Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

The Supreme Court Finally Takes on Law Enforcement Access to Cell Phone Location Data: 2017 in Review Protecting the highly personal location data stored on or generated by digital devices is one of the 21st century’s most important privacy issues. In 2017, the Supreme Court finally took on the question of how law enforcement can get ahold of this sensitive information. Whenever you use a cell phone, whether to make calls, send or receive texts, or browse the Internet, your phone automatically generates “cell site location information” (CSLI) through its interactions with cell towers. This means that cell providers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have records of everywhere your phone has been, going back months and even years. And since almost everyone has a cell phone, cell providers have these records for nearly everyone. The government has long argued that it doesn’t need a warrant to obtain CSLI from cell providers because of two 1970’s Supreme Court cases, Smith v. Mary...

Nation-State Hacking: 2017 in Review If 2016 was the year government hacking went mainstream , 2017 is the year government hacking played the Super Bowl halftime show. It’s not Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear making headlines. This week, the Trump administration publicly attributed the WannaCry ransomware attack to the Lazarus Group, which allegedly works on behalf of the North Korean government. As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump famously dismissed allegations that the Russian government broke into email accounts belonging to John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee, saying it could easily have been the work of a “400 lb hacker” or China. The public calling-out of North Korean hacking appears to signal a very different attitude towards attribution. Lazarus Group may be hot right now, but Russian hacking has continued to make headlines. Shortly after the release of WannaCry, there came another wave of ransomware infections, Petya/NotPetya (or, this author’s favorite nam...