Justice Department: No comment on forcing encryption passphrases
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A recent federal judge rejected the Justice Department's request to force a defendant to cough up his PGP passphrase. We unsuccessfully asked the agency to elaborate.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. district judge has struck down a part of the anti-terrorism-inspired Patriot Act that requires telephone and Internet service providers to turn over records to the government without telling customers. Judge Victor Marrero, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled Thursday that the Patriot Act provision that allows the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation toÂ obtain ISP and telecom subscribers' billing, calling, and Web surfing recordsÂ without court approval violates the U.S. Constitution. Marrero ordered the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to stop issuing so-calledÂ national security letters, or NSLs, requiring ISPs to turn over subscriber records. The NSL program prohibited ISPs from telling customers that they were being investigated. Marrero delayed the order pending a DOJ appeal of his decision. The NSL program under the Patriot Act violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as a restraint on free speech, the judge said in his 107-page order. The program also bypasses judicial oversight of the requests, Marrero said. The NSL program could allow the FBI to unmask the identity of Internet users posting anonymous comments, obtain all of the e-mail messages of an Internet user, and even find out all the Web sites a user has visited, Marrero said. "In light of the seriousness of the potential intrusion into the individual's personal affairs and the significant possibility of a chilling effect on speech and association -- particularly of expression that is critical of the government or its policies -- a compelling need exists to ensure that the use of NSLs is subject to the safeguards of public accountability," the judge wrote. The DOJ is reviewing the decision and considering its options, a spokesman said. The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit against the DOJ and FBI, praised Marrero's decision. "Courts have a constitutionally mandated role to play when national security policies infringe on First Amendment rights," Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, said in a statement. "A statute that allows the FBI to silence people without meaningful judicial oversight is unconstitutional." The U.S. Congress passed the Patriot Act less than two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Congress, under pressure from President George Bush, reauthorized the Patriot Act in 2006. Many civil liberties groups have criticized the law for being overly broad and targeting innocent U.S. residents. Marrero in 2004 ruled that the NSL provisions of the Patriot Act violated the Constitution because they amounted to unreasonable search and seizure. After the 2006 revisions to the Patriot Act, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sent the case back to Marrero for a ruling on whether the NSL provisions were still unconstitutional. The FBI's use of the NSL program, which existed before the Patriot Act, has ballooned since the law was passed, Marrero noted. In 2000, the FBI issued about 8,500 NSL requests, and the number of requests rose to 56,000 in 2004, he wrote. The NSL program's "most troubling" aspect, Marrero wrote, is that it attempts to bypass judicial review of law enforcement requests. The program "reflects an attempt by Congress and the executive to infringe upon the judiciary's designated role under the Constitution," he wrote.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is alerting e-mail users about a possible phishing attack using messages that claim to be from the DOJ. In a news release Thursday, the DOJ said the e-mails may have the subject field or be addressed "Dear Citizen." It also said the messages may refer to a fraudulent U.S. Internal Revenue Service case filed against the recipient, and may contain a DOJ logo in the body of the mail or as an attachment. The DOJ said the e-mail is a hoax, and asked recipientsÂ to neither open the message nor download any attachments that come with it, and delete the message immediately. The department said it would not contact users about such matters via e-mail. Anyone receiving the e-mail is asked to file a complaint via a DOJ Web site.
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A U.S. magistrate judge urged a federal judge yesterday to order the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails, rejecting arguments by the Bush administration.
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WASHINGTON - Moving against Internet crime, the Justice Department on Wednesday disrupted a network allegedly used to illegally share copyrighted files and was engaged in a series of arrests against purveyors of e-mail "spam."   In the copyright case, search warrants were executed by the FBI in Texas, New York and Wisconsin targeted at computer servers that allowed users to illegally share music, movies, software and games.    The case marks the first federal criminal copyright action taken against a peer-to-peer, or P2P, network in which users can access files directly from the hard drives of fellow users' computers...
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(InfoWorld) - Whitfield Diffie has been credited with making privacy possible in the digital age. As a co-inventor of public key cryptography, he is one of the most respected contributors to the field of computer security and is in constant demand as a speaker. In his day job as Sun Microsystemsâ chief security officer, he works out of a corner office in the Sun Labs, just down the hall from where scientists are working on Sunâs next-generation Proximity Communication processors, which seek to do away with wire connections. Although he describes his job as a âmarketingâ position, Diffie didnât sound anything like a corporate pitch man when he spoke with IDG News Service reporter Robert McMillan at his Menlo Park, California office recently. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation. InfoWorld: When the PC went on the network, there were security implications that nobody thought about. Microsoft has spent the last five years fixing all of the security problems that maybe could have been foreseen.                                                     Whit Diffie: Wait a minute. I think there are two issues. I think youâll find that lots of them were foreseen. I think the critical thing [is] that Microsoft showed that its judgment was correct. If it had paid less attention to security, maybe it would have had less market share. It had no real motivation, I think, until the last few years to try to fix these things. The interesting thing to me is why itâs been so hard for them to do so, because they must have half the smart people I know about in the industry, and in security, working for them. And I think it has to do with the problems of legacy code, and the legacy interface expectations of their customers. IW: Nowadays we donât hear about widespread security outbreaks, but thereâs a sense that many of the things we do on the Internet are not trustworthy. People going to Web pages do not have confidence that they are where they think they are. WD: I think thatâs a well-placed misconfidence. IW: So, are things getting better? WD: I certainly donât worry about the security arrangements of going to Americanexpress.com, where I probably make the single largest most routine money transfer that I initiate. Iâm not the least bit worried about that, partly because of the law, and partly because the essential point of SSL [Secure Sockets Layer â a standard used in secure Web connections] is not about the quality of the cryptography but about the fact that the certificate costs enough money that the thieves arenât putting up a front. IW: I think that ties into an interesting point you made earlier: This lack of security is a fair price to pay for growth. WD: Look at Microsoft. It has 99 percent penetration in the Chinese market and 1 percent payment in the Chinese market. The business asset to them of being able to claim that they were ripped off at the same time that they gained this market of one billion people is fantastic. IW: What are your current thoughts on privacy? WD: I believe in privacy, but privacy is just one of a number of considerations. Privacy of political conversation is essential for a democratic society. Is the privacy of information about yourself necessary for it? Thatâs not very clear. Itâs a very squishy concept. In small communities, you have very little privacy, but you have accountability because you know who the members of the community are. What bothers me is that information about people is so readily available in a way not auditable to them, to organizations like ChoicePoint, who broker it around and enable other people, who are not legally constrained in what they do with it, to make decisions based on it. I am, on balance, more pleased with the fact that I can learn lots of information about people in minutes by using the Web than I am concerned about the fact that people can learn lots of information about me that way. And I would not like to see laws that restrict peopleâs ability to go investigate things. Hereâs my scenario: For all its current faults, it wonât be 10 years before facial recognition gets incredibly good. So everybodyâs camera will be saying "hi" to the people who go by. Would I like to see that outlawed? I think what outlawing it would be saying [are] that certain classes of big boys â the Fortune 1,000, the secret police â would be allowed to have access to such information, but you little irresponsible children wonât be. So I have a cowboy viewpoint on this.
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By HOPE YEN  WASHINGTON - The Bush administration asked an appeals court Thursday to step in immediately and dismiss a lawsuit over the government's warrantless eavesdropping program, calling a lower judge's ruling dangerous and wrong.  The Justice Department asked the 9th U.S.
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Antivirus vendors have yet to see the code used in any attacks, however.
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The U.S. Department of Justice has asked an appellate court to keep its arguments secret for a case in which privacy advocate John Gilmore challenges federal requirements to show identification before boarding commercial flights.
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Mortgage finance company Freddie Mac   does not expect the U.S. Justice Department to take further   action in a criminal investigation into accounting   transgressions at the company, the Washington Post reported on   Tuesday.
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A Texas man pleads no contest to child pornography charges after a government investigator easily gains access to a password-protected Zip file and allegedly discovers illegal images.
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WASHINGTON -- The Department of Veterans Affairs says a computer hard drive missing in Alabama since last month was not encrypted, the latest in an embarrassing series of data breaches sparking concern in Congress.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Justice is asking questions about conduct by Hewlett-Packard Co. that has embroiled the technology company in controversy. HP acknowledged in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday that it isÂ cooperating with an inquiryÂ by the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California intoÂ possibly illegal tactics used by investigators hired by HP to investigate news leaks from the company's board members. HP described the U.S. Attorney's inquiry as "informal" and said the questions are similar to those asked by the attorney general of California. HP is based in Palo Alto, California. "We are cooperating fully with these inquiries," HP said in its SEC filing. The probes are looking into the use of "pretexting" to search phone records to determine which board members may have been talking to reporters. The phone records of nine reporters from various news organizations were also obtained to determine who their sources from within HP might have been on stories about the company. Pretexting refers to posing as a phone company customer to get access to personal records. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer says a crime was committed in connection with the pretexting, but his office is still investigating what crime and by whom. The scandal has brought pressure on HP Chairman Patricia Dunn, who ordered the investigation, but claims she didn't know the outside investigative firm hired to trace the leaks would engage in pretexting. HP's board is meeting Monday for the second straight day to discuss its response to the controversy. Former HP director Thomas Perkins, who quit in protest in May because of the way the investigation was conducted, called on Dunn to resign. His statement, released Saturday by his attorney, was prompted by Dunn's comments in media interviews last week in which she alleged that it was Perkins who wanted "more aggressive measures" used to investigate the leaks, including use of lie detectors on board members. "I am saddened, but not surprised, that Patricia Dunn has attacked me personally for doing my job. I acted not from any ill will toward Ms. Dunn but to protect the best interests of HP. I think the past months and days have shown that those interests are best served if Ms. Dunn would resign from the board," said Jenkins in his statement. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission also is investigating HP. The FCC reportedly sent a "letter of inquiry" to AT&T Inc. asking how its customer phone records may have been accessed, according to an Associated Press report. An FCC spokesman could not confirm that. HP's internal probe identified director George Keyworth as the source for a CNet Networks Inc. story about HP's strategy, which the technology news Web site posted in January. He refused to resign when asked to doÂ so by Dunn in May, but theÂ board has since voted not to renominate him to his seat. Â
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Federal prison officials aren't reading all mail sent and received by convicted terrorists and other high-risk inmates, a security gap that could prove deadly, a Justice Department review concluded Tuesday.
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NEW YORK Sept. 30, 2004 - The Justice Department will likely appeal a court ruling that declared unconstitutional a Patriot Act provision allowing secret and unchallengeable searches of Internet and telephone
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Seagate CEO Bill Watkins says the flaw with current legislation is that it does not specify how to encrypt data.
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;