Archive: Year: 2014

Turning On Google is rolling out an alpha version of "end to end" encryption to its email service, that will function as an extension in Chrome browsers and is built on top of OpenPGP, Stephan Somogyi, a security and privacy product manager blogged for the company yesterday. Assuming this new extension passes muster with the open source security community, it could make it much easier for ordinary web users to encrypt their emails. This could be a very big deal, though as Brian Behlendorf, one of the primary developers of the Apache Web server, tweeted, "How might one check that their Chrome extension isn't backdoored (due to an NSL)? You still have to trust Google". (A NSL is a "national security letter,"...

Power Shifts The Supreme Court refused to hear New York Times reporter James Risen's appeal of a court subpoena demanding that he turn over information about a source for a chapter in his book "State of War." Risen has vowed that he will go to jail rather than disclose his source, leaving his case in the hands of the Justice Department. In the US, search warrants eventually become public court documents, but as the Wall Street Journal's Jennifer Valentino-Devries reports, requests for electronic surveillance stay sealed indefinitely, even after cases are closed, obscuring the extent to which law enforcement is using digital tracking tools like pen registers to pursue suspects. She notes, "Getting permission to use [those] techniques is easier than...

Saving Face James Risen and Laura Poitras report that the NSA has been collecting "millions of images per day" for use in facial recognition tracking of suspects. They point out that current American law does not provide for any protection regarding the collecting of facial recognition data. Palantir, the secretive data analysis firm, gets a friendly profile in the Sunday Times Business Section, but it does include this critical quote from the ACLU's Chris Soghoian: "They are a key force in the surveillance-industrial complex, but they are in denial about it." Former Howard Dean internet organizer Zephyr Teachout got 42% of the votes of the Working Families Party state committee, falling short in her bid to get its endorsement for governor, reports Jesse...

Rumblings The NSA has released an internal email from Edward Snowden to its general counsel's office that it says shows he didn't raise concerns about mass surveillance, contrary to his claims, but Snowden says this release is "incomplete" and doesn't include other correspondence about "indefensible collection activities," Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman report for the Washington Post. Google's chief legal officer David Drummond is calling on the U.S. Senate to fix the loopholes that were added to the USA Freedom Act as it passed through the House, telling recipients of a mass email that the current bill "will not prevent bulk Internet data collection." He notes, "as the bill stands today it could still permit the collection of email records from...

Bodyguards The New York Times' Jason Horowitz reports on the roles of former Obama campaign titans David Axelrod and Jim Messina, who are lined up on opposite sides in the United Kingdom's upcoming national elections. He writes, "As more former aides turn their affiliation with the president into lucrative consulting arrangements, the Battle of Britain crystallizes a concern among some Democrats over whether those most central to Mr. Obama’s rise should be expected in their private business to stand for his public policies and values. And if they are not, some of the president’s supporters wonder what exactly it means to work for Mr. Obama in the first place." Horowitz notes, "while Mr. Messina found former associates generous with their time, Democratic...

Hashing it Out In the New Yorker, Sasha Weiss explains the rise and power of the #YesAllWomen hashtag in the wake of Friday's mass killings in Santa Barbara by Elliot Rodger, a misogynist madman. More than a million tweets with the #YesAllWomen hashtag have appeared thru Monday--here's a visualization of geotagged tweets using the hashtag on Twitter spreading across the world on May 25. Feminist dynamo (and friend of PDM) Deanna Zandt collected several must-reads on the killings. She's also collecting stories of violence inflicted on women who refuse sexual advances on this Tumblr. Every now and then we come across something that connects the dots in a broader way that the daily drumbeat of news and commentary. Today here's the text and accompanying...

Trucking Despite the late opposition of a coalition of tech companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, the US House voted overwhelmingly in favor of the watered down USA Freedom Act, 303-121. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the bill's main sponsor, said the vote shows "Congress does not support bulk collection" of Americans' metadata. But, as Alex Byers of Politico noted, during floor debate he added, "I wish this bill did more…“To my colleagues who lament the changes, I agree with you. The privacy groups who are upset about lost provisions, I share your disappointment.” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), said that she didn't believe that the bill would end bulk collect, noting, "Regrettably, we have learned that if we leave any ambiguity in the...

Georemixing Riffing off of the success of Pharell Williams' "Happy" and YouTube homage culture, and the plight of the young Iranians who tried to join in, MIT's Ethan Zuckerman shares his thoughts in a must-read Atlantic piece on the evolution of the "georemix" and what it means when people around the world jump on a meme. The six Iranians arrested for posted their "Happy" video to YouTube have been released on bail, and their case illustrates the ongoing clash between religious conservatives and a more moderate faction represented by the country's president Hassan Rouhani, Rick Gladstone reports for the New York Times. Six months before going public, NSA contractor Edward Snowden helped organize a "cryptoparty" -- where people learn how to use encryption...

Decay After unanimously clearing the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees two weeks ago, the USA Freedom Act surveillance reform bill looks like it's in trouble, after being weakened by the Rules Committee in response to pressure from the White House on House leaders. The Open Technology Institute has withdrawn its support, with its policy counsel Robyn Greene noting that the amended bill "may still allow data collection on a dangerously massive scale" and its policy director Kevin Bankston decrying the watering down of the bill's transparency reporting provisions. The Internet freedom group Access also pulled its support for the bill. A federal court has ruled that a 50-year-old secret CIA history on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation can remain classified and exempt...

Disruptors The Intercept's Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras report that the NSA records and archives the audio "of virtually every cell phone conversation" in the Bahamas, retaining them for playback for up to a month. They note that "nearly five million Americans visit the country every year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey." The NSA program apparently uses "lawful intercept" access obtained by the Drug Enforcement Administration, piggybacking on equipment used to tap suspected drug kingpins, to obtain this country-level data. Why the Bahamas, a country that poses little threat to the US? "The country's small population," they write, "provides a manageable sample to try out the surveillance...