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Posts Tagged privacy
UPS Requires Access To Gun Sellers’ Books
From Ammoland:
Firearms sellers started to receive a new agreement that they must sign to ship firearms through UPS. The letter contains new provisions in addition to the requirements announced last month. The most concerning of these new regulations is that UPS requires gun companies to turn over customer data and must allow UPS access to review and examine the shipper’s books and records relevant to the products being shipped upon request. The shipper must also provide UPS with invoices for any firearms-related products.
Gun Control Groups Complain That Gun Owners’ Privacy Is Hampering Violence Studies
From Ammoland:
The Los Angeles Times is reporting that lawsuits filed by the National Rifle Association, Second Amendment Foundation and “other gun rights groups” challenging California’s sharing of admittedly “detailed information on gun owners” with researchers is hampering so-called “gun violence studies.”
Oppose the Surveillance of the EARN IT Act
From EFF:
While Apple’s plan would have put the privacy and security of its users at risk, the EARN IT Act compromises security and free speech for everyone. The bill would create serious legal risk for business that hosts content—messages, photos stored in the cloud, online backups—and, potentially, even cloud-hosting sites like those using Amazon Web Services, unless they use government-approved scanning tools.
Governments Continue Encryption Propaganda
From Electronic Frontier Foundation:
This week, the U.K. government launched an unprecedented and deceptive effort to kill off end-to-end encryption. They’ve hired a fancy ad agency to convince people that encrypted messages are dangerous to children.
The explicit goal of the “No Place to Hide” campaign, launched on Tuesday, is to prevent Facebook from expanding its use of end-to-end encryption. Currently, Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging system uses end-to-end encryption, but other communications systems, including Facebook Messenger, are scanned and checked against a US government database, run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which identifies child abuse images.
Apple Backs Down On Phone Scanning Plans
NBC Tried To Dox Rittenhouse Jurors
From The Federalist:
Judge Bruce Schroeder announced Thursday morning that MSNBC would no longer be permitted in the courtroom of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial after someone who identified himself as a producer working for MSNBC was pulled over and arrested when he blew a red light while following a bus transporting the jurors.
The man identified himself as James J. Morrison, employed by MSNBC, and said he had been instructed by MSNBC’s Irene Byon in New York to follow the jury bus, according to the judge.
Georgia Senator Introduced Gun Owner Privacy Act
From Bearing Arms:
Loeffler’s bill, the Gun Owner Privacy Act, would ban the use of federal funds to store personal information collected during background checks attached to gun purchases. Federal agencies are already barred from creating a database of gun owners, but the legislation will give citizens recourse for any infringements on their privacy. While the law would not apply to Americans who fail background checks, those whose records are illegally stored will be able to sue agencies in federal court and collect damages.
Researcher Tracked Gun Buyers For 12 Years
From The Truth About Guns:
These researchers — including noted anti-gun rights UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program director Garen Wintemute — used Dealer Records of Sales to identify 160,619 lawful gun owners. They then tracked these individuals, including where they lived, for the period of 2001-2013.
Mobile Customer Locations Easily Accessible
From Motherboard:
Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, and comes as media and policy makers are paying more attention than ever to how location and other sensitive data is collected and sold. The investigation also shows that a wide variety of companies can access cell phone location data, and that the information trickles down from cell phone providers to a wide array of smaller players, who don’t necessarily have the correct safeguards in place to protect that data.
CA Registration Data Breach
Posted by Brian in Law, News, Threat Watch on 9/Jul/2018 12:40
From NRA-ILA:
Possibly even more concerning with DOJ’s online registration system were the reports of the system’s improper disclosure of personal information to other users. There have been confirmed reports of individuals attempting to register their firearms who were improperly given access to the account information associated with another individual, due to a complete breakdown of CA DOJ’s registration application system. In some cases, the system allowed users to see all the personal information (including home address, telephone number, email, and Driver’s License number) for another user and all the information that user had submitted for registering their firearms as “assault weaponsâ€â€”including the firearms make/model/serial number and all of the photos and attachments to the user’s registration application.
Choosing A Strong Password Is Easier Than You Think
Posted by Brian in Tech, Threat Watch on 8/Aug/2016 07:00
From EFF:
Randomly-generated passphrases offer a major security upgrade over user-chosen passwords. Estimating the difficulty of guessing or cracking a human-chosen password is very difficult. It was the primary topic of my own PhD thesis and remains an active area of research. (One of many difficulties when people choose passwords themselves is that people aren’t very good at making random, unpredictable choices.)
Measuring the security of a randomly-generated passphrase is easy. The most common approach to randomly-generated passphrases (immortalized by XKCD) is to simply choose several words from a list of words, at random. The more words you choose, or the longer the list, the harder it is to crack. Looking at it mathematically, for k words chosen from a list of length n, there are kn possible passphrases of this type. It will take an adversary about kn/2 guesses on average to crack this passphrase. This leaves a big question, though: where do we get a list of words suitable for passphrases, and how do we choose the length of that list?
In general choosing four five-letter words is better than one long word with number substitutions and some weird characters thrown in. It’s easier to remember and vastly harder for a computer to guess.
How Did The FBI Break Into iPhone?
From the EFF:
In addition, this new method of accessing the phone raises questions about the government’s apparent use of security vulnerabilities in iOS and whether it will inform Apple about these vulnerabilities. As a panel of experts hand-picked by the White House recognized, any decision to withhold a security vulnerability for intelligence or law enforcement purposes leaves ordinary users at risk from malicious third parties who also may use the vulnerability. Thanks to a lawsuit by EFF, the government has released its official policy for determining when to disclose security vulnerabilities, the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP).
The Apple Case Could Violate The Thirteenth Amendment
If Apple is compelled to create a program that doesn’t exist for the government, that would be a type of slavery.
From Reason.com:
Instead, the DOJ has obtained the most unique search warrant I have ever seen in 40 years of examining them. Here, the DOJ has persuaded a judge to issue a search warrant for A THING THAT DOES NOT EXIST, by forcing Apple to create a key that the FBI is incapable of creating.
There is no authority for the government to compel a nonparty to its case to do its work, against the nonparty’s will, and against profound constitutional values. Essentially, the DOJ wants Apple to hack into its own computer product, thereby telling anyone who can access the key how to do the same.
If the courts conscripted Apple to work for the government and thereby destroy or diminish its own product, the decision would constitute a form of slavery, which is prohibited by our values and by the Thirteenth Amendment.