Meddling

It would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

There are 614 posts filed in Meddling (this is page 29 of 62).

NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls

Remember how Glenn Greenwald speculated that the NSA was capable of listening to the contents of phone calls? It turns out to be true.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

I had heard rumors of an AT&T facility in Kansas that transcribed millions of phone calls. Supposedly AT&T’s voice recognition software was highly developed for this purpose. Can’t find anything about it online, though, and not sure where I learned of it.

Also, read the Washington Post’s story on the NUCLEON program.

via NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls | Politics and Law – CNET News.

NextDoor and silos

Searching around this morning, I found this insightful comment on NextDoor which echoes my concerns. It was posted on a message board way back in October 2011:

How tragic that I could sign up to *heyneighbor.com* and *not* be connected to all my neighbours who happened to signed up to *nextdoor.com* And every new venture in this space could serve to silo people as much as it connects them. These business models contain paradox – they can only succeed in a neighbourhood if they have a monopoly.

There’s a lot of truth here.

via Post in Another one … NextDoor.com: Locals Online – For hosts of neighborhood e-lists, placeblogs, and community social nets: E-Democracy.org.

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

In addition to collecting call detail records, there is some speculation that phone conversations themselves are being harvested. Recall this exchange from last month, as reported by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian:

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

via Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers

Yesterday it was revealed that the National Security Agency is collecting millions of phone records from Verizon:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Today, the Wall Street Journal claims this extends to AT&T and Sprint customers, too. Yesterday, The Guardian revealed PRISM, a Top Secret NSA program to directly query social media servers owned Facebook, Google, Apple, and others.

I suppose the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” got left behind somewhere in the 20th century.

via NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news | The Guardian.

Nextdoor: the online version of a gated community

Nextdoor
Many of the neighborhoods in and around mine are signing up for the Nextdoor social media site to manage their neighborhood communication. Nextdoor is a social media site which provides a forum for neighbors to post. From Nextdoor’s About page:

Nextdoor is the private social network for you, your neighbors and your community. It’s the easiest way for you and your neighbors to talk online and make all of your lives better in the real world. And it’s free.

Thousands of neighborhoods are already using Nextdoor to build happier, safer places to call home.

People are using Nextdoor to:

  • Quickly get the word out about a break-in
  • Organize a Neighborhood Watch Group
  • Track down a trustworthy babysitter
  • Find out who does the best paint job in town
  • Ask for help keeping an eye out for a lost dog
  • Find a new home for an outgrown bike
  • Finally call that nice man down the street by his first name

Nextdoor’s mission is to bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood, one of the most important communities in each of our lives.

Sounds groovy, doesn’t it? The problem is with the fourth word in the description:

“Nextdoor is the private social network …”

Continue reading →

Don’t share that infographic spam – Salon.com

Salon’s Andrew Leonard wrote in March about what might actually be behind the mystery infographics. Nice reporting, Andrew!

Won’t you share my infographic, please?

Doesn’t seem too much to ask, does it? Until you investigate further and discover that by incorporating these infographics into your website, you are not only probably violating at least the spirit of Google’s guidelines on Web spam, but you are also quite likely steering unsuspecting visitors to websites bankrolled by the for-profit education industry.

via Don’t share that infographic spam – Salon.com.

Dear William: fat chance.

Got this in today, with regard to the mystery infographics. I was thinking of responding politely that I wasn’t interested but then I realized this was yet another bulk email distributed through pandasent.com. Nor is it personalized in any way: my name does not appear anywhere in it.

So, tough luck, “William.” I’m not interested in covering your tracks!

Received: from pandasent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by pandasent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 38C0B47E2
for My_Email_Address; Tue, 7 May 2013 12:32:24 +0000 (UTC)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=simple; d=pandasent.com; h=message-id
:mime-version:from:to:subject:date:content-type
:content-transfer-encoding; s=postfix; bh=blah blah blah=
Message-Id: 08UE0KF-5RC7-UWYS-JIEE-FRL6JC12TPZ@onlinecriminaljusticedegree.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
From: William Pritchard william.pritchard@onlinecriminaljusticedegree.com
To: My_Email_Address
Subject: OnlineCriminalJusticeDegree.com Link Removal Request
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 07:31:16 -0700
X-Bounce-Tracking-Info: blah blah blah
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
X-SMTPCOM-Tracking-Number: blah blah blah
X-SMTPCOM-Sender-ID: 446126
X-SMTPCOM-Spam-Policy: SMTP.com is a paid relay service. We do not tolerate UCE of any kind. Please report it ASAP to abuse@smtp.com

Hello,

My name is Will, and I am writing to you today on behalf of my employer, OnlineCriminalJusticeDegree.com. We’ve been keeping a close eye on the goings on of other websites since the advent of the new Webmaster Standards. We want to make sure we’re doing everything in our power to stay up to date and relevant. Looking around the web, as it were, we’re beginning to fear that, perhaps, we’re not doing everything correctly. We’ve studied the guidelines rather closely, and we do see where we might have missed the marks.
Continue reading →

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

Astonishing. There’s a reason the federal government buys millions of dollars worth of file servers.

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

via Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Britian’s ITV investigates Bosch dishwasher fires

A guest blog reader kindly alerted me to an investigation by Britain’s ITV channel which aired two days ago on Bosch dishwashers catching fire. The report is highly critical of the “voluntary recall” process that Bosch seems to be using, pointing out that nearly half a million potentially faulty Bosch dishwashers are still in use in the UK.

I’m still working my way through the ITV report but I assume this number is based this on the models that have been recalled but not yet fixed. I’d like to know if situations like mine have been considered: models which haven’t been recalled yet still pose a fire hazard?

Here’s the first of the video reports. I’ll see if I can link to the others (though it appears ITV is using some kind of country-specific DRM-cruft to block viewing here in the States).