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SALT LAKE CITY - (KSTU via CNN) - Police in Utah have recruited an unlikely ally in the fight against child pornography. The pooch named URL (pronounced Earl) is a black Lab trained for detecting electronic storage devices. Affectionately dubbed "porn dog" by the department, URL operates by sniffing out chemicals used in storage media. URL comes from the same trainer as the K-9 that helped arrest former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle. "I think everyone was pretty skeptical. Really? A dog that can detect electronics?" said Lt. Lane Findlay of the Weber County Sheriff’s Office. "He certainly has some...

The Senate on Wednesday rejected a Republican-led effort to allow the FBI to access a person’s Internet browsing history, email account data and other electronic communications without a court order in terrorism and spy cases. The measure from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) would have also extended the government’s authority to conduct surveillance over potential “lone wolf” attackers. [ ] A majority of the Senate backed the proposal in a 58 to 38 vote, but it needed 60 votes to advance. [ ] The measure inspired a fierce backlash...

The campaign against Rule 41 – which will give cops and Feds in America the power to hack people's computers around the world – has kicked up a gear. Leaders of the US House of Representatives and Senate got a letter today urging them to block the rule change before it becomes permanent in December. The proposed legislative tweak, quietly passed by an obscure committee and approved by the Supreme Court in April, would allow a US magistrate judge to grant law enforcement access to any stored data on a computer, phone, or any storage device around the world that...

The FBI continues its push to greatly expand government surveillance and exempt that spying from constitutional safeguards and privacy rules Like living in a police state much? The FBI is pushing on multiple fronts to greatly expand its surveillance powers and exempt that spying from constitutional safeguards and privacy rules. Many in Congress are only too happy to help. With a treasure trove of digital information tantalizingly within reach, the FBI doesn't want to be slowed down by inconveniences like Fourth Amendment protections.... Comey's campaign against encryption may have stalled, but his push to expand the agency's use of warrantless...

During a PBS town hall meeting, president Obama was asked why he and Hillary want to control and restrict guns and ammunition to responsible gun owners. Obama's response was the typical stock answer of rejecting the "notion" that anyone is hell-bent on taking away "folks' guns", yada yada. However, as AllOutdoor notes, if you listen carefully to Obama's full response, there is a comment Obama gives about knowing browser history that should sent everyone into a blind rage. "I just came from a meeting, today, in the situation room, in which I’ve got people who we know have been on...

5 Ways Law Enforcement Will Use Tattoo Recognition Technology - Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/5-ways-law-enforcement-will-use-tattoo-recognition-technology?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWm1NeU56TmxOelptT0RjNCIsInQiOiI4dk1NRjl2bld2Mk5aRW9weFpod1h4djJxTTZ3Kzg5NEJRc0NjMmFOWmVUc3dsQmlYSmdWajZaUDVMU2ZNcitrclNIa25RVGlZaXVtbG85OHBsNWRld3RadkRRWWMzSlFLTXJvanlxZUdwYz0ifQ%3D%3D June 2, 2016 | By Dave Maass and Aaron Mackey and Soraya Okuda 5 Ways Law Enforcement Will Use Tattoo Recognition Technology There's an action movie cliché in which a cop inspects the body of a felled assassin or foot soldier and discovers a curious tattoo that ultimately leads to a rogue black-ops squadron, a secret religious sect, or an underground drug trafficking ring. The trope isn’t entirely Hollywood fantasy, but the reality of emerging tattoo recognition technology is closer to a dystopian tech thriller. Soon,...

The 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act would enable the FBI to obtain anyone's email records without a court order. All the agency would need is a National Security Letter, which would allow the FBI get information from companies without their customers knowing they were being investigated. The bill is co-sponsored by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif). "If we want the government to protect us we must let go of our obsession with personal privacy," Sen. Feinstein urged. "The police are consummate professionals, not nosy busybodies. Unless you're doing something wrong you have nothing...

COURTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY are grappling with a key question for the information age: When law enforcement asks a company for cellphone records to track location data in an investigation, is that a search under the Fourth Amendment? By a 12-3 vote, appellate court judges in Richmond, Virginia on Monday ruled that it is not — and therefore does not require a warrant.The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld what is known as the third-party doctrine: a legal theory suggesting that consumers who knowingly and willingly surrender information to third parties therefore have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in that information...

Precision Medicine Initiative and Data Security | whitehouse.gov (05/25/2016 White house decree) https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/25/precision-medicine-initiative-and-data-security?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRFNE1Ua3laRGRqTlRZMyIsInQiOiJ1R1VHbTk3M2o5NmhHSFQrOHNYdXZKakE4OW1tWTJlSUszSThzbnRnRkNlSGZjK2VCREJGWG5xemdyanpIQUdLU3pJSjBHYTdZd2hPUERUdmliaVBMZjA3SjNUYVY2WUt2Z1pTS0xXdTNqcz0ifQ%3D%3D Precision Medicine Initiative and Data Security May 25, 2016 at 3:00 PM ET by Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Lisa O. Monaco Twitter Facebook Email Summary: Today, we are pleased to release the final Data Security Policy Principles and Framework (Security Framework) for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI).     “We’re going to make sure that protecting patient privacy is built into our efforts from day one.”     - President Barack Obama, January 30th 2015 The health care system of the future is taking shape right now, and...

Image Source: yournewswire.com A new Senate bill would let the FBI and other law enforcement agencies access the contents of any US citizen’s email without a court order during investigations. Instead, the FBI would need just a National Security Letter, which would force companies to provide email access to the agency without alerting the person who’s being investigated. The FBI can already access phone records without a court order, but that law doesn’t apply to email conversations. The Senate Intelligence Committee approved the 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act on Tuesday, CNET reports. The bill will head to the full Senate now that...

Better watch what you put in email. The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday approved a bill that would make it easier for the government to read what you're writing online.... The bill is the latest move by the federal government to shore up its powers when it comes to surveilling citizens. The government has been battling Apple and other tech companies for more access to data stored on devices. Law enforcement argues it can't fight crimes unless it has access to information on mobile gadgets. Technology companies and rights groups argue that features like strong encryption, which scrambles data so...

Like many Silicon Valley start-ups, Larry Gadea's company collects heaps of sensitive data from his customers. Recently, he decided to do something with that data trove that was long considered unthinkable: He is getting rid of it. The reason? Gadea fears that one day the FBI might do to him what it did to Apple in their recent legal battle: demand that he give the agency access to his encrypted data. Rather than make what he considers a Faustian bargain, he's building a system that he hopes will avoid the situation entirely. "We have to keep as little [information] as...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wants to prevent information about its creepy biometric database, which contains fingerprint, face, iris, and voice scans of millions of Americans, from getting out to the public. The Department of Justice has come up with a proposal to exempt the biometric database from public disclosure. It states that the Next Generation Identification System (NGI) should not be subject to the Privacy Act, which requires federal agencies to give people access to records that have been collected concerning them, “allowing them to verify and correct them if needed.” The proposal states that allowing individuals to view their...

..... They need a cause. Without a cause, Progressives lose the means to hammer us with guilt and they lose their think tank foundations and all that money. So as I have it figured, one fine day, a slow day, something suitable to ruin the country…a new cause. The old causes were not doing so well. ..... Then, to top it off, Obama’s most trusted advisor, Ben Rhodes, confirmed what we always suspected, that the Iran Nuke Deal was a farce from the word go. Yes we were tricked. So they had to find something else to bamboozle us, something...

....Obama, the titular head of the LGBT movement, has added to the firestorm of confusion...by threatening schools with loss of federal funding unless they allow students to join the sex-segregated restroom, locker room, and sports teams of their chosen gender, without regard to biological reality. ....As someone who underwent surgery from male to female and lived as a female for eight years before returning to living as a man, I know firsthand what it’s like to be a transgender person.... What has arisen is a new breed emerging among young people that falls outside the purview of the LGBT: the...

U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., yesterday introduced the Stopping Mass Hacking (SMH) Act to protect millions of law-abiding Americans from government hacking. The Stopping Mass Hacking (SMH) Act prevents recently approved changes to Rule 41 from going into effect. The changes would allow the government to get a single warrant to hack an unlimited number of Americans’ computers if their computers had been affected by criminals, possibly without notifying the victims. Sens. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Jon Tester, D-Mont., are original co-sponsors of the Senate bill.“This is a dramatic expansion of the government’s...

Apple has quietly changed a policy that has resulted in iPhone and iPad owners having to more frequently enter passwords to unlock their devices.Users must now enter a passcode anytime the device’s Touch ID fingerprint sensor hasn’t been used in the past eight hours or when the device hasn’t been unlocked with a passcode in the last six days. In such cases, Touch ID is turned off until users enter passcodes.Apple-tracking site Macworld noted the little-noticed change and investigated the reason behind it. It found users who claimed that Apple’s passcode requests had become increasingly frequent.Apple has long required that...

Beyond James Comey, there are still a few law enforcement officials beating the anti-encryption drum. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance is one of those. He's been joined in this fight by some like-minded district attorneys from the other coast, seeing as New York and California both have anti-encryption bills currently working their way through local legislatures. Vance, along with Los Angeles County DA Jackie Lacey and San Diego County DA Bonnie Dumanis, penned an op-ed against encryption for the LA Times. In it, they argue that tech companies have set them up as "gatekeepers" of communications and data, which they believe...

French Far-Right leader Marine Le Pen thrust her mobile phone down her cleavage to keep it out of the hands of fraud inspectors who raided Front National headquarters, daring them to “come and get it”, say French reports. ....when inspectors arrived, Ms Le Pen started filming the scene with her mobile. After repeated requests to stop filming, fraud officers lunged for the phone only to see it disappear down Ms Le Pen’s ample cleavage.

FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday said the U.S. government will continue to wage legal war with tech companies to gain access to encrypted devices, intimating that such measures are weakening terror organizations like ISIL. At an FBI briefing, Comey said gaining privileged access to passcode locked — or otherwise protected — devices is an important national security concern as encryption is now "essential tradecraft" of terror groups, reports Reuters....