Jay McDaniel

Trailrunner7 writes "A group of eight senators from both parties have introduced a new bill that would require the attorney general to declassify as many of the rulings of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as possible as a way of bringing into the sunlight much of the law and opinion that guides the government's surveillance efforts. Under the terms of the proposed law, the Justice Department would be required to declassify major FISC opinions as a way to give Americans a view into how the federal government is using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Patriot Act. If the attorney general determines that a specific ruling can't be declassified without endangering national security, he can declassify a summary of it. If even that isn't possible, then the AG would need to explain specifically why the opinion needs to be kept secret."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

trendspotter points out this research from Duke University: "Hours spent at the video gaming console not only train a player's hands to work the buttons on the controller, they probably also train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers (abstract). 'Gamers see the world differently,' said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. 'They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.' ... Each participant was run though a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second. After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared, pointing to one spot on the circle where a letter had been. Participants were asked to identify which letter had been in that spot. At every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nerval's Lobster writes "In an open letter addressed to U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and FBI director Robert Mueller, Google chief legal officer David Drummond again insisted that reports of his company freely offering user data to the NSA and other agencies were untrue. 'However,' he wrote, 'government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.' In light of that, Drummond had a request of the two men: 'We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.' Apparently Google's numbers would show 'that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made.' Google, Drummond added, 'has nothing to hide.'" Another open letter was sent to Congress from a variety of internet companies and civil liberties groups, (headlined by Mozilla, the EFF, the ACLU, and the FSF), asking them to enact legislation to prohibit the kind of surveillance apparently going on at the NSA and to hold accountable the people who implemented it. (A bipartison group of senators has just come forth with legislation that would end such surveillance.) In addition to the letter, the ACLU sent a lawsuit as well, directed at President Obama, Eric Holder, the NSA, Verizon and the Dept. of Justice (filing, PDF). They've also asked (PDF) for a release of court records relevant to the scandal. Mozilla has also launched Stopwatching.us, a campaign to "demand a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored." Other reactions: Tim Berners-Lee is against it, Australia's Foreign Minister doesn't mind it, the European Parliament has denounced it, and John Oliver is hilarious about it (video). Meanwhile, Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked the information about the NSA's surveillance program, is being praised widely as a hero and a patriot. There's already a petition on Whitehouse.gov to pardon him for his involvement, and it's already reached half the required number of signatures for a response from the Obama administration.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter WML MUNSON sends this quote from NJ.com: "License, registration and cell phone, please. Police officers across New Jersey could be saying that to motorists at the scenes of car crashes if new legislation introduced in the state Senate becomes law. The measure would allow cops — without a warrant — to thumb through a cell phone to determine if a driver was talking or texting when an accident occurred. It requires officers to have 'reasonable grounds' to believe the law was broken. There were 1,840 handheld cell phone-related crashes in New Jersey in 2011, resulting in 807 injuries and six deaths, according to the state Division of Highway Traffic Safety. 'Think about it: The chances of the cop witnessing the accident are slim to none,' said the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. James Holzapfel (R-Ocean), who has worked as a county and municipal prosecutor. 'He’s dispatched, and by the time he gets there — unless they’re unconscious and the phone is in their hands, or some passenger says they were on the phone — then he’s got to do what? Subpoena the service to see if the phone was actively used or not?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows/OS X/Linux: If you've built the media center of your dreams and download your entertainment, you probably want an easy way to manage it all from another computer or when you're not home. HTPC Manager controls almost every function of your HTPC in one easy-to-use interface.

The great thing about HTPC Manager is that it's free, open source, and available on just about every platform. If you're using XBMC as a front-end on your HTPC, Sickbeard to manage your TV shows, Couchpotato for downloads, and Sabnzbd for Usenet, HTPC Manager can handle all of them at the same time. Plus, it gives you a UI that works on any web-connected device, including your tablet or smartphone.

Installing can be a little tricky, but there are detailed instructions to make sure you get everything set up nicely. Once installed, HTPC Manager lets you browse, play, and manage all of your media. You can search for new TV shows and movies, view airdates and upcoming show information, view and manage your active downloads, and more. Plus, since you get a web interface for the whole thing, you can access it from your tablet on the couch, or you can set up your router to let you manage your downloads while you're at work (or play your media when you're not home). Hit the link below to read all of the features and download it yourself.

HTPC Manager

Voice search is one of those features that seems silly, but is awesome once you start using it. Not convinced? Here are a few ways to turn voice search from a silly gimmick into a useful productivity tool.

Why Voice Commands Rock

Google's been pushing voice actions for awhile, adding tons of new features and trying to make it seem more appealing. I, like many of you, thought the whole thing was pretty silly until I actually started using it. Now, I realize that it actually solves my biggest cellphone annoyance: typing on phones sucks.

Voice search, on the other hand, is fast. Really fast. On Android, all it takes is a quick swipe up from the bottom of your screen to access Google Now, after which you can just say what you want and be on your way (iPhone users have to do a bit more work, unless they're jailbroken). No tapping, no correcting typos (as long as you're in a reasonably quiet room, of course), and no scrolling through menus for contacts if you're trying to call a friend. You can do everything nearly instantaneously—and it's more than just search.

Search for Information

Obviously, searching the web is one of Voice Actions' biggest features, but it's more than just a faster way to type a search query. The more Google's "Knowledge Graph" grows, the more voice search actually becomes worthwhile, since it gives you a very straightforward answer to the things you ask. Here are some of the cooler things you can ask:

• How many quarts are in a gallon? Everybody knows Google can make calculations and perform conversions, but boy, it's a lot faster to ask it than it is to type it in. This is especially handy when you're in the kitchen and just need a quick answer, when you want to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, or...anything having to do with the imperial and metric systems, really.
• Define "bellwether." My friend and I didn't know what this word actually meant, so I just asked Google.
• Show me a video of how to peel garlic. If you specify that you want a video, Google will ensure videos show up at the top of your search results. The same works for images, too: Show me pictures of the Playstation 4 will push image search results right to the top. You can even give it more detail, like Show me pictures of the Lincoln Memorial at sunset.
• When does Whole Foods close? This is way faster than looking it up on Yelp or Google yourself.
• What's the weather like this weekend? Weather apps are usually just a tap away, but this is nice if you want to see the weather for a specific day without having to scroll through a bunch of information, I suppose.
• When is Father's Day? I hate holidays that change every year.
• What's a good Thai restaurant near me? It'll search nearby Thai restaurants. If you change your mind, you can then ask How about Mexican? It'll understand you're still searching for restaurants nearby and act accordingly.
• How long is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey? As if you didn't already know the answer was "too long."
• What is area code 909? This is awesome for when you get those unnamed calls.
• Who is the CEO of Ford Motor Company? Google knows who a lot of people are.
• When is the next Red Wings game? You can also ask for the score of the last game, and other such things.
• What time is it in Tokyo? Never try to convert time zones in your head again.
• What is the status of US Airways flight 200? There are already a lot of other apps that deal with stuff like this (and can do more), but it's good to know that Google can do it too.
• What's the theme song to Firefly? Shocker: it's not called "You can't take the sky from me."

You get the idea. It knows a lot more than you probably think it does, and anything you can ask, it can probably answer. Of course, if you're doing real research, this isn't helpful—but it's great for that quick stuff that you just need an answer to right away.

Integrate It With Your Android Apps

That's all fine and dandy, but if you're on Android, voice actions also integrate with a lot of apps on your system—and not just the built-in apps, either. Here are some really cool uses for it:

• Text Kathleen "when are you coming home?" Okay, you probably already knew about this one—it's been around forever. But, did you know you can give your contacts "phonetic names" so Google can understand the more complicated ones? Just head into your address book, edit that contact, and add the phonetic name field to help it out. You can use a similar command to make calls, too.
• Create new calendar event, lunch with Zach at 12:30 pm. Creating calendar events is a lot faster than it used to be on your phone, but it's still one of the slowest, most annoying processes I've come across. This is so much faster.
• Note to self: I'm parked on level C3. This used to just make a draft in Gmail with that text, but now you can use it to add a note to Google Keep, Evernote, or Catch, which is awesome.
• Set alarm for 30 minutes from now, label, get laundry. This is much faster than opening up the clock app and setting it manually.
• Remind me to call Mom tomorrow at 2 pm. We've talked about this one before, but no list of productive voice commands would be complete without it.
• Navigate me to The Alibi Room. This immediately starts navigation to my favorite taco restaurant, no searching or addresses necessary. You can also add phrases like "on foot" if you want walking navigation.
• Call the Culver Hotel. Similar to the above, if it can find what you're talking about, it'll help you skip the search step and get straight to your call.
• Listen to Never Gonna Give You Up. This will start searching your music library for that song, but you can also pull it up on YouTube if you don't have it on your phone, which is pretty cool.
• What's this song? No need for Shazam anymore. This trick will work for finding out what's playing wherever you are. (You can also just tap the mic, then tap the music note icon instead of saying "What's this song?")
• Integrate it with tons of web services. If you have an app that doesn't integrate with voice actions, you can usually work around this. If it integrates with SMS or email, then you can make it work with voice actions by adding its SMS code or email to your contacts. For example, you could add your Facebook email address to your contacts, call it "Facebook Post," and say something like Send email to Facebook Post: I'm using Google Voice search! and it'll post that status to your Facebook.

Do voice commands work perfectly every time? Absolutely not. It doesn't really work in loud rooms, and sometimes it just doesn't understand you (I tried to look up what a "morel" was the other day, but it just kept telling me what "morals" were). But, once you start using it, you'll get the hang of which stuff it does well and which stuff it doesn't. After that small initial learning curve, you'll realize you can save a ton of time with it over opening your browser and typing.

Edward Snowden broke the law by releasing classified information. This isn't under debate; it's something everyone with a security clearance knows. It's written in plain English on the documents you have to sign when you get a security clearance, and it's part of the culture. The law is there for a good reason, and secrecy has an important role in military defense.

But before the Justice Department prosecutes Snowden, there are some other investigations that ought to happen.

We need to determine whether these National Security Agency programs are themselves legal. The administration has successfully barred anyone from bringing a lawsuit challenging these laws, on the grounds of national secrecy. Now that we know those arguments are without merit, it's time for those court challenges.

It's clear that some of the NSA programs exposed by Snowden violate the Constitution and others violate existing laws. Other people have an opposite view. The courts need to decide.

We need to determine whether classifying these programs is legal. Keeping things secret from the people is a very dangerous practice in a democracy, and the government is permitted to do so only under very specific circumstances. Reading the documents leaked so far, I don't see anything that needs to be kept secret. The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn't even pass the laugh test; there's nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do. But in any case, now that the documents are public, the courts need to rule on the legality of their secrecy.

And we need to determine how we treat whistle-blowers in this country. We have whistle-blower protection laws that apply in some cases, particularly when exposing fraud, and other illegal behavior. NSA officials have repeatedly lied about the existence, and details, of these programs to Congress.

Only after all of these legal issues have been resolved should any prosecution of Snowden move forward. Because only then will we know the full extent of what he did, and how much of it is justified.

I believe that history will hail Snowden as a hero -- his whistle-blowing exposed a surveillance state and a secrecy machine run amok. I'm less optimistic of how the present day will treat him, and hope that the debate right now is less about the man and more about the government he exposed.

This essay was originally published on the New York Times Room for Debate blog, as part of a series of essays on the topic.

EDITED TO ADD (6/13): There's a big discussion of this on Reddit.

Interesting.

Crazy as these theories are, those propagating them are not -- they’re quite normal, in fact. But recent scientific research tells us this much: if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another. And it’s very likely that this isn't the only news story that makes you feel as if shadowy forces are behind major world events.

"The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories," says Viren Swami, a psychology professor who studies conspiracy belief at the University of Westminster in England. Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn't so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview.

[...]

Our access to high-quality information has not, unfortunately, ushered in an age in which disagreements of this sort can easily be solved with a quick Google search. In fact, the Internet has made things worse. Confirmation bias—the tendency to pay more attention to evidence that supports what you already believe—is a well-documented and common human failing. People have been writing about it for centuries. In recent years, though, researchers have found that confirmation bias is not easy to overcome. You can’t just drown it in facts.

Net neutrality is one of the biggest policy debates around the internet, and the government has voted to officially repeal the net neutrality regulations. Here’s what net neutrality is, and how it affects you.

Many low-level tweaks can normally only be performed on Android by flashing custom ROMs. The Xposed Framework allows you to modify your existing system without installing a new custom ROM. All it requires is root access.

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As a new wave of classified documents published by news organizations appeared online over the past week, the Department of Defense instructed employees and contractors that they must neither seek out nor download classified material that is in the public domain.

“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites, disclosed to the media, or otherwise in the public domain remains classified and must be treated as such until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. government authority,” wrote Timothy A. Davis, Director of Security in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence), in a June 7 memorandum.

“DoD employees and contractors shall not, while accessing the web on unclassified government systems, access or download documents that are known or suspected to contain classified information.”

“DoD employees or contractors who seek out classified information in the public domain, acknowledge its accuracy or existence, or proliferate the information in any way will be subject to sanctions,” the memorandum said.

The post DoD Warns Employees of Classified Info in Public Domain appears on Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy.

In December 1974, when a previous program of secret government surveillance was revealed by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times, the ensuing public uproar led directly to extensive congressional investigations and the creation of new mechanisms of oversight, including intelligence oversight committees in Congress and an intelligence surveillance court.

The public uproar over the latest disclosures of secret domestic surveillance by The Guardian and the Washington Post different cannot produce a precisely analogous result, because the oversight mechanisms intended to correct abuses already exist and indeed had signed off on the surveillance activities.  Those programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government,” President Obama said Friday.  In some sense, the system functioned as intended.

Nevertheless, all three branches of government performed badly in this case, by misrepresenting the scope of official surveillance, misgauging public concern and evading public accountability.

Official Dissembling and Misrepresentation

The executive branch has repeatedly issued misleading statements about its surveillance programs.

Sen. Ron Wyden asked DNI James Clapper at a March 12, 2013 hearing “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

DNI Clapper replied “No, sir.” He added “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly.”

That was not an accurate statement.  Perhaps DNI Clapper misheard the question or misunderstood it, or perhaps he judged that denial was the proper course of action under the circumstances.  But he did not correct the record, and the false statement was left standing.  There is a price to pay in public credibility for such misrepresentation.

On other occasions, executive branch agencies promised declassification of information that they failed to deliver.

In 2010, the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence undertook to declassify opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that contained “important rulings of law.”

At her 2011 confirmation hearing to be DoJ National Security Division director, Lisa Monaco Congress that “I will work to ensure that the Department continues to work with the ODNI to make this important body of law as accessible as possible….”

But no new Court opinions were ever declassified as a result of this initiative. “As accessible as possible” turned out to mean “not accessible at all.” (Move to Declassify FISA Court Rulings Yields No Results, Secrecy News, May 29, 2012).  Again, official words spoken in public were drained of meaning.

Suppressing Public Oversight

Congressional leaders have repeatedly blocked efforts to provide a modicum of new disclosure and accountability to government surveillance programs.

Some members of the House Judiciary Committee insisted last year that “The public has a right to know, at least in general terms, how often [this surveillance authority] is invoked, what kind of information the government collects using this authority, and how the government limits the impact of these programs on American citizens.”

But when an amendment to require unclassified public reporting on these topics was offered by Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), it was defeated 10-19.  For the majority in Congress, the public does not have a right to know these things, not even in general terms.  (Congress Resists Efforts to Reduce Secrecy, Secrecy News, August 6, 2012)

Modest amendments to the FISA Amendments Act offered by Senators Wyden, Udall and Merkley that were intended to increase public reporting and awareness of the scale of surveillance were likewise blocked in the Senate, which renewed the Act without changes. (Intelligence Oversight Steps Back from Public Accountability, Secrecy News, January 2, 2013).  Had these public accountability measures been incorporated into policy, a different future might have unfolded.

Judicial Overreach

Of the three branches, the judicial branch seems least culpable here, since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which provides a measure of judicial review of surveillance operations, can only operate within the parameters sought by the executive branch and granted by Congress.

But even here there are concerns about official excess, specifically with respect to the Court order issued by Judge Roger Vinson and disclosed by The Guardian which directed Verizon Business Services to surrender all metadata records of its customers’ telephone calls.

“In our view, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court simply lacks the legal authority to authorize this program of domestic surveillance,” wrote Marc Rotenberg and colleagues at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. They asked Congress to take steps to investigate and clarify the situation.

“The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered an American telephone company to disclose to the NSA records of wholly domestic communications. The FISC lacks the legal authority to grant this order,” they argued.

Unchecked Secrecy

The common thread underlying all of these deviations from political integrity and public consensus is unchecked official secrecy.  Too much essential information on intelligence surveillance policy has been withheld from public access, thereby inhibiting public debate, precluding informed consent, and inspiring growing cynicism.

The appropriate response must include significant new declassification of surveillance policy and a thorough airing of the issues at stake.  Over the weekend, DNI Clapper made some helpful gestures in this direction.  But more is needed, beginning with release of the Administration’s legal interpretations of its surveillance authorities. In theory, everyone involved has an interest in restoring the credibility and effectiveness of an intelligence oversight system that has not lived up to public expectations.

“Now that the fact of bulk collection has been declassified, we believe that more information about the scale of the collection, and specifically whether it involves the records of ‘millions of Americans’ should be declassified as well,” said Senators Wyden and Udall on Friday. “The American people must be given the opportunity to evaluate the facts about this program and its broad scope for themselves, so that this debate can begin in earnest.”

The post Secret Surveillance and the Crisis of Legitimacy appears on Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy.

A former CIA employee and NSA contractor named Edward Snowden identified himself as the source of the the serial revelations of classified documents concerning U.S. intelligence surveillance activities that were disclosed last week.

“I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he told The Guardian newspaper.

“I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these [unauthorized] disclosures that are outside of the democratic model,” he told interviewer Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong, where he has evidently taken refuge.

“When you are subverting the power of government– that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.”

“I’m willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity [of these disclosures]. This is the truth.  This is what’s happening.  You should decide whether we need to be doing this,” he said of his disclosures.

In the history of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, a voluntary admission of having committed such disclosures is the exception, not the norm.  And it confers a degree of dignity on the action.  Yet it stops short of a full acceptance of responsibility. That would entail surrendering to authorities and accepting the legal consequences of “subverting the power of government” and carrying out “a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.”

There are occasions when breaching restrictions on classified information may be necessary and appropriate, suggested Judge T.S. Ellis, III of the Eastern District of Virginia in a June 2009 sentencing hearing for Lawrence Franklin, who pleaded guilty to disclosing classified information in the “AIPAC” case.  But in order to reconcile an unauthorized disclosure with the rule of law, he said, it must be done openly.

“I don’t have a problem with people doing that [disclosing classified information to the press] if they are held accountable for it…,” Judge Ellis said. “One might hope that, for example, someone might have the courage to do something that would break the law if it meant they’re the savior of the country; but then one has to take the consequences, because the rule of law is so important.”

“Simply because you believe that something that’s going on that’s classified should be revealed to the press and to the public, so that the public can know that its government is doing something you think is wrong, that doesn’t justify it. Now, you may want to go ahead and do it, but you have to stand up and take the consequences,” Judge Ellis said then.

The post Edward Snowden, Source of NSA Leaks, Steps Forward appears on Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy.

Wireless printing is a common answer to a common problem. Everyone wants to print a document or photo from their Android powered device with ease. Over the years we have seen plenty of offerings that come in the way of specific printers and devices. Samsung has some and so does HP. Most of the time you forward something to yourself and then print it when you get on your PC again. There are a number of apps out there that offer ways for you to print wirelessly, However, I haven’t spent a great deal of time testing or using any of them. Until today that is. I’d like to introduce you to ThinPrint cloud from Cortado.

ThinPrint Cloud lets you send a file, image or anything that can be printed, from your device to your home or work printer. On the PC side of things you install the free client and register for a free account online through ThinPrint. Once you are registered and have changed your password, you install the ThinPrint app on your iOS or Android device. You can also install the client on your Windows based Laptops.

All sides of the service and app are free. They don’t force any in app purchases or have any annoying ads. Printing is as easy as sharing what you want printed through the ThinPrint app. You can also go through the app and navigate your various folders and find what you want printed and send it off. All of this is reliant on your PC being connected to the internet and your printer being plugged in and on of course. Shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that part out. Even better, since it is a PC side client that sends the print job to your printer, the make and model of your print doesn’t even matter. So if you have a $20 printer from a black Fiiday sale or a $200 professional printer that you need to access, you are all set.

If you have been looking for a simple, easy and free printing solution for your life, you should give ThinPrint cloud printing a chance. It is free, and quite easy to set up.

ThinPrint Play Store Link

ThinPrint Website

P.S. Once you register, be sure to check your SPAM folder for the confirmation. That is where mine ended up. Once your email is confirmed, if you are using the new Gmail, the email with your temporary password ends up in the ‘Updates” tab.

Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That's everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted -- for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. This "metadata" allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and a build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It's exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.

The Guardian delivered this revelation after receiving a copy of a secret memo about this -- presumably from a whistle-blower. We don't know if the other phone companies handed data to the NSA too. We don't know if this was a one-off demand or a continuously renewed demand; the order started a few days after the Boston bombers were captured by police.

We don't know a lot about how the government spies on us, but we know some things. We know the FBI has issued tens of thousands of ultra-secret National Security Letters to collect all sorts of data on people -- we believe on millions of people -- and has been abusing them to spy on cloud-computer users. We know it can collect a wide array of personal data from the Internet without a warrant. We also know that the FBI has been intercepting cell-phone data, all but voice content, for the past 20 years without a warrant, and can use the microphone on some powered-off cell phones as a room bug -- presumably only with a warrant.

We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames like Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime -- deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what's really going on. We know that the NSA is building an enormous computer facility in Utah to store all this data, as well as faster computer networks to process it all. We know the U.S. Cyber Command employs 4,000 people.

We know that the DHS is also collecting a massive amount of data on people, and that local police departments are running "fusion centers" to collect and analyze this data, and covering up its failures. This is all part of the militarization of the police.

Remember in 2003, when Congress defunded the decidedly creepy Total Information Awareness program? It didn't die; it just changed names and split into many smaller programs. We know that corporations are doing an enormous amount of spying on behalf of the government: all parts.

We know all of this not because the government is honest and forthcoming, but mostly through three backchannels -- inadvertent hints or outright admissions by government officials in hearings and court cases, information gleaned from government documents received under FOIA, and government whistle-blowers.

There's much more we don't know, and often what we know is obsolete. We know quite a bit about the NSA's ECHELON program from a 2000 European investigation, and about the DHS's plans for Total Information Awareness from 2002, but much less about how these programs have evolved. We can make inferences about the NSA's Utah facility based on the theoretical amount of data from various sources, the cost of computation, and the power requirements from the facility, but those are rough guesses at best. For a lot of this, we're completely in the dark.

And that's wrong.

The U.S. government is on a secrecy binge. It overclassifies more information than ever. And we learn, again and again, that our government regularly classifies things not because they need to be secret, but because their release would be embarrassing.

Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal -- or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law -- but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we're living in a police state.

We need whistle-blowers.

Leaking information without getting caught is difficult. It's almost impossible to maintain privacy in the Internet Age. The WikiLeaks platform seems to have been secure -- Bradley Manning was caught not because of a technological flaw, but because someone he trusted betrayed him -- but the U.S. government seems to have successfully destroyed it as a platform. None of the spin-offs have risen to become viable yet. The New Yorker recently unveiled its Strongbox platform for leaking material, which is still new but looks good. This link contains the best advice on how to leak information to the press via phone, email, or the post office. The National Whistleblowers Center has a page on national-security whistle-blowers and their rights.

Leaking information is also very dangerous. The Obama Administration has embarked on a war on whistle-blowers, pursuing them -- both legally and through intimidation -- further than any previous administration has done. Mark Klein, Thomas Drake, and William Binney have all been persecuted for exposing technical details of our surveillance state. Bradley Manning has been treated cruelly and inhumanly -- and possibly tortured -- for his more-indiscriminate leaking of State Department secrets.

The Obama Administration's actions against the Associated Press, its persecution of Julian Assange, and its unprecedented prosecution of Manning on charges of "aiding the enemy" demonstrate how far it's willing to go to intimidate whistle-blowers -- as well as the journalists who talk to them.

But whistle-blowing is vital, even more broadly than in government spying. It's necessary for good government, and to protect us from abuse of power.

We need details on the full extent of the FBI's spying capabilities. We don't know what information it routinely collects on American citizens, what extra information it collects on those on various watch lists, and what legal justifications it invokes for its actions. We don't know its plans for future data collection. We don't know what scandals and illegal actions -- either past or present -- are currently being covered up.

We also need information about what data the NSA gathers, either domestically or internationally. We don't know how much it collects surreptitiously, and how much it relies on arrangements with various companies. We don't know how much it uses password cracking to get at encrypted data, and how much it exploits existing system vulnerabilities. We don't know whether it deliberately inserts backdoors into systems it wants to monitor, either with or without the permission of the communications-system vendors.

And we need details about the sorts of analysis the organizations perform. We don't know what they quickly cull at the point of collection, and what they store for later analysis -- and how long they store it. We don't know what sort of database profiling they do, how extensive their CCTV and surveillance-drone analysis is, how much they perform behavioral analysis, or how extensively they trace friends of people on their watch lists.

We don't know how big the U.S. surveillance apparatus is today, either in terms of money and people or in terms of how many people are monitored or how much data is collected. Modern technology makes it possible to monitor vastly more people -- yesterday's NSA revelations demonstrate that they could easily surveil everyone -- than could ever be done manually.

Whistle-blowing is the moral response to immoral activity by those in power. What's important here are government programs and methods, not data about individuals. I understand I am asking for people to engage in illegal and dangerous behavior. Do it carefully and do it safely, but -- and I am talking directly to you, person working on one of these secret and probably illegal programs -- do it.

If you see something, say something. There are many people in the U.S. that will appreciate and admire you.

For the rest of us, we can help by protesting this war on whistle-blowers. We need to force our politicians not to punish them -- to investigate the abuses and not the messengers -- and to ensure that those unjustly persecuted can obtain redress.

Our government is putting its own self-interest ahead of the interests of the country. That needs to change.

This essay originally appeared on the Atlantic.

EDITED TO ADD (6/10): It's not just phone records. Another secret program, PRISM, gave the NSA access to e-mails and private messages at Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Skype, AOL, and others. And in a separate leak, we now know about the Boundless Informant NSA data mining system.

The leaker for at least some of this is Edward Snowden. I consider him an American hero.

EFF has a great timeline of NSA spying. And this and this contain some excellent speculation about what PRISM could be.

Someone needs to write an essay parsing all of the precisely worded denials. Apple has never heard the word "PRISM," but could have known of the program under a different name. Google maintained that there is no government "back door," but left open the possibility that the data could have been just handed over. Obama said that the government isn't "listening to your telephone calls," ignoring 1) the meta-data, 2) the fact that computers could be doing all of the listening, and 3) that text-to-speech results in phone calls being read and not listened to. And so on and on and on.

Here are people defending the programs. And here's someone criticizing my essay.

Four more good essays.

I'm sure there are lots more things out there that should be read. Please include the links in comments. Not only essays I would agree with; intelligent opinions from the other sides are just as important.

EDITED TO ADD (6/10): Two essays discussing the policy issues.

My original essay is being discussed on Reddit.

Ars Technica gave three experts a 16,000-entry encrypted password file, and asked them to break them. The winner got 90% of them, the loser 62% -- in a few hours.

The list of "plains," as many crackers refer to deciphered hashes, contains the usual list of commonly used passcodes that are found in virtually every breach involving consumer websites. "123456," "1234567," and "password" are there, as is "letmein," "Destiny21," and "pizzapizza." Passwords of this ilk are hopelessly weak. Despite the additional tweaking, "p@$$word," "123456789j," "letmein1!," and "LETMEin3" are equally awful....

As big as the word lists that all three crackers in this article wielded -- close to 1 billion strong in the case of Gosney and Steube -- none of them contained "Coneyisland9/," "momof3g8kids," or the more than 10,000 other plains that were revealed with just a few hours of effort. So how did they do it? The short answer boils down to two variables: the website's unfortunate and irresponsible use of MD5 and the use of non-randomized passwords by the account holders.

The article goes on to explain how dictionary attacks work, how well they do, and the sorts of passwords they find.

Steube was able to crack "momof3g8kids" because he had "momof3g" in his 111 million dict and "8kids" in a smaller dict.

"The combinator attack got it! It's cool," he said. Then referring to the oft-cited xkcd comic, he added: "This is an answer to the batteryhorsestaple thing."

What was remarkable about all three cracking sessions were the types of plains that got revealed. They included passcodes such as "k1araj0hns0n," "Sh1a-labe0uf," "Apr!l221973," "Qbesancon321," "DG091101%," "@Yourmom69," "ilovetofunot," "windermere2313," "tmdmmj17," and "BandGeek2014." Also included in the list: "all of the lights" (yes, spaces are allowed on many sites), "i hate hackers," "allineedislove," "ilovemySister31," "iloveyousomuch," "Philippians4:13," "Philippians4:6-7," and "qeadzcwrsfxv1331." "gonefishing1125" was another password Steube saw appear on his computer screen. Seconds after it was cracked, he noted, "You won't ever find it using brute force."

Great reading, but nothing theoretically new. Ars Technica wrote about this last year, and Joe Bonneau wrote an excellent commentary.

Password cracking can be evaluated on two nearly independent axes: power (the ability to check a large number of guesses quickly and cheaply using optimized software, GPUs, FPGAs, and so on) and efficiency (the ability to generate large lists of candidate passwords accurately ranked by real-world likelihood using sophisticated models).

I wrote about this same thing back in 2007. The news in 2013, such as it is, is that this kind of thing is getting easier faster than people think. Pretty much anything that can be remembered can be cracked.

If you need to memorize a password, I still stand by the Schneier scheme from 2008:

So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should choose something that this process will miss. My advice is to take a sentence and turn it into a password. Something like "This little piggy went to market" might become "tlpWENT2m". That nine-character password won't be in anyone's dictionary. Of course, don't use this one, because I've written about it. Choose your own sentence -- something personal.

Until this very moment, these passwords were still secure:

• WIw7,mstmsritt... = When I was seven, my sister threw my stuffed rabbit in the toilet.
• Wow...doestcst::amazon.cccooommm = Wow, does that couch smell terrible.
• Ltime@go-inag~faaa! = Long time ago in a galaxy not far away at all.
• uTVM,TPw55:utvm,tpwstillsecure = Until this very moment, these passwords were still secure.

You get the idea. Combine a personally memorable sentence, some personal memorable tricks to modify that sentence into a password, and create a long-length password.

Better, though, is to use random unmemorable alphanumeric passwords (with symbols, if the site will allow them), and a password manager like Password Safe to store them. (If anyone wants to port it to the Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android, please contact me.) This article does a good job of explaining the same thing. David Pogue likes Dashlane, but doesn't know if it's secure.

In related news, PasswordSafe is a candidate for July's project-of-the-month on SourceForge. Please vote for it.

EDITED TO ADD (6/7): As a commenter noted, none of this is useful advice if the site puts artificial limits on your password.

This study claims "terrorism has cost Pakistan around 33.02% of its real national income" between the years 1973 and 2008, or about 1% per year.

The St. Louis Fed puts the real gross national income of the U.S. at about $13 trillion total, hand-waving an average over the past few years. The best estimate I've seen for the increased cost of homeland security in the U.S. in the ten years since 9/11 is $100 billion per year. So that puts the cost of terrorism in the US at about 0.8% -- surprisingly close to the Pakistani number.

The interesting thing is that the expenditures are completely different. In Pakistan, the cost is primarily "a fall in domestic investment and lost workers' remittances from abroad." In the US, it's security measures, including the invasion of Iraq.

I remember reading somewhere that about a third of all food spoils. In poor countries, that spoilage primarily happens during production and transport. In rich countries, that spoilage primarily happens after the consumer buys the food. Same rate of loss, completely different causes. This reminds me of that.

Imagine you live in a world where the buildings are glass and you can’t ever close the curtains. Imagine the floor is glass, the ceiling is glass and all the walls are glass. There are no curtains, no window shades, no shutters and you can’t make your own. We’re heading into this world online. A robust network, cheap sensors and massive data manipulation builds the equivalent of glass houses.

The question today is whether we can have curtains. Whether any business or ecosystem provides curtains and whether we can make our own. Today we have very little ability to close the curtains in commercial activities. Websites are technically able to track *everything* we do, from how long we stay on a page to what ads attract us to how to travel from one website to the next. The data about you can be sold to others. Online data can be combined with data from your physical world and made available or sold to others  Telephone providers know when we make a phone call, where we made it from, who we called, how long we talked, our regular patterns of calls, and more.

Now we know that the U.S. government is gathering significant quantities of this data. Currently it’s understood to be using only “metadata” about phone calls for U.S. citizens, and to be using the actual content as well for foreign nationals. Now we also know that the inability to pull the curtains applies to governments as well.  We can also wonder how many other governments are collecting these types of data.

Now is the moment to ask — do we care?  Do care how much our government watches us, tracks us without our knowing it? Do we care how  the U.S. government treats the citizens of friendly, allied states? Do we care if other governments emulate the U.S. and gather this data?   How do businesses, organizations and individuals approach the US knowing the scope of online activities that are being monitored?  How much do other governments do this — either to  citizens or to foreign nationals?

Let’s face it, even some of the best case mods we feature are built in a typical shape: a rectangular prism.  This mod, on the other hand, literally thinks outside the box by mounting the computer’s components in an vertical, open air configuration.

“The bottom of the case houses the PSU, water cooling pump & reservoir, a fan controller, and a 7″ touchscreen (underneath the radiators).  The standing backbone of the case is only 3cm wide and contains the watercooling tubing, wiring for motherboard, 2 SSD’s and the RGB LED controller.”

The entire mod was built it by hand using basic tools (files, hacksaw and a small drill).  No CNCs were used.  Top it all off with some sexy blue LEDs and you’ve got an epic case mod!  The build document was well photographed throughout the construction process to help understand how the entire chassis was built.  Hopefully it has inspired your own case modding projects!

Top Case Mod Projects:

• Tron Lightcycle PC Case Mod
• Superb Battlefield 3 Case Mod with Fridge & Minigun
• See-Through Desktop PC and Gaming Desk

If you happen to be an Android user and also a Verizon FiOS subscriber — there is a new app you may want to grab. The app is called Verizon FiOS Mobile and it is currently available by way of the Google Play Store. Perhaps more important though, this app brings 75 channels worth of live streaming television to your smartphone or tablet.

Verizon has said the app will work with “most” devices that are running Android 2.3.3 or later. In our limited testing, the app seems to be working rather nicely on a Galaxy S III and Nexus 7. In addition to the 75 available channels, the Verizon FiOS Mobile app will also allow you to watch video-on-demand content. A few points worth mention up front include that you will need to have an HD set-top box in your home and you will need to be connected to your home network to stream live television.

In addition to watching television and VOD, this app will serve as a remote control for the set-top boxes in your home and allow you to manage the content on your DVR. You can schedule new recordings using the app, but sadly you cannot watch any of the content you have on your DVR. Also, just to clarify — while television streaming will be limited to when you are at home, you will be able to watch VOD movies from anywhere using a cellular connection (or an alternate WiFi connection).

Using the app is a fairly simple process. You will need to agree to the terms at first launch and also login using your existing FiOS account credentials. Once those have been completed, it is just a matter of tapping the icon for what you want. As you can see from the images here in the post, everything is clearly listed and pretty easy to navigate around.

The majority of the features can be found by tapping the menu icon towards the upper left corner. Otherwise, one nice feature (for those with young children) are the parental controls. These are accessible from the shield icon towards the upper right and will let you create a pin code. Bottom line here, FiOS is now letting Android users stream live television.

SOURCE: Verizon, Google Play Store