A highly regarded and influential US federal judge exhibits a dumbfounding lack of imagination and sense of history.
Judge Posner: it should be illegal to make phones the government can’t search – Boing Boing
…is now banned in order to protect the sanctity of the Chinese language.
In early 2009, a creature called the grass-mud horse appeared in an online music video which became an immediate viral hit. “Grass-mud horse” (cǎonímǎ 草泥马), which sounds nearly the same in Mandarin as “fuck your mother” (cào nǐ mā 肏你妈), was originally coined to get around, and also poke fun at, government censorship of vulgar content. The idea caught fire instantly, completely transforming its symbolic meaning. Within weeks, the grass-mud horse became the de facto mascot of Chinese netizens fighting for free expression, inspiring poetry, photos, videos, artwork, clothing, andmore. As one Chinese blogger explained, “The grass-mud horse represents information and opinions that cannot be accepted by the mainstream discourse, and the ‘Song of the Grass-Mud Horse’ has become a metaphor of the power struggle over Internet expression.”
Categories of Records Headed to the Trash Folder
Core Infrastructure – Email, contact and other personal information of federal workers and public citizens who communicate concerns about potential cyber threats to DHS; “Suspicious files, spam and other potential cyber threats via an email network” exclusively used within DHS’ Mission Operating Environment system.
Intrusion Detection – Network traffic data and alerts from government servers; this information includes the IP address, port address, timestamp and some red flags identified in network traffic; telltale signs, or signatures, of known malicious behavior; oddities in captured traffic, such as “an unusual number of hits,” or sometimes, “known actors floating through multiple dot-gov” websites. Interactions with domain name system servers that translate website names like “USDA.gov” into numeric IP addresses.
Intrusion Prevention – Indicators of known and unknown malicious activity agencies should be on the lookout for.
Analysis – Forensic imagery and files from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team containing malicious data for studying purposes; metadata from traffic “packet capture” analysis might contain email addresses and IP addresses; a database for supporting commercially available tools that allow US-CERT personnel to visualize relevant relationships “by presenting drilldown views of data with patterns, trends, series and associations to analyze seemingly unrelated data”; a segregated, closed computer network system for inspecting digital devices and their storage mediums; information about security vulnerabilities and threats in the form of actual malicious code submitted to US-CERT.
Information Sharing – Technical Web records, including operations and maintenance; content might include research, white papers, advertising for conferences and other published information for feds and the public; “CyberScope” reports on an agency’s security posture required to comply with the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act; the US-CERT.gov website and data exchange portal; a repository for threat sightings and indicators.
DHS Set to Destroy Governmentwide Network Surveillance Records – Nextgov.com
