Liberal Saudi Web Forum Founder Sentenced To 600 Lashes and 7 Years In Prison - Slashdot

Liberal Saudi Web Forum Founder Sentenced To 600 Lashes and 7 Years In Prison - Slashdot:

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A break for smokers? Glitch may limit penalties - Yahoo! Finance

A break for smokers? Glitch may limit penalties - Yahoo! Finance:

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Obama finally begins taking advice from conservatives seriously [Unlikely]

Obama finally begins taking advice from conservatives seriously [Unlikely]:

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Tammy Duckworth Does Not Suffer Phony Disabled Vets Gladly

Tammy Duckworth Does Not Suffer Phony Disabled Vets Gladly:
An IRS contractor who has been using a minor, possibly non-existent injury from his prep school days 27 years ago to secure government contracts for his company was publicly shamed by Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) in such a magnificent way that it almost made his fraud worthwhile.
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Pelosi's defense of NSA surveillance draws boos - Yahoo! News

Pelosi's defense of NSA surveillance draws boos - Yahoo! News:

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Data Miners Liken Obama Voters To Caesars Gamblers

Data Miners Liken Obama Voters To Caesars Gamblers: theodp writes "As Steve Wozniak publicly laments how government used new technologies he introduced in unintended ways to monitor people, the NY Times reports how the digital masterminds behind the Obama Presidential campaign are cashing in by bringing the secret, technologically advanced formulas used for reaching voters to commercial advertisers. 'The plan is to bring the same Big Data expertise that guided the most expensive presidential campaign in history to companies and nonprofits,' explains Civis Analytics, which is backed by Google Chairman and Obama advisor Eric Schmidt. Also boasting senior members of Obama's campaign team is Analytics Media Group (A.M.G.), which pitched that 'keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney.' The extent to which the Obama campaign used the newest tech tools to look into people's lives was largely shrouded, the Times reports, but included data mining efforts that triggered Facebook's internal safeguard alarms. ... 'We asked to see [voter's Facebook] photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends.' The Times also explains how the Obama campaign was able to out-optimize the Romney campaign on TV buys by obtaining set-top box TV show viewing information from cable companies for voters on the Obama campaign's 'persuadable voters' list. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More NSA leaks: how the NSA bends the truth about spying on Americans while insisting it doesn't spy on Americans

More NSA leaks: how the NSA bends the truth about spying on Americans while insisting it doesn't spy on Americans:
The Guardian has published two more top-secret NSA memos, courtesy of whistleblower Edward Snowden. The memos are appendices to "Procedures used by NSA to target non-US persons" (1, 2), and they detail the systems the NSA uses to notionally adhere to the law that prohibits them from spying on Americans.
More importantly, they expose the "truth" behind NSA director James Clapper's assertion that "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress." This turns out to be technically, narrowly true, but false in its implication, as Declan McCullagh explains on CNet:

Clapper's statement was viewed as a denial, but it wasn't. Today's disclosures reveal why: Because the Justice Department granted intelligence analysts "proper legal authorization" in advance through the Holder regulations.
"The DNI has a history of playing games with wording, using terms with carefully obscured meanings to leave an impression different from the truth," Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated domestic surveillance cases, told CNET earlier this week.

This is important in the context of McCullagh's earlier story about Rep. Jerrold Nadler allegedly saying that the NSA listens in on Americans' phone-calls, a statement he later denied. As the Guardian's publications make clear, the NSA operates under a baroque and carefully engineered set of guidelines that allow it to spy on Americans while insisting that it's not spying on Americans.
For example, as Glenn Greenwald writes:

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:
• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;
• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;
• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;
• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

On Ars Technica, Dan Goodin goes further into the documents, showing how people who use encryption and proxies, such as Tor and PGP mail, are especially targeted for spying and data-retention, even when it is clear that the communications originate with, and are destined for, US persons:

While the documents make clear that data collection and interception must cease immediately once it's determined a target is within the US, they still provide analysts with a fair amount of leeway. And that leeway seems to work to the disadvantage of people who take steps to protect their Internet communications from prying eyes. For instance, a person whose physical location is unknown—which more often than not is the case when someone uses anonymity software from the Tor Project—"will not be treated as a United States person, unless such person can be positively identified as such, or the nature or circumstances of the person's communications give rise to a reasonable belief that such person is a United States person," the secret document stated.
And in the event that an intercepted communication is later deemed to be from a US person, the requirement to promptly destroy the material may be suspended in a variety of circumstances. Among the exceptions are "communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time during which encrypted material is subject to, or of use in, cryptanalysis."
Other conditions under which intercepted US communications may be retained include when it is "reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed."
The document, dated July 28, 2009, bears the signature of US Attorney General Eric Holder.

And as Goodin notes, some of the heaviest users of PGP-encrypted email are lawyers handling confidential, privileged attorney-client communications, meaning that the US Attorney General is deliberately targeting privileged communications between US persons for extra surveillance and retention, an act of galling lawlessness.

Court documents reveal secret rules allowing NSA to use US data without a warrant

Court documents reveal secret rules allowing NSA to use US data without a warrant:

NSA's information gathering practices have been further detailed in court papers revealed by The Guardian. While the agency has continued to reiterate that it doesn't collect its data indiscriminately, the leaked papers detail several loopholes that allow it to gather data from both American and foreign origins without the need for a warrant. If you use data encryption or other privacy tools, your communications are likely to receive extra attention, and the agency can indefinitely keep any information assembled for "crypto-analytic, traffic analysis or signal exploitation purposes" -- in short, if the NSA believes may be relevant in the future.

One reason to hold onto said files could simply be the fact that the data is encrypted and NSA wants to be able to analyze its protection. The security agency can also give the FBI and other government organizations any data if it contains a significant amount of foreign intelligence, or information about a crime that has (or will be) committed. Any data that's "inadvertently acquired" through the NSA's methods -- and could potentially contain details of US citizens -- can be held for up to five years before it has to be deleted. The Guardian's uploaded the leaked papers in full -- hit the source links for more.
Filed under: Internet
Comments
Via: The Guardian, Forbes
Source: The Guardian (1), (2)

Obamacare Is Turning Walmart Workers Into Temps

Obamacare Is Turning Walmart Workers Into Temps: Comments

BBC News - Mueller: FBI uses drones for surveillance over US soil

BBC News - Mueller: FBI uses drones for surveillance over US soil:

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The 14-year-old kid arrested over his pro-NRA shirt now faces a year in jail - Yahoo! News

The 14-year-old kid arrested over his pro-NRA shirt now faces a year in jail - Yahoo! News:

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SELL OUT: Jack Lew's New Signature Is Much Worse Than His Old One

SELL OUT: Jack Lew's New Signature Is Much Worse Than His Old One:
The U.S. Treasury Department has just revealed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew's new official signature.
Check it out:

Here it is. Secretary Jack Lew’s official #signature as it will appear on U.S. currency starting this fall pic.twitter.com/Jvid5uOgBA
— Treasury Department (@US Treasury) June 18, 2013

You can compare the new signature to his old one.   It's much more legible.

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The NSA's Lockbox Has No Lock

The NSA's Lockbox Has No Lock: One of the key points that officials have been making in defense of the NSA surveillance is this idea that even if they're collecting all this data on your communications, they can't actually do anything with it, because they keep it safely locked up in a lockbox, and only check it if they have some bit of data they want to find out about later. That was the crux of the claims made by former NSA/CIA boss Michael Hayden who seemed to think that "data mining" and "asking the database questions" were two different things. However, as William Saletan is pointing out at Slate, the lockbox is a lie. There is no lockbox. He quotes officials including NSA boss Keith Alexander and Congress's number one NSA apologist, Rep. Mike Rogers, both suggesting strongly that even if the NSA is collecting all your data, it's safe because it can't be explored without a "very specific court-ordered approval process."



Except... what they conveniently left out, is that the court doesn't review any of this. It appears that it probably set some very basic rules up front when it gave the okay on collecting the data, which no one else gets to know about, and no one carefully checks up on the NSA later to see if they really follow any of those rules. What the claims most certainly do not mean, is that the NSA needs to get a court order to search the database. Senator Dianne Feinstein admitted as much directly:

Q:  Is a court order necessary to query the metadata database?

Feinstein:  Is a court order necessary to query—

Q: The metadata database under 215. An individual court order for each query.

Feinstein: A court order—well, I don't know what you mean by a query. A court order—

Q: To search the database.

Feinstein: To search the database, you have to have reasonable, articulable cause—

Q: Certified by a judge?

Feinstein: —to believe that that individual is connected to a terrorist group. You cannot—

Q: But does that have to be determined by a judge?

Feinstein: Could I answer? You may not like it, but I'll answer. Then you can query the numbers. The only numbers you have—there's no content. You have the name and the number called, whether it's one number or two numbers. That's all you have. Then you can get the numbers. If you want to collect content, then you get a court order.

Q: So you don't need a court order for the query itself.

Feinstein: That's my understanding.

And yet, as the article notes, most of the defenders of the program strongly imply otherwise, highlighting the "court-approved" process that people need to go through to query the database. But if there's no real oversight, and no court reviewing each query, then, as Saletan points out, there is no lockbox.

There's no lock on the lockbox.



That hasn't stopped current and former government officials from repeating the lockbox line. Yesterday Rogers used it again on Face the Nation. Dick Cheney, appearing on Fox News Sunday, backed him up. On Meet the Press, Michael Hayden, the guy who ran the NSA when it began collecting phone records, assured Rep. Bobby Scott, (D-Va.,) "The only way you can access the metadata is through a terrorist predicate." When Scott asked, "Where is that written?" Hayden replied: "It's in the court order." Really? Where's the court order? When is it applied, and how?



If the court isn't screening data requests, that leaves two possibilities. One is that nobody's screening them. The other is that some other, unknown entity is doing it in a way that nobody has explained. Either way, the answers we're getting are unacceptable. They betray privacy, public trust, and national security.

If there's no public standard, and no official oversight or review process, then the probability that the database is being abused approaches one very, very quickly.

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Smoking Now Banned in Your Apartment and in Your Car

Smoking Now Banned in Your Apartment and in Your Car:

The smoking rate here in the USA is down to a meager 18%, continuing a decline that's been going on for decades. Which is good, because it is now illegal to smoke almost everywhere.
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