Category Archives: Current Events

New York Just Subpoenaed Airbnb to Hand Over Its User Data

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The city is fighting the startup for breaking local laws against operating an illegal hotel out of your home, worried that hustlers are abusing the online service to turn a profit. To that end, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman just slapped the company with a subpoena to hand over the user data of all New Yorkers who’ve listed their apartment on the site, the New York Daily News reported today. That’s about 225,000 users.

via New York Just Subpoenaed Airbnb to Hand Over Its User Data | Motherboard.

Private Cygnus Spacecraft Makes Historic 1st Rendezvous with Space Station

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Orbital officials initially aimed for Cygnus to arrive at the space station on Sunday, Sept. 22, but a data format issue between the spacecraft and orbiting lab forced the company to abort that first rendezvous attempt. Troubleshooting efforts with that glitch and the impending arrival of a new space station crew aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which launched and docked on Wednesday (Sept. 25), pushed Cygnus’ arrival to today.

via Private Cygnus Spacecraft Makes Historic 1st Rendezvous with Space Station | Space.com.

The other firm is SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., which has a $1.9 billion contract for 12 supply missions using its Dragon space capsules and Falcon 9 rockets. SpaceX has flown two of those delivery missions already, and is expected to test fly an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket later today in a launch from California. Unlike Cygnus, SpaceX’s Dragon capsules are equipped with a heat shield and can return science experiments and gear to Earth from the station.

Brazil Looks to Break from U.S.-Centric Internet

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Most of Brazil’s global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff’s government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping.

via Brazil Looks to Break from U.S.-Centric Internet | TIME.com.

It cited a “common understanding” between Brazil and the European Union on data privacy, and said “negotiations are underway in South America for the deployment of land connections between all nations.” It said Brazil plans to boost investment in home-grown technology and buy only software and hardware that meet government data privacy specifications.

Orbital Sciences Launch News

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Solar array deployment is complete for Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Cygnus spacecraft, now traveling 17,500 mph in Earth’s orbit to rendezvous with the International Space Station on Sunday, Sept. 22, for a demonstration resupply mission. The spacecraft will deliver about 1,300 pounds (589 kilograms) of cargo, including food and clothing, to the space station’s Expedition 37 crew, who will grapple and attach the capsule using the orbiting laboratory’s robotic arm.

via NASA – Orbital Sciences Launch News.

UAV Provides Colorado Flooding Assistance Until FEMA Freaks Out

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Falcon UAV is a Colorado company that makes a fixed-wing UAV called a Falcon that uses GPS and cameras to autonomously generate among other things highly accurate maps of the ground. The UAV is hand-launched, with an endurance of about an hour, and generally operates between 300 and 1,500 feet above the ground. It has public safety flight approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration FAA to fly in some parts of Colorado. Basically, the point here is that we’re not talking about some random dude with a quadrotor flying around taking pictures: the Falcons are designed for and governmentally approved for mapping missions in public airspace.

via UAV Provides Colorado Flooding Assistance Until FEMA Freaks Out – IEEE Spectrum.

How the NSA Spies on Smartphones Including the BlackBerry

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All the images were apparently taken with smartphones. A photo taken in January 2012 is especially risqué: It shows a former senior government official of a foreign country who, according to the NSA, is relaxing on his couch in front of a TV set and taking pictures of himself — with his iPhone. To protect the person’s privacy, SPIEGEL has chosen not to reveal his name or any other details.

The access to such material varies, but much of it passes through an NSA department responsible for customized surveillance operations against high-interest targets. One of the US agents’ tools is the use of backup files established by smartphones. According to one NSA document, these files contain the kind of information that is of particular interest to analysts, such as lists of contacts, call logs and drafts of text messages. To sort out such data, the analysts don’t even require access to the iPhone itself, the document indicates. The department merely needs to infiltrate the target’s computer, with which the smartphone is synchronized, in advance.

via How the NSA Spies on Smartphones Including the BlackBerry – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

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The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

via Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s – NYTimes.com.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

There once was a time, back when the old AT&T existed,  when all  phone companies viewed customer privacy sacrosanct.

In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA’s “It’s just metadata” excuse

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Storage and data-mining have come a long way in the past 35 years, Felten notes, and metadata is uniquely easy to analyze—unlike the complicated data of a call itself, with variations in language, voice, and conversation style. “This newfound data storage capacity has led to new ways of exploiting the digital record,” writes Felten. “Sophisticated computing tools permit the analysis of large datasets to identify embedded patterns and relationships, including personal details, habits, and behaviors.”

via In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA’s “It’s just metadata” excuse | Ars Technica.

I remember Ed Felton as being one of the leading researchers who uncovered the Sony rootkit fiasco.  Many years ago Sony included a rootkit installer that would install whenever someone played one of their CDs on a Windows PC.  Felton’s blog at the time covered that situation well.

Groklaw – Forced Exposure ~pj

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Harvard’s Berkman Center had an online class on cybersecurity and internet privacy some years ago, and the resources of the class are still online. It was about how to enhance privacy in an online world, speaking of quaint, with titles of articles like, “Is Big Brother Listening?”

And how.

You’ll find all the laws in the US related to privacy and surveillance there. Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That’s not the rule of law as I understood the term.

via Groklaw – Forced Exposure ~pj.