Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Stanford Files Weev Amicus with Mozilla, Security and Privacy Experts 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Andrew Auernheimer ("weev") was convicted of a federal felony for something many of us do routinely: changing a user-agent and crawling a public website. His case is now on appeal in the Third Circuit. The Stanford Center for Internet and Society has filed an amicus brief, clarifying the technical issues and arguing that the conviction poses a grave risk to research. Signatories include the Mozilla Foundation and a litany of security and privacy luminaries.

Submission + - US, UK watchdogs file legal moves to curb government surveillance (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) of the United States of America has filed a petition with the US Supreme Court, asking the Supremes to vacate what it alleges is "an unlawful order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that enables the collection of all domestic phone record by the NSA."

EPIC explains that it finds itself forced to petition the Supreme Court directly because it has no other recourse:

Normally, when a court issues an unlawful order, the adversely affected parties can intervene or appeal to a higher court. However, the FISC and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review only have jurisdiction to hear petitions by the Government or recipient of the FISC Order. Neither party to the order represents EPIC's interests. As EPIC is not a recipient of the order, it cannot challenge it in the FISC. Other federal and state trial and appellate courts have no jurisdiction over the FISC, and therefore cannot grant relief.

The EPIC petition requests the Supreme Court to halt the disclosure of details of Americans' telephone usage, alleging that the FISC did not have legal authority to compel Verizon to hand that metadata to the NSA

According to EPIC, the FISC order exceeded the autnority granted to is under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which states that such orders require "reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation."

Submission + - Snowden Video Part 2 (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 'In the second part of an exclusive interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden contemplates the reaction from the US government to his revelations of top-secret documents regarding its spying operations on domestic and foreign internet traffic, email and phone use.' Theguardian

Submission + - Average cost per 'official' wiretap in the United States: $50,452 (sovereignman.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Last week, in a very, very quiet release, the US Federal Court system published its annual Wiretap report to Congress.

This is something that is required by law; the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) must annually report the number of federal and state applications for court orders to “intercept wire, oral, or electronic communications.”

Note – this report only covers wiretapping orders by US courts; it does not include anything related to the NSA’s electronic surveillance, FBI ‘administrative subpoenas’ to Google / Facebook, the US Postal Service snooping people’s physical mail, or any of this top secret FISA nonsense.

In other words, these numbers add yet another dimension to how vast the US spy state has become.

The report gives a lot of eye-popping details about these official, court-ordered wiretaps, including:
  • Riverside County, California is the most spied-on county in the United States
  • Followed by Clark County, Nevada
  • 3,395 wiretaps were ordered, averaging 29.03 days each
  • The average cost of a wiretap order last year was $50,452
  • The highest cost was $872,841 for a Federal wiretap in the Eastern district of Washington
  • 87.39% of these wiretap orders were connected to drug-related charges
  • Only 18.19% of these wiretaps actually led to a conviction

Submission + - Sent to jail because of a software bug.

Submitted by toshikodo
toshikodo writes: The BBC is reporting a claim that some sub-postoffice workers in the UK have been sent to jail because of a bug in the accounting software that they use. Post Office admits Horizon computer defect. I've worked on safety critical system in the past, and I am well aware of the potential for software to ruin lives (thankfully AFAIK nobody has been harmed by my software), but how many of us consider the potential for bugs in ordinary software to adversely affect those that use it?

Submission + - NYT Looks at FISA: Everybody is a potential "Target" (nytimes.com)

Submitted by some old guy
some old guy writes: This NYT analysis looks into the recent attention given to the FISA court, particularly at its broad interpretations of Congress' intent and what constitutes "foreign intelligence". Particularly disturbing is how only the government is allowed to present it's side of the story in filings. We're all being subjected to a court where we have no standing to defend or assert our side of any case.

Submission + - Inside the Electronic Frontier Foundation (tuxradar.com)

Submitted by qwerdf
qwerdf writes: Airstrip One wasn’t built in a day, nor will a total police state suddenly appear overnight. But times are changing, the threats to our freedom are coming from every direction, and fighting this battle demands a great deal of persistence and determination. One group firmly on our side is the EFF. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s goal is “defending your rights in the digital world”, and its activities span the full gamut of freedom fighting: providing help with court cases; issuing white papers that explain current threats; running campaigns to spread awareness of various issues; and developing technologies that make our online activities safer from prying eyes. It’s a non-profit, donation-supported organisation based in San Francisco with an impressive staff roster (see www.eff.org/about/staff), including attorneys, analysts and activists – and generally with a strong pro-free software and pro-GNU/Linux culture.

Read on to find out how the EFF came together, what it has done so far, and how it’s preparing for upcoming battles.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Will the NSA Controversy Drive People to Use Privacy Software? (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: As the U.S. government continues to pursue former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for leaking some of the country’s most sensitive intelligence secrets, the debate over federal surveillance seems to have abated somewhat—despite Snowden’s stated wish for his revelations to spark transformative and wide-ranging debate, it doesn’t seem as if anyone’s taking to the streets to protest the NSA’s reported monitoring of Americans’ emails and phone-call metadata. Even so, will the recent revelations about the NSA lead to a spike in demand for sophisticated privacy software, leading to a glut of new apps that vaporize or encrypt data? While there are quite a number of tools already on the market (SpiderOak, Silent Circle, and many more), is their presence enough to get people interested enough to install them? Or do you think the majority of people simply don't care? Despite some polling data that suggests people are concerned about their privacy, software for securing it is just not an exciting topic for most folks, who will rush to download the latest iteration of Instagram or Plants vs. Zombies, but who often throw up their hands and profess ignorance when asked about how they lock down their data.

Submission + - Spying Scandal: EU may sever Ties with American Internet Providers (rt.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: EU businesses are threatening to terminate relations with American internet providers in response to the National Security Agency surveillance scandal, the European Commission has warned. Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, said that US providers of ‘cloud services,’ a technology that permits clients to store data on remote servers, could suffer steep losses if users fear the security of their material is at risk of being compromised. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out,” Kroes said. “Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes?" The EC vice president then pointed to the “multi-billion euro consequences” facing US internet companies in the wake of the scandal. "It is often American providers that will miss out, because they are often the leaders in cloud services. If European cloud customers cannot trust the United States government, then maybe they won't trust US cloud providers either. If I am right, there are multibillion-euro consequences for American companies. If I were an American cloud provider, I would be quite frustrated with my government right now."

Submission + - Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

Submitted by recoiledsnake
recoiledsnake writes: German site Horizont Online reports that [translate link] Google paid AdBlock Plus to unblock it's own ads. According to their tests, Google's text ads show up with AdBlock Plus installed, but Bing's and Yahoo's are blocked even though they are similarly less intrusive. This creates a conflict of interest for AdBlock Plus since it encourages companies to pay them to get whitelisted. Note, Adblock Plus is not directly related to Adblock. We previously covered the FTC was making new rules to prevent search results from looking like ads and how 62% of folks didn't even realize there were ads on search result pages because of search engines reducing background contrast to increase ad clicks.

Submission + - Texas Teen Jailed For Sarcastic Facebook Comment (cnn.com)

Submitted by tukang
tukang writes: 18 year old Justin Carter faces up to 8 years in prison after posting on Facebook that he was "going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts". According to Justin, the comment was a sarcastic response which he followed up with "lol, jk". Unable to make $500,000 bail, Justin has been incarcerated since March 27th.

Comment Re:Someone please create an App (Score 1) 276

Centrally controlled surveillance is dangerous, expensive, and inefficient. It must be limited in a democratic society. Decentralized, community based surveillance has great potential to improve overall quality of life, especially on public roads, where every idiot has a license to kill with their own stupidity.

Yeah let's outsource surveillance to the community so that neighbors spy and tell on each other. That doesn't sound like a police state at all.

His earlier thought returned to him; probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all.

Slashdot Top Deals

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

Close