Static and extremely low frequency electromag... [J Cell Biochem. 1993] - PubMed - NCBI
Monday, February 25, 2013
Dark matter mysteries: a true game of shadows - New Scientist - New Scientist
Dark matter mysteries: a true game of shadows - New Scientist - New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/mg21328461.900-dark-matter-mysteries-a-true-game-of-shadows.html
Far from shedding light on dark matter, our first experimental glimpses of the elusive stuff have only deepened its mystique
Editorial: “No more eureka moments”
IT’S a troubling time to be looking for the universe’s missing matter. On the face of it, it shouldn’t be. Deep underground, several experiments have been buzzing with possible sightings of dark matter, the hitherto invisible stuff that is believed to make up around 85 per cent of all matter in the cosmos. Detecting dark matter would be a major triumph.
Yet any hopes that the nature of the stuff would be quickly revealed by these first detections have been utterly dashed. The trouble is that dark matter appears to be different things to different detectors. It appears heavier in one detector than another; it appears more ready to interact in one experiment than another. In the most extreme case, it shows up in one instrument but not in another - even when both are made of identical material and are sitting virtually next door in the same underground lab.
“The present situation is pretty confusing,” admits Juan Collar of the University of Chicago, who is head of the CoGeNT dark matter experiment, based in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. It is seeing something - hundreds of somethings - each of which could be a dark matter particle striking the detector. But if CoGeNT and the other experiments are truly seeing dark matter, then it’s not what anybody thought it was.
We need dark matter. For starters, it is a form of cosmic glue that binds our galaxy together and provides the necessary gravitational force for galaxies to cluster around one another. If dark matter does not exist, it means that our understanding of gravity on the largest scales is wrong. This is unthinkable to most astronomers, who continue to pin their hopes on dark matter and use observations of the way galaxies move and rotate to help pin down its properties.
What’s more, dark matter is the missing link in our attempts to move beyond the standard model of particle physics. The standard model cannot explain the masses of ordinary particles, and while it can describe three forces of nature as an exchange of “messenger” particles, it has failed to do so with the fourth, gravity. To allow it to do these things, theorists postulate as yet undiscovered particles that would have played a big part in the interaction of ordinary matter in the extreme temperatures just after the big bang, but now loaf around, having lost most of their potency.
With both astronomy and particle physics needing more particles to be identified to make sense of observations, theorists began calculating what these entities might be. They homed in on the weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP, a sluggish entity with a mass of around 100 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), or 100 times that of a proton. That’s because of a coincidence so striking that it looked frankly miraculous.
Rewind 13.7 billion years to the aftermath of the big bang and you can calculate the density of dark matter present simply from the WIMP’s mass and its ability to interact with ordinary matter. By fine-tuning this mass and assuming that dark matter interacts via the weak force, physicists predicted exactly the amount of dark matter that astronomers said they needed for galaxy formation. The agreement became known as the WIMP miracle.
We might have been fooled, though. “It turns out that the WIMP miracle isn’t as miraculous as we once thought,” says Jonathan Feng, a dark matter theorist from the University of California, Irvine.
The first evidence that something was amiss came in 2008, when the DAMA experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy reported seeing something that could be dark matter.
All dark matter experiments are conducted deep underground so that the overlying rocks can block out cosmic rays, fragments of atoms that have been accelerated to huge speeds by dying stars or other celestial exotica. Still, cosmic rays do get through with alarming regularity. The task of most dark matter detectors is to spot any oddballs, hits that cannot easily be explained away as cosmic rays or natural radioactivity.
The DAMA team took a different tack. Instead of looking for the needles in the universal haystack, they counted everything registered by their sodium iodide detectors and then looked for variations in the detection rates as each year progressed. They reasoned that cosmic rays would flash through space in random directions and should therefore arrive at a constant rate throughout the year. The same would be true for any radioactivity.
But researchers expect to see seasonal variations in the dark matter signal because the speed at which the Earth ploughs through the surrounding sea of dark matter changes depending on its direction of motion. As a result the amount of dark matter particles hitting Earth should rise in June, when the planet is moving through the galaxy in the same direction as the sun, and fall in December when it is moving in the opposite direction. The DAMA team claimed they had seen an annual modulation that was consistent with this picture.
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But the tricksy nature of dark matter detection soon showed up. Results from another Gran Sasso experiment called XENON100, which uses liquid xenon, seemed to exclude the very dark matter particles DAMA was suggesting. Other results sided with XENON100. Then last year the tables turned again. First the CoGeNT team, which uses an underground germanium detector, announced the sighting of a similar annual modulation to DAMA. Then a third experiment in Gran Sasso, known as CRESST, reported a set of possible detections.
Banished to the cold
Admittedly, DAMA, CoGeNT and CRESST do not agree on what they are seeing. “Everything is very close but there’s no actual overlap yet,” Collar says. Yet they all point to a dark matter particle that is far too light. Far from being heavyweight couch potatoes, WIMPs are turning out to be lively flyweights with a mass of 10 GeV - just a tenth of that expected.
The conflicting detections are not the only problem. Observations of dwarf galaxies are prompting a growing number of astronomers to change their minds about what properties they want dark matter to have. The thinking is that WIMPs will not cut it any more.
More problems have come courtesy of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. If our understanding of dark matter is correct, then we should be able to make WIMPs in the LHC’s high-energy collisions. So far none have shown up. WIMPs as we know them could soon be impossible.
“You can tweak all the dials in the theory and see if you can fit the detections, but the bottom line is that it is not really doable,” Feng says. So is it time to abandon WIMPs?
Feng’s calculations show you can still have the correct density of dark matter in the universe by lowering the mass of the particles and boosting their ability to interact. This also increases the possibility of different sorts of dark matter particles. “There are many directions to go once you start thinking beyond the WIMPs,” he says.
One long-time challenger to WIMPs for the dark matter crown is the axion. This hypothetical particle might help to explain why certain weak-force reactions dominate over others and why there is more matter in the universe than antimatter.
On the face of it, axions sound promising. However, they are also slow-moving, and so axions are labelled alongside WIMPs as “cold” dark matter. The trouble with cold dark matter of any variety is that we are starting to have reservations about its existence.
Being the dominant form of matter in the universe, dark matter must sculpt galaxies into shape. So by looking at the number of galaxies in the universe, and their sizes, we should be able to learn about the properties of dark matter. “The problem that cold dark matter faces is that it cannot explain the absence of small-scale structures in the universe,” says Héctor José de Vega at the Laboratory of Theoretical and High Energy Physics in Paris, France.
By small-scale he means dwarf galaxies. Simulations of cold dark matter predict tens to hundreds of times more dwarf galaxies than anyone can find. The reason is cold dark matter falls together easily because it is slow-moving and so cannot resist its own gravitational attraction. As computing power has grown, our simulations have become finer and predict clumpy clouds of cold dark matter the size of the solar system. Yet no evidence for any such substructures has yet been found.
“These problems have been known for 20 years, but they are becoming worse as the observations get better,” says de Vega.
He and colleagues are discussing the need for a somewhat lighter, faster-moving particle: “warm” dark matter. Such particles would have no more than one-thousandth the mass of WIMPs. So they would resist clumping on the smaller scales and not be expected to produce so many dwarf galaxies. “Fast progress is being made on the simulations,” says de Vega. “You will surely hear a lot more about warm dark matter in the future.”
What exactly makes up warm dark matter? The best bet at the moment is a hypothesised type of neutrino, known as the sterile neutrino because of its reluctance to interact with normal matter except through gravity (unlike ordinary neutrinos, which also feel the weak force). Sterile neutrinos could also help explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.
Then there’s the new kid on the block that some are claiming could do the job just as well: “dark atoms”. Not only could dark atoms explain the lack of dwarf galaxies, it’s just possible, say their inventors, that they could also explain the discrepancies between the dark matter experiments.
Christopher Wells of Houghton College in New York and colleagues began to ponder whether they could square the seemingly contradictory results from the underground experiments. They found it should be possible if the dark matter was not a single particle but the dark equivalent of a hydrogen atom - a dark electron orbiting a dark proton.
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Ordinary atoms can change their energy levels under the right conditions by either absorbing or emitting a photon. A dark atom could use dark photons to do the same when it hits a dark matter detector, depending on the chemical composition of the detector.
In the case of the sodium iodide that DAMA uses, the dark atom would change its energy and be seen. However, xenon would not have the same effect on the dark atom and so the particle would go unnoticed by XENON100.
It is very early days for dark atoms, and Wells admits he has not figured out how the current pantheon of physics theories could motivate their existence, although he suggests that string theory could offer some leads. “We know nature gives us ordinary atoms, we wondered if it could do it again,” he says.
A world of pain
What’s promising about dark atoms is that they could explain the lack of dwarf galaxies in our observations. Because dark atoms would emit or absorb dark photons, the universe might be full of invisible, dark light that constantly interacts with clouds of dark atoms, raising their temperature and puffing them up. This would prevent dwarf galaxies from forming in the first place. “It’s still a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation at the moment,” admits Wells, who has started working on simulations to better test the idea.
Still, many researchers are not quite prepared to abandon WIMPs yet. “I don’t find the arguments about dwarf galaxies very convincing,” says Dan Hooper of the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. “My money is still on WIMPs.”
He suggests that the missing dwarf galaxies could be out there but are invisible because they are made solely of dark matter. One way to find them is to look for gamma rays, which should be produced when WIMPs collide and disintegrate. NASA’s Fermi space telescope has searched for such gamma rays in nearby dwarf galaxies twice and so far found nothing. That does not necessarily mean that the WIMPs are missing, just that they are not in the form expected. And Hooper says that the results do not rule out low-mass WIMPs similar to those that may have been seen in the underground experiments.
Collar dubs the current impasse “a world of pain” and reckons that it is likely to get worse before it gets better. Now that we have begun to see something, either astrophysics is wrong, or particle physics is wrong, or our whole understanding of dark matter is wrong.
Everyone agrees that the way forward is to collect more and better data. To do that, we need more sensitive dark matter detectors on Earth, better astrophysical observations and more particle accelerator experiments.
One spacecraft that will help is the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope. Launched in 2009, it is taking the most precise images of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation that it is possible to take. Subtle variations in the CMB are sensitive to the rate of expansion of the universe, which itself is determined by the soup of particles present in the cosmos.
“Planck is the really big player in this,” says Feng. “It could tell us for sure whether there are more particles than we have detected.”
There are already hints from NASA’s WMAP spacecraft that the CMB shows the fingerprints of undetected particles. These could plausibly be sterile neutrinos or even dark photons. Planck has the potential to turn these hints into solid discoveries.
But when it comes to figuring out what the dark matter actually is, there will probably be no single eureka moment. Instead, the nature of the beast will become apparent as everyone fits together their own pieces of the puzzle.
“This is like the story of the elephant,” says Feng, referring to the Indian parable in which a group of blind men all touch a different part of an elephant and then compare notes to try to work out what the beast looks like. “We are all touching a different bit of the dark matter. Hopefully, at some stage, we’ll be able to put them all together in the right way and discover what it looks like.”
Let’s hope so. The trouble is that in some versions of the parable the conflicting views are never resolved and the truth is never uncovered.
Stuart Clark is a consultant to New Scientist and author of The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth (Polygon)
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Print - Counter-Terrorism Is Getting Complicated - Esquire
Print - Counter-Terrorism Is Getting Complicated - Esquire
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/waffle-house-terrorists-0212?page=all
He had become a little old man. The “little” part he could handle; Fred Thomas had been small all his life, and had countered it with a rigorous self-belief. The old part was harder. He was sick, for one thing. He had kidney disease. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He dragged around a tank of oxygen everywhere he went. He had two flights of stairs in his new house and couldn’t make it up either of them without stopping halfway. He had torn rotator cuffs and couldn’t lift his arms over his head. He had always been a man of action, and now he was enduring the irrelevancy of old age in a place where he was unknown. He retired from Lockheed Martin on June 1, 2008, and moved from his home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to the new house on the dirt road in Georgia a month later. Charlotte insists that he loved both his retirement and the place to which he’d retired; that his son and his family lived not an hour away; that they spent their days together, exploring the quaint nearby towns, like Helen and Dahlonega, and working in the garden. “Oh, he loved it,” Charlotte says. “We love it. We still do.”
No, he didn’t sleep very well. But then, he never had. He’d always been a night owl, Charlotte says, and now in retirement he had the chance to stay on the computer into the morning and sleep late into the day. He did not tell Charlotte what he did on his computer; she did not ask, nor think to. He had never been one to keep secrets. But he had one now. He’d developed a disease more wasting even than the disease that caused him to drag around an oxygen tank like a cold metal curse. He couldn’t tell Charlotte about it, though, for the disease was regret. He was alone with it, and two nights before Christmas 2006, he shared it in a post submitted to the online forum of his old nuclear submarine, the James Madison. It was called “Reflections,” and he wrote of having been young and “seeing older people through the years and thinking that those older people were years away from me and that winter was so far off that I could not fathom it or imagine fully what it would be like….But, here it is…wife retired and she’s really getting gray…she moves slower and I see an older woman now. She’s in better shape than me…but, I see the great change….Not the one I married who was young and vibrant…but, like me, her age is beginning to show and we are now those older folks that we used to see and never thought we’d be.
“Yes, I have regrets. There are things I wish I hadn’t done…things I should have done. But indeed, there are many things I’m happy to have done. It’s all in a lifetime….So, if you’re not in your winter yet…let me remind you, that it will be here faster than you think. So, whatever you would like to accomplish in your life, please do it quickly!”
He had an answer to the disease of regret, however, and it was the same answer that a lot of men find, especially through the Internet: fantasy.
He’d always been a “conservative Republican,” his wife says, who’d gone from Limbaugh to Hannity to Beck, and now started commenting on the Web sites of those who shared his enthusiasm for guns and for Second Amendment absolutism. One he enjoyed in particular was the blog of a former Alabama militiaman named Mike Vanderboegh, who not only wrote for “the 3 percent” of Americans who would shoot back when the government comes to seize their guns but also began posting chapters from his novel Absolved. Styled by Vanderboegh as a “warning,” the novel is instead an exercise in wish fulfillment in which virtuous gun owners start a civil war by resisting the effete, decadent, and inevitably corrupt forces of a collectivist government out to steal the weapons that are the only true emblems of a free citizenry. It is no accident that an overwhelming technical facility is the great equalizer between the gun owners and the government, nor that most of the book’s heroes are fat, sick, and old.
It was not long before Thomas found the Liberty Forum, which is the message board of the Militia of Georgia. Mostly under the name “Ahab627,” he began posting sternly eloquent warnings about government tyranny, and also writing of “hypothetical” situations by which fictional dreams might be realized. Two days before Christmas 2008 — and almost two years to the day after posting about his disillusion watching himself and his wife grow old — he became a man of action again through an act of imagination. While denying actual intention, he envisioned the ease with which the United States government could be overthrown by a program of “patriotic assassinations” carried out by groups of five “committed citizens” executing “lightning strikes” against “problem” politicians. He was not disciplined for this by the moderator nor rebuked by other Liberty Forum posters. Instead he was praised for his “gonads,” and finally, on January 2, 2009, six months after moving to Georgia and eighteen days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, he celebrated the New Year by joining the Militia of Georgia, also known as the MOG:
“My name is Frederick W. Thomas RMC (SS), USN, Ret. and I’m new to this forum. I’ve seen the handwriting on the wall and I believe what I’ve read. Most of my adult life has been spent in service to America, and here in the twilight of my years I find that my sacrifice and the blood I’ve shed for this country has led to the enslavement of me and mine. The Constitution I swore to uphold is being abrogated by the very government that called for service and I wonder if there will be my America much longer.
“I’ve decided I can sit idly by no longer and so freely join with you to do something about this intolerable situation. If membership here-in makes me a member of the Militia of Georgia, then I’ve succeeded.”
He worried that he was too old for membership; he needn’t have. He’d stumbled on the secret of the militia movement: that it ignores virtually every reality but the self-actualizing realities of the Internet. It didn’t matter that Fred Thomas could barely hold a gun, much less shoot one; he could post, couldn’t he, and so he discovered what Jimmy Wynn, the nominal “commander” of the MOG, had discovered ten years earlier, when, as he says, “the message board replaced the meeting, and suddenly anybody with a keyboard could call himself a militiaman.” Wynn discovered this the hard way when Joe Sims came across the river from South Carolina. After he won an election that displaced Dan Roberts as “captain” of “the Toccoa Unit” of the MOG, he set his sights on Wynn. “Joe Sims was a little more tech-savvy than I was back then,” Wynn says, “and he wanted to start a Militia of Georgia message board. I blindly trusted him, and one morning I wake up and I’m locked out of the message boards and he’s the leader of the whole thing.”
What Wynn discovered to his detriment, however, Fred Thomas discovered to his advantage. Though suited to no activity other than the virtual kind, he began to rise in the esteem of the MOG’s ranks by virtue of his energy and the unstinting posts he wrote with military care. Did anyone know he was just a little old man? No, and he found himself in enthusiastic parlay with some of the more radical voices of the MOG, such as “getawayman,” who liked to follow quotes from liberal politicians with quips like “far as I’m concerned just another round in the mag babe” and “just waiting to empty a few mags!!!!!!!!!!” Now Thomas’s retirement actually served as a benefit, as he had enough time on his hands to volunteer for an “officer” position that no one else wanted. Jimmy Wynn had to struggle to restore his leadership of the Militia of Georgia after Joe Sims unaccountably disappeared; but within months of joining the MOG, Fred Thomas had become Wynn’s second in command — his executive officer, or XO — just by raising his virtual hand.
It didn’t last long. Wynn has spent half his life in power struggles with half the militia members of Georgia, and Fred Thomas was no different. He objected to Wynn’s moderation on the issue of immigration and his opposition to the Iraq War. Wynn met with him face-to-face and noticed that Fred Thomas in person was not exactly the rational radical of the message board. “He tries to be head honcho of everything. He’s pretty aggressive.” Thomas resigned from the MOG by early 2010, but instead of fading away he called Dan Roberts in Toccoa. They’d both had fallings out with Jimmy Wynn, and they were united in their disgruntlement. What’s more, they had an idea for a new kind of militia, smaller, more purposeful, more covert, more selective, more imbued with vision. Fred Thomas reached out to “getawayman.” Dan Roberts reached out to Joe Sims.
First, to get the money thing out of the way: Joe Sims wanted to get paid. He had already sent me an e-mail telling me that he wouldn’t give me an interview. He would, however, get on the phone to negotiate, and a few hours after I met Charlotte Thomas, Joe Sims called with his pitch.
He said, “I’ve had my life threatened, I’ve had my car keyed, I’ve had my tires slashed.”
He said, “I’ve had Fox up my behind, I’ve had CNN up my behind, I’ve had BBC up my behind. Ev-er-y-body wants to talk to me.”
He said, “I’m not sticking my nose in any publication unless I’m getting paid. Just to keep me on the safe side. I’m going to use that money to relocate me and fight the problems that I have. I’ve spent the last year of my life in this mess. I’ve been in the militia movement for twenty years. I know ev-er-y-body. I know everybody that’s considered a domestic terrorist, I know people that should be considered domestic terrorists but aren’t yet because they haven’t hit the radar. I mean, I am probably one of the most connected militia people on the planet at this minute. I know everybody’s dirty little deeds and I have become persona non grata….”
He wound up talking to me for an hour and fifteen minutes, with no compensation. He was fed up with the feds — “They don’t return my calls. They don’t return text messages. They don’t return e-mails. When I called a certain government agency and told them who I was and that I needed to speak to someone, two hours later my handler was calling me and was mad at me for making the phone call.” His handler wasn’t going to like him giving an interview, either, but Sims didn’t care because to his mind, his handler hadn’t been taking care of him. “I’ll probably be threatened with something, I might go to jail,” he said. “I’ve been threatened with tampering with evidence, lying to a federal officer, blah blah blah blah blah. I just want to be left in a little hole someplace. I don’t want to be Joe Federal Informant.”
But his complaint about the government in general and his handler in particular was just that — a complaint. In the end he talked because he’s a talker, and he wanted to explain himself. He’d been shamed in Anderson — “The typical, ‘Oh, he’s a pedophile, blah blah blah blah blah.’ ” But that, he said, “has kind of died out. None of my ex-stepchildren are still in town, so I don’t have to deal with that lie. My ex-wife has apparently moved and gotten remarried, so I don’t have to deal with her anymore. Everything I have to deal with now is little people coming to town, wanting to ask me about this and ask me about that.”
The shame of the pedophile, then, has given way to the more precarious shame of the snitch. “I’m concerned for my safety every time I walk outside. I’m very well known in this town. I’m concerned when I go to the grocery store. I’m concerned when I stop and get gas.” But of course the two brands of opprobrium are intertwined: People think he’s a snitch because they think he’s a pedophile. They think that he volunteered to rat out his fellow militiamen in order to get out from under the charges that he sexually molested his stepdaughters. He can’t address the alleged crimes of Fred Thomas and Dan Roberts without addressing his own. And so he told me:
“I never touched my daughters. That was a case of vindictive prosecution.”
“I can prove [the child porn] isn’t mine. It was all on the hard drive I had that me and my brother-in-law got free on Craigslist in New Jersey. It was not on the computer I used personally.”
“I didn’t go to Maryland. I was living in New Jersey. I was working for Domino’s Pizza. I was picked up on highway 95 going south. I was heading back to South Carolina to answer the charges.”
Indeed, Joe Sims is an unusual government asset in that he is a government asset who has not pleaded guilty to the charges against him. He is fighting them and trying to prove that the stepdaughters who stepped up to accuse him are liars. At the same time he is fighting to make people believe that the only reason he told the feds about the plot to kill public officials is that he knew it was happening and was a concerned citizen. And yet both claims are connected, because he didn’t try to contact the FBI until he went to jail and had the necessary motivation. What would have happened if he hadn’t alerted the feds?
“If they’d pulled this off, tens of thousands of people would have died. So I did the right thing.”
Why did he do it?
“To keep people from dying.”
You really think that would have happened?
“It would have.”
Are you a hero?
“I’m just a grunt. I’m the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time who did the right thing.”
One of the peculiarities of the federal policy of preemption, however, is that the right thing is usually inextricable from the wrong thing. And one of the things that the story of Joe Sims asks us to believe is that our safety was purchased by his sin — that we were spared because two girls in Anderson, South Carolina, say they were not.
Industry Experts to Congress: We Can Remove Personally Identifiable Information Before Reporting Cybersecurity Threats | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Industry Experts to Congress: We Can Remove Personally Identifiable Information Before Reporting Cybersecurity Threats | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/industry-experts-congress-we-can-remove-personally-identifiable-information
Companies say redacting personally identifiable information of users is possible, but it wouldn’t be required under CISPA.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing on CISPA, the newly introduced “cybersecurity” legislation that would allow companies to pass sensitive user data directly to the government without a judge’s oversight. No members of the civil liberties community were invited to testify. But while Internet freedom advocates were barred from voicing our concerns at the hearing, there was one important fact brought to light during the testimony of industry representatives: experts from the financial industry and the business roundtable confirmed that it’s possible for them to remove data that identifies users from cybersecurity data before sharing it with the government.
EFF and other civil liberties groups have long said that a smart cybersecurity bill wouldn’t give companies blanket permission to share any and all data with the government. At the hearing, experts from fields of business and finance went on record to agree with us that this is possible: companies are able to strip out personally identifiable information of users.
In the hearing, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) questioned former Governor John Engler, President of the Business Roundtable, and Paul Smocer, President of BITS, the technology policy division of the financial industry group called the Financial Services Roundtable. Schiff began by quizzing Engler on whether it was “too much of a burden” for companies to take reasonable steps to remove personally identifiable information from cybersecurity threat data shared with the government:
Schiff: Americans are concerned with the amount of personal information that the government is getting already without adding to it. Is it too much of a burden to ask the private sector to take reasonable steps where reasonable steps can be taken?
Engler: No…I think it’s exactly fine. That’s what I tried to tell my daughters with Facebook. Take reasonable steps. But, seriously.
Schiff: We just want industry to do what you’re asking your daughters to do.
Engler: Exactly.
Schiff then repeated his question, and specifically asked whether the experts testifying believed that companies would find it so burdensome to remove personally identifiable information that they might not even participate in the program.
Schiff: Let me ask it another way. Do you think that the private industry would decide to opt-out of getting classified information about attacks on their own systems because it were required to take reasonable steps to protect the privacy of the American people? You think any companies would say “Well, if I have to take reasonable steps to minimize personal information I’m giving the government I just won’t participate?”
Engler: I’ll let the companies respond to that. I don’t think so.
Smocer: I would also say I don’t think that would be the case. I mean, I think—again I go back to the core issue that there is very little private data, PII, being exchanged today in the threat information world. So I don’t think it’s a big issue to begin with. I think working through, as the Governor [Engler] said, the implementation of specifics will be key, but I think to answer your question I don’t think it would be an issue to make sure we’re doing it the right way.
Like the experts who testified in Congress, EFF sees no reason that companies couldn’t ensure that personally identifiable information of users was not part of the information provided to the government. But as CISPA is currently drafted, companies wouldn’t be required to ensure that identifiable user data was stripped out. Under the current proposal, “cybersecurity threat information” may be sent directly from companies to the government. Companies are under no requirement to strip out personally identifiable information of users before sending it along, and there are broad immunities granted to companies who share more data than is necessary to communicate a cybersecurity threat.
The companies may include restrictions on further sharing of data, including “appropriate anonymization or minimization of such information.” But the government can ignore these restrictions, since the bill provides no liability for violating this provision.
The only would-be privacy protection for stripping out personally identifiable information is a mere suggestion for the federal government: under the bill, the federal government “may…undertake reasonable efforts to limit the impact on privacy and civil liberties of the sharing of cyber threat information.” This wording is extremely important: the government “may” do this, but isn’t actually required to do this by law.
Right now, the United States has an elaborate body of laws governing how personally identifiable information flows to the government—including industry-specific laws around utilities companies, communications laws like the Stored Communications Act and the Wiretap Act, and video privacy laws like the Cable Privacy Act and the Video Privacy Protection Act. But CISPA as drafted would sidestep all of these laws, allowing companies to share information for “cybersecurity” purposes without requiring them to strip out personally identifiable information of users.
Please join EFF in opposing CISPA by sending an email to Congress now. Blanket permissions for companies to share unredacted user data with the government without a warrant is unnecessary and dangerous, and it’s not the right solution for America’s cybersecurity concerns.
The Impending Cybersecurity Power Grab – It’s not just for the United States | Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Impending Cybersecurity Power Grab – It’s not just for the United States | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/impending-cybersecurity-power-grab-its-not-just-united-states
EFF, OpenMedia.ca, CIPPIC and a number of civil society organizations have declared this to be ‘Stop Cyber Spying Week’ in protest of several controversial U.S. cybersecurity legislative proposals, including the bill currently before Congress and the Senate called CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing & Protection Act of 2011. While ‘Stop Cyber Spying Week’ is focused on U.S. initiatives, Canadians should be concerned as well as the adoption of a privacy-invasive U.S. cybersecurity strategy is likely to have serious implications for Canadian civil liberties. For this reason, Canadian civil society groups have joined the protest. In general, Canadians would do well to remain vigilant.
Using the guise of ‘cybersecurity’, CISPA aims to mobilize Internet intermediaries to institute a sweeping, privacy-invasive, voluntary information-sharing regime with few safeguards. The U.S. cybersecurity strategy, embodied in CISPA and other legislative proposals, also seeks to empower Internet companies to deploy ill-defined ‘countermeasures’ in order to combat these threats. Use of these powers is purportedly limited to situations addressing ‘cybersecurity’ threats, yet this term is so loosely defined that it can encompass almost anything – even, potentially, to investigate potential breaches of intellectual property rights!
The cornerstone of the privacy-invasive CISPA component is the establishment of private-public partnerships for information sharing. This creates a two-tiered regime that, on the one hand, facilitates the collection of personal Internet data by private Internet companies as well as the sharing of that information with the government and, on the other, allows government agencies to share information with private companies.
To enable information flows from Internet companies to government agencies, CISPA will grant Internet companies immunity from civil or criminal liability for any monitoring or sharing of user activity—as long as it is done in ‘good faith.’ Specifically, CISPA authorizes companies to “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information.” Aggrieved users who sue Internet companies for wrongfully handing over their data to the government will have to meet the incredibly high bar of proving the decision comprised ‘willful misconduct.’
The U.S. cybersecurity strategy will also permit Internet companies to employ dubiously defined ‘countermeasures,’ provided they are justified with equally vague and undefined ‘defensive intent.’ Internet companies will be permitted to deploy ‘cybersecurity systems’ – products designed to ‘safeguard…a network from efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy’. While it is unclear exactly what this would permit an Internet company to do, it could allow blocking of specific websites or individuals or even a much broader range of filtering. Given the potentially all-encompassing and inclusive definition of ‘cybersecurity’, it would not be surprising if these ‘countermeasures’ were ultimately used to block online entities such as Wikileaks or sites accused of copyright infringement. The inclusion of ‘degrade’ in the definition of permissible ‘cybersecurity systems’ could even raise net neutrality concerns, as ISPs have, in the past, claimed ‘network degradation’ as justification for the throttling of downstream services such as peer-to-peer applications. Indeed, U.S. cybersecurity laws have a history of being employed by private Internet companies to stifle downstream competition.
In sum, the U.S. cybersecurity strategy envisions a voluntary cooperative regime where Internet companies are given broad-ranging immunities to surveil Internet users and downstream online services. This amounts to an erosion of personal privacy safeguards currently in place. Under this regime, an online company need only to assert a vague ‘cybersecurity objective’ and it will have carte blanche to bypass domestic laws and protections against privacy invasion.
This legislation is likely to have direct implications for Canadians. Canada and the United States have agreed to a joint ‘Beyond the Borders Initiative’ [pdf] aimed at establishing a ‘secure perimeter’ around the two countries. Somewhat ironically given the borderless nature of the Internet, the Initiative envisions a secure cyber perimeter in addition to the secure physical perimeter it seeks to put in place. While the cybersecurity segment of this Initiative remains vague, it includes a commitment to:
- Develop joint Canadian and U.S. programs, and analytic or communications products, aimed at enhancing the cross-border protection of critical infrastructure;
- Enhance the two countries’ ability to ‘respond jointly and effectively’ to cyber incidents, including joint engagement with private sector entities as well as ‘real-time information sharing’ between cybersecurity operation centres across both countries;
- Harmonize best practices and objectives on cybersecurity between Canada and the U.S., and actively advance these objectives in international Internet governance forums and bi-lateral interactions with third countries; and
- Take steps to generally “make cyberspace safer for all our citizens.”
While lacking in specifics, the emphasis on joint information flows, references to bi-national cooperation with private sector entities, and a commitment to jointly advance cybersecurity and best practices all hint at a consolidation of laws and practices. Moreover, reference to joint cybersecurity ‘products’ is reminiscent of the ‘cybersecurity systems’ invoked by CISPA.
If CISPA passes in the U.S., Canadians could expect great political pressure to adopt similar measures in Canada. As Canada’s Federal and Provincial Privacy Commissioners recently noted in a Joint Resolution, there is currently nothing in the Initiative to guarantee Canadian privacy standards are maintained in this harmonization effort. Suggestions that programs subject to the a ‘shared vision’ [see p. 15] between Canada and the United States on privacy emphasize this.
In fact, two current legislative proposals in Canada, if passed, will remove any legal barriers to the type of public-private information sharing that is at the heart of CISPA. First, there is Bill C-12, which will amend Canada’s federal privacy protection statute, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). PIPEDA legally restricts the conditions under which private organizations such as telecommunications companies can disclose personal information about their customers to third parties, such as the government. Bill C-12 will significantly expand the conditions under which companies can share information without having to seek customer consent. It will permit telecommunications companies to hand over customer information to any organization seeking it for the purpose of performing ‘policing services’, a term that is increasingly being applied to public-private cybersecurity partnerships.
More concerning is a provision included in Bill C-30, the Canadian Government’s latest attempt to update its capacity to surveil the online activities of its citizens. Among the numerous privacy-invasive elements found in Bill C-30 is a provision granting organizations – including telecommunications companies – immunity from “any criminal or civil liability” if they voluntarily decide to preserve customers’ information or share it with law enforcement. This is evocative of the civil and criminal immunity CISPA offers U.S. companies for handing over their users’ data to the United States Government. While the scope of monitoring permitted under C-30 may not go as far as that in CISPA, the C-30 immunities for voluntary sharing of customer information to the Government are arguably broader.
Canadians would do well to take note of developments on CISPA in the United States. While the immunities granted in Bill C-30 may not have been included specifically with a cybersecurity purpose in mind, Canada is now tied to United States cybersecurity strategies through commitments in the joint perimeter security Initiative. If the CISPA vision is adopted in the United States, Canadians can expect similar strategies to appear soon after. If Bill C-30 passes, many of the legal tools for this unaccountable sharing regime will already be in place, ready for exploitation.
Proponents of Canada’s Online Spying Bill Still Trying to Justify Excessive Powers | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Proponents of Canada’s Online Spying Bill Still Trying to Justify Excessive Powers | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/proponents-canada-online-spying-bill-still-trying-justify-excessive-powers
Canada’s online surveillance bill may be on hold for now, but a recent news article confirms that a rather formidable figure has been angling for its return: Richard Fadden, head of the Canadian equivalent of the FBI. Fadden, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), wrote in a letter that the highly contentious Bill C-30 was “vital” to protecting national security. The letter was sent to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, the driver behind Bill C-30, in late February. It was released to the Canadian Press in response to a request filed under the Access to Information Act.
As EFF has noted before, Bill C-30 would introduce new police powers allowing Canadian authorities easy access to individuals’ online activities, including the power to force Internet companies to hand over private customer data without a warrant. It would also pave the way for gag orders preventing online service providers from notifying subscribers that their private data has been disclosed — a move that would make it impossible for users to seek legal recourse for privacy violations.
Similar gag orders are frequently imposed in the United States, when the FBI issues national security letters (NSLs) seeking customer information. In a case EFF has taken on to challenge an NSL statute on behalf of a telecommunications company that received one of these secret letters in 2011, fundamental due process and First Amendment issues arising from these gag order provisions are a central concern.
Toews, the bill’s proponent, has made some outrageous claims about Bill C-30. Early on, he stated that opponents of the bill were either with him, “or with the child pornographers,” an apparent attempt to paint the legislation merely as a tool to combat online predators. Yet this framing of the issue was roundly rejected by stakeholders – as EFF reported back in February, internal documents reveal that even the government’s own analysts have claimed the powers in question were actually needed for non-criminal investigations.
Indeed, the legislation met with broad criticism across the board. Privacy Experts, academics, all of Canada’s Privacy Commissioners (and specifically the Federal, Ontario and British Columbia Commissioners), telecommunications companies, major Canadian newspapers, all opposition political parties, the Internet community, and more than 145,000 Canadians who signed an OpenMedia.ca petition spoke out against the legislation because they understood that it represented an unwarranted invasion of Canadians’ online privacy. The message seemed to get through: The legislation was ultimately placed temporarily on hold in the wake of the public outcry.
In spite of this, Fadden made it clear in his letter that he’s eager to see the bill return to Parliament. He offered to help draft revisions to the legislation to strengthen accountability measures, and stated that his agency is available “to support this process through all legislative stages.”
This did not come as a great surprise to Canadian privacy advocates. “CSIS has been a strong (but silent) supporter of the legislation for quite some time,” said Tamir Israel, of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC). “Unfortunately, [Fadden’s] statement … offers little that will make this legislation palatable to Canadians. CSIS already has very broad surveillance powers and they have yet to make the case that these new powers are, in fact, necessary for them to continue to do their job.”
Fadden’s focus on strengthening accountability fails to address the endemic problems in Bill C-30. British Columbia Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham hit on the inherent problems with this approach in her assessment of prior government attempts to fix Bill C-30 by introducing stronger accountability:
I appreciate these changes attempt to improve the legislation. However, they remain premised on, and leave unaltered, the Bill’s fundamental flaw; that law enforcement can obtain an array of personal information about citizens, including real names, home addresses, unlisted numbers, email addresses and IP addresses from Internet service providers, without a warrant.
The Ontario Privacy Commissioner has also issued a detailed outline of what it would take to fix Bill C-30. And Denham’s perspective is shared by a broad cross-section of Canadians.
“If there’s one lesson Toews should have learned from the huge public outcry via the over 145,000+ who have spoken out through the StopSpying.ca petition and social media, it is that the government needs to make an effort to consult Canadians on issues relating to online privacy,” said Steve Anderson of OpenMedia.ca. “Canadians know this online spying bill will provide a range of authorities with the private information of any Canadian, at anytime, without a warrant. The fact is Vic Toews’ online spying plan is invasive, costly and poorly thought out.”
More recently, Toews claimed that Bill C-30 would have helped law enforcement apprehend accused killer Luka Magnotta, who has been charged in the gruesome murder of a Chinese university student. But Dr. Michael Geist, an expert in Internet and E-Commerce law and law professor at the University of Ottawa, immediately debunked this assertion:
“There is simply no question that law enforcement can obtain the necessary warrant on customer name and address information (if an ISP refused as part of an investigation) and police have presumably obtained warrants for far more detailed information. Moreover, the surveillance capabilities at ISPs mandated by C-30 - which focus on real-time surveillance - appear completely irrelevant given that Magnotta fled to France. In fact, reports indicate that there were early warnings about Magnotta and the video openly available that were dismissed by police.”
For his part, Israel characterized Toews’ statements as “more posturing from the Ministry of Justice and more crude attempts to leverage inflammatory issues in order to justify unnecessary and excessive powers.”
EFF continues to stand with Canadian privacy advocates who remain wary of Bill C-30’s return. We will continue to keep an eye on this legislation, which may be revisited once Parliament is back in session this coming fall.
Just How Many Drone Licenses Has the FAA Really Issued? | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Just How Many Drone Licenses Has the FAA Really Issued? | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/just-how-many-drone-licenses-has-faa-really-issued
The Los Angeles Times reported last week that the FAA has issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007 and noted this was “far more than were previously known.”
This new number points out again how difficult it is to answer the most common questions EFF gets from reporters about drones — just how many agencies have applied for drone licenses? How many licenses has the FAA issued since it started issuing licenses (which was earlier than 2007)? And how much has domestic drone use increased over the years?
Unfortunately, the FAA has made it impossible to answer these questions. We’ve been tracking drone flights in the United States for several years now through our two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the Federal Aviation Administration, and we currently have more information on domestic drone flights than anyone other than the FAA. But thanks to discrepancies among various drone numbers the FAA has released—to EFF, to the Government Accountability Office and to members of Congress—it’s anyone’s guess exactly how much drone authorizations have increased over the years.
Here’s a summary of the various numbers the FAA has released. See if you can make sense of them.
July 2010: | The FAA stated in a Fact Sheet that it issued 71 “experimental certificates” since July 2005 (Source: July 15, 2010 FAA Fact Sheet (since taken down from the FAA website)) |
April 2012: | The FAA told EFF that 61 public “proponents” had applied for drone licenses since the agency’s drone licensing program began. The FAA has also said these 61 proponents applied for approximately 750 Certificates of Authorization (COAs). (Source: FAA list provided to EFF and EFF’s FOIA litigation) |
July 2012: | The Government Accountability Office reported that “[b]etween January 1, 2012 and July 17, 2012, FAA had issued 201 COAs to 106 federal, state, and local government entities across the United States, including law enforcement entities as well as academic institutions.” (Source: July 2012 GAO Testimony on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (pdf, p.2)) |
September 2012: | The Government Accountability Office reported that “[b]etween January 1, 2012, and July 13, 2012, FAA issued 342 COAs to 106 federal, state, and local government entities across the United States, including law enforcement entities as well as academic institutions.” (Source: September 2012 GAO Report on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (pdf, p.7)) |
September 2012: | The FAA told Representatives Markey and Barton that, as of September 2012, 228 public drone license “sponsors” had a current, expired, or disapproved COA. (Source: FAA list provided to Representatives Markey and Barton. (pdf, p.6)) |
January 2013: | The FAA told EFF that 81 public drone license “proponents” had applied for COAs between July 2011 and October 2012. (Source: Second FAA list provided to EFF) |
February 2013: | The LA Times and the Government Accountability Office reported that the FAA has issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since January 2007. The Times notes that “some 327 permits are still listed as active.” (Source: Los Angeles Times; February 2013 GAO Report (pdf, p.3)) |
There are other discrepancies. Of the 228 entities on the list released to Representatives Markey and Barton in September 2012, at least 28 are not on either of the lists the FAA provided to EFF, despite the fact that the FAA has assured EFF—as part of our litigation—that EFF’s lists include all public entities that have applied for drone licenses. These missing entities include the following:
- Bastrop County Texas Emergency Management Coordinator
- Becker Soil & Water Conservation District (city of Minnesota)
- Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies
- City of El Dorado, KS
- Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office
- Colorado Department of Transportation
- Department of Military and Veterans Commonwealth (PA)
- Florida Atlantic University
- Jacksonville District Corps of Engineers
- New Mexico Tech at Playas Training & Research Center
- SPAWAR Systems Center
- Stark County Sheriff Department
- Texas Rangers
- EPA
And a number of State National Guard offices:
- California Air National Guard
- Guam Army National Guard
- Illinois Army National Guard
- Iowa Army National Guard
- Louisiana Army National Guard
- Michigan Army National Guard
- Minnesota Army National Guard
- New Mexico Army National Guard
- Ohio Army National Guard
- Oklahoma National Guard
- Oregon National Guard
- Tennessee Army National Guard
- Texas National Guard
- Virginia Army National Guard
And, by the FAA’s own admission, the list provided to Markey and Barton does not include classified drone applications.
Why can’t the FAA provide accurate drone license information that the public can rely on? Is it because the agency doesn’t want the public to know? Or is it that the FAA, itself, doesn’t know because it hasn’t kept track of its own program? Both of these possibilities raise serious issues about how the government is managing drone licenses and whether drone use should be allowed to expand in the United States.
The only way we can have an open and full debate about domestic drone flights is if we have accurate, complete, up-to-date and reliable data on how many entities are licensed to fly drones, who those entities are, and how many licenses the FAA has issued for each year it’s issued licenses. EFF shouldn’t have to keep suing the FAA to get this information.
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