Good article from 404 Media on the cozy surveillance relationship between local Oregon police and ICE: > In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and > the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance > tools and tactics they have access to and felt comfortable using, and in some > cases offered to perform surveillance for their colleagues in other > departments. The thread also includes a member of ICE’s Homeland Security > Investigations (HSI) and members of Oregon’s State Police. In the thread, > called the “Southern Oregon Analyst Group,” some members talked about making > fake social media profiles to surveil people, and others discussed being > excited to learn and try new surveillance techniques. The emails show both the > wide array of surveillance tools that are available to even small police > departments in the United States and also shows informal collaboration between > local police departments and federal agencies, when ordinarily agencies like > ICE are expected to follow their own legal processes for carrying out the > surveillance...

Mitre’s CVE’s program—which provides common naming and other informational resources about cybersecurity vulnerabilities—was about to be cancelled, as the US Department of Homeland Security failed to renew the contact. It was funded for eleven more months at the last minute. This is a big deal. The CVE program is one of those pieces of common infrastructure that everyone benefits from. Losing it will bring us back to a world where there’s no single way to talk about vulnerabilities. It’s kind of crazy to think that the US government might damage its own security in this way—but I suppose no crazier than any of the other ways the US is working against its own interests right now...