February 2012
8 posts
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Your smartphone could be the next target of...
Using a cheap handset and easily available open-source software, someone could monitor your cell phone’s location or even block it from receiving calls without you knowing about it, according to the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering.
The hacking collective Anonymous proved recently that their list of victims would not be limited to simple websites and databases. It...
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Deleted your Internet dating profile? Your...
Signing up for an online dating site isn’t always our proudest moment. But many of us have full-time schedules, and meeting people isn’t easy. So the lonely among us try out Zoosk, eHarmony, OkCupid, or one of the many other popular online dating sites. Unfortunately, many such sites are less-than-transparent about what’s happening to your personal data, even after you’ve...
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Target Corporation's obsessive collection of...
When a Minnesota-area man received coupons for baby products from the Target Corporation addressed to his teenage daughter, he was outraged. My daughter is in high school, he complained to a Target store manager. Why are you sending her this stuff? Turns out she was, in fact, pregnant, but he hadn’t been told about it.
What the daughter presumably did not know was that Target collects...
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Helpful infographic explains the nuts and bolts of...
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Stanford grad continues fight for removal from...
My story today on the nation’s terrorist no-fly list …
The federal appeals court ruling last week on gay marriage in California overshadowed other potentially big news in the legal community. A quieter decision Wednesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has enabled Stanford University Ph.D. graduate Rahinah Ibrahim to clear another hurdle in her now years-long battle over...
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“We used to joke that the air crew of the future would be one pilot and one dog....”
– FAA expert on the future use of pilotless drones quoted by journalist Shane Harris in his recent insightful report for the Hoover Institution.
January 2012
14 posts
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“The looming failure to comply with an explicit presidential order is a sign of...”
– Steven Aftergood this morning on his popular open-government blog, Secrecy News.
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Social media profiles and the Web now a fact of... →
If there was any doubt in your mind that employers were now actively using social media and the Web as part of their process for background checks, look no further than this new course being offered by the largest organization representing private security professionals. Included in the course description is how to “track down anonymous users.”
The Lens & University of Oxford to launch... →
thelensnola:
Remember back in May of last year, when The Lens reported that the same FEMA trailers that once housed victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita were being resold Alabama as cheap housing for people displaced after tornadoes destroyed residential areas in 2011?
Our investigation found that…
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Hawaii may keep track of all Web sites visited →
Not much I can add here, folks. Story pretty much speaks for itself. Breathtaking.
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Download this blank search warrant application for...
Who’s ready for a game of Mad Libs? Well, it’s actually the federal law enforcement version of Mad Libs. The folks over at legal blog Volokh Conspiracy got their hands on a blank search-and-seizure warrant application, which offers all kinds of opportunities for great fun. Tape the official-looking document to a friend’s front door with the crudely scrawled note,...
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The Waffle House chain, it turns out, tells FEMA...
Radars, satellites and special monitoring devices all can’t tell the federal government as much about the scope of a disaster as the Waffle House restaurant chain, legendary in the Midwest and South. If you’ve never heard of the Waffle House, it’s kind of a slightly less-classy version of IHOP, at the risk of offending Waffle House regulars. (I’m not exactly a Waffle...
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What's DARPA working on now?
What if the way you type on a keyboard, how you move a mouse, the way your eyes shift, how you surf the Web and the speed with which you respond to an email could all be used for unique identification purposes? The sci-fi minds at DARPA are exploring that very question to determine if such behavior could be used to secure a computer. We’ve already told you before at Perilous about the...
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“It seems implausible that the U.S. military would deliberately reduce the...”
– Lot of stories, commentaries and policy papers floating around lately about the use of pilotless drones. If you only read one, make it this new paper from journalist Shane Harris, author of a wonderful book on spying technology called The Watchers.
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“If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it...”
– Mark Wahlberg to Men’s Journal on what would have happened were he onboard one of the 9/11 flights. Wonder if his publicist is in overdrive about now. Is he saying those who perished weren’t as tough and brave as him?
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Wired.com registers its opposition to SOPA/PIPA...
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Google's memorable protest of the Stop Online...
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WatchGeorge Friedman of the Austin-based security consultancy Stratfor appears in a new video to discuss the recent massive hack his firm endured. After discussing it with the FBI, he says, “the matter remains under active investigation.”
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Private company hoarding license-plate data on...
Capitalizing on one of the fastest-growing trends in law enforcement, a private California-based company has compiled a database bulging with more than 550 million license-plate records on both innocent and criminal drivers that can be searched by police.
The technology has raised alarms among civil libertarians, who say it threatens the privacy of drivers. It’s also evidence that 21st-century...
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Who's been hanging out at Obama's house?...
<a href=”http://opendata.socrata.com/Government/White-House-Visitor-Records-Requests/644b-gaut” _mce_href=”http://opendata.socrata.com/Government/White-House-Visitor-Records-Requests/644b-gaut” title=”White House Visitor Records Requests” target=”_blank”>White House Visitor Records...
December 2011
17 posts
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Turns out your butt has a unique biometric...
By now, we’re all used to hearing about the rise of biometric identity. Police have been using fingerprints for years, after all. Iris scans and facial recognition technology are widely used for secure access to computer networks and even everyday consumer products. Mexico and India are both biometrically registering millions of people. But who knew scientists would figure out how to use...
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Click here to see Salon.com's chat with me about... →
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Contractor earns $46M to dispose of all that crazy...
Fireworks. Medical needles. Insect spray. Cooking fuel. Flammable gas torches. Ammunition. Yes, people forget they have cooking fuel in their travel bags. Or, amazingly, they thought it was acceptable in the first place to take cooking fuel onto an airplane.
So what happens to all that bizarre crap security screeners have to confiscate? It doesn’t just disappear, after all. Turns out a...
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Lawsuit: 14 bomb dogs dead after being left in...
The dogs were reportedly on a stopover in Houston waiting for a flight to Afghanistan. So I know this isn’t much of a holiday-friendly story, but for what it’s worth, here are their names: Tiny, Rex, Rocky, Crock, Dork, Harrie, Stress, Sigo, Rex, Jaco, Kimbo, Kilo, Albert and Bak. More from the Houston Chronicle:
The animals were to be flown to Afghanistan Dec. 21, 2010. But when...
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Has the war on terror militarized America's...
After months of work, my reporting partner Andrew Becker and I are live with another story about the war on terror. A shorter version appears today on the Newsweek/Daily Beast site. The complete story can be found here, accompanied by a full package of amazing multimedia material assembled with help from our incomparable team at the Center for Investigative Reporting. There’s a map, a...
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“I remember one question about bedwetting.”
– Legendary former CIA agent Bob Baer on the lengthy application he filled out before joining the spook shop.
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Hollywood wants to halt 'content thieves,' but new...
Earlier this week, Age of Peril told you about a new site that automatically checks your IP address and reveals (sort of) what files you’ve been downloading from the web through file-sharing networks. Now TorrentFreak has used the tool in a way that perhaps the entertainment industry didn’t expect: to expose file-sharing pirates inside Hollywood’s biggest studios. These are the...
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centerforinvestigativereporting:
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New website makes it startlingly easy to see what...
I don’t use online file-sharing networks to download copyrighted music and movies, not due to some position I take on the matter, but mostly because I’m paranoid about linking my computer to anything that can feasibly inject malicious software. So I didn’t hesitate to drop by the site Youhavedownloaded.com, because I knew they wouldn’t have any records of my Internet...
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*SWAT team, bomb squad and Predator drone all...
*A colleague pointed out that maybe I should have made the headline a little clearer. These resources were reportedly deployed to pursue the alleged armed thieves of six cows.
You’re gonna love this, Tumblr fans. Some cows went missing in North Dakota. Six in all. Here is what local authorities decided was necessary to search for said bovine:
A SWAT team
A bomb squad
The highway...
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Couldn't this same technology be used for piecing...
It’s known as the Shredder Challenge. The military’s think tank of crack technology researchers called DARPA launched a curious contest earlier this year that few people thought was actually possible: Develop a computer algorithm that can aid in reassembling shredded documents. The idea was to figure out how war fighters could extract useful intelligence from them as quickly as...
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November 2011
3 posts
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New reality show offers two men $1M to sneak out...
It’s almost 2013, so perhaps no one should be surprised that a reality show in the works would mimic the 1996 dystopian flick “Escape From L.A.” What’s chilling is that the show is not fiction and may in the end say more about the post-Sept. 11 surveillance state than anything else so far.
Two everyday Americans will be awarded $1 million if they can successfully sneak...
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Murder of crows. Pride of lions. Gaggle of geese....
Pilotless drones have become a fixture in the public’s imagination and potent symbol of the nation’s 10-year war on terror. Who could have imagined such a thing when, say, “Back to the Future” was still in theaters?
Now that it’s a reality, and now that the Department of Homeland Security is slowly deploying them with greater frequency on the border, and now that...
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October 2011
6 posts
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Feds continue their curious habit of giving...
Congress mandates that the Department of Homeland Security conduct special assessments whenever it builds new counterterrorism databases that explain how the systems might negatively impact the privacy of everyday Americans.
We keep track of these assessments at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the latest offers insight into the warmly titled database “ICEPIC,” short for...
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Border corruption probes more than tripled over...
More than 130 employees of Customs and Border Protection have been indicted or convicted of corruption-related charges since late 2004, most of them occurring on the southwest border. That’s one of several findings my reporting partner Andrew Becker reveals today in a partnership with the Los Angeles Times. The story is accompanied by an exhaustive online database detailing the cases.
...
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Feds attempt to copyright public website owned by...
The Pentagon got so excited about its new Guantanamo war-court website that it apparently tried to copyright the whole thing, until a Yale professor pointed out that the government can’t copyright its own publications. They’re owned by you and me. Interestingly, the phrase “If you see something, say something,” which the feds have used to promote suspicious activity...
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September 2011
13 posts
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SNAKES ON A PLANE: Laugh at the TSA, but they do...
This list of recent catches comes courtesy of the TSA’s website.
Exotic snakes and tortoises stuffed into nylon and concealed in man’s pants
Double-side 19-inch sword hidden inside of a walking cane
Thirteen different knives hidden in one carry on bag
Knife taped to the inside cover of a DVD player
Several containers of pot hidden inside a jar of peanut butter
Knife hidden...