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Contents 1. Introduction 2. Surveillance Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 Facial Recognition Technology Border Search and Immigration Surveillance Surveillance Tech at the Border and the Virtual Wall Reproductive Justice and Digital Surveillance 2. Encryption and Cybersecurity End-to-End Encryption Client-Side Scanning and Other Recent U.S. Attempts At Encryption Backdoors Government Cybersecurity 4. Consumer Privacy Consumer …
The New York Times – no paywall: “It was driven with a frenetic focus by Mr. Musk, who channeled his libertarian impulses and resentment of regulatory oversight of his vast business holdings into a singular position of influence. Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and …
“The New York Times [no paywall] identified 45 people within the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a group formed by Elon Musk that in a short few weeks has radically upended federal agencies. Few members have formal Washington experience. Many are software engineers. All seem to have a clear mandate: Shrink and disrupt the federal …
AP: “Sensitive financial and health data belonging to millions of veterans and stored on a benefits website is at risk of being stolen or otherwise compromised, according to a federal employee tasked with cybersecurity who was recently fired as part of massive government-wide cuts. The warning comes from Jonathan Kamens, who led cybersecurity efforts for …
CNET – Codes sent via SMS messages will be replaced by QR codes sent to user’s phones to verify Gmail accounts. Gmail users will soon see a big change in the way their accounts are secured and how their two-factor authenticated logins are handled. Google is planning to stop sending 2FA codes via text message …
Assessing Common PINs – “ABC News analyzed 29 million leaked four-digit PINs from Have I Been Pwned? (a database of exposed credentials from data breaches) and visualized the data using a grid where each square represents a unique PIN. The brightness of each square indicates the popularity of the code—brighter squares show more commonly used …
The Atlantic [unpaywalled]: “The president’s special commission now has an unprecedented ability to view and manipulate information at many federal agencies. The employee’s account, along with the accounts of several others across federal agencies, offers the clearest portrait yet of just how deep DOGE has burrowed into the systems of the federal government—and the sensitive …
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 15, 2025 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the …
How to ensure data cannot be recovered from electronic storage media. In this guidance What is electronic storage media? What is sanitisation? Before you sanitise Preparing ESM for re-use Disposing of ESM This guidance is for organisations who need to ensure that data held on electronic storage media can’t be read by unauthorised parties after …
Gizmodo: “A cybersecurity company is warning businesses and organizations not to use a popular app from the generative AI company DeepSeek, saying that the program contains a number of security vulnerabilities that could compromise users’ data. The DeepSeek app, which shocked the stock market when it moved to the top of the Apple App Store …
The New Yorker [unpaywalled]: “…To run his agency [DOGE], Musk brought on a group of tech-company managers and inexperienced twentysomethings whose credentials included internships at SpaceX. We watched as this crew began interrogating federal employees about their jobs, interfering with the system that controls payments at the Treasury Department, and trawling government budgets while Musk …
Musk Watch and Bloomberg – “Just nine days before his DOGE team visited CFPB, Musk’s X — the former Twitter — announced that it had struck a deal with Visa to process peer-to-peer payments. Musk has publicly mused about expanding into payment-services since he first took control of X in 2022. Entering that business could …
