Weekly Edition
Return to the Security page
| |||||||||||||
Security quotes of the week
A knife is allowed if:
-- US
Transportation Security Administration [PDF] on new rules
governing knives on planes using nice round numbers in two different
measurement systems
Excommunication is like being fired, only it lasts for eternity.
-- Bruce
Schneier
When conducting national security investigations, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation can issue a National Security Letter (NSL) to obtain identifying information about a subscriber from telephone and Internet companies. The FBI has the authority to prohibit companies from talking about these requests. But we’ve been trying to find a way to provide more information about the NSLs we get—particularly as people have voiced concerns about the increase in their use since 9/11.
-- Google
shines a little light onto US government secrecy
Starting today, we’re now including data about NSLs in our Transparency Report. We’re thankful to U.S. government officials for working with us to provide greater insight into the use of NSLs. Visit our page on user data requests in the U.S. and you’ll see, in broad strokes, how many NSLs for user data Google receives, as well as the number of accounts in question. In addition, you can now find answers to some common questions we get asked about NSLs on our Transparency Report FAQ.
This also goes for security people. If we had any sense we'd go live
in the woods in a cabin and drink moonshine and go hunting. I'm still
assigning CVE's for /tmp file vulns. That's just inexcusably stupid.
-- Kurt Seifried(Log in to post comments)
Security quotes of the week Posted Mar 7, 2013 22:17 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]
I am glad I could not see Iran, North Korea, China or Syria in the Google transparency list of countries, at least officially they cannot monitor their citizens. Because it is so obvious that Iran abuses this power against her citizens.
But how are current countries included/trusted? Is there any international law or convention that one has to be part of in order to get the deal? Is it related to the reported human rights violations, or the number of political prisoners? Why Google collaborates with Russian government but not Chinese?
Well, transparency is always great
Security quotes of the week Posted Mar 8, 2013 0:59 UTC (Fri) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341) [Link]
It's easy to criticise the TSA, but the length specification of 6cm (or its non-round imperial equivalent) is almost certainly there to just allow the blade of a normal sized swiss army knife. As the name suggests the swiss army knife is of European design and would naturally be specified in metric units. The 1/2" width is a round number large enough to accommodate the width of a swiss army knife blade, but not too much more.
Checking out the linked PDF makes it even more clear. The other criteria are non-locking blade and not having a shaped hand grip. The latter even rules out many small knives but not the ever popular, and not very threatening, swiss army knife, which is the pictured example of an acceptable knife.
Security quotes of the week Posted Mar 8, 2013 9:46 UTC (Fri) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]
That's what I thought too at first. But it doesn't completely add up: I have a simple swiss army knife with non-locking blade, and the blade is longer than 6 cm (it's about 6.8 cm).
Security quotes of the week Posted Mar 8, 2013 19:31 UTC (Fri) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
When I first heard about the TSA's knife policy, it was accompanied by a few CNN opinion articles describing quite graphically the danger it presents to flight attendants and airline workers, along with cries to revert the policy from various groups.
Given that this change won't speed anything up or improve anyone's airline experience (since the shoes and no-liquids nonsense causes the vast majority of delay and inconvenience), I strongly suspect that the point of this change is to incite a "ban the knives! think of the children!" response --- and the TSA will later point to this as evidence that Americans want them.
|
|||||||||||||