Companies, Governments Lose Personal Data
You know, it’s not even that March was all that unusual. But here, on World Backup Day, it’s worth looking at some of the incidents that happened this month: The personal information — including the...
View ArticleIf Dropbox Opens Encryption to Law Enforcement, Should Only the Guilty Worry?
When you absolutely, positively have to keep people from being able to look at your data, what do you do? Last week a number of people were surprised to find out that the popular cloud storage site...
View ArticleWhy al-Qaida Hopes Osama bin Laden Did a Backup, and Other Cautionary Tales
Granted, it’s not every IT administrator who has to deal with a C-level executive in a remote office losing confidential company data because an elite armed military force broke into the place he was...
View ArticleThe ‘Lost or Seized Laptop Data’ Case for the Chromebook
A lot of my friends spent the day scoffing at the notion that anybody would spend $28 a month (for a business user), $20 a month (for a student), or almost $500 to outright purchase a Chromebook, a...
View ArticleResearcher Files FTC Complaint Against Dropbox
Well, the other Dropbox shoe has, uh, dropped. In response to last month’s revelation that the Dropbox file sharing service can’t actually promise to keep your files secure, but can look at them and...
View ArticleSuspects May Not Need to Decrypt Storage for Law Enforcement After All
Contradicting earlier court actions in other states, the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals of the 11th Circuit has ruled that a man suspected of holding child pornography on his hard disk drive...
View ArticleDon’t Have an Encryption Key? Go to Jail
Christian Szell: Is it safe?… Is it safe? Babe: You’re talking to me? Christian Szell: Is it safe? Babe: Is what safe? Christian Szell: Is it safe? Babe: I don’t know what you mean. I can’t tell you...
View ArticleMD Anderson Cancer Center Loses Patient Data *Again*
For the second time this year, and the third time since 2006, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas has had to alert patients that it had lost access to their personal data. “On July 14, 2012, MD Anderson...
View ArticleGovernments Behaving Badly With Personal Data
There’s been a couple of instances recently where government agencies have been careless with data, losing access to personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers. First, a NASA...
View ArticleUtah Government Data Breach More Expensive Than Thought
In another case of governments behaving badly with personal data, the state of Utah has learned that a data breach a year ago is likely to be even more costly than originally estimated – and that’s...
View ArticleJudge Reverses Himself on Revealing Encryption Keys in Child Porn Case
Courts have been ruling one way or another in the past few years about whether someone accused of encrypting incriminating information needs to reveal the encryption key to law enforcement. Now we...
View ArticleFollowing Amazon, Google Unveils a Bigger Station Wagon
“The point is this: No matter how fat a pipe you have to the Internet, at some given amount of data, it’s going to be faster, cheaper, or both to use some manual method to ship data on some storage...
View ArticleProsecution Drops Attempt to Force Child Porn Suspect to Decrypt Hard Drives
Prosecutors have dropped attempts to force a suspect to give up the encryption key for his hard drives. Unfortunately, they dropped the attempts not because it was the right thing to do, but because...
View ArticleJudge Upholds Right to Border Electronics Searches
In the tv show the West Wing, there’s an episode in the first season called “Take Out the Trash Day,” where Josh explains to Donna that in White House parlance, “take out the trash day” refers to the...
View Article‘You Had One Job’: Canadian Privacy Agency Loses Employee Personal Data
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada had to admit last week that it had, uh, lost an unencrypted hard drive containing the personal data of up to 800 current and former federal employees...
View ArticleWhat We Can Learn From the ‘ISIS Terror Laptop of Doom’
Our government loses so many laptops, it’s kind of nice when the tables are turned once in a while. That said, a lot of people are talking about what’s purported to be a laptop belonging to the Sunni...
View ArticleWill Only Outlaws Be Able to Have Smartphone Encryption?
Now that Apple and Google have announced that they will incorporate encryption in smartphones by default, the question is how long law-abiding Americans will be allowed to continue to have encryption...
View ArticleYes, Cops Can Make You Use Your Fingerprint to Unlock Your Phone
While courts are still arguing back and forth about whether people can be compelled to give up the encryption key for their laptops and other devices, it looks like they may have decided that it’s okay...
View ArticleGovernments, Old Tech, Acquisitions: 2015 Storage Trends
The interesting thing about looking over an entire year’s worth of stories at once is that things that seemed like a single event at the time turn out to be part of a larger arc. Yes, the storage...
View ArticleCalifornia, New York Put Forth Useless Phone Encryption Bills
California and New York are each attempting to pass bills that they claim will help protect people against crime, but in reality would likely simply eliminate a source of sales tax revenue from the...
View Article