Tracing the ownership of many of Mr. Trump’s buildings can be a complicated task. Sometimes he owns a building and the land underneath it; sometimes, he holds a partial interest or just the commercial portion of a property.
And in some cases, the identities of his business partners are obscured behind limited liability companies — raising the prospect of a president with unknown business ties.
A revealing analysis of Trump’s actual financial situation.
“Travel “naked” as one encryption expert told me. If any government wants your information, they will get it no matter what,” she adds.
Something has gone terribly awry if this is the advice that journalists working for international news outlets are giving to those entering or exiting the United States.
Russian Hackers Now Targeting U.S. Think Tanks That Specialize in Russia:
“Any respectable think tank has been hacked,” Lewis told Defense One on Monday. “The Russians just don’t get the idea of independent institutions, so they are looking for secret instructions from Obama. Another benefit is they can go to their bosses and show what they took to prove their worth as spies.”
Any respectable think tank is proud to have such garbage security that the intellectual property it hopes to profit from, to say nothing of political advocacy, is available to unauthorized third parties.
Right….
The new lawsuits also suggest that BlackBerry has patents it believes describe Android features, so don’t be surprised if more Android phones are in the crosshairs soon. One of the two cases filed last week accuses user-interface features that are more about Android than they are about BLU. A small manufacturer like BLU could make for a good “test case” against a maker of Android phones.
Great. We’re back to the patent-suit wars that more or less wrapped up between mobile phone companies a few years back.
It’s going to be pretty amazing to watch Blackberry sue firms which have adopted the Android OS…just like Blackberry itself. I wonder if some other trolls will come out from their bridge and fire reciprocal suits against Blackberry.
Litt’s article focuses on finding new ways of conceptualizing privacy such that the current activities of intelligence agencies and law enforcement organizations are made legal, and thus shift the means by which their activities are legally and constitutionally evaluated. While his proposal to overturn much of the third-party doctrine coheres with the positions of many contemporary scholars his suggested replacement — that we should no longer focus on collecting data, but on use of collected data — would eviscerate basic privacy protections. In particular, I think that it’s important we not just ignore the ‘search’ aspect of fourth amendment law: we need to recalibrate what a search is within the context of today’s reality. And that doesn’t mean just letting the government collect with fewer baseline restrictions but instead modifying what a ‘search’ is itself.
The core aspects of the article that give a flavour of the entire argument are:
I suggest that—at least in the context of government acquisition of digital data—we should think about eliminating the separate inquiry into whether there was a “reasonable expectation of privacy” as a gatekeeper for Fourth Amendment analysis. In an era in which huge amounts of data are flowing across the Internet; in which people expose previously unimagined quantities and kinds of information through social media; in which private companies monetize information derived from search requests and GPS location; and in which our cars, dishwashers, and even light bulbs are connected to the Internet, trying to parse out the information in which we do and do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy strikes me as a difficult and sterile task of line-drawing. Rather, we should simply accept that any acquisition of digital information by the Government implicates Fourth Amendment interests.
After all, the concept of a “reasonable expectation of privacy” as a talisman of Fourth Amendment protection is not found in the text of the Fourth Amendment itself, which says merely that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” It was only in 1967, in Katz, that the Supreme Court defined a search as the invasion of a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Katz revisited Olmstead v. United States after 40 years; the accelerating pace of modern technological change suggests to me that fifty years is not too soon to revisit Katz. My proposal is that the law should focus on determining what is unreasonable rather than on what is a search.
…
What I have suggested, however, is that—at least in the area of government collection of digital data—we eliminate the preliminary analysis of whether someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data and proceed directly to the issue of whether the collection is reasonable; that the privacy side of that analysis should be focused on concrete rather than theoretical invasions of privacy; and that courts in evaluating reasonableness should look at the entirety of the government’s activity, including the “back end” use, retention restrictions, and the degree of transparency, not just the “front end” activity of collection.
Crocker’s article is a defining summary of the legal problems associated with the U.S. Government’s attempts to use malware to conduct lawful surveillance of persons suspected of breaking the law. He explores how even after the law is shifted to authorize magistrates to issue warrants pertaining to persons outside of their jurisdictions, broader precedent concerning wiretaps may prevent the FBI or other actors from using currently-drafted warrants to deploy malware en masse. Specifically, the current framework adopted might violate basic constitutional guarantees that have been defined in caselaw over the past century, to the effect of rendering mass issuance of malware an unlawful means of surveillance.
The Megaupload saga has a new chapter, as the only person convicted by the US in relation to Mega’s file sharing system has broken his silence. Tänavsuu’s article is an in-depth interview with Andrew Nõmm, who did programming for the site and service. Nõmm takes strong issue with Kim Dotcom — he asserts regularly the Kim did nothing to assist Nõmm in his legal efforts — as well as with the Estonian government for their lack of support.
This is a relatively unique piece, insofar as it discusses the experiences of people within the Kim Dotcom empire, and from the perspective of someone who has directly suffered as a result of their association with the project and company. It’s worth the read, if only to understand how the US system deals with persons found guilty of significant copyright violation and some of the inner workings of the Mega projects.
What’s the big deal about Hillary using her personal email at work?
Christopher Parsons, a Toronto-based cybersecurity expert with the think tank Citizen Lab, explained the security difference between a personal and official government email.
“The core security advantage is that the U.S. government will be attuned to the risk of her communications being deliberately targeted and, as such, would have a chance to maximize protections afforded to her communications,” Parsons said. “Moreover, data sent and received in U.S. government systems could be protected according to the sensitivity of the communications. So when sending classified or secret documents, a higher standard of care could have been provided.”
I would note that I don’t work at a think tank: I work at the University of Toronto, within the Munk School of Global Affairs.
U.S. Cyber Command investment ensures hackers targeting America face retribution :
Later that summer, Marine Lt. Gen. Richard P. Mills bluntly told a conference in Baltimore that commanders under his control in Afghanistan routinely used cyberwarfare tactics to attack and disable al Qaeda and Taliban enemies.
“I can tell you that as a commander in Afghanistan in the year 2010, I was able to use my cyberoperations against my adversary with great impact,” Gen. Mills was quoted at the time as saying. “I was able to get inside his nets, infect his command and control, and in fact defend myself against his almost constant incursions to get inside my wire, to affect my operations.”
While the military is developing the capability, the political and policy realm is struggling with the right parlance.
If that’s the language that US generals are using to explain what ‘cyber’ is then I think that the executive-class is clueless about the things that their ‘cyberwarriors’ are up to. And if they’re this clueless then how can they be relied on (or quoted in anything other than a mocking way?) to provide expert advice to policy makers, politicians, or the public?
Homeownership in America Has Collapsed—Don’t Blame Millennials – The Atlantic
The economy has a Gen-X problem. It’s a small cohort with a much-smaller-than-usual homeownership rate. And people wonder why the housing market is sluggish.
To quote a friend… “ah, it feels good to be blamed for something once again.” :p Damn us GenXers for ruining the economy.
Excited Pixels