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Links for 2014-07-04

  • Irish parliament pressing ahead with increased access to retained telecoms data

    While much of the new bill is concerned with the dissolution of the Competition Authority and the National Consumer Agency and the formation of a new merged Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) the new bill also proposed to extend the powers of the new CCPC to help it investigate serious anticompetitive behaviour. Strikingly the new bill proposes to give members of the CCPC the power to access data retained under the Communications (Retention of Data) Act 2011. As readers will recall this act implements Directive 2006/24/EC which obliges telecommunications companies to archive traffic and location data for a period of up to two years to facilitate the investigation of serious crime. Ireland chose to implement the maximum two year retention period and provided access to An Garda Siochana, The Defence Forces and the Revenue Commissioners. The current reform of Irish competition law now proposes to extend data access powers to the members of the CCPC for the purposes of investigating cartel offences.

    (tags: data-retention privacy surveillance competition ccpc ireland law dri)

  • NSA: Linux Journal is an “extremist forum” and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance

    DasErste.de has published the relevant XKEYSCORE source code, and if you look closely at the rule definitions, you will see linuxjournal.com/content/linux* listed alongside Tails and Tor. According to an article on DasErste.de, the NSA considers Linux Journal an “extremist forum”. This means that merely looking for any Linux content on Linux Journal, not just content about anonymizing software or encryption, is considered suspicious and means your Internet traffic may be stored indefinitely.
    This is, sadly, entirely predictable — that’s what happens when you optimize the system for over-sampling, with poor oversight.

    (tags: false-positives linuxjournal linux terrorism tor tails nsa surveillance snooping xkeyscore selectors oversight)

  • stout

    a C++ library adding some modern language features like Option, Try, Stopwatch, and other Guava-ish things (via @cscotta)

    (tags: c++ library stout option try guava coding)

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