Lawsuit Claims Accidental Google Search Led To Years Of Government Investigation And Ha... - 0 views
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Jeffrey Kantor, who was fired by Appian Corporation, sued a host of government officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry in Federal Court, alleging civil rights violations, disclosure of private information and retaliation… He also sued Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Rand Beers, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, EPA Administrator Regina McCarthy and U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta.
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"In October of 2009, Kantor used the search engine Google to try to find, 'How do I build a radio-controlled airplane,'" he states in his complaint. "He ran this search a couple weeks before the birthday of his son with the thought of building one together as a birthday present. After typing, 'how do I build a radio controlled', Google auto-completed his search to, 'how do I build a radio controlled bomb.'" From that point on, Kantor alleges coworkers, supervisors and government investigators all began "group stalking" him. Investigators used the good cop/bad cop approach, with the "bad cop" allegedly deploying anti-Semitic remarks frequently. In addition, his coworkers at Appian (a government contractor) would make remarks about regular people committing murder-suicides (whenever Kantor expressed anger) or how normal people just dropped dead of hypertension (whenever Kantor remained calm while being harassed)
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Kantor also claims he was intensely surveilled by the government from that point forward.
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Switzerland Questions Crazy Hollywood Claims About File Sharing... Ends Up On Congressi... - 0 views
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Last December, we wrote about a report put out by the Swiss executive branch noting that, based on their research, it appeared that unauthorized file sharing was not a big deal, showing that consumers were still spending just as much on entertainment, and that much of it was going directly to artists, rather than to middlemen. In other words, it was a market shift, not a big law enforcement problem. At the time, we wondered if Switzerland had just bought itself a place on the USTR's "Special 301 list" that the administration uses each year to shame countries that Hollywood doesn't like.
Massachusetts Man Charged Criminally For Videotaping Cop... Despite Earlier Lawsuit Rej... - 0 views
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You may remember a high-profile, landmark ruling last year in Massachusetts, where charges against Simon Glik -- arrested for violating a state law that said it's "wiretapping" to record a police officer in public without his permission -- weren't just dropped, but the arrest was found to be both a First and Fourth Amendment violation. In the end, Boston was forced to pay Glik $170,000 for violating his civil rights. You would think that story would spread across Massachusetts pretty quickly and law enforcement officials and local district attorneys would recognize that filing similar charges would be a certified bad idea. Not so, apparently, in the town of Shrewsbury. Irving J. Espinosa-Rodrigue was apparently arrested and charged under the very same statute after having a passenger in his car videotape a traffic stop for speeding, and then posting the video on YouTube. Once again, the "issue" is that Massachusetts is a "two-party consent" state, whereby an audio recording can't be done without first notifying the person being recorded, or its deemed a "wiretap." This interpretation, especially when dealing with cops in public, is flat-out ridiculous and unconstitutional, as the Glik ruling showed.
New Zealand Launched Mass Surveillance Project While Publicly Denying It - The Intercept - 0 views
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Documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the government worked in secret to exploit a new internet surveillance law enacted in the wake of revelations of illegal domestic spying to initiate a new metadata collection program that appeared designed to collect information about the communications of New Zealanders.
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Those actions are in direct conflict with the assurances given to the public by Prime Minister John Key (pictured above), who said the law was merely designed to fix “an ambiguous legal framework” by expressly allowing the agency to do what it had done for years, that it “isn’t and will never be wholesale spying on New Zealanders,” and the law “isn’t a revolution in the way New Zealand conducts its intelligence operations.”
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Snowden explained that “at the NSA, I routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in my work with a mass surveillance tool we share with GCSB, called ‘X KEYSCORE.”" He further detailed that “the GCSB provides mass surveillance data into XKEYSCORE. They also provide access to the communications of millions of New Zealanders to the NSA at facilities such as the GCSB facility in Waihopai, and the Prime Minister is personally aware of this fact.”
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Kurt Eichenwald Claims Snowden Is A Chinese Spy And Leaks Are Just To Protect Their Cyb... - 0 views
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And the attempts to tar and feather Ed Snowden continue. The latest is that famed reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who started attacking Ed Snowden months ago, has written up a long speculative article for Newsweek arguing that Ed Snowden has "escalated the cyber war" by giving China the necessary cover it needs to avoid reining in its own cyber attacks
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That is, if you follow the bizarre logic here, without Snowden, Eichenwald believes that the US would have somehow convinced the Chinese to stop their cyber attack program. And, now because of Snowden, the Chinese can ignore that effort, by pointing out that the US is doing a ton of online hacking too.
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Again, nearly everything about that statement is ridiculous. He didn't "leave all of the documents in Hong Kong." He provided heavily encrypted versions to a very small number of journalists, and then got rid of the files himself. Eichenwald takes that to mean he "left" them in Hong Kong, based on nothing, and all of this apparently means that Snowden is working for the Chinese (even though he left China pretty quickly).
Man Arrested for Urinating on Dunkin Donuts Counter - WJW - 0 views
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ALLIANCE, Ohio A 19-year-old man was taken into custody early Sunday morning after police say he urinated on the counter and carpet at a Dunkin Donuts in Alliance. According to an arrest report filed on the incident, James Dobran, 19, was arrested at 1:30 am after police received a call from employees at the store claiming Dobran had exposed himself and urinated on the counter and floor of the business.
Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Software To Grab Photos Of Every Person Attending... - 0 views
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Ultimately, taking several thousand photos with dozens of surveillance cameras is no greater a violation of privacy than a single photographer taking shots of crowd members. The problem here is the cover-up and the carelessness with which the gathered data was (and is) handled.
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law enforcement automatically assumes a maximum of secrecy in order to "protect" its investigative techniques
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The city claims it's not interested in pursuing this sort of surveillance at the moment, finding it to be lacking in "practical value." But it definitely is interested in all the aspects listed above, just not this particular iteration. It also claims it has no policies on hand governing the use of "situational awareness software," but only because it's not currently using any. Anyone want to take bets that the eventual roll out of situational awareness software will be far in advance of any guidance or policies?
It's Not Whether NSA Surveillance Helped Stop Any Plots, But Whether Or Not It Needed T... - 0 views
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But, the bigger issue is that without presenting any actual evidence on these situations, it's impossible to know whether or not the NSA really needed this massive data collection to stop those "potential" plots. As we've already seen, in the one case where the NSA has said the programs were useful, it quickly became clear that they were not necessary, and traditional policework actually did the bulk of the effort in identifying the plot.
$100 Million Pledged To Indie Film On Kickstarter... And 8,000 Films Made | Techdirt - 0 views
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And, yes, the "but what about my $100 million movie" crowd will scoff and argue that this number is so "small." But, two points there: first, this number is growing very, very, very fast. And if you can't understand how trends explode, then you're going to be in trouble soon. Second -- and this is the more important point -- those funds helped create 8,000 films. For those who have been arguing about culture and how we're going to lose the ability to make movies... this suggests something amazing and important is happening which goes against all those gloom and doom predictions. By way of comparison, the UN, which keeps track of stats on film production, claimed that in 2009, 7,233 films were made. Worldwide.
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"Less than a year after being declared the darling of Sundance -- especially for not having "the arrogance of a studio" -- Kickstarter has announced that over $100 million has been pledged to indie film via its platform (which, of course, is hardly the only crowdfunding platform that filmmakers use, though it is the most popular). There are some caveats, of course. This is over Kickstarter's lifetime (since April 2009), but the numbers have been growing rapidly. $60 million of those pledges came in 2012. Also, that's pledges, not actual money given, since only projects that hit their target get the money. The actual total collected is $85.7 million -- which means that'll get over $100 million pretty quickly. "
FCC to buy out TV broadcasters to free up mobile spectrum | Ars Technica - 0 views
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I had my first issue at step one, "asks broadcasters to tell the FCC how much it wold take for the agency to buy them out". They claim that this is a way to keep cost down by hopefully grabbing the least popular via low bids. I see two issues immediately. Number one by asking them what they want they are going to immediately INCREASE the bids. Two, if you are asking me what I want for my business to change how it broadcasts why would I not include any expense to make the switch. By asking them what they think a fair bid would be, they are, more or less, giving them a blank check.
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the commission will put the newly-freed blocks of spectrum up for auction. If, as expected, the spectrum is more valuable when used for mobile services than broadcast television, then the FCC should reap significantly more from these traditional auctions than it had to pay for the spectrum in the original reverse auctions, producing a tidy profit for taxpayers.
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The objective at an auction is to purchase the object at the lowest possible cost. How much mobile providers are willing to pay will determine how high bids will climb. Based on how our current mobile providers already provide poor service when compared to the rest of the world, how much is that bandwidth actually worth to these companies that, more or less, have a lobbied stranglehold on the consumer?
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Court: Fining Jammie Thomas $9,250 Per Song Infringed Motivates Creative Activity | Tec... - 0 views
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This is hardly a surprise, but similar to the Joel Tenenbaum case, Jammie Thomas-Rasset (the other person sued for copyright infringement for using a file sharing system), has lost again. The appeals court (8th Circuit) has ruled that $9,250 per song infringed is perfectly reasonable and that the judge in the case, Michael Davis, erred in calling for a new trial after the initial jury verdict (the first of three). There were a number of procedural issues here, and it's worth pointing out that Thomas-Rasset herself more or less asked the court to bring back this first verdict and focus on the Constitutionality of the damages amount. So, the whole mess with the three separate district court trials sort of gets swept under the rug. However, the court simply isn't buying Thomas-Rasset's claim that the statutory damages are unconstitutionally punitive and a violation of due process. Basically, it says that the fact that statutory damages are completely out of whack with actual damages doesn't matter, because the point of statutory damages is that they're disconnected from actual damages on purpose (because, in theory, they're put in place because actual damages are difficult to assess).
Germany: Mosley takes on Google in privacy fight - 0 views
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claiming the search engine is breaking German privacy laws by providing links to websites hosting a hidden-camera video of him at a sadomasochistic sex party.
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Mosley successfully sued a British tabloid over a 2008 story headlined "Formula One boss has sick Nazi orgy with five hookers." Mosley has acknowledged the orgy, but says the story was an "outrageous" invasion of privacy and the Nazi allegation was damaging and "completely untrue."
Rep. Goodlatte Slips Secret Change Into Phone Unlocking Bill That Opens The DMCA Up For... - 0 views
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Because of section 1201 of the DMCA, the "anti-circumvention" provision, companies have been abusing copyright law to block all sorts of actions that are totally unrelated to copyright. That's because 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent basically any "technological protection measures." The intent of the copyright maximalists was to use this section to stop people from breaking DRM. However, other companies soon distorted the language to argue that it could be used to block certain actions totally unrelated to copyright law -- such as unlocking garage doors, ink jet cartridges, gaming accessories... and phones
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Separately, every three years, the Librarian of Congress gets to announce "exemptions" to section 1201 where it feels that things are being locked up that shouldn't be. Back in 2006, one of these exemptions involved mobile phone unlocking.
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Every three years this exemption was modified a bit, but in 2012, for unexplained reasons, the Librarian of Congress dropped that exemption entirely, meaning that starting in late January of 2013, it was possible to interpret the DMCA to mean that phone unlocking was illegal. In response to this there was a major White House petition -- which got over 100,000 signatures, leading the White House to announce (just weeks later) that it thought unlocking should be legal -- though, oddly, it seemed to place the issue with the FCC to fix, rather than recognizing the problem was with current copyright law.
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How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputatio... - 0 views
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“The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
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Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.
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Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends. The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:
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Uroburos Rootkit: Most sophisticated 3-year-old Russian Cyber Espionage Campaign - The ... - 0 views
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The researchers claimed that the malware may have been active for as long as three years before being discovered and appears to have been created by Russian developers.
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The two main components of Uroburos are - a driver and an encrypted virtual file system, used to disguise its nasty activities and to try to avoid detection. Its driver part is extremely complex and is designed to be very discrete and very difficult to identify.
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The virtual file system can’t be decrypted without the presence of drivers, according to the Gdata’s analysis explained in the PDF.
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RapidGator Wiped From Google by False DMCA Notices | TorrentFreak - 0 views
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File-hosting service RapidGator has had nearly all of its search results wiped from Google, including many clearly non-infringing pages. The URLs in question were removed by the search engine after a DMCA notice from several copyright holders. RapidGator is outraged and says the overbroad censorship is hurting its business, warning that the same could happen to others. “If it happens to us, it can happen to MediaFire or Dropbox tomorrow,” they state.
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Thus far this has resulted in more than 200 million URLs being removed from Google’s search engine. While many of these takedown claims are legit, some are clearly false, censoring perfectly legitimate webpages from search results. File-hosting service RapidGator.net is one site that has fallen victim to such overbroad takedown requests. The file-hosting service has had nearly all its URLs de-listed, including its homepage, making the site hard to find through Google. Several other clearly non-infringing pages, including the FAQ, the news section, and even the copyright infringement policy, have also been wiped from Google by various takedown requests.
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“Our robots.txt forbids search engines bots to index any file/* folder/ URLs. We only allow them to crawl our main page and the pages we have in a footer of the website. So most of the URLs for which Google gets DMCA notices are not listed in index by default,” RapidGator’s Dennis explains.
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Quoting the article: "File-hosting service RapidGator has had nearly all of its search results wiped from Google, including many clearly non-infringing pages. The URLs in question were removed by the search engine after a DMCA notice from several copyright holders. RapidGator is outraged and says the overbroad censorship is hurting its business, warning that the same could happen to others. "If it happens to us, it can happen to MediaFire or Dropbox tomorrow," they state." This is, sooner or later, going to have to be addressed... It totally works against the concept of the cloud. I can not believe that more people are using the cloud for illegal uses than legit.
How LexisNexis and others may have unwittingly aided identity thieves | Ars Technica - 0 views
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Wednesday's report exposes serious risks in what banks, mortgage companies, and other financial services call "knowledge-based authentication." Representatives from these services frequently rely on a list of about 100 questions such as "What was your previous address?" or "Which company services your mortgage?" when trying to determine if the person on the phone or filling out an application is the individual he claims to be. Ready access to the data stored by the data aggregators can make the difference between a fraudulent application being approved or rejected. Krebs goes on to recount a story told by Gartner fraud analyst Avivah Litan about a fellow analyst who witnessed an identity thief in action.
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