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Government

Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops To Deceive Judges About Surveillance Tech 251

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can-trust-us dept.
Advocatus Diaboli sends this excerpt from Wired: Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails (PDF). At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect's location from a 'confidential source' rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.

Comment It's The Bureaucracy, Stupid (Score 1) 538

by EmagGeek (#47290419) Attached to: Teaching College Is No Longer a Middle Class Job

Bureaucracies exist for one reason and one reason alone: to grow themselves larger.

We see it in every level of government, and in every single institution there is, whether it be medical, educational, or professional. The "institution" grows and grows and grows while those who work "in the trenches" do worse and worse and worse and the bureaucrats do better and better and better.

Comment Color me shocked (Score 1) 82

by EmagGeek (#47289791) Attached to: Google's Nest Buys Home Monitoring Camera Company Dropcam

What is funny about this whole thing is that the same privacy "advocates" who pretend to be so outraged at the mere possibility of being spied upon are the same people who constantly ask me why I haven't bought a Nest yet or installed an Internet-enabled home security system.

Truth is, there are smarter thermostats than the Nest out there already, that do not require any communications at all except with the HVAC system, and a security system need not hand your video over to a marketing company in order to be effective.

Internetting things for the sake of Internetting things was always and is now a terrible idea.

Comment Calm down - it's not a real prohibition (Score 5, Informative) 164

by EmagGeek (#47280579) Attached to: US House of Representatives Votes To Cut Funding To NSA

From the news:

"he amendment would block the NSA from using any of its funding from this Defense Appropriations Bill to conduct such warrantless searches."

It only covers THIS appropriations bill. They'll just sneak funding into another one to make it up.

You have to pay careful attention to the language these people use.

" In addition, the amendment would prohibit the NSA from using its budget to mandate or request that private companies and organizations add backdoors to the encryption standards that are meant to keep you safe on the web."

So, money that is NOT budgeted, as in part of planned spending, as in slush fund money, is fair game.

Any time an amendment talks about what they cannot use particular money for, as opposed to simply prohibiting the action, it will be full of loopholes.

When there is an amendment that prohibits the ACTION, then we'll have something to be happy about. Nothing in this amendment prohibits the spying.
Space

Draper Labs Develops Low Cost Probe To Orbit, Land On Europa For NASA 79

Posted by samzenpus from the heading-out dept.
MarkWhittington writes Ever since the House passed a NASA spending bill that allocated $100 million for a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa, the space agency has been attempting to find a way to do such a mission on the cheap. The trick is that the mission has to cost less than $1 billion, a tall order for anything headed to the Outer Planets. According to a Wednesday story in the Atlantic, some researchers at Draper Labs have come up with a cheap way to do a Europa orbiter and land instruments on its icy surface.

The first stage is to orbit a cubesat, a tiny, coffee can sized satellite that would contain two highly accurate accelerometers that would go into orbit around Europa and measure its gravity field. In this way the location of Europa's subsurface oceans would be mapped. Indeed it is possible that the probe might find an opening through the ice crust to the ocean, warmed it is thought by tidal forces.

The second stage is to deploy even smaller probes called chipsats, tiny devices that contain sensors, a microchip, and an antenna. Hundreds of these probes, the size of human fingernails, would float down on Europa's atmosphere to be scattered about its surface. While some might be lost, enough will land over a wide enough area to do an extensive chemical analysis of the surface of Europa, which would then be transmitted to the cubesat mothership and then beamed to Earth.

Comment N/A (Score 1) 127

by EmagGeek (#47261945) Attached to: Emotional Contagion Spread Through Facebook

"when your friend circle doesn't just include the dozen people you actually hang out with regularly, but also the hundreds or thousands of acquaintances you have online"

To me, these are the same people, and it's more like "tens" of people. I don't have online "friends" that aren't my friends in real life.

Comment It's Spearphishing (Score 1) 65

by EmagGeek (#47229537) Attached to: AT&T Says Customer Data Accessed To Unlock Smartphones

I get 4 to 5 calls a day from an automated scammer trying to get me to "claim my $200 AT&T bill credit" by logging into a fake AT&T site using all kinds of sensitive personal information.

The scammers take that information and use it to buy phones and plans under the victim's account and ship them overseas where they can be used by whoever.

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