senate
Lawmakers Punt Patriot Act to Obama
Congress is sending President Barack Obama legislation that extends three provisions of the Patriot Act — despite heated debate among lawmakers that the surveillance measure goes too far. The act, hastily adopted six weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, greatly expands the government’s ability to spy on Americans in the name of national security. Three measures of the act were set to expire at the end of 2009, but in December lawmakers extended the deadline to the end of February in hopes of reaching a compromise.
Continue reading »FBI: 19,000 Matches to Terrorist Screening List in 2009
United States law enforcement agents and partners reported “encounters” with suspected terrorists 55,000 times in the last year; a check against the terrorist watchlist found a match 19,000 times, according to testimony presented to the Senate on Wednesday. The figure includes multiple hits on the same people, according to an FBI spokesman, who didn’t know how many unique individuals were counted in the 19,000 hits. The statistics appeared in testimony by the FBI’s Timothy Healy, director of the Terrorist Screening Center, or TSC, to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
Continue reading »Copyright Czar Vote Heads to Full Senate
The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved Victoria Espinel’s nomination Thursday, paving the way for a full Senate vote to confirm the nation’s first copyright czar. No Senate vote date was set immediately for a nominee who was applauded by both the “copyleft” and the “copyright.” Espinel is expected to have a key role for the United States as it and several other countries secretly negotiate an intellectual property treaty, known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. That treaty could fundamentally alter copyright law to require ISPs to adopt “graduated response” policies to terminate internet service of repeat, copyright offenders.
Continue reading »"Discount club" scams filch billions from online shoppers
Imagine that you visit Restaurants.com and purchase a gift card for a friend. During the checkout process, a screen asks if you want to save ten dollars on the purchase you just made, and it shows a single “Continue” button, as though this is just one more step in the process. On the next page, you are offered information about some kind of discount club that will give you cash back on the purchase you just made, and there’s a box for entering your e-mail address.
Continue reading »Senate Panel: 80 Percent of Cyber Attacks Preventable
If network administrators simply instituted proper configuration policies and conducted good network monitoring, about 80 percent of commonly known cyber attacks could be prevented, a Senate committee heard Tuesday. The remark was made by Richard Schaeffer, the NSA’s Information Assurance Director, who added that simply adhering to already known best practices would sufficiently raise the security bar so that attackers would have to take more risks to breach a network, “thereby raising [their] risk of detection.” The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security heard from a number of experts offering commentary on how the government should best tackle securing government and private-sector critical infrastructure networks. Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance told senators that public apathy and ignorance played as much a role in the current state of cybersecurity as the unwillingness of corporate entities to take responsibility for securing the public’s data.
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