Shuyuan Mary Ho Metcalfe

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that, as technology continues to proliferate, the United States may have to update safeguards against its surveillance programs.

But Obama, speaking at a news conference in Stockholm with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, once again asserted that despite some cases of overreach there are already checks and balances on the books “designed to avoid a surveillance state.”

“What I can say with confidence is that when it comes to our domestic operation, the concerns that people have back home in the United States of America, that we do not surveil the American people or persons within the United States, that there are a lot of checks and balances in place designed to avoid a surveillance state,” Obama said. “There have been times where the procedures, because these are human endeavors, have not worked the way they should and we had to tighten them up. And I think there are legitimate questions that have been raised about the fact that as technology advances and capabilities grow, it may be that the laws that are currently in place are not sufficient to guard against the dangers of us being able to track so much.”

Click here for more from TalkingPointsMemo.com

The official website for the U.S. Marines was hacked by a group purporting to be the Syrian Electronic Army on Monday, following President Obama’s announcement that he would seek congressional approval for a military strike on Syria, the Independent reported.

The homepage of www.marines.com, the official Marines recruitment site, was changed to a page signed “delivered by the SEA,” according to a screen shot posted by the Independent. The message on the page called for support from the Marines for their “brothers, the Syrian army soldiers.”

The entire message is here from TalkingPointsMemo.com

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

This summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.

More on this from the Washington Post by clicking here

Women are less likely than men to commit corporate fraud, according to a team of sociologists.

A team of researchers from Penn State University say that when women are involved in corporate fraud, they generally have a lesser role to play — and make far less money than men. However, typically women choose not to be part of shady dealings.

Darrell Steffensmeier, professor of sociology and criminology at Penn State said that about three out of four conspiracies to commit corporate fraud were all-male, and there was no report of an all-female conspiracy.

More than half of females involved in corporate fraud made either no money or a “trivial” amount, whereas 26 percent of males earned between $500,000 and $999,000 and 33 percent made more than $1 million.

The team’s report is based on corporate fraud cases from the U.S. Department of Justice between 2002 and 2009.

Steffensmeier believes that female executives may improve ethical standards, or the findings could suggest that women generally take fewer risks and self-censor more in the corporate world due to feeling “they are under greater surveillance” than male colleagues. In addition, women may not have as much access to top corporate positions — and so less opportunity to profiteer.

“Women are less likely to be recruited as co-conspirators in male-orchestrated schemes and less likely to be able to recruit co-offenders should they wish to initiate a corporate fraud,” Steffensmeier said. “The glass ceiling effect for involvement in corporate corruption is likely as great or greater than the ceiling that keeps women from climbing the corporate ladder.”

This article came from SmartPlanet.com and can be found here.

The findings have been reported in the current issue of the American Sociological Review.

Online ratings, internet reviews… these don’t always reveal the best choice, according to a new MIT study. A massive controlled experiment of web users found that such ratings are highly susceptible to irrational “herd behavior” — and that the herd can be manipulated. ScienceNOW reports.

Sometimes the crowd really is wiser than you, especially when it comes to the average of many people’s choices. But what if you’re judging something like quality?

According to one theory, the wisdom of the crowd still holds — measuring the aggregate of people’s opinions produces a stable, reliable value. Skeptics, however, argue that people’s opinions are easily swayed by those of others…

To test which hypothesis is true, you would need to manipulate huge numbers of people, exposing them to false information and determining how it affects their opinions.

A team led by MIT’s Sinan Aral conducted an experiment using a website that aggregates news stories, where users make comments and vote others up or down — like Reddit though he won’t say which exactly. He wanted to know how much the crowd influences the individual, and whether it can be controlled from outside.

Click here for more from SmartPlanet.com

When our understanding of cause-and-effect is contradicted by what we actually see, sometimes our understanding overrules our perception.

Research published online in Psychological Science on June 26 found people’s causal expectations influenced their perception of the ordering of events in time.

“It appears that when people hold strong convictions about the relationships between objects or events, then inference takes precedence over perception,” Christos Bechlivanidis of the University College London, the lead author of the study, told PsyPost.

For their study, Bechlivanidis and Lagnado created a software-based game that contained various 2-D objects that could be activated by the user. The objects each behaved in predefined ways, which the user had to figure out through trial and error. They learned, for instance, that the collision of a green square caused a red rectangle to transform into a star.

Once the user learned how the various objects interacted, they watched one of two recorded video clips of the game. One clip violated the expected causal order of events, while the other did not. Those who watched the former clip tended to perceive events in the wrong temporal order.

“Despite having clearly witnessed the events happening at a very close distance to each other, our participants reported an order that matched not what they saw but what they thought it would be normal to see, i.e. they reported the presumed cause occurring before its associated effect,” Bechlivanidis said.

More detail from RawStory.com @

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/14/study-on-the-psychology-of-causality-finds-inference-can-take-precedence-over-perception/

Well, not really a debate, but they each respond to the same questions…  Excellent discussion of the underlying issues at play.

From TalkingPointsMemo.com: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/06/obama-and-snowden-debate-nsa-surveillance-programs.php?ref=fpb

To ensure public safety, there may be a requirement for some level of governmental surveillance.  The question is: how can we ensure public safety through surveillance while still maintaining individual privacy?  This is one of the more important issues of the day, and requires a socio-technical level of research that expands the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines.

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting and historic look at public surveillance in the US.

From ProPublica.org: http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeline

The Global Islamic Media Front Technical Center is a group of mysterious programmers with links to Al Qaeda who claim to be trying to arm jihadists with digital weaponry. These high tech terrorists have released a series of plugins that purportedly encrypt instant messages to help mujahideen avoid surveillance while communicating online. However, it’s unclear if this Jihadi cryptography software is effective. In fact, experts said these programs may do would-be terrorists more harm than good by leaving behind traceable, digital breadcrumbs and even possibly exposing them to dangerous trojan horse downloads planted by law enforcement.

In February, the “Global Islamic Media Front Technical Center” released a program called “Asrar al-Dardashah,” or “Chat Secret.” It was billed as “the first Islamic program for encrypted instant messaging.”

More from TalkingPointsMemo,com at http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/05/the-jihadi-geek-squad.php?ref=fpblg

Mozilla, maker of Firefox, the world’s most popular web browser, has a problem. Gamma International Ltd. is passing off a product that looks and acts like Firefox, but which is really a cleverly written spyware application. Gamma’s product, FinFisher, is capable of keylogging, recording Skype calls, and even converting webcams and cell phones into surveillance devices. The extent to how far such products have disseminated is unclear, but lately they’ve gone so far as to identifying their own processes as “Firefox.exe,” including a version number, and including trademark claims.

Such abusive exploitation of Firefox’s open source web browser has alarmed the company. “We are sending Gamma, The FinFisher parent company, a cease and desist letter demanding that these practices be stopped immediately,” said Mozilla executive Alex Fowler.

More from JDJournal @ http://www.jdjournal.com/2013/05/01/mozilla-fights-against-spyware-company-and-its-exploits/