I have signed a petition calling on the NSA to "suspend its domestic surveillance program pending public comment." This is what's going on: In a request today to National Security Agency director Keith Alexander and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the group argues that the NSA's recently revealed domestic surveillance program is "unlawful" because the agency neglected to request public comments...

On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media. My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I'll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways that sociopaths and terrorists couldn't duplicate. Anyone can...

John Mueller and Mark Stewart ask the important questions about the NSA surveillance programs: why were they secret, what have they accomplished, and what do they cost? This essay attempts to figure out if they accomplished anything, and this essay attempts to figure out if they can be effective at all....

Facebook (here), Apple (here), and Yahoo (here) have all released details of US government requests for data. They each say that they've turned over user data for about 10,000 people, although the time frames are different. The exact number isn't important; what's important is that it's much lower than the millions implied by the PRISM document. Now the big question:...

In an excellent essay about privacy and secrecy, law professor Daniel Solove makes an important point. There are two types of NSA secrecy being discussed. It's easy to confuse them, but they're very different. Of course, if the government is trying to gather data about a particular suspect, keeping the specifics of surveillance efforts secret will decrease the likelihood of...

Interesting speculation that the NSA is storing everyone's phone calls, and not just metadata. Definitely worth reading. I expressed skepticism about this just a month ago. My assumption had always been that everyone's compressed voice calls is just too much data to move around and store. Now, I don't know. There's a bit of a conspiracy-theory air to all of...

This finally explains what John Ellis was talking about in "The Possibility of Non-Secret Encryption" when he dropped a tantalizing hint about wartime work at Bell Labs....

There's one piece of blowback that isn't being discussed -- aside from the fact that Snowden has killed the chances of any liberal arts major getting a DoD job for at least a decade -- and that's how the massive NSA surveillance of the Internet affects the US's role in Internet governance. Ron Deibert makes this point: But there are...

It's a novel behavior. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....

On April 1, I announced the Sixth Annual Movie Plot Threat Contest: I want a cyberwar movie-plot threat. (For those who don't know, a movie-plot threat is a scare story that would make a great movie plot, but is much too specific to build security policy around.) Not the Chinese attacking our power grid or shutting off 911 emergency services...