National Security Agency (NSA)
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Senate puts brakes on NSA Accumulo Project that mimics Google
But the NSA also saw the database as something that could improve security across the federal government — and beyond. Last September, the agency open sourced its Google mimic, releasing the code as the Accumulo project. It’s a common open source story — except that the Senate Armed Services Committee wants to put the brakes on the project. Read More »
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Should U.S. Hackers Fix Cybersecurity Holes Or Exploit Them?
Maybe someday we'll patch vulnerabilities faster than the enemy can use them in an attack, but we're not there yet. There’s a debate going on about whether the U.S. government—specifically, the NSA and United States Cyber Command—should stockpile Internet vulnerabilities or disclose and fix them...
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Snowden Saw What I Saw: Surveillance Criminally Subverting The Constitution
What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience. Read More »
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Socrata Raises $18M For Platform To Open Government Data
Socrata has raised $18 million to further the extension of its open-data platform now used at all levels of government to present information for the general public. Read More »
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Splunk 2013: Top enterprise cyber security 'appalling' - former NSA CIO/CTO
Former National Security Agency (NSA) CIO and CTO Dr Prescott Winter believes that many large organisations don't know what they're doing when it comes to cyber security and as a result defences against hackers and cyber attacks are "appalling". Read More »
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Sqrrl Raises $2 Million For Secure, Scalable Big Data Technology Originally Developed At NSA
Sqrrl, a big data startup that came out of development at the National Security Agency (NSA), has raised $2 million in seed funding from Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture. Read More »
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Sqrrl Snags $5.2M To Commercialize The NSA’s Accumulo Database
New funding from Atlas Venture and Matrix Ventures will help the NoSQL database vendor push its product globally. Read More »
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Stallman: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use. Read More »
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Strata Week: Leaked Documents, Intel Committees, Definition Of Data Mining, And Accumulo
I was cranky from absorbing the NSA news dominating many data conversations.[...] My crankiness dissolved a bit after speaking with Q and other Chicago-based people who are working on positive impact data science projects. Read More »
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The CISPA-Zombie Won’t Die. Instead, It Changed Its Name To CISA And It’s Here To Violate Your Privacy.
On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee met in secret and approved the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014 (CISA)(S. 2588). The bill started out in bad shape, and privacy advocates across the country spoke out about our concerns...
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The Day We Fought Back
[...] The groups that organized this action have long been pushing hard for real surveillance reform. But we knew that the time was ripe—that the Snowden leaks, unrelenting media pressure, grassroots activism, and even pressure from within Congress—were creating a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give the public—worldwide—the chance to voice its opposition to mass spying. [...] Read More »
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The Digital Panopticon
If the American people sit back and let a digital panopticon be constructed by our government, we will have a nearly impossible time destroying it. The fear which can be created through the threats of constant surveillance and draconian persecution by a government (ex. using the Espionage Act to put leakers away for life) is a powerful mechanism of control that can paralyze an entire population. Read More »
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The Google File System Makes NSA’s Hack Blatantly Illegal And They Know It
The latest Edward Snowden bombshell that the National Security Agency has been hacking foreign Google and Yahoo data centers is particularly disturbing. Plenty has been written about it so I normally wouldn’t comment except that the general press has, I think, too shallow an understanding of the technology involved. The hack is even more insidious than they know. Read More »
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The History Of Surveillance And The Black Community
February is Black History Month and that history is intimately linked with surveillance by the federal government in the name of "national security." Indeed, the history of surveillance in the African-American community plays an important role in the debate around spying today and in the calls for a congressional investigation into that surveillance. [...] Read More »
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The Inside Story Of The Open Source PC, And How It Could Stop You Being A Slave To Your Hardware
Hardware engineer Andrew 'bunnie' Huang on how his path to building an open source computer started with a childhood fascination with the Apple II and why we need to rediscover open hardware...
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