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NSA Experimented With Cell Phone Location Tracking Program
The National Security Agency experimented with a cell phone location tracking program in 2010, but eventually shelved the idea. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, declassified the program during a senate testimony today on Capitol Hill.
“In 2010 and 2011 N.S.A. received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format, but that data was not used for any other purpose and was never available for intelligence analysis purposes,” a draft of the report says, which was obtained early by The New York Times.
The NSA has repeatedly denied that it tracks Americans’ locations, but its secret documents reveal that GPS data is used to create a network of suspects tied to Americans.
“After years of stonewalling on whether the government has ever tracked or planned to track the location of law-abiding Americans through their cellphones, once again, the intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret — even when the truth would not compromise national security,” Said Senator Ron Wyden.
Wyden has spearheaded a surveillance reform package that could actually pass, but will have to wait for President Obama’s NSA task force to issue its recommendations.
[Image Credit: Flickr User DeaPeaJay]
Google's Social Sign-In Growth Slows In Q3
Janrain, the popular user-management and social login provider, announced its latest social login trends report today. It looks like Google’s recent advances in getting people to use its social login solutions have hit a plateau. After a year of sustained growth that allowed it to go from 25 percent of social logins across Janrain’s vast network of partners to 34.4 percent last quarter, Google’s numbers actually dropped to 32.9 percent in the third quarter of 2013.
Given that Janrain added the new Google+ Sign-In tools in April, it’s a surprise to see that the company didn’t register a growth in Google sign-in usage over the last quarter. Google itself has been very upbeat about the performance of Google+ sign-ins, and most of the early data I’ve seen supports this sentiment. Maybe the slew of NSA revelations that implicated Google drove people away from using it, or maybe Janrain’s partners made some changes that explain this shift, but it’s definitely odd. We will have to watch the next report to draw any definitive conclusions.
Facebook, it’s worth noting, also dropped more than 1 percent in Janrain’s charts. However, it’s still comfortably in the lead at 44.9 percent, compared to 46.2 percent last quarter. Facebook’s lead, by the way, is especially obvious when looking at some of Janrain’s user segments. It dominates sign-ins on media and retail and gaming sites, for example, where it owns between 53 percent and 62 percent of logins. Google barely gets above 20 percent in these categories. On B2B sites, on the other hand, Google keeps closing the gap and is now at 26 percent compared to Facebook’s 33 percent.
The users Facebook and Google lost seem to have moved to smaller players in the social log-in game. Yahoo and Twitter registered some growth last quarter, for example, and now power 7.1 percent and 6.5 percent of Janrain’s logins.
FBI Seizes Deep Web Black Market Silk Road, Arrests Owner
The feds have caught up to the Silk Road. The underground website long known for drug trafficking and other illegal activity was seized by the FBI who also arrested the owner on three criminal counts. New York State prosecutors charged Ross William Ulbricht with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing.
Silk Road has long existed in the corner of the Internet dubbed Deep Web and accessible only through the seemingly secure Tor Network. Launched in 2011, the site quickly gained notoriety for its shadowy marketplace of drugs and guns. Silk Road became the Amazon of illegal things. As of July 23, 2013, there were approximately 957,079 registered user accounts, and as the court docs note, this does not necessarily equal the number of actual users.
Although obscured, Silk Road netted big money. The total revenue generated from launch until July 23, 2013, resulted in approximately 9,519,664 Bitcoins and 614,305 Bitcoins of commission for Silk Road itself, court documents reveal. That converts to roughly $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions, at current Bitcoin prices.
A Silk Road competitor, Atlantis, aimed to add a bit of whimsy and Web 2.0 marketing pizzazz to the same markets. It closed last month.
As the court documents note, the owner of Silk Road, Ross William Ulbricht, intentionally and knowingly violated U.S. narcotics laws. The document, available here, reads:
From in or about 2011, up to and including in or about September 2013, ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, a/k/a “Dread Pirate Roberts,” a/k/a “DPR,” a/k/a “Silk Road,” the defendant, owned and operated an underground website, known as “Silk Road,” that provided a platform for drug dealers around the world to sell a wide variety of controlled substances via the Internet.
But that’s just the start of Ulbricht’s troubles. He is also charged with hacking conspiracy and money laundering. The site is currently down, seized by the FBI. It should be interesting, however, to see how the government handles this hydra of an organization. The vast majority of interactions on the Silk Road are anonymous, performed using Bitcoin transfers between parties and set up in secure email exchanges.
According to the court documents, law enforcement agents made over 100 individual undercover purchases through Silk Road, obtaining Schedule I and II drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, LSD and others.
Ulbricht was reportedly arrested yesterday, October 1, 2013, at the Glenn Park library in San Francisco.
This is a developing story. It will be updated when we receive additional information.
As Its Ecosystem Expands, Box Taps Google Health Founder To Lead The Cloud-Based Transformation Of Healthcare
Over the last year, Box has been ramping up its efforts to bring its cloud storage platform into new verticals. That began in April, when the seven-year-old cloud services company began making a major push into healthcare, which given the mayhem around the launch of the new healthcare exchanges yesterday, seems like it couldn’t have come at a better time.
Behind a roster of healthcare partners, HIPAA compliance and an equity investment in drchrono — an EHR service built specifically for the iPad — Box has been looking to leverage its cloud collaboration platform and growing ecosystem of mobile apps to become the glue that can help stick a broken industry back together. As an increasing number of doctors adopt mobile devices and Obamacare forces the market to move toward a digital future, the lack of interoperability between care providers, businesses and patients has become increasingly obvious.
Through its new secure cloud collaboration platform, Box wants to help medical teams access health information from anywhere, while upping the level of collaboration between doctors and nurses and taking the fax machine and paper trail out of healthcare. Box is mature enough that it has customers in each vertical, says Google Health founder Missy Krasner, and it’s at that point where it’s time to start developing solutions that serve these verticals more strategically. “What we’re really going after is the unstructured data in healthcare,” she says, “the images, video, documents and forms that tend to get lost in the archaic infrastructure and workflow that prevails in healthcare today.”
By that, Krasner means that Box doesn’t want to become another Electronic Health Records (EHR) provider, but instead invest in the startups that are developing better mobile EHR solutions (a la drchrono) and live within each of these apps to power collaboration, file transfer and secure, HIPAA-compliant sharing. Box is looking to take an unassuming role — literally — by living inside these apps and appearing as a small button that will read “Sync with Box,” allowing doctors to instantly upload their patient data to Box’s cloud.
A patient’s x-ray, for example, can be instantly stored in the cloud by their doctor within their personal folder, which only they and their doctor are able to access. This is the type of secure, instant access to medical information Box wants to represent, and power, going forward. And not only that, but secure data exchange between doctors and care providers — not just living at the interface between physicians and patients. Box is, after all, is an enterprise cloud.
In another show of its determination to infiltrate the opaque, offline and unstructured world of healthcare, Box is again expanding its roster and ecosystem of partners in an effort to increase the value of its tools for healthcare. Krasner tells us that the 13 new partners will work with Box to help physicians, payers, patients and administrators collaborate and share data across organizations and applications. These new healthcare customers include names like SSM Healthcare, Tri-Counties Regional Center, Cyberonics and Safety Management Systems and join existing customers like Johns Hopkins and Wake Forest Baptist Health that are now using Box to manage patient data and coordinate care.
The list of new partners also includes Care Cloud, a cloud-based practice management, EHR an medical billing systems provider, mobile medical image viewer Nephosity, Qualaris, pharma engagement platform Medikly, VitalHub and physician marketplace Pokitdok — to name a few.
To lead its new healthcare platform, Box is tapping a familiar name to become its new “managing director of healthcare and life sciences.” Miss Krasner, who has previously been acting as an advisor and consultant, will lead the way, bringing her 20 years of experience in the industry to help ramp up Box’s incipient “Health Cloud,” as I’m calling it. Krasner most recently served as an executive in residence at Morgenthaler Ventures, and before that, spent several years at Google, where she was one of the founding members of Google Health.
To help encourage innovation in the space and to get startups tapping into Box’s growing healthcare ecosystem, Krasner and Box have teamed up with national hospital system, Dignity Health, to launch a developer challenge. Through this challenge, developers will be encouraged to help Box build better apps for doctors and hospitals to deliver and exchange content, with the winner receiving a $100,000 convertible note from The Social+Capital Partnership. Twilio, Tokbox, Parse and Firebase will also be providing developers with full access to tools and services to help increase the functionality of submissions.
According to Krasner, the challenge officially kicks off today and runs through January 10th, 2014, with the first place winner not only securing a convertible note, but one month of office space, mentorship from Social+Capital and will be featured in Box’s App Marketplace.
More on Box Healthcare at home here.
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