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NSA Spying. By 285 votes to 281, MEPs decide to call on EU member states to "drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden" : worldnews. Senate passes controversial cybersecurity bill Cisa 74 to 21 | Technology. The US Senate overwhelmingly passed a controversial cybersecurity bill critics say will allow the government to collect sensitive personal data unchecked, over the objections of civil liberties groups and many of the biggest names in the tech sector. The vote on Tuesday was 74 to 21 in support of the legislation. Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders voted against the bill. None of the Republican presidential candidates (except Lindsey Graham, who voted in favor) were present to cast a vote, including Rand Paul, who has made privacy from surveillance a major plank of his campaign platform. Ahead of the vote a group of university professors specializing in tech law, many from the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, sent an open letter to the Senate, urging them not to pass the bill.

The bill, they wrote, would fatally undermine the Freedom of Information Act (Foia). Snowden, via Twitter, said that “a vote for Cisa is a vote against the internet.” CISA Security Bill Passes Senate With Privacy Flaws Unfixed. For months, privacy advocates have asked Congress to kill or reform the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a bill that they say hides new government surveillance mechanisms in the guise of security protections. Now the Senate has shot down a series of attempts to change the legislation’s most controversial measures, and then passed it with those privacy-invasive features fully intact.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate voted 74 to 21 to pass a version of CISA that roughly mirrors legislation passed in the House earlier this year, paving the way for some combined version of the security bill to become law. CISA is designed to stem the rising tide of corporate data breaches by allowing companies to share cybersecurity threat data with the Department of Homeland Security, who could then pass it on to other agencies like the FBI and NSA, who would in theory use it to defend the target company and others facing similar attacks. CISA still faces some hurdles to becoming law. Web surv3illanc3. Windows-10-spying-almost-everything-opt-130502898. Windows-10-1 Windows 10 is amazing. Windows 10 is fantastic. Windows 10 is glorious.

Windows 10 is faster, smoother and more user-friendly than any Windows operating system that has come before it. Windows 10 is everything Windows 8 should have been, addressing nearly all of the major problems users had with Microsoft’s previous-generation platform in one fell swoop. But there’s something you should know: As you read this article from your newly upgraded PC, Windows 10 is also spying on nearly everything you do. DON’T MISS: Windows 10: The first 5 things you need to do immediately after you install it It’s your own fault if you don’t know that Windows 10 is spying on you.

Well, here is Microsoft’s 12,000-word service agreement. Canada's New Income Opportunity Traders Education Centre Sponsored Actually, here’s one excerpt from Microsoft’s terms of use that everyone can understand: If that sentence sent shudders down your spine, don’t worry. 32 Chilling Images Of Creepy Abandoned Places. BIG BROTHER & Co. are WATCHING us.... Judge eager to re-enter NSA surveillance fight. Warning that the constitutional rights of tens of millions of Americans are being violated, a federal judge said Wednesday that he's eager to expedite a lawsuit seeking to shut down the National Security Agency's controversial program to collect data on large volumes of U.S. telephone calls.

During an hourlong hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, Judge Richard Leon repeatedly urged the conservative lawyer who brought the suit to take steps to allow the case to move forward quickly by asking a federal appeals court to formally relinquish control over an appeal in the case. Leon noted that the so-called bulk collection program is set to shut down on November 29 as part of a transition to a new system where queries will be sent to telephone companies rather than to a central database stored at the NSA. "The clock is running and there isn't much time between now and November 29," Leon told conservative gadfly Larry Klayman.

Last week, the U.S. You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History. Khairullozhori Matanov, a friend of the Boston bomber, is being sentenced under a law whose purview is growing disturbingly wide. Matanov and his lawyer Paul Glickman stand before Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Friday, May 30, 2014 in Boston. (AP Photo/Jane Flavell Collins) Khairullozhon Matanov is a 24-year-old former cab driver from Quincy, Massachusetts. The night of the Boston Marathon bombings, he ate dinner with Tamerlan and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev at a kebob restaurant in Somerville.

Then Matanov went home and cleared his Internet browser history. Matanov continued to live in Quincy for over a year after the bombings. Matanov faced the possibility of decades in prison—twenty years for the records-destruction charge alone. Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal. This past February the Supreme Court somewhat narrowed the scope of Sarbanes-Oxley in the case of Yates v. After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracking program. Hours after the Senate balked at reauthorizing the bulk collection of U.S. telephone records, the National Security Agency began shutting down a controversial program Saturday that senior intelligence and law enforcement officials say is vital to track terrorists in the United States. The Senate had debated into early predawn hours Saturday but failed to reach a deal to reform the program or extend its life beyond May 31, when the law used to authorize it is set to expire.

Lawmakers then left on a weeklong recess, vowing to return at the end of it to try again in a rare Sunday session. Administration officials said later that they had to start the lengthy procedure of winding down the counter-terrorism program in anticipation of Congress failing to act. “That process has begun,” an administration official said Saturday. The data include the number dialed, duration, date and time for most telephone calls made by Americans. Opponents of the program, including presidential candidate Sen. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Government Surveillance (HBO) How Companies Learn Your Secrets.

New police radars can 'see' inside homes. Radar devices allowing officers to detect movement through walls have been secretly used by at least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies over the last two years. VPC WASHINGTON — At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance. Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used.

The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. The RANGE-R handheld radar is used by dozens of U.S. law enforcement agencies to help detect movement inside buildings. By then, however, the technology was hardly new. Imgur. Kyllo v. United States. Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), held that the use of a thermal imaging, or FLIR, device from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person's home was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant. Facts[edit] Department of the Interior used a thermal imaging device outside of Danny Lee Kyllo's home in Florence, Oregon.

According to the District Court that presided over Kyllo's evidentiary hearing, the device could not "penetrate walls or windows to reveal conversations or human activities. Opinion of the Supreme Court[edit] The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the thermal imaging of Kyllo's home constituted a search. In the dissent Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the use of thermal imaging does not constitute a search, which requires a warrant, because any person could detect the heat emissions. See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] Works related to Kyllo v. Text of Kyllo v. Secret US cybersecurity report: encryption vital to protect private data | US news.

A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough. The advice, in a newly uncovered five-year forecast written in 2009, contrasts with the pledge made by David Cameron this week to crack down on encryption use by technology companies. In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, the prime minister said there should be no “safe spaces for terrorists to communicate” or that British authorites could not access.

Cameron, who landed in the US on Thursday night, is expected to urge Barack Obama to apply more pressure to tech giants, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, which have been expanding encrypted messaging for their millions of users since the revelations of mass NSA surveillance by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Cameron said the companies “need to work with us. Obama's Computer Security Solution is a Mishmash of Old, Outdated Policy Solutions. The Obama Administration is on a roll with proposing legislation that endangers our privacy and security.

Over the course of two days, President Obama proposed a cybersecurity bill that looks awfully similar to the now infamous CISPA (with respect to information sharing), a computer crime bill that is the opposite of our own proposed computer crime reform, and a data breach law weaker than the current status quo.

All three of the bills are recycled ideas that have failed in Congress since their introduction in 2011. They should stay on the shelf. Zombie Bill Dead in 2013, Stumbles from the Grave in 2015 Every year for the past four years we've seen at least one cybersecurity "information sharing" bill introduced in Congress. Unfortunately, those bills were deeply flawed: they were redundant, offered new authorities that could be abused by companies to spy on users, and offered broad legal immunity for disclosing the information obtained with the government.

Recycled Ideas. Aaron Swartz. Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist who was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS[3] and the Markdown publishing format,[4] the organization Creative Commons,[5] the website framework web.py[6] and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami. [i] He committed suicide while under federal indictment for data-theft, a prosecution that was characterized by his family as being "the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach".[7] Swartz's work also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.[8][9] He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison.

Life and works[edit] W3C[edit] Markdown[edit] Is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the 'worst law in technology'? | Dan Gillmor. Is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the "worst law in technology", as Columbia Law School's Tim Wu calls the statute? I think there are worse laws for the technology industry and its customers, but the CFAA is more than bad enough – a vague, outdated and Draconian law, abused by the government in several high-profile cases – to have spurred calls for repeal. As Wu and many others (including me) have pointed out over the years, the vagueness of the CFAA has given prosecutors a tool that should worry everyone. This is because the government contends that the statute's ban on "unauthorized access" to someone else's computer is a felony, period, with potential penalties you'd associate with serious violent crime.

But he wasn't the first. The Bush administration relied on the CFAA to prosecute the easy-to-dislike Lori Drew, who was among several people who created a bogus MySpace account of a fictitious teenaged boy who wooed and rejected the daughter of Drew's neighbor in suburban St Louis. Remember That Undeletable Super Cookie Verizon Claimed Wouldn't Be Abused? Yeah, Well, Funny Story... This Rule About Drone Surveillance Is Just Plain Absurd -- And Scary. From the Wiki article on Air rights "At the same time, the law, and the Supreme Court, recognized that a landowner had property rights in the lower reaches of the airspace above their property. The law, in balancing the public interest in using the airspace for air navigation against the landowner's rights, declared that a landowner owns only so much of the airspace above their property as they may reasonably use in connection with their enjoyment of the underlying land.

In other words, a person's real property ownership includes a reasonable amount of the airspace above the property. A landowner can't arbitrarily try to prevent aircraft from overflying their land by erecting "spite poles," for example. But, a landowner may make any legitimate use of their property that they want, even if it interferes with aircraft overflying the land. So technically they are invading a persons private property unless this has been overruled. Meet the machines that steal your phone’s data.

The National Security Agency’s spying tactics are being intensely scrutinized following the recent leaks of secret documents. However, the NSA isn't the only US government agency using controversial surveillance methods. Monitoring citizens' cell phones without their knowledge is a booming business. From Arizona to California, Florida to Texas, state and federal authorities have been quietly investing millions of dollars acquiring clandestine mobile phone surveillance equipment in the past decade. Earlier this year, a covert tool called the “Stingray” that can gather data from hundreds of phones over targeted areas attracted international attention. Rights groups alleged that its use could be unlawful. Details about the devices are not disclosed on the Harris website, and marketing materials come with a warning that anyone distributing them outside law enforcement agencies or telecom firms could be committing a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.

“Stingray” “Gossamer” A Chatbot Has 'Passed' The Turing Test For The First Time. Man receives the creepiest letter ever from OfficeMax. Single Point of Failure: The Day Google Forgot To Check Passwords. Obama can’t point to a single time the NSA call records program prevented a terrorist attack. President Obama speaks during an end-of-the year news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, Dec. 20, 2013. (Susan Walsh/AP) National Security Agency defenders, including President Obama, continue to cite the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 when defending the program that scoops up domestic call records in bulk. But asked specifically, on Friday, if he could identify a time when that program stopped a similar attack, President Obama couldn't.

That's because the program hasn't prevented a second 9/11. At the end of the year news conference, Reuters's Mark Felsenthal asked: As you review how to rein in the National Security Agency, a federal judge says that, for example, the government has failed to cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata actually stopped an imminent attack. Are you able to identify any specific examples when it did so? But President Obama never answered the question about a specific examples. White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts. Iris-scanning technology streamlines refugee registration process — UNHCR. Genetic Privacy: Bite Sci-zed. Meet the cheap facial-recognition system that will identify you everywhere you go.

"Is This You?" - lifelogging, privacy and scandal by Tom Scott at Electromagnetic Field 2012. I Know What You Did Five Minutes Ago. Ring Could Log Users In to Houses, Phones and Website as Soon as Next Month. David Birch: Identity without a name. Password Reuse. CA School District Announces It's Doing Round-The-Clock Monitoring Of Its 13,000 Students' Social Media Activities. Facebook privacy and kids: Don’t post photos of your kids online. Edward Snowden's E-Mail Provider Defied FBI Demands to Turn Over Crypto Keys, Documents Show | Threat Level. Brazilian president Rousseff: US surveillance a 'breach of international law' | World news. Comms giant pushes anti-spy network.

Brazil looks to break from US-centric Internet (Update 2) NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' WikiLeaks. Manning Found Not Guilty Of Aiding The Enemy. WikiLeaks. Facebook Now Knows What You're Buying at Drug Stores. Protests follow Google 'endorsed advert' change. Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet - Apr. 8, 2013. I can't stop watching these private feeds from insecure webcams.