TECHNOLOGY

[screwdriver]

Signal Audit Reveals Protocol Cryptographically Sound 

Academics from three different continents recently audited the popular end-to-end encryption app Signal and their findings, for the most part, are encouraging. The protocol, which boasts over a billion users, including those via apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Google’s Allo services, has no major flaws, according to the researchers.

Signal Audit Reveals Protocol Cryptographically Sound wp.me/p3AjUX-vI0

[fortnight]

Report: AT&T is data mining phone records for the police, for profit

Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.



privacysos.org/blog/report-att-data-mining-phone-records-police-profit/

[fortnight]

REPORT: YAHOO HELPED GOVERNMENT WITH ‘UNPRECEDENTED, UNCONSTITUTIONAL’ EMAIL SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM

Big news dropped yesterday in Reuters: In 2015, the US government asked Yahoo to scan all incoming email looking for certain, unknown characters in emails or attachments; unfortunately, Yahoo agreed to do it—without putting up a fight. The demand came in the form of a classified “edict,” as Reuters describes it, to Yahoo’s legal department.

privacysos.org/blog/report-yahoo-helped-government-unprecedented-unconstitutional-email-surveillance-program/

[fortnight]

Boston Police Dept. uses controversial social media spy tool made by CIA-linked firm

According to publicly available budget records, the Boston Police Department contracts with a social media monitoring company that received start-up funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The company, Geofeedia Inc., sells its software to police departments nationwide, as well as to media companies. The organization LittleSis, which documents connections between powerful companies and government actors, has published documents from the Austin, Oakland, San Diego, San Jose, Santa Clara, and Philadelphia police departments revealing contracts with the company.

LittleSis has an outstanding request in to the Boston Police Department seeking information about Geofeedia contracts. The organization should receive records describing a $6,700 payment the BPD made to the company in January 2016, evidence of which is available on the city’s open checkbook website.

privacysos.org/blog/boston-police-uses-controversial-social-media-spy-tool-made-cia-linked-firm/

[fortnight]

HOW NEW FBI POWERS TO LOOK THROUGH NSA INTERCEPTS WILL EXACERBATE MASS INCARCERATION

The wall separating “foreign” intelligence operations from domestic criminal investigations has finally, fully collapsed. The FBI now plans to act on a rule change initiated by the Bush administration and finally massaged into actionable policy by Obama: Soon, domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI will be able to search through communications collected under the mysterious authority of executive order 12333. Now, FBI agents can query the NSA’s database of Americans’ international communications, collected without warrants pursuant to Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. That law put congress’ stamp of approval on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was widely denounced as totalitarian when the New York Times‘ James Risen exposed it to the world in 2005.

privacysos.org/blog/fbi-will-now-be-able-to-search-through-nsa-intercept-data/

[fortnight]

SAY NO TO DRAGNET LOCATION TRACKING, MASSACHUSETTS!

Today the ACLU of Massachusetts testified before the state legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee in support of proposals to regulate law enforcement and corporate use of license plate readers and the data they produce. If you haven’t heard of license plate readers, here’s the down and dirty: They are cameras, affixed to police cars and stationary objects, that capture thousands of license plates per minute, creating records not just of the image, but also the time, date, and GPS location when and where the image was captured. Law enforcement agencies and private companies alike are using license plate readers to amass enormous databases containing the sensitive location histories of millions of people accused of no crime. Twelve states have regulated the technology in some way; it’s time for Massachusetts to join them.

privacysos.org/blog/just-say-no-to-dragnet-location-tracking-massachusetts/

[fortnight]

Pre-crime policing software determines your threat level based off of your social media use, criminal record

erhaps the most controversial and revealing technology [at the crime center] is the threat-scoring software Beware. Fresno is one of the first departments in the nation to test the program. As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The searches return the names of residents and scans them against a range of publicly available data to generate a color-coded threat level for each person or address: green, yellow or red. Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user. In promotional materials, Intrado writes that Beware could reveal that the resident of a particular address was a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, had criminal convictions for assault and had posted worrisome messages about his battle experiences on social media. The “big data” that has transformed marketing and other industries has now come to law enforcement.

privacysos.org/blog/pre-crimefresno/

[fortnight]

CONGRESS SNEAKS MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE EXPANSION INTO BUDGET

You might think that just a few short years after the Snowden revelations, Congress would hesitate to give the executive branch brand new, dragnet surveillance powers. If you thought that, you would be wrong.

Advocacy groups like the ACLU have succeeded in blocking cybersurveillance bills masquerading as so-called “cybersecurity” legislation for years, but this week, proponents in Congress slipped the package into the 2016 omnibus budget authorization. The omnibus budget includes funding for core functions of government, including the US military, so the chances that the White House will veto it are approximately zero.
privacysos.org/blog/congress-sneaks-massive-surveillance-expansion-into-budget/

[fortnight]

NEW FBI SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING TOOL CAN “DIVE INTO DATA ABOUT AN INDIVIDUAL,” TRACK ITEMS BY LOCATION privacysos.org/blog/new-fbi-social-media-monitoring-tool-can-dive-into-data-about-an-individual-track-items-by-location/

[fortnight]

PREDICTING STUDENT OUTCOMES BY DATA-MINING THEIR INFORMATION: WHAT ARE THE RISKS? privacysos.org/blog/predicting-student-outcomes-by-data-mining-their-information-what-are-the-risks/

You might have read lately that elementary, middle, and high school administrators are using high-tech tools to track and monitor students as they move through public school systems. But that tracking doesn’t end when students graduate high school, if they go on to university.

Georgia State is one college that’s feeding many points of student data into algorithms that alert administrators and professors when it seems as if a person may be falling behind.