Forbes has an interesting summary of recent ACLU work to expose the business of cellphone taps in America
Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area†and per “technology†as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target.
…an AT&T spokesperson referred me to the company’s privacy policy, pointing out a specific line that reads, “We do not sell your personal information to anyone for any purpose. Period.â€
That claim is “simply misleading,†says Catherine Crump, an attorney with the ACLU who coordinated the group’s FOIA project. “That’s a curious definition of ‘sell,’ given that they seem to be charging money for people’s information on a regular basis and handing it over to law enforcement agencies around the country.â€
The data is obviously full of clues of how to make a cellphone tap as expensive as possible. It also reveals that the carriers vary widely in their definition of operational “cost”.
In any case the ACLU has an excellent point. Although access to data may carry a cost burden that carriers need to recoup, they directly assign a value and sell access to data instead of covering their costs indirectly.
NPR attempts to provide a comical and historical look at the problem of data classification, in terms of a debate over singing and speaking
Speak-singing, the murky marriage of spoken lyrics and sung melodies, can be heard in everything from 17th-century opera to The Velvet Underground and the latest Mountain Goats record. On this edition of All Songs Considered, hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton argue over the pros and cons of this polarizing art form and take a look at some of their favorite (and not-so-favorite) speak-singing artists.
Sadly, the show does not mention anything about the history of story-telling and secret messaging through song to circumvent censorship. Their data set for analysis appears to be tiny and they seem to miss the very point of why speak-singers are so effective and important.
I am shocked (pun not intended) that at least one of the punk icons of speak-singing, like Sid Vicious or Henry Rollins are not mentioned, for example. Even more shocking to me is the show does not seem to bring up even one sample or reference to blues, reggae, rap, hip-hop…WTF? How can anyone do a music show on speak-singing and not mention rap?
William Lam has posted a detailed explanation of how to quickly and easily configure multiple ESXi hosts to forward logs to multiple syslog servers:
…with ESXi 5.0 you can now forward to multiple syslog servers which is great for providing redundancy when shipping your logs. In addition to supporting multiple syslog servers, with the release of ESXi 5.0, you can specify different transport protocols: UDP (default), TCP and SSL.
From Copenhagen comes a video emphasising the ubiquity and ease of cycling. It makes bicycling look so common, convenient and safe you might ask yourself why drive a car if you are in the city. Many security features stand out such as a dedicated bike lane with special colouring, bright lights, fenders…
…all that being said you might also notice that the bikes in the video lack the latest/greatest brake and suspension improvements or that no one is wearing helmets or gloves. This says to me that bicycle safety advocacy is focused on making a safe environment for people to cycle in but it leaves personal risk decisions within that environment up to them.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
