Month: November 2017

Why the NSA Should Delete Its Data on Americans – The Atlantic

Source: Why the NSA Should Delete Its Data on Americans – The Atlantic

Software vulnerabilities aren’t the only thing that the NSA stockpiles. Four years ago, the American public learned that the agency hoovers up metadata pertaining to the private communications of most every adult in this country. … What if the U.S. government never itself abused the system it built, but failed to safeguard its contents?

The likelihood of the trove’s eventual theft strikes me as significant (and that is assuming that a foreign government or group of hackers hasn’t already gotten any of it). The NSA failed to stop Snowden from taking some of its most closely held secrets. It failed to stop the Shadow Brokers from taking some of its most closely held cyber weapons and deploying them against innocents, including Americans. Why expect it to successfully safeguard its most closely held trove of metadata?

To keep it in the hands of the NSA, given its track record, is folly. All data the NSA retains on Americans should be erased now before it falls into the wrong hands. And Congress should pass data-retention laws that force categories of private corporations, which are often even less capable of safeguarding the data that they amass, to purge whole categories of sensitive information at regular intervals. How many breaches must we witness to give up on securing and start deleting?

Why I’m Digging Deep Into Alzheimer’s | Bill Gates

Source: Why I’m Digging Deep Into Alzheimer’s | Bill Gates

  • We need to better understand how Alzheimer’s unfolds.
  • We need to detect and diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier.
  • We need more approaches to stopping the disease.
  • We need to make it easier to get people enrolled in clinical trials.
  • We need to use data better.

This is a frontier where we can dramatically improve human life. It’s a miracle that people are living so much longer, but longer life expectancies alone are not enough. People should be able to enjoy their later years—and we need a breakthrough in Alzheimer’s to fulfill that.

TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Source: TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Even as late as May 2017, CBP recognized that its power to verify the identification of travelers was limited to those entering or leaving the country. But the TSA Modernization Act would allow CBP and TSA to collect any biometrics they want from all travelers—international and domestic—wherever they are in the airport. That’s a big change and one we shouldn’t take lightly. Private implementation of face recognition at airports only makes this more ominous.

This vast data collection will also create a huge security risk. As we saw with the 2015 Office of Personnel Management data breach and the 2017 Equifax breach, no government agency or private company is capable of fully protecting your private and sensitive information. But losing your social security or credit card numbers to fraud is nothing compared to losing your biometrics. While you can change those numbers, you can’t easily change your face.

Tech Goes to Washington – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Source: Tech Goes to Washington – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Facebook, Google, and Twitter testified before a Senate committee: it provided evidence of how tech prefers power over decentralization, even if it means regulation

Kennedy’s two lines of questions combined revealed the tech companies’ testimony for the paradox it was: on the one hand, their sheer scale means it is impossible to fully stamp out activities like Russian meddling; on the other, that same scale means they all have the most intimate information on nearly everyone.

Is what is acceptable driven by what is right or what is collectively decided? What if the powers that be decide unilaterally?

This line of questioning highlights the problems raised by Kennedy: if the powers that be also happen to have massive investigatory power over basically everyone, then at what point do the internal rules and norms against utilizing that power become overwhelmed by the demand that right thinking be enforced? The tech companies argued throughout this testimony that they took their responsibility seriously, and would snuff out bad actors. Who, though, decides who those bad actors are?
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This also highlights the absurdity in Stretch’s declaration that “We want our ad tools to be used for political discourse, certainly. But we do not want our ad tools to be used to inflame and divide.” Politics is inflammatory, and it does divide. To endeavor to stamp out inflammatory and divisive statements is, by definition, to exercise a degree of power that is clearly latent in Facebook et al, and clearly corrosive to the democratic process.

The fact of the matter is that Facebook (and Google) is more powerful than any entity we have seen before. Magnifying the problem is that, over the last year, Facebook has decided to “take responsibility”, and what is that but a commitment to exercise their control over what people see?