Government Gangsters: DHS Goons Coming Soon To A Polling Place Near You

NINE STATES ACCEPT DHS ELECTION SECURITY SUPPORT

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Wow, if there was ever a time when the old saying “We are From The Government and are Here to Help.” Should be viewed with healthy skepticism, if not outright distrust, it is NOW!!

Nine State so far have elected to have this “Help”. That number will most likely triple in the next few days.

At least ONE Politician is seeing the whole picture clearly:

Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler told the commission the election security rhetoric in the media and in Congress should be ratcheted down.  

“The last we thing we need is the creation of a new post office department or a new TSA in the area of elections in this country,” he said, referring to the formation of the Transportation Security Administration under DHS. “Leave it in the states. That’s what the Constitution says. Leave it there. We know what we’re doing. We need your assistance. We want it. But let’s everybody stay in their lanes.”  

Federal Government “Staying in their Own Lane.” Boy wasn’t  that the good ole’ days!

Yet another Govt. Agency being created to “protect” Americans??

“Federal Election Protection Agency” maybe?  Wow that even rhymes.

You know this just occurred to me this morning.

I cannot recall a time when the Govt. moved SO FAST in order to fix a problem… I mean it takes FEMA a week or more to mobilize just to hand out water for God’s sakes!

From the time all this “election hacking” started to an actual boots on the ground “fix”, has been a just a matter of a few weeks.

Sorry, even though I am not a member of the infamous “tin foil hat club”, I am calling bullshit on this one.

Classic Govt. MO: Create a Problem so you can “Fix” the problem and thereby exert Control and Influence.

Blame it on “Russian hackers” “Chinese Cyber Criminals” or “Islamic Terrorist”, whichever.

Make it an issue of “National Security” and the majority of sheeple consent as they are slowly herded into their cages.

Wake Up Folks! The Fix is In!

Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!

Espionage Files: Spy ‘Wearables’

Secret agents typically use tracking devices to monitor foreign adversaries, but now, U.S. spies will assess their own capabilities by outfitting (willing) intelligence personnel with body sensors.

Yes, spies have plans to spy on themselves with wearables.

“Selecting and evaluating a workforce that is well-suited for the psychological and cognitive demands of the diverse positions across the intelligence community is an important and persistent need,” states a pre-solicitation notice for interested testers.

To tackle this staffing challenge, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will embark on MOSAIC, and harness “mobile, worn and carried sensors” for friendly signals intelligence.

The program will measure volunteers’ biometric signals during their daily activities, according the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the test lab of ODNI.

The biofeedback captured will relate to behavior, physiology, social dynamics, physical location and proximity, among other data sources that all will be aggregated, officials say.

This might not seem like the most novel idea from an agency whose mission is taking big risks for high payoffs, like predicting the future.

Corporations already are taking the pulse of employees with Fitbits and other health-monitoring devices to boost productivity.

But IARPA’s program is a bit more ambitious, it seems.

MOSAIC expects to allow intelligence agencies “to evaluate an individual’s psychological drivers, cognitive abilities and mental wellness and resilience,” the program announcement states.

Body diagnostics should help intelligence agencies “select the right person for the right job,” as well as “evaluate and help maintain optimal performance throughout their career,” IARPA officials say.

There also is a prediction factor to the personnel evaluation program. Data from digital accessories is expected to “anticipate changes in an individual that may impact their work effectiveness, productivity and overall health and wellness,” officials say.

With a program as intimate as this one, test subjects must provide informed consent to participate.

The intrusiveness of employee body-monitoring is an issue the corporate world currently is grappling with.

Edward McNicholas, co-leader of privacy, data security and information law at law firm Sidley Austin, recently told the Wall Street Journal that employers should take into consideration employees’ physical or mental differences when rating performance based on Fitbit metrics, Apple watch sensors and such.

“If the results of this sort of tracking led to discrimination against persons with conditions ranging from insomnia or depression or ADHD,” organizations should adjust biofeedback evaluations, he said. “We should not deny ourselves the potential benefits of these technologies by banning them,” but keep a close eye on the abuse of data from wearables so “that they do not become new ways of discriminating against people.”

During the MOSAIC program, there will be privacy safeguards in place, as well as legal, ethical and safety precautions, IARPA officials said.

Plus, researchers will study whether the body signals of an individual, in a number of situations, across time, have “convergent validity,” or are a credible source of information, officials said.

The program is so focused on factoring in context that the word is part of its title. “MOSAIC” stands for “Multimodal Objective Sensing to Assess Individuals with Context.”

The program will “test a suite of multimodal sensors to collect a range of subject-focused and situational data; build capabilities to develop an integrated model of the subject, their behaviors, and the social and physical context; and advance methods to personalize modeling approaches to develop accurate assessments of an individual over time,” the announcement states.

Researchers also will evaluate the social environment and physical surroundings of the person to help interpret the results of the sensors.

IARPA will hold an Aug. 2 workshop in the Washington area for interested academic and industry researchers.

Read the Original Article at NextGov

Reversing the Cyber-Crime Paradigm: The “Cyber-Robin Hood”

ID THIEF HACKS INTO FAMILY’S NETFLIX, AT&T ACCOUNTS TO PAY OFF THEIR BILLS

STOLEN CREDENTIALS; USER ACCOUNTS COMPROMISED

An Orange County, Fla. family says a hacker breached their phone and Netflix accounts to pay off the family’s bills.

The Hennigs discovered the sorta well-meaning hack when AT&T alerted Kathy Hennig that she owed $1,300 because the card listed for her account was a stolen credit card.

Kathy learned that the same card was being used on her Netflix account when she received an alert indicating the card had expired. When she asked to know the last four digits of the card, Netflix gave her the exact sequence of the stolen card used for the phone account.

“There’s no other person in my situation where somebody compromised my account changed the credit cards and started paying my bills, there’s no such thing,” Hennig said.

Hennig says the only other information she has about what went down is that the two hacked accounts are linked to the same email and the accounts were switched at about the same time.

When Hennig called AT&T to try to clear up the switcheroo, she was banned from using a credit card to pay off her cellphone account ever again.

“It blows my mind,” she says. “It makes me look like such a liar because why would someone hack into an account just to get a stranger to pay the bill?”

Hennig has a long history with the phone company and a pristine credit history.

News 6 investigator Mike Holfeld contacted AT&T spokeswoman Rosie Montalvo and in less than 24 hours, the company agreed to remove the credit card ban.

Montalvo says AT&T has never seen a case like this before.

Read the Original Article at NextGov

U.S. Voter Database Mysteriously Appears Online in the Open

A misconfigured database has provided users of the World Wide Web access to 191 million voter records. White hat hacker Chris Vickery happened upon the leaky system and sent CSO’s Steve Ragan his personal voter record to prove it.

“It was current based on the elections listed. My personal information was accurate too,” Ragan writes.

Vickery and the parents of Forbes’ Thomas Fox-Brewster  also were listed in the dump.

Vickery told Ragan: “I needed to know if this was real, so I quickly located the Texas records and ran a search for my own name. I was outraged at the result. Sitting right in front of my eyes, in a strange, random database I had found on the Internet, were details that could lead anyone straight to me. How could someone with 191 million such records be so careless?”

The database contains a voter’s full name (first, middle, last), their home address, mailing address, a unique voter ID, state voter ID, gender, date of birth, date of registration, phone number, a yes/no field for if the number is on the national do-not-call list, political affiliation, and a detailed voting history since 2000. In addition, the database contains fields for voter prediction scores.

Each state has its own rules for the protection of such data.

In Alaska, Arkansas, and Colorado, voter data has no restrictions placed on it. However, in California, voter data must not be made available to persons outside of the United States. South Dakota has a law that is directly related to incidents such as this one:

“…the voter registration data obtained from the statewide voter registration database may not be used or sold for any commercial purpose and may not be placed for unrestricted access on the internet.”

No one has claimed ownership of the data or responsibility for the security flub.

It would appear every registered U.S. voter is included in the leak, Forbes says.

Certain markers in the database pointed to a NationBuilder-designed database.

It could be that a non-hosted NationBuilder customer was responsible for the misconfiguration. The company’s CEO Jim Gilliam said “it is possible that some of the information it contains may have come from data we make available for free to campaigns”.

“From what we’ve seen, the voter information included is already publicly available from each state government so no new or private information was released in this database,” Gilliam added.

Based on the voter count and some of the records, the database appears to be from Nation Builder’s 2014 update from February or March, but it’s unclear how long the system has existed online.

To some, it might not seem alarming that this, largely public, information is in the wild, but campaigns charge thousands of dollars to see it all aggregated in this manner.

“Right now, thanks to someone’s carelessness, it’s free to anyone who can find what Vickery did. That means anyone in the world can find out where a person in the US lives and what political beliefs they may have. If they can find the database, scammers and marketing folk alike will likely benefit most,” Forbes writes.

Read the Original Report at NextGov

DHS wants Boeing to Test Brain Chip

The Department of Homeland Security is funding a Boeing company to create a “brain chip” for its self-destructing Black smartphone that could be adapted for any device, DHS officials say.

The technology powering the devices potentially could identify the user’s walking style, for example. Officials would be alerted if the gait does not match the authorized user’s walk – a red flag the phone might have fallen into the wrong hands, officials said.

The “secret sauce” of the mobile device is a so-called neuromorphic computer chip that simulates human learning, Vincent Sritapan, the program manager for DHS’ mobile device security program, told Nextgov.

Gait recognition — driven by the phone’s accelerometer, GPS and the chip — is but one of many kinds of continuous ID verification intended to tighten access controls on mobile devices.

Boeing and HRL Laboratories, a software firm jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors, are partnering under a DHS project worth $2.2 million over 2.5 years.

Read the Remainder at NextGov