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Ellen Nakashima’s article [snipped] – Verizon in January filed a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s program that collects billions of Americans’ call-detail records, but a surveillance court rejected it, according to newly declassified documents and individuals with knowledge of the matter. In denying the phone company’s petition in March, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court …
“EFF recently filed comments with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) concerning Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA), one of the key statutes under which the government claims it can conduct mass surveillance of innocent people’s communications and records from inside the US. EFF maintains that the government’s activities under Section 702 that we know …
Excerpt from the Verizon 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report: ‘“We have more incidents, more sources, and more variation than ever before—and trying to approach tens of thousands of incidents using the same techniques simply won’t cut it. Not only would the dominant incident characteristics drown out the subtleties of the less frequent varieties, but we cannot …
“In a letter to the White House, a coalition of US organizations urged the Administration to recognize the recent opinion by the Court of Justice, the highest court in Europe, that ended a European data retention mandate. The European law required telephone and internet companies to retain metadata on customers for national security purposes. The European Court of Justice …
“As the result of a Freedom of Information Act request, EPIC has received several hundred pages of documents related to the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Facebook business practices. The documents include assessments by the FTC of Facebook’s privacy changes and communications with the company. EPIC has repeatedly pressed the Commission to enforce the 2012 Consent Order which barred the company from future …
Pew Research – Mary Madden – “As news of large-scale data breaches and vulnerabilities grows, new findings from the Pew Research Center suggest that growing numbers of online Americans have had important personal information stolen and many have had an account compromised. Findings from a January 2014 survey show that: 18% of online adults have …
EFF – “New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer. EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on …
Tom Hamburger, Matea Gold, Washington Post: “…Google — once a lobbying weakling — has come to master a new method of operating in modern-day Washington, where spending on traditional lobbying is rivaled by other, less visible forms of influence. That system includes financing sympathetic research at universities and think tanks, investing in nonprofit advocacy groups across the political …
Via American Banker: “The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council said Thursday that it expects “financial institutions to incorporate patches on systems and services, applications, and appliances using OpenSSL and upgrade systems as soon as possible to address the vulnerability.” OpenSSL is open-source software that lets web sites encrypt communications with visitors. A vulnerability has been found …
News release: “If you’re thinking “Heartbleed” sounds serious, you’re right. But it’s not a health condition. It’s a critical flaw in OpenSSL, a popular software program that’s used to secure websites and other services (like VPN and email). If your company relies on OpenSSL to encrypt data, take steps to fix the problem and limit …
ComputerWorld: “The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) acknowledged this week that it missed the April 8 cut-off for Windows XP support, and will be paying Microsoft millions for an extra year of security patches. Microsoft terminated Windows XP support on Tuesday when it shipped the final public patches for the nearly-13-year-old operating system. Without patches for vulnerabilities …
“The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice today issued a policy statement on the sharing of cyber-security information that makes clear that properly designed cyber threat information sharing is not likely to raise antitrust concerns and can help secure the nation’s networks of information and resources. The policy statement provides the agencies’ analytical framework for …
