FBI’s Data-Mining System Sifts Airline, Hotel, Car-Rental Records | Threat Level | Wired.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
11:14 am EDT, Sep 23, 2009
Data-Mining - not just for counterterrorism.
“The IDW objective was to create a data warehouse that uses certain data elements to provide a single-access repository for information related to issues beyond counterterrorism to include counterintelligence, criminal and cyber investigations,” stated a formerly secret fiscal year 2008 budget request document. “These missions will be refined and expanded as these capabilities are folded into the NSAC.”
They're going to collect everything they can and use it to investigate everything they can.
lonew0lf wrote: Congress is going to give health care entities an exception to notify people if they get broken in to as long as they use cryptography.
A large percentage of compelled data breach notifications involve accidental data loss - an employee looses their laptop or some backup tapes get misplaced and no one can account for them. If in such cases the data was properly encrypted, it hasn't necessarily been exposed. I think its reasonable for the state to allow entities to forgo notifications in these cases. These kinds of exceptions give these entities a reason to invest in encrypting data at rest and they have motivated large scale adoption of encryption in corporate environments in recent years.
The question is - exactly what kinds of encryption are considered adequate. The Federal Register notification linked through this article says "The guidance specified encryption and destruction as the technologies and methodologies for rendering protected health information, as well as PHR identifiable health information under section 13407 of the Act and the FTC’s implementing regulation, unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to unauthorized individuals such that breach notification is not required. The RFI asked for general comment on this guidance as well as for specific comment on the technologies and methodologies to render protected health information unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to unauthorized individuals."
If this is something that concerns you'd I'd suggest digging up that guidance and checking to see if you think the requirements are adequate.
Volcker Sees ‘Long Slog’ for U.S. Economy, Seeks Bank Limits - Bloomberg.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
8:59 am EDT, Sep 18, 2009
“It will be alongslog -- a matter of years -- with the risk of some relapses along the way."
Wired's Long Boom cover story was one of the most insipid things that they ever printed. It was clear the minute you saw it that the exact opposite was going to happen.
I think "The Long Slog" would be a more apt name for the present era.
In 1997 I was a student. By the time this slog is over, I will be an old man.
The ad questions why Ross has fought against a government-run health care plan when a poll shows that 55% of people in his state support it. Ross, the ad notes, has taken $921,670 in campaign contributions from health insurers and the pharmaceutical industry since arriving in Congress.
Its important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change - it is us. I don't really believe in campaign finance reform - if you pass federal laws removing the money from one location it is just going to pop up somewhere else. People are under tremendous pressure from pundits, churches, activists, and true believers to tout a party line and wealthy people will always be able to get their messages out. It is easy to mislead the public when you have millions with which to do it.
I've always been a believer that the answer to bad speech is better speech. We need good, publicly funded, refereed voter guides that provide balanced information about the issues, and we need to promote a culture that advocates that people evaluate the information in these guides objectively and without regard to partisan bias.
Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession | Mail Online
Topic: Miscellaneous
8:55 am EDT, Sep 16, 2009
The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination.
Bob Barr wrote a nice essay on border searches of laptops that does a good job picking at the argument that nothing has changed:
In earlier times, the government also relied much more heavily than nowadays on customs duties for its revenues, and the number of offenses for which federal agents were responsible was far fewer. As such, it was difficult to fault customs agents for conducting brief physical inspections of travelers’ luggage.
Unlike customs agents in the post-Revolutionary War era, however, the jurisdiction today of federal law enforcement agents encompasses literally thousands of criminal and civil offenses...
The huge expansion of the universe of possible offenses for which an individual can be charged, coupled with the massive increase in the amount of information that can be stored on even the cheapest of modern electronic devices, has caused many privacy advocates and civil libertarians to question the propriety if not the constitutionality of this vast expansion of the government’s “border search” power. In the absence of legislation placing reasonable limits on this power, the 1,000 such searches just of laptops the government said it has conducted in the last year, will expand exponentially.
Their policy allows them to search every single laptop.
Police say syringes will help stop drunk driving - Yahoo! News
Topic: Miscellaneous
8:33 am EDT, Sep 14, 2009
A friend of mine asked me to comment on this. I wrote the following:
My perspective is that such tests constitute a search and should require a warrant. If you look at the story, the people running this program agree - the story dances around that a bit. They say:
The nation's highest court ruled in 1966 that police could have blood tests forcibly done on a drunk driving suspect without a warrant, as long as the draw was based on a reasonable suspicion that a suspect was intoxicated, that it was done after an arrest and carried out in a medically approved manner.
That ruling basically has nothing to do with this story. The after arrest part is key - if you've already been arrested the constitutional issues are not the same. You are a prisoner. Later down in the article they say:
Under the state's implied consent law, drivers who refuse to voluntarily submit to the test lose their license for a year, so most comply. For the approximately 5 percent who refuse, the officer obtains a search warrant from an on-call judge and the suspect can be restrained if needed to obtain a sample, Layden said.
So, a warrant is required. However, "we pulled the guy over because he was weaving" is probable cause sufficient to get a warrant, so it doesn't really matter.
So, the question really boils down to what you think about "implied consent." If they had absolutely no basis to suspect you of being intoxicated they couldn't get a warrant, but you'd still loose your license.
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the idea of "implied consent" when it comes to the fourth amendment. It goes to show you how little respect the fourth amendment has when the game for legislators is to come up with a creative way of thinking it out of existence.
Imagine you started a neighborhood, and you wanted it to be crime free. You create an Home Owners Association with an HOA contract. In that contact you include language that says that if you buy a home in this neighborhood you consent to suspicionless searches of your home and property by the police. Its buried in the fine print - most people don't really notice its there and the police rarely exercise this power anyway so its not a practical concern, until it is. Here consent is more than implied - you actually signed paperwork authorizing searches of your property.
If this practice became common, over time it might be harder and harder to buy a home in a "nice" neighborhood without signing your constitutional rights away.
Now, imagine you started an ISP, and you wanted it to be crime free...
We estimated that our balloon achieved an altitude of about 93000 feet before returning to the earth. The balloon’s ascent took about 4 hours, and its descent took 40 minutes.
