Tag Archives: tech

Science Says FitBit Is a Joke

by OlivaPohlman Posted on February 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Recently, bands in assorted colors began appearing on the wrists of everyone from young athletes to old lawyers. FitBits, FueldBands, and other wearable fitness trackers promised to enhance the health of the wearer by accurately monitoring every step, calorie, and sleep pattern. But, according to a new study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the apps on your smartphone do the job just as well, or even better—at least in terms of measuring your steps and your calories.

“There is strong evidence that higher levels of physical activity are associated with weight loss,” says Mitesh Patel, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of medicine and health care management at the University of Pennsylvania. “For most adults that want to track their general activity, smartphones will meet their needs.”

Penn researchers compared 10 of the top-selling smartphone fitness applications and pedometers with wearable devices, tracking 14 healthy adults as they walked on the treadmill.

According to the results, the smartphones were just as accurate and consistent as wearable devices. Wearable devices had as much as a 22 percent variation in the range of step counts compared to the observed number of steps taken. There was only a 6 percent difference in the range of the step counts from smartphones in comparison to observable steps. The number of steps is important to accurately estimate the number of calories burned, which the apps and devices track by detecting the shifting position of your body.

If smartphones are just as accurate, why spend $100 or more on a fancy tracker bracelet?

“Smartphones may be harder to carry with more vigorous activity such as running or biking, and that might be one reason an individual chooses to use a wearable device,” explains Patel, pointing to an obvious objection for people who might reject smartphones as fitness trackers.

But fitness trackers still might not be the right choice for heavy exercisers. According to Live Science, a site that tracks scientific news, when fitness trackers first came out, workout enthusiasts were disappointed in the basic functions like step counters. “A lot of people stopped using fitness trackers altogether because it wasn’t telling much more then they already knew,” Wes Henderek, a market researcher at NPD Group told Live Science. JAMA also reported that only about 1 to 2 percent of adults own wearable devices, and one-third completely stop using the devices after only six months.

More than 65 percent of American adults own smartphones and generally carry them throughout the day. For those hoping to get a handle on how active they were during the day, smartphone applications that track food consumption, activity, sleep, and other health factors may be more convenient and less expensive.

“While smartphones and wearable devices can help track health behaviors, they may not alone drive behavior change,” says Patel. The key, he says, is to figure out how to engage individuals so they use technology to lead them to changing unhealthy behavior, especially those that most in need of making the change.

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Science Says FitBit Is a Joke

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How to Turn Off Tynt, the Most Annoying Thing on the Internet

by DanielaKenneall Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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You know how when you copy text from certain websites, it pastes with a bunch of junk you didn’t mean to copy? Like promotional crap for the website?

Business Insider adds “Read more:” and the URL:

Daily Mail adds that and Twitter and Facebook links:

This is a super annoying service, designed to boost SEO, provided by a company called Tynt.

Screenshot: http://www.tynt.com

Places pay for this service. A place I used to work (briefly) paid for this service. It was super annoying! One day a colleague showed me a little known secret to turn it off and made my life immeasurably better.
I now share this little nugget with you:

Step 1) Open a browser.

Step 2) Type in the URL of an offending site.

Step 3) add ?disableTracer=on to the end of the URL. (example: http://www.businessinsider.com?disableTracer=on)

Step 4) Press Enter.

Step 5) You’re done!

You’ll have to do this for every browser you use and every site, but trust me, if you visit one of these sites often, it’s worth it.

UPDATE: An even easier way to turn this off for all websites is to go here, and just click “opt out.” You’ll still have to do it in each browser but you won’t have to do it for every site. (Thanks to indispensable friend Stefan Becket for the tip.)

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How to Turn Off Tynt, the Most Annoying Thing on the Internet

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Google Can Do Well With Its New Communications Products, But Only If It Acts Like a Genuine Startup

by MarylouMuo Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Fung tells us that Google is making a “serious play in the communications space,” featuring an aggressive strategy that includes rollouts of new products like ultra-fast internet service, new smartphones, and even wireless service:

Google’s investments in telecom pit the company against some of the largest voice and Internet providers around. But Google has a key advantage: It doesn’t make its money from Internet service subscribers. That’s why it will be able to drive down prices for consumers, to adopt business practices that would be unsustainable for other carriers and to influence Washington policy debates in surprising ways.

“This is a multilayered strategy,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president for the consumer group Public Knowledge. “Even if Google only makes 10 percent profit margin on its fiber and wireless offerings, that’s enough for it to be successful and to achieve the desired result of driving more use of its applications.”

This isn’t quite right. Or maybe I should say it’s only half right. It’s true that these new services will probably help Google increase sales of its core products, thus offsetting low margins in the communications space. But that’s not the real reason Google can afford to do this. The real reason is that Google is a new entrant, which means that entering these new businesses doesn’t force it to cannibalize any of its current businesses.

This is the key problem that kills old companies when new technology hits the street. Every cheap new widget they sell means one less expensive old widget they sell, and very few companies have the stones to just accept reality and really dive into the new widgets regardless. So they sell the new widgets, but only half-heartedly. They defeature them. They limit their sales channels. They don’t spend enough on marketing. Meanwhile, a startup with no such issues eats their lunch because their new widgets are their main business and they just sell the hell out of them.

That’s Google’s big advantage in this space. The fact that entering the telecom business might—might!—boost sales of other Google products is great, but it’s just a bonus, and not one they should be thinking too hard about. In fact, if their new products are tailored too tightly as mere helpers for their old product lines, they could end up in the same position as all those old dinosaur companies that couldn’t quite put their hearts into new tech. That road is well trod, and it’s usually a pretty grim one.

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Google Can Do Well With Its New Communications Products, But Only If It Acts Like a Genuine Startup

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FAA to Football Fans: Super Bowl Is a No-Drone Zone

by LeannaFraley Posted on January 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a 15-second warning to football fans eager to sneak a bird’s-eye look at this Sunday’s Super Bowl: Leave your drones at home.

The No Drone Zone campaign is part of the FAA’s ongoing efforts to regulate small drones flying over crowded stadiums. The Washington Post reported last November that the aviation agency was investigating a rash of incidents involving drones hovering over major sporting events. A month earlier, the agency extended its ban on airplane flights over large open-air stadiums to include unmanned and remote controlled aircraft.

Drones over sporting events have occasionally raised alarms. In August, a man was detained after he flew a drone that flew over a preseason NFL game between the Carolina Panthers and Kansas City Chiefs. A month later, police questioned a University of Texas student who was flying a drone around Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. Last October, a drone carrying an Albanian flag during a soccer match between Serbia and Albania sparked a riot in Belgrade.

Earlier this month, the FAA issued an advisory reiterating the civil and criminal penalties for pilots who drone the Super Bowl. (Also banned in the airspace above the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona: gliders, parachutes, hang gliders, balloons, crop dusters, model aircraft, and model rockets.) The Goodyear blimp will be allowed.

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FAA to Football Fans: Super Bowl Is a No-Drone Zone

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Does the Internet Really Make Dumb People Dumber?

by DixieHarden Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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I don’t normally get to hear what Bill Gates thinks of one of my ideas, but today’s the exception. Because Ezra Klein asked him:

Ezra Klein: ….Kevin Drum, who writes for Mother Jones, has a line I’ve always thought was interesting, which is that the internet makes dumb people dumber, and smart people smarter. Do you worry about the possibility that the vast resources the internet gives the motivated, including online education, will give rise o a big increase in, for lack of a better tterm, cognitive or knowledge inequality that leads to further rises in global inequality?

Bill Gates: Well, you always have the challenge that when you create a tool to make activity X easier, like the internet makes it easier to find out facts or to learn new things, that there are some outliers who use that thing extremely well. It’s way easier to be polymathic today than it was in the past because your access to materials and your ability if you ever get stuck to find people that you can engage with is so strong.

But to say that there’s actually some negative side, that there actually will be people that are dumber, I disagree with that. I mean, I’m as upset as anyone at the wrong stuff about vaccination that’s out there on the internet that actually confuses some small number of people. There’s a communications challenge to get past.

But look at IQ test capability over time. Or even take a TV show today and how complex it is — that’s responding to the marketplace. You take Breaking Bad versus, I don’t know, Leave it to Beaver, or Combat!, or The Wild, Wild West. You know, yeah, take Combat! because that was sort of pushing the edge of should kids be allowed to watch it.

The interest and complexity really does say that, broadly, these tools have meant that market-driven people are turning out more complex things. Now, you can say, “Why hasn’t that mapped to more sophistication in politics or something like that?” That’s very complicated. But I don’t see a counter trend where there’s some group of people who are less curious or less informed because of the internet.

I’m sure that was said when the printing press came along and people saw romance novels and thought people would stay indoors and read all the time. But I just don’t see there being a big negative to the empowerment.

Unsurprisingly, Gates agrees that the internet can make smart people smarter. By analogy, the printing press also made smart people smarter because it gave them cheap, easy access to far more information. Since they were capable of processing the information, they were effectively smarter than they used to be.

It’s equally unsurprisingly that he disagrees about the internet making dumb people dumber. It’s a pretty anti-tech opinion, after all, and that’s not the business Bill Gates is in. But I think his answer actually belies his disagreement, since he immediately acknowledges an example of precisely this phenomenon: the anti-vax movement, something that happens to be close to his heart. Unfortunately, to call this merely a “communications challenge” discounts the problem. Sure, it’s a communications challenge, but that’s the whole point. The internet is all about communication, and it does two things in this case. First, it empower the anti-vax nutballs, giving them a far more powerful medium for spreading their nonsense. On the flip side, it makes a lot more people vulnerable to bad information. If you lack the context to evaluate arguments about vaccination, the internet is much more likely to make you dumber about vaccinating your kids than any previous medium in history.

The rest of Gates’ argument doesn’t really hold water either. Sure, IQ scores have been rising. But they’ve been rising for a long time. This long predates the internet and has nothing to do with it. As for TV shows, he picked the wrong example. It’s true that Breaking Bad is far more sophisticated than Leave it to Beaver, but Breaking Bad was always a niche show, averaging 1-2 million viewers for nearly its entire run. Instead, you should compare Leave it to Beaver with, say, The Big Bang Theory, which gets 10-20 million viewers per episode. Is Big Bang the more sophisticated show? Maybe. But if so, it’s not by much.

In any case, the heart of Gates’ response is this: “I don’t see a counter trend where there’s some group of people who are less curious or less informed because of the internet.” I won’t pretend that I have ironclad evidence one way or the other, but I wouldn’t dismiss the problem so blithely. I’m not trying to make a broad claim that the internet is making us generally stupider or anything like that. But it’s a far more powerful medium for spreading conspiracy theories and other assorted crap than anything we’ve had before. If you lack the background and context to evaluate information about a particular subject, you’re highly likely to be misinformed if you do a simple Google search and just start reading whatever comes up first. And that describes an awful lot of people.

Obviously this has been a problem for as long humans have been able to communicate. The anti-fluoridation nutballs did just fine with only dead-tree technology. Still, I think the internet makes this a more widespread problem, simply because it’s a more widespread medium, and it’s one that’s especially difficult to navigate wisely. Hopefully that will change in the future, but for now it is what it is. It doesn’t have to make dumb people dumber, but in practice, I think it very often does.

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Does the Internet Really Make Dumb People Dumber?

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

by Mitchel123 Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Via James Pethokoukis, here’s a chart from a new CBO report on federal policies and innovation. Needless to say, you can’t read too much into it. It shows the growth since 1963 of total factor productivity (roughly speaking, the share of productivity growth due to technology improvements), and there are lots of possible reasons that TFP hasn’t changed much over the past five decades. At a minimum, though, the fact that patent activity has skyrocketed since 1983 with no associated growth in TFP suggests, as the CBO report says dryly, “that the large increase in patenting activity since 1983 may have made little contribution to innovation.”

The CBO report identifies several possible innovation-killing aspects of the US patent system, among them a “proliferation of low-quality patents”; increased patent litigation; and the growth of patent trolls who impose a substantial burden on startup firms. The report also challenges the value of software patents:

The contribution of patents to innovation in software or business methods is often questioned because the costs of developing such new products and processes may be modest. One possible change to patent law that could reduce the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit patent protections for inventions that were relatively inexpensive to develop. For example, patents on software and business methods could expire sooner than is the case today (which, with renewals, is after 20 years), reducing the incentive to obtain those patents. Another change that could address patent quality, the processing burden on the USPTO, and the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit the ability to obtain a patent on certain inventions.

Personally, I’d be in favor of limiting software and business method patents to a term of zero years. But if that’s not feasible, even a reduction to, say, five years or so, would be helpful. In the software industry, that’s an eternity.

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

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4 Stupid Conservative Arguments Against Net Neutrality, Debunked

by RevaChavarria Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas set off a firestorm of ridicule when he took to Twitter in an attempt to mock the concept of net neutrality:

The comparison, so stupid on so many levels that it isn’t worth debunking, is not just an isolated example of partisan idiocy. In recent weeks, Republican operatives have trotted out a steaming heap of similar malarkey in an effort to ward off a popular revolt against the cable industry, which wants to charge big companies such as Google or Netflix for faster internet service while slowing it down for the rest of us. Here are four other ludicrous conservative arguments for why the Federal Communications Commission shouldn’t prevent this from happening:

1. You’ll pay more taxes!

The reality: To prevent broadband companies from discriminating against certain types of internet traffic, President Obama’s wants the FCC to regulate them as a public utilities. This is something it already does with telecommunications providers. While it’s true that the Communications Act subjects telecoms to a 16 percent service fee—which helps provide phone service to rural communities—this doesn’t mean broadband providers would automatically have to pay a similar tax.

2) Regulating the internet will stifle innovation and job creation.

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Post by Speaker John Boehner.

The reality: The internet we know and love is already built on the concept of net neutrality. Obama’s proposed “regulation” would simply maintain the status quo by preventing monopolistic broadband providers from charging content providers tiered rates for different speeds of internet service. Far from stifling innovation, net neutrality encourages it by allowing startups to compete on the same footing as giants like Google and Facebook. That’s why it has overwhelming support among Silicon Valley’s “job creators.”

3) Letting big companies hog bandwidth will encourage cable companies to create more bandwidth

The reality: America ranks 31st in the world (behind Estonia) in its average download speeds. But that’s not because we’re preventing Comcast from cutting deals. Quite the opposite: Deregulation of the telecommunications industry has allowed Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, and AT&T to divide up markets and put themselves in positions where they face no competition.

4) It’s all a secret plot to hype the risks of global warming

This claim made by Andy Kessler in a 2006 Weekly Standard story has been making the rounds recently on conservative blogs:

The answer is not regulations promoting net neutrality. You can already smell the mandates and the loopholes once Congress gets involved. Think special, high-speed priority for campaign commercials or educational videos about global warming. Or roadblocks—like requiring emergency 911 service—to try to kill off free Internet telephone service such as Skype.

The reality: Regulating broadband providers as utilities does not give the FCC more authority to tell them how to treat specific types of content. In fact, preventing discrimination against certain types of content by ISPs is the whole point. That’s why net neutrality is popular with everyone from John Oliver to porn stars.

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4 Stupid Conservative Arguments Against Net Neutrality, Debunked

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No, the Culture Wars Haven’t Heated Up. It Just Seems Like They Have.

by Ilaria3pl Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Andrew Sullivan cogitates today on the seemingly endless outpouring of outrage over relatively small lapses in decent behavior:

I wonder also if our digital life hasn’t made all this far worse. When you sit in a room with a laptop and write about other people and their flaws, and you don’t have to look them in the eyes, you lose all incentive for manners.

You want to make a point. You may be full to the brim with righteous indignation or shock or anger. It is only human nature to flame at abstractions, just as the awkwardness of physical interaction is one of the few things constraining our rhetorical excess. When you combine this easy anonymity with the mass impulses of a Twitterstorm, and you can see why manners have evaporated and civil conversations turned into culture war.

I’m as guilty of this as many….

Why yes! Yes you are, Andrew.

On a more serious note, I actually disagree with his diagnosis of the problem, which has become so common as to be nearly conventional wisdom these days. Here’s why: I have not, personally, ever noticed that human beings tend to rein in their worst impulses when they’re face to face with other human beings. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Most often, they don’t. Arguments with real people end up with red faces and lots of shouting constantly. I just flatly don’t believe that the real problem with internet discourse is the fact that you’re not usually directly addressing the object of your scorn.1

So what is the problem? I think it’s mostly one of visibility. In the past, the kinds of lapses that provoke internet pile-ons mostly stayed local. There just wasn’t a mechanism for the wider world to find out about them, so most of us never even heard about them. It became a big deal within the confines of a town or a university campus or whatnot, but that was it.

Occasionally, these things broke out, and the wider world did find out about them. But even then, there was a limit to how the world could respond. You could organize a protest, but that’s a lot of work. You could go to a city council meeting and complain. You could write a letter to the editor. But given the limitations of technology, it was fairly rare for something to break out and become a true feeding frenzy.

Needless to say, that’s no longer the case. In fact, we have just the opposite problem: things can become feeding frenzies even if no one really wants them to be. That’s because they can go viral with no central organization at all. Each individual who tweets or blogs or Facebooks their outrage thinks of this as a purely personal response. Just a quick way to kill a few idle minutes. But put them all together, and you have tens of thousands of people simultaneously responding in a way that seems like a huge pile-on. And that in turn triggers the more mainstream media to cover these things as if they were genuinely big deals.

The funny thing is that in a lot of cases, they aren’t. If, say, 10,000 people are outraged over Shirtgate, that’s nothing. Seriously. Given the ubiquity of modern social media, 10,000 people getting mad about something is actually a sign that almost nobody cares.

The problem is that our lizard brains haven’t caught up to this. We still think that 10,000 outraged people is a lot, and 30 or 40 years ago it would have been. What’s more, it almost certainly would have represented a far greater number of people who actually cared. Today, though, it’s so easy to express outrage that 10,000 people is a pretty small number—and most likely represents nearly everyone who actually gives a damn.

We need to recalibrate our cultural baselines for the social media era. People can respond so quickly and easily to minor events that the resulting feeding frenzies can seem far more important than anyone ever intended them to be. A snarky/nasty tweet, after all, is the work of a few seconds. A few thousand of them represent a grand total of a few hours of work. The end result may seem like an unbelievable avalanche of contempt and derision to the target of the attack, but in real terms, it represents virtually nothing.

The culture wars are not nastier because people on the internet don’t have to face their adversaries. They’re nastier because even minor blowups seem huge. But that’s just Econ 101. When the cost of expressing outrage goes down, the amount of outrage expressed goes up. That doesn’t mean there’s more outrage. It just means outrage is a lot more visible than it used to be.

1I’ll concede that this is potentially a problem with a very specific subset of professional troll. Even there, however, I’d note that the real world has plenty of rough equivalents, from Code Pink to the Westboro Baptist Church lunatics.

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No, the Culture Wars Haven’t Heated Up. It Just Seems Like They Have.

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The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes

by Lilla22Bjygef Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. “Here is my DNA profile.” He smiled. “I have nothing to hide.” I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company’s headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the time it takes to watch a movie.

Schueren grabbed a cotton swab and dropped it into a plastic cartridge. That’s what, say, a police officer would use to wipe the inside of your cheek to collect a DNA sample after an arrest, he explained. Other bits of material with traces of DNA on them, like cigarette butts or fabric, could work too. He inserted the cartridge into the machine and pressed a green button on its touch screen: “It’s that simple.” Ninety minutes later, the RapidHIT 200 would generate a DNA profile, check it against a database, and report on whether it found a match.

A scanner, quickly: The RapidHIT 200 can generate a DNA profile in about 90 minutes. IntegenX

The RapidHIT represents a major technological leap—testing a DNA sample in a forensics lab normally takes at least two days. This has government agencies very excited. The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Justice Department funded the initial research for “rapid DNA” technology, and after just a year on the market, the $250,000 RapidHIT is already being used in a few states, as well as China, Russia, Australia, and countries in Africa and Europe.

“We’re not always aware of how it’s being used,” Schueren said. “All we can say is that it’s used to give an accurate identification of an individual.” Civil liberties advocates worry that rapid DNA will spur new efforts by the FBI and police to collect ordinary citizens’ genetic code.

The US government will soon test the machine in refugee camps in Turkey and possibly Thailand on families seeking asylum in the United States, according to Chris Miles, manager of the Department of Homeland Security’s biometrics program. “We have all these families that claim they are related, but we don’t have any way to verify that,” he says. Miles says that rapid DNA testing will be voluntary, though refusing a test could cause an asylum application to be rejected.

Miles also says that federal immigration officials are interested in using rapid DNA to curb trafficking by ensuring that children entering the country are related to the adults with them. Jeff Heimburger, the vice president of marketing at IntegenX, says the government has also inquired about using rapid DNA to screen green-card applicants. (An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said he was not aware that the agency was pursuing the technology.)

Meanwhile, police have started using rapid DNA in Arizona, Florida, and South Carolina. In August, sheriffs in Columbia, South Carolina, used a RapidHIT to nab an attempted murder suspect. The machine’s speed provides a major “investigative lead,” said Vince Figarelli, superintendent of the Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab, which is using a RapidHIT to compare DNA evidence from property crimes against the state’s database of 300,000 samples. Heimburger notes that the system can also prevent false arrests and wrongful convictions: “There is great value in finding out that somebody is not a suspect.”

But the technology is not a silver bullet for DNA evidence. The IntegenX executives brought up rape kits so often that it sounded like their product could make a serious dent in the backlog of half a million untested kits. Yet when I pressed Schueren on this, he conceded that the RapidHIT is not actually capable of processing rape kits since it can’t discern individual DNA in commingled bodily fluids.

Despite the new technology’s crime-solving potential, privacy advocates are wary of its spread. If rapid-DNA machines can be used in a refugee camp, “they can certainly be used in the back of a squad car,” says Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I could see that happening in the future as the prices of these machines go down.”

Lynch is particularly concerned that law enforcement agencies will use the devices to scoop up and store ever more DNA profiles. Every state already has a forensic DNA database, and while these systems were initially set up to track convicted violent offenders, their collection thresholds have steadily broadened. Today, at least 28 include data from anyone arrested for certain felonies, even if they are not convicted; some store the DNA of people who have committed misdemeanors as well. The FBI’s National DNA Index System has more than 11 million profiles of offenders plus 2 million people who have been arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime.

For its part, Homeland Security will not hang onto refugees’ DNA records, insists Miles. (“They aren’t criminals,” he pointed out.) However, undocumented immigrants in custody may be required to provide DNA samples, which are put in the FBI’s database. Homeland Security documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation say there may even be a legal case for “mandating collection of DNA” from anyone granted legal status under a future immigration amnesty. (The documents also state that intelligence agencies and the military are interested in using rapid DNA to identify sex, race, and other factors the machines currently do not reveal.)

The FBI is the only federal agency allowed to keep a national DNA database. Currently, police must use a lab to upload genetic profiles to it. But that could change. The FBI’s website says it is eager to see rapid DNA in wide use and that it supports the “legislative changes necessary” to make that happen. IntegenX’s Heimburger says the FBI is almost finished working with members of Congress on a bill that would give “tens of thousands” of police stations rapid DNA machines that could search the FBI’s system and add arrestees’ profiles to it. (The RapitHIT is already designed to do this.) IntegenX has spent $70,000 lobbying the FBI, DHS, and Congress over the last two years.

The FBI declined to comment, and Heimburger wouldn’t say which lawmakers might sponsor the bill. But some have already given rapid DNA their blessing. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a former prosecutor who represents the district where IntegenX is based, says he’d like to see the technology “put to use quickly to help law enforcement”—while protecting civil liberties. In March, he and seven other Democratic members of Congress, including progressive stalwart Rep. Barbara Lee of California, urged the FBI to assess rapid DNA’s “viability for broad deployment” in police departments across the country.

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The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes

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Elizabeth Warren to Banks: Prove You Can Protect Customer Data From Hackers

by Gustavo Stanfield Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

Elizabeth Warren is off to a running start in her new leadership role with the Senate Democratic caucus. She called out Walmart for its terrible labor practices. She wrote an op-ed this week warning the president against appointing Wall Street insiders to the Federal Reserve. And Tuesday morning, she called on financial institutions to prove that they can protect customer data from cybercriminals.

Over the past year, cyber attackers have stolen roughly 500 million records from financial institutions, according to federal law enforcement officials. In a joint letter also signed by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Warren asked 16 firms—including Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—for detailed information about cyber attacks they experienced over the past year and how they plan to prevent future breaches.

“The increasing number of cyberattacks and data breaches is unprecedented and poses a clear and present danger to our nation’s economic security,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter. “Each successive cyberattack and data breach not only results in hefty costs and liabilities for businesses, but exposes consumers to identity theft and other fraud, as well as a host of other cyber-crimes.”

Warren and Cummings requested the firms provide information on the number of customers that may have been affected by breaches, data security measures the companies have taken in response, the value of the fraudulent transactions connected with the cyber attacks, and who is suspected to have carried them out. The letters also request that IT security officers at each firm brief the lawmakers on how they are protecting their data from cybervillains.

The lawmakers hope to use the information the firms provide to inform new federal cybersecurity legislation. Current cybersecurity law is unclear about when companies are required to notify the government about a data hack. Warren has previously called on Congress to give the Federal Trade Commission more power to regulate data breaches.

The American financial sector is one of the most targeted in the world, according to the FBI and Secret Service officials. The hackers who stole data from JPMorgan Chase earlier this year—compromising information from 76 million households—also targeted 13 other financial institutions, Bloomberg reported last month.

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Elizabeth Warren to Banks: Prove You Can Protect Customer Data From Hackers

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