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Years later, there was a push to officially renounce the use of chemical weapons in war, which became the chemical weapons treaty... but it included exceptions for domestic use.

I frankly think that we don't know much about the long-term effects, especially in civilian exposure with kids or elderly or people in the street who might have some kind of lung disease already. There's very few follow-up studies. These are very active chemicals that can cause quite significant injury, so I'm concerned about the increased use of these agents. [....] I'm very concerned that, as use has increased, tear gas has been normalized. The attitude now is like, this is safe and we can use it as much as we want.

the report recognized that email privacy is critical

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.

the algorithm is only as fair as the data fed into it.

If there’s one thing that needs constant reminding, it’s the explicit purpose of the copyright monopoly. Its purpose is to promote the progress of human knowledge. Nothing less. Nothing more.

[Congress has the power] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

has the power, and not the obligation

Further evidence of overeager and illegal police work emerged Thursday in New Zealand as Inspector General of Security and Intelligence Paul Neazor released a report on the illegal bugging of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload programmer Bram van der Kolk. Two GCSB officers were present at a police station nearby Dotcom’s mansion as the raid took place.

Police weighed several options for the raid named “Operation Debut,” undertaken at the behest of US authorities, and sought to take Dotcom and associates with the “greatest element of surprise” and to minimise any delays the in executing the search and seizure operation should the German file sharing tycoon’s staff be uncooperative or even resist officers on arrival.

The police planners also noted that “Dotcom will use violence against person’s [sic] and that he has several staff members who are willing to use violence at Dotcom’s bidding” after a U.S. cameraman, Jess Bushyhead, reported the Megaupload founder for assaulting him with his stomach after a dispute. Based on Dotcom’s license plates such as MAFIA, POLICE, STONED, GUILTY, and HACKER, police said this indicates the German “likes to think of himself as a gangster” and is “described as arrogant, flamboyant and having disregard for law enforcement.” However, the documents show that Dotcom had only been caught violating the speed limit in New Zealand. The request for assistance from the STG notes that the US investigation against Mega Media Group and Dotcom was started in March 2010 by prosecutors and the FBI. According to the documents, US prosecutors and FBI “discovered that the Mega Media Group had engaged in and facilitated criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale around the world.” FBI in turn contacted NZ Police in “early 2011," requesting assistance with the Mega Media Group investigation as Dotcom had moved to New Zealand at the time.

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.

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.

“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.

“The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

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. 

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:

Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG's current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts. We experimentally demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away.

the IRS appears to argue that because there might be some "non-charitable" uses of the software, the Foundation doesn't deserve non-profit status, which would make it exempt from certain taxes (and make donations tax deductible).

More unusually, the attacks also employed a rapidly changing array of methods to maximize the effects of this torrent of data. The uncommon ability of the attackers to simultaneously saturate routers, bank servers, and the applications they run—and to then recalibrate their attack traffic depending on the results achieved—had the effect of temporarily overwhelming the targets."This very well could be a kid sitting in his mom's basement in Ohio launching these attacks." "It used to be DDoS attackers would try one method and they were kind of one-trick ponies," Matthew Prince, CEO and founder of CloudFlare, told Ars. "What these attacks appear to have shown is there are some attackers that have a full suite of DDoS methods, and they're trying all kinds of different things and continually shifting until they find something that works. It's still cavemen using clubs, but they have a whole toolbox full of different clubs they can use depending on what the situation calls for."

It had already been suggested by other researchers that the gastrointestinal contents of maggots could be used to identify the subjects they feed on. However, never before has the theory been trialed in a legal, criminal case. Pathologists at Autonomous University of Nuevo León in San Nicolás, Mexico, led by María de Lourdes Chávez-Briones and Marta Ortega-Martínez, carried out short tandem repeat typing tests (a common method of DNA profiling) on the matter extracted from three dissected maggots found on the victim's face and neck, and separately on the alleged father of the missing woman. Preliminary results showed that the body was female, and the final outcome was a 99.685 percent probability of positive paternity—the victim had been identified.

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

between 2008 and 2010

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

US surveillance agency may be using Google's advertising cookies to track and "pinpoint" targets for government hacking and location-tracking. According to Snowden's leaked presentation slides, both the NSA and the British equivalent, the GCHQ, are using a Google-specific ad cookie (know as "PREF") as a way of homing in on specific surveillance targets. While Google's cookie doesn't contain personal information like a name or email address, it does contain numeric codes that uniquely identify a user's browser.

The defendants, aged between 18 and 28, are believed to have stolen more than $100 million in intellectual property and other proprietary data from the likes of Microsoft Corporation, Epic Games, Valve, and even the US Army. This includes pre-release versions of Gears of War 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Apache helicopter simulation software developed for the US army, and information about the Xbox One console. Two of the suspects have pleaded guilty, one of which is 22-year old David Pokora. His plea represents what may be the first conviction of a foreign-based individual for hacking into US businesses to steal trade secret information.

18-count superseding indictment

Researchers on Thursday discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in the widely used command-line shell GNU Bourne Again Shell (Bash), dubbed "Shellshock" which affects most of the Linux distributions and servers worldwide, and may already have been exploited in the wild to take over Web servers as part of a botnet that is currently trying to infect other servers as well.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset

the first US file-sharer to take her RIAA-initiated lawsuit all the way to a trial and a verdict back in 2007. Five years, three trials, and one appeal later, she owes $222,000 to the recording industry for sharing songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network, but she doesn't plan to quit fighting.

Thomas-Rasset will follow Joel Tenenbaum, the second US resident to take his file-sharing case that far. Tenenbaum—who reached the Supreme Court first because he had only one jury trial instead of three—tried to convince the justices that they should take his case to stop the music label plan to create, in his lawyer's words, "an urban legend so frightening to children using the Internet, and so frightening for parents and teachers of students using the Internet, that they will somehow reverse the tide of the digital future." The Supremes showed no interest, denying Tenenbaum's petition back in May.

"deny, disrupt, degrade and deceive" by any means possible.

According to reports in Der Spiegel last year, British intelligence has tapped the reservations systems of over 350 top hotels around the world for the past three years to set up Royal Concierge. It was used to spy on trade delegations, foreign diplomats, and other targets with a taste for the high life.

A PowerPoint presentation from 2010 states that JTRIG activities account for five per cent of GCHQ's operations budget and uses a variety of techniques. These include "call bombing" to drown out a target's ability to receive messages, attacking targets in hotels, Psyops (psychological operations) against individuals, and going all the way up to disrupting a country's critical infrastructure.

The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes, by one account, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’s print collection.

NSA defends the program by saying that it uses the location data to find "unknown associates of known intelligence targets." Basically, it's tracking where everyone goes, just in case people end up spending time with people the NSA deems as being terrorists.

Elsewhere in the article, they quote NSA officials repeatedly saying that the program is "tuned to be looking outside the United States," but not saying it only collects info outside the US. Also, they make clear, once a person leaves the US, the NSA no longer believes the 4th Amendment applies to them, so their location is fair game in this giant database.. Asked for specific numbers, an NSA person said:

t's a messaging app for iOS.

based on peer-to-peer “mesh networking” and connects to nearby phones using Bluetooth and WiFi, with connectivity increasing as more people use it in an area.