Privacy Advocates Urge Senate to Rein In NSA Data Collection

On the same day that Google, Facebook and other tech companies urged stricter reforms to the National Security Agency’s surveillance policy, members of the Senate debated whether a bill passed by the House went too far or not far enough in protecting the privacy of Americans.

"The NSA has shown time and time again that it will seize on any wiggle room, and there is plenty of that in this bill," Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said at a Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday.

Most of the debate centered on whether language modified by the House defeated one of the major goals announced by President Barack Obama in the spring: to limit the bulk collection of data by the National Security Agency.

The USA Freedom Act passed by the House left the "specific selection terms" — which define exactly what kind of information the NSA can request — too vague and broad for some people and too restrictive for others.

"There is nothing in this bill that would prohibit 'Verizon' or 'Gmail' or the state of Georgia from being used as a specific selection term," said Harley Geiger, senior counsel with the Center for Democracy & Technology, a privacy advocacy group.

Geiger and other privacy advocates want to limit those terms to specific people, phones or physical locations. White House officials, however, argued that strict definitions could limit law enforcement if they were searching for something without the benefit of specific names or telephone numbers, like all purchases of a chemical in a certain area.

Some of the speakers had some choice words for former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who recently told "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams that he was trained as a spy and worked for the United States at high levels. Snowden kick-started the privacy debate by leaking thousands of classified documents last summer.

On Thursday, Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss referred to those leaks as "Snowden’s treasonous exposures."

"My phone data is in there with everybody else," said the Republican senator. "I’m not worried because I’m not talking to terrorists, and hopefully I’m not talking to anybody who is talking to terrorists."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., committee chairman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and ranking member Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., listen during a hearing before the Senate (Select) Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

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Intel's gesture control promises hands-free life at Taiwan show

US computer chip giant Intel said its gesture-controlled technology could soon become part of everyday life as it showed its vision of a no-touch lifestyle in Taiwan Thursday.

A woman operates a device with gesture-controlled technology during the Computex tech show in Taipei on June 4, 2014

Its stand at Computex, Asia's largest technology trade show, recreates a living space centred around a kitchen, illustrating how sticky fingers on screens and recipe books could be a thing of the past.

An actress with messy hands from cooking clicked through icons and apps and scrolled through cookery pages on a large monitor using just hand motions from around 12 inches (30 centimetres) away.

"This is a good example of the home usage of gesture," Intel's Jon Marshall told AFP, adding the technology harnesses voice recognition as well.

"We're trying to get a hands-free environment. Most people when they speak are animated -- it's a natural way to communicate. We're trying to take that to the next level in computing.

"It's going to mean more cameras, microphones -- the platform you're working with is going to natively recognise what you're doing."

The advances are the latest developments in Intel's sense technology which uses a camera with both 2-D and 3-D capabilities embedded into devices, enabling them to "see" depth and recognise facial expressions and movements.

Other companies that have rolled out gesture-control devices include Microsoft, which developed the Kinect accessory for its Xbox video game consoles which can recognise users, respond to spoken commands and detect a person's pulse.

Marshall, who is a senior technical marketing engineer at Intel, said the firm's gesture-controlled technology should be available on a range of devices by the end of the year.

Visitors at the show also tried their hand at controlling an old-fashioned fairground-style toy grabber game which uses the same hands-free technology, operating a metal claw through hand gestures detected by a camera.

As they closed their own hands into a claw shape, the metal grabber mimicked the motion.

"Traditionally you have to use keyboard or touches to activate your gadgets, now you may only need motions," said June Leung, programme director of the Chinese company TheBestSync which developed the grabber device.

"To me, this technology is a real breakthrough," Alexandre Straumann, product manager in IT hardware of France-based company Sources and Creation, said of the no-touch range.

"It could be applied everywhere and could really change our experience of living and entertainment."

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Microsoft's top lawyer tells Uncle Sam to back off on surveillance

Microsoft's Brad Smith says the US government ought to end bulk collection of phone data, reform FISA court, and stop hacking data centers.

Microsoft legal chief Brad Smith

Microsoft's top lawyer verbally gobsmacked the United States government on Wednesday, proposing a laundry list of surveillance reforms he says ought to get instituted immediately.

"It's now apparent that the government intercepted data in transit across the Internet and hacked links between company data centers," Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, wrote in a blog post today. "These disclosures rightly have prompted a vigorous debate over the extent and scope of government surveillance, leading to some positive changes. But much more needs to be done."

Specifically,Smith urged the following:

   
Stop trying to force tech companies to turn over data in other countries, thus circumventing existing        treaties.
 
End the bulk collection of data of telephone records.
   
Reform the FISA court to make its proceedings more open.
 
Commit not to hack data centers or cables.
   
Do more to increase transparency.

Earlier in the year, President Obama issued a call for transparency as part of a general reform of NSA practices. Tech firms will now be able to disclose the total amount of FISA court orders they receive annually and the number of users affected by those requests, as long as they do so in bands of 250 or 1,000. But Smith's cri de coeur represents the growing frustration in the technology industry with the government's slow-footed response in the aftermath of the Edward Snowden revelations about the NSA's broad reach and intelligence-gathering practices.

"The US has both a responsibility and an opportunity to show new leadership on these issues," Smith wrote.

His decision to go public with his five-point complaint coincides with the one-year anniversary of the first leaked revelations about the extensive surveillance practices used by the National Security Agency to intercept phone and Internet records.

It's not the first time that Smith has gotten in Uncle Sam's face over surveillance. Earlier this year, he said in a blog that "government snooping potentially now constitutes an 'advanced persistent threat."

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Massive dirt pile may have led to bridge closure

A contractor dumped a mountain of dirt about two stories high and 100 yards long next to an interstate bridge over several years, so much that it may have moved the ground and caused the bridge to tilt, state officials said Wednesday.

The Interstate 495 bridge, a major East Coast thoroughfare traveled by 90,000 vehicles daily, was closed Monday when engineers determined that bridge support columns were leaning.

The contractor said he was working with state officials to remove the dirt from the site, which he was allowed to use under an arrangement with a company that leases land. However, state officials said some of the dirt appeared to be on state land and a fence cordoning off the government's property was gone.

Officials aren't sure when the bridge will reopen to traffic, which has been detoured to Interstate 95. No major problems have been reported.



"I really feel bad about what happened," said contractor James Thomas Jr., 60. "I have absolutely no idea what happened, I really don't. ... I'm not a structural engineer. I'm not a bridge engineer."

Engineers suspect the weight of the dirt caused the ground underneath the bridge to shift. Four pairs of the bridge's support columns were tilting toward the pile of dirt.

Officials have said a system to shore up and brace the bridge will have to be designed, which will take weeks. State officials do not have an estimated price tag but have indicated that they might seek federal funds to help pay for the repairs.

Delaware Transportation Secretary Shailen Bhatt said officials did not know about the dirt mound until Monday, when engineers visited the bridge in response to a report received late last week. That report came from an engineer with a private company who was in the area on an unrelated project and saw cracking in the soil around the dirt pile. The engineer then spotted the leaning columns and contacted the transportation agency.

Thomas said he has worked in the area around the Port of Wilmington, just down the road from the bridge, for 41 years.

"I used to unload and load ships. I had a paving business and some other businesses. ... I've worn a lot of different hats down there," he said.

Thomas said no one had ever expressed concern about him storing dirt next to the bridge. He said he sells it as fill dirt.

Bhatt said: "I don't know where he gets his dirt or what he uses it for.... Our primary focus right now is just getting it out."

The DuPont Co. owns the land where the dirt is located and leases it out to a materials handing company called Port Contractors Inc.

Thomas's company, Keogh Contracting, has an arrangement with Port Contractors, which was founded by his father, to store dirt on the property.

Michael Evanko, president of Port Contractors, said his company is allowing Thomas to temporarily store dirt being removed from the bridge site on another parcel just down the road.

Built in 1974, the bridge is scheduled for inspection every two years and was last examined in October 2012.

Officials said they were examining aerial photographs in an effort to ascertain how long the dirt mound has been there.

"In 2012, there was some stuff out there but not very much; in 2013, a little more," Bhatt said. "Right now obviously there's a lot more dirt under there."

Crews plan to erect a new fence at the site after enough dirt is removed. Bhatt didn't know what happened to the original fence.

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US general says SKorea databases hacked

The top U.S. military official in South Korea said a hacking incident might have compromised the personal information of thousands of South Koreans employed by the American command.

Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, commander of U.S. Forces in South Korea, apologized Thursday for the "possible theft" from two databases of private details of South Koreans such as names, contact information and work history.

About 16,000 current and former workers, almost all of them Korean nationals, and people who have sought jobs with the U.S. military in South Korea, are affected by the incident.

The U.S. military said no classified military data was compromised as the databases were on a separate network.

South Korean government, broadcasting and finance industry networks have been a frequent target of cyberattacks in the past. Some have been blamed on North Korea, which denies any involvement. Others have been attributed to hackers seeking to profit from data theft.

U.S. Forces spokesman Christopher Bush said an investigation by the U.S. Army was underway to determine who was responsible.

The U.S. has around 28,500 soldiers in South Korea as a deterrent against the North. The 1950-1953 Korean War ended in a truce so the peninsula is still technically at war.

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Softbank enters robotics with emotional humanoid

Softbank Corp. is entering the robotics business with its cooing, gesturing and sympathetic Pepper humanoid-on-wheels that it says is designed for companionship and can decipher human emotions.



The Japanese mobile carrier said Thursday that Pepper will go on sale in Japan in February for 198,000 yen ($1,900). Overseas sales plans are under consideration but undecided.

The machine, which has no legs, but has gently gesticulating hands appeared on a stage in a Tokyo suburb, cooing and humming. It dramatically touched hands with Softbank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son in a Genesis or "E.T." moment.

Son, who told the crowd that his longtime dream was to go into the personal robot business, said Pepper has been programmed to read the emotions of people around it by recognizing expressions and voice tones.

"Our aim is to develop affectionate robots that can make people smile," he said.

Cuddly robots are not new in Japan, a nation dominated by "kawaii," or cute culture, but no companion robot has emerged a major market success yet.

Japanese electronics and entertainment company Sony Corp. discontinued the Aibo pet-dog robot in 2006, despite any outcry from its fans. At that time, Sony had developed a child-shaped entertainment robot similar to Pepper but much smaller, capable of dances and other charming moves, which never became a commercial product.

Honda Motor Co. has developed the walking, talking Asimo robot, but that is too sophisticated and expensive for home use, and appears in Honda showrooms and gala events only. Even then, it is prone to glitches because of its complexity.

Many other Japanese companies, including Hitachi Ltd. and Toyota Motor Corp., not to mention universities and startups, have developed various robots, big and small, that entertain and serve as companions.

There is little emphasis on delivering on practical work, in contrast to industrial robots at factories and military robots for war.

But the potential is great for intelligent machines as the number of elderly requiring care is expected to soar in rapidly-aging Japan in coming years. Robotics are already used to check on the elderly and monitor their health and safety, but they might also play a role in reducing feelings of loneliness and isolation.

The 121 centimeter (48 inch) tall, 28 kilogram (62 pound) white Pepper, which has no hair but two large doll-like eyes and a flat-panel display stuck on its chest, was developed jointly with Aldebaran Robotics, which designs, produces and sells autonomous humanoid robots.

Besides featuring the latest voice recognition, Pepper is loaded with more than a dozen sensors, including two touch sensors in its hands, three touch sensors on its head, and six laser sensors and three bumper sensors in its base.

It also has two cameras and four microphones on its head and has Wi-Fi and Ethernet networking capabilities.

In Thursday's demonstration, Pepper sang, "I want to be loved."

Softbank said Pepper can dance and tell jokes. The machine will be on display starting Friday at Softbank retailers, the company said.

Softbank, which now owns Sprint of the U.S. and boasts more than 100 million subscribers globally, has been growing rapidly as a mobile carrier in Japan, boosted by being the first to offer Apple's iPhone.

Pepper was jointly developed with Aldebaran Robotics, which has offices in France, China, Japan and the U.S. and is 78.5 percent owned by Softbank.

"I've believed that the most important role of robots will be as kind and emotional companions to enhance our daily lives, to bring happiness, constantly surprise us and make people grow," said Bruno Maisonnier, founder and chief executive of Aldebaran, who appeared on the stage with Son.

Aldebaran has produced more than 5,000 of its Nao humanoid, its first product, which is used for research and educational purposes.

Pepper can get information from cloud-based databases and comes with safety features to avoid crashes and falls, and its capabilities can grow by installing more robot applications, according to Softbank.

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U.S. companies seek cyber experts for top jobs,board seats

Some of the largest U.S. companies are looking to hire cybersecurity experts in newly elevated positions and bring technologists on to their boards, a sign that corporate America is increasingly worried about hacking threats.

An illustration picture shows projection of binary code on man holding aptop computer in Warsaw

JPMorgan Chase & Co, PepsiCo Inc, Cardinal Health Inc, Deere & Co and The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) are among the Fortune 500 companies seeking chief information security officers (CISOs) and other security personnel to shore up their cyber defenses, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

While a CISO typically reports to a company's chief information officer (CIO), some of the hiring discussions now involve giving them a direct line to the chief executive and the board, consultants and executives said.

After high-profile data breaches such as last year's attack on U.S. retailer Target Corp, there is now an expectation that CISOs understand not just technology but also a company's business and risk management.

    "The trend that we are seeing is that organizations are elevating the position of the CISO to be a peer of the CIO and having equal voice associated with resource priorities and risk decisions," said Barry Hensley, executive director at Dell SecureWorks' Counter Threat Unit.

    With many companies looking for security executives with military or defense backgrounds, people with the right expertise can command increasingly higher salaries.

Large corporations have recently hired CISOs for between $500,000 and $700,000 a year, according to Matt Comyns, global co-head of the cybersecurity practice at search firm Russell Reynolds Associates. Compensation for CISOs at some technology companies with generous equity grants have reached as high as $2 million, he said.

In comparison, CISOs who have been with a company for five or more years are on $200,000 to $300,000 per year, Comyns said.

NEW URGENCY

Security experts have often criticized corporate America for being too complacent about cyber risks and for not doing enough to protect their computer networks from hackers.

A recent PwC survey found the vast majority of cybersecurity programs fell far short of guidelines drafted by the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Only 28 percent of more than 500 executives surveyed said their company had a CISO or Chief Security Officer.

But high-profile data breaches, such as the one at Target, have injected a new sense of urgency, executives said. Target ousted its CEO, Gregg Steinhafel, earlier this month, and its chief information officer, Beth Jacobs, resigned in February. The retailer is now searching for a CISO, a newly created role.

    "This is ringing bells at the C-suite," Charlie Croom, vice president of cybersecurity solutions at U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp told the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit.

Recruiters and executives said companies are increasing both the size and budget of their security teams. By the end of 2014, JPMorgan's annual cybersecurity budget will rise to $250 million from $200 million in 2012, CEO Jamie Dimon said in April. And the largest U.S. bank will have about 1,000 people focused on cybersecurity, compared with 600 people two years ago, he said.

A JPMorgan spokesman said the bank will continue to invest and expand its security team, but declined to confirm if the firm was looking for a CISO.

Cardinal Health CIO Patty Morrison said the healthcare services company was looking to hire a vice president of security to bring in "new talent and new ideas." USAA Chief Security Officer Gary McAlum confirmed the diversified financial services group was looking for a CISO.

Deere representatives were not available for comment, while a spokesman for PepsiCo declined to comment. The soft drink and snack maker lost its CISO, Zulfi Ahmed, to MetLife Inc earlier this year.

CHANGING FACE OF BOARDS

As companies look for CISOs, many boards are seeking directors with technology know-how so that they can better understand cyber risks. Matt Aiello, co-head of the cyber practice at Heidrick & Struggles, said he is seeing "unprecedented" demand for CIOs to serve on boards.

"Boards don't feel they have the right expertise to draw upon. It is not that they don't understand it is a risk; they don't want to blunder uninformed into it," said David DiBari, managing partner at the law firm Clifford Chance in Washington.

Retired Accenture CIO Frank Modruson, former Department of Defense CIO Teresa Takai, Dell SecureWorks chief Mike Cote and AT&T Inc CISO Ed Amoroso have all been approached to serve as potential directors, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Takai said she is "looking at a couple of things," including with a security technology company. Cote, through a Dell spokeswoman, confirmed he has been approached by several companies about serving on their boards. An AT&T spokesman declined to comment on behalf of Amoroso. Modruson was not available for comment.

Pamela Craig, who serves on the boards of Akamai Technologies Inc, Wal-Mart Stores Inc and software maker VMWare Inc, expects demand for CIOs to serve on public boards to increase. "You need people who have direct first-hand experience in the boardroom," she said.

Some boards are also considering moving responsibility for network security to risk committees from audit committees, as cybersecurity is increasingly viewed as a business risk more than a compliance issue, according to Mary Galligan, director of Cyber Risk Services at Deloitte & Touche LLP.

RSA Security Senior Vice President Amit Yoran said boards are looking for experts who can help them build security into products in development, rather than bolting it on at the last minute.

"CISOs are being brought to the business table more often," Yoran said. "This is a realization that in many cases a business's survival relies on the security of the technology."

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Cloud Turbulence: Feature Creep Means New Clashes in the Cloud Market

As cloud services mature and add features, they increasingly overlap, signaling heightened competition in both the consumer and enterprise markets.

Smaller cloud players must be nimble and adaptive to avoid getting trampled.

The cloud is the latest battleground of the tech titans across the spectrum of enterprise and consumer business, but maturation, a desire for market hegemony and technology evolution naturally lead to new features and that means formerly disparate services are encroaching upon one another. The last week has provided two great examples. First, Amazon released the AWS Management Portal for vCenter, a plugin for VMware’s omnipresent, at least in the enterprise where where surveys routinely show the company’s penetration north of 60%, vCenter management software, vCenter management software that allows migrating VMs to EC2 and managing them alongside private cloud vSphere resources. If it wasn’t clear from the product title, this quote makes clear Amazon is taking a shot squarely aimed at VMware’s core business and nascent vCloud Hybrid Service (VCHS) (italics added):

    If you have invested in learning VMware and have trained on virtualization tools like vCenter, the portal lets you leverage your experience, while benefiting from the infrastructure, APIs, tools, and ecosystem that AWS provides. As you gain experience with AWS, you can use the portal in combination with other AWS tools, like the AWS Management Console and the AWS CLI, or even migrate to using those tools in place of the portal if you decide that it no longer meets your needs or if you move off of using VMware is the future.

VMware’s response, in the form of a lengthy blog post by CTO Chris Wolf demonstrates that the company both recognizes the threat and takes it seriously. After some introductory fluff about the benefits of hybrid cloud strategies and a unified management platform, Wolf gets to the point by offering a litany of shortcomings in Amazon’s product: it’s hard to move workloads back and forth, you can’t use existing software licenses, it doesn’t provide software automation for both private and public clouds, it doesn’t enforce enterprise security and policy across clouds and it doesn’t work with other third-party VMware plugins. Wolf’s closing argument is clearly directed at enterprise CIOs and IT pros, not the developers, startups and new tech businesses that are Amazon’s bread and butter:

    Whether you are strategically aligned to VMware or not, you should demand consistent management, third party integration, and a common API that spans all hybrid cloud deployment scenarios. Don’t be fooled by basic management that is tactically useful today but can lead to increased lock-in down the road. The cloud service broker has to be multi-provider -– vCloud Automation Center is today and has been for some time. Beyond that – the hybrid cloud platform should enable provider choice and seamless third party integration, regardless of where a workload is deployed. Deciding to run a workload somewhere else should not require a massive migration effort along with massive costs.

In sum, as The Register aptly points out, Amazon is offering a Trojan Horse designed to wean users from the friendly confines of VMware’s ecosystem. Like all Trojan’s, it’s a gift with unintended consequences that once in the front gate can make life very difficult for IT and mean later switching public cloud providers exceedingly complicated. Amazon is betting that its market dominance, rich feature set and a convenient, familiar administrative interface will be enough to win devoted VMware customers. VMware is counting on strategic-thinking IT execs to consider the long term implications of embracing an alternative cloud.

All’s not quiet on the consumer front as Apple AAPL +1.14% retools iCloud

There’s an equally compelling battle brewing among consumer cloud services that got much more interesting this week as Apple unveiled a series of enhancements to its core operating systems and iCloud platform at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference. By adding iCloud Drive, CloudKit and app extensions Apple addresses long-standing complaints about its incomplete cloud services and mobile operating system.

With Drive, iCloud becomes a full fledged cloud filesystem accessible from iOS, Mac OS X or Windows (but unsurprisingly, not from Android), just like Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. By simultaneously announcing significant price cuts, down to 99 cents per month for 20GB and $3.99 for 200GB, Apple essentially matches Google (which charges $1.99 per month for 100GB) and significantly undercuts Dropbox.

iCloud will also be much cheaper than Box, but there are a couple reasons its CEO Aaron Levie is anything but worried. First, Box is moving up the food chain from being a provider of raw storage to that of an enterprise content management and collaboration platform. Indeed, it’s IPO S–1 filing spells out the strategy:

    Box provides a cloud-based, mobile-optimized Enterprise Content Collaboration platform that enables organizations of all sizes to easily and securely manage their content and collaborate internally and externally.

The other reason Levie is sanguine about the developments at WWDC are app extensions, namely new iOS APIs that provide Android-like flexibility in how apps share data. No longer will iOS apps be locked into iCloud, reliant on a cloud service like Dropbox to develop an independent set of storage APIs or forced engineer their own. Instead, iOS storage provider extensions will allow easy integration for any cloud service. As Levie said at WWDC, Extensions eliminate the “virtual moats” around mobile app data. “This,” he said, “is going to be really powerful set of capabilities. And it’s going to give Apple a massive advantage.” Levie’s optimism may be premature since Apple’s advantage may not devolve to Box. It will be equally simple for all of its enterprise competitors like EMC Syncplicity, Egnyte, Citrix ShareFile or even Microsoft to build iCloud hooks into their own services.

Collision of cloud backends

CloudKit was Apple’s other major cloud announcement and here too we see evidence of encroachment into other cloud services. Designed to make it much easier for app developers to use iCloud as a storage and database backend, CloudKit sounds quite similar to other backend infrastructure and backend as a service (BaaS) products like Google’s Mobile Backend Starter, Azure, AWS, Parse and Kii. Of course Apple is focused on enabling its own developers, not providing a general purpose platform for Android or Windows, but CloudKit is just another example of how the narrow silos around targeted cloud services are crumbling.

Cloud services are the latest realm in the technology industry’s quest to build compelling, defensible and sticky ecosystems. As such, the dominant tech giants will continue to expand their reach and further intrude on each other’s turf in both the enterprise and consumer markets. The jostling will create plenty of news and be fun to watch, but smaller cloud players must be nimble and adaptive to avoid getting trampled.source

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