Wired – The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens “A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans…Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.” It is no secret, the report adds, that it is often trivial “to deanonymize and identify individuals” from data that was packaged as ethically fine for commercial use because it had been “anonymized” first. Such data may be useful, …

“I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” Ron Wyden, a US senator from Oregon, says.

The report notes: “The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation.”

NB 48-page PDF https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf

Other reports: https://www.odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2023

2-page ToC starts on physical page 6

2-page Conclusion starts on physical page 46

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Abstracted from beSpacific
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The Markup found many sites tied to the national mental health crisis hotline transmitted information on visitors through the Meta Pixel Websites for mental health crisis resources across the country—which promise anonymity for visitors, many of whom are at a desperate moment in their lives—have been quietly sending sensitive visitor data to Facebook, The Markup has found.

Dozens of websites tied to the national mental health crisis 988 hotline, which launched last summer, transmit the data through a tool called the Meta Pixel, according to testing conducted by The Markup. That data often included signals to Facebook when visitors attempted to dial for mental health emergencies by tapping on dedicated call buttons on the websites.

In some cases, filling out contact forms on the sites transmitted hashed but easily unscrambled names and email addresses to Facebook.

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From the series — Pixel Hunt, Privacy, and Impact

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has issued a new binding operational directive requiring agencies to enhance protections for devices on federal information systems that use network protocols for remote management over public internet — or remove them from their networks.The new directive applies to devices like routers, switches, firewalls and load balancers that allow agency administrators to provide remote configurations through a management interface accessible over public internet using HTTP, remote login services or file transfer protocols, among other methods.

Many federal agencies employ consumer devices that provide configuration and management capabilities over the public internet. Under the new directive, agencies can only leverage devices that feature management interfaces exclusively accessible from inside the enterprise network through a management jumpbox separate from the device or through enforcement points that employ zero trust principles.

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Filed: https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/

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European commissioner Thierry Breton wants Huawei and ZTE barred throughout the EU, and revealed plans to remove kit made by the Chinese telecom vendors from the Commission’s internal networks.”We cannot afford to maintain critical dependencies that could become a weapon against our interests,” he declared in a Thursday speech.

The Chinese vendors’ presence in foreign networks has been a point of concern for years. There are concerns that backdoors in Huawei equipment could allow China to spy on foreign nations, given Chinese law requires local businesses to share info with Beijing. However, Huawei has repeatedly rejected the claims of backdoors, insisted it follows the law of the land wherever it operates, and denied that Chinese laws would see it sell out customers.

Those protestations haven’t stopped the US, UK, and at least ten EU countries from banning the manufacturer’s kit from their networks. ZTE has also run afoul of regulators.

Implementing a US-style rip-and-replace program won’t, however, come cheap. In the US, the federal government agreed to subsidize replacement of Huawei and ZTE tech at a cost of $5.6 billion, according to an FCC report from early 2022.

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