friendly_iconoclast
friendly_iconoclast's JournalDocuments show AT&T secretly sells customer data to law enforcement
Reposted from LBN: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141607262
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/att-secretly-sells-customer-data-law-enforcement-hemisphere
The program, called Hemisphere, was previously known only as a “partnership” between the company and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for the purposes of counter-narcotics operations.
But according to internal company documents revealed Monday by the Daily Beast, Hemisphere is being sold to local police departments and used to investigate everything from murder to Medicaid fraud, costing US taxpayers millions of dollars every year even while riding roughshod over privacy concerns.
It accesses the trove of telephone metadata available to AT&T, who control a large proportion of America’s landline and cellphone infrastructure. Unlike other providers, who delete their stored metadata after a certain time, AT&T keeps information like call time, duration, and even location data on file for years, with records dating back to 2008.
The original Daily Beast article can be found at:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit.html
Documents show AT&T secretly sells customer data to law enforcement
Source: Guardian
Telecommunications giant AT&T is selling access to customer data to local law enforcement in secret, new documents released on Monday reveal.
The program, called Hemisphere, was previously known only as a “partnership” between the company and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for the purposes of counter-narcotics operations.
It accesses the trove of telephone metadata available to AT&T, who control a large proportion of America’s landline and cellphone infrastructure. Unlike other providers, who delete their stored metadata after a certain time, AT&T keeps information like call time, duration, and even location data on file for years, with records dating back to 2008.
But according to internal company documents revealed Monday by the Daily Beast, Hemisphere is being sold to local police departments and used to investigate everything from murder to Medicaid fraud, costing US taxpayers millions of dollars every year even while riding roughshod over privacy concerns.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/att-secretly-sells-customer-data-law-enforcement-hemisphere
The original Daily Beast article can be found at:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit.html
Shale gas—not EPA rules—has pushed decline in coal-generated electricity, study confirms
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-shale-gasnot-epa-ruleshas-decline.htmlPower plants, which use 93 percent of the coal produced nationally, have been operating under the same EPA regulations signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Proposed new rules since then have all been challenged in court and not implemented until June 2016, when the EPA's restrictions on mercury and other toxic emissions were approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Consumption of coal continued to grow under those 1990-era EPA rules until 2008, and then went into steady decline, dropping by 23 percent from 2008 thru 2015.
The data show the drop in those years to be correlated with the shale revolution, as natural gas production increased by a factor of more than 10 and its price dropped in half, the researchers say. And, due to the continuing—and in some cases accelerating—technological and economic advantages of gas over coal, the decline in coal is expected to continue at least decades into the future.
Yahoo’s Government Email Scanner Was Actually a Secret Hacking Tool
X-posted from Good Reads: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016168160
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool
Last year, the US government served Yahoo with a secret order, asking the company to search within its users’ emails for some targeted information, as first reported by Reuters this week. It’s still unclear what was the information sought, but The New York Times, citing an anonymous official source, later reported that the government was looking for a specific digital “signature” of a “communications method used by a state-sponsored, foreign terrorist organization.” ...
...But two sources familiar with the matter told Motherboard that this description is wrong, and that the tool was actually more like a “rootkit,” a powerful type of malware that lives deep inside an infected system and gives hackers essentially unfettered access. The rootkit-like tool was found by Yahoo’s internal security testing team during one of their checkups, according to a source.
“They assumed it was a rootkit installed by hackers,” an ex-Yahoo employee, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, told Motherboard. “If it was just a slight modification to the spam and child pornography filters, the security team wouldn't have noticed and freaked out.”
Tl;dr version: The Feds demand Yahoo management install rootkit (my guess is to look for posts using steganography), Yahoo management obliges- but does not tell Yahoo corporate security.
Yahoo security finds poorly-written malware, tells management. Management says
"National security letter, STFU or do time". Head of security resigns as a result.
Presumably someone at Yahoo remains pissed off, leaks details to Motherboard.
(or if your are of conspiratorial bent, malware was/is actually good and reports of
it being poorly written are attempts to make NSA look more inept than they
really are...)
Yahoo’s Government Email Scanner Was Actually a Secret Hacking Tool
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-toolLast year, the US government served Yahoo with a secret order, asking the company to search within its users’ emails for some targeted information, as first reported by Reuters this week. It’s still unclear what was the information sought, but The New York Times, citing an anonymous official source, later reported that the government was looking for a specific digital “signature” of a “communications method used by a state-sponsored, foreign terrorist organization.” ...
...But two sources familiar with the matter told Motherboard that this description is wrong, and that the tool was actually more like a “rootkit,” a powerful type of malware that lives deep inside an infected system and gives hackers essentially unfettered access. The rootkit-like tool was found by Yahoo’s internal security testing team during one of their checkups, according to a source.
“They assumed it was a rootkit installed by hackers,” an ex-Yahoo employee, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, told Motherboard. “If it was just a slight modification to the spam and child pornography filters, the security team wouldn't have noticed and freaked out.”
Tl;dr version: The Feds demand Yahoo management install rootkit (my guess is to look for posts using steganography), Yahoo management obliges- but does not tell Yahoo corporate security.
Yahoo security finds poorly-written malware, tells management. Management says
"National security letter, STFU or do time". Head of security resigns as a result.
Presumably someone at Yahoo remains pissed off, leaks details to Motherboard.
(or if your are of conspiratorial bent, malware was/is actually good and reports of
it being poorly written are attempts to make NSA look more inept than they
really are...)
Trump Supporters Spent The Debate Tweeting At Jon Lester Because They Thought He Was Lester Holt
https://deadspin.com/trump-supporters-spent-the-debate-tweeting-at-jon-leste-1787351028We’re late on this (we never would have known about it if Randall J. Sanders hadn’t noticed) but I think it’s worth the wait. Last week, presidential debate moderator Holt drew the ire of some Trump supporters by asking questions of Donald Trump about his insane statements and policies, and by attempting to keep him on track. The next morning those Trumplings ran to Twitter and tweeted at the first “Lester” they could find...
...For next Sunday night’s debate, forget the fact-checking. Make sure your second screen is a search for Jon Lester’s mentions.
Best comment from Deadspin:
"Check out the feeds for those twitter users, holy shit. A couple straight up white power, and a bunch of just raging ignorance."
Gun control advocacy attracts bullshit artists, like all prohibitionism. DU is not exempt
They come in several varieties. All are (according to them) the smartest, most concerned/caring
person in the room and purport to "know" what others do and do not "need"
Some are of more than one type:
*The Royalist Gun Owner- "*My* firearms are just fine- it's *those people* (and/or
their guns) that are the problem!"
*The Veteran- "I was (Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines) and (carried/served on) (Weapon
System X). Nobody needs an assault rifle/weapon!"
*The Fudd- Inevitably mentions that they do not own any firearm with post-19th Century
technology and declares that no one needs a gun designed after 1900. If pressed, may grudgingly
accept M-1 Garands.
*The Expert- Knows far more about guns than you ignorant sociopathic racist peasants do,
and is not a bit shy about letting you know that.
If confronted by evidence that they in fact do *not* know what they are talking about
(or are simply flat-out wrong) they press on as if they never saw it, a la Donald Trump.
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