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AT&T has been secretly spying on its own customers, the Daily Beast reports. The revelation comes days after the top carrier announced plans to purchase Time Warner. The report claims that AT&T ran a program called Project Hemisphere through which it analyzed cellular data from the company's call records to determine where a given individual is located and with whom they are speaking. The New York Times reported about the program's existence in 2013, but it was described as a "partnership" between A&T and the government for fighting narcotics trafficking. But today's report, which cites several classifed documents, claims that AT&T used Hemisphere for a range of other functions -- and always without a warrant. From the report:Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why. [...] Hemisphere isn't a "partnership" but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company's massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public. These new revelations come as the company seeks to acquire Time Warner in the face of vocal opposition saying the deal would be bad for consumers. While telecommunications companies are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian. "Companies have to give this data to law enforcement upon request, if they have it. AT&T doesn't have to data-mine its database to help police come up with new numbers to investigate," Soghoian said. AT&T has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation's wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months, according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has declared a popular internet meme depicting a cartoon frog to be a hate symbol. Pepe the Frog's beginnings were unoffensive: he is the creation of comic book creator Matt Furie, who featured the frog as a character in the series Boy's Club beginning in 2005. The character subsequently became a beloved meme, often called the "sad frog meme" and shared with a speech bubble reading "Feels good man" or "Feels bad man." But recently, as the Daily Beast reported in May, the character has been co-opted by a faction of Internet denizens who decided to reclaim it from the mainstream, and began sharing it in anti-Semitic contexts. "Images of the frog, variously portrayed with a Hitler-like mustache, wearing a yarmulke or a Klan hood, have proliferated in recent weeks in hateful messages aimed at Jewish and other users on Twitter," the ADL wrote in a statement. "Once again, racists and haters have taken a popular Internet meme and twisted it for their own purposes of spreading bigotry and harassing users," wrote ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt.

The founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, has backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America that is dedicated to "shitposting" and spreading inflammatory memes about Hillary Clinton. In 2014, Luckey's virtual-reality company, Oculus, was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. Forbes estimates his current net worth to be $700 million. The Daily Beast reports: "The 24-year-old told The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym "NimbleRichMan" on Reddit with a password given to him by the organization's founders. Nimble America says it's dedicated to providing that "shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real," according to the company's introductory statement, and has taken credit for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a cartoonishly large image of Clinton's face alongside the words "Too Big to Jail." "We conquered Reddit and drive narrative on social media, conquered the [mainstream media], now it's time to get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not," a representative for the group wrote in an introductory post on Reddit. Potential donors from Donald Trump's biggest online community -- Reddit's r/The_Donald, where one of the rules is "no dissenters" -- turned on the organization this weekend, refusing to believe "NimbleRichMan" was the anonymous "near-billionaire" he claimed to be and causing a rift on one of the alt-right's most powerful organizational tools. Luckey insists he's just the group's money man -- a wealthy booster who thought the meddlesome idea was funny. But he is also listed as the vice-president of the group on its website. In another post written under Luckey's Reddit pseudonym, Luckey echoes Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who used his wealth to secretly bankroll Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker. The Daily Beast adds: "'The American Revolution was funded by wealthy individuals," NimbleRichMan wrote on Saturday. Luckey confirmed to The Daily Beast he penned the posts under his Reddit pseudonym. 'The same has been true of many movements for freedom in history. You can't fight the American elite without serious firepower. They will outspend you and destroy you by any and all means.'"

The hacker who claimed to compromise the DNC swore he was Romanian, but new investigation shows he worked directly for Russia President Vladimir Putin's government in Moscow. The Daily Beast reports: The hacker who claims to have stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and provided them to WikiLeaks is actually an agent of the Russian government and part of an orchestrated attempt to influence U.S. media coverage surrounding the presidential election, a security research group concluded on Tuesday. The researchers, at Arlington, Va.-based ThreatConnect, traced the self-described Romanian hacker Guccifer 2.0 back to an Internet server in Russia and to a digital address that has been linked in the past to Russian online scams. Far from being a single, sophisticated hacker, Guccifer 2.0 is more likely a collection of people from the propaganda arm of the Russian government meant to deflect attention away from Moscow as the force behind the DNC hacks and leaks of emails, the researchers found. ThreatConnect is the first known group of experts to link the self-proclaimed hacker to a Russian operation, amidst an ongoing FBI investigation and a presidential campaign rocked by the release of DNC emails that have embarrassed senior party leaders and inflamed intraparty tensions turning the Democratic National Convention. The emails revealed that party insiders plotted ways to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential bid. The researchers at the aforementioned security firm are basing their conclusion on three signals: the hacker used Russian computers to edit PDF files, he also used Russian VPN -- and other internet infrastructure from the country, and that he was unable to speak Romanian.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: The Russian military claims it's making progress on a space plane similar to the U.S. Air Force's secretive X-37B robotic mini-shuttle. The tech is pretty basic. But alone among space-plane developers, the Kremlin is proposing to arm its space plane. With nukes. Lt. Col. Aleksei Solodovnikov, a rocketry instructor at the Russian Strategic Missile Forces Academy in St. Petersburg who is overseeing the space plane's development, said the orbital bomber would be flight-ready by 2020. It's unclear how much money the Kremlin is investing in the project, and how serious senior officers are about actually deploying the space plane, if and when Solodovnikov and his team finish it. In any event, the military space plane could give Russia a potentially history-altering nuclear first-strike capability. "The idea is that the bomber will take off from a normal home airfield to patrol Russian airspace," Solodovnikov said, according to Sputnik, a government-owned news site. "Upon command, it will ascend into outer space, strike a target with nuclear warheads and then return to its home base." Thanks to its orbital capability, the bomber would be able to nuke any target on Earth no longer than two hours after taking off, Solodovnikov claimed.

mi writes from a report via The Daily Beast: Unlike in cases of commercially-held data, where the Third Party doctrine allows police warrantless access, prescription drug monitoring databases are maintained by state-governments. The difference is lost to the Obama Administration, which argues that "since the records have already been submitted to a third party (a state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program) that patients no longer enjoy an expectation of privacy." The DEA has claimed for years that under federal law it has the authority to access the states' prescription drug databases using only an "administrative subpoena." These are unilaterally issued orders that do not require a showing of probable cause before a court, like what's required to obtain a warrant. Some states, like Oregon, fight it; some, like Wisconsin, do not. "The federal government is eager to see all these databases linked," reports The Daily Beast. "The Department of Justice has developed a software platform to facilitate sharing among all state PDMPs. So far 32 states already share their PDMP data through a National Association of Boards of Pharmacy program. The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA), which passed Congress in March, calls for expanding sharing of PDMP data."

An anonymous reader writes: The Daily Beast is investigating internal emails, contracts, and new information provided by a former accounting employee at Mt. Gox for clues about how and why the world's largest bitcoin exchange failed in 2014. They conclude that CEO Mark Karpeles "bought a company already missing tens of thousands of bitcoins" in 2011, leading to an email exchange a few months later where the previous owner suggested ways to make up the $800,000 shortfall. Unfortunately, Karpeles "had signed a non-disclosure agreement that left him unable to discuss the loss," and after a second larger hack, he moved the majority of bitcoins offline into "cold storage," leaving only enough online to complete transactions.

According to the article, former Mt. Gox employees "claim rogue U.S. government agents seized $5 million of Mt. Gox funds in summer 2013 in retaliation for Karpeles's refusal to cooperate with them. This seizure supposedly cut into the firm's operating reserves, which may have been the beginning of the end, at least according to the former Mt. Gox accountant."
While $450 million eventually disappeared, Thursday ZDNet reported that a class-action lawsuit brought against the bitcoin exchange by investors "has been dismissed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from US Uncut: A Super PAC headed by a longtime Clinton operative is spending $1 million to hire online trolls to "correct" Bernie Sanders' supporters on social media. Correct The Record (CTR), which is operated by Clinton attack dog and new owner of Blue Nation Review David Brock, launched a new initiative this week called "Barrier Breakers 2016" for the purpose of debating supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders -- or "Bernie Bros," as they're referred to in Correct the Record's press official release -- on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms. The "Barrier Breakers" will also publicly thank Hillary Clinton's superdelegates and fans for supporting her campaign. The paid trolls are professional communicators, coming from public relations and media backgrounds. "The task force staff's backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize," CTR stated.

Reader bricko writes: The 'Human Computer' Behind the Moon Landing Was a black woman (video). She calculated the trajectory of man's first trip to the moon by hand, and was such an accurate mathematician that John Glenn asked her to double-check NASA's computers. To top it off, she did it all as a black woman in the 1950s and 60s, when women at NASA were not even invited to meetings. And you've probably never heard of her. Meet Katherine Johnson, the African American woman who earned the nickname 'the human computer' at NASA during its space race golden age.

An anonymous reader writes: The Turkish downing of the Russian SU-24 jet last November saw a predictable series of statements from each side claiming complete innocence and blaming the other entirely. Social media was a key battleground for both sides — the Turkish and Russian governments, along with their supporters — as each tried to establish a dominant narrative explanation for what had just happened. In the midst of the online competition, a little-observed, funhouse mirror of an online hoax was brilliantly perpetrated, one with consequences likely exceeding the expectation of the hoaxster. The Russian Ministry of Defense was duped by a fake image that Russian state media itself had circulated more than a year earlier, as a way to deny Moscow's involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

schwit1 writes: The Pentagon is attempting what was, until recently, an impossible technological feat -- developing a high-bandwidth neural interface that would allow people to beam data from their minds to external devices and back. That's right -- a brain modem. One that could allow a soldier to, for example, control a drone with his mind. On Feb. 8, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the US military's fringe-science wing -- announced the first successful tests, on animal subjects, of a tiny sensor that travels through blood vessels, lodges in the brain and records neural activity. The so-called "stentrode," a combination stent and electrode, is the size of a paperclip and flexible. The tiny, injectable machine -- the invention of neurologist Tom Oxley and his team at the University of Melbourne in Australia -- could help researchers solve one of the most vexing problems with the brain modem: how to insert a transmitter into the brain without also drilling a hole in the user's head, a risky procedure under any circumstances.

According to the Daily Beast, writes reader schwit1, North Dakota police will be free to fire 'less than lethal' weapons from the air thanks to the influence of a pro-police lobbyist. That means beanbags, tear-gas, and Tasers, at the very least, can be brought to bear by remote. It's worth noting that "non-lethal" isn't purely true, even if that's the intent behind such technologies. From the article, based partly on FOIA requests made by MuckRock into drone use by government agencies: The bill’s stated intent was to require police to obtain a search warrant from a judge in order to use a drone to search for criminal evidence. In fact, the original draft of Representative Rick Becker’s bill would have banned all weapons on police drones. Then Bruce Burkett of the North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association was allowed by the state house committee to amend HB 1328 and limit the prohibition only to lethal weapons. “Less than lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons, and Tasers are therefore permitted on police drones.

mi points out an article from Nick Gillespie, editor of libertarian website Reason, who was recently asked by the federal government to provide identifying information on anonymous commenters from one of the site's blog posts. Not only was Reason issued a subpoena for the commenters's identities, but they were also placed under a gag order, preventing them from even mentioning it to somebody who wasn't their lawyer. Gillespie says the comments in question were "hyperbolic, in questionable taste–and fully within the norms of Internet commentary." He continues: To the extent that the feds actually thought these were serious plans to do real harm, why the hell would they respond with a slow-moving subpoena whose deadline was days away? By spending five minutes doing the laziest, George Jetson-style online "research" (read: Google and site searches), they would have found publicly available info on some of the commenters. I'm talking things like websites and Google+ pages. One of the commenters had literally posted thousands of comments at Reason.com, from which it is clear that he (assuming it is a he) is not exactly a threat to anyone other than common decency."

HughPickens.com points out Shane Harris's report at The Daily Beast that when powerful spying authorities under the Patriot Act expire at the stroke of midnight Monday, as currently appears likely, they may never return. "Senators have been negotiating over whether to pass a House bill that would renew and tweak existing provisions in the long-controversial law, but if the sunset comes and the provisions are off the books, lawmakers in both chambers would be facing a vote to reinstate controversial surveillance authorities, which is an entirely different political calculation. ... Three major Patriot provisions are on the chopping block: so-called roving wiretaps, which let the government monitor one person's multiple electronic devices; the "lone-wolf" provision, which allows surveillance of someone who's not connected to a known terrorist group; and Section 215, which, among other things, the government uses to collect the records of all landline phone calls in the United States." Obama has been urging Congress to pass the Freedom Act, but not warning that the sky will fall if they don't. That may reflect a calculation on the president's part that the surveillance authorities aren't important enough to lose political capital fighting to keep them. Meanwhile with the Senate not slated to return to Washington until just hours before that deadline, opponents like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) showing no signs of budging, and the House so far unwilling to bail out the upper chamber, the prospects for an eleventh-hour breakthrough look slim.

Penguinisto writes According to a scan by Qualys, Hillary Clinton's personal e-mail server, which has lately generated more than a little controversy in US political circles, has earned an "F" rating for security from the security vendor. Problems include SSL2 support, a weak signature, and only having support for older TLS protocols, among numerous other problems. Note that there are allegations that the email server was possibly already hacked in 2013. (Note: Mrs. Clinton plans on Giving a press conference to the public today on the issue.)

reifman writes In 'The Imitation Game': Can This Big Fat Cliche Win Best Picture?, reviewer Monica Guzman blasts the film for distorting history and missing the opportunity to inspire today's tech savvy, highly surveilled generation to follow in Turing's path: Instead of an inventor, it shows a stereotype. Instead of inspiring us to follow in the footsteps of a person who shaped technology, the film inspires us only to get out of the way of the next genius who can. The Imitation Game changed aspects of the real Alan Turing's personality to conform more closely to our idea of the solitary nerd. It falls in line with the tired idea that only outcasts could love computers...As for explaining the science behind Turing's code-breaking machine, the movie doesn't bother. if invention doesn't deserve top billing in this story, where the technology at its heart is not only historically significant but hugely resonant in our lives today, then I don't know where it would. The message of the movie is that the uncommon man can do amazing things, but the message we need is that the common man, woman, anybody can and should tinker with the technology that manages our whole world.

As reported by The Daily Beast, news on the ongoing terror attack (or attacks) in Paris. Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, who are accused of slaughtering 12 in an attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine, have been cornered by hundreds of security officials close to Charles de Gaulle Airport, north of Paris. Officials say they believe the heavily armed brothers are holding one hostage. Twenty miles south, in the east of the city, at least one gunman is believed to have taken six hostages at a Jewish store. Police suspect that the third gunman is the same man who shot and killed a policewoman on Thursday morning before escaping in a bulletproof vest. Update: 01/09 17:44 GMT by T : And now all three of the gunmen involved in today's hostage taking are dead. Watch this space for updates. Update: 01/09 17:15 GMT by T : CNN's story features a stream of updates (and an autoplaying video ad to beware), as does The Telegraph. Latest news is that brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi have been killed by police, but it's unclear whether the same is true of the third hostage-taker.

schwit1 writes with this excerpt from The Daily Beast: America's $400 billion, top-of-the-line aircraft can't see the battlefield all that well. Which means it's actually worse than its predecessors at fighting today's wars. .... The problem stems from the fact that the technology found on one of the stealth fighter's primary air-to-ground sensors—its nose-mounted Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS)—is more than a decade old and hopelessly obsolete. The EOTS, which is similar in concept to a large high-resolution infrared and television camera, is used to visually identify and monitor ground targets. The system can also mark targets for laser-guided bombs. ... Older jets currently in service with the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps can carry the latest generation of sensor pods, which are far more advanced than the EOTS sensor carried by the F-35. ... The end result is that when the F-35 finally becomes operational after its myriad technical problems, cost overruns, and massive delays, in some ways it will be less capable than current fighters in the Pentagon's inventory.

mbone writes with news about the first privately-funded spacecraft to travel the Moon. Cold War competition between superpowers dominated the first decades of space travel and exploration. Individual governments took the lead, bankrolling most of the process in the name of competition and nationalism. Ultimately international cooperation and collaboration took root, and the landscape is already very different. The present and future of space exploration is more collaborative, more international, and involves both space agencies and private companies. One such project is the combination Chang’e 5-T1 and Manfred Memorial Moon Mission (4M), which launched together last Thursday. Both projects are testbeds for ideas: Chang’e 5-T1 is a prototype for a robotic probe intended to return samples from the Moon to Earth, while 4M is a simple communications experiment encouraging amateur participation. But the intriguing bit is that 4M is a project of the private Luxembourg-based company LuxSpace, while Chang’e 5-T1 is a Chinese project, and the whole endeavor was launched on a Chinese rocket.

An anonymous reader writes The investigation of a Malaysian passenger jet shot down over Ukrainian rebel held territory is heating up. U.S. and U.K. news organizations are studiously trying to spread the blame, Russian ITAR, which, just earlier today was celebrating the downing of a large aircraft by rebel missiles in Torez (Google cache) is reporting that the rebels do not have access to the missiles needed for such attacks. The rebel commander who earlier today reported the downing of the aircraft has also issued a correction to earlier reports that they had captured BUK air defense systems with Russian sources now stating that the rebels do not posses such air defenses. The Ukrainian president has been attempting to frame the incident as a "terrorist attack". President Obama made contact with Vladimir Putin and has been instead treating it as an accident, calling it a "terrible tragedy" and saying that the priority is investigating whether U.S. citizens were involved. With control of the black box and its own internet propaganda army Russia may be in a good position to win the propaganda war.

PvtVoid writes: "Jeopardy champion Arthur Chu pens a heartfelt takedown of misogyny in nerd culture: 'I’ve heard and seen the stories that those of you who followed the #YesAllWomen hashtag on Twitter have seen—women getting groped at cons, women getting vicious insults flung at them online, women getting stalked by creeps in college and told they should be "flattered." I’ve heard Elliot Rodger’s voice before. I was expecting his manifesto to be incomprehensible madness—hoping for it to be—but it wasn’t. It’s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto, except for the part about mass murder. I've heard it from acquaintances, I've heard it from friends. I've heard it come out of my own mouth, in moments of anger and weakness.

What the f*$# is wrong with us? How much longer are we going to be in denial that there's a thing called "rape culture" and we ought to do something about it? ... To paraphrase the great John Oliver, listen up, fellow self-pitying nerd boys — we are not the victims here. We are not the underdogs. We are not the ones who have our ownership over our bodies and our emotions stepped on constantly by other people's entitlement. We're not the ones where one out of six of us will have someone violently attempt to take control of our bodies in our lifetimes.'"

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Examiner: "The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) confirmed March 16 the arrest of a group of Russians in the Zaporizhzhia (Zaporozhye) region of Ukraine. The men were armed with firearms, explosives and unspecified 'special technical means'. This follows the March 14 arrest ... of several Russians dressed black uniforms with no insignia, armed with AKS-74 assault rifles and in possession of numerous ID cards under various names. One of which was an ID card of Military Intelligence Directorate of the Russian armed forces; commonly known as 'Spetsnaz'. ... Spetsnaz commandos operating in eastern Ukraine would have the missions encompassing general ground reconnaissance of Ukrainian army units ... missions they may perform preparatory to a Russian invasion would be planting explosives at key communications choke points to hinder movement of Ukrainian forces; seizing control of roads, rail heads, bridges and ports for use by arriving Russian combat troops; and possibly capturing or assassinating Ukrainian generals or politicians in key positions ... Spetsnaz also infiltrate themselves into local populations ... Once in place they begin 'stirring the pot' of ethnic and political strife with the goal of creating violent clashes usually involving firearms and destabilizing local authority." The submitter adds links to more at Forbes, The Daily Beast, and The New Republic.

sandbagger writes "New York City may have to deal with a measles problem. New Yorkers are being urged to make sure all household members, including young children, are vaccinated. To date, there have been 16 confirmed cases and four hospitalizations. This follows news from the CDC in December that 2013 saw triple the average number of yearly measles cases. 2014 is off to an even worse start; there have been cases recently in the Boston metropolitan area and more than a dozen in the Bay Area as well. Vaccinations seem to be a victim of their own success — people look around and see no polio or measles and wonder why they should bother. Others repeat bogus claim about vaccines causing autism. How do you think we can get through to the anti-vaxxers?"

__roo writes "Many Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It's all pseudoscience — so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others? That's the question the author of this article tackles: 'From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort ... Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. ... The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.' He points out his local Whole Foods' clientele shop at a place where a significant portion of the product being sold is based on simple pseudoscience. So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"

cold fjord writes "The Daily Beast reports on Web Junkie, a documentary showing the unsettling efforts undertaken by the Internet Addiction Treatment Center in China to break teenagers of their internet habits. Quoting: 'China was one of the first countries to brand "Internet addiction" as a clinical disorder, and to claim it's the number one threat to its teenagers today. The Chinese government has erected 400 rehabilitation boot camps like this one ... a bizarre hybrid of military barracks and mental hospital. ... Every room in the facility is monitored by cameras. ... Teens spend a minimum of three months at Daxing. ... Wires and nodes will be hooked to their head ... they're administered daily medication (without being told what it is), they have to keep their rooms spotless, partake in individual and group therapy sessions with their parents, and do boot camp-style exercise ... One kid in the film claims to have played World of Warcraft for 300 hours straight, taking only tiny naps in between. ... "Some kids are so hooked on these games they think going to the bathroom will affect their performance. So they wear a diaper. These are the same as heroin addicts. ... That's why we call it electronic heroin."' Wired has further details and a clip from the documentary."

Dega704 writes with news that Edward Snowden is believed to have a collection of highly sensitive classified documents that will be released in the event he is detained, hurt, or killed. According to Reuters, "The data is protected with sophisticated encryption, and multiple passwords are needed to open it, said two of the sources, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. The passwords are in the possession of at least three different people and are valid for only a brief time window each day, they said. The identities of persons who might have the passwords are unknown." These details have caused several security experts to express skepticism, but multiple sources, including Glenn Greenwald, believe Snowden has not released all of the documents he appropriated. "U.S. officials and other sources said only a small proportion of the classified material Snowden downloaded during stints as a contract systems administrator for NSA has been made public. Some Obama Administration officials have said privately that Snowden downloaded enough material to fuel two more years of news stories." Whether or not it's true, U.S. and U.K. officials clearly believe it, which can only serve to protect Snowden.

theodp writes "With new bike sharing programs all the rage, spending tens of millions of dollars to make city streets more bike friendly with hundreds of miles of bike lanes has become a priority for bike-loving mayors like NYC's Michael Bloomberg and Chicago's Rahm Emanuel. 'You cannot be for a startup, high-tech economy and not be pro-bike,' claimed Emanuel, who credited bike-sharing and bike lanes for attracting Google and Motorola Mobility to downtown Chicago. Now, with huge bike-sharing contracts awarded and programs underway, the NY Times asks the big question, How Safe Is Cycling? Because bike accidents rarely make front page news and are likely to be dramatically underreported, it's hard to say, concludes the NYT's Gina Kolata. UCSF trauma surgeon Dr. Rochelle Dicker, who studied hospital and police records for 2,504 bicyclists treated at San Francisco General Hospital, told Kolata,'Lots of my colleagues do not want to ride after seeing these [city biking] injuries.' On the other hand, Andy Pruitt, the founder of the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine and an avid lifelong cyclist, said the dangers were overstated, noting he's only broken his collarbone twice and hip once in four decades of long-distance cycling. So, is cycling safe, especially in the city? And is it OK to follow Mayor Emanuel's lead and lose the helmet?"

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "BBC reports that Jofi Joseph, a senior National Security Council staffer who was a key member of the White House team negotiating on Iran's nuclear weapons program, has been fired ... after a months-long probe into a barrage of tweets that included caustic criticisms of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top NSC officials, especially Ben Rhodes – whom he accused of dodging questions about Benghazi. Joseph, who posted under the now defunct Twitter name @NatSecWonk, gave a lacerating commentary on anything from policy to personal appearance. 'Was Huma Abedin wearing beer goggles the night she met Anthony Weiner,' he tweeted, referring to the scandal-hit former New York mayoral candidate and his wife, a former aide of Hillary Clinton. He tweeted that Mrs Clinton 'had few policy goals and no wins' in the Middle East. He said Chelsea Clinton was 'assuming all of her parents' vices,' and targeted figures such as Republican commentator Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney's wife Ann for their looks and weight. Many in the foreign policy community reacted with shock to the revelation that Joseph was the mystery tweeter because Joseph was well known among policy wonks and his wife, Carolyn Leddy, is a well-respected professional staffer on the Republican side of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 'What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments,' said Joseph in an apology. 'I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologize to everyone I insulted.'"

An anonymous reader writes "According to a report at The Daily Beast, the Obama administration has decided to give the drone program to the Pentagon, taking it away from the CIA. This could lead to increased transparency for the program and stricter requirements for drone strikes. From the article: 'Officials anticipate a phased-in transition in which the CIA’s drone operations would be gradually shifted over to the military, a process that could take as little as a year. Others say it might take longer but would occur during President Obama’s second term. “You can’t just flip a switch, but it’s on a reasonably fast track,” says one U.S. official. During that time, CIA and DOD operators would begin to work more closely together to ensure a smooth hand-off. The CIA would remain involved in lethal targeting, at least on the intelligence side, but would not actually control the unmanned aerial vehicles. Officials told The Daily Beast that a potential downside of the agency’s relinquishing control of the program was the loss of a decade of expertise that the CIA has developed since it has been prosecuting its war in Pakistan and beyond. At least for a period of transition, CIA operators would likely work alongside their military counterparts to target suspected terrorists.'"

theodp writes "Over at The Daily Beast, Dan Lyons says Resumegate is overblown and says it's time to stop picking on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. Even without the circa-1979 CS degree some incorrectly thought he possessed, Lyons argues that Thompson is still perfectly capable, his critics have ulterior motives, and his competitors have all lied before. 'Forgive me for being less than shocked at the idea of a CEO lying,' writes Lyons. 'Steve Jobs [college dropout] used to lie all the time, and he's apparently the greatest CEO who ever lived. Google lied about taking money from Canadian pharmacies to run illegal drug ads, but finally had to come clean and pay $500 million in fines to settle the charges. Mark Zuckerberg [college dropout] last fall settled charges brought by the FTC that his company had made "unfair and deceptive" claims—I think that's like lying—and, what's more, had violated federal laws.' So what makes the fudging of a 30-year old accomplishment on the Yahoo CEO's resume a transgression that the 'highly ethical and honest folks in Silicon Valley' simply cannot bear? 'Facebook is a cool kid,' explains Lyons. 'So is Apple. Yahoo is the loser kid that nobody likes.'"

theodp writes "The WSJ reports that China's Ministry of Education plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which more than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work. What if the U.S. government were to adopt China's approach? According to the most recent U.S. census data, among the first majors to go: psychology, U.S. history and military technologies. Lest you computer programmers get too smug, consider this."

An anonymous reader writes "Protesters in Syria, dealing with a strict media blackout, have rolled out new iPhone and iPad apps to share news, stories, and even jokes. Amid a brutal crackdown, rebels are fighting back on their iPhones. The Arab Spring's newest weapon keeps the opposition informed—and the regime in check."

Hugh Pickens writes "Eli Lake reports that the U.S.'s 16 intelligence agencies are using a program called SureView that makes it easier to spy on the spies and catch whistleblowers early in the act. SureView is a type of auditing software that specializes in 'behavior-based internal monitoring' that monitors the intelligence officer's computer activity. If the officer acts like a potential leaker, sending an encrypted email or using an unregistered thumb drive, the analyst might push a button and watch a screen video of the officer's last hour of work. Once a case is made that a leak might be imminent, it is checkmate: the agent is thwarted. 'Had SureView been on Bradley Manning's machine, no one would know who Bradley Manning is today,' says Ryan Szedelo, manager for Raytheon's SureView software. The intelligence community has had auditing software for years. SureView came on the market in 2002. But the programs were buggy and often prone to false positives, alerting a network administrator too often to routine behavior. 'The technology has gotten substantially better in the last year,' says Jeffrey Harris, a former head of the National Reconnaissance Office. 'The problem with audit files was it took an army of people to understand them. Now we have rule-driven systems and expert systems that help us reason through the data.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. government has cited national security as a reason not to let Chinese company Huawei build an LTE public safety network. They're worried about Huawei's close ties to the Chinese government and the threat of any devices Huawei manufactures being bugged. Of course, whoever gets the contract is going to be manufacturing their devices in China anyway, but it looks like a Chinese company won't be allowed to deploy the infrastructure."

Hugh Pickens writes "Brian Cathcart writes that whatever happens to News Corp., it will surely happen without James Murdoch, the clever, dashing heir apparent to his buccaneer father, Rupert, who has become a liability with little hope of survival. James Rupert told members of Parliament that when he approved a payment of about $1.1 million in 2008 to settle the first lawsuit brought by a phone-hacking victim, he was not shown an email that suggested phone hacking was more widespread at the News of the World, and not limited to one 'rogue' reporter. 'He is saying one thing—that in briefing him they gave an "incomplete picture" — and, remarkably, in a statement Thursday, they publicly denied that,' writes Cathcart. All the News Corp. executives used to tell the same story but one by one as the pressure has grown these people have been cast off or have drifted away and now as the little group has splintered and scattered, and they all need to save their own skins. 'It's not just James who is done,' writes David Carr in the NY Times. 'Rupert Murdoch, as we have long known him, is done as well.'"

Here's frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton who writes "Facebook apparently hired a PR firm that tried to seduce some pundits into writing negative editorials about Google. The 'attack angle' would have been that Google was endangering users' privacy by scraping information about users from Facebook and making such information easier to find with a Google search." Hit the link below to read the rest of Bennett's story.

The reliably cynical Seth Finkelstein commented that the attempted editorial-planting was just "often implicit dealing made explicit", (i.e. that pundits are drafted as fronts for corporate publicity campaigns like this all the time, and that the PR firm in this case spoiled the game by rudely blurting out the terms of the deal, like a guy offering to buy a girl dinner if she'll sleep with him). Steven Levy of Wired opined that with regard to the privacy issues, Facebook was the real villain for exposing information in the first place that many users would rather keep private.

Some perspective here: In 2008, I was corresponding with a high school student (using one of the Circumventor sites to get around their local school Internet blocker, naturally) who mentioned that he was able to see all the personal information of other students in his Facebook high school network -- including email address, phone number, and home address, if the user had uploaded that information to Facebook -- even if those users had not confirmed him as a friend. (Facebook allows users to join one or more "networks" indicating their school affiliation, workplace, city of residence, etc. -- such networks are distinct from Facebook groups and fan pages.) Double-checking with a few more users in the same network and in other high school networks, we found that it really was possible for any member of a high school network to view the profiles of any other member of that high school network and see all of their personal information.

Unlike other types of "networks" on Facebook, it is not possible to join a high school network simply by specifying it in your preferences. However, all of the students that I corresponded with said that in order to join their high school networks, they simply had to request to join the network, and then get a friend request confirmed by an existing member of that high school network. Which means that conning your way into the network would be easy: either (1) create a profile with the name and photo of a real student at that school, and send out friend requests to that student's friends, hoping that one of them would confirm you (not remembering that they had already friended that person under their real account), or (2) create a profile with a hot girl's picture and send out random friend requests to a bunch of guys in the network. Once you got confirmed, you'd have access to all the personal information that any student in that high school had posted on their profile. (I hasten to add that we did not actually try either of these things, but it stands to reason that it would work, since it wasn't functionally any different from what all of those students actually had to do in order to join their networks in the first place!)

I sent a message to Facebook's security team about this, and got a non-form-letter response from a real person -- their reply, however, was that this behavior was by design:

We believe this allows for greater sharing and helps make the site more useful for people, though we also recognize the potential for misuse. That's why we've built a peer verification system around the joining of high school networks. We also use automated systems to detect and flag anomalous behavior, like lots of messages sent to non-friends or a high percentage of ignored friend requests.

Smart, but probably not secure enough. For one thing, if someone is creating disposable accounts to send out friend requests in hopes of getting into a high school network, it only has to work once, so even if most of their accounts get flagged for "anomalous behavior," they only need one that doesn't get flagged. And even if that account does get flagged and cancelled later, by that time it might be too late, if they've already grabbed enough users' information. In any case, some time between 2008 and 2011, Facebook did change the behavior of high school networks so that members can no longer see the personal information of other members without a confirmed friend request. But this loophole was not that difficult to find, and it's likely that at least a few other users had discovered the same issue.

Now, imagine what would have happened if Facebook had announced that, for a fee of a few hundred dollars, they were offering CDs for sale containing the names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, and instant messenger names of all the high school students on their site (along with, of course, all the photos those students had posted of themselves). It goes without saying that after the class action lawsuits had finished, there'd be nothing left of the company but a smoldering crater. Now, I'm not suggesting that Facebook's security policy for high school networks was anywhere near as bad as selling CDs with all the personal information of their high school users, but it's worth thinking about why it should not be considered as bad. In either case, anybody willing to spend a few hundred dollars (or, equivalently, a few hundred dollars' worth of effort -- the effort to discover the loophole, and then to crank out the friend requests) could obtain the personal information of as many high school students as they wanted. What's the difference?

Well, obviously, there's the message that it would send if a company like Facebook offered to sell CDs full of users' personal information. It would lower the bar for future behavior by similar companies, it would make users extremely cynical about trusting the motivations of social networking sites, and in the long run it might even cause courts to decide that users had no reasonable expectation of privacy when joining those sites, because it was "common knowledge" and "common practice" that those sites offered up people's personal information for sale! On the other hand, if Facebook makes that information available indirectly through "benign neglect" -- by, for example, forcing you to create a fake high school profile and send out a bunch of friend requests and create a new profile from scratch if your first one gets canned -- that's far less likely to cause the side effects I just listed. MySpace is not going to get the idea that it's OK to start selling CDs of users' personal information because, hey, Facebook let people pry out the same information if they jumped through enough hoops.

But what this means is that fairly mild privacy issues, if they arise as a result of deliberate choice by a company like Facebook, are likely to get more press attention than far more serious privacy issues that arise as a result of benign neglect. Because when Facebook makes a deliberate choice that affects user privacy (like sharing users' preferences with Pandora), the pundits and the public are reacting to the direct privacy implications of that action, plus all the auxiliary issues, like the "message" that it sends, and the precedent that it sets for future actions by that company and other companies. Whereas if an issue arises as a result of neglect (as in the case of PlayStation Networks users' credit cards being stolen), people are reacting only to the direct privacy implications of the incident, so the issue has to be much more serious to get the equivalent amount of press.

For example, the right reason to be concerned about Facebook sharing users' personal information with Pandora, was the principle that it violated -- if users say "no" to sharing their personal information, Facebook shouldn't be allowed to switch that choice unilaterally. But as for the practical implications -- come on. Facebook and Pandora are both big faceless corporate behemoths as far as we're concerned, so why would we trust one with our personal data but not the other? Besides, what if Facebook had simply bought out Pandora? Then they could share all of our personal information with all the employees of the newly merged Facepanbookdora, and the exact same people would have had access to the exact same data, but it wouldn't have violated the agreement against sharing information with "third parties," because they wouldn't be a third party any more.

When I first found that email addresses of Ameritrade customers had been obtained by a pump-and-dump stock spammer, I was sure (as were most readers, probably) that Ameritrade was not deliberately selling its customers' email addresses; I figured that they had simply left their database inadequately secured, and some third party had broken in and stolen it. On the other hand, because the incident happened as a result of benign neglect and not deliberate choice, I figured the incident would not garner much press as a result, and that seems to have been the case -- the wholesale thievery of Ameritrade customers' personal information by financial criminals received far less press attention than, say, Facebook's decision to change their privacy policy so they could share information with Pandora.

What this means is that if you're an ardent cyber-rights hippie like me, then yes, you should care about the privacy issues that set the blogosphere afire, even if they're fairly minor privacy issues that are magnified out of proportion because they speak to the deliberate intentions of the companies involved. It matters that Facebook decided one day to share our music preferences with Pandora, even if it doesn't hurt anyone.

On the other hand, if you simply care about threats to your personal privacy, then you should heavily discount the noise being made about deliberate choices taken by companies like Facebook, and pay far more attention to dangers of benign neglect by the company guarding your privacy, when that benign neglect is exploited by malicious outsiders. If you have a stalker and you're worried about them finding your Facebook profile, it makes no sense to be worried about Google scraping the information from the public version of your Facebook profile, if it's the same information that your stalker would be able to see anyway if they were logged in to Facebook themselves. It's far more likely that your stalker would try to exploit a weakness in Facebook's privacy settings -- for example, ingratiating themselves with one of your Facebook friends and getting them to accept a friend request, so that they can then see any information on your Facebook profile that is viewable to "friends of friends." Maybe you knew about that already, but if you didn't, you wouldn't know it from reading all the punditry about the Facebook-Google kerfuffle.

hasanabbas1987 writes "The clash of the Internet Giants reached new heights after a spokesman for Facebook confirmed to Daily Beast that Facebook paid a high level Public Relation firm to publish and spread stories against Google throughout the media to study various methods to examine the allegations that Google has been violating user privacy."

mark72005 writes "National-security officials say that the National Security Agency, the US government's eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country's domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders. 'We may not have been able to stop WikiLeaks so far, and it's been frustrating,' a US law-enforcement official tells The Daily Beast. 'The Russians play by different rules.'" Something tells me those rules might be in line with professor Tom Flanagan (an adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper), who openly advocates assassinating Assange. Update: 12/03 00:56 GMT by S : Reader Red Flayer points out that Flanagan later recanted, saying, "It was a thoughtless, glib remark about a serious subject."

Stoobalou writes "A member of Iceland's parliament and prominent organizer for whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks has turned on the site's spokesman, Julian Assange, urging him to step down over rape allegations made against him in Sweden. Birgitta Jonsdottir told news site The Daily Beast that she did not believe Assange's repeated assertion that the allegations of rape and molestation made against him were part of a US-backed smear campaign to distract attention from documents posted on the site laying bare US involvement in the war in Afghanistan and further promised revelations."

krou writes "Coming on the back of human rights groups criticizing WikiLeaks, American officials are saying that the Obama administration is pressuring allies such as Australia, Britain, and Germany to open criminal investigations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and to try limit his ability to travel. 'It's not just our troops that are put in jeopardy by this leaking. It's UK troops, it's German troops, it's Australian troops — all of the NATO troops and foreign forces working together in Afghanistan,' said one American diplomatic official, who added that other governments should 'review whether the actions of WikiLeaks could constitute crimes under their own national-security laws.'"

Strudelkugel writes "The Beast reports unhappiness with Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft: Sources say the talk around Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters — which has grown increasingly loud ever since Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization — is that the company's stock suffers from a 'Ballmer discount,' and that the CEO is on the clock to significantly move the needle on its share price over the next two or three quarters or face a potential move to oust him. 'Ballmer is on the list of mega-executives under pressure,' says a banker who has negotiated deals for Microsoft. 'If he was asked to leave the building, I suspect there would be more happy than unhappy people.'"