Hacks
CIA employees hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers, a report by its Inspector General’s Office has concluded, according to Jonathan Landay and Ali Watkins of McClatchyDC.
Noting that back in the spring, after Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) had publicly charged the CIA with improperly interfering with the committee’s investigation into the CIA’s involvement in torture, the agency’s chief John Brennan had publicly denied the charge–saying, “Nothing could be further from the truth”–Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn says Obama should fire Brennan, or explain why he is retaining “an intelligence chief who misled the public about CIA misconduct.”
Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) told The New York Times’s Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse that “This is a serious situation and there are serious violations,” noting, he called for the C.I.A. employees to be “dealt with very harshly.” Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) called for Brennan to resign, they reported.
CIA director Brennan has apologized to Senator Feinstein, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reports.
Twitter’s fifth annual transparency report shows “a steady increase in global requests for account information, content removal, and copyright takedowns.”
Microsoft’s refusal to comply with a US search warrant for customer’s emails held on a server in Ireland took a blow yesterday when a NY federal judge ruled against the company. It is planning to appeal.
Al-Qaeda is using more sophisticated encryption software in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, according to this report from NPR citing big data analytics firm Recorded Future. Not mentioned in the NPR report: one of the main investors in Recorded Future is the CIA.
According to a new survey conducted by Rad Campaign, Lincoln Park Strategies and Craig Newmark’s craigconnects, Americans are deeply anxious about all the information that is available about them online, and they also have very little trust in social media sites.
VC Fred Wilson explains why “zero rating” by mobile carriers is an affront to the open Internet and is “setting up is a mobile internet that looks a lot more like cable TV.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is fascinated by her Internet notoriety.
The taxi industry has spent $3500 to every dollar spent by ride-sharing companies like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, Stan Oklabdzija reports for the Sunlight Foundation.
Politically-minded techies Jim Greer (former CEO of gaming site Kongregate), Matt Cutts of Google, Ethan Beard of Greylock Partners. and several likeminded colleagues are backing CounterPAC, a new SuperPAC that is urging congressional candidates to reject “dark money” campaign spending on their behalf, Matea Gold reports for The Washington Post.
Ben Wellington, a statistics professor at NY’s Pratt Institute, is telling all kinds of fascinating stories based on NYC’s open data portal and other public data at his blog I Quant NY, as Adam Kroopnick reports for CityLab. Most intriguing: how the spread of restaurant health inspection scores seems to indicate hidden grade inflation. Also this: 25% of the $5 million in Medicare payments that cover massage therapy goes to one zip code, in Brighton Beach.
Bookmark this: NationMaster has built a web search engine solely for finding data visualizations.
Emails From the DCCC is a tumblr. In case you haven’t gotten any of them.