Warrantless Laptop Searches at U.S. Borders

Decius

U.S. customs agents have begun randomly searching the contents of laptops carried by individuals across U.S. border checkpoints. Personal laptops contain increasingly vast and intimate collections of information about their owners, and cannot be easily sanitized for government inspection prior to travel. The privacy implications of this policy are obviously tremendous. There is presently a debate in the U.S. court system about the constitutionality of these searches. This talk will cover the developments so far, explaining (and criticizing) the basic legal framework in which this debate is occurring as well as the reasoning employed by the courts that have heard this issue. Related topics will also be discussed, such as recent controversy over the Fifth Amendment right to refuse to reveal an encryption password to the police and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Attendees will be armed with a deeper understanding of these present threats to our fundamental rights.

Decius will be speaking at Hope next month in NYC. A number of other people connected with MemeStreams are also speaking. It should be a good time.

The Last HOPE - July 18-20, 2008 - Hotel Pennsylvania - New York City

China denied accusations by two U.S. lawmakers that it hacked into congressional computers, saying Thursday that as a developing country it wasn't capable of sophisticated cybercrime.

"Is there any evidence? ... Do we have such advanced technology? Even I don't believe it," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regularly scheduled news conference.

This deflection is actually really quite insulting. They played the developing country card? Seriously?? What a load of crap!

Once information technology is widely available to people who take an interest in it, it's only a matter of time before there are hackers capable of preforming offensive information operations exist. The biggest factor I can think of, is if there are numbers of kids that have easy access to computers. The only universal thread in common with all the rockstar hackers I know is that they all got interested in the stuff real young, and just got more and more devastatingly capable as they matured and got more access to information and other hackers.

No one expects the avenues of Xinjiang to start flowing with 0day anytime soon.. But I assure you, places like Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Guangdong have no shortage of capable hackers. Beijing damn well knows that, and isn't afraid to use it strategically.

Hackers sprout given enough people, time, technology, and access to information. They manifest themselves in different ways. If you have an economy that can support a technology sector, you get one. If you don't, you get cybercrime. If your military wants the capability to do information operations, it will get it. Even the DPRK was claiming to have infowar capabilities at one point..

China denies hacking into US computers - Yahoo! News

Tim Russert, NBC News’ Washington bureau chief and the moderator of “Meet the Press,” died Friday after a sudden heart attack at the bureau, NBC News said Friday. He was 58.

Russert was recording voiceovers for Sunday’s “Meet the Press” program when he collapsed, the network said. He and his family had recently returned from Italy, where they celebrated the graduation of Russert’s son, Luke, from Boston College.

No further details were immediately available.

I'm really bummed out. Russert was one of the greats.

R.I.P. Tim Russert

The electricity is back in D.C. after a huge outage that left the downtown area in the dark during the height of the morning rush hours Friday.

It left traffic lights out, Metro commuters hoofing it up steep staircases and thousands of employees on the streets waiting for the electricity to come back on.

"It's blacked out a fairly good sized area of downtown, north to U street, south to F Street, over to Dupont and east to 3rd," Pepco spokesman Bob Dobkin tells WTOP.

The outages included a lot of office buildings and federal buildings, he says.

During the outage, people milled about the streets, waiting for the electricity and air conditioning in their offices to come back on.

The morning of Friday the 13th was not a good time to be an operations guy in downtown Washington, DC.

All of the facilities I'm responsible for had no power. Server rooms were silent and dark. Hallways were filled with the sounds beeping UPSs.

Fun fun fun. This was the second power outage I've had to deal with this week...

Electricity restored after massive D.C. outage

Los Angeles city Councilman Dennis Zine:

"We believe that the Constitution needs to be upheld [but] at the same time, we need to protect our celebrities."

Something about that quote sends a chill down my spine...

Ken Starr helping lawmakers fight paparazzi - CNN.com

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - Authorities say a four-year-old girl from Salley is recovering after she grabbed a gun out of her grandmother's purse and shot herself in the Harbison Blvd. Sam's Club Monday.

Where's video surveillance when you need it?

Imagine getting to write a lede/headline combination like that? Wow.

Grandmother from Sam's Club accidental shooting a magistrate judge

Google's loss is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's gain.

The EFF, based in San Francisco, said Monday it has snapped up Michael Kwun, the Mountain View-based search engine's chief of litigation.

"I've really been a big fan of EFF," Kwun said in a brief telephone interview.

Kwun, 39, graduated from Boalt School of Law at UC Berkeley in 1998. He was the lawyer responsible for managing Google's ongoing defense against a copyright case brought by Viacom. Other intellectual property courtroom disputes concern YouTube, Google Book Search, Google AdWords and Google Image Search.

"I've always been interested in technology and its intersection with law," Kwun said. "I think that technology creates a whole wealth of issues."

Obviously, he'll be making less cash at the nonprofit, where he'll focus on intellectual property. "It's rewarding in different ways," he said.

Bang.

EFF Scores Google's Litigation Gun | Threat Level

Bo Diddley, a founding father of rock 'n' roll whose distinctive "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm and innovative guitar effects inspired legions of other musicians, died Monday after months of ill health. He was 79.

Diddley died of heart failure at his home in Archer, Fla., spokeswoman Susan Clary said. He had suffered a heart attack in August, three months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa. Doctors said the stroke affected his ability to speak, and he had returned to Florida to continue rehabilitation.

R.I.P. Bo Diddley

The computer attackers who took down Comcast's homepage and webmail service for over five hours Thursday say they didn't know what they were getting themselves into.

In an hour-long telephone conference call with Threat Level, the hackers known as "Defiant" and "EBK" expressed astonishment over the attention their DNS hijacking has garnered. In the call, the pair bounded freely between jubilant excitement over the impact of their attack, and fatalism that they would soon be arrested for it.

Neither hacker would identify their full names or locations. Defiant's MySpace profile lists him in Cashville, Tennessee, but he says that's incorrect. His girlfriend lists herself in New York. Threat Level expects both hackers' names and locations will emerge shortly.

This is entertaining... One of those cases where you really gotta sympathize with the perps. It was a prank - fairly innocent. Egg on Comcast's face for getting outsmarted by a couple of teenage pot heads. Hope they don't throw the book at them. This isn't the mafia here.

Comcast Hijackers Say They Warned the Company First | Threat Level from Wired.com

Here is the text and video of Dan Geer's remarks at Source Boston 2008, basically a L0pht reunion with friends.

At the end of the day, however, we are facing a much bigger, more metaphysical question than the ones I have so far posed. That I can pose many others is of no consequence; either you are sick of them by now or you are scribbling down your own as I speak. The bigger question is this -- how much security do we want?

A world without failure is a world without freedom. A world without the possibility of sin is a world without the possibility of righteousness. A world without the possibility of crime is a world where you cannot prove you are not a criminal. A technology that can give you everything you want is a technology that can take away everything that you have. At some point, real soon now, some of us security geeks will have to say that there comes a point at which safety is not safe.

Via Bruce Schneier...

Schneier on Security: Dan Geer on Security, Monoculture, Metrics, Evolution, Etc.