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the danger of discrimination remains due to the very digital nature of big data

especially the elderly, minorities, and the poor

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.”

The authors of the report agree, recommending that the Privacy Act be extended to all people, not just US persons.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

We were particularly disconcerted

the Fort Hood shooting by Major Nidal Hasan

two big concerns

First, whistleblowers are simply not comparable to an Army officer who massacres his fellow soldiers

Secondly, the real big-data issue at play here is overclassification of enormous quantities of data.

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.

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.

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.

Kaspersky officials first became suspicious their network might be infected in the weeks following February's Security Analyst Summit, where company researchers exposed a state-sponsored hacking operation that had ties to some of the developers of Stuxnet. Kaspersky dubbed the highly sophisticated group behind the 14-year campaign Equation Group. Now back in Moscow, a company engineer was testing a software prototype for detecting so-called advanced persistent threats (APTs), the type of well-organized and highly sophisticated attack campaigns launched by well-funded hacking groups. Strangely enough, the developer's computer itself was having unusual interactions with the Kaspersky network. The new APT technology under development, it seemed, was one of several things of interest to the Duqu attackers penetrating the Kaspersky fortress. "For the developer it was important to find out why" his PC was acting oddly, Kamluk said. "Of course, he did not consider that machine could be infected by real malware. We eventually found an alien module that should not be there that tried to mask behind legitimate looking modules from Microsoft. That was the point of discovery."