Author: Administrator

New Site Uses Cat Pictures to Target Your Location

August 20, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Privacy

What the Internet can see from your cat pictures (NYT, 22 July 2014) – Your cat may never give up your secrets. But your cat photos might. Using cat pictures – that essential building block of the Internet – and a supercomputer, a Florida State University professor has built a site that shows the locations of the cats (at least at some point in time, given their nature) and, presumably, of their owners. Owen Mundy, an assistant professor of art who studies the relationship between data and the public, created “I Know Where Your Cat Lives” as a way of demonstrating “the status quo of personal data usage by startups and international megacorps who are riding the wave of decreased privacy for all,” Mr. Mundy wrote in a post about the site . Using images of cats uploaded to photosharing services, including Flickr, Twitpic and Instagram, Mr. Mundy extracted latitude and longitude coordinates that many modern cameras, especially those in smartphones, attach to each image. His site displays random images from a sample of one million of the many millions of pictures tagged with the word “cat” online. The images are displayed on a map using satellite imagery, with nearby cat photos also visible. Specific street addresses are not displayed, but the geographic information can leave few details to the imagination in rural areas.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/apolonia.

FCC Internet Packet Standards Set to Threaten Encryption Rights

August 19, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Justice, Privacy

Net neutrality a key battleground in growing fight over encryption (InfoWorld, 21 July 2014) – Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers’ hard-won right to use encryption, a digital privacy advocate says. Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be Net neutrality, Meinrath said. The new fight will be even more fierce than the last one, because Internet service providers now see dollars and cents in the details of packets traversing their networks. They want to charge content providers for priority delivery of their packets across the network, something that a controversial Federal Communications Commission proposal could allow under certain conditions. Encrypted traffic can’t be given special treatment because it can’t be identified, Meinrath said. That could eliminate a major revenue source for ISPs, giving them a strong reason to oppose the use of encrypted services and potentially an indirect way to degrade their performance, he said. Meinrath laid out parts of this argument in a recent essay in the June issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication , called “Crypto War II” and written with tech policy activist Sean Vitka.

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Note from MIRLN Founder, Vince Polley:

[ Polley : Others have reported seeing their Netflix speeds INCREASE when using VPN connections (which block your home ISP from seeing what kind of traffic you’re running). Me, too. Interesting.]

 

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/rejithkrishnan

MIT Developing Algorithm to Extract Audio from Visual Information

August 18, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Tech

Extracting audio from visual information (MIT News, 4 August 2014) – Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass. In other experiments, they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant. The researchers will present their findings in a paper at this year’s Siggraph, the premier computer graphics conference. Reconstructing audio from video requires that the frequency of the video samples – the number of frames of video captured per second – be higher than the frequency of the audio signal. In some of their experiments, the researchers used a high-speed camera that captured 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second. That’s much faster than the 60 frames per second possible with some smartphones, but well below the frame rates of the best commercial high-speed cameras, which can top 100,000 frames per second. In other experiments, however, they used an ordinary digital camera. Because of a quirk in the design of most cameras’ sensors, the researchers were able to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video recorded at a standard 60 frames per second. While this audio reconstruction wasn’t as faithful as it was with the high-speed camera, it may still be good enough to identify the gender of a speaker in a room; the number of speakers; and even, given accurate enough information about the acoustic properties of speakers’ voices, their identities. 

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/zirconicusso.

New Cybersecurity Reporting Requirement

August 14, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Security

2014 Intelligence Authorization Act requires contractors to report cybersecurity breaches (Hogan Lovells, 18 July 2014) – [T]he president signed into law the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 ( Pub. L. 113-126 ), which requires intelligence contractors with security clearances to promptly report network and information system penetrations and provide government investigators access to such systems. This new statutory cybersecurity reporting requirement for cleared intelligence contractors is largely consistent with a reporting requirement applicable to cleared U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) contractors under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2013. * * *

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/David Castillo.

Reagan’s Executive Order That Allows NSA To Spy On Americans

August 13, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Privacy

Meet Executive Order 12333: the Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans (Washington Post, 18 July 2014) – Even after all the reforms President Obama has announced, some intelligence practices remain so secret, even from members of Congress, that there is no opportunity for our democracy to change them. Public debate about the bulk collection of U.S. citizens’ data by the NSA has focused largely on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, through which the government obtains court orders to compel American telecommunications companies to turn over phone data. But Section 215 is a small part of the picture and does not include the universe of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons authorized under Executive Order 12333. From 2011 until April of this year, I worked on global Internet freedom policy as a civil servant at the State Department. In that capacity, I was cleared to receive top-secret and “sensitive compartmented” information. Based in part on classified facts that I am prohibited by law from publishing, I believe that Americans should be even more concerned about the collection and storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than under Section 215. Bulk data collection that occurs inside the United States contains built-in protections for U.S. persons, defined as U.S. citizens, permanent residents and companies. Such collection must be authorized by statute and is subject to oversight from Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The statutes set a high bar for collecting the content of communications by U.S. persons. For example, Section 215 permits the bulk collection only of U.S. telephone metadata – lists of incoming and outgoing phone numbers – but not audio of the calls. Executive Order 12333 contains no such protections for U.S. persons if the collection occurs outside U.S. borders. Issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to authorize foreign intelligence investigations, 12333 is not a statute and has never been subject to meaningful oversight from Congress or any court. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has said that the committee has not been able to “sufficiently” oversee activities conducted under 12333. Unlike Section 215, the executive order authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons. Such persons cannot be individually targeted under 12333 without a court order. However, if the contents of a U.S. person’s communications are “incidentally” collected (an NSA term of art ) in the course of a lawful overseas foreign intelligence investigation, then Section 2.3(c) of the executive order explicitly authorizes their retention. It does not require that the affected U.S. persons be suspected of wrongdoing and places no limits on the volume of communications by U.S. persons that may be collected and retained.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Suat Eman.

Let’s Not Forget About HIPAA

August 12, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Health Justice

Former hospital worker faces HIPAA charges (HealthcareInfoSec, 16 July 2014) – Federal prosecutors in Texas have taken the relatively uncommon move of pursuing criminal charges against an individual for alleged HIPAA violations. The case serves as a reminder that healthcare workers can potentially face prison time and hefty monetary fines for wrongful disclosures of patient data. The U.S. Department of Justice earlier this month announced the criminal indictment of Joshua Hippler, a 30-year-old former employee of an unnamed hospital in East Texas. The indictment, which was filed on March 26 in the U.S. district court in Tyler, Texas, but was sealed until July 3, charges Hippler with wrongful disclosure of individual identifiable health information, with the intent to sell, transfer and use for personal gain. The alleged criminal HIPAA violations began about Dec. 1, 2012, continuing through about Jan. 14, 2013, court documents says.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/cooldesign.