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Penny Crosman, BankThink/American Banker: “Ten large U.S. and European banks are using natural language processing technology from Digital Reasoning — one of Bank Technology News’ ‘Top Ten Tech Companies to Watch for 2012′ — to uncover such revealing documents before lawyers and examiners do. The company launched six Proactive Compliance analytics products six months ago. …
What the Government Does with Americans’ Data, by Rachel Levinson-Waldman, October 8, 2013. “After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the government’s authority to collect, keep, and share information about Americans with little or no basis to suspect wrongdoing dramatically expanded. While the risks and benefits of this approach are the subject of intense debate, …
Secret servers and a privileged position on the internet’s backbone used to identify users and attack target computers, by Bruce Schneier, October 4, 2013. “The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA‘s application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of …
One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets’ computers by James Ball, Bruce Schneier and Glenn Greenwald “The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the …
“Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is the Weil family professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. This article is based on his report The Obama Administration and the Press, forthcoming Thursday from the Committee to Protect Journalists. “With the passage of the Patriot …
Selling Secrets of Phone Users to Advertisers – by Claire Cain Miller and Somini Sengupta, October 5, 2013 “Now, smartphones know everything — where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, …
What does the data show? “Microsoft (including Skype) received 37,196 requests from law enforcement agencies potentially impacting 66,539 accounts in the first six months of this year. This compares to 75,378 requests and 137,424 potential accounts in the whole of 2012. Approximately 77 percent of requests resulted in the disclosure of “non-content data”. No data …
Via cnet – “Facebook, Google, and other tech firms apparently aren’t the only ones who’ve been fascinated by the potential of “social graphs” — maps of people’s social connections. The NSA has reportedly been tapping its giant repositories of phone and e-mail data to create complex diagrams of some Americans’ interactions, including lists of associates …
EFF: “Acxiom, a data broker that collects 1,500 data points per person on over 700 million consumers total and sells analysis of such information, is trying to ward off federal privacy regulations by flaunting transparency—a diluted term, in this case—around user data. The company just launched AboutTheData.com, a site that will let users see and edit some information that Acxiom has about …
EPIC: “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has just released new documents concerning the NSA’s surveillance programs. The documents, which include numerous filings with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, date back to 2006. The documents specifically relate to the governments collection of information under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. In a …
IDG News Service – “Yahoo received 12,444 requests from the U.S. government for user data in the first half of this year, resulting in 11,402 instances of data disclosure, it said Friday in its first transparency report. For nearly 7,000 of the U.S. requests between Jan. 1 and June 30, only non-content data was disclosed, …
Ellen Nakashima: “The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended …
