/12

Obama can’t point to a single time the NSA call records program prevented a terrorist attack
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/23/obama-cant-point-to-a-single-time-the-nsa-call-records-program-preve

Obama and Co : Il n’y a pas eu de nouveau « 9/11 » parce qu’il n’y a eu aucune nouvelle tentative mais c’est quand même la #surveillance de la #NSA qui a empêché un nouveau « 9/11 »...

National Security Agency defenders, including President Obama, continue to cite the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 when defending the program that scoops up domestic call records in bulk. But asked specifically, on Friday, if he could identify a time when that program stopped a similar attack, President Obama couldn’t. That’s because the program hasn’t prevented a second 9/11.

But the lack of evidence that the program is effective will probably not prevent the NSA’s defenders from continuing to invoke 9/11 to protect the program. Another member of the task force, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, admitted the group had found that “the program to date has not played a significant role in stopping terrorist attacks in the United States,” but earlier in his interview credited the NSA as one of the agencies responsible for the lack of successful terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11.

The NSA is trying to have it both ways on its domestic spying programs
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/22/the-nsa-is-trying-to-have-it-both-ways-on-its-domestic-spying-progra

(...)

... now the Internet has made a hash of the tidy distinction between foreign and domestic surveillance. Today, citizens of France, Brazil and Nigeria routinely use Facebook, Gmail, and other American online services to communicate. Americans make calls with Skype. And much Internet traffic between two foreign countries often passes through the United States.

The NSA has reacted to this changing communications landscape by trying to claim the best of both worlds. The FISA Amendments Act, passed in 2008, gave the NSA the power to compel domestic telecommunications providers to cooperate with the NSA’s surveillance programs. Yet the NSA has resisted the transparency and judicial oversight that has traditionally accompanied domestic surveillance. They’ve argued that disclosing the existence of these programs would compromise their effectiveness. And they’ve argued that because the “targets” of surveillance are overseas, only limited judicial oversight by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, not individualized Fourth Amendment warrants, were required.

But the NSA programs revealed by Snowden, including PRISM and the phone records program, look more like domestic surveillance programs than foreign ones. Like conventional domestic wiretaps, they rely on compelling domestic firms to cooperate with surveillance. Like conventional wiretaps, they sweep up information about the communications of Americans on American soil. And like domestic wiretaps, information collected by the NSA is sometimes shared with domestic law enforcement agencies for prosecution of Americans.

If the NSA is going to run what amounts to a domestic surveillance program that collects the private information of Americans on American soil, it’s going to face pressure to subject that program to the same kind of oversight as other domestic surveillance program. That means disclosing the general characteristics of the program—but not the specific targets—to the public. And it means requiring individualized warrants, supported by probable cause, before the government can intercept the communications of Americans on American soil.

#NSA #surveillance

#Elsevier is taking down papers from #Academia.edu

Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions.

Enter Elsevier, stage left. Bioinformatician Guy Leonard is just one of several people to have mentioned on Twitter this morning that Academia.edu took down their papers in response to a notice from Elsevier. Here’s a screengrab of the notification:

http://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/oli5n9w.png

▻http://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu

#copyright #revue #revue_scientifique #revue_académique #université #propriété_intellectuelle
(mais, en fin de compte, cher Elsevier, les #auteurs ne comptent vraiment rien du tout ?)

J’aime beaucoup ce « Hi guy » (et tout le reste évidemment...)

#NSA uses #Google #cookies to pinpoint targets for #hacking
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/nsa-uses-google-cookies-to-pinpoint-targets-for-hacking

Marvin Ammori, a lawyer who advises technology companies including Google on surveillance issues, wrote in USA Today that “limiting bulk data collection by private companies - whether they advertise or not - would do little or nothing to limit the NSA.”

Felten disagrees, noting that the latest documents show that “the unique identifiers that are being placed on users’ computers are not only being used by analytic and advertising companies, but also being used by the NSA for targeting.” He also says that there are things those companies could do to protect their users from the type of attacks described in the slides, like “not sending tracking IDs, or at least not sending them in the clear” without a layer of encryption.

#surveillance