Yearly Archives: 2017

Now in Effect: California Law Bans Participation in a Federal Registry Based on Religion or Ethnicity

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Oct. 18, 2017) – On Sunday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that prohibits the state from cooperating with any federal efforts to create a database compiling personal information relating to a person’s religious beliefs, practices, or affiliations.The new law takes a step toward nullifying any attempts to create such…

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Will Trump Make a Deal with the CIA on JFK Records?

"The JFK Records Act, enacted in 1992 in response to public outrage over continued official secrecy in the JFK assassination, required the CIA and other federal agencies to release all their records relating to the JFK assassination. Someone, however, slipped a provision into the law entitling the CIA (and other federal agencies) to wait another 25 years to release their records. Taking advantage of that provision, the CIA withheld tens of thousands of pages of records, no doubt thinking that another 25 years was a long time away."

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Millions of high-security crypto keys crippled by newly discovered flaw

"A crippling flaw in a widely used code library has fatally undermined the security of millions of encryption keys used in some of the highest-stakes settings, including national identity cards, software- and application-signing, and trusted platform modules protecting government and corporate computers."

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Texas and California: Two State Approaches to Federal Immigration Enforcement

Last week, California Gov. Jerry Brown put his signature on a bill to withdraw state resources from the enforcement of most federal immigration laws. While some people have argued this will open the door for immigrants to enter the U.S. through California and then spread into other states, the approach Texas took can minimize this…

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Severe flaw in WPA2 protocol leaves Wi-Fi traffic open to eavesdropping

"It affects the core WPA2 protocol itself and is effective against devices running the Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, and OpenBSD operating systems, as well as MediaTek Linksys, and other types of devices. The site warned attackers can exploit it to decrypt a wealth of sensitive data that's normally encrypted by the nearly ubiquitous Wi-Fi encryption protocol."

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