchers, but some of it is a couple of decades old and focused on platforms like Linux.
If anything, the leak might backfire. Edward Snowden notes that while the leak is "nowhere near" representing the NSA's complete tool set, there's enough that the NSA should "instantly identify" where and how the kit leaked. This doesn't mean the Shadow Brokers themselves are about to face capture. However, this may give the agency info it needs to both connect the dots (how much of a role did NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin III play in the online leak, for instance?) and prevent a repeat incident.Does this open a can of worms? It's hard to say -- researchers are still combing over the data. If there are any hacks that can be made useful, though, this could be problematic for server operators worried about cybercrime. If nothing else, it shows that the Shadow Brokers didn't reveal their full hand.
Right around the time that Apple stock was surging to new highs thanks to a better than expected earnings report and stock split, another story was surfacing: Arizona is leading a multi-state investigation into whether or not Apple is deliberately slowing its old iPhones, and whether such practices would violate deceptive trade laws.
A probe has been ongoing "since 2018" and investigators are focusing on data that shows "unexpected shutdowns" of old Apple iPhones and the company's potential slowing down of devices using power management software, according to Reuters.
Documents obtained last week from a Texas watchdog group showed that the Texas AG was also involved in the investigation. Sources told Reuters that a "majority of U.S. states", with AGs spanning both parties, are involved and are "teaming up" together in the probe.
Apple agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a related class action lawsuit earlier this year.
