the report recognized that email privacy is critical
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shared by John Lemke on 05 May 14
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The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing | Electronic Fronti... - 0 views
www.eff.org/...ta-report-good-bad-and-missing
2014 EFF mass data indienationnews law technology legal White House report review privacy yourrights notice and consent
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one issue was left conspicuously unaddressed in the report. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the civil agency in charge of protecting investors and ensuring orderly markets, has been advocating for a special exception to the warrant requirement. No agency can or should have a get-out-of-jail-free card for bypassing the Fourth Amendment.
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an example of this in Boston, which had a pilot program to allow residents to report potholes through a mobile app but soon recognized that the program was inherently flawed because “wealthy people were far more likely to own smart phones and to use the Street Bump app. Where they drove, potholes were found; where they didn’t travel, potholes went unnoted.”
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The authors of the report agree, recommending that the Privacy Act be extended to all people, not just US persons.
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metadata (the details associated with your communications, content, or actions, like who you called, or what a file you uploaded file is named, or where you were when you visited a particular website) can expose just as much information about you as the “regular” data it is associated with, so it deserves the same sort of privacy protections as “regular” data.
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The report merely recommended that the government look into the issue.
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several other government reports have taken a much stronger stance and explicitly stated that metadata deserves the same level of privacy protections as “regular” data.
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We think the report should have followed the lead of the PCAST report and acknowledged that the distinction between data and metadata is an artificial one, and recommended the appropriate reforms.
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the White House suggested advancing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which includes the idea that “consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it,” as well as “a right to access and correct personal data.”
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Consumers have a right to know when their data is exposed, whether through corporate misconduct, malicious hackers, or under other circumstances. Recognizing this important consumer safeguard, the report recommends that Congress “should pass legislation that provides a single national data breach standard along the lines of the Administration's May 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.”
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While at first blush this may seem like a powerful consumer protection, we don’t think that proposal is as strong as existing California law. The proposed federal data breach notification scheme would preempt state notification laws, removing the strong California standard and replacing it with a weaker standard.
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the Fort Hood shooting by Major Nidal Hasan
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First, whistleblowers are simply not comparable to an Army officer who massacres his fellow soldiers
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Secondly, the real big-data issue at play here is overclassification of enormous quantities of data.
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Over 1.4 million people hold top-secret security clearances. In 2012, the government classified 95 million documents. And by some estimates, the government controls more classified information than there is in the entire Library of Congress.
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The report argues that in today’s connected world it’s impossible for consumers to keep up with all the data streams they generate (intentionally or not), so the existing “notice and consent” framework (in which companies must notify and get a user’s consent before collecting data) is obsolete. Instead, they suggest that more attention should be paid to how data is used, rather than how it is collected.
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While we agree that putting more emphasis on responsible use of big data is important, doing so should not completely replace the notice and consent framework.
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Despite being a fairly thorough analysis of the privacy implications of big data, there is one topic that it glaringly omits: the NSA’s use of big data to spy on innocent Americans.
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Even though the review that led to this report was announced during President Obama’s speech on NSA reform, and even though respondents to the White House’s Big Data Survey “were most wary of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies are collecting and using data about them,” the report itself is surprisingly silent on the issue.2 This is especially confusing given how much the report talks about the need for more transparency in the private sector when it comes to big data. Given that this same logic could well be applied to intelligence big data programs, we don’t understand why the report did not address this vital issue.
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shared by John Lemke on 27 Jan 14
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Little red lawsuit: Prince sues 22 people for pirating his songs | The Verge - 0 views
www.theverge.com/...-people-for-pirating-his-songs
prince lawsuit 2014 legal law YouTube Blogger litigation intellectualproperty indienationnews
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The case, filed as Prince v. Chodera in the Northern District of California, reads, "The Defendants in this case engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince's material." Only two defendants are named in the suit, however — the rest are listed as John Does, though eight do have the distinction of being regarded by their online handles. Nevertheless, Prince, based on "information and belief," alleges that each of the individuals worked together on Facebook and Blogger to conduct infringing activity, and lists extensively the mirror sites and blogs each used to distribute copies of his work. He has thus demanded $1 million with interest in damages from each of the defendants, along with a permanent injunction to prevent all of them from doing further harm.
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shared by John Lemke on 13 Dec 13
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Hubble spots water spurting from Europa : Nature News & Comment - 0 views
www.nature.com/...r-spurting-from-europa-1.14357
2013 hubble news ET-life space spaceexploration extraterrestialLife
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“If this pans out, it’s potentially the biggest news in the outer Solar System since the discovery of the Enceladus plume,” says Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who was not involved in the research.
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Roth’s team spotted the plumes when Europa was at its greatest distance from Jupiter. Changing stresses in the moon's crust, caused by tidal forces between the moon and planet, may explain why the researchers didn't see any plumes in the November observation when Europa and Jupiter were close. “Maybe Europa is just burping once in a while,” Pappalardo says.
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shared by John Lemke on 12 May 14
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World's Largest Solar Array Set to Crank Out 290 Megawatts of Sunshine Power - Scientif... - 0 views
www.scientificamerican.com/...90-megawatts-of-sunshine-power
indienationnews 2014 solar green energy power electric future american tech
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Agua Caliente, the largest photovoltaic solar power facility in the world, was completed last week in Arizona.
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ive million solar panels that span the equivalent of two Central Parks in the desert between Yuma and Phoenix. It generates 290 megawatts of power—enough electricity to fuel 230,000 homes in neighboring California at peak capacity.
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The project, which cost a total of $1.8 billion to construct, received a million-dollar loan from the Loan Programs Office. Under its “SunShot” initiative (so-named in the spirit of president John F. Kennedy’s “moon shot” program), the DoE provides guaranteed loans to unproved ventures in solar power in the hopes of promoting innovation and making the technology more cost-effective.* Although Agua Caliente (owned by U.S. energy giant NRG Energy and partner MidAmerican Solar) is now the largest photovoltaic solar facility in the world, it probably will not hold that distinction for long. Other massive solar panel facilities, such as Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One in California’s Mojave Desert, are rapidly springing up across the Southwest.
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The energy contained in just one hour of sunlight could power the world for a year, if only it could be harnessed.