J. G. Sandom ~ Author

dEATH in dAVOS — How the super rich (except celebs) are all but invisible to the average American

They are invisible to most people . . . but not to the heroine of my new book, dEATH in dAVOS. She knows just how to find them — and how to kill them. Check out this opinion piece by Paul Krugman of The New York Times.

Our Invisible Rich

Paul Krugman

Half a century ago, a classic essay in The New Yorker titled “Our Invisible Poor” took on the then-prevalent myth that America was an affluent society with only a few “pockets of poverty.” For many, the facts about poverty came as a revelation, and Dwight Macdonald’s article arguably did more than any other piece of advocacy to prepare the ground for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

I don’t think the poor are invisible today, even though you sometimes hear assertions that they aren’t really living in poverty — hey, some of them have Xboxes! Instead, these days it’s the rich who are invisible.

But wait — isn’t half our TV programming devoted to breathless portrayal of the real or imagined lifestyles of the rich and fatuous? Yes, but that’s celebrity culture, and it doesn’t mean that the public has a good sense either of who the rich are or of how much money they make. In fact, most Americans have no idea just how unequal our society has become.

The latest piece of evidence to that effect is a survey asking people in various countries how much they thought top executives of major companies make relative to unskilled workers. In the United States the median respondent believed that chief executives make about 30 times as much as their employees, which was roughly true in the 1960s — but since then the gap has soared, so that today chief executives earn something like 300 times as much as ordinary workers.

So Americans have no idea how much the Masters of the Universe are paid, a finding very much in line with evidence that Americans vastly underestimate the concentration of wealth at the top.

Is this just a reflection of the innumeracy of hoi polloi? No — the supposedly well informed often seem comparably out of touch. Until the Occupy movement turned the “1 percent” into a catchphrase, it was all too common to hear prominentpundits and politicians speak about inequality as if it were mainly about college graduates versus the less educated, or the top fifth of the population versus the bottom 80 percent.

And even the 1 percent is too broad a category; the really big gains have gone to an even tinier elite. For example, recent estimates indicate not only that the wealth of the top percent has surged relative to everyone else — rising from 25 percent of total wealth in 1973 to 40 percent now — but that the great bulk of that rise has taken place among the top 0.1 percent, the richest one-thousandth of Americans.

So how can people be unaware of this development, or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds.

The exceptions are celebrities, who live their lives in public. And defenses of extreme inequality almost always invoke the examples of movie and sports stars. But celebrities make up only a tiny fraction of the wealthy, and even the biggest stars earn far less than the financial barons who really dominate the upper strata. For example, according to Forbes, Robert Downey Jr. is the highest-paid actor in America, making $75 million last year. According to the same publication, in 2013 the top 25 hedge fund managers took home, on average, almost a billion dollars each.

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.

Most Americans say, if asked, that inequality is too high and something should be done about it — there is overwhelming support for higher minimum wages, and a majority favors higher taxes at the top. But at least so far confronting extreme inequality hasn’t been an election-winning issue. Maybe that would be true even if Americans knew the facts about our new Gilded Age. But we don’t know that. Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

dEATH in dAVOS — New study shows benefits of economic expansion going to the very richest Americans

Economic expansions are supposed to be the good times, the periods in which incomes and living standards improve. And that’s still true . . . at least for some of us. Unfortunately, who benefits from rising incomes in an expansion has changed drastically over the last 60 years. Check out this story from The New York Times. 

Enormous yachts at a boat show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., are one visible manifestation of large income gains at the top. CreditLynne Sladky/The Associated Press

The Benefits of Economic Expansions Are Increasingly Going to the Richest Americans

by Neil Irwin

Economic expansions are supposed to be the good times, the periods in which incomes and living standards improve. And that’s still true, at least for some of us.

But who benefits from rising incomes in an expansion has changed drastically over the last 60 years. Pavlina R. Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College, created a chart that vividly shows how. (The chart appears in print in the Fall 2014 edition of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, in her article “Reorienting fiscal policy: A bottom-up approach.”)

Back in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, most of the income gains experienced during expansions — the periods from the trough of one recession until the onset of another — accrued to most of the people. That is to say, the bottom 90 percent of earners captured at least a majority of the rise in income.

With each expansion in sequence, however, the bottom 90 percent captured a smaller share of income gains and the top 10 percent captured more.

Fast-forward to the 1990s and early 2000s expansions, and a new pattern emerged, with the huge majority of income gains going to the top 10 percent, leaving pocket change for everybody else. From 2001 to 2007, 98 percent of income gains accrued to the top 10 percent of earners, Ms. Tcherneva found, basing her analysis on data from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the academics who have made a speciality in documenting the rise of income inequality around the world. (As a point of reference, an American needed a 2011 adjusted gross income of $120,136 to be in the top 10 percent of earners that year, according to I.R.S. data.)

Which brings us to the current expansion. Ms. Tcherneva’s data goes only through 2012, so perhaps in the two years since then things have gotten a bit better for most workers. But in the first three years of the current expansion, incomes actually fell for the bottom 90 percent of earners, even as they rose nicely for the top 10 percent. The result: The top 10 percent captured an impossible-seeming 116 percent of income gains during that span.

But one consistent finding of research into inequality is that merely cutting things off at the top 5 or 10 percent of earners doesn’t capture all of what is changing in patterns of wealth and earnings. So Ms. Tcherneva also compiled the same data for those in the top 1 percent. (The cutoff there, according to the I.R.S., is $388,905 in 2011 adjusted gross income).

This pattern is, in its way, all the more striking. One percent of the population, in the first three years of the current expansion, took home 95 percent of the income gains.

She argues that this approach isn’t flowing through to broad-based wage gains because it is so untargeted. “Conventional fiscal fine-tuning measures ensure that when government increases its total demand for goods and services, it first improves the conditions of the skilled, employable, highly educated, and relatively highly-paid wage and salary workers,” she wrote. “It is hoped that after those workers increase their own demand for products and services, the fiscal stimulus would trickle down to the less skilled and low-wage workers.”

But, she added, “this trickle-down mechanism never quite trickles down far enough to create job opportunities for all individuals willing and able to work.”

She would prefer forms of fiscal stimulus that focus more directly on employing workers, especially at the lower end of the economic ladder. “The manpower of the poor and the unemployed can be mobilized for the public purpose irrespective of their skill level, which in turn will be upgraded by the very work experience and educational programs that the program would offer,” she writes.

Not everyone would agree with that prescription. But this much is clear: Recessions are bad enough; everyone understands that they will tend to be times of stagnant or falling incomes. What is remarkable about the patterns of the last half-century is the steady march toward expansions that also do less and less to build up the incomes of most Americans.

404 — White House pressured into issuing report on drone use by federal agencies

And speaking of drones — Hollywood or otherwise — the Obama Administration, under pressure from privacy groups, is finally revealing our government's domestic drone policies in a published report. Allegedly, it will define which government agencies are flying where, and just how much they are eavesdropping on us. We'll see. I won't hold my breath, Mr. President. So far, most of your reports about your Administration's domestic warrantless mass surveillance programs have been far from truly forthcoming. Check out this story from The Washington Post. Drones, used domestically, play a significant role in my forthcoming novel, 404, coming out in just a few weeks.

White House plans to require federal agencies to provide details about drones

By Craig Whitlock

The White House is preparing a directive that would require federal agencies to publicly disclose for the first time where they fly drones in the United States and what they do with the torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance.

The presidential executive order would force the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to reveal more details about the size and surveillance capabilities of their growing drone fleets — information that until now has been largely kept under wraps.

The mandate would apply only to federal drone flights in U.S. airspace. Overseas military and intelligence operations would not be covered.

President Obama has yet to sign the executive order, but officials said that drafts have been distributed to federal agencies and that the process is in its final stages. “An interagency review of the issue is underway,” said Ned Price, a White House spokesman. He declined to comment further.

Privacy advocates said the measure was long overdue. Little is known about the scope of the federal government’s domestic drone operations and surveillance policies. Much of what has emerged was obtained under court order as a result of public-records lawsuits.

 “We’re undergoing a quiet revolution in aerial surveillance,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “But we haven’t had all in one place a clear picture of how this technology is being used. Nor is it clear that the agencies themselves know how it is being used.”

Most affected by the executive order would be the Pentagon, which conducts drone training missions in most states, and Homeland Security, which flies surveillance drones along the nation’s borders round-the-clock. It would also cover other agencies with little-known drone programs, including NASA, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department.

Military and law enforcement agencies would not have to reveal sensitive operations. But they would have to post basic information about their privacy safeguards for the vast amount of full-motion video and other imagery collected by drones.

Until now, the armed forces and federal law enforcement agencies have been reflexively secretive about drone flights and even less forthcoming about how often they use the aircraft to conduct domestic surveillance.

Security officials are generally reluctant to disclose operational methods and techniques. But drones are in a special category of sensitivity, given the top-secret role they’ve long played in CIA and military counterterrorism missions. There’s also evidence that federal agencies simply have been unable to develop internal guidelines and policies quickly enough to keep up with rapid advances in drone technology.

“Federal use of drones has gone way up, but it’s hard to document how much,” said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that has sued the Federal Aviation Administration for records on government drone operations. “It’s been in­cred­ibly difficult.”

Even Congress has struggled to uncover the extent to which the federal government uses drones as a surveillance tool in U.S. airspace.

In March 2013, lawmakers directed the Defense Department to produce a report, within 90 days, describing its policies for sharing drone surveillance imagery with law enforcement agencies.

Eighteen months later, the Pentagon still has not completed the report. Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Crosson, a Defense Department spokesman, said officials hoped to provide an interim response next week and a full version “in the coming months.”

Department of Justice officials have also been reluctant to answer queries from lawmakers about their drone operations. The FBI first disclosed its use of small, unarmed surveillance drones to Congress in June 2013 andsubsequently revealed that it had been flying them since 2006.

The Justice Department inspector general reported last fall that the FBI had not developed new privacy guidelines for its drone surveillance and was relying instead on old rules for collecting imagery from regular aircraft.

Since then, Justice officials have said they are reviewing their drone surveillance policies but have not disclosed any results. An FBI spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The FBI has resisted other attempts to divulge details about the size of its drone fleet and its surveillance practices.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit group that pushes for transparency in government, sued the FBI last yearunder the Freedom of Information Act for records on its drone program. Although the FBI has turned over thousands of pages of documents, many have been redacted or provide only limited insights.

“They’ve been dragging their feet from the outset, and it’s been enormously frustrating,” said Anne Weismann, CREW’s chief counsel. “I don’t know if it’s because they don’t want to expose the fact that they’ve been operating without any clear guidance or if they just don’t like to talk about it.”

Another section of Obama’s draft executive order would instruct the Commerce Department to help develop voluntary privacy guidelines for private-sector drone flights. The intent is to shape nonbinding industry standards for commercial surveillance instead of imposing new regulations by law.

The executive order is an attempt to cope with a projected surge in drone flights in the United States.

For years, the FAA has enforced a de facto ban on commercial drone flights. The FAA permits government agencies to fly drones only under tightly controlled circumstances.

Under a 2012 law passed by Congress, however, the FAA is developing rules that will gradually open the skies to drones of all kinds. The drone industry, which lobbied Congress to pass the law, predicts $82 billion in economic benefits and 100,000 new jobs by 2025.

On Thursday, the FAA approved requests from six Hollywood filmmakersto fly small camera-equipped drones on movie sets, the first time businesses will be allowed to operate such aircraft in populated areas. About 40 companies, including Amazon.com, have filed similar requests with the FAA. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post.

Federal lawmakers have introduced several bills in recent years to regulate the use of drones by law enforcement agencies and strengthen privacy protections, but none has passed.

No department flies more drones than the Pentagon, which has about 10,000 of the aircraft in its inventory, from four-pound Wasps to the 15-ton Global Hawk.

While many are deployed overseas, Defense Department documents show that the military is making plans to base drones at 144 sites in the United States. Pentagon officials have said they soon expect to fly more drones in civilian airspace in the United States than in military-only zones.

The Department of Homeland Security also conducts extensive surveillance with unarmed drones. Its Customs and Border Protection service has nine large Predator B models, which account for about three-quarters of all drone flight hours reported by federal civilian agencies.

Customs and Border Protection drones patrol a 25-mile-wide corridor along the nation’s northern and southern borders, as well as over the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.

Records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that the Border Patrol has also outsourced its drones on hundreds of occasions to other law enforcement agencies throughout the United States. Details of most of those operations remain secret.

404 — Hollywood gets and exemption to fly drones

Well, I guess if you give millions to political candidates, they'll listen to you and grant you an exception. Hmmmmm. First it's Hollywood. Next it will be real estate, oil companies and wedding videographers. Pretty soon, Google and Amazon will be flying all over our skies. Drones play a significant role in my forthcoming novel, 404. And not in a good way. Check out this story from The New York Times.

Flying-Cam, a filmmaking company, on a movie set in Dunhuang, China. Its application for a waiver to use camera-equipped drones on certain movie and television sets is still under review. For a video, click on the image above.

Drone Exemptions for Hollywood Pave the Way for Widespread Use

By BROOKS BARNES

The commercial use of drones in American skies took a leap forward on Thursday with the help of Hollywood.

The Federal Aviation Administration, responding to applications from seven filmmaking companies and pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, said six of those companies could use camera-equipped drones on certain movie and television sets. Until now, the F.A.A. has not permitted commercial drone use except for extremely limited circumstances in wilderness areas of Alaska.

Put bluntly, this is the first time that companies in the United States will be able to legally use drones to fly over people.

The decision has implications for a broad range of industries including agriculture, energy, real estate, the news media and online retailing. “While the approval for Hollywood is very limited in scope, it’s a message to everyone that this ball is rolling,” said Greg Cirillo, chairman of the aviation practice at Wiley Rein, a law firm in Washington.

Michael P. Huerta, the administrator of the F.A.A., said at least 40 similar applications were pending from companies beyond Hollywood. One is Amazon, which wants permission to move forward with a drone-delivery service. Google has acknowledged “self-flying vehicle” tests in the Australian outback.

“Today’s announcement is a significant milestone in broadening commercial use,” Anthony R. Foxx, secretary of transportation, told reporters in a conference call.

Under the six waivers granted on Thursday — a seventh, for a company called Flying-Cam, is still under review — the companies can use camera-equipped drones on outdoor movie and television sets that are closed to the public. The equipment must be inspected before each flight, fly no higher than 400 feet and be operated by a technician with a pilot’s license. The F.A.A. must be notified of filming.

Night use is prohibited, at least for now.

Some aviation-safety advocates and other watchdog groups have opposed the waivers for Hollywood, worrying about air traffic situations like drone crashes in populated areas. Privacy has also been a concern. Mr. Foxx said on Thursday that he determined that the waivers did “not pose a risk to national airspace users.”

Studios like Sony Pictures Entertainment and Paramount Pictures have already been using drones in overseas shoots for movies like “Transformers: Age of Extinction” and “Skyfall.” Filming in Bulgaria, Millennium Films and Lionsgate recently used a drone-mounted camera for portions of “The Expendables 3.”

Studios, battling a severe slump at the domestic box office, are looking to unmanned flying cameras to create ever more dazzling footage. Hollywood has also cited significant cost savings from foregoing helicopter filming and improved safety; three people were killed last year when a helicopter crashed while filming a Discovery Channel show. Studios also say drone filming will keep production at home.

“By creating a climate that further encourages more movie and TV production in the U.S., today’s decision also supports job creation,” said Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the Motion Picture Association. Mr. Dodd, a former senator from Connecticut, added that the decision was “a victory for audiences everywhere as it gives filmmakers yet another way to push creative boundaries.”

The six film companies receiving approval are Aerial Mob, Astraeus Aerial, HeliVideo Productions, Pictorvision, Snaproll Media and Vortex Aerial.

Among major companies, Amazon has perhaps been the leading proponent of drone use, but it is far from alone. On Friday, the German logistics company DHL is expected to begin using a drone to deliver supplies to residents of the island of Juist. It is the first time such a device has been authorized for regular use in Europe, the company said.

And entertainment companies are racing to use drones in more than the movies.

Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian operator of acrobatic shows, on Monday released a video that explores storytelling on stage using drones called “quadcopters.” The video depicts an electrician surrounded by 10 drone-powered floating lamps; he then appears to conduct their movement in the air — a bit like the way Mickey Mouse interacts with the dancing brooms in Disney’s “Fantasia.”

In August, Disney applied for three drone patents related to outdoor theme park shows. Based on the applications, the company appears to want to use drones to fly projection screens into the air and to move huge marionettes. The company, which has declined to comment, submitted an example of a flying version of Jack Skellington from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

dEATH in dAVOS — Historically small share of jobless folks receiving unemployment insurance

Unemployment insurance (UI) is a crucial component of the American social safety net, but since 2010, the share of unemployed workers receiving UI benefits has eroded to one of its lowest points in decades. Check out this startling graph, below. This article was posted by the Economic Policy Institute. In the novel I'm currently working on, my heroine's mentor and his family are forced into poverty and crime due to GOP policies that limit unemployment benefits.

Historically Small Share of Jobless People Are Receiving Unemployment Insurance

By Josh Bivens

Unemployment insurance (UI) is a crucial component of the American social safety net, but since 2010, the share of unemployed workers receiving UI benefits has eroded to one of its lowest points in decades. The figure below shows the share of unemployed workers in the United States who receive unemployment compensation benefits, including standard benefits and the extended benefits that are often legislated in the wake of economic downturns. Because unemployment is seasonal, the line in the chart shows a 12-month moving average of the recipiency rate. Because this 12-month moving average includes months that occurred before the latest round of emergency extended benefits were cut off, the blue dots pinpoint the recipiency rate for August 2014 (the last month of available data) and the rate that prevailed in August of each of the previous years as well. This August-to-August comparison helps emphasize how low UI recipiency is likely to be for the full 12 months of 2014.

As unemployment spiked during the Great Recession, the overall UI recipiency rate reached roughly two-thirds of all unemployed workers. Between stubbornly long average durations of unemployment spells and cutbacks in UI at both state and federal levels, the recipiency rate dropped sharply in 2012 and 2013. Then the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program that was signed into law in the middle of 2008 expired at the end of 2013, and Congress failed to extend it. This led to an acceleration of the pace of decline in the UI recipiency rate. By August 2014 this rate had declined to 25.9 percent, one of the lowest since the beginning of 1987.With 2.1 job seekers for every job opening, Congress has essentially shredded the safety net while chances of finding work remain distressingly low.

404 — Bash software bug could be bigger threat than Heartbleed, experts warn

A newly discovered security bug in a widely used piece of Linux software, known as Bash, could pose a bigger threat to computer users than the Heartbleed bug that surfaced in April, cyber experts have warned. This is exactly the kind of "exploit" that first alerts my protagonist, John Decker, in my forthcoming novel 404. Except that in the case of 404, the hack occurs within the systems of a major defense contractor. Check out this piece from The Guardian.

Computer users have been warned of a new threat to data security.

Bash software bug could be bigger threat than Heartbleed, experts warn

Newly discovered bug is rated high for severity and low for complexity, meaning it may be easy for hackers to exploit

Reuters in Boston

A newly discovered security bug in a widely used piece of Linux software, known as Bash, could pose a bigger threat to computer users than the Heartbleed bug that surfaced in April, cyber experts have warned.

Bash is the software used to control the command prompt on many Unix computers. Hackers could exploit a bug in Bash to take complete control of a targeted system, security experts said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, issued an alert saying the vulnerability affected Unix-based operating systems including Linux and Apple’s Mac OS X.

Heartbleed allowed hackers to spy on computers but not take control of them, according to Dan Guido, chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits.

“The method of exploiting this issue is also far simpler. You can just cut and paste a line of code and get good results,” he said.

Tod Beardsley, an engineering manager at cybersecurity firm Rapid7, warned the bug was rated a “10” for severity, meaning it has maximum impact, and rated “low” for complexity of exploitation, meaning it is relatively easy for hackers to launch attacks.

“Using this vulnerability, attackers can potentially take over the operating system, access confidential information, make changes etc,” Beardsley said. “Anybody with systems using Bash needs to deploy the patch immediately.”

US-CERT advised computer users to obtain operating systems updates from software makers. It said Linux providers including Red Hat had already prepared them, but it did not mention an update for OS X. Apple representatives could not be reached.

Tavis Ormandy, a Google security researcher, said via Twitter that the patches seemed “incomplete”. Ormandy could not be reached to elaborate, but several security experts said a brief technical comment provided on Twitter raised concerns.

“That means some systems could be exploited even though they are patched,” said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer with the security software maker Veracode.

He said corporate security teams had spent Wednesday combing their networks to find vulnerable machines and patch them, and they would probably be taking other precautions to mitigate the potential for attacks in case the patches proved ineffective.

“Everybody is scrambling to patch all of their internet-facing Linux machines. That is what we did at Veracode today,” he said. “It could take a long time to get that done for very large organisations with complex networks.”

Heartbleed, discovered in April, is a bug in an open-source encryption software called OpenSSL. The bug put the data of millions of people at risk as OpenSSL is used in about two-thirds of all websites. It also forced dozens of technology companies to issue security patches for hundreds of products that use OpenSSL.

Bash is a shell, or command prompt software, produced by the non-profit Free Software Foundation. Officials with that group could not be reached for comment.

404 — FBI gags state and local police on capabilities of IMSI catcher cellphone spy gear

The FCC authorizes the sale of IMSI catcher cellphone surveillance equipment (fake cellphone towers) to state and local police departments on the condition that they first sign an FBI “non-disclosure agreement.” Plus, some law enforcement departments that use such IMSI catcher tech are lying when questioned about the source of their intel, stating that it comes from "confidential sources" when it's actually coming through the use of cellphone spy gear. Check out this story from The Washington Post.

FBI gags state and local police on capabilities of cellphone spy gear

By Craig Timberg

The FBI requires state and local police to keep quiet about the capabilities of a controversial type of surveillance gear that allows law enforcement to eavesdrop on cellphone calls and track individual people based on the signals emitted by their mobile devices, according to a bureau document released recently under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The December 2012 document is a heavily redacted letter between the FBI and police in Tacoma, Wash., as the local department sought to acquire an IMSI catcher, sometimes described as a “fake cellphone tower” because it tricks individual phones into routing their calls and other data through the surveillance equipment. The Tacoma police were buying gear produced by Harris Corp., a Florida-based company that makes the StingRay and other IMSI catchers used by law enforcement agencies across the country.

The FBI letter, which was not classified but was designated as "law enforcement sensitive," told the Tacoma police chief that the Federal Communications Commission authorizes the sale of such surveillance equipment to state and local police departments on the condition that they first sign an FBI “non-disclosure agreement.”

The details of the agreement are redacted from the letter as released; the blacked-out portions stretch across the bulk of a six-page document, which was first published on Monday by MuckRock, a news site that helps journalists, researchers and others submit Freedom of Information Act requests and publishes the results.

The FBI, which calls IMSI catchers "cell site simulators," declined to comment on the document. The bureau has said elsewhere that it considers the tactics used by IMSI catchers to be sensitive technology that could be defeated if too much information becomes available about its capabilities. An affidavit by an FBI official in April said, "The FBI routinely asserts the law enforcement sensitive privilege over cell site simulator equipment because discussion of the capabilities and use of the equipment in court would allow criminal defendants, criminal enterprises, or foreign powers, should they gain access to the items, to determine the FBI’s techniques, procedures, limitations, and capabilities in this area."

The FCC last month began investigating reports of illegal use of IMSI catchers, by foreign intelligence services and criminals but has said it does not oversee the use of the surveillance gear by federal government agencies. Last week, the marketers of a device that’s designed to detect IMSI catchers reported finding 18 in the Washington area over two days of searching.

The locations, said the marketer of the GSMK CryptoPhone, included areas around the White House, the Capitol, the Russian Embassy and the cluster of defense contractors near Dulles International Airport. The CryptoPhone was not able to determine whether the IMSI catchers were being used by the federal government, local police or some other entity.

E-mails collected through a separate Freedom of Information Act request, by the ACLU, showed in June that the U.S. Marshals Service had asked police in Florida to not reveal that they had used IMSI catchers in determining the locations of criminal suspects. Instead, the police were instructed to say that they had learned the whereabouts of suspects using “a confidential source.”

404 — A working car has been 3D-printed out of carbon fiber plastic

Here's a cool car made in 44 hours using a 3-D printer. And, yes, it works! 3-D printers play a pivotal role in my forthcoming novel, 404. Check out this story at The Washington Post.

So, this exists: A working car has been 3D-printed out of carbon fiber plastic

By Brian Fung

This is a car that is made almost entirely out of plastic. The Strati took 44 hours to make, and it's completely driveable. It's lighter and, if you believe its creators, also stronger than its metal counterparts. And it just might be the future of automotive technology everywhere.

Local Motors, the Phoenix-based 3D-printing company that built the car with help from Oak Ridge National Lab and the manufacturing company SABIC, says it's the first to 3D print both a body and chassis together. Other models, such as the Urbee, also use 3D-printed parts, but with a more traditionally manufactured frame.

Everything in the Strati that could be made as part of a single piece of plastic, was. This isn't your standard milk jug plastic, however. It's been mixed with carbon fibers for extra strength.

Although plastic might seem like an unusual choice for a car, the American Chemistry Council's Steve Russell says it's become an increasingly common component in vehicles. "Carbon fiber reinforced plastics are 50 percent lighter than steel, and 30 percent lighter than aluminum," says Russell, "but it has 12 times higher energy absorption."

That means big bonuses for safety and fuel efficiency, which has encouraged car manufacturers to make more and more of their vehicles out of the stuff. Today, carbon-fiber polymers may account for as much as 50 percent of a car's volume (while contributing to only 10 percent of its weight). It's also helped car makers to comply with rising federal emissions standards.

You might think of 3D printing as more of a hobbyist's activity. But there are some real engineering puzzles to be solved with the technoloogy. Most 3D printers, as I've written before, are generally limited to printing in a single material. That makes it harder to make versatile use of them.

Then there's all the materials science that goes into it. Introducing the carbon fiber additive isn't as simple as dumping a load of powder into a vat of molten plastic.

"Part of the secret sauce is knowing how much of it to add, when [to add it], and getting the curing to spit out of the 3D jet at exactly the right time — that's really where the intellectual property resides," Russell says.

See more photos below:

 

 

 

 

404 — In largest retail hack to date, 56 million Home Depot customers' data compromised

Home Depot admits that the account information of 56 million cardholders was compromised in what is the largest known breach of a retail company’s computer network. Check out this piece from The New York Times.

Home Depot said that hackers breached the company’s cash register systems in its United States and Canadian stores in April.

Home Depot Says Data From 56 Million Cards Was Taken in Breach

By NICOLE PERLROTH

Home Depot said on Thursday that the account information of 56 million cardholders was compromised in what is the largest known breach of a retail company’s computer network.

Home Depot said hackers breached the company’s cash register systems in its United States and Canadian stores in April. The hackers, the company said, used custom malware that was designed to evade traditional security tools and had not been previously used in other cyberattacks. The company said that it had since removed infected registers and closed off the hackers’ mode of entry and that it had been using new encryption systems in its American and Canadian stores for the last nine months.

Home Depot has been scrambling to investigate the breach since it became public on Sept. 8. It is unclear how the company missed signs of the attack after a breach last year at Target compromised 40 million cardholders’ information, and after the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security warned retailers in July that their systems were potentially compromised.

The company said its encryption project began in January but was not completed in its American stores until Saturday. It said encryption in its Canadian stores would not be completed until 2015.

Home Depot’s attack went unnoticed for five months. During that time, hackers found an entry into the company’s network, gained access to its in-store payment systems and installed malware to take payment data off the memory of the company’s registers during processing. The hackers then sent that data back to their servers abroad.

Home Depot said it would offer free identity protection and credit monitoring services to any customer who had used a credit or debit card at affected stores.

“We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and anxiety this has caused, and want to reassure them that they will not be liable for fraudulent charges,” Frank Blake, Home Depot’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Security experts and law enforcement say that hackers are actively scanning merchants’ networks for ways to gain remote access to their systems. The Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service recently estimated that more than 1,000 businesses in the United States had been infected with malware programmed to siphon payment card details from cash registers. They believed that many of these businesses did not know they were sharing customers’ credit card information.

Besides Home Depot and Target, companies that have been attacked by hackers include UPS, Goodwill, P. F. Chang’s, Sally Beauty, Michael’s and Neiman Marcus.

The only way to thwart such attacks, security experts say, is for merchants to adopt a new chip-based payment standard known as E.M.V., short for Europay MasterCard and Visa, the technology’s first backers. The technology makes it more difficult for criminals to use stolen account information to make purchases or create counterfeit cards.

Home Depot said that moving to E.M.V. required writing tens of thousands of lines of new software code and deploying it to 85,000 new PIN pads in its stores. It said on Thursday that E.M.V. already existed in its Canadian stores but would not be introduced in its United States stores until the end of the year. Credit card companies have set an October 2015 deadline for American retailers to upgrade their payment systems.

404 — Newest Androids will join iPhones in offering default encryption, blocking police

As Apple recently announced re their products, the next generation of Google’s Android operating system, due for release next month, will encrypt data by default for the first time, raising yet another barrier to police gaining access to the troves of personal data typically kept on smartphones. Check out this story at The Washington Post. The importance of this kind of encryption is explored in my forthcoming thriller, 404.

Newest Androids will join iPhones in offering default encryption, blocking police

By Craig Timberg

The next generation of Google’s Android operating system, due for release next month, will encrypt data by default for the first time, the company said Thursday, raising yet another barrier to police gaining access to the troves of personal data typically kept on smartphones.

Android has offered optional encryption on some devices since 2011, but security experts say few users have known how to turn on the feature. Now Google is designing the activation procedures for new Android devices so that encryption happens automatically; only somebody who enters a device's password will be able to see the pictures, videos and communications stored on those smartphones.

The move offers Android, the world’s most popular operating system for smartphones, a degree of protection that resembles what Apple on Wednesday began providing for iPhones, the leading rival to devices running Android operating systems. Both companies have now embraced a form of encryption that in most cases will make it impossible for law enforcement officials to collect evidence from smartphones – even when authorities get legally binding search warrants.

“For over three years Android has offered encryption, and keys are not stored off of the device, so they cannot be shared with law enforcement,” said company spokeswoman Niki Christoff. “As part of our next Android release, encryption will be enabled by default out of the box, so you won't even have to think about turning it on.”

The move, which Google officials said has been in the works for many months, is part of a broad shift by American technology companies to make their products more resistant to government snooping in the aftermath of revelations of National Security Agency spying by former contractor Edward Snowden.

Expanded deployment of encryption by Google and Apple, however, will have the most direct impact on law enforcement officials, who  have long warned that restrictions on their access to electronic devices make it much harder for them to prevent and solve crimes. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that police needed search warrants to gain access to data stored on phones in most circumstances. But that standard is quickly being rendered moot; eventually no form of legal compulsion will suffice to force the unlocking of most smartphones.

Privacy advocates are ecstatic about the changes by Apple and Google, and especially about their shift toward making encryption automatic, through default settings, so that users get privacy protections without taking any action on their own.

"Most people aren't going to go out of their way to do these things," said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington-based non-profit group that receives substantial industry support. "It's so awesome, as someone who has worked on these issues for a long time, to see these two companies switch their defaults to where these things will be strongly encrypted, and rightly so."

Apple and Google have been engaged in an increasingly pointed competition over the lucrative smartphone market, with Apple in recent weeks portraying the iPhone as a safer, more secure option – despite a recent run of bad publicity over the leak of intimate photos from the Apple accounts of celebrities.

There remain significant differences between how Apple and Google are handling encryption. Apple, which controls both the hardware and software on its devices, will be able to deliver the updated encryption on both new iPhones and iPads and also most older ones, as users update their operating systems with the latest release, iOS 8.

That is likely to happen over the next several weeks, and for those with iOS 8, the encryption will be so secure that the company says it will lack the technical ability to unlock the phones or recover data for anyone -- whether it be for police or even users themselves if they forget their device passcodes. Much data is likely to remain on iCloud accounts, which back up pictures and other data by default for many iPhones and iPads; police with search warrants will still be able to access this information. Users who want to prevent all forms of police access to their information can adjust their phone settings in a way that blocks data from flowing to iCloud.

By contrast, Google does not have the ability to deliver its updated operating system, called the “L-release,” quickly to most users. Several different manufacturers make smartphones and tablets that use the Android operating system, and those devices are sold by many cellular carriers worldwide. This results in what experts call “fragmentation” – meaning there are hundreds of different versions of Android worldwide, many several years old, making it difficult to keep them current with the latest security features.

The newest Android devices will likely ship with default encryption after October, but it will take many months and probably years before most Android devices have encryption by default.