A
federal judge has ruled that Google must comply with the FBI's
warrantless requests for confidential user data, despite the search
company's arguments that the secret demands are illegal.
CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco rejected Google's request to modify or throw out 19 so-called National Security Letters, a warrantless electronic data-gathering technique
used by the FBI that does not need a judge's approval. Her ruling came
after a pair of top FBI officials, including an assistant director,
submitted classified affidavits.
The
litigation taking place behind closed doors in Illston's courtroom -- a
closed-to-the-public hearing was held on May 10 -- could set new ground
rules curbing the FBI's warrantless access to information that Internet
and other companies hold on behalf of their users. The FBI issued 192,499 of the demands from 2003 to 2006, and 97 percent of NSLs include a mandatory gag order.
It
wasn't a complete win for the Justice Department, however: Illston all
but invited Google to try again, stressing that the company has only
raised broad arguments, not ones "specific to the 19 NSLs at
issue." She also reserved judgment on two of the 19 NSLs, saying she
wanted the government to "provide further information" prior to making a
decision.
NSLs
are controversial because they allow FBI officials to send secret
requests to Web and telecommunications companies requesting "name,
address, length of service," and other account information about users
as long as it's relevant to a national security investigation. No court
approval is required, and disclosing the existence of the FBI's secret
requests is not permitted.
Because
of the extreme secrecy requirements, documents in the San Francisco
case remain almost entirely under seal. Even Google's identity is
redacted from Illston's four-page opinion, which was dated May 20 and
remained undisclosed until now. But, citing initial filings, Bloomberg disclosed last month that it was Google that had initiated the legal challenge.
While
the FBI's authority to levy NSL demands predates the Patriot Act, it
was that controversial 2001 law that dramatically expanded NSLs by
broadening their use beyond espionage-related investigations. The
Patriot Act also authorized FBI officials across the country, instead of
only in Washington, D.C., to send NSLs.
EFF's separate challenge
Illston, who is stepping down
from her post in July, said another reason for her decision is her
desire not to interfere while the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is
reviewing the constitutionality of NSLs in an unrelated case that she
also oversaw.
In that separate lawsuit
brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of an unnamed
telecommunications company, Illston dealt a harsh blow to the bureau's
use of NSLs.
EFF
had challenged the constitutionality of the portion of federal law that
imposes nondisclosure requirements and limits judicial review of NSLs.
Illston ruled that the NSL requirements "violate the First Amendment and
separation of powers principles" and barred the FBI from invoking that
language "in this or any other case." But she gave the Obama
administration 90 days to appeal to the Ninth Circuit, which it did on May 6.
Neither the FBI nor Google responded to requests for comment. (In March, Google began publishing summary statistics about NSLs it received, making it the first major Internet company to do so.)
These aren't the first cases to tackle whether NSLs, including gag orders, are constitutional or not. In a 2008 ruling (PDF), the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a mixed decision.
A
three-judge panel of the Second Circuit took an odd approach: the
judges agreed that the "challenged statutes do not comply with the First
Amendment" but went on to rewrite the statute on their own to make it
more constitutional. They drafted new requirements, including that FBI
officials may levy a gag order only when they claim an "enumerated harm"
to an investigation related to international terrorism or intelligence
will result.
Illston's
decision in the Google NSL case said that the FBI had submitted
"classified" evidence "intended to demonstrate that the 19 NSLs were
issued in full compliance with the procedural and substantive
requirements imposed by the Second Circuit."
That includes classified declarations submitted by Stephanie Douglas, executive assistant director of the FBI's national security branch, and Robert Anderson, assistant director of the counterintelligence division at FBI headquarters.
A 2007 report
by the Justice Department's inspector general found "serious misuse" of
NSLs, and FBI director Robert Mueller pledged stricter internal
controls. Mueller has also called the investigative technique invaluable.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- An asteroid as long as the Golden Gate Bridge will
pass harmlessly by Earth on Friday as NASA and private firms aim to
explore or commercially exploit these rocky interplanetary bodies rich
with precious metals and rare minerals.
But
coming just three months after a meteor explosion injured more than
1,000 people in Russia, the flyby also will point up the need to hunt
down and track asteroids that threaten Earth — to develop capabilities
to deflect incoming asteroids that could cause planetary catastrophe.
"In
response to a question we always get — 'Can you protect the planet?' —
the answer to that is 'no,'" NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, a former
astronaut, said Thursday on the eve of asteroid 1998 QE2's closest
approach to Earth.
"But
if we're able to get into space, and humans are able to redirect an
asteroid, or deflect it in some slight way, we may be getting close to
the day when we can say, 'Yes, we can protect the planet.' "
About
1.7 miles in diameter — or, nine times longer than a cruise ship —
Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest approach to Earth at 4:59 p.m.
Friday
"This
is one of the big ones," said Paul Chodas, a scientist with NASA's
Near-Earth Orbit Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
California. "It's certainly one to keep an eye on."
Chodas
and colleagues over the past 15 years have catalogued 9,808 near-Earth
asteroids that are greater than two-thirds-of-a-mile wide and could
cause global destruction in a collision, rendering the human species
extinct.
Asteroid
1998 QE2 was one of the first to be identified and tracked, and now it
is on a course that will pass within 3.6 million miles of Earth on
Friday.
Have no fear. That's 15 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.
But
it's close enough to give scientists a rare astronomical glimpse at a
rocky remnant of the solar system's birth 4.5 billion years ago.
"In a way, it's a visitor from deep space," Chodas said.
Planetary
astronomers using NASA's Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone,
Calif., and Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico are tracking the
asteroid.
They've
already made a new discovery: Asteroid 1998 QE2 is a "binary."
Scientists this week discovered a smaller natural satellite — about
one-third-of-a-mile in diameter — orbiting the asteroid. Marina
Brozovic, a NASA JPL radar scientist, said the find was a surprise.
Asteroid
1998 QE2 is a very dark, carbonaceous object chock full of amino acids
and organic materials, and the flyby will have the full attention of
startup firms interested in mining asteroids.
Planetary
Resources Inc. is banking on financial backing from Google co-founders
Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, film producer James Cameron, Microsoft
alumni Charles Simonyi and Ross Perot Jr.
"It's
possible that we could actually mine these objects. We could go out and
extract things like water and oxygen from these and use them as
resources in space, possibly," Chodas said.
"There
are also many minerals that are present in these objects. And so it's
possible that these objects could be the sources of resources and
minerals that we could use on the Earth."
President Barack Obama challenged NASA in April 2010 to send American astronauts to an asteroid by 2025.
Bolden
noted that NASA's proposed 2014 budget includes start-up funds for a
mission to identify, track, and send a robot spacecraft to capture a
small asteroid and tow it to a stable lunar orbit.
Then
in 2021, more than a half-century after the historic Apollo 11
moon-landing, American astronauts would be launched on a prospecting
mission to mine the asteroid for samples that would shed scientific
light on the origins and evolution of the solar system.
"Asteroids
are a very high priority at NASA for a number of different reasons,"
said NASA's Gay Yee Hill. "To protect the planet…to understand how the
solar system formed…and to explore."
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Parents
in Polk County, Florida are outraged after learning that students in
area schools had their irises scanned as part of a new security program
without obtaining proper permission.
Students
at three facilities — an elementary school, a grade school and a high
school — had their eyeballs scanned earlier this month as part of a
‘student safety’ pilot program being carried out by Stanley Convergent
Security Solutions.
“It simply takes a picture of the iris, which is unique to every individual,” Rob Davis, the school board’s senior director of support services, wrote home to parents in a letter dated May 23. “With
this program, we will be able to identify when and where a student gets
on the bus, when they arrive at their school location, when and what
bus the student boards and disembarks in the afternoon. This is an
effort to further enhance the safety of our students.The EyeSwipe-Nano
is an ideal replacement for the card based system since your child will
not have to be responsible for carrying an identification card,” he added.
Parents at Daniel Jenkins Academy, Bephune Academy and the
Davenport School of the Arts received the letter from the school board
on May 24 informing them of the EyeSwipe-Nano program and that their
child’s principal should be notified if they don’t want their son or
daughter to participate.
But elsewhere in the letter, the board explained that the
program would begin last Monday, May 20. By the time the letter was
received on Friday, iris scans had already been completed at the three
area schools without a single student opting out, Angel Clark wrote for
The Examiner this week.
Because Memorial Day landed on May 27, parents were unable
to receive confirmation from the school until this Tuesday, nearly one
week after the scans began.
In the letter, Davis described the scanning as a safe and
noninvasive way of collecting students’ biometric data as a way of
ensuring the safety of pupils in the Polk County school district.
Parents are appalled that they weren’t informed of the program ahead of
time, though, and are calling it an invasion of privacy.
“It seems like they are mostly focused on this program,
like the program was the problem. It's not, it's the invasion of my
family's Constitutional right to privacy that is the problem, as well as
the school allowing a private company access to my child without my
consent or permission,” one concerned parent wrote in a Facebook post that has since been shared hundreds of times. “This is stolen information, and we cannot retrieve it.”
When the parent reached the school on Tuesday, she was told that the program was suspended.
Reporter Michelle Malkin caught up with Davis on Wednesday
and he apologized for the board’s actions and confirmed that the data
had been destroyed.
“Davis told me that ‘it is a mistake on our part’ that a notification letter to parents did not go out on May 17,” she wrote. “He blamed a secretary who had a ‘medical emergency.’”
Polks planned to install EyeSwipe-Nano units on 17 local
school busses starting next year. The scandal comes just months after a
high school student in Texas was suspended for refusing to wear an
identification card to class.
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Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad says Damascus is already in possession of the
first batch of S-300 missile defense systems from Russia.
During
an interview with Lebanon’s Al-Manar TV, President Assad also said that
the second shipment of the Russian systems will be delivered to Syria
soon.
He added that Syria would respond to any Israeli aggression against the country.
The complete interview is expected to be aired later on Thursday.
Earlier on May 28, Moscow had said it would go ahead with
the delivery of S-300 systems to Damascus, following which the Israeli
regime hinted it would take action to prevent the delivery of the
systems to Damascus.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem later reiterated
that Damascus would give an “immediate” response to any act of
aggression by Israel.
“Syria
will not let any Israeli aggression go unanswered without retaliation.
The retaliation will be the same size as the aggression, and the same
type of weapons will be used,” the Syrian foreign minister stated.
In
a separate development, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on
May 29 that Moscow may reconsider its commitments to restrictions on the
delivery of arms to the Syrian government, following a recent decision
by the European Union to end an arms embargo on the militants in Syria.
Russia says that the shipment of the S-300 missile
defense system is aimed at deterring foreign intervention in Syria.
Syria has been gripped by turmoil since March 2011 and
the foreign-sponsored militancy has taken its toll on the lives of many
people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security
personnel.
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The
technology, which aims to remove the need to enter passwords and
replace them simply with a phone being close to a user’s body, was one
of the suggestions Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s chief executive,
California's D11 conference yesterday.
The
tattoos have been developed by Massachusetts-based engineering firm
MC10, and contain flexible electronic circuits that are attached to the
wearer's skin using a rubber stamp.
Nokia has previously experimented with integrating tattoos into mobile phones,
and Motorola's senior vice president of advance research, Regina Dugan,
a former head of the US Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects
Agency, demonstrated the silicon-based technology that uses bendable
electronic circuits. Initially designed for medical purposes, Motorola
hopes the ‘Biostamps’ could now be used for consumer authentication
purposes.
Motorola
is also investigating the Proteus Digital Health pill, which has
already been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and was
given European regulatory approval in 2010. Its computer chip is powered
by a battery using the acid in a user’s stomach.
The
pill creates a unique signal like an ECG trace that can be picked up by
devices outside the body and which could be used to verify a user’s
identity. It can be taken daily for up to a month, it has been claimed.
Woodside
admitted that such experimental ideas were not going to be on sale
soon. But he claimed Motorola had “tested it authenticating a phone, and
it works.'
The
former Google employee, however, who was parachuted in to Motorola
after its $12.5billion acquisition in 2011, said “Having the boldness to
think differently about problems that everybody has every day is really
important for Motorola now.'”
Dugan
added “Authentication is irritating. In fact its so irritating only
about half the people do it, despite the fact there is a lot of
information about you on your smartphone, which makes you far more prone
to identity theft.”
She
said authentication takes 2.3 seconds each time for existing users,
some of whom log in to their phones a 100 times a day and added Motorola
would not be put off by those who felt that the new technologies were
“creepy”.
Meanwhile,
the Moto X phone, which will launch in October, will be struggling
Motorola's first device to go on sale sinces its acquisition. It will
know what you want to do before you do but cost significantly less than
an iPhone, Motorola has claimed.
The
phone, which is to largely be manufactured in America, will also use
advanced sensors to anticipate user behaviour, Woodside said.
Without
offering further details, he said the Moto X would change the way users
“engage with how the devices are designed”, and that the “broadly
distributed” phone would provide “experiences [that] are unlike other
experiences out there.”
The
device will also be an attempt to drive down prices of smartphones, and
Woodside said the flagship device would compete with both top Android
devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One as well as the
iPhone, which is expected to be updated later this year.
Woodside
said the Moto X “is more contextually aware of what’s going on around
it. It allows you to interact with it more than other devices today. It
anticipates my need”.
The
device, which is likely to build on the features in Google’s ‘Now’
search product, will aim to predict what a user wants to do so that they
do not waste time choosing it manually. Examples include automatically
sensing a device is travelling at speed along a road and suggesting
entering ‘car mode’ or making it faster to open the camera application.
Woodside
added that Google wanted to sell the device at lower margins than
companies such as Apple have become used to. Although he did not aim the
iPhone specifically, he told the D11 conference, “Those products earn
50 per cent margins. We don’t necessarily have those constraints. Those
[margins] will not persist.” He said that while computers and
televisions had seen dramatic price drops in recent years, smartphones
had yet to see such falls.
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Is the Dollar Dying? Why US Currency Is in Danger
The
U.S dollar is shrinking as a percentage of the world's currency supply,
raising concerns that the greenback is about to see its long run as the
world's premier denomination come to an end.
When compared to its peers, the dollar has drifted to a 15-year low, according to the International Monetary Fund, indicating that more countries are willing to use other currencies to do business.
While
the American currency still reigns supreme -- it constitutes $3.72
trillion, or 62 percent, of the $6 trillion in allocated foreign
exchange holdings by the world's central banks -- the Japanese yen,
Swiss franc and what the IMF classifies as "other currencies" such as
the Chinese yuan are gaining.
"Generally
speaking, it is not believed by the vast majority that the American
dollar will be overthrown," Dick Bove, vice president of equity research
at Rafferty Capital Markets, said in a note. "But it will be, and this
defrocking may occur in as short a period as five to 10 years."
Bove
uses several metrics to make his point, focusing on the dollar as a
percentage of total world money supply.That total has plunged from
nearly 90 percent in 1952 to closer to 15 percent now. He also notes
that the Chinese yuan, the yen and the euro each have a greater share of
that total.
"To
the degree that China succeeds in increasing its market share of the
world's currency market, the United States is the loser," Bove said.
"For years, I have been arguing that the move of the Chinese makes
perfect sense from their point-of-view but no sense for the Americans."
For
a country with a budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion a year, the
consequences of losing standing as the world's reserve currency would be
dire.
"If
the dollar loses status as the world's most reliable currency the
United States will lose the right to print money to pay its debt. It
will be forced to pay this debt," Bove said. "The ratings agencies are
already arguing that the government's debt may be too highly rated.
Plus, the United States Congress, in both its houses, as well as the
president are demonstrating a total lack of fiscal credibility."
Bove
is not the only one sounding the reserve currency alarm, though the
issue has fallen off the front pages as hopes for a sustained U.S.
recovery have taken hold and the stock market has surged to near-record highs.
But the looming battle over budget sequestration in Washington could revive long-standing fears of fiscal stability.
"If
(dollars) no longer offer the safety that investors have come to
expect, they will not function as the stable collateral required by bank
funding markets," Barry Eichengreen, a professor at the University of
California, Berkley, warned in a Financial Times commentary
late last year. "They will not be regarded as an attractive form in
which to hold international reserves. And they will not be seen as a
convenient vehicle for merchandise transactions."
To
be sure, the markets at this point are not acting like the dollar is in
severe trouble. The greenback has maintained its position as a general
safe haven in times of trouble.
"Longer
term, of course, countries are going to diversify away from the dollar
if they can. There are more favorable investment opportunities out there
if you can catch yield," said Christopher Vecchio, currency analyst at
DailyFX, a trading firm. "Despite the increase in risk to the U.S.
dollar and Treasury, investors still feel safest at home."
But the Federal Reserve's successive quantitative easing programs, which have created $3 trillion in new greenbacks, continue to spur worry over the dollar's status.
"The
No. 1 security issue we have as a nation is the preservation of the
U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency," said Michael Pento,
president of Pento Portfolio Strategies. "It's a thousand times more
important than a nuclear bomb being tested by North Korea. It's a
thousand times more important that we keep the dollar as the world's
reserve currency, and yet we are doing everything to abuse that status."
The
dollar's seemingly precarious status is why Pento remains bullish on
gold and believes the dollar's demise as the premier reserve currency
could end even sooner than Bove predicts -- perhaps by 2015.
"Five
to 10 years -- that would be an outlier," he said. "I would say 2015,
2016, that would be the time when it becomes a particularly salient
issue. When we're spending 30 to 50 percent of our revenue on debt
service payments, we enter into a bond market crisis. The dollar starts
to drop along with bond prices. That would set off the whole thing."
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(CNN) -- A new SARS-like virus
recently found in humans continues to spread -- with the worldwide
total now at 49, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
Of the 49 known infections with the MERS-CoV virus, 27 have resulted in death, the organization said.
The latest deaths were reported in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi health ministry said Wednesday that three people died from their infections in the country's eastern region.
The virus is "a threat to the entire world," the WHO's general director said Monday.
5 things to know about the coronavirus
It
"is not a problem that any single affected country can keep to itself
or manage all by itself," Margaret Chan said Monday in her closing
remarks at the 66th World Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland.
Although many of the cases have occurred on the Arabian Peninsula, people have died of the infection elsewhere.
However, "all of the European cases have had a direct or indirect connection to the Middle East," the WHO said
earlier this month. But "in France and the United Kingdom, there has
been limited local transmission among close contacts who had not been to
the Middle East but had been in contact with a traveler recently
returned from the Middle East."
On Tuesday, a patient died in France after having contracted the virus during a trip to the Middle East, the WHO reported.
Coronaviruses
cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to SARS, or Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome, as well as a variety of animal diseases.
However, the new virus is not SARS.
The WHO recently gave it a more specific name: Middle East respiratory symptom coronavirus, or MERS-CoV.
It
acts like a cold virus and attacks the respiratory system, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention has said. But symptoms, which include
fever and a cough, are severe and can lead to pneumonia and kidney
failure.
Health
officials do not yet know much about how the virus spreads, which makes
it hard for scientists to prevent infections, Chan said.
The WHO is calling for the world to pull together its resources to study and tackle the virus.
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