Page 365 - Tim Cushing News Today

The British government is looking to literally silence dissent. Protests are a fact of life. There hasn't been a government yet...

Tue, Mar 16th 2021 9:34am — Tim Cushing Law enforcement loves loves LOVES third parties. Anyone one step removed from someone theyre investigating generally isnt covered by the Fourth Amendment, which means no one needs a warrant or probable cause to go fishing for "third party" data. But when it comes to the accused, whats easy for law enforcement is seldom simple for regular citizens. Third parties obtain tons of personal data when interacting with customers and users. But when a regular p...

Mon, Mar 15th 2021 10:59am — Tim Cushing The DOJ has indicted another company for supposedly making it easier for criminals to elude law enforcement. The true target, though, isnt the company whose principals have been indicted, but encryption itself. A couple of years ago the DOJ decided to bring RICO charges against Phantom Secure, a cellphone provider that catered to the criminal element with "uncrackable" phones/messaging services built on existing Blackberry hardware/software. The FBI ap...

Mon, Mar 15th 2021 12:12pm — Tim Cushing The good news is that Iowa prosecutors attempt to jail a journalist for being present at a protest has failed. Andrea Sahouri -- who was arrested while covering a George Floyd protest in Des Moines last summer -- has been acquitted of all charges by a jury. But the fact that she was prosecuted at all is still problematic. Sahouri was arrested by Des Moines police officers while apparently walking away from the scene of a protest. Officers at the scene ...

Thu, Mar 11th 2021 3:35pm — Tim Cushing At long last, some more NYPD police misconduct records have been released. Last month, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to block the release of these records, now publicly available thanks to the repeal of a state law that shielded these records from the public eye for more than 40 years. A first batch of records was released before the matter was even settled. Records obtained by the NY-ACLU and ProPublica were released by ProPublica even as...

Fri, Mar 12th 2021 11:59am — Tim Cushing Last Wednesday, the House passed the "George Floyd Justice in Policing Act," a bill that targets a number of aspects of law enforcement that need improvement, including two that have caused a considerable amount of collateral damage. The bill [PDF] -- passed by the Democratic majority 220-212 with all but one member of either party voting the way youd expect them to vote -- bans discriminatory profiling, mandates more training on discrimination, and re...

Killing people using metadata is boring. These days, we're killing people using data brokers. A division of the Iowa Air...

A group of hackers say they breached a massive trove of security-camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada Inc., gaining access to live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, companies, police departments, prisons and schools. Some of the more notable targets include Tesla factory cameras and security cameras deployed by Cloudflare. The hackers also apparently have access to archived video from these sources. Verkada has responded by disabling all internal adminis...

Tue, Mar 9th 2021 3:37pm — Tim Cushing The end of a crooked and corrupt era in Mississippi is still paying long-belated dividends to wrongly convicted criminals in Mississippi. The state that has defined "backwater" for so many years is slowly crawling out of its self-created gutter. Eddie Lee Howard has been freed. And it took "only" 26 years. Howard was convicted of murdering Georgia Kemp back in 1995. He was 38 at the time he was arrested. He is now 67. And he is being freed. The case was ...

We give government agencies a whole lot of power. That's the way the government works: we, the people, allow agencies to perform...