Signal bugs, car hack antics, the Adobe flaw you may have missed, and much more Here's your guide to this week's infosec news beyond what we've already covered. ICE's extreme vetting plan melts away US Customs won't getting their massive terror predicting system after all. It's reported that America's immigration cops – ICE – have abandoned its call for the development of an artificially intelligent tool …
Ouch! Don't suppose there's much point phoning Potus and asking if the White House have hired a GDPR Data Protection Officer by now either?
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Canvas fingerprinting:
"Even well-respected sites, from Whitehouse.gov are running these scripts."
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https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-do-advertisers-track-you-online-we-found-out/
Getting rid of the White House cyber czar is a good thing.
repeat: IT"S A GOOD THING.
1 - It cuts down on the number of layers and red tape to get something accomplished
2- It provides power, decision and policy making to someone who is actually skilled in cyber security.
3- Saves $20 million per year.
4- Cyber Security is now added to the daily security brief from the NSA. Allowing POTUS to interject on info security if needed.
Just more left wing lunacy -- taking something good, then spinning it to make it look like something else.
I'm neutral about the elimination of that position, but I don't think any of the four points you raise are affected by whether or not it exists.
"It cuts down on the number of layers and red tape to get something accomplished"
Given what has been "getting accomplished" lately, this is much more likely to be a bad thing than a good one. But it's even more likely that nothing would be accomplished anyway.
"It provides power, decision and policy making to someone who is actually skilled in cyber security."
Yeah, right, pull the other one.
"Saves $20 million per year."
More like redirects it.
"Cyber Security is now added to the daily security brief from the NSA. Allowing POTUS to interject on info security if needed."
At best, this is a meaningless distinction.
U.S. border patrol should NOT be able to snoop/confiscate your devices, particularly if you're a U.S. citizen, without some kind of justifiable cause (and due process). ACLU and EFF are right on this one.
[getting a warrant usually doesn't take that long, courier goes to the court house with documents, judge reviews and signs [or not] the warrant]
I'd expect any rulings here would be applied to non-U.S.-citizens as well.
I agree as well, despite my cynicism regarding both organizations.
We have wide-open borders online. Not even the Great Firewall of China can stop anonymous cross-border illegal data migration. So why bother searching physical devices coming across our real borders? Quit wasting our time and tax dollars.
To me, the idea is not what they gain from the "big" data-transfer guys (the child porn traders and drug cartels and whatnot, most of whom are not that stupid as to cross a border with such searching procedures in the first place!), this is about giving the public some sense of "Hey, we're tough guys with a gun and we're gonna search your phone, so you should be scared of us!"
The benefit is amplified by an order of magnitude if it pays off and they catch somebody.
With mid-term elections months away, opponents of the move are worried the cuts could make the US government and its electorate more vulnerable to online attacks from both foreign governments and private hackers.
Yet another example of Magical Hollywood Thinking that is fed to us daily like LSD in drinkwater.
1) How does a czar magically enhance the eletronic safety of US governemnt and electorate.
2) How, if you are not ready now, will you be ready in a a few months, czar or no czar? (Install Kaspersky on your voting machine! There is an XKCD on that.)
3) How would foreign governments target the electorate exactly? To accomplish what? The US is doing it regularly via loud announcements from the State Departments. Very effective, doesn't involve magical hacking.
4) Has the electorate and the US government ever been observed to be under attack to influence elections? Note that the media clownshow about "attacks on democracy by Russia" don't count, there is zilch hard info about any on this, only lolrandom statements by that abysmally corrupt non-governmental organization, the DNC and their hired "cyberanalysts".
As a keen amateur photographer I took a look at the referenced article. Some very dramatic images there. But then I ran some of the grid references through Google Earth and was left wondering why on earth some of these cameras were there. A couple of the locations looked like it would take a minor expedition to install them !
This comes back to the remark about the Park Rangers in the article - 'Because we can'. More proof, if any more was needed, that surveillance has reached ridiculous limits. I am somewhere past the age when I am interested in making out with my girlfriend in some quiet spot but images like thes would give any young couple pause for thought !
Chris Cosgrove
OK, that seems logi...I mean what?
"It saves time, money (taxpayer dollars), and labor (also paid in taxpayer dollars, both in field trips and in medical bills if an accident occurs)."
That makes no sense. If a medical accident occurs, the camera won't help. Even if you're lucky enough to experience the medical problem that leaves you stranded and unable to use any communications capability you have directly in the view of the camera, what will that do. Let's also assume that they have people watching all these cameras (national parks are big. It would be a lot of people, paid with taxpayer dollars, for a lot of cameras). Field trips are still required in order to come get you and the medical bills won't be affected. Then, there is the high likelihood that you get hurt out of view of the camera, in which case it won't help them find you at all. They don't have complete coverage. Meanwhile, any management they have to do to keep the park going requires them to go to various places. I'm assuming that their cameras never get broken, run out of power if they are wireless, have cables cut if they are wired, sag due to gravity, get dirty such that their imaging is impaired, nor require maintenance of any kind, so that the cameras don't add to the workload. You'd still need people to go to all these places.
I could see some logic if they were trying to do research on the animal population, although I don't think the cameras they have would be as useful as regular naturalist procedures, but that's not even the argument they came out with. When a camera that can save people when injured comes out, I'll drop my objections and most likely purchase some to put around all sorts of high risk areas. Until then, I dismiss that as pure illogic.
It makes perfect sense. Telepresence beats a physical visit to a remote, rarely-accessed location any day of the week. A trip not taken is an accident not risked. And you can make far fewer field trips thanks to that camera, which needs less maintenance if set up correctly. Which probably means you need to hire fewer rangers in the first place. That's why the Border Patrol uses this, too.
Sites like El Reg are as close as I get to social media, and I only carry a battery-sipping dumb phone. The American surveillance wonks are so paranoid that they'd probably conclude I was a Drugs/Porn/Terror overlord. Good job I've no desire to go there.
Oh... Somebody at the door.
"opponents of the move are worried the cuts could make the US government and its electorate more vulnerable to online attacks from both foreign governments and private hackers."
I'm less concerned these days about "private hackers" than being exposed to the likes of Facebook, Google, etc. -- something that was never going to be addressed by the cringlingly-named "cyber czar" anyway.
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