A federal court in San Francisco on December 5th, approved of the government’s interception and use of emails and other communications in a terrorism case involving the so-called Portland Christmas Tree Bombing case. In that case a Somali-American was caught plotting a bombing on the Christmas tree lighting after his parents repeatedly asked the FBI to…
DetailsWas Russia responsible for hacking the DNC and John Podesta, and releasing their communications as part of a concerted effort to impact the US electoral result and get their favored candidate elected president? Yes. And no. And maybe. This question, and the various questions subsumed by this question, have much broader implications for how we conduct…
DetailsOne problem with modern computer or computer related crime: it’s international in scope. But governments are limited by their borders, their authority, and their sovereignty. A proposed change to the federal rules of criminal procedure that authorize US judges and magistrates to permit searches is either a minor tweak of a procedural rule designed to deal with a growing problem, which…
DetailsOne of the most hotly contested issues in information security is whether the government should encourage the ubiquitous use of strong encryption to protect data both at rest and in transit, or whether the government (and by this, I mean any government) should require users to use only “government approved” encryption. That is crypto algorithms…
DetailsThe U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings on November 16, 2016 on security of Internet of Things in the wake of the massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks perpetrated against certain network DNS servers via a host of unsecured IoT devices. So, what’s a government to do? That is, not what SHOULD…
DetailsIf a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?? If a company has a data security event exposing sensitive data, but nobody is harmed by the exposure, is it a violation of the law? A recent case from a federal appeals court in Atlanta LabMD…
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