Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times: ars technica

“A blogger has released audio of Sprint's Electronic Surveillance Manager describing the carrier's cooperation with law enforcement. Among the revelations are that Sprint has so far filled over 8 million requests from LEOs for customer GPS data.

“By Jon Stokes | Last updated December 1, 2009 5:38 PM

“Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student at Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing, has made public an audio recording of Sprint/Nextel's Electronic Surveillance Manager describing how his company has provided GPS location data about its wireless customers to law enforcement over 8 million times.

“Through a mix of documents unearthed by Freedom of Information Act requests and the aforementioned recording, Soghoian describes how ‘the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.’”

Sprint: 50 million customers, 8 million law enforcement GPS requests in 1 year from Christopher Soghoian on Vimeo.

Why Privacy Concerns are Ruining Facebook

PC World seems troubled by Facebook's elimination of regional networks:

"Facebook was built as a...social connector, allowing users to befriend others with similar interests, locations, schools, and more. But as privacy concerns mount…Facebook is eliminating regional networks -- or groupings of people based on where they live…

"Regional networks granted access to wider swaths of potential friends, but therein was the concern: how much is too much? Do we really want the entire city of Boston looking at last year's Halloween pictures? Is making friends with these strangers something I want to do?

"Facebook has had more than its share of privacy problems. There's the Beacon fiasco; the lawsuits; the federal complaints; international investigations; and schemes galore. There are also...methods to protect your privacy both on Facebook and online in general.

"Brennon Slattery

"Dec 2, 2009 9:29 am"

Lawsuit Demands Answers About Social-Networking Surveillance

Government Agencies Withholding Information on Data-Gathering from Facebook, Twitter, and Other Online Communities

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) …filed suit today against a half-dozen government agencies for refusing to disclose their policies for using social networking sites for investigations, data-collection, and surveillance.

Recent news reports have publicized the government's use of social networking data as evidence in various investigations, and Congress is currently considering several pieces of legislation that may increase protections for consumers…

"Millions of people use social networking sites like Facebook every day, disclosing lots of information about their private lives," said James Tucker, a student working with EFF…"As Congress debates new privacy laws covering sites like Facebook, lawmakers and voters alike need to know how the government is already using this data and what is at stake."

Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”

“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company writes….

I'm not all that shocked, and I'm certainly not confused.

Despairwear

OMG The Reviews of this T-Shirt on Amazon!

Not our normally heavy shit, but... must.... have.... t.... shirt....



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Ufozz : The digg like about UFO's

Ufozz helps you to find where UFOs links are hiding on the web. Based on a digg like system , the main goal of ufozz is to share and democratize ufo's informations.

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US ramps up cybersecurity focus

The White House should take direct control of US cybersecurity, the woman tipped to be President Obama's net security Czar has said.

Melissa Hathaway told a conference in San Francisco that the net had not been built with safety in mind.

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Researchers recently concluded the average number of unique new infected sites grew from 100,000-200,000 a day to 200,000-300,000 a day and this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. In addition, the world recently witnessed the third cyber attack against a country (Kyrgyzstan).

Rogue Wireless Gets Sneakier

Many companies conduct regular “war-walking” scans to detect rogue access points (ie. using Kismet or Netstumbler), or invest in commercial Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS). However, there are sneaky ways to bypass traditional war-walking and WIDS systems.

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Surf the web as it was

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web at your fingertips. The Archive contains over 100 terabytes and 10 billion web pages archived from 1996 to the present.

Our historical websites, dating from 1997, are thorny.ml.org, thorny.synchro.net, and free-state.net.

A new website continues to be under construction, at least in theory.

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Pizza Hut Sends Spam Email To Apologize For Spam Email

Pizza Hut apologized for sending an unsolicited marketing email by sending an unsolicited apology email. The pizza-maker's flub is all the more egregious because they force customer who place orders online to opt-in to spam marketing. According to Pizza Hut, the error occurred while "testing new functionality."

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Did McCain Plagiarize His Georgia Speech From Wikipedia?

A Wikipedia editor notices some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia. They appear similar enough that most people would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived from Wikipedia.

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Another Inventor Of The Internet Wants To Gag It

Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title:" Inventor of the Internet" in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer filesharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and — you guessed it — can throttle them in favor of other, more 'high-priority' traffic."

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January 30th is International Delete Your MySpace Day

Flushing the toilet of the Internet: http://bloggasm.com/january-30th-is-international-delete-your-myspace-account-day

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White House leaked classified info to FOX News, tipped off al Qaeda to secret surveillance, destroyed year-long spy effort.

From a Washington Post story: Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

Unbelievable. Seriously. Leaking national security info to Fox News and destroying a year-long surveillance of Al Qaeda should put someone from the Bush Administration in jail. We are in greater danger because of the continued incompetence of George Bush and his minions.

From the Washington Post: A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release. Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

Okay, so we know that SITE has some amazingly important intel. They pass it on to the Bush administration. And, it ends up on Fox News.

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Our Internet Policy Is A Disgrace: Here's The Proof - Yahoo! News

Our Internet Policy Is A Disgrace: Here's The Proof - Yahoo! News:

"There's only one force powerful enough to combat all these weapons. You. You have to ask your member of Congress and your Senator, 'Why don't we have the same choice for the Internet that people in England do?' You have to ask what your representatives are going to do about this deplorable situation. And you have to keep on asking until there's an answer."