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Submission + - Pakistanis face a deadline: Surrender fingerprints or give up cellphone (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Cellphones didn’t just arrive in Pakistan. But someone could be fooled into thinking otherwise, considering the tens of millions of Pakistanis pouring into mobile phone stores these days.

In one of the world’s largest — and fastest — efforts to collect biometric information, Pakistan has ordered cellphone users to verify their identities through fingerprints for a national database being compiled to curb terrorism. If they don’t, their service will be shut off, an unthinkable option for many after a dozen years of explosive growth in cellphone usage here.

Prompted by concerns about a proliferation of illegal and untraceable SIM cards, the directive is the most visible step so far in Pakistan’s efforts to restore law and order after Taliban militants killed 150 students and teachers at a school in December. Officials said the six terrorists who stormed the school in Peshawar were using cellphones registered to one woman who had no obvious connection to the attackers.

Submission + - Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Compared to other recreational drugs — including alcohol — marijuana may be even safer than previously thought. And researchers may be systematically underestimating risks associated with alcohol use. They found that at the level of individual use, alcohol was the deadliest substance, followed by heroin and cocaine.

Submission + - Secrecy around police surveillance equipment proves a case's undoing (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The case against Tadrae McKenzie looked like an easy win for prosecutors. He and two buddies robbed a small-time pot dealer of $130 worth of weed using BB guns. Under Florida law, that was robbery with a deadly weapon, with a sentence of at least four years in prison.

But before trial, his defense team detected investigators' use of a secret surveillance tool, one that raises significant privacy concerns. In an unprecedented move, a state judge ordered the police to show the device — a cell-tower simulator sometimes called a StingRay — to the attorneys.

Rather than show the equipment, the state offered McKenzie a plea bargain.

Today, 20-year-old McKenzie is serving six months' probation after pleading guilty to a second-degree misdemeanor. He got, as one civil liberties advocate said, the deal of the century.

Submission + - Snowden Film 'Citizenfour' Wins Oscar for Best Documentary (nationaljournal.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Citizenfour, a film chronicling the living history of Edward Snowden's unprecedented heist of U.S. government secrets, won the Academy Award for best documentary Sunday night—an unusual feat for a movie so critical of a sitting president's policies.

Directed by Laura Poitras, the political thriller captures Snowden in a claustrophobic Hong Kong hotel room in the days leading up to and after the release of the first of batch of classified documents that publicly revealed the sweeping scope of the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications.

Submission + - Everything About Kepler-432b is Extreme, Especially the Way it's Going to Die (universetoday.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A rare planet has been discovered, and it doesn’t seem like a stop anyone would want to make on an intergalactic cruise. Found by two research teams independently of each other, Kepler-432b is extreme in its mass, density, and weather. Roughly the same size of Jupiter, the planet is also doomed — in 200 million years it will be consumed by its sun whose radius is 'quickly' increasing.

Submission + - A loophole in immigration law is costing thousands of American jobs (latimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Southern California Edison is using the H1B program — to cut its wage costs, possibly by as much as 40%, according to data compiled by Ron Hira, a public policy expert at Howard University.

Edison relies on a loophole to skate around rules forbidding the use of cheap H-1B labor to replace existing domestic employees. Technically, Edison isn't the H-1B employer; Tata and Infosys are. This sleight of hand allows Edison to say that it is "not hiring H-1B visa workers to replace displaced employees." The contractors, Tata and Infosys, are doing the hiring. Edison says those firms "determine the composition of their own workforce." Because the outsourcing firms employ minimal American staffs themselves, the thousands of Indian workers they import aren't technically replacing Americans.

Submission + - Federal Court: Theft of Medical Records Not An 'Imminent Danger' To Victim (digitalguardian.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: A federal court in Texas ruled last week that a massive data breach at a hospital in that state didn’t put patients at imminent risk of identity theft, even when presented with evidence that suggested stolen patient information was being used in attempted fraud and identity theft schemes.

According to this post over at Digital Guardian's blog (https://digitalguardian.com/blog/court-finds-data-breach-not-imminent-risk-victim) Beverly Peters was one more than 400,000 patients of St. Joseph Hospital whose information was stolen by hackers in an attack that took place between December 16 and 18, 2013. Peters alleged that her personal information had been exposed in the breach and then disseminated in the public domain, where it was being “misused by unauthorized and unknown third parties.” Specifically: Peters reported that, subsequent to the breach at St. Josephs, her Discover credit card was used to make a fraudulent purchase and that hackers had tried to infiltrate her Amazon.com account — posing as her son. Also: telemarketers were using the stolen information. Peters claimed that, after the breach, she was besieged with calls and solicitations for medical products and services companies, with telemarketers asking to speak to her and with specific family members, whose contact information was part of the record stolen from St. Joseph's.

As a result, Peters argued that she faced an “imminent injury” due to “increased risk” of future identity theft and fraud because of the breach at St. Joseph, and wished to sue the hospital for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

But the court found otherwise, ruling that Peters lacked standing to bring the case in federal court under Article III of the Constitution. That was because she hadn’t been able to prove any direct damages from the attempted identity theft that occurred in the past (Discover reversed the fraudulent charge), while the threat she faced in the future was not “imminent.”

As this article notes (http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/02/13/judge-throws-out-hospital-data-hack-case.htm), the ruling turns on a high profile case involving government surveillance and the now-infamous FISA courts dating back to the Carter administration: Clapper v. Amnesty International USA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapper_v._Amnesty_International_USA) In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the human rights group and a collection of lawyers and reporters in a challenge to part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The plaintiffs said they feared that their sources, colleagues and clients would be targets of U.S. government surveillance, and the threat would force them to take expensive security measures to keep their communications private. The High Court ruled otherwise, saying the threat of government surveillance was hypothetical, but not “certainly impending.”

In his 15 page ruling (http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/02/13/st%20%20joseph%20data%20breach.pdf), U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt said the same logic applied to Peters’ suit as well. “Under Clapper, Peters must at least plausibly establish a “certainly impending” or “substantial” risk that she will be victimized,” Hoyt wrote. “The allegation that risk has been increased does not transform that assertion into a cognizable injury.”

Submission + - Google: FBI's Plan to Expand Hacking Power a 'Monumental' Constitutional Threat (nationaljournal.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Any change in accessing computer data should go through Congress, the search giant said.

The search giant submitted public comments earlier this week opposing a Justice Department proposal that would grant judges more leeway in how they can approve search warrants for electronic data.

The push to change an arcane federal rule "raises a number of monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal, and geopolitical concerns that should be left to Congress to decide," wrote Richard Salgado, Google's director for law enforcement and information security.

The provision, known as Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure, generally permits judges to grant search warrants only within the bounds of their judicial district. Last year, the Justice Department petitioned a judicial advisory committee to amend the rule to allow judges to approve warrants outside their jurisdictions or in cases where authorities are unsure where a computer is located.

Google, in its comments, blasted the desired rule change as overly vague, saying the proposal could authorize remote searches on the data of millions of Americans simultaneously—particularly those who share a network or router—and cautioned it rested on shaky legal footing.

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