Wyoming law—which forbids testing water quality, taking photos—is being challenged.
Source: There are laws making it illegal to collect data on open land | Ars Technica
Tag: USA
TSA Master Keys – Schneier on Security
Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors, whether in cryptographic systems or physical systems: they’re fragile.
DEA Impersonating Medical Board Investigators To Gain Access To Personal Health Records | Techdirt
“It’s not like there’s ten of them. There’s probably thousands — I know there are thousands,” Matt Barden, spokesman for the DEA, told the Daily Caller News Foundation about the DEA’s use of administrative subpoenas.
Source: DEA Impersonating Medical Board Investigators To Gain Access To Personal Health Records | Techdirt
Germany trades citizens’ metadata for NSA’s top spy software | Ars Technica
In order to obtain a copy of the NSA’s main XKeyscore software, whose existence was first revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency agreed to hand over metadata of German citizens it spies on. According to documents seen by the German newspaper Die Zeit, after 18 months of negotiations, the US and Germany signed an agreement in April 2013 that would allow the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamtes für Verfassungsschutz—BfV) to obtain a copy of the NSA’s most important program and to adopt it for the analysis of data gathered in Germany.
Source: Germany trades citizens’ metadata for NSA’s top spy software | Ars Technica
Feds accuse X-Art/Malibu Media’s attorney Jason Aaron Kotzker of a $7,000,000 payday loan fraud | Fight Copyright Trolls
From at least 2011 to at least 2013, Defendants operated as data brokers, collecting and selling sensitive consumer information from consumer payday loan applications to non-lenders.
In particular, Defendants sold this information to at least one non-lender, Ideal Financial Solutions, Inc. and its subsidiaries (collectively, “Ideal Financial”), knowing or having reason to know that Ideal Financial used the information to make unauthorized debits from the consumers’ bank accounts.
When Black Lives Didn’t Matter in New Orleans
Ten years ago today, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, police gunned down two black families on Danziger Bridge. A new book by Ronnie Greene tells their story.
We’re now averaging more than one mass shooting per day in 2015 – The Washington Post
238 days, 247 mass shootings.
Source: We’re now averaging more than one mass shooting per day in 2015 – The Washington Post
Alleged Hypno-Lawyer Disbarred – Lowering the Bar
Both women claim that after they hired the lawyer and began meeting with him, they began to suspect something other than privileged conversation was going on. They couldn’t remember large parts of the meetings, and one said she also started to notice certain physical symptoms and disheveled clothing afterward. That one went to the police, and also started recording her conversations with the lawyer. (It may seem odd that she kept interacting with him, but he was handling a child-custody case for her and so it’s plausible that she may have been reluctant to change lawyers in mid-stream.) She recorded one phone call that “began with a discussion about normal legal matters and then turned into questions about where [she] was and whether she was alone.”
Well … maybe he was just worried about preserving the attorney-client privilege?
Apparently not. “[He] then began to use ‘code’ words that induced [her] to enter a trance-like stage [sic].” He then made 12 transcript pages worth of highly explicit suggestions, which seems like a lot, and finally told her not to remember anything but the legal matters they discussed. “The conversation ends with a few pages of legitimate conversation about [the woman’s] case,” so I guess he could bill her for that part, at least.
FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America • The Register
Ten-year investigation into whether commies used SciFi to put nation into bad mood
Source: FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America • The Register