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As usual, the rabbit hole gets much deeper the more you look. In yesterday’s post, Credibility of Cyber Firm that Claimed Russia Hacked the DNC Comes Under Serious Question, I examined how CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to look into its hacking breach, had been exposed as being completely wrong about a separate attack it claimed originated from the same group it claimed broke into DNC systems, and supposedly works for Russia’s military intelligence unit, GRU. Here’s some of what we learned: An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S....

A senior level IT source within the California Department of Motor Vehicles has informed CTH within the past 48 hours California officials have instructed DMV data programmers to remove the internal coding flags for the drivers licenses of illegal aliens in California. As you might be aware, California passed a law known as AB60 authorizing illegal aliens to receive drivers licenses throughout the state. Within the administrative functions of the state DMV database a designation code known as “AB60 code” was created to flag those specific licenses as containing “Federal Limits Apply”.

The end of the year is approaching, and data concerning government abuses of power has begun pouring in. According to Facebook’s Global Government Requests Report, government’s requests for Facebook account data rose 27 percent in the first half of 2016. Facebook’s official announcement explained that requests for user data went from 46,710 in the last half of 2015 to 59,229 in the first half of 2016. At least 56 percent of these requests, Facebook added, “contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from notifying the user.” Law enforcement agencies from across the globe, Facebook continued, often send restriction requests demanding...

Theresa May wants to deploy an army of computerized “mind-readers” to help her win the next Election, sources claim. Tory chiefs have been in talks with Cambridge Analytica, the polling data experts credited with playing a key role in Donald Trump’s presidential victory. The British company, run by Old Etonian Alexander Nix, 40, uses computers to “mine” huge amounts of data on voters — including Facebook likes, favorite foods, TV shows and even football clubs. …

Jesse Worley threatened to sue Microsoft. He’s not the first to take on the Redmond company, but his move to take legal action had a purpose. He wanted Microsoft to acknowledge that aggressively pushing the Windows 10 update was a problem. Customers weary of the Windows 8 disaster were unwilling to take the upgrade leap; Microsoft was, he reasoned, ignoring their fear of heights. ... I’m an IT tech whose grandfather’s computer was updated through subterfuge, which made life harder for him and his caretakers until it was fixed ... Privacy advocates dislike it, as Microsoft collects data such as...

I was excited when I first heard that Peter Thiel was going to be a speaker at the Republican National Convention.  While everyone naturally focuses on what Trump and Pence will have to say, Thiel, often labeled an “eccentric billionaire,” could help rebrand the Trump-era GOP. Like Trump, Thiel is flamboyant and loves shaking things up.  Andrew Styles of Heat Street: Thiel, who is also a Trump delegate to the convention, is an interesting choice. In some ways, Thiel’s support for Trump makes a lot of sense. Both are billionaires who like to disrupt the sh*t out of the status...

February 11, 2016 Ted Cruz Launches Internet Data-Mining "Stazi" APP To Identify Friends and Phone Contacts of Cruz by sundance If you begin to receive weird phone text messages, Facebook contacts and weird emails from the Cruz campaign, it’s probably because one of your “friends” is a Ted Cruz supporter – and he or she has you in their contact list. An alarming article from the Associated Press explains how Ted Cruz has moved his campaign from direct cyber contact to data-mining and spyware within the contacts on phones and social media of Ted Cruz supporters.According to the Associated Press...

His "Cruz Crew" mobile app is designed to gather detailed information from its users' phones -- tracking their physical movements and mining the names and contact information for friends who might want nothing to do with his campaign. That information and more is then fed into a vast database containing details about nearly every adult in the United States to build psychological profiles that target individual voters with uncanny accuracy. Cruz's sophisticated analytics operation was heralded as key to his victory in Iowa earlier this month -- the first proof, his campaign said, that the system has the potential to...

Executive SummaryWe live digital lives—from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history. The personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic arteries of the network. While our daily lives have upgraded to the 21st century, the law hasn’t kept pace. To date, the U.S. Congress hasn’t managed to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to acknowledge that email stored more than 6 months deserves identical protections to email stored...

NEW YORK Eric Lichtblau, one of two New York Times' reporters who broke today's story of a secret government monitoring of private banking records - which the Bush Administration sought to block - said the White House arguments to halt the story were not as strong as those that had kept a previous report on secret wiretapping out of the paper for a year. "They were similar in terms of the objections raised not to publish," Lichtblau told E&P today. "That the bad guys knew we were listening to them, but they don't know exactly how." But he said the...

WASHINGTON, June 22 - Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

One professor’s million-dollar campaign against conservatives, courtesy of the taxpayer Leftist speech suppressors are at it again, but this time they’re apparently being subsidized by the American taxpayer. On Monday, House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent a letter to the head of the National Science Foundation (NSF), demanding information about the nearly $1 million spent on the “Truthy” data-mining project that monitors political speech on Twitter. “The committee and taxpayers deserve to know how NSF decided to award a large grant for a project that proposed to develop standards for online political speech...

Sitting at his laptop, Jon Black scrolled over "Arkansas" to see a burst of bar graphs, each representing a week's worth of data on an important slice of the electorate: Republican-leaning Arkansans who often don't vote. Black winced. A crooked blue line skirted just above the top of seven consecutive bars, telling Black, director of voter turnout at the Republican National Committee, that his Arkansas colleagues were short of their goals for this particular cluster of voters labeled "High Value GOP." He called his colleagues in Arkansas. Almost instantly, Tom Cotton's Senate campaign started visiting, calling, and aiming digital ads...

Facebook is mining its data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain candidates or issues and sharing that data with ABC News and BuzzFeed for use in their 2016 reporting, the social-networking site will announce on Friday. The data will be gathered from the posts of Facebook users in the United States 18 and older, classifying sentiments about a politician or issue as positive, negative or neutral. The data can also be broken down into sentiments by gender and location, making it possible to see how Facebook users in the key primary states of Iowa or...

Two House Republicans are trying to stop the Obama administration from collecting information about the race or ethnicity of people who buy guns. According to a report from the Washington Times, the ATF is requiring people to fill out a form when buying a gun that asks purchasers whether they are Hispanic or Latino, and then to identify themselves as being Indian, Asian, black, Pacific Islander or white.

The Republican National Committee is on track to spend more than $100 million in the midterm campaign, with virtually every dime plowed into the party’s new digital voter-turnout program. If the program is effective, Republican campaigns will have access to a modern get-out-the-vote operation that has been the hallmark of the Democrats’ success in recent election cycles. But if it fails to deliver as advertised, Republican candidates will be stuck with another subpar voter turnout program and without the resources the GOP traditionally sent to their campaigns in midterm years. The RNC is set this week to announce the deployment...

In January, the Obama administration put together a "working group" to analyze how huge swaths of Americans' data are being gathered and stored and what sort of privacy issues need to be addressed. The group's report was just released this week. Before you ask: No, it's not about the National Security Agency (NSA) sweeping up huge amounts of metadata from phone and online communications by Americans, even though that’s the big data conversation many Americans want to have right now. Such data gathering is vaguely mentioned in the full report, but primarily the 85-page study (pdf) is about consumer privacy...

The SAT college entrance exam will no longer require a written essay or penalize students for wrong answers, part of a major overhaul announced Wednesday.

Dubai: At a conference in Dubai this week, an American futurist painted an intriguing, at times unsettling, picture of the coming world. As Dr Peter Diamandis went over his presentation slides at The Government Summit on Tuesday, there were plenty of raised eyebrows. In the future, the slides suggested, privacy will be a thing of the past, robots will take over our jobs, 3D printers will pop out everything from human organs to houses, and man will mine asteroids in deep space for unfathomable mineral wealth. The 58-year-old said hyper-tech breakthroughs are already hurtling us towards that future, today. “The...

Officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are conducting a massive, NSA-esque data-mining project collecting account information on an estimated 991 million American credit card accounts. It was also learned at a Congressional hearing Tuesday that CFPB officials are working with the Federal Housing Finance Agency on a second data-mining effort, this one focused on the 53 million residential mortgages taken out by Americans since 1998.