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EPIC – “Today the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence announced that the President will seek a renewal of the court order authorizing the NSA’s bulk collection of American telephone records through September 12, 2014. The President has chosen to renew this order despite his promise in March 2014 to end the bulk collection program and the …
“EFF recently kicked off our second Tor Challenge, an initiative to strengthen the Tor network for online anonymity and improve one of the best free privacy tools in existence. The campaign—which we’ve launched with partners at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Tor Project, and the Free Software Foundation—is already off to a great start. …
The Fourth Amendment Third-Party Doctrine, Richard M. Thompson II, Legislative Attorney. June 5, 2014. “In the 1970s, the Supreme Court handed down Smith v. Maryland and United States v. Miller, two of the most important Fourth Amendment decisions of the 20th century. In these cases, the Court held that people are not entitled to an expectation of privacy …
EFF – “It has been one year since the first Snowden disclosure and in lieu of this first anniversary, world privacy expert and publisher of The Privacy Surgeon, Simon Davies, conceived and published a report titled “A Crisis of Accountability: A global analysis of the impact of the Snowden revelations.” The report includes contributions from individual countries, summarizing the extent to …
National Archive and Records Administration. The Information Security Oversight Office’s (ISOO) Report for Fiscal Year 2013, as required by Executive Order 13526, “Classified National Security Information” (the Order). “Original classification authorities, also called original classifiers, are those individuals designated in writing, either by the President, by selected agency heads, or by designated senior agency officials …
The Presidential Records Act: Background and Recent Issues for Congress. Wendy Ginsberg, Analyst in American National Government, May 30, 2014. “Presidential documents are historical resources that capture each incumbent’s conduct in presidential office. Pursuant to the Presidential Records Act ((PRA) 44 U.S.C. §§2201-2207), the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) collects most records of former Presidents and former …
Economic Policy Institute – Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, Lawrence Mishel, and Heidi Shierholz | June 4, 2014 “Our country has suffered from rising income inequality and chronically slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans. This disappointing living-standards growth—which was in fact caused by rising income inequality—even preceded the Great Recession. Fortunately, income inequality and middle-class living …
“For the past few years, EFF has been working on promoting the universal use of encryption for Internet protocols. We started by pushing major sites to switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and gave individual users ways to pull things along. Last November, we launched our Encrypt the Web Scorecard, which in addition to Web encryption, added a second focus on …
By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS “The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new …
INFORMATION SECURITY: Agencies Need to Improve Cyber Incident Response Practices, GAO-14-354: Published: Apr 30, 2014. Publicly Released: May 30, 2014. “Twenty-four major federal agencies did not consistently demonstrate that they are effectively responding to cyber incidents (a security breach of a computerized system and information). Based on a statistical sample of cyber incidents reported in fiscal year 2012, …
Agency Report Shows Data Brokers Collect and Store Billions of Data Elements Covering Nearly Every U.S. Consumer: “In a report issued today on the data broker industry, the Federal Trade Commission finds that data brokers operate with a fundamental lack of transparency. The Commission recommends that Congress consider enacting legislation to make data broker practices …
“Stories is a new Google+ Photos feature that automates photo album creation. It collects your photos and videos into natural groupings–like a weekend trip you took to the mountains, or a child’s soccer game–clustered around out-of-the ordinary moments. Then it builds a narrative for you around those clusters of photos, almost instantly and without any …
