Recommended:
Cyber Law, Tech and Policy
Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan Rule that Lets the NSA Spy on Americans — John Napier Tye, former section chief for Internet freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, in an OpEd at The Washington Post:
“A legal regime in which U.S. citizens’ data receives different levels of privacy and oversight, depending on whether it is collected inside or outside U.S. borders, may have made sense when most communications by U.S. persons stayed inside the United States. But today, U.S. communications increasingly travel across U.S. borders — or are stored beyond them. For example, the Google and Yahoo e-mail systems rely on networks of ‘mirror’ servers located throughout the world. An e-mail from New York to New Jersey is likely to wind up on servers in Brazil, Japan and Britain. The same is true for most purely domestic communications. Executive Order 12333 contains nothing to prevent the NSA from collecting and storing all such communications — content as well as metadata — provided that such collection occurs outside the United States in the course of a lawful foreign intelligence investigation. No warrant or court approval is required, and such collection never need be reported to Congress. None of the reforms that Obama announced earlier this year will affect such collection. Without any legal barriers to such collection, U.S. persons must increasingly rely on the affected companies to implement security measures to keep their communications private. The executive order does not require the NSA to notify or obtain consent of a company before collecting its users’ data.”Network Neutrality and Quality of Service: What a Non-Discrimination Rule Should Look Like – a new paper (pdf) by Stanford Law Professor Barbara Van Schewick.
Why the Security of USB Is Fundamentally Broken — Wired:
”Computer users pass around USB sticks like silicon business cards. Although we know they often carry malware infections, we depend on antivirus scans and the occasional reformatting to keep our thumbdrives from becoming the carrier for the next digital epidemic. But the security problems with USB devices run deeper than you think: Their risk isn’t just in what they carry, it’s built into the core of how they work. That’s the takeaway from findings security researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell plan to present next week, demonstrating a collection of proof-of-concept malicious software that highlights how the security of USB devices has long been fundamentally broken.”General Interest
40 Years on, the Barcode Has Turned Everything Into Information — Wired:
“On June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m., Sharon Buchanan used a barcode to ring up a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. A tectonic shift in the underlying economics of trade in tangible, physical goods of all kinds soon followed. “Stanford Team Achieves ‘Holy Grail’ of Battery Design: A Stable Lithium Anode.
Revolutionary new blood test ‘could detect ALL types of cancer’ – The Daily Mail