Massachusetts Supreme Court says it can order you to decrypt your computer

Say you get arrested, your computer is seized and state wants to peek at the encrypted data hidden away on your machine’s hard drive. Can it force you to decrypt your computer? Traditionally, the answer has been no: courts have previously ruled that ordering a defendant to decrypt their data was tantamount to self-incrimination — a violation of their 5th amendments rights. The Massachusetts Supreme Court sees things differently, and has recently ordered a defendant to decrypt his machine because the pertinent data’s presence on the computer was a “foregone conclusion.” In other words, if the police already know the data they are looking for is there, it doesn’t count as new testimony and is not protected by the 5th amendment.

The state’s argument seems largely based on the defendant’s own statements. When Leon Gelfgatt was arrested under suspicion of mortgage fraud he told state troopers that everything on his computers was encrypted and that “no one is going to get to it.” He also explained that he was capable of decrypting this data, but refused to. According to the Supreme Court, this made the presence of encrypted data and the existence of a decryption key a “foregone conclusion,” and won’t tell the government anything it didn’t already know. The ruling seems a little bit slippery though — of course the government already knows that there are encrypted documents on the computer, but it doesn’t know what those documents contain, which leaves proponents of digital privacy rights uncomfortable with the supreme court ruling.

While this ruling only applies to the state of Massachusetts, it’s a major strike against privacy advocates. For the rest of the country, the burden of decrypting seized data still falls on the burden of of authorities, but the larger issue is still up for debate in the higher courts. This certainly won’t be the last we hear of it.

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

Filed under: Software

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Source: Document Cloud, Ars Technica

The Associated Press welcomes its robot journalist overlords

Robots are cool and all, but they’re just mere toys until they start doing things like reporting the news, right? (Okay, we may be looking at the prospect somewhat selfishly.) Fortunately, that’s already starting to take place — to a degree. In July, the Associated Press will begin using an automated service capable of churning out up to 4,400 business stories. With the help of a company called Automated Insights, these articles will include numerous pieces on quarterly earnings reports, which in theory should free up the humans to do the deeper stuff, such as pieces on why the numbers actually matter and what the executives say during their calls to investors.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of services producing automated content for publications. The AP has relied on the tech for piecing together sports stories in the past, while Yahoo uses Automated Insights to put together some of its fantasy sports material. The Guardian has also “hired” an automated Editor-in-Chief to curate the best articles for its monthly print edition in the US — and that’s not even the first time the publication has adopted such services to automate content. So today’s announcement isn’t necessarily groundbreaking tech in the strictest sense, but it’s an indication that more publications will begin relying on automated material more often. This is great news for newspapers and online media trying to cut costs and produce more content, though admittedly many human journalists may worry about being replaced; however, AP Managing Editor Lou Ferrara insists that robots are merely complementing them, giving Homo Sapiens the opportunity to shift their focus to more meaningful writing.

Filed under: Robots, Software

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Source: Poynter

The NSA’s 2013 transparency report is more opaque

In an attempt to offer transparency to United States surveillance tactics, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report today offering numbers for National Security Agency actions in 2013. The report notes thousands of orders placed for use of surveillance tactics (FISA requests: 1,899 in total), but fails to mention who or what was being targeted, not to mention exactly how. It recounts thousands of requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — the court that decides which surveillance tactics are considered legal by the US government — and thousands of “targets” (90,601). However, issues arise immediately. The word “target” is defined as such:

“[It] has multiple meanings. For example, ‘target’ could be an individual person, a group, or an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information that the U.S. government is authorized to acquire.”

Moreover, numbers are given for business records requests; instance where business records were specifically requested by the US government. While only numbering in the hundreds (178), the word “target” is used once again, which the US defines in an extremely loose way. As such, once more, it’s unclear exactly how many US citizens were affected and how.

There’s also a stat breakdown of national security letter (NSL) requests in 2013. Historically, NSLs were used in financial matters — they’re subpoenas for electronic records, as ordered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — but their use was expanded under the PATRIOT Act of 2001. These are particularly important to surveillance, as they order record holders to turn over otherwise private information, cannot be challenged, and even require the records holder not to tell the individual(s) or entity that their records are being given to the US government.

The report is slightly more specific in respect to NSL requests: 38,832 requests were made for records and 19,212 were approved. The report says those numbers skew far higher because, “the FBI may serve multiple NSLs for an individual for multiple facilities, e.g., multiple e-mail accounts, landline telephone numbers, cellular phone numbers, etc.” In plain English: multiple NSLs might be issued for the same person or entity.

The report is in response to President Barack Obama’s June 2013 directive to the Director of National Intelligence to issue a transparency report. Obama’s directive, of course, is in response to the deluge of NSA leaks last summer led by Edward Snowden.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Source: Office of the Director of National Intelligence