Displaying items by tag: Department of Homeland Security

The US Government has gone and done something that they have been trying to claim they would never do. They have put forward an Executive Order that outlines their ability to control communications in the event of an “emergency”. The new order has the interesting title of “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions”. You could say that the new Executive Order does assign functions to different offices in the government and also assigns duties to the rest of the country including “the private and nonprofit sectors, and the public”. If you read the new EO in its entirety (and we highly recommend you do) you will see that this is a precursor to the enablement of the US Government to require surveillance and control measures all across the internet. So it looks like the big content holders have managed to get their way all in the name of “National Security”.

Yesterday we wrote an article where we described how a military drone could be hacked through the use of GPS spoofing. This morning we received an email from one of the people involved in the actual event with some clarifications. First despite original reports (and some addition information we were given) the drone that was used for the demonstration was not a military class drone. It was one that the University of Texas purchased. It is still fairly sophisticated and is the same kind used by law enforcement. The team did this to point out serious issues with commercial drones before there is a rewrite of the FAA rules governing this new class of vehicles. You can check out the original story about for more information on the hack.

**********UPDATE 7/1/2012 - We have heard from Both Vanguard Defense Industries and Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas. The Drone in quesstion was NOT purchased from Vanguard. The University of Texas declined to state how they did purchase it from, but commented that the vulnerability exists in any drone that uses Civil GPS systems. ******************

After working so very hard (and unsuccessfully) to convince everyone that CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) would not be like SOPA and that it is all good for everyone, it seems that the lawmakers involved in it just could not resist adding in a special little touch. There is an amendment to CISPA that would grant the Department of Homeland Security some brand new powers over all that data.