This week the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), as part of the United Nations, is meeting once again in what has become a regular reflection of current thought in the field of cyber security internationally. ‘Reflection’ is the perfect word to describe what the GGE does because it’s not clear to what purpose the group is moving. It might be a useful exercise to review what we know about cyber security at this point and why the GGE will fail to engage with the most…
The town of Altamonte, a small suburb of Orlando, is going to pay Uber at least $1 million in taxpayer money over the next year to subsidize residents’ ridesharing trips. But should a journalist or concerned citizen want to learn more about the public transportation-replacing program, their public records request will ultimately end up in the hands of an Uber employee, who will decide whether or not the information is fit for public release. It’s unsettling that a city government will allow a private corporation…
IN RECENT MONTHS, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers. […] But it should come as no surprise to anyone who looks back at the founding principles of WikiLeaks that Assange — who has clearly stated his distaste for the idea of the former secretary of state becoming president — would make aggressive use of leaked documents to try to…
Use of common Web privacy tools or even mere curiosity about them could get you added to a National Security Agency watch list, according to a new report. The NSA surveillance program called X-Keyscore, first revealed last summer in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, has been found to contain selection rules that potentially add to an NSA watch list anybody who has not only used, but visited online privacy-protection tools such as the Tor Network for anonymous Web browsing and the Linux-based Tails operating system….
A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DOJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”. In an effort to demonstrate that the…