On Monday a Federal Trade Commission representative stated that current privacy laws fail to protect American consumers.
“We’ve put too much burden on the consumers to understand these policies,” said Kathryn Ratte, a senior attorney in the FTC’s consumer protection bureau.
This is most likely the result of a report that the agency plans to publish later this year. The report is expected to offer to Congress recommendations on new laws and may state that the FTC intends to expand its current authority around policing “deceptive” practices to address more Internet-related business practices.
“One of the issues we’ve identified is…to encourage companies to have better data hygiene,” Ratte said, through implementing policies such as “minimization and retention limits.”
In an area like cloud computing, which demonstrates “some of the limits of these traditional structures,” the current “notice and choice model in some very basic sense isn’t working,” she said.
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11 alleged Russian spies have been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States by not registering with the attorney general. 9 of these individuals have also been charged with money laundering. Details on the people arrested are here. One couple is based in Cambridge, MA.
The FBI says that these spies not only used encryption to protect data on their laptops and USB flash drives, but that they also are suspected of using proprietary Russian-build steganography software to hide data inside images and other files on their computers.
Steganography is the technique of hiding information inside other documents or data, so that it cannot be detected. Combining steganography with cryptography can create systems of communications and data protection that are incredibly difficult to detect and to crack.
For example, imagine encrypting a data file using strong encryption, and then inserting that file as noise in the soundtrack or video stream of a large .wmv video file.