Category: Ignorant or unreasonable
This is what’s wrong with politics today
Cable companies and telcos are huge political contributors to Congress. AT&T and Comcast individually spent just under $8m in political contributions last year; the National Cable and Telecommunications Association spent $6.6m; Verizon, $6.3m.
Likewise with lobbying. The cable industry spent more than any other industry except the healthcare industry on lobbying last year. Comcast spent $12m; AT&T, $11m; and Verizon, $10m.
As has been repeatedly noted since the net neutrality debate took hold, those politicians opposing net neutrality rules have been disproportionately compensated by the cable industry.
HealthCare.gov Sends Personal Data to Dozens of Tracking Websites
The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more.
An example of personal health data being sent to third parties from healthcare.govAn example of personal health data being sent to third parties from healthcare.gov
EFF researchers have independently confirmed that healthcare.gov is sending personal health information to at least 14 third party domains, even if the user has enabled Do Not Track. The information is sent via the referrer header, which contains the URL of the page requesting a third party resource. The referrer header is an essential part of the HTTP protocol, and is sent for every request that is made on the web. The referrer header lets the requested resource know what URL the request came from. This would for example let a website know who else was linking to their pages. In this case however the referrer URL contains personal health information.
FBI Defuses Another Of Its Own Terrorist Plots; John Boehner Pretends It’s Evidence That We Need To Renew The PATRIOT Act
Last week, as you may have heard, the Justice Department breathlessly announced that it had uncovered and broken up a terrorist plot against the government, leading to the arrest of a 20 year-old man, Christopher Lee Cornell, in Ohio. According to the FBI, Cornell was planning to go to the US Capitol and kill government officials. As often happens with these kinds of announcements, the press was quick to jump in and fuel the narrative of some big terror plot that the FBI was able to miraculously disrupt at the last minute.
For years now, we’ve pointed out a pattern of how nearly every big headline about the US disrupting a domestic terrorist attack was almost always about the FBI creating its very own plot, and then pressuring and cajoling some vulnerable, poverty-stricken, desperate Muslim (almost always Muslim) young men into “joining” this plot. This happens despite those individuals rarely having expressed direct interest in any sort of terrorist activity, or having any connections or means to carry out such activity. But with continued pressure from “FBI informants” (who tend to either by paid by the FBI or are trying to reduce punishment for other crimes they’ve been charged with — or both), eventually these men agree to take part in a “plot” that was entirely designed by the FBI and had no chance of ever happening.
MPAA Wants to Censor OpenCulture’s Public Domain Movies
Despite the growing availability of legal services in many countries, movie studios face a constant stream of pirated films.
In an attempt to deter these infringements, the MPAA and individual movie studios send thousands of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google.
When it comes to takedown notices the MPAA has a dubious track record. The movie industry group has got into the habit of asking Google to remove the homepages of allegedly infringing sites instead of individual pages where the infringing movies are listed.
A few days ago, for example, the MPAA asked Google to remove the homepage of the most popular torrent site Kickass.so, alongside several other torrent and streaming sites. As with previous requests Google declined to do so as the request was too broad.
The same takedown notice includes another unusual and perhaps more worrying request. Between all the “pirate sites” the MPAA also targeted Open Culture’s list of public domain movies.
For those unfamiliar with the project, Open Culture offers an archive of high-quality cultural & educational media. With Stanford University’s Dan Colman as founder and lead editor, the content listed on the site is selected with great care.
The MPAA, however, appears to have spotted a problem with the list and has asked Google to remove the entire page (containing 700 movies) from its search results
Horace Edwards Snowden And Others For Billions Of Dollars Adds The United States As An Involuntary Plaintiff
Remember when former Kansas Secretary of Transportation Horace Edwards filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and others connected to the CitizenFour documentary “on behalf of the American people?” And remember when plenty of American people said, “STFU Edwards, you don’t speak for me?”
Well, suck it, dissenters. Horace Edwards has other plans for you.
Horace Edwards, the retired naval officer who last month sued the makers and distributors of Citizenfour, has filed an amended complaint that names the “United States of America” as a putative involuntary plaintiff.
Remember That Undeletable Super Cookie Verizon Claimed Wouldn’t Be Abused? Yeah, Well, Funny Story…
A few months ago, we noted how Verizon and AT&T were at the bleeding edge of the use of new “stealth” supercookies that can track a subscriber’s web activity and location, and can’t be disabled via browser settings. Despite having been doing this for two years, security researchers only just noticed that Verizon was actively modifying its wireless users’ traffic to embed a unique identifier traffic header, or X-UIDH. This identifier effectively broadcasts user details to any website they visit, and the opt-out settings for the technology only stopped users from receiving customized ads — not the traffic modification and tracking.
AT&T responded to the fracas by claiming it was only conducting a trial, one AT&T has since claimed to have terminated. Verizon responded by insisting that the unique identifier was rotated on a weekly basis (something researchers found wasn’t true) and that the data was perfectly anonymous (though as we’ve long noted anonymous data sets are never really anonymous). While security researchers noted that third-party websites could use this identifier to build profiles without their consent, Verizon’s website insisted that “it is unlikely that sites and ad entities will attempt to build customer profiles” using these identifiers.
As such, you’ll surely be shocked to learn that sites and ad entities are building customer profiles using these identifiers.
John Brennan Exonerates Himself
The outrageous whitewash issued yesterday by the CIA panel John Brennan hand-picked to lead the investigation into his agency’s spying on Senate staffers is being taken seriously by the elite Washington media, which is solemnly reporting that officials have been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing“.
But what the report really does is provide yet more evidence of Brennan’s extraordinary impunity.
The panel concluded that CIA officials acted reasonably by scouring Senate computer drives in early 2014 when faced with a “potential security breach”. (That “breach” had allowed Senate staffers investigating CIA torture to access, more than three years earlier, a handful of documents Brennan didn’t want them to see.)
But the CIA yesterday also released a redacted version of the full report of an earlier investigation by the CIA’s somewhat more independent inspector general’s office. And between the two reports, it is now more clear than ever that Brennan was the prime mover behind a hugely inappropriate assault on the constitutional separation of powers, and continues to get away with it.
David Cameron: I’m off to the US to get my bro Barack to ban crypto
UK Prime Minister David Cameron is hoping to gain the support of US President Barack Obama in his campaign-year crusade to outlaw encrypted communications his spies can’t break, sources claim.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Conservative Cameron would like to see left-leaning Obama publicly criticize major US internet companies like Facebook and Google, many of which have made strong encryption the default on their online services.
The President hasn’t taken a public position on the issue so far, but several prominent federal law enforcement officials have given internet firms lashings over their use of encryption tech, which they claim undermines national security interests.
Last September, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey went as far as to describe encrypted communications as “something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law.”
Australia tries to ban crypto research
While the world is laughing at UK PM David Cameron for his pledge to ban encryption, Australia is on the way to implementing legislation that could feasibly have a similar effect.
Moreover, the little-debated Defence Trade Control Act (DCTA) is already law – it’s just that the criminal sanctions it imposes for sending knowledge offshore without a license are being phased in, and don’t come into force until May 2015.
As noted in Defence Report, the lack of an academic exclusion in the law, which passed parliament under the previous Labor government in 2012, could mean “an email to a fellow academic could land you a 10 year prison sentence”.
The control of defence research isn’t new or surprising, and in fact this law was put into place to align Australia’s regime with that of the USA (the International Traffic in Arms Regulations), but the haste with which it was implemented means someone forgot that academic researchers routinely discuss sensitive technologies.