from the but-is-THIS-story-real-or-fake? dept.
The Associated Press filed a lawsuit this morning, demanding the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] hand over information about its use of fake news stories. The case stems from a 2007 incident regarding a bomb threat at a school. The FBI created a fake news story with an Associated Press byline, then e-mailed it to a suspect to plant malware on his computer.
An Electronic Frontier Foundation FOIA request on a different matter revealed the strategy in 2011, but it wasn't made public until last year, when privacy researcher Chris Soghoian saw evidence of the operation in the documents and tweeted about it. That spurred both the AP and The Seattle Times to complain vocally about the FBI's behavior.
"The FBI both misappropriated the trusted name of The Associated Press and created a situation where our credibility could have been undermined on a large scale," AP General Counsel Karen Kaiser wrote in a letter to then-AG [Attorney General] Eric Holder last year.
It has been widely reported that the US government's illegal spying has cost tech companies a great deal of money and undermined their credibility with their customers. Will this case do the same for the press?
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The Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems has written to the US President explaining how recent relevations regarding NSA installing backdoors into equipment being exported is damaging the trust that companies have built up with their customers, and stressing how it is making new sales even more difficult. This is all the more relevant to Cisco as one of their packages is shown in the photograph accompanying the (previously) Top Secret revelation from Glenn Greenwald's book 'No Place to Hide'. The letter is shown in full in the following PDF.
http://cryptome.org/2014/05/cisco-implant.pdf
Online PDF Viewer (if required): http://view.samurajdata.se/
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has released a report claiming that U.S. tech companies have lost $35 billion in sales as a result of "failure of U.S. policymakers to address surveillance concerns" after the release of the first Snowden documents in 2013.
ITIF recommends that policymakers:
* Increase transparency about U.S. surveillance activities both at home and abroad.
* Strengthen information security by opposing any government efforts to introduce backdoors in software or weaken encryption.
* Strengthen U.S. mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs).
* Work to establish international legal standards for government access to data.
* Complete trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership that ban digital protectionism, and pressure nations that seek to erect protectionist barriers to abandon those efforts.
(Score: 5, Touché) by dyingtolive on Saturday August 29 2015, @08:16AM
Wouldn't that imply that the press maintained credibility?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by penguinoid on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:33PM
The press has never had much credibility, and the last bit of credibility is the hardest to lose. Kind of how you might take the word of a fisherman that he caught a fish, but maybe not that it was [spreads arms] "this big".
Also, the press has been doing lots of stuff to lose credibility -- and a fake email or website shouldn't affect credibility, anymore than your bank loses credibility when a scammer sends you a fake bank email.
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 29 2015, @05:22PM
But, you know, it does. I won't accept on-line notification by my bank of anything, and that's a large part of the reason.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 29 2015, @06:55PM
Quite a few people have this weird idea that trust is of little value, and can be spent cheaply to accomplish a few short term goals. The most egregious case of that in recent times was the War of Choice. The perps sunk their whole political party and a good deal of the opposition and the nation as a whole into a morass of ruined and lost credibility. Made everyone more cynical. Nixon departed in shame after the Watergate scandal, helped along by public outrage, but W. pressed on blithely. And the people let him. The scandal over Monica Lewinsky was totally blown out of proportion. The public was treated to hyperbolic, slippery slope reporting (the Prez lied about an affair! He could be lying about far, far more serious matters!!), and thus was the stage inadvertently set for not taking W.'s far worse offenses as seriously as they should have been. Valerie Plame was worse, and little of consequence was done about it. An administration official, Libby, took the fall, and the rest went on as before. That they might have done the same, and had created a climate that encouraged such wrongdoing, was ignored, and that really was a slippery slope, for they later sent Colin Powell to lie to the UN that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. The whole administration, especially Cheney, should have been impeached over that.
Some are so deep in that they aren't sure if facts matter, and treat genuine facts on an equal footing with propaganda. To them, scientists as a group are no different than any other political organization and propaganda organ such as the Heritage Foundation and ALEC. That scientists are far more numerous and diverse than the handful of propaganda hacks that run these so-called think tanks is conveniently overlooked.
Conservatives do have some good points. But these days, they're their own worst enemies, and the good points they have get drowned in the ruckus they helped create through, in many cases, sheer stupidity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:23AM
While I 100% agree with your last paragraph, its not all that relevant since this was the FBI under Obama's watch.