Archive: Year: 2014

Cheers Bruce Schneier's expert doubts about North Korea's alleged role in the Sony hack make it into David Sanger's New York Times news analysis on "countering cyberattacks without a playbook." Kim Zetter of Wired surveys a bunch of other cybersecurity experts who also continue to have doubts about North Korea having committed the Sony hack. Access Now's Drew Mitnick and Amie Stepanovich offer some smart and sober policy recommendations for how to respond to the Sony hack, starting with not comparing it to an act of war and incentivizing improved digital security by companies and Internet users. The FCC now admits that it lost nearly 680,000 of the more than 4 million public comments submitted in response to its "open Internet" proposal, in a...

Dealing Security expert Bruce Schneier offers some sobering thoughts on the Sony hack, trying to dial down the claims that this is a case of "cyber-warfare." He writes: Remember, the hackers didn't start talking about The Interview until the press did. Maybe the NSA has some secret information pinning this attack on the North Korean government, but unless the agency comes forward with the evidence, we should remain skeptical. We don't know who did this, and we may never find out. I personally think it is a disgruntled ex-employee, but I don't have any more evidence than anyone else does. North Korea's Internet appeared to be under a cyber-attack, following on President Obama's promise of a "proportional response" to the Sony hack, reports...

Civic Hall, our new collaborative community center for civic tech innovators, will be opening in “beta” mode in late January. If you want to get in on Civic Hall's ground floor--well, literally we're on the second floor--send in your application now. How do you know if joining Civic Hall makes sense for you? If you are excited by the potential of technology and social innovation to make a positive difference in the world, and you are a change-maker yourself, you should consider making Civic Hall your home base. Being a member means having a great place to work and network, the opportunity to deepen your connections with peers and strategic partners, and a chance to co-create and participate in world-changing...

Brewing Democratic tech firms are starting to pick favorites in the emerging 2016 presidential field, reports Darren Samuelsohn in Politico. Several top firms, including Blue State Digital, Bully Pulpit Interactive, Catalist, NGP VAN, Precision Strategies, Rising Tide Interactive, Trilogy Interactive and 270 Strategies, are all jockeying to work for the as-yet-undeclared Hillary Clinton campaign, he notes, while others like Revolution Messaging appear to be hoping to help an Elizabeth Warren candidacy. Why hasn't campaigns' use of personal data led to the kind of backlash now surrounding companies like Uber? The Washington Post's Nancy Scola talked to some campaign data nerds, and the reason is contextual. As UNC professor Daniel Kreiss said to her, "what seems to matter in the political space...

MonopSony Speaking to Motherboard's Jason Koebler, cybersecurity expert Peter Singer points out that whatever the Sony hack is, it's not cyber-terrorism or an act of war: "The ability to steal gossipy emails from a not-so-great protected computer network is not the same thing as being able to carry out physical, 9/11-style attacks in 18,000 locations simultaneously." He adds, "I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this." Taking the opposite point of view, Jonathan Chait argues in New York magazine that "a totalitarian regime has just successfully exerted control over American media" and that to prevent any such leverage the US government should therefore "guarantee Sony's financial liability in the event of an attack, or it should...

Company According to a new international survey on Internet security and trust, about 700 million people have taken steps to increase their online privacy since hearing of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA and GCHQ surveillance, analyst Bruce Schneier reports. Of 29 major consumer-facing web companies--including social networks, fitness tracking, dating, payment, messaging, mapping and music apps, only ten responded directly to a series of questions form BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel about how their privacy policies governed employee access to their users' data. (Most of their so-called privacy policies, which really must be referred to as "data usage" policies, are silent on the issue.) In fairness, the companies were only given 36 hours to comment. Microsoft has been joined in its fight against US Justice...

In 2007, WikiLeaks received and published documents revealing corruption and misconduct perpetuated by the former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi and his family. The story, which was then front-paged by the Guardian, helped Julian Assange’s nascent whistleblowing platform gain crucial momentum. Now, history is coming full circle asThe African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) has launched afriLeaks, a pan-African whistleblowing platform, by gathering together a dozen partner media companies. “The primary purpose of afriLeaks is to provide a highly secure vehicle between whistleblowers and the media or investigative NGOs of their choice to allow for both connections and protection between both,” says journalist and ANCIR member Khadija Sharife to techPresident. According to Sharife, “afriLeaks itself acts as a neutral...

Mood Slime The leaked Sony emails show how the MPAA movie lobby paid state Attorneys General to go after Google, Mike Masnick writes in TechDirt. Aaron Sorkin on the hacked Sony emails: they're not "newsworthy" and powerful people like him should band together to keep them out of public view. (And Sony is demanding that news organizations stop reporting on the "stolen information" being posted online by hackers.) Inside Uber's huge lobbying effort, which employs at least 161 people, as reported by Rosalind Heiderman for the Washington Post. She writes, "Uber’s approach is brash and, so far, highly effective: It launches in local markets regardless of existing laws or regulations. It aims to build a large customer base as quickly as possible. When...

Cloudy "The Internet is not a CIA creation," Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells Reuters, responding to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is also not a big truck. For Newsweek, Lauren Walker explains how House Speaker John Boehner killed the FOIA Improvement Act. Public opinion is "overwhelmingly pro net neutrality" according to a new analysis by data science company Quid for the Knight Foundation, looking at news coverage, blogs, 120,000 tweets using the hashtag #netneutrality, one million public filings to the FCC and a lobbying analysis of 2.500 filing from 2009 to mid-2014. “'The encyclopedia that anyone can edit' is at risk of becoming, in computer scientist Aaron Halfaker’s words, 'the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal...