As Feared: House Guts USA Freedom Act, Every Civil Liberties Organization Pulls Their Support from the tragic dept As we feared would happen, the House, under pressure from the White House, has completely watered down the USA FREEDOM Act. After a long (and, we’ve heard, contentious) battle among the different players, the bill that’s moving to the floor tomorrow is even less useful than the already weakened version that passed out of both the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. Following the revelation of the new version of the bill late Tuesday, basically every civil liberties organization pulled their support for the bill.
Tag: public interest groups
Origin of the The Philadelphia Cheese Steak and Hoagie The Philly Cheese Steak
The Hoagie
European settlers purchased Hog Island from the Lenape Indians in 1680. The settlers gradually developed the island by building log and earthwork dikes to minimize storm damage and convert the marshes into good grazing meadows. Hog Island supposedly got its name from the pigs which local residents left to roam free, as no fencing was needed.
#Privacy #Heartbleed
Heartbleed Means HealthCare.gov Users Must Reset Passwords
http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2014/04/heartbleed-means-healthcaregov-users-must-reset-passwords/82852/
By Aliya Sternstein
Nextgov.com
April 19, 2014
Federal officials are telling Obamacare website account holders to reset
their passwords, following revelations of a bug that could allow hackers
to steal data.
Officials earlier in the month said the government’s main public sites,
including HealthCare.gov, were safe from the risks surrounding Heartbleed
— faulty code recently found in a widely-used encryption tool.
But, this weekend, the online marketplace’s homepage directs users to
change their login information.
“While there’s no indication that any personal information has ever been
at risk, we have taken steps to address Heartbleed issues and reset
consumers’ passwords out of an abundance of caution,” HealthCare.gov
states.
[…]
INFO: Google scans user’s emails
http://bit.ly/1reFUNj
Google updates terms of service to reflect its scanning of users’ emails
Google has updated its terms of service to reflect that it analyzes user
content including emails to provide users tailored advertising, customized
search results and other features.
The Internet giant’s scanning of users’ email has been controversial with
privacy groups describing it as an intrusion into user privacy.
[…]
Mission-critical satellite communications wide open to malicious hacking
By Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
April 17, 2014
Mission-critical satellite communications relied on by Western militaries
and international aeronautics and maritime systems are susceptible to
interception, tampering, or blocking by attackers who exploit easy-to-find
backdoors, software bugs, and similar high-risk vulnerabilities, a
researcher warned Thursday.
Ground-, sea-, and air-based satellite terminals from a broad spectrum of
manufacturers—including Iridium, Cobham, Hughes, Harris, and Thuraya—can
be hijacked by adversaries who send them booby-trapped SMS text messages
and use other techniques, according to a 25-page white paper published by
penetration testing firm IOActive. Once a malicious hacker has remotely
gained control of the devices, which are used to communicate with
satellites orbiting in space, the adversary can completely disrupt
mission-critical satellite communications (SATCOM). Other malicious
actions include reporting false emergencies or misleading geographic
locations of ships, planes, or ground crews; suppressing reports of actual
emergencies; or obtaining the coordinates of devices and other potentially
confidential information.
“If one of these affected devices can be compromised, the entire SATCOM
infrastructure could be at risk,” Ruben Santamarta, IOActive’s principal
security consultant, wrote. “Ships, aircraft, military personnel,
emergency services, media services, and industrial facilities (oil rigs,
gas pipelines, water treatment plants, wind turbines, substations, etc.)
could all be impacted by these vulnerabilities.”
Santamarta said that every single one of the terminals he audited
contained one or more weaknesses that hackers could exploit to gain remote
access. When he completed his review in December, he worked with the CERT
Coordination Center to alert each manufacturer to the security holes he
discovered and suggested improvements to close them. To date, Santamarta
said, the only company to respond was Iridium. To his knowledge, the
remainder have not yet addressed the weaknesses. He called on the
manufacturers to immediately remove all publicly accessible copies of
device firmware from their websites to prevent malicious hackers from
reverse engineering the code and uncovering the same vulnerabilities he
did.
[…]
Key win on court openness
My colleague Scott Michelman has obtained an excellent ruling from the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit holding that a company could not sue the federal government over its maintaining files about a allegedly bad product while keeping both the name of the product, and the name of the company, confidential
Paul Alan Levy
Public Citizen Litigation Group
1600 – 20th Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 588-1000
http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=396
Fourth Circuit: Injury to Corporate Reputation Not Enough to Justify Sealing Court Case
‘Company Doe’ Sued to Keep Complaint Out of Federal Database Designed to Warn Consumers of Faulty Products
April 16, 2014
Contact: Scott Michelman (202) 588-7739
Angela Bradbery (202) 588-7741
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Holding that injury to corporate reputation doesn’t justify sealing a court case, an appellate court today in Company Doe v. Public Citizen handed a key victory (PDF) to consumers. It also solidified the integrity of a federal database designed to warn consumers about faulty products and confirmed the importance of public access to courts, Public Citizen said today.
In the case, a company sued to keep a complaint about one of its products out of a database created by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and persuaded a district court judge to adjudicate the matter in secret, sealing most documents pertaining to the case and permitting the company to use the pseudonym “Company Doe.” Public Citizen, along with Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union (the publisher of Consumer Reports), objected to the seal. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled today that the record must be unsealed.
“The Fourth Circuit sent a strong message today that corporations that turn to the courts must accept that public access to the proceedings is part of going to court in an open and democratic society,” said Scott Michelman, the Public Citizen attorney handling the case.
The public will learn the name of the company as soon as the case is sent back to the district court, Michelman said.
The court ruled that:
• Injury to corporate reputation is not enough to justify sealing court records under the First Amendment;
• The right to exclude a report from the CPSC database doesn’t include the right to litigate the entire matter in secret;
• Judicial opinions, summary judgment materials and docket sheets are protected by First Amendment right of access to courts;
• Permitting a company to use a pseudonym to challenge the inclusion of a report in the CPSC database was an abuse of discretion in light of the public interest in the database; and
• District courts must act expeditiously on sealing requests.
The underlying case was the first legal challenge to the CPSC product safety database, which was set up in 2011 as required by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. Allowing public access to the court record allows the public to assess both the functioning of the court and the effect of this case on the CPSC and its database going forward.
“The ruling is a complete victory for consumers and a strong vindication of the First Amendment imperative to conduct litigation in the open,” Michelman added. “This decision will stand as a bulwark against the conduct of secret litigation such as occurred in this case.”
Learn more about the case.
http://www.citizen.org/litigation/forms/cases/getlinkforcase.cfm?cID=783
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