"Secret Service paid TJX Hacker $75,000 a Year"

According to Wired, a convicted hacker and credit card thief was paid to work undercover for the U.S. Secret Service. A convicted accomplice told Wired that Albert Gonzalez was paid $75,000 a year in cash as a confidential informant to the U.S. Government.

Though the Secret Service would not comment, a former federal prosecutor told Wired that the payment was not unusual. He compared it to "million-dollar payouts" to informants involved in organized crime investigations. According to Department of Justice guidelines, agents are required to advise confidential informants that payments "may be taxable income that must be reported to appropriate tax authorities".

Albert Gonzalez was arrested in 2008 and accused of running one of the largest identity theft crimes in U.S. history. After his arrest Gonzalez lead instigators to more than $1 million buried behind his parent's home.

Gonzalez will be sentenced on Thursday. The government is seeking a 25 year sentence.

Disgruntled Hacker [Debt Collector] Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely

Pay Technology's Webtech Plus

Cleveland-based Pay Technologies is a company that sells hidden wireless black boxes that allow car dealers to remotely disable a car’s ignition, or trigger the horn to begin honking, as a not-so-gentle reminder that a payment is due. The Webtech Plus responds to commands issued through a central website, and relayed over a wireless pager network.

A car dealer in Austin Texas began receiving complaints from hundreds of stranded customers late last month. According to the dealership's manager, the complaints stopped several days later, when he reset all the Webtech Plus employee passwords. Then police obtained access logs from Pay Technologies, and traced an IP address to a former employee. Police say he hacked into the dealership's computer system to deactivate the starters on the cars and set off their horns.

To call the suspect a "hacker" is really an insult to hackers. On the other hand, anyone who's ever spoken with a debt collector probably isn't very surprised by allegations of unethical behavior.

According to the dealership, the employee's account had been closed when he was terminated last month, but they allege he got in through another employee’s account. They claim he was working his way alphabetically through a database of all 1,100 customers whose cars were equipped with the device.

Attn. MPAA: There are much worse ways to copy movies than with a computer.

In 2007 prosecutors in Anchorage Alaska accused 34 year old stripper Mechele Linehan of plotting a murder based on the 1994 movie "The Last Seduction". Life so closely imitated art, said prosecutors, that they even tried to have the movie played for the jury.

Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto

In 2008 a teenager confessed that he was trying to imitate scenes from the video game "Grand Theft Auto" when he robbed a murdered a taxicab driver in Bangkok Thailand. Movies like "The Deer Hunter" (1978) are even believed to have inspired several "copycat" suicides in the late 1970's and early 80's.

All of this may seem like fodder for censorship advocates, but that debate has largely come and gone in favor preserving the First Amendment's right to free speech. Wise as the framers of the U.S. Constitution may have been, few would accuse them of being clairvoyant. After all, who could have predicted the impact the Internet would some day have on both the precept of free speech and the concept of privacy?

Though many speak of the "right to privacy", it is not, at least as far as the U.S. Constitution is concerned, a right at all. It is, nonetheless, an ethos that has long been coveted by Americans, and is implicit in the Fourth Amendment's:

...right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...

Of course, mention the term "search" to most people today, and it's far more likely to conjure thoughts of friends lists", home pages and e-books, than actual people, houses and papers. And while, in just the past few years, popular culture has come to embrace the sharing of intimate, private and personal details with virtual strangers, the desire to remain "secure" seems to be very much alive in the 21st Century. In fact, more than any other, the Fourth Amendment has played a central, albeit contested, role in the litigation of hi-tech criminal evidence.

I know what you watched last summer...

So, what does all this have to do with your Netflix queue? Though Americans, and many other people around the world, may be willing to voluntarily divulge personal information, either in trade for modern conveniences and services, or increasingly, for a sense of online significance, we're not quite as enthusiastic when it's taken from us and shared without any tangible return. It's no longer a secret that the monetary value of data has been pre-calculated into the return on investment (ROI) of so many of today's business models, but consumers still tend to expect a certain level of security. In recent years the bar has been set pretty low. Still, it may surprise many to learn that "anonymous" usage data can be deciphered into personally-identifiable intelligence, as proven by a pair of researchers at the University of Texas using what was thought to be anonymous user data provided to contestants in the three-year $1 million "Netflix Prize" to improve the site's recommendation results.

The UT's results brought both unwanted attention from the Federal Trade Commission and a lawsuit from a private firm, resulting in Netflix's decision last week to cancel a planned sequel to the prize awarded last year.

It's not hard to imagine how this sort of data could be exploited to peddle shoes to people who have rented all six seasons of "Sex in the City", or BestBuy ads targeted at fans of NBC's "Chuck".

Dreamworks Minority Report (2002)

It's no longer extraordinary to see similar data exploited in the process of investigating crimes either. Certainly the viewing interests and habits of the individuals mentioned above have been considered relevant discovery by law enforcement. In these cases, there's little, if anything, to decipher.  Anything that Netflix knows about you, your account, and your viewing habits, is subject to a warrant, and, with or without much imagination, could be incriminating. How many of us haven't seen a good fictional car case, a well-written murder plot, a scripted street-fight, or a perfectly executed crime? The consumption of such fiction could be hazardous to your defense, if it proceeds similar accusations.

Now, imagine the same evidence available to anyone, without a warrant, subpoena, or probable cause. Perhaps someone at the FTC had the movie "Minority Report" in their queue.

WARNING: Portions of this video may be disturbing to automotive enthusiasts.

A brother and sister from Diamond Bar were arrested on suspicion of insurance fraud after investigators found a video on the Internet that appears to show their high-performance 2009 Nissan GT-R sports car crashing during a street race.

Investigators say Jay Chen, 21 from Diamond Bar, California first reported to his insurance company that his sister crashed his 2009 Nissan GT-R supercar on the 10 Freeway on March 16, 2009, but later withdrew the claim. They say his sister, Tracy Chen, corroborated the story. Months later, according to insurance investigators, Chen filed another claim (estimated at $76,000 in damage), saying that he had crashed the same car on the 60 Freeway in Riverside. Having received information from a body shop that they had the damaged vehicle on their premises for several months, an investigator turned to the Internet and discovered evidence the California Insurance Commission calls "key to building the case" against the Chens. Both have been booked on charges of felony insurance fraud.

More @ San Gabrel Valley Tribune (http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_14666391) & California Department of Insurance (http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2010/release040-10.cfm)

How Google might know what you did last summer -- even if you forgot.

Google Latitude is a service that allows users to see and share their location on a Google map live and in real-time. The service runs on most smart-phones, regardless of service provider, including Apple's iPhone, Windows Mobile, the Palm Pre, and, of course, Google's Android. Latitude relies on a combination of GPS, cellular tower triangulation, and wi-fi triangulation. Having brushed-up on the service for a recent National Public Radio (NPR) Interview, I have since considered Latitude one-part creepy, and two-parts cool. However, the creepy / cool ratio may be shifting.

This week Google introduced a new and improved Google Latitude -- with enhanced features like "Location History".  With Location History Latitude users can go back in time retrace their footsteps, and even see where they stayed-put, and for how long. Kind of cool...yet, very creepy. But practical?

Imagine, for example, you're the owner of a Palm Pre on Sprint's 3G Now Network , having trouble remembering where your were when you told your spouse you were somewhere else? Now, there's a map for that!

But wait -- there's more! How about "Location Alerts"? Certainly, a application that would alert you when a particular individual, say a family member, has left work or school, would be very practical. After a while of being alerted every time someone is, or has arrived, exactly where you would expect them to be, however, could get old. So, Google's geniuses stepped it up a notch. According to Google, Latitude will learn user's patterns and behavior so that alerts can be issued when a person has strayed from their routine -- left at a different time, or arrived at a different place.

For example, if you decide to  staycation with your mistress, you can receive a handy alert when your spouse leaves the office earlier than usual. Or, if traffic is particularly light, Latitude will let you know when it's time for a quick window-exit.

Best of all, when the jig is up, no one has to know, because -- for now -- Google is making all these free services available to you, and no one else... at least, without subpoena powers.

This is deception... on the Now Network.

Recently, I had a wonderful opportunity to play a game of hi-tech "phone tag" on the streets of San Francisco with Reporter Martin Kaste from NPR's "All Things Considered". Late last Summer I was  asked if I would be willing to sit down for an interview for a story he was researching about location privacy. But, instead of agreeing to meet Kaste, I told him he had to find me.

With the aid of his GPS-equipped smart-phone, some software, a little patience, and a good pair of walking shoes, he was able to "tag" me sipping a latte outside a coffee shop on Market St. Of course, with my own GPS, and software-equipped smart-phone, I was able to see him coming. What follows are the fruits of that encounter:

Digital Bread Crumbs: Following Your Cell Phone Trail

Jeff Fischbach is a little bit like those guys in The Matrix — when he puts on his shades and looks at the world, he sees data.

Walking down the street in San Francisco, he points out all the devices that record people's comings and goings: digital parking meters, apartment intercom systems, digital security cameras...

Audio and transcript: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114241860&ft=1&f=1019

It's rare that I clap for [watch] TV commercials. But Verizon just took AT&T to the mat -- er, map.

Technically, this is off-topic, but I think I can apply a little broad discretion when it comes to bad data -- That is, the data that every U.S. cell phone company uses to claim to be the best.

I know I spend a lot of time picking on Apple -- especially the the iPhone. But when something falls just short of great, it leaves room for criticism. That, however, doesn't describe Apple's choice of service partner. Verizon customers love their coverage. T-Mobile customers love their customer service. Sprint customers love their features (and free 3G roaming to Verizon). AT&T customers love their iPhones, and tolerate their service. Now Verizon is taking them to the map.

Watch and see what I mean.

What do you call the sacrifice of one person's privacy in an attempt to save the privacy of over 1300? If you're a bank, you call it collateral damage.

When I was a kid I earned my first paycheck passing out fliers for a neighbor who was starting a pool cleaning business. With my first $13 in hand, my grandfather took me to the a bank in walking distance to my home, got me a tour of the vault from the branch manager, a neat pouch to hold all my coin, a full explanation of the principals of savings and loans, and helped me open my very first savings account. Believe it or not, back then, all my account information was stored on a double-sided index card behind the teller.

Today, things are much more complicated. Gone are the index cards and passbooks, most of the employees, tellers and branches, a good deal of the service, interest-bearing accounts with only $13 in them, and a lot of the customers' money. Today, it's all computerized, and most banks even attach various penalties to discourage human contact.

I know an awful lot about electronic data systems, but I don't pretend to fully understand how the modern banking system works. Sometimes, I think I do--from a mechanical (as opposed to financial) perspective. But then something convinces me that I don't. For instance, you know how every so often your bank emails its customers' names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and loan information to Gmail?

To be completely honest, I didn't know they did that either, until I found out recently that The Rocky Mountain Bank in Wyoming had sent 1,325 such records to the wrong Gmail account. (Mind you, most would have trouble imagining who could possibly be the right recipient.) Once the error was noticed, the bank attempted to contact the recipient to request immediate destruction of the email and its attachment. When the bank received no response, a request was made to Google for the recipient's identity. Citing its privacy policy, Google refused to provide the information requested, and the bank filed suit.

According to court documents:

"On August 12, 2009, Plaintiff received a request from one of its customers for Plaintiff to send certain loan statements to a third-party representative of that customer. That same day, an employee of Plaintiff attempted to send the requested information to the customer’s representative via email. The next day, Plaintiff discovered that its employee had inadvertently sent the email to the wrong Gmail email address. In addition, Plaintiff discovered that attached to the email was a file containing confidential customer information for 1,325 individual and business customer accounts for customers other than just the customer who requested information. The confidential information includes names, addresses, tax identification numbers, and loan information for each of the 1,325 customer accounts.

After learning of its inadvertent disclosure of confidential customer information, Plaintiff tried to recall the email without success. It then sent another email to the Gmail address, instructing the recipient to immediately delete the prior email and the attached file in its entirety without opening or reviewing it. Plaintiff also requested that the recipient contact Plaintiff to discuss his or her actions. The recipient has not responded to Plaintiff’s email."

Ironically, in a case that pits the privacy interests of innocent parties against each other, the protagonists of this story had some privacy concerns of their own. The Bank's lawyers attempted to file their suit under seal -- which was denied by the U.S. District Court. Though not mentioned in the court's ruling on this issue, most states have security breach notification laws that require disclosure of any records that may have gotten into the hands of unauthorized individuals. Wyoming does, indeed, have such a law (40-12-502. "Computer security breach; notice to affected persons"). It states:

"(a) An individual or commercial entity that conducts business in Wyoming and that owns or licenses computerized data that includes personal identifying information about a resident of Wyoming shall, when it becomes aware of a breach of the security of the system, conduct in good faith a reasonable and prompt investigation to determine the likelihood that personal identifying information has been or will be misused. If the investigation determines that the misuse of personal identifying information about a Wyoming resident has occurred or is reasonably likely to occur, the individual or the commercial entity shall give notice as soon as possible to the affected Wyoming resident."

While the bank was compounding errors by ignoring its obligations to its customers and state law, their case against Google was being reviewed by another judge who ordered Google to disable the account, and disclose the recipient's identity.

The Rocky Mountain Bank maintains that it contacted the recipient more than once and requested that the individual respond to requests to "discuss his or her actions". The implication is that, had the recipient responded, this whole matter could have been handled amicably and honorably -- among gentlemen, as it were. I wonder if, from the perspective of the bank, its customers, or even the email recipient, a "discussion" would have really sufficed. I know, as a bank customer, John Doe's word that he had deleted all my personal information from his Gmail account wouldn't satisfy me at all. If I were in charge of bank security, I don't think I'd be very satisfied either. In either case, I suppose I would be demanding proof that had been deleted, never copied, forwarded, or printed, and probably some kind of connotative memory-wipe.

Years ago, I was consulted by a judge after a District Attorney's office "accidentally" obtained access to a defense lawyer's hard drive (quotes inserted to cite the provided explanation, not my personal feelings about the explanation). The negotiated remedy and order was an extensive forensic search of the DA's hard drives, and a complete wipe of their contents -- even when the search turned up no conclusive evidence that the DA had ever examined any privileged materials. But I doubt any accidental recipient would agree to that -- especially a civilian. And why should they?

Of course, no one knows, at this point, if the recipient ever saw the message. Many reading this web site would likely have dismissed it, and any subsequent messages from the bank as a phishing scam. The Rocky Mountain Bank even has a link to an oddly nondescript PDF addressing the subject of phishing scams.

There's really no reason to believe that the bank ever considered litigation to be an entirely avoidable option, no matter how cooperative the recipient might have been. Nor am I convinced that the court's decision has provided any comfort to the individual's who's privacy has been sacrificed -- including the one who's email account has been disabled, and personal information shared with a bank that's already demonstrated that they can't be trusted with the information.

So, if suing Google won't assure its customers' privacy and financial security, what should the bank have done? That's an easy one. Ask any programmer. They'll tell you: The only way to fix a 1D10T error is to upgrade your wetware and reboot.

How Twitter says they'll hide your location from twits with subpoenas.

Recently, Twitter announced that they would be adding geolocation features to their service, allowing users to embed their physical location in their Twitter feed. As not to alarm: Twitter has always maintained that this would be an opt-in feature. But, frankly, any web site you visit is privy to some information about your physical location by virtue of the IP address assigned to your computer by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) from a group of IP addresses reserved for your neighborhood. The logs kept by a web server, combined with a subpoena to the appropriate ISP, usually yield a street address for the subscriber assigned that IP address.

SmarterWare's Gina Trapani (formerly of Lifehacker.com) is attending the Twitter Conference in LA. She's posted updates explaining how Twitter plans to deploy this service and how they intend to protect its Twitter geolocation users from subpoenas. According to Gina, "Twitter will scrub geo-data stored in tweets more than 14 days old to avoid getting subpoena’d about a user’s location in the past. They will outright delete the location information from their database, not just anonymize."

She also reports that while,

"Twitter usually encourages developers and applications to cache data, in the case of geo, they recommend dropping historical location data so that application developers don’t become a subpoena target, either. They also recommend 'fuzzing' location and time data, so that instead of knowing that Joe Smith was at 8th avenue and 15th street at 2:11PM Eastern time on March 7, 2008, you only show that Joe was in Brooklyn on that day. The geodata-scrubbing isn’t a permanent solution. They are looking into ways to store this data in a 'safe' (anonymized?) way in the future, so they won’t always scrub +14 day old data, just at first."

Purging data that isn't mission critical, but likely to be subpoenaed makes a lot of sense. After all, no one writes "Satisfy search warrants in a timely, efficient, and effective manner" into their corporate mission statement.

While I'm convinced that Twitter's motivation is for the sanctity of the corporation, rather than its user-base, it is a step in the right direction. In fact, the direction is so right that one has to wonder why all personally identifiable user data isn't "scrubbed" every 14 days from most online services. Of course, Twitter's raison d'être, is -- among other things -- to give it's user's messages some life and legacy. It's likely that most of those users would also like to take credit for their various flashes of 140 character brilliance.

Not so, however, every time an individual fires off an instant message (IM), or searches Google. Most instant messaging services, for instance, don't store messages after they are sent, but they do store the sender and recipient's IP addresses, with their account information, and the time they logged in. While Google relies on demographic data, such as geography, income, and search interests, in order to sell ads, it doesn't need to be personally attributable to me. Companies like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace and AOL are not in the subpoena response business. But, all of these companies employ subpoena compliance personnel, who add to the cost of doing business, but contribute nothing to the bottom-line. Worse yet, where nearly every individual in these companies, in some way, does something, either directly or indirectly, to add to the end-user experience, subpoena compliance often works in direct opposition to that objective.

As many companies learn when they're sued, subpoena compliance is often so expensive that it's cheaper to settle. A company can't be forced to produce what they don't have. And, with some significant exceptions, a company can't be forced to archive what they don't need.

By the way, I'm not just an end-user of all the services listed above, I'm also one of the twits writing the subpoenas.