Free Republic

Precision Medicine Initiative and Data Security | whitehouse.gov (05/25/2016 White house decree) https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/25/precision-medicine-initiative-and-data-security?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRFNE1Ua3laRGRqTlRZMyIsInQiOiJ1R1VHbTk3M2o5NmhHSFQrOHNYdXZKakE4OW1tWTJlSUszSThzbnRnRkNlSGZjK2VCREJGWG5xemdyanpIQUdLU3pJSjBHYTdZd2hPUERUdmliaVBMZjA3SjNUYVY2WUt2Z1pTS0xXdTNqcz0ifQ%3D%3D Precision Medicine Initiative and Data Security May 25, 2016 at 3:00 PM ET by Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Lisa O. Monaco Twitter Facebook Email Summary: Today, we are pleased to release the final Data Security Policy Principles and Framework (Security Framework) for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI).     “We’re going to make sure that protecting patient privacy is built into our efforts from day one.”     - President Barack Obama, January 30th 2015 The health care system of the future is taking shape right now, and...

The state’s economic picture took on a completely different look Friday with the Connecticut Labor Department’s latest employment report. Though the state economy added 900 jobs in January, its unemployment rate increased by one-tenth of a percentage point to 5.5 percent. But even more troubling than that were the Labor Department’s revised employment numbers for 2015: Connecticut only added 12,200 jobs last year instead of 26,900 that the state agency had originally reported. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said January’s new employment data and the revised employment numbers for 2015 are “emblematic of our new economic reality.” .... “Connecticut’s economy is...

despite his commitment to Americans' privacy and civil liberties, a balance was needed to allow some intrusion when needed. Obama Wants Access To All Your Data While He Keeps All His Data Totally Hidden

His "Cruz Crew" mobile app is designed to gather detailed information from its users' phones -- tracking their physical movements and mining the names and contact information for friends who might want nothing to do with his campaign. That information and more is then fed into a vast database containing details about nearly every adult in the United States to build psychological profiles that target individual voters with uncanny accuracy. Cruz's sophisticated analytics operation was heralded as key to his victory in Iowa earlier this month -- the first proof, his campaign said, that the system has the potential to...

When presidential candidates turn to data crunchers at Rocket Fuel in Silicon Valley for help finding voters who want tougher immigration enforcement, the firm comes up with a surprisingly specific answer: Chevy truck drivers who like Starbucks. The data modeling from Rocket Fuel shows that this group leans against a path to citizenship for workers in the U.S. illegally. And these particular voters have become surprisingly easy – some argue creepily so – for campaigns to find and approach. So have consumers of frozen vegetables, who are more likely to oppose abortion. As have people curious about diabetes, a group...

Hillary Clinton on Sunday defended instructing an aide to send information to her through a "nonsecure" channel, saying the data she requested was not classified and accusing her presidential rivals of seeking to score political points over a non-issue. The State Department released more than 3,000 of Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of State on Friday. One of the emails has drawn scrutiny because in it, Clinton, who was awaiting a secure fax detailing talking points, instructed an adviser to turn the talking points into "nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure" because the fax wasn't coming...

Recovery comes just as 50th anniversary of “The Original Series” approaches Documents written by “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry have been recovered from 200 floppy disks owned by the late TV writer and producer. DriveSavers and eDiscovery announced Monday that after months of work they were able to pull data from the disks, which Roddenberry used to store information while he was working on “Star Trek.” Mike Cobb, DriveSavers director of engineering, would not reveal what was on the disks, but he did offer some clues. “Lots of documents,” Cobb hinted in a press release. “2016 just happens to be...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Sunday that his Democratic presidential campaign is trying to put the scandal over campaign staffers accessing data belonging to front-runner Hillary Clinton "behind us." He said that it is time to focus on "the real issues" like income inequality and problems plaguing the middle class. “We’re trying to work with the [Democratic National Committee] to put this whole thing behind us," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "There were two breaches, we screwed up on one and the other one we did the right thing. Right now we're in negotiations with the DNC. Frankly,...

Oversight: A federal agency keeps stonewalling congressional efforts to access its internal communications. What's the problem here? If the agency's global warming claim was honestly arrived at, just turn over the documents.

Has political polling reached the end of the line? While some won’t find it as terribly shocking anymore, the polls in Kentucky which had previously been considered among the most reliable missed the Bevin win in the governor’s race by a wide margin. This wasn’t the first time either. The last few cycles down there saw the Bluegrass Poll taking one hit after another and they responded this week with something of an apology. The wide gulf between the results of Tuesday’s election races and the most recent Bluegrass Poll is a source of frustration for the Herald-Leader and its...

New Horizons: River of Data Commences by Paul Gilster on September 8, 2015 Hard to believe it’s been 55 days since the New Horizons flyby. When the event occurred, I was in my daughter’s comfortable beach house working at a table in the living room, a laptop in front of me monitoring numerous feeds. My grandson, sitting to my right with his machine, was tracking social media on the event and downloading images. When I was Buzzy’s age that day, Scott Carpenter’s Mercury flight was in the works, and with all of Gemini and Apollo ahead, I remember the raw...

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/happened-hackers-posted-stolen-ashley-madison-data/ Wired link, can't post excerpt.

The federal personnel agency will announce Thursday that a breach of OPM data revealed the information of 21.5 million federal employees and their families. More than 21 million Social Security numbers were compromised in a breach that affected a database of sensitive information on federal employees held by the Office of Personnel Management, the agency announced Thursday. That number is in addition to the 4.2 million social security numbers that were compromised in another data breach at OPM that was made public in June. The second data breach, which officials have privately linked to China, affected 21.5 million federal employees...

With the rise of flexible working schedules, the freelance economy, and video conferencing, more Americans are getting their jobs done without ever heading into an office, according to new data from the American Time Use Survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among all workers, 23% report spending all or part of their day working from home. That’s up from less than 19% in 2003, the first year for which there’s comparable data.

Facebook's photo-sharing app Moments will not be made available in Europe due to concerns about its use of facial recognition, it has been revealed. The app, which allows users to share mobile-phone photos with friends without posting them publicly, was launched in the US this week. The Irish data regulator said that users must be given a choice about whether they want it, with an opt-in. There is currently no timetable for such a feature, said Facebook. Richard Allen, Facebook's head of policy in Europe said: "We don't have an opt-in mechanism so it is turned off until we develop...

Executive SummaryWe live digital lives—from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history. The personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic arteries of the network. While our daily lives have upgraded to the 21st century, the law hasn’t kept pace. To date, the U.S. Congress hasn’t managed to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to acknowledge that email stored more than 6 months deserves identical protections to email stored...

Khairullozhon Matanov is a 24-year-old former cab driver from Quincy, Massachusetts. The night of the Boston Marathon bombings, he ate dinner with Tamerlan and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev at a kebob restaurant in Somerville. Four days later Matanov saw photographs of his friends listed as suspects in the bombings on the CNN and FBI websites. Later that day he went to the local police. He told them that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers and that they’d had dinner together that week, but he lied about whose idea it was to have dinner, lied about when exactly he had looked at the Tsarnaevs’...

In March, the federal government removed the latest vaccine injury court statistics—more than a year’s worth of data—from one of its publicly reported charts. It was an abrupt departure from the normal practice of updating the figures monthly. Wiping the latest data means the “adjudication” chart on a government website no longer reflects the recent, sharp rise in court victories for plaintiffs who claimed their children were seriously injured or killed by one or more vaccines. Since January of 2014, twice as many victims have won court decisions than the previous eight years combined. In these court decisions, a judge...

It never ceases to amaze me when I come across reports of problems in our society which I had no idea were even issues. One of these cropped up last night while reading the latest blog entry from Washington Post editor Jonathan Capehart, where he discusses a peculiar aspect of demographic data collection. We’re apparently having a tough time accurately counting the number of gay, lesbian and bisexual people in the United States and it’s not because of too many people being in the closet. (Though I’m sure that’s still an issue as well.) No, the problem currently under examination...

Aviation buff John Zimmerman was at a weekly gathering of neighbors Friday night when he noticed something peculiar: a small plane circling a route overhead that didnÂ’t make sense to him. It was dark, so a sightseeing flight didnÂ’t make sense, and when Zimmerman pulled up more information on an aviation phone app he routinely checks, he had immediate concerns. The planeÂ’s flight path, recorded by the website flightradar24.com, would eventually show that it circled downtown Minneapolis, the Mall of America and Southdale Center at low altitude for hours starting at 10:30 p.m., slipping off radar just after 3 a.m....