Emmeran wrote:

Stop changing that password!!!

https://passwordday.org/

Check out Betty...

Baywolfe wrote:

Passwords, which go back to the big iron days when a single extra character was worth your left testicle, are completely out of date, especially with the power that your average laptop or PC has.  Passwords are required to be, effectively, human difficult but machine easy.  Any free password cracking program will long figure out "Ad0i0asdfd!" before it could ever decrypt "My dinosaur is purple and his name is Barney."  In fact, some experts have determined that such a pass phrase is beyond anything even the NSA could handle, especially with 256 bit encryption.

And, making you change your password periodically makes things even worse.  Most of the more savvy users use the hack of Password01@ changed to Password02@, rinse, lather, repeat, which totally defeats the purpose.

Change password fields to a variable length phrase of between 20 characters and 100.  (with no characters being invalid including spaces)

It's important to teach users that the internet is far more risky than a password list kept under your keyboard.  So change them, use sentences when available and write them down.  Running your ATM card through the pump scanner at your local gas station is far more dangerou than writing it down at home.

NYTimes: Philadelphia Police Sergeant Francis Rawls - never charged with a crime but fired and jugged since August, 2015 for failing to unencrypt his Mac FileVault files.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016 … ta-mining/

In another sign that tensions between Silicon Valley and the US government are strong, Twitter is now barring US intel agencies from a service that analyzes the micro-blogging service's entire feed.

San Francisco-based Twitter has informed business partner Dataminr to cut off access to the CIA, NSA, and other government surveillance outfits.

Somewhat tangential, but still related.

For most of our history, records of judicial proceedings were always accessible to the public, a practice inherited from English common law courts. Limited exceptions only began to appear around the turn of the 20th century, mostly in divorce, adoption, or juvenile proceedings. In 1915, the Supreme Court first encountered a judicial sealing order, which Justice Holmes denounced as "a judicial fiat" having "no judicial character" and "in excess of the jurisdiction of the lower court" before granting a writ of mandamus to revoke it.

That traditional aversion to court secrecy has been overcome in the last few decades. To take but one example, the case name In re Sealed Case first appeared in 1981; it is now the most common case name on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals docket. Another telling sign is that the government is far more aggressively (and successfully) asserting evidentiary privileges than ever before.

Last edited by square (2016-05-13 00:08:11)

Now, apparently, standing alone at a bus stop is no longer considered a reasonable expectation of privacy.

They put microphones under rocks, they put microphones in trees, they plant microphones in equipment. I mean, there’s microphones that are planted in places that people don’t think about, because that’s the intent!

square wrote:

Surely, any American can't truly expect to have a private conversation without carrying around one of these at all times?

I thought we had a separate thread for shit like that.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

The drip becomes a stream; soon to be a flood?

We are, beginning today, publishing in installments the NSA's internal SIDtoday newsletters, which span more than a decade beginning after 9/11. We are starting with the oldest SIDtoday articles, from 2003, and working our way through the most recent in our archive, from 2012. Our first release today contains 166 documents, all from 2003, and we will periodically release batches until we have made public the entire set.

Just report your concerns through the chain of command, eh?

During dozens of hours of interviews, [former Department of Defense Assistant Inspector General John] Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute [NSA whistleblower Thomas] Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake's identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.

The supreme irony? In their zeal to punish Drake, these Pentagon officials unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches when the 29-year-old NSA contract employee blew the whistle himself. Snowden was unaware of the hidden machinations inside the Pentagon that undid Drake, but the outcome of those machinations - Drake's arrest, indictment and persecution - sent an unmistakable message: raising concerns within the system promised doom.

Another technique where the Chinese are leading: 1/2% of social media posts are covert government propaganda.

China's government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year -- nearly the same as one day of Twitter's total global volume -- in a massive effort to distract its citizens from bad news and sensitive political debates, according to a study.

Three scholars led by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard University who specializes in using quantitative data to analyze public policy, ran the first systematic study of China's online propaganda workers, known as the Fifty Cent Party because they are popularly believed to be paid by the government 50 Chinese cents for every social media post.

Contrary to popular perception inside China, the Fifty Cent Party avoids engaging in debates with critics and doesn't make fun of foreign governments. Instead, it mostly works to distract public attention away from hot topics by highlighting the positive, cheering the state, symbols of the regime, or the Communist Party's revolutionary past.

Because what the FBI needs is a freer hand.

A provision snuck into the still-secret text of the Senate's annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals' email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.

If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI's already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs -- most commonly, information about the name, address, and call data associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.

Since a 2008 Justice Department legal opinion, the FBI has not been allowed to use NSLs to demand "electronic communication transactional records," such as email subject lines and other metadata, or URLs visited.

Eric Holder: Snowden did a public service, but I still want him to face capital charges.

A small victory, but still a victory.

As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency, Yahoo is announcing today the public disclosure of three National Security Letters (NSLs) that it received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This marks the first time any company has been able to publicly acknowledge receiving an NSL as a result of the reforms of the USA Freedom Act.

Certainly the big boys have a lot more lawyers to throw at this.  Some of them choose to prioritize user rights, and some of them don't. Almost nobody seems to be willing to take things so far as to risk actual jail, though.

Les Propheties...

Turns out the insider who got a slap on the wrist (because, of course, he's such a good guy) was a lot more chatty than we were told.

"There is a recorded conversation between [David] Petraeus and, inter alia, Washington Post reporters, which, based on the information and belief of your affiant, occurred in or about March 2011," Special Agent Diane Wehner wrote. "In the conversation, Petraeus stated, 'I would really love to be on background as a senior military officer.' Later in the recording, Petraeus discusses sensitive military campaigns and operations, some of which, on the basis of a preliminary review ... is believed to contain classified information, including information at the Top Secret level."

If you carry a significant amount of cash, you're already subject to having it stolen by forfeited to the cops.  Now the same is true for your cards.

And fortunately for them, there's no warrant required for them to go fishing.

choad wrote:

Les Propheties...

~ click ~

The telescreen watches you as you watch it.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

square wrote:

Smile, you're on Candid Camera:

According to the GAO Report, FBI's Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (FACE) Services unit not only has access to FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) face recognition database of nearly 30 million civil and criminal mug shot photos, it also has access to the State Department's Visa and Passport databases, the Defense Department's biometric database, and the drivers license databases of at least 16 states. Totaling 411.9 million images, this is an unprecedented number of photographs, most of which are of Americans and foreigners who have committed no crimes.

To be fair, what do you think the government does with all of the required passport sized photos that you have to provide or have taken for a digital ID? Throw them away? Print them and stick them in a card catalog?

square wrote:

Plus, you gotta love those checks and balances.

The 2015 Wiretap Report also notes that judges denied none of the 4,148 wiretap orders sought by police -- revealing an overwhelming deference to law enforcement on the part of courts.

Especially because many of the wiretaps are for "Unknown Subject" and the purpose being specified is "Conspiracy" without providing further details.

Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich warn against efforts to slip extra surveillance in to various bills.

The reality is that getting access to people's web browsing history is almost like spying on their thoughts. This level of surveillance absolutely ought to come with court oversight. Yet a number of senators are moving to go in the opposite direction. The annual intelligence bill would let any FBI field office issue something called a National Security Letter to demand this information. These letters are essentially administrative subpoenas and often come with gag orders that prevent the company that receives them from discussing them publicly. . . .

But the FBI already has at least two separate ways they can quickly obtain these electronic records with court oversight. First, under the Patriot Act's section 215, the FBI can get a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a suspect's electronic records. The president's surveillance review group, which included former top intelligence officials, said this kind of court oversight should be required for this kind of information. Second, in emergency situations where the FBI believes it needs to move immediately, it already has the authority to get these records first, and then settle up with the court afterward.

There are search options, if you will use them.

Long-term aerial dragnet surveillance is now a charitable activity.

The firm, Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS), has been actively trying to get new contracts with large cities nationwide. When Ars profiled the company in 2014, company CEO Ross McNutt said PSS was trying to work with Chicago after having controversially flown for nine days over Compton, California--adjacent to Los Angeles--in 2012.

PSS has evidently now succeeded in Baltimore. As Businessweek reported, the Baltimore project was funded by two Texan philanthropists, John and Laura Arnold, who said that if the company could find a city to partner with, they would fund it. . . .

"In December 2015, BCF [Baltimore Community Foundation] received a gift of $120,000 from the Fidelity Charitable Fund for the Baltimore Police Foundation Special Grants Fund, one of those 800 funds at BCF," according to the statement sent by Andrew Waldman. Waldman went on to explain that the Baltimore Police Foundation Special Projects Fund then paid the same $120,000 to Persistent Surveillance Systems. "Recent payments from this fund have been used to purchase food for community events, trophies for sports teams, and items for the city police museum."

Square you're starting to drift off into Kathy's territory.

Baywolfe wrote:

Square you're starting to drift off into Kathy's territory.

Industry titans and colluding nation states across the planet are spending obscene amounts to deploy vast dark armies in search of two elusive grails; how do they keep what they've stolen and how do they get more. It won't end well.