zionHopeful - Slashdot User

Federal Agents Quietly Using Social Media 171

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @04:45PM from the friend-of-the-devil dept.

SpuriousLogic passes along this excerpt from the ChiTrib: "The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter, too. US law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting. ... The document... makes clear that US agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target's friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs, and video clips. Among other purposes: Investigators can check suspects' alibis by comparing stories told to police with tweets sent at the same time about their whereabouts. Online photos from a suspicious spending spree... can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries." The FoIA lawsuit was filed by the EFF, which has posted two documents obtained from the action, from the DoJ and Internal Revenue (more will be coming later). The rights group praises the IRS for spelling out limitations and prohibitions on deceptive use of social media by its agents — unlike the DoJ. The US Marshalls and the BATFE could not find any documents related to the FoIA request, so presumably they have no guidelines or prohibitions in this area.

Comment Re:Ron Paul (Score 1) 475

by zionHopeful on Wednesday November 28, 2007 @02:16PM (#21507445) Attached to: Presidential Candidates and Online Privacy

Ron Paul !!! The others are Fed Reserve puppets working for the money. There's a great paper discussing privacy at: 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 It talks about how privacy benefits society as a whole.

Submission + - Einstein's spooky action leads to quantum computer

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Friday September 07, 2007 @12:25AM

Stony Stevenson writes: Physicists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how two separate atoms can communicate with a sort of 'quantum intuition' which Albert Einstein referred to as "spooky". In doing so, the researchers have made an advance towards super-fast quantum computing and even a quantum internet.

The scientists used light to establish an "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped one metre apart in separate enclosures. "This link between remote atoms could be the fundamental piece of a radically new quantum computer architecture," said Professor Christopher Monroe, the principal investigator on the project who is now at the University of Maryland. "Now that the technique has been demonstrated, it should be possible to scale it up to networks of many interconnected components that will eventually be necessary for quantum information processing."

Submission + - Storm worm more powerful than top supercomputers

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Friday September 07, 2007 @12:12AM

Stony Stevenson writes: Security researchers who are tracking the burgeoning network of Microsoft Windows machines that have been compromised by the virulent Storm worm, are saying it has now grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world's top supercomputers.

"In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away," said Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, in an interview. "If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It's very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there's not much we can do about it." Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity.

Submission + - Testing Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance'

Submitted by smooth wombat on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @03:14PM

smooth wombat writes: Travelling to a time in the past is, as far as we know, not possible. However, Einstein postulated a faster-than-light effect known as 'spooky action at a distance'. The problem is, how do you test for such an effect? That test may now be here. If all goes well, hopefully by September 15th, John Cramer will have experimented with a beam of laser light which has been split in two to test Einstein's idea.

While he is only testing the quantum entanglement portion, changing one light beam and having the same change made in the other beam, his experiment might show that a change made in one beam shows up in the other beam before he actually makes the change.

An interesting sidenote is that the money for this project was raised not from the scientific community but from the public at large. His fans have sent him the money necessary to purchase the equipment to test Einstein's idea.

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