national security policy
CVE Program Almost Unfunded
Mitre’s CVE’s program—which provides common naming and other informational resources about cybersecurity vulnerabilities—was about to be cancelled, as the US Department of Homeland Security failed to renew the contact. It was funded ...
Arguing Against CALEA
At a Congressional hearing earlier this week, Matt Blaze made the point that CALEA, the 1994 law that forces telecoms to make phone calls wiretappable, is outdated in today’s threat environment and ...
DIRNSA Fired
In “Secrets and Lies” (2000), I wrote: It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. It’s something a bunch of us were saying at the ...
DOGE as a National Cyberattack
In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, ...
The Scale of Geoblocking by Nation
Interesting analysis: We introduce and explore a little-known threat to digital equality and freedomwebsites geoblocking users in response to political risks from sanctions. U.S. policy prioritizes internet freedom and access to information ...
NIST Releases First Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms
From the Federal Register: After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was ...

House Passes Privacy-Preserving Bill, but Biden Blasts it
Are you a FANFSA fan? The White House isn’t. It says the bill “threatens national security.” ...
Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened
Last week, the Internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s ...
OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today
There’s a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents. Here’s CNBC. Here’s Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but there’s still a lot ...
Spying through Push Notifications
When you get a push notification on your Apple or Google phone, those notifications go through Apple and Google servers. Which means that those companies can spy on them—either for their own ...