Intelligence chief Clapper to set up US surveillance review group

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday launched a review of whether the country uses optimally advancements in technology to protect its national security while preventing unauthorized disclosure and maintaining public trust.

Surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency has been at the center of a privacy controversy after its former contractor, Edward Snowden, released in June certain documents that suggested large scale collection of phone metadata and information from the Internet by the agency.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has been directed to form the new Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which is to brief Obama on its interim findings within 60 days of the establishment of the group. A final report and recommendations are to be submitted through Clapper to the president no later than Dec. 15.

The constitution of the body including the number of members it will have was not disclosed.

The review group "will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust," according to a memorandum on the White House website.

Obama said Friday that his administration will appoint an independent board to review the country's surveillance programs, and also add a privacy advocate to defend privacy in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when agencies ask the court for new surveillance orders. Obama also said he will work with the U.S. Congress to limit data collection by the NSA under the Patriot Act.

The U.S. National Security Agency "touches" about 1.6 percent of daily Internet traffic, of which only 0.025 percent is selected for review, the agency said in its defense in a brief on Friday.

Citing figures from an unnamed tech provider, the NSA said the Internet carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day, of which the agency's analysts in effect look at 0.00004 percent or "less than one part in a million." The agency said its total collection added up to an area smaller than a dime in the standard basketball court of global communications.

U.S. telecommunications providers are compelled by court order to provide NSA with metadata about telephone calls to, from or within the country, NSA said in the brief. The purpose of the collection, under the NSA's Business Records FISA program, is to identify the "U.S. nexus of a foreign terrorist threat to the homeland." But the government "cannot conduct substantive queries of the bulk records for any purpose other than counterterrorism," it added.

NSA said it is authorized under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to target non-U.S. persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S. The controversial part, criticized by many rights groups, is that the communications of U.S. persons are sometimes incidentally acquired in targeting the foreign entities.

In those cases, approved minimization procedures, which control the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of any information of a U.S. person, are used to protect the privacy of that person, NSA said.

"We do not need to sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of national security; both are integral to who we are as Americans," the unsigned document stated.

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Trade group reports controversial Oracle advertisements to FTC

An advertising industry oversight group has reported Oracle to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission after the vendor allegedly failed to comply with previous rulings.

The National Advertising Division, which is controlled by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, investigated three Oracle advertising campaigns last year after complaints from IBM. Each of the campaigns contained “an overbroad and unsupported comparison between one Oracle product and one IBM product,” the group said in a statement late Thursday.

In July 2012, Oracle agreed to pull advertisements claiming that its Exadata database machine was vastly more powerful than IBM’s Power Systems hardware, but said at the time it believed the NAD’s ruling was too broad.

“Now, IBM has brought NAD’s attention to a fourth Oracle advertising campaign, featuring the claim that Oracle’s Sparc T5 has ‘2.6x Better Performance’ as compared to IBM’s Power7+ AIX server,” the NAD said. “The advertising in question features the same stark, overbroad IBM-versus-Oracle comparison that NAD recommended against in the three previous cases.”

Oracle has repeatedly failed to “make any (much less a good faith) effort to bring its advertising into compliance,” which has required referring the matter to the FTC, according to NAD’s statement.

An Oracle spokesman said via email Friday that the company disagrees with the NADs’ decision, and “believes the ad is fair and accurate.”

“The ad provides a clear and objective comparison between an IBM Power7+ AIX system and an Oracle Sparc T5 system using industry standard benchmark results that legitimately show 2.6x better performance by the Oracle system,” said spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger. “NAD has failed to take into account the sophistication of the ad’s target audience, namely businesses that purchase enterprise hardware systems.”

Meanwhile, IBM is “gratified” by the NAD’s decision, spokesman Jeffrey Cross said in a statement.

The Sparc T5 advertisement “suffers from the same problems as its former campaigns: A disconnect between the message conveyed by the advertising and the testing offered in its support,” he added.

There’s little love lost between Oracle and IBM, who are fierce competitors in the high-end server market.

Oracle’s hardware revenue has consistently fallen since it got into the business with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but company officials maintain they are focused on selling higher-margin products like Exadata, which customers must also load up with lucrative software licenses.

Khronos Group releases updates to graphics, parallel programming tools

Programming tools that harness the computing power of CPUs and graphics processors have been updated, bringing more parallel programming capabilities to the table.

Standards-setting firm Khronos Group released OpenCL 2.0, which is a key development platform used to write applications in which processing is broken down over multiple processors and hardware inside systems. The group also released OpenGL 4.4, a graphics programming standard that takes advantage of the latest graphics hardware available in consoles, PCs and mobile devices.

OpenCL has grown in importance as graphics hardware and other co-processors are increasingly used to crunch complex math and science applications. Some of the world's fastest computers combine CPUs and co-processors to speed up application processing, and Hewlett-Packard and Dell are offering servers and workstations loaded with graphics cards for customers that work on visual and CAD/CAM applications.

"It does significantly expand some of the new GPGPU compute function," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

McGregor referred to general-purpose graphics processing unit computing, in which processing is increasingly offloaded to graphics processors in systems.

But the effectiveness of OpenCL depends on programming and OS, which needs to support all the functions. OpenCL is backed by organizations such as Intel and Nvidia, which offer their own parallel programming tools to speed up processing of applications. Microsoft offers DirectX, its own parallel programming framework that is also used for game development and rendering.

Khronos also announced OpenGL 4.4, which allows "applications to incrementally use new features while portably accessing state-of-the-art graphics processing units (GPUs) across diverse operating systems and platforms," the organization said in a release.

The new graphics specification also allows easy porting of applications across APIs (application programming interfaces), Khronos said.

Verizon joins Ubuntu carrier advisory group

Verizon Wireless became the first U.S. carrier to join the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, but it is not clear whether it will eventually promote phones running the open-source Ubuntu OS on its network.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, announced in June the formation of a Carrier Advisory Group that would shape Ubuntu for the mobile industry. Other members of the CAG include Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, Smartfren, China Unicom and SK Telecom.

Being able to work closely with Verizon gives Canonical an opportunity to shape Ubuntu into “the most compelling new, alternative platform for mobile,” Canonical said Thursday.

CAG members get to launch Ubuntu devices before non-members in local markets. The first two launch partners will be selected from within the group, with the next following six months later. Non-members will have a substantial wait to gain access to the platform, Canonical said.

Verizon Wireless is joining the carrier advisory group “to participate in technology discussions around this new platform, which has the ability to bring new and exciting features to developers and ultimately, customers,” Samir Vaidya from the Device Technology team at Verizon Wireless was quoted as saying in a statement by Canonical.

Verizon did not immediately comment.

Ubuntu, Tizen and Firefox OS are three of a number of operating systems that are targeting the mobile phone market which is currently dominated by Android and iOS.

Tizen is an alternative backed by Samsung Electronics and Intel, while Mozilla claims over 20 operators and hardware makers support the Firefox OS. Deutsche Telekom said Thursday T-Mobile Poland would roll out the Alcatel One Touch Fire smartphone running the Firefox OS, with online sales beginning Friday, as the first leg of an European launch of the device. Telefonica announced earlier this month the world’s first commercial launch of a smartphone running the OS.

The Ubuntu operating system is expected to be available on phones during the fourth quarter of this year or in early 2014, Canonical said in February.

The CAG will close to new members at the end of this month.

Gun Group Aims To Stop Immigration Bill

Some gun-rights advocates see a threat to the Second Amendment in Congress' immigration overhaul plans.
What does an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws have to do with the Second Amendment right to own guns?
If you're the Gun Owners of America, everything.
The GOA, a smaller cousin of the National Rifle Association that often takes an even more aggressive approach, is branding the just-passed Senate immigration bill, with its path to citizenship for people in the country illegally, as an "anti-gun amnesty."
As the GOA sees it, allowing the estimated 11 million immigrants now in the U.S. illegally to eventually become U.S. citizens would inevitably lead to many more Democratic voters in the electorate and thus more votes for gun control legislation.
In an interview, Larry Pratt, the GOA's executive director, told me his experience with many Hispanic immigrants (he said he's bilingual and that he attends a Spanish-language church) suggests that "they really don't know much about American politics but that their default assumption is that the Democrats are their friends.
"And the Democrats very likely will end up getting their votes. And if that, indeed, winds up with a Democratic dominance politically, there go our guns," he said.
Pratt said his group asked its 375,000 members to make this point to lawmakers, especially as the action on immigration moves from the Senate to the House. "Hopefully we will be a little more convincing than we were with the Senate," he said.
The NRA hasn't yet followed the GOA's lead on this immigration-Second Amendment issue, Pratt said, though he hopes that will change. "Sometimes, they take a little bit longer to get involved on an issue. Hopefully, they'll weigh in as well. It would be very helpful if they were on the same page, absolutely."
An NRA spokesman couldn't be reached for comment.
While some might criticize Pratt and the GOA for seeking to link immigration and guns, they're not alone. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, had sought to attach two immigrant-related gun control measures to the Senate immigration bill. The amendments didn't survive to become part of the final legislation, however.

Prism implicates Facebook, Yahoo and others in Europe, student group charges

The U.S. government surveillance program known as Prism, which reportedly collects data from major technology companies, has compelled a European student group to file a barrage of complaints against the companies, claiming the data collection runs afoul of European privacy laws.

 

The complaints were recently filed in Ireland against Facebook and Apple, in Luxembourg against Skype and Microsoft, and in Germany against Yahoo. The complaints are directed at the companies' European subsidiaries.

 

The Austrian student group Europe-v-Facebook.org said that while the Prism scandal is playing out in the U.S., "most of the involved companies conduct their business through subsidiaries in the EU in order to avoid U.S. taxes." This means that the companies must abide by European privacy laws, the group said.

 

The basis of the group's complaints concerns how the companies export their user data back to their U.S. counterparts. When a European company sends that data back to its U.S. parent company, that is considered an "export" of the data, the group said, which is only allowed if the subsidiary can ensure an "adequate level or protection" in the foreign country, the group said Wednesday in a statement.

 

However, "after the recent disclosures on the Prism program, such trust in an 'adequate level of protection' by the involved companies can hardly be upheld," the group said.

 

In their privacy policies, some of the largest tech companies say that they will share users' personal information to meet applicable laws, regulations, legal processes or enforceable government requests.

 

Since Prism's revelations have ripped trough the technology industry and the privacy landscape more broadly, companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft have called for greater transparency in disclosure of data on government requests for customer information.

 

Yahoo, for instance, has since disclosed some of its user data requests, but companies have had a harder time clearing the way to specifically reveal requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has been at the center of the Prism controversy.

 

"For European subsidiaries of the involved companies, American 'gag order' does not apply," the student group said Wednesday, adding, "in contrast to that, the companies are even under an obligation to tell the truth under European proceedings."

 

Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland must now decide whether it is legal for European companies to mass-transfer personal data to a foreign intelligence agency, the group said.

 

"We want a clear statement by the authorities if a European company may simply give foreign intelligence agencies access to its customer data," it said.

 

"If this turns out to be legal, then we might have to change the laws," it added.

 

In recent weeks, Europe's justice commissioner has pledged that Europeans' rights would not be sacrificed for U.S. national security.

 

The student group also seeks more clarity from the tech companies on how they handle users' personal data under European procedures.

 

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo could not be immediately reached to comment on the complaints.

 

In 2006, E.U. data protection authorities already decided in a case involving the payment processor Swift that a mass transfer of data to the U.S. authorities is illegal under EU law, the student group said.

 

Google and YouTube were not included in the first round of complaints, the group said, because they do not use European intermediaries.

 

"But since Google has data centers in Ireland, Belgium and Finland, we can take similar actions on a slightly different path," they said.

 

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Prism implicates Facebook, Yahoo and others in Europe, student group charges

The U.S. government surveillance program known as Prism, which reportedly collects data from major technology companies, has compelled a European student group to file a barrage of complaints against the companies, claiming the data collection runs afoul of European privacy laws.

 

The complaints were recently filed in Ireland against Facebook and Apple, in Luxembourg against Skype and Microsoft, and in Germany against Yahoo. The complaints are directed at the companies’ European subsidiaries.

 

The Austrian student group Europe-v-Facebook.org said that while the Prism scandal is playing out in the U.S., “most of the involved companies conduct their business through subsidiaries in the EU in order to avoid U.S. taxes.” This means that the companies must abide by European privacy laws, the group said.

 

The basis of the group’s complaints concerns how the companies export their user data back to their U.S. counterparts. When a European company sends that data back to its U.S. parent company, that is considered an “export” of the data, the group said, which is only allowed if the subsidiary can ensure an “adequate level or protection” in the foreign country, the group said Wednesday in a statement.

 

However, “after the recent disclosures on the Prism program, such trust in an ‘adequate level of protection’ by the involved companies can hardly be upheld,” the group said.

 

In their privacy policies, some of the largest tech companies say that they will share users’ personal information to meet applicable laws, regulations, legal processes or enforceable government requests.

 

Since Prism’s revelations have ripped trough the technology industry and the privacy landscape more broadly, companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft have called for greater transparency in disclosure of data on government requests for customer information.

 

Yahoo, for instance, has since disclosed some of its user data requests, but companies have had a harder time clearing the way to specifically reveal requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has been at the center of the Prism controversy.

 

“For European subsidiaries of the involved companies, American ‘gag order’ does not apply,” the student group said Wednesday, adding, “in contrast to that, the companies are even under an obligation to tell the truth under European proceedings.”

 

Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland must now decide whether it is legal for European companies to mass-transfer personal data to a foreign intelligence agency, the group said.

 

“We want a clear statement by the authorities if a European company may simply give foreign intelligence agencies access to its customer data,” it said.

 

“If this turns out to be legal, then we might have to change the laws,” it added.

 

In recent weeks, Europe’s justice commissioner has pledged that Europeans’ rights would not be sacrificed for U.S. national security.

 

The student group also seeks more clarity from the tech companies on how they handle users’ personal data under European procedures.

 

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo could not be immediately reached to comment on the complaints.

 

In 2006, E.U. data protection authorities already decided in a case involving the payment processor Swift that a mass transfer of data to the U.S. authorities is illegal under EU law, the student group said.

 

Google and YouTube were not included in the first round of complaints, the group said, because they do not use European intermediaries.

 

“But since Google has data centers in Ireland, Belgium and Finland, we can take similar actions on a slightly different path,” they said.

 

 

Old Safe Reveals Historical Relics For Women's Suffrage Group

Started in 1888 by suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony, the National Council of Women of the United States still exists today in a small office near the United Nations.

On the organization's 125th anniversary, it teamed up with the University of Rochester to open an old safe painted with the words: "Women's Suffrage Party." No one knew what was in the safe or when it had last been opened.

On the website of The University of Rochester's Susan B. Anthony Center, people were speculating all week about what might be in the safe. Would it be lists of secret members? Organizing strategies and protest plans? Or perhaps the original copy of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote? Perhaps love letters, perhaps photographs?

Perhaps nothing, and that's exactly what safe cracker Elaad Israeli said. Most times when he opens safes there's not much, just "rubber bands, paper clips [and] pens."

Israeli worked the combination lock while people crowded into a tiny room. "I don't want to sound rude but I really need quiet to be able to concentrate," he said.

Suddenly, he was done, and Mary Singletary, the president of the National Council of Women, pulled open the safe to reveal a cache of items.

First there was a change purse filled with coins from France, Mexico and various other countries. There was also a box with a Smithsonian replica of the gavel originally used by Susan B. Anthony, as well as an envelope with a 1999 stamp that revealed the safe had been opened within the last 14 years.

The safe also held medals, a silver broach, a wooden stamp, a corporate seal, a paper of incorporation dating back to 1931. Other documents included federal tax exemption papers from 1957 and an IRS letter from 1940. They didn't open the documents and letters because archivists suggested they handle them with care and many may later be digitized.

Perhaps the loveliest items were six small panels, replicas of huge wall murals of women that were commissioned for the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. Catherine Cerulli, the director of the Susan B. Anthony Center at the University of Rochester, pointed out that one woman is clearly a Red Cross worker.

"They're historical pictures of women, women caring for others," she says. "Perhaps these are historical figures."

Why was the safe not opened for a long time? Mary Singletary said the hundreds of dollars needed to hire a locksmith was just too much for an organization struggling to survive with multiple projects.

"I had to make a choice of raising money for my programs or raising money to pay this gentleman," she said.

She chose the programs until the University of Rochester joined the effort. One thing they also found was a candy box filled with keys, one going to a storage room in the basement. So who knows, there may be more discoveries.