Privacy:
Privacy advocates seek more openness on NSA surveillance
As Congress considers whether to extend the life of a program that sweeps up American phone records, privacy advocates and civil liberties groups say too much about government surveillance remains secret for the public to fully evaluate its reach or effectiveness. The disclosure two years ago of the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts prodded the federal government to declassify reams of once-secret documents, including opinions from a secretive intelligence court laying out the program’s origins and legal underpinnings. But critics say key language from the disclosed documents remains censored, the release of information has been selective, and the ongoing trickle of once-secret memos has raised concerns about how many other potentially illuminating records might yet remain outside the public’s reach.
"That means the public lacks information it needs to understand the significance of the powers that government already has and the significance of the powers that the government is asking for," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
http://www.columbian.com/news/2015/apr/22/privacy-advocates-seek-more-openness-on-nsa-survei/.
AALL Strongly Opposes Clean Reauthorization of Section 215 of USA PATRIOT Act
With the June 1 expiration looming, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) have introduced legislation to reauthorize of key provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act (Patriot Act). The bill, S. 1035, would extend, without amendment, Section 215 of the Patriot Act through 2020. Circumventing the usual deliberation and debate that occurs in committee, the Majority Leader has invoked Rule XIV, a Senate procedural rule to bypass the usual committee process and send the bill straight to the Senate floor.
AALL staunchly opposes this effort to cleanly reauthorize Section 215, the "library records" provision, which has been used to justify the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of Americans’ phone records. Since its hasty passage in 2001, the Patriot Act has upended Americans’ expectation of privacy and fomented a culture of government secrecy.
https://aallwash.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/aall-strongly-opposes-clean-reauthorization-of-section-215-of-usa-patriot-act/.
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Intellectual Property:
Report: Automakers Push To Outlaw Home Car Repairs
According to a report recently ran by Autoblog, in the future it could contrary to copyright law if car enthusiasts were to work on their own vehicles. Thanks to Auto Alliance, which is the big lobbying group that represents automakers in the U.S. the brave new world could crush shade tree mechanics nationwide. The whole thing stems from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a piece of legislation that doesn’t seem to obviously prohibit people from fixing or modifying their own cars. According to Auto Alliance, when any third party tinkers with a vehicle’s ECU it’s "legally problematic." After all, a kid who decides to tweak his ride’s ECU could through amateurish programming cause the brakes to become unresponsive or shut off all emissions controls.
http://www.insidercarnews.com/report-automakers-push-to-outlaw-home-car-repairs/.
Settlement stalls in Palin copyright lawsuit
Sarah Palin agreed to pay a New Jersey newspaper $15,000 for using one of its iconic Sept. 11 photographs, but terms of a confidentiality agreement stalled the deal, according to federal court documents filed this week. Details of the legal wrangling became public in a federal copyright infringement lawsuit. New Jersey Media Group, which publishes The Record of Bergen County, sued Palin and her political action committee, SarahPAC, in September 2013 after one of its images was used without permission on the campaign’s website and social media.
The photograph, taken by Thomas E. Franklin, showed three firefighters raising the American flag over ground zero hours after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001. In documents filed Monday, William Dunnegan, an attorney for the newspaper, wrote that Palin’s attorneys told him that the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee required the non-disclosure clause "because her political action committee did not want any hint of compromise associated with her name."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/04/22/settlement-stalls-in-palin-copyright-lawsuit/26216965/.
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Public Policyy:
Hearing airs charges that states took grant money while violating laws
At a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, federal employees and child advocates argued that states have been allowed to take juvenile-justice grant money while violating laws against jailing kids for minor infractions. "The true victims in all of this are the children who come into contact with inadequate juvenile-justice systems," said Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the committee.
Among those testifying at the hearing was University of Tennessee law professor Dean Rivkin, who was featured in a 2014 Center for Public Integrity investigation into children who were shackled and jailed in Knox County, Tenn., after being summoned to court for truancy. "In the juvenile jail," Rivkin told the committee, "our clients were shackled, indiscriminately drug tested, asked to strip, given orange jail jump-suits, and placed in a facility that held serious juvenile offenders. They were not screened for mental-health problems."
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/22/17205/hearing-airs-charges-states-took-grant-money-while-violating-laws.
Can California Tame “Energy Hog” Computers?
California may soon become the first state in the nation to set minimum energy standards for home digital devices, including computers, monitors, modems and video game consoles. These machines use a lot of electricity, even when they’re off – and we’re using them more than five times as often as we did in 2001. The California Energy Commission is debating new rules for digital energy efficiency at a public workshop on Wednesday in Sacramento. Last fall, the governor vetoed an industry-supported bill that would have made rules like these non-binding.
http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2015-04-13/energy-policy/can-california-tame-energy-hog-computers/a45619-1.
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International Outlook:
Woman behind Pakistan’s first hackathon, Sabeen Mahmud, shot dead by unknown gunmen
The progressive activist and organizer who ran Pakistan’s first-ever hackathon and led a human rights and a peace-focused nonprofit known as The Second Floor (T2F) was shot dead today by unidentified gunmen in Karachi. Sabeen Mahmud was leaving the T2F offices with her mother some time after 9pm on Friday evening, reports the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. She was on her way home when she was shot, the paper reports.
T2F had on Friday organised a talk on Balochistan: ‘Unsilencing Balochistan Take 2: In Conversation with Mama Qadeer, Farzana Baloch & Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur.’ Sabeen had left T2F after attending the session, when she was targeted. T2F, described as a community space for open dialogue, was Sabeen’s brainchild. In an interview with Aurora, she referred to it as "an inclusive space where different kinds of people can be comfortable." Conceived as a bookstore and café patterned after the old coffeehouse culture of Lahore and Karachi, The Second Floor – or T2F, as everyone calls it – says on its website that it was born out of a desire to enact transformational change in urban Pakistani society.
http://boingboing.net/2015/04/24/woman-behind-pakistans-firs.html.
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Internet Access:
How to Detect Sneaky NSA ‘Quantum Insert’ Attacks
Among all of the NSA hacking operations exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden over the last two years, one in particular has stood out for its sophistication and stealthiness. Known as Quantum Insert, the man-on-the-side hacking technique has been used to great effect since 2005 by the NSA and its partner spy agency, Britain’s GCHQ, to hack into high-value, hard-to-reach systems and implant malware. Quantum Insert is useful for getting at machines that can’t be reached through phishing attacks. It works by hijacking a browser as it’s trying to access web pages and forcing it to visit a malicious web page, rather than the page the target intend to visit. The attackers can then surreptitiously download malware onto the target’s machine from the rogue web page. Quantum Insert has been used to hack the machines of terrorist suspects in the Middle East, but it was also used in a controversial GCHQ/NSA operation against employees of the Belgian telecom Belgacom and against workers at OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The “highly successful” technique allowed the NSA to place 300 malicious implants on computers around the world in 2010, according to the spy agency’s own internal documents—all while remaining undetected. But now security researchers with Fox-IT in the Netherlands, who helped investigate that hack against Belgacom, have found a way to detect Quantum Insert attacks using common intrusion detection tools such as Snort, Bro and Suricata.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/researchers-uncover-method-detect-nsa-quantum-insert-hacks/.
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The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.