Reference Desk

Ref Desk: Keeping Your Data While Border Crossing

February 15, 2017 by robmcclel Leave a Comment

Since the subject of international border crossing shenanigans for travelers has come up in the news, I found this tidbit on Boingboing.com:

How to legally cross a US (or other) border without surrendering your data and passwords

The combination of 2014’s Supreme Court decision not to hear Cotterman (where the 9th Circuit held that the data on your devices was subject to suspicionless border-searches, and suggested that you simply not bring any data you don’t want stored and shared by US government agencies with you when you cross the border) and Trump’s announcement that people entering the USA will be required to give border officers their social media passwords means that a wealth of sensitive data on our devices and in the cloud is now liable to search and retention when we cross into the USA.

On Wired, Andy Greenberg assembles some best-guess advice on the legal and technical strategies you can deploy to maintain the privacy of your sensitive data, based on techniques that security-conscious travelers have arrived at for crossing into authoritarian countries like China and Russia.

The most obvious step is to not carry your data across the border with you in the first place: get a second laptop and phone, load them with a minimal data-set, log out of any services you won’t need on your trip and don’t bring the passwords for them (or a password locker that accesses them) with you, delete all logs of cloud-based chat services. I use POP mail, which means that I don’t keep any mail on a server or in a cloud, so I could leave all my mail archives at home, inaccessible to me and everyone else while I’m outside of the USA or at the border.

Call your lawyer (or a trusted friend with your lawyer’s number) before you cross the border, then call them again when you’re released; if they don’t hear from you, they can take steps to ensure that you have crossed successfully, or send help if you need it.

One thing Greenberg misses is the necessity of completing a US Customs and Immigration Service Form G-28 before you cross the border. This form authorizes an attorney to visit you if you are detained at the border, but it has to be completed and signed in advance of your crossing. It also should be printed on green paper. The current version of the form expires in 2018, so you can complete it now, file it with your attorney or friend, and leave it until next year.

Remove any fingerprint-based authentication before you cross and replace them with PINs. Greenberg’s experts recommend using very strong passwords/PINs to lock your devices. I plan on a different strategy: before my next crossing, I’ll change all of these passwords/PINs to 0000 or aaaaaaaa, so that I can easily convey them to US border officials and they can quickly verify that I have no sensitive data on any of my devices. Once I have successfully crossed, I’ll change these authentication tokens back to strong versions.

Trusting Your News Feed

January 31, 2017 by robmcclel Leave a Comment

10 Investigative Reporting Outlets to Follow

January 13, 2017

This post first appeared on BillMoyers.com.

We’ve just started a new series highlighting some of the best, in-depth investigative journalism that is uncovering real news, revealing wrongdoing and fomenting change. As a compendium, here are 10 investigative reporting outlets that are worth following if they’re not already on your radar.

1. ProPublica — Founded 10 years ago by a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica is a nonprofit investigative news site based in New York City. In 2010 ProPublica was the first online publication to win a Pulitzer Prize and has earned two more since, as well as a long list of other prestigious awards.

2. The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) — An early player in the nonprofit investigative space, CPI has been around for close to 30 years. Its reporters have won dozens of journalism awards, including a Pulitzer in 2014, for its investigations of money in politics, national security, health care reform, business and the environment.

3. The Center For Investigative Reporting (CIR) — Founded 40 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area, CIR is a nonprofit that has partnered for years with other outlets to reach a wide audience in print, on television, on radio and online. It collaborates with PRX Radio to produce Reveal, the investigative radio program and podcast. The Reveal website is now home to all of CIRs investigative content.

4. Frontline — Launched more than 30 years ago, Frontline is television’s most consistent and respected investigative documentary program. Its documentaries are broadcast on PBS and are available online, along with original reporting.

5. Mother Jones — Mother Jones, founded in 1976, is a reader-supported, nonprofit news organization headquartered in San Francisco with bureaus in Washington, DC and New York City. The site includes investigative reporting as well as general reporting on topics including politics, climate change and education.

6. The Intercept — The Intercept is a news organization launched in 2014 by legal and political journalist Glenn Greenwald, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

7. Real Clear Investigations — Real Clear Investigations, which launched last fall, is the new nonprofit, investigative arm of Real Clear Politics. It is mostly an aggregator of investigative reporting, but has also begun conducting original investigations.

8. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) — ICIJ is a nonprofit offshoot of the Center for Public Integrity that began 20 years ago. It is a global network of more than 190 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries who work together to investigate cross-border issues including crime, corruption and abuse of power.

9. Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) — IRE is a grass-roots, nonprofit, membership organization that has been providing tips, training and conferences for investigative reporters since 1975. Its blog, Extra! Extra! showcases a wide variety of watchdog journalism.

10. BuzzFeed — Whatever you think about its decision to release the Trump dossier earlier this week (journalists are divided in their opinions), BuzzFeed has a growing investigative team and body of work worth attention, but it’s not always easy to find on the site. If you want to know what the team is up to you can follow its editor, Mark Schoofs, @Schoofsfeed on Twitter.

My Expocalyptic Stomping Ground

May 20, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

The rule is: write what you know. Years ago, I worked in a retail software store in lower Manhattan in the financial district. I had regular contact with the locals, the NYSE market makers, the stock brokers, the office workers and the early finance types who orked in the area. When the idea for The Taste Makers came to me, I developed it into a story about Wall Street and the environment. Most recently, the school where I work moved to the same neighborhood. After walking my old beat for a few weeks, I can say that things now are not exactly how they were in 1989, but the basics haven’t changed much, either. I think I managed to catch the tone of the neighborhood in my writing.

One thing that doesn’t always come across in descriptions of lower Manhattan (including my own) is just how closely knit everything is. It’s a twenty minute walk from City Hall Park down Broadway to South Ferry, with tourists and natives alike packing every sidewalk and street corner. Traffic moves at a snail’s pace, while red lights, stop signs, and traffic cops represent strong suggestions rather than hard and fast rules of the road as far as pedestrians are concerned. And while I can’t bring any of you closer to this part of the city, I can bring a few choice bits of the city closer to you.

So. A brief tour…

Julie Meyer works at Ponzick, Fitch, Schuster, and Schiff, a fictional firm that lives at 40 rector street…a completely real location. The irony here is that 40 Rector is also the home of a number of NYC government offices (City of New York, Office of Labor Relations Health Benefits Program has the most impressive title). Look at the spotless lobby. The elevators, however, are dimly lit murder boxes. If there is any portal from normalcy to a horrible, horrible, apocalypse, it’s those elevators.

A very different book... — A very different book…

Meanwhile across the street we have the Clinton beer garden. No, I haven’t actually spent any time there, but plans are in the works for an after-work get together some Friday night. I want to stress that I had no clue this place even existed when I started writing over a year ago. I had the memories of my time in the dim past and had made a few excursions down to the area (my wife works further up Broadway). Had I known this place existed, I’d have written a very different book.And probably had way too many samples of the local brews (So. Many. Bottles)

Leaving the building, we head up Rector street. Notice how how the buildings seem to rise out of the ground, choking off your light and threatening to so the same to your body? That’s most of lower Manhattan. It’s one of the few neighborhoods in the city where you can look out your window to see a glass and steel tower from a few years ago bumping up against a tenement from 1919. Narrow streets, kamikaze pedestrians, and construction awnings are all part of life down here.

At the end of Rector street–where it joins with Broadway in a T-intersection–the brown stone spire of trinity Church rises on the left. In The Taste Makers, Julie and her stalwart crew take refuge a few blocks further up Broadway, in St. Paul’s Chapel, a church in the Trinity family with a similar but distinctly different architecture. St Paul’s also at the moment has half a block of construction barriers in front of it. Trinity church makes the better photo, at least, today.

In real life, it’s a ten minute walk uphill, even while dodging traffic and other people. Imagine doing it while blind and with armed guards rushing down the street to secure the neighborhood, who are shooting at you.

The perfect place for an Expocalypse…

Get The Taste Makers Now!

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A Question of Attribution

December 20, 2007 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I came across this tidbit while looking over Andy’s website this afternoon. I’m not a reference librarian by training and my days as an English major are long behind me, so I thought I’d toss this out there to see if anyone wanted to chime in.

To wit:

BEWARE THOSE WHO
HAVE FOUND THE TRUTH

Ted U.: “Your correspondent Randy Wolman may
well be correct in attributing the quotation ‘Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run from those who
have found it’ to Vaclav Havel. But a very similar line (‘Trust those
who seek the truth. Beware of those who have found it’)
is often attributed to Andre Gide, who, if that attribution is
correct, would have priority, and another (‘Grant me the company of
those who seek the truth. And God deliver me from those who have found it’) has
been attributed to a much earlier personage, namely,
Isaac Newton. I have not done any checking on the accuracy of any of
these attributions, but it would be interesting to know just which one (or
ones) are correct.”

Any takers?