The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.
Source: EXCLUSIVE – U.S. to let spy agencies scour Americans’ finances | Reuters
Yesterday, the Supreme Court sadly dismissed the ACLU’s case, Clapper v. Amnesty International, which challenged the FISA Amendments Act (FAA)—the unconstitutional law that allows the government to wiretap Americans communicating with people overseas.
since the Americans did not have definitive proof that they were being surveilled under the FAA—a fact the government nearly always keeps secret—they cannot challenge the constitutionality of the statute
You have a secret that can ruin your life. It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters that can reveal everything about you.
The most secure system isn’t any good if it’s a total pain to access. Requiring you to remember a 256-character hexadecimal password might keep your data safe, but you’re no more likely to get into your account than anyone else.
Source: Kill the Password: A String of Characters Won’t Protect You | WIRED
When security by plebeian obscurity is insufficient, what do you do?
Proposed law scheduled for a vote next week originally increased Americans’ e-mail privacy. Then law enforcement complained. Now it increases government access to e-mail and other digital files.
Source: Senate bill rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants – CNET
On 15 October, the Dutch ministry of Justice and Security proposed powers for the police to break into computers, install spyware, search computers and destroy data. These powers would extend to computers located outside the Netherlands. Dutch digital rights movement Bits of Freedom warns for the unacceptable risks to cybersecurity and calls on other countries to strongly oppose the proposal.
Source: Dutch proposal to search and destroy foreign computers « Bits of Freedom