The
federal government borrowed 46 cents of every dollar it has spent so
far in fiscal year 2013, which began Oct. 1, according to the latest
data the Congressional Budget Office released Friday.
The government notched a $172 billion deficit in November, and is already nearly $300 billion in the hole through the first two months of fiscal year 2013, underscoring just how deep the government’s budget problems are as lawmakers try to negotiate a year-end deal to avoid a budgetary “fiscal cliff.” Higher spending on mandatory items such as Social Security, Medicare and interest on the debt led the way in boosting spending compared with the previous year, which also highlights the trouble spots Congress and President Obama are struggling to grapple with. All sides agreed to discretionary spending cuts and automatic spending cuts last year, but have been unable to agree on ways to control entitlement costs, which are the long-term drivers of deficits and debt. Fiscal year 2013 began on Oct. 1 and so far the government has spent $638 billion and taken in just $346 billion in revenue. That tax revenue is up by $30 billion compared with last year, or about 10 percent. But spending is up even more — a staggering $87 billion, or 14 percent. The CBO said much of that higher spending total is due to timing of payments month-to-month. Without those shifts, spending would be up $22 billion, or 4 percent. Overall, CBO analysts said that, accounting for shifts in both revenue and spending, the deficit would be $8 billion lower this year than it was last year at this time. The agency, Congress’s nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, releases preliminary estimates of the government’s fiscal position each month. Final figures will come later this month from the Treasury Department. The government is poised to post another $1 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2013, which would mark the fifth straight year. Before that, the record was $438 billion, which came in 2008, President George W. Bush’s last full year in office. Congress and the White House are trying to hash out a long-term fiscal framework that could lead to higher taxes and limits on future spending. |
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Many motorists don't know it, but it's likely that every time they get behind the wheel, there's a snitch along for the ride.
In the next few days, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to propose long-delayed regulations requiring auto manufacturers to include event data recorders - better known as "black boxes" - in all new cars and light trucks. But the agency is behind the curve. Automakers have been quietly tucking the devices, which automatically record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop, into most new cars for years. When a car is involved in a crash or when its airbags deploy, inputs from the vehicle's sensors during the 5 to 10 seconds before impact are automatically preserved. That's usually enough to record things like how fast the car was traveling and whether the driver applied the brake, was steering erratically or had a seat belt on. The idea is to gather information that can help investigators determine the cause of accidents and lead to safer vehicles. But privacy advocates say government regulators and automakers are spreading an intrusive technology without first putting in place policies to prevent misuse of the information collected. Data collected by the recorders is increasingly showing up in lawsuits, criminal cases and high-profile accidents. Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray initially said that he wasn't speeding and that he was wearing his seat belt when he crashed a government-owned car last year. But the Ford Crown Victoria's data recorder told a different story: It showed the car was traveling more than 100 mph and Murray wasn't belted in. In 2007, then-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was seriously injured in the crash of an SUV driven by a state trooper. Corzine was a passenger. The SUV's recorder showed the vehicle was traveling 91 mph on a parkway where the speed limit was 65 mph, and Corzine didn't have his seat belt on. There's no opt-out. It's extremely difficult for car owners to disable the recorders. Although some vehicle models have had recorders since the early 1990s, a federal requirement that automakers disclose their existence in owner's manuals didn't go into effect until three months ago. Automakers who voluntarily put recorders in vehicles are also now required to gather a minimum of 15 types of data. Besides the upcoming proposal to put recorders in all new vehicles, the traffic safety administration is also considering expanding the data requirement to include as many as 30 additional types of data such as whether the vehicle's electronic stability control was engaged, the driver's seat position or whether the front-seat passenger was belted in. Some manufacturers already are collecting the information. Engineers have identified more than 80 data points that might be useful. Despite privacy complaints, the traffic safety administration so far hasn't put any limits on how the information can be used. About a dozen states have some law regarding data recorders, but the rest do not. "Right now we're in an environment where there are no rules, there are no limits, there are no consequences and there is no transparency," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group. "Most people who are operating a motor vehicle have no idea this technology is integrated into their vehicle." Part of the concern is that the increasing computerization of cars and the growing transmission of data to and from vehicles could lead to unintended uses of recorder data. "Basically your car is a computer now, so it can record all kinds of information," said Gloria Bergquist, vice president of the Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers. "It's a lot of the same issues you have about your computer or your smartphone and whether Google or someone else has access to the data." The alliance opposes the government requiring recorders in all vehicles. Data recorders "help our engineers understand how cars perform in the real world, and we already have put them on over 90 percent of (new) vehicles without any mandate being necessary," Bergquist said. Safety advocates, however, say requiring data recorders in all cars is the best way to gather a large enough body of reliable information to enable vehicle designers to make safer automobiles. "The barn door is already open. It's a question of whether we use the information that's already out there," said Henry Jasny, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Automotive Safety. The National Transportation Safety Board has been pushing for recorders in all passenger vehicles since the board's investigation of a 2003 accident in which an elderly driver plowed through an open-air market in Santa Monica, Calif. Ten people were killed and 63 were injured. The driver refused to be interviewed and his 1992 Buick LeSabre didn't have a recorder. After ruling out other possibilities, investigators ultimately guessed that he had either mistakenly stepped on the gas pedal or had stepped on the gas and the brake pedals at the same time. When reports of sudden acceleration problems in Toyota vehicles cascaded in 2009 and 2010, recorder data from some of the vehicles contributed to the traffic safety administration's conclusion that the problem was probably sticky gas pedals and floor mats that could jam them, not defects in electronic throttle control systems. "Black box" is a mechanic's term for a part that should only be opened by someone with authority to do so. The term is most widely used to refer to flight data recorders, which continually gather hundreds of data points about an aircraft's operation during flight. Aircraft recorders, by law, are actually bright orange. Some automakers began installing the recorders at a time when there were complaints that air bags might be causing deaths and injuries, partly to protect themselves against liability and partly to improve air bag technology. Most recorders are black boxes about the size of a deck of card with circuit boards inside. After an accident, information is downloaded to a laptop computer using a tool unique to the vehicle's manufacturer. As electronics in cars have increased, the kinds of data that can be recorded have grown as well. Some more recent recorders are part of the vehicle's computers rather than a separate device. Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, introduced legislation to require that automakers design recorders so that they can be disabled by motorists A transportation bill passed by the Senate earlier this year would have required that all new cars and light trucks have recorders and designated a vehicle's owner as the owner of the data. The provision was removed during House-Senate negotiations on the measure at the behest of House Republican lawmakers who said they were concerned about privacy. "Many of us would see it as a slippery slope toward big government and Big Brother knowing what we're doing and where we are," Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., who is slated to take over the chairmanship of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in January, said at the time. "Privacy is a big concern for many across America." |
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The
US is trying to prevent Russia from recreating a new version of the
Soviet Union under the ruse of economic integration, Hillary Clinton
warned on Thursday. “There is a move to re-Sovietise the region,” the US secretary of state told a news conference in Dublin hours before going into a meeting with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. “It’s not going to be called that. It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that,” she said, referring to various iterations of a Moscow-backed plan to deepen economic ties with its neighbours. “But let's make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.” Mrs Clinton said efforts at regional hegemony had been accompanied by new campaigns of repression from pro-Moscow regimes throughout the former Soviet Union. Her tone signalled that the US was rethinking its “reset” in relations with Russia, declared in 2009, during which criticism of its human rights record has been muted and Moscow appeared to have a freer hand in the former Soviet region. The integration efforts she was referring to were championed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a newspaper article in October calling for deeper political and economic integration into a “Eurasian Union”. “There is no talk of reforming the USSR in some form,” Mr Putin said at the time. “It would be naive to restore or copy what has been abandoned in the past but close integration – on the basis of new values, politics and economy is the order of the day.” Andrew Weiss, who served on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton and now is at the US Rand Corporation think-tank, said Mr Putin made clear when he returned to the presidency this year that he planned to focus on bolstering Russia’s influence in its neighbourhood. But he added: “Elites in the neighbouring states show little enthusiasm for simply handing over their autonomy and sovereignty to Moscow.” Progress on integration has been modest. After more than a decade of false starts, a customs union, formed in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in January 2010, saw removal of tariffs and customs controls along mutual borders. This was transformed into a “common economic space” in January 2012 which should eventually ensure free movement of goods, services and capital across a single market of 165m people. This year also saw the creation of a supranational body called the Eurasian Economic Commission, modelled on the European Commission in Brussels, designed to act as a disinterested arbiter of disputes between economic union members. The commission has made one decree so far, when it ruled that Russia must change a law on government procurement of worsted cloths for army and police uniforms to allow suppliers from other customs union members to participate. A second supranational body, the Eurasian Economic Court, located in Minsk, Belarus, has made two rulings since it began to function this year. Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s press secretary, called Mrs Clinton’s comments “a completely wrong understanding” of integration efforts. “What we see on the territory of the ex-Soviet Union is a new type of integration, based only on economic integration. Any other type of integration is totally impossible in today’s world,” he said. Mrs Clinton linked what she said was an effort at expansionism by the Kremlin to a political crackdown within Russia, which has passed repressive laws. Speaking to an audience of civil society groups from the region, she said: “It's distressing that 20 years into the post-Soviet era . . . so many of the hoped-for indicators of progress are retreating . . . We are trying to fight that, but it is very difficult,” she said. |
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There’s a lot of sky-is-falling doomsday predictions about the World Conference on International Telecommunications, which opens Monday in Dubai with some 190-plus nations discussing the global internet’s future.
That’s because much of the accompanying proposals from the global community have been kept under lock and key, although some of the positions of nations have been leaked and published online. The idea behind the meetings is to update the International Telecommunications Regulations governed by the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency known as the ITU, that is responsible for global communication technologies. But the outcome of the two-week session isn’t likely to make much change, as no proposal will be accepted if not agreed to by all nations. And the biggest fear — that the session will lead to net censorship — has already come to pass. “Member States already have the right, as stated in Article 34 of the Constitution of ITU, to block any private telecommunications that appear ‘dangerous to the security of the State or contrary to its laws, to public order or to decency.’ The treaty regulations cannot override the Constitution,” said Hamadoun Touré, the ITU Secretary-General. Emma Llanso, a policy attorney with the Center for Democracy & Technology, said proposals by various governments to treat internet connections like the telephone system are cause for concern regarding privacy and the unfettered, free flow of information. But there is no “doomsday” internet kill switch scenario, she said. “There’s not going to be some kind of doomsday scenario that there’s a treaty that makes the internet go dark,” Llanso said. “What we’re seeing is governments putting forward visions of the internet and having discussions.” The last time the International Telecommunication Regulations global treaty was considered was in 1988. But technology has changed dramatically in the past 25 years. On the table for discussion are spectrum and technology standards to improve global interoperability and efficiency. Cybersecurity, spam and data retention are also on the table. Brett Solomon, executive director of Access, a digital rights group, is livid that the debate will be done largely in secret, with limited input from stakeholders. “The ITU and its member states have attempted to respond to our criticisms and other challenges about the WCIT, but they fail to address the critical flaw: It’s a closed, government-controlled agency that should not be making decisions about internet policy,” he said. “Such decisions necessarily require the participation of governments and the private sector and civil society.” The United States is battling plans to treat the internet like the telephone when it comes to transmission agreements. Some European and Middle Eastern members are calling for so-called termination fees, in which networks where a web session begins must pay the routing cost for the session’s destination — like phone companies work with phone calls. “That model, in general, lends itself to fewer providers, higher prices, slower take-up of internet, slower economic growth,” said Terry Kramer, the head of the U.S. delegation. Llanso said termination fees, which would obviously be paid for by consumers, also opens the door to more internet monitoring. “You can also read it as a campaign,” she said, “to make all internet communication more traceable and more trackable, invading users’ privacy.” The dot-nxt site has published a clearinghouse of leaked documents regarding member proposals. |
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State
and local law enforcement groups want wireless providers to store
detailed information about your SMS messages for at least two years --
in case they're needed for future criminal investigations. AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and other wireless providers would be required to record and store information about Americans' private text messages for at least two years, according to a proposal that police have submitted to the U.S. Congress. CNET has learned a constellation of law enforcement groups has asked the U.S. Senate to require that wireless companies retain that information, warning that the lack of a current federal requirement "can hinder law enforcement investigations." They want an SMS retention requirement to be "considered" during congressional discussions over updating a 1986 privacy law for the cloud computing era -- a move that could complicate debate over the measure and erode support for it among civil libertarians. As the popularity of text messages has exploded in recent years, so has their use in criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. They have been introduced as evidence in armed robbery, cocaine distribution, and wire fraud prosecutions. In one 2009 case in Michigan, wireless provider SkyTel turned over the contents of 626,638 SMS messages, a figure described by a federal judge as "staggering." Chuck DeWitt, a spokesman for the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, which represents the 63 largest U.S. police forces including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago, said "all such records should be retained for two years." Some providers, like Verizon, retain the contents of SMS messages for a brief period of time, while others like T-Mobile do not store them at all. Along with the police association, other law enforcement groups making the request to the Senate include the National District Attorneys' Association, the National Sheriffs' Association, and the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, DeWitt said. "This issue is not addressed in the current proposal before the committee and yet it will become even more important in the future," the groups warn. That's a reference to the Senate Judiciary committee, which approved sweeping amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act last week. Unlike earlier drafts, the latest one veers in a very privacy-protective direction by requiring police to obtain a warrant to read the contents of e-mail messages; the SMS push by law enforcement appears to be a way to make sure it includes one of their priorities too. It wasn't immediately clear whether the law enforcement proposal is to store the contents of SMS messages, or only the metadata such as the sender and receiver phone numbers associated with the messages. Either way, it's a heap of data: Forrester Research reports that more than 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the U.S. last year, over 6 billion SMS messages a day. The current policies of wireless providers have been highlighted in some recent cases. During a criminal prosecution of a man for suspected murder of a 6-year old boy, for example, police in Cranston, R.I., tried to obtain copies of a customer's text messages from T-Mobile and Verizon. Superior Court Judge Judith Savage said that, although she was "not unfamiliar with cell phones and text messaging," she "was stunned" to learn that providers had such different policies. While the SMS retention proposal opens a new front in Capitol Hill politicking over surveillance, the principle of mandatory data retention is hardly new. The Justice Department has publicly called for new laws requiring Internet service providers to record data about their customers, and a House of Representatives panel approved such a requirement last summer. "We would oppose any mandatory data retention mandate as part of ECPA reform," says Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. That proposal is "a different kettle of fish -- it doesn't belong in this discussion," he says. An internal Justice Department document (PDF) that the ACLU obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that, as of 2010, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint did not store the contents of text messages. Verizon did for up to five days, a change from its earlier no-logs-at-all position, and Virgin Mobile kept them for 90 days. The carriers generally kept metadata such as the phone numbers associated with the text for 90 days to 18 months; AT&T was an outlier, keeping it for as long as seven years, according to the chart. A review of court cases by CNET suggests that Justice Department document is out of date. While Sprint is listed as as not storing text message contents, the judge in Rhode Island noted that the company turned over "preserved text messages." And in an unrelated Connecticut case last year, a state judge noted that Sprint provided law enforcement with "text messages involving the phone numbers." An e-mail message from a detective in the Baltimore County Police Department, leaked by Antisec and reproduced in a Wired article last year, says that Verizon keeps "text message content on their servers for 3-5 days." And: "Sprint stores their text message content going back 12 days and Nextel content for 7 days. AT&T/Cingular do not preserve content at all. Us Cellular: 3-5 days Boost Mobile LLC: 7 days" Sprint and Verizon referred calls last week to CTIA - The Wireless Association, which declined to comment. So did the Justice Department. T-Mobile and AT&T representatives did not respond to a request for comment. Katie Frey, a spokeswoman for U.S. Cellular, said: Due to the volume of text messages sent by our customers every day, text messages are stored in our systems for approximately three to five days. The content of text messages can only be disclosed subject to a lawful request. We comply with every lawful request from authorities.Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he would be skeptical of the need for a law mandating that text messaging data be retained. "These data retention policies serve one purpose: to require companies to keep databases on their customers so law enforcement can fish for evidence," he said. "And this would seem to be done against the wishes of the providers, presumably, since...some of the providers don't keep SMS messages at all." |
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Facebook accused of massive 'data grab' with new service that automatically uploads your phone pictures
The social network from Friday began asking users of its mobile apps to activate its new Photo Sync, which will automatically upload each picture to a private album. Whether or not users decide share the photos on their public newsfeed, Facebook itself will still have access.
That
means it will be able to mine those files for their metadata, including
the location where the photo was taken, as well as use its facial
recognition technology to spot those pictured.
Photo
Sync: The new function being promoted to users of Facebook's mobile
apps will automatically upload pictures taken from mobile devices to the
company's servers - where they can be mined for data
As
a result, over time, Facebook will be able to build up a comprehensive
database of where users have been, and with whom, from information they
automatically give to the company.Emma Carr, deputy director of civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: 'This provides a stark warning about the loss of control experienced once you have installed an application to your mobile phone. 'Privacy is clearly at the very back of the Facebook's mind when creating an application that enables this kind of uploading of photographs to be easier when it, in fact, it should be made more difficult.' The Photo Sync feature, which was launched on Friday with no public announcement from Facebook, is being promoted by a banner at the top of the news feed of its mobile applications. Once activated it allows the most recent pictures taken on users' smart phones to be background uploaded straight to a private album on Facebook's servers, where they will sit pending approval for publication. A Q&A on Facebook's help pages stresses that the album remains private, but experts say the social network will benefit from swathes of picture metadata that will enable it to find out unprecedented details about users' lives. At its most basic level it could enable them to tailor advertising by location. However, combined with Facebook's facial recognition technology it could also automatically find out who users have been socialising with and where. The same technology could also potentially be used for brand recognition, TechCrunch reported, allowing Facebook to even identify the types of trainers users are wearing and tailor adverts to suit. The automatic nature of the service also suggests that Facebook is set to gain access to users' most private photos, including some that may violate its notorious terms of service. TechCrunch writer John Constine said the service is essentially Facebook's entry into cloud storage. 'Facebook wants to help you share your life,' he wrote. 'You capture more angles and perspectives of your life through your camera than you might want to share. 'That means it can either make you decide what to upload and what to share, or eliminate the first decision, take care of that seamlessly in the background, and only ask you to choose what to publish.' Facebook mobile app users can activate the Photo Sync function by merely clicking 'Get Started' on a banner currently displayed at the top of the newsfeed. Once enabled, every picture taken on the device will be uploaded to the company's servers with no user interference or further approval needed. So far the Facebook allows for about 2GB of uploads, with users having to manually delete images to upload more once the limit has been reached. Facebook says it will 'generally try to sync your photos as soon as you take them', but the service also has a range of features to lessen its potential impact on users' phone bills and the battery life of their phones. 'When you're on a cellular network like 3G or 4G, we'll sync photos at a smaller size (around 100K each), so they're unlikely to use much of your data plan,' the company says, adding that larger versions will be synced if the device is connected to a WiFi network. Unlike Facebook's facial-recognition technology, which was recently banned in Europe, users will have to opt in to begin using Photo Sync. However, the potential remains that unsuspecting users will find a host of pictures uploaded to the Internet that had been intended for their eyes only. Internet security company Sophos warned: 'You are no longer in charge of what photos you upload to Facebook. 'In the past, you could decide what images you uploaded to the social network, and which pictures it could analyse for its own purposes. 'Now, all photos - good and bad - will be available to Facebook.' Big Brother Watch's Emma Carr added: 'This is yet another example of profit coming before privacy. If a company cares about the privacy of its customers it ensures that they are fully aware of how their information is being gathered and for what purposes. 'Companies that don't care act like Facebook.' MailOnline contacted Facebook's representatives for comment, but none were available. |
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Spaun,
a new software model of a human brain, is able to play simple pattern
games, draw what it sees and do a little mental arithmetic. It powers
everything it does with 2.5 million virtual neurons, compared with a
human brain's 100 billion. But its mistakes, not its abilities, are
what surprised its makers the most, said Chris Eliasmith, an engineer
and neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Ask Spaun a question, and it hesitates a moment before answering, pausing for about as long as humans do. Give Spaun a list of numbers to memorize, and it falters when the list gets too long. And Spaun is better at remembering the numbers at the beginning and end of a list than at recalling numbers in the middle, just like people are. "There are some fairly subtle details of human behavior that the model does capture," said Eliasmith, who led the development of Spaun, or the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network. "It's definitely not on the same scale [as a human brain]," he told TechNewsdaily. "It gives a flavor of a lot of different things brains can do." Eliasmith and his team of Waterloo neuroscientists say Spaun is the first model of a biological brain that performs tasks and has behaviors. Because it is able to do such a variety of things, Spaun could help scientists understand how humans do the same, Eliasmith said. In addition, other scientists could run simplified simulations of certain brain disorders or psychiatric drugs using Spaun, he said. [SEE ALSO: Military-Funded Brain Science Sparks Controversy] A brain with thought and action Researchers have made several brain models that are more powerful than Spaun. The Blue Brain model at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in France has 1 million neurons. IBM's SyNAPSE project has 1 billion neurons. Those models aren't built to perform a variety of tasks, however, Eliasmith said. Spaun is programmed to respond to eight types of requests, including copying what it sees, recognizing numbers written with different handwriting, answering questions about a series of numbers and finishing a pattern after seeing examples. Spaun's myriad skills could shed light on the flexible, variable human brain, which is able to use the same equipment to control typing, biking, driving, flying airplanes and countless other tasks, Eliasmith said. That knowledge, in turn, could help scientists add flexibility to robots or artificial intelligence, he said. Artificial intelligence now usually specializes in doing only one thing, such as tagging photos or playing chess. "It can't figure out to switch between those things," he said. In addition, artificial intelligence isn't built to mimic the cellular structure of human brains as closely as Spaun and other brain models do. Because Spaun runs more like a human brain, other researchers could use it to run health experiments that would be unethical in human study volunteers, Eliasmith said. He recently ran a test in which he killed off the neurons in a brain model at the same rate that neurons die in people as they age, to see how the dying off affected the model's performance on an intelligence test. Such tests would have to be just first steps in a longer experiment, Eliasmith said. The human brain is so much more complex than models that there's a limit to how much models are able to tell researchers. As scientists continue to improve brain models, the models will become better proxies for health studies, he said. Next up: a brain in real time There's one major way Spaun differs from a human brain. It takes a lot of computing power to perform its little tasks. Spaun runs on a supercomputer at the University of Waterloo, and it takes the computer two hours to run just one second of a Spaun simulation, Eliasmith said. [SEE ALSO: 9 Super-Cool Uses for Supercomputers] So Eliasmith's next major step for improving Spaun is developing hardware that lets the model work in real time. He'll cooperate with researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and hopes to have something ready in six months, he said. In the far future, people may find Spaun's humanlike flaws deliberately built into robot assistants, Eliasmith said. "Those kinds of features are important in a way because if we're interacting with an agent and it has a kind of memory that we're familiar with, it'll more natural to interact with," he added.
Eliasmith and his colleagues published their latest paper about Spaun today (Nov. 29) in the journal Science.
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