Monthly Archives: February 2014

Street Insider
1776 Wraps Up Regional Challenge Cup Competitions and Announces Winning Startups For San Francisco Region
Posted February 28, 2014 2:31 PM EST

Today, 1776, an incubator platform located a few blocks from the White House, in partnership with RocketSpace, an open innovation campus for startups, announced the winners of Challenge Cup for the San Francisco region.

Challenge Cup is a startup competition spanning 16 cities around the world and culminating in Washington, D.C. to find the world’s most promising startups innovating in the categories ofeducation, healthcare, energy, and smart cities. The San Francisco event marks the end of the regional competitions, which began last fall. Winning competitors are now preparing for the global festival, kicking off May 10th.

Twenty-two startups competed during the event on February 27. The competitors also participated in an accelerator program for the two days preceding the competition, which included a fireside chat led by Yelp CEO, Jeremy Stoppleman.

In addition to Evan Burfield, cofounder of 1776, judges included Doug Solomon, IDEO Fellow; Bob Linscheid, President and CEO of San Francisco Chamber of Commerce; Aleda Schaffer, Strategic Partnerships Manager of American Airlines; Shannon Spanhake, Deputy Innovation Officer for the City of San Francisco; Freddi Rokaw, Purdue University; Mike Beckerman, President and CEO of the Internet Association and representatives from Pearson.

“San Francisco was the 16th and last city of the Challenge Cup tour and the startups lived up to expectations with a lineup of amazing pitches,” said Evan Burfield, cofounder of 1776. “The competition was so steep that the judges required triple the amount of time to decide who would advance to the final round in Washington, D.C. this May at the Challenge Festival. It seems only fitting that in the city of startups, the cofounders were prepared and put on a great show.”

The regional winners include:

•      Education: UClass – A venture-backed, Common-Core-lesson marketplace that aims to disrupt the curriculum industry. On UClass, both teachers and textbook companies sell their vetted resources in bite-sized formats.
•     Energy: Enact Systems – A home-energy marketplace that allows you to plan money-saving projects, view live bids from local service providers and financiers in an area, schedule appointments with them and more.
•     Healthcare: ReferralMD – A web application that offers a comprehensive, business-management solution designed to track and monetize health care referrals.
•     Smart Cities: HandUp – A direct donation system for homeless people and others in need in a given neighborhood. With HandUp, users can donate to a specific person via their web profile or SMS, learn about their story and needs and hear updates on their progress.

The Challenge Festival will run from May 10th to May 17th, with the headline event, the Challenge Cup Global Finals, taking place the afternoon of May 17th. View the schedule and register for badges here. Challenge Cup Global Partners include: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, District of Columbia, Pearson, TechCocktail, iStrategyLabs, Microsoft, The Aspen Institute and Booz Allen Hamilton.

To be accepted, companies must be less than three years old, have less than $3M USD in revenue to date, have a scalable product or service already in the market, evidence some level of traction (active users, enterprise customers, or revenue), and have raised less than $1.5M USD in capital. Companies can apply on http://challengecup.1776dc.com/apply.

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The Guardian
Senators to investigate NSA role in GCHQ ‘Optic Nerve’ webcam spying
Posted Friday 28 February 2014 12.14 EST

Three US senators are planning to investigate any role the National Security Agency played in its British partner’s mass collection of Yahoo webcam images.

Reacting to the Guardian’s revelation on Thursday that UK surveillance agency GCHQ swept up millions of Yahoo users’ webcam chats, senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich said in a joint statement that “any involvement of US agencies in the alleged activities reported today will need to be closely scrutinized”.

The senators described the interception as a “breathtaking lack of respect for privacy and civil liberties”.

On Friday, the Internet Association – a trade body representing internet giants including Google, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, AOL and Twitter – joined the chorus of condemnation, issuing a statement expressing alarm at the latest GCHQ revelations, and calling for reform.

According to documents provided to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the GCHQ program codenamed Optic Nerve fed screengrabs of webcam chats and associated metadata into NSA tools such as Xkeyscore.

NSA research, the documents indicate, also contributed to the creation of Optic Nerve, which attempted to use facial recognition technology to identify intelligence targets, particularly those using multiple anonymous internet IDs.

Neither NSA nor GCHQ addressed the Guardian’s questions about US access to the images themselves. Outgoing NSA director Keith Alexanderwalked away from a reporter on Thursday who asked the army four-star general about the NSA’s role in Optic Nerve.

Wyden, Udall and Heinrich are all members of the Senate intelligence committee. They said they were “extremely troubled” by Optic Nerve and planned to investigate it during the committee’s announced omnibus inquiry into the scope of US surveillance activities revealed over the nine months since the Guardian and other news outlets began reporting the Snowden disclosures.

“We are extremely troubled by today’s press report that a very large number of individuals – including law-abiding Americans – may have had private videos of themselves and their families intercepted and stored without any suspicion of wrongdoing. If this report is accurate it would show a breathtaking lack of respect for the privacy and civil liberties of law-abiding citizens,” they said.

GCHQ’s program, which uses data collected by cable taps as it transits the internet, does not filter out information from British or American webcams. Under UK law, there is no requirement for UK or US material to be removed from the agency’s databases. Additional legal safeguards apply when analysts come to search the database for material on individuals located in the British Isles, though there are no UK laws banning searches for US citizens’ data without a warrant.

The documents seen by the Guardian make clear the lengths to which GCHQ has gone to prevent sexually explicit material appearing in the analysts’ searches. According to one document, it made up between 3% and 11% of the material stored under Optic Nerve.

The agency used face recognition software in an attempt to prevent explicit images clogging up search results but the documents make it clear that those tools were not always successful. Analysts were advised that if they were “uncomfortable about such material” they should not open the images. The guidance adds: “Retrieval and or reference to such material should be avoided.”

GCHQ declined to comment on Optic Nerve but said all its programs operated in full accordance with UK law.

The three US senators said the revelation prompted new thinking about how the interconnectedness of global communications had “dramatically increased the likelihood of innocent Americans being swept up in intelligence collection nominally aimed at foreigners.

“It is becoming clearer and clearer that more needs to be done to ensure that ‘foreign’ intelligence collection does not intrude unnecessarily on the rights of law-abiding people or needlessly undermine the competitiveness of America’s leading industries.”

President Barack Obama said in a 17 January speech that foreigners ought to enjoy some degree of privacy from US surveillance, but has left the specifics undefined.

In a statement, the Internet Association’s CEO Michael Beckerman said:

Today’s revelations, about British intelligence practices, are alarming and reaffirm the need for greater transparency and reform of government surveillance.

Governments must immediately act to reform the practices and laws regulating surveillance and collection of Internet users’ information. The most pressing Internet user privacy issue continues to concern governments’ access to and use of electronic data. The Internet Association supports the Reform Government Surveillance principles and encourages legislation to limit governments’ authority to collect users’ information and increase transparency about government demands.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — In reaction to today’s news reports detailing the UK government’s secret interception of millions of Yahoo! users’ webcam images, The Internet Association’s President and CEO Michael Beckerman issued the following statement supporting government surveillance reform and denouncing the violation of privacy:

“Today’s revelations, about British intelligence practices, are alarming and reaffirm the need for greater transparency and reform of government surveillance. Governments must immediately act to reform the practices and laws regulating surveillance and collection of Internet users’ information. The most pressing Internet user privacy issue continues to concern governments’ access to and use of electronic data. The Internet Association supports the Reform Government Surveillance principles and encourages legislation to limit governments’ authority to collect users’ information and increase transparency about government demands.”

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The Hill
Tech industry slams NSA webcam spying
Posted February 27, 2014, 05:27 pm

The tech industry came out against what it called an “outrageous” surveillance program that allowed intelligence agencies to capture images from users’ webcams.

Reports surfaced Thursday that the National Security Agency helped its British counterpart to access and capture images, including sexually explicit ones, from millions of Yahoo chat users between 2008 and 2012.  Yahoo denied having any knowledge of the program and repeated calls it has made with other tech companies for reform of U.S. surveillance laws.

Trade associations representing major players in the tech industry followed suit.  The latest report about webcam spying “indicates government privacy violations have reached an alarming new level of intrusiveness,” Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said in a statement.

Black’s group includes Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Sprint and T-Mobile.  “The size and audacity of this online spying is outrageous and shows how government surveillance officials will go as far as they can to gather data with minimal regard for privacy expectations, ethics or laws,” Black said.

The Internet Association, which includes Facebook, Google, Amazon and Yahoo, called for surveillance reform measures “to limit governments’ authority to collect users’ information and increase transparency about government demands.”

“The most pressing Internet user privacy issue continues to concern governments’ access to and use of electronic data,” the group’s president, Michael Beckerman, said in a statement.  Beckerman called on governments to “immediately act to reform the practices and laws regulating surveillance and collection of Internet users’ information.”

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The Washington Post
Consumer Privacy Rights Need Urgent Protection in Washington, Activists Say
Posted February 24, 2014