Month: June 2018

In a move that will surely please parents and grandparents around the world, Apple has finally announced group FaceTime functionality for iOS. In iOS 12, you’ll finally be able to FaceTime with up to 31 of your closest friends.

The major appeal of group FaceTime for me comes with its simplified integration with iMessage. There are a few group chats on my phone that are constantly updated/active among family and friends, and being able to quickly turn one of them in a FaceTime session seems like it’ll be extremely convenient. For special occasions (like my yearly fantasy football draft), rather than trying to wrangle everyone into a G-Hangout or Google Hang or whatever they’re called now, this seems like a much more simplified solution.

Apple will also let you put Animoji and other weird photo filters over your face when you’re FaceTiming with lots of people, and that doesn’t really matter so much unless you’re really sick and need to be on camera or something.

Group FaceTime is the type of thing that won’t seem useful until the option to start one pops up on your phone and you think, “hey, I actually would like to do that right now, thanks Apple.” I won’t be FaceTiming my family five times daily, but it’s a nice comfort to know that the option is there when the opportunity arises.

Now all that’s left to do is wait for your mom and dad to put you in a group FaceTime with them and your Uncle Bill while they’re tailgating at the Mets game. Whether you pick up, however, is another question entirely.

In a move that will surely please parents and grandparents around the world, Apple has finally announced group FaceTime functionality for iOS. In iOS 12, you’ll finally be able to FaceTime with up to 31 of your closest friends.

The major appeal of group FaceTime for me comes with its simplified integration with iMessage. There are a few group chats on my phone that are constantly updated/active among family and friends, and being able to quickly turn one of them in a FaceTime session seems like it’ll be extremely convenient. For special occasions (like my yearly fantasy football draft), rather than trying to wrangle everyone into a G-Hangout or Google Hang or whatever they’re called now, this seems like a much more simplified solution.

Apple will also let you put Animoji and other weird photo filters over your face when you’re FaceTiming with lots of people, and that doesn’t really matter so much unless you’re really sick and need to be on camera or something.

Group FaceTime is the type of thing that won’t seem useful until the option to start one pops up on your phone and you think, “hey, I actually would like to do that right now, thanks Apple.” I won’t be FaceTiming my family five times daily, but it’s a nice comfort to know that the option is there when the opportunity arises.

Now all that’s left to do is wait for your mom and dad to put you in a group FaceTime with them and your Uncle Bill while they’re tailgating at the Mets game. Whether you pick up, however, is another question entirely.

In a move that will surely please parents and grandparents around the world, Apple has finally announced group FaceTime functionality for iOS. In iOS 12, you’ll finally be able to FaceTime with up to 31 of your closest friends.

The major appeal of group FaceTime for me comes with its simplified integration with iMessage. There are a few group chats on my phone that are constantly updated/active among family and friends, and being able to quickly turn one of them in a FaceTime session seems like it’ll be extremely convenient. For special occasions (like my yearly fantasy football draft), rather than trying to wrangle everyone into a G-Hangout or Google Hang or whatever they’re called now, this seems like a much more simplified solution.

Apple will also let you put Animoji and other weird photo filters over your face when you’re FaceTiming with lots of people, and that doesn’t really matter so much unless you’re really sick and need to be on camera or something.

Group FaceTime is the type of thing that won’t seem useful until the option to start one pops up on your phone and you think, “hey, I actually would like to do that right now, thanks Apple.” I won’t be FaceTiming my family five times daily, but it’s a nice comfort to know that the option is there when the opportunity arises.

Now all that’s left to do is wait for your mom and dad to put you in a group FaceTime with them and your Uncle Bill while they’re tailgating at the Mets game. Whether you pick up, however, is another question entirely.

Federal prosecutors have accused Paul Manafort of witness tampering, alleging that he used WhatsApp and Telegram in an attempt to coordinate his testimony with old business associates. Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, may have thought that he was being sneaky by using encrypted chat apps, but Manafort just learned the hard way that strong encryption doesn’t really matter if you’re backing up your messages to the cloud—especially when the federal government gets a warrant to access your iCloud account.

The new court filing, made public just last night, outlines the communications that Manafort had with multiple unnamed sources. And while some of the sources willingly handed over WhatsApp and Telegram messages to special prosecutor Robert Mueller, it’s clear that the feds also have a court order to search through Manafort’s iCloud account.

A screenshot from the court filing is below, with highlighting by Gizmodo:

Manafort is accused of money laundering, tax evasion, and violating federal laws that require lobbyists to declare who they’re working for, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Manafort allegedly lobbied for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, and also lobbied in the United States. Manafort has pleaded not guilty to the charges, though his longtime business partner Rick Gates has cut a deal and is cooperating with investigators.

WhatsApp allows both manual and automatic scheduled backups to iCloud, though it’s not clear what settings Manafort may have had on his device. As WhatsApp notes on its website, “Media and messages you back up aren’t protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in iCloud.”

Manafort’s messages include code names for people and they allegedly show an attempt to get everyone on the same page about their testimony. One of the people that Manafort communicated with alleges that Manfort was trying to “suborn perjury” by saying that the Hapsburg group only did lobbying work in Europe and not the United States.

“We should talk. I have made clear that they worked in Europe,” one of Manafort’s messages reads.

So how does the government gain access to someone’s iCloud account? It’s pretty straightforward. If the feds present Apple with a lawful court order, Apple must give prosecutors like Mueller access to an iCloud account under 18 U.S. Code § 2703. Apple even has a special email address for the process, subpoenas@apple.com. Prosecutors can also request that anything in iCloud be retained for as long as 180 days under federal law.

What can the average person do to protect themselves from the prying eyes of the feds? Number one is don’t do crimes. Manafort appears to have skipped that step. Number two is, once you’re being investigated for doing crimes, don’t think that an encrypted messaging app will keep your messages hidden from the cops, especially if you’re backing everything up to iCloud. And number three, even if you keep messages out of iCloud, remember that the person you’re sending those messages to could give them to police.

President Trump keeps calling Robert Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt” in an attempt to undermine the entire process as prosecutors gets closer and closer to the president himself. And Trump is clearly sending a signal to people like Manafort that he’s ready to give out pardons. Trump even declared that he has the right to pardon himself yesterday.

But did Manafort break numerous federal laws? That’s up for the government to prove. But could you ever believe that a guy like this would ever lie about doing crimes? It’s unimaginable.

[New York Times and Court Filings]

As it wrestled with accusations about a fake cyberattack last spring, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) purposely misled several news organizations, choosing to feed journalists false information, while at the same time discouraging them from challenging the agency’s official story.

Internal emails reviewed by Gizmodo lay bare the agency’s efforts to counter rife speculation that senior officials manufactured a cyberattack, allegedly to explain away technical problems plaguing the FCC’s comment system amid its high-profile collection of public comments on a controversial and since-passed proposal to overturn federal net neutrality rules.

The FCC has been unwilling or unable to produce any evidence an attack occurred—not to the reporters who’ve requested and even sued over it, and not to U.S. lawmakers who’ve demanded to see it. Instead, the agency conducted a quiet campaign to bolster its cyberattack story with the aid of friendly and easily duped reporters, by spreading word of an earlier cyberattack that never happened.

The FCC’s system was overwhelmed on the night of May 7, 2017, after comedian John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, directed his audience to flood the agency with comments supporting net neutrality. In the immediate aftermath, the agency claimed the comment system had been deliberately impaired due to a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). Net neutrality supporters, however, accused the agency of fabricating the attack to absolve itself from failing to keep the system online.

The system similarly crashed after Oliver ordered his viewers to the FCC website in 2014. The FCC, at the time led by Democrat Tom Wheeler, determined that the comment system had been affected by a surge of internet traffic. The issue was compounded, sources told Gizmodo, by a weakness in the system’s out-of-date software.

Importantly, the agency never blamed a malicious attack for the system’s downtime in 2014—not in any official statement.

But in May 2017, under the Trump-appointed chairman, Ajit Pai, at least two FCC officials quietly pushed a fallacious account of the 2014 incident, attempting to persuade reporters that the comment system had long been the target of DDoS attacks. “There *was* a DDoS event right after the [John Oliver] video in 2014,” one official told reporters at FedScoop, according to emails reviewed by Gizmodo.

David Bray, who served as the FCC’s chief information officer from 2013 until June 2017, assured reporters in a series of off-the-record exchanges that a DDoS attack had occurred three years earlier. More shocking, however, is that Bray claimed Wheeler, the former FCC chairman, had covered it up.

According to emails from Bray to reporters, Wheeler was concerned that if the FCC publicly admitted there was an attack, it would likely incite “copycats.”

“That’s just flat out false,” said Gigi Sohn, former counselor to Chairman Wheeler. “We didn’t want to say it because Bray had no hard proof that it was a DDoS attack. Just like the second time.”

Bray’s exchanges with reporters, which took place via email, were obtained by American Oversight, a watchdog group, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Gizmodo reviewed the more than 1,300 pages of records last week.

Neither Bray nor the FCC responded to requests for comment.

In August, Gizmodo revealed that Bray had been the anonymous source behind reports that the FCC had been “hacked” in 2014. Multiple FCC sources—including a security contractor who worked on the comment system at the time—confirmed that no evidence was ever found showing a malicious attack caused the system’s downtime during Oliver’s show.

Multiple sources said that Bray, the senior official responsible for maintaining the comment system, had alone pushed the cyberattack narrative internally. When he was unable to produce proof, they said, he reached out to a reporter. After requesting anonymity, Bray contradicted the agency’s official story, claiming an attack was responsible. The conflicting accounts led to confusion in the press over whether Oliver’s call-to-action was actually responsible for the FCC’s technical failures.

“The security team was in agreement that this event was not an attack,” a former FCC security contractor told Gizmodo of the 2014 outage. “The security team produced no report suggesting it was an attack. The security team could not identify any records or evidence to indicate this type of attack occurred as described by Bray.” The contractor’s statements were supported by Sohn and confirmed by two other sources with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named or quoted.

Bray is not the only FCC official last year to push dubious accounts to reporters. Mark Wigfield, the FCC’s deputy director of media relations, told Politico: “there were similar DDoS attacks back in 2014 right after the Jon Oliver [sic] episode.” According to emails between Bray and FedScoop, the FCC’s Office of Media Relations likewise fed cooked-up details about an unverified cyberattack to the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal apparently swallowed the FCC’s revised history of the incident, reporting that the agency “also revealed that the 2014 show had been followed by DDoS attacks too,” as if it were a fact that had been concealed for several years. After it was published, the Journal’s article, authored by tech reporter John McKinnon, was forwarded by Bray to reporters at other outlets and portrayed as a factual telling of events. What’s more, Bray emailed the story to several private citizens who had contacted the FCC with questions and concerns about the comment system’s issues.

In doing so, the FCC was apparently using the Journal as a way to bolster their own unsubstantiated claims, which the agency’s security staff, and its former leadership, had internally dismissed.

In several emails, the FCC encouraged journalists to compare the 2017 incident to a DDoS attack on the Pokémon Go mobile game a year before. Michael Krigsman, a columnist for ZDNet, took the bait, despite the FCC continuing to withholding any proof an attack occurred. Krigsman wrote, unqualifiedly: “It’s similar to the distributed denial of service attack on Pokemon Go in July 2016.”

(In later exchanges with Bray, Krigsman turned on one of his own colleagues, who had published a story about the FCC’s refusal to release proof there was an attack. In one email, Krigsman encouraged the FCC to demand a correction for the story, while instructing Bray to complain to his colleague’s boss. Amazingly, Krigsman then encouraged the FCC to publicly admonish his own publication.)

Krigsman’s own flattering piece about Bray was, like the Journal’s report, circulated to security reporters and described as a “good article that does get the technical facts correct on what happened.”

Bray’s claim that Wheeler knew that DDoS attacks had occurred, but withheld it from the public “out of concern of copycats,” is an allegation that has never been made publicly. It is also refuted by numerous former and current FCC officials with whom Gizmodo spoke recently and over the past year.

Wheeler declined our request to comment.

Bray’s claim about Wheeler also appears in a draft copy of a blog post written by Bray on Chairman Pai’s behalf. It appears to have never been published online. One line from the draft reads: “This happened in 2014, though at the time we chose not to talk about the automated programs denying service to the commenting system since we didn’t want to invite copycats.”

As with Bray’s claim about a 2014 attack, the FCC has repeatedly failed to present any evidence that its servers—which, unlike in 2014, now reside on a cloud infrastructure—were bombarded by malicious traffic following Oliver’s net neutrality segment last year. However, in response to inquiries from Senators Ron Wyden and Brian Schatz last year, the FCC stated that the disruption was caused by what it called “a non-traditional DDoS attack.” (Bray was also the first official to claim a DDoS attack occurred in May 2017.)

The agency said it detected “patterns of disruptions that show abnormal behavior outside the scope of a lobbying surge,” which it said included an “extremely high level of atypical cloud-based traffic” directed toward the comment system’s API interface. “From our analysis of the logs, we believe these automated bot programs appeared to be cloud-based and not associated with IP addresses usually linked to individual human filers,” the agency said.

The FCC has refused to release any documentation showing an investigation into the comment system’s downtime occurred. According to the FCC, the FBI declined to investigate the matter, saying it “did not appear to rise to the level of a major incident that would trigger further FBI involvement.” The FBI declined to confirm or deny any contact with the FCC about the issue.

The fact that an investigation at the FCC would have been carried out by an official who had earlier refused to accept the formal findings of the FCC’s own security professions, and then anonymously leaked claims contradicting them, only further casts suspicion on the FCC’s story.

Last July, the agency refused to release more than 200 pages of documents related to the incident in response to a FOIA request filed by Gizmodo. In a formal letter, the agency claimed that while its IT staff had observed a cyberattack taking place, those observations “did not result in written documentation.” A federal watchdog investigation, which is ongoing, followed in October.

In the more than 1,300 emails released to American Oversight last month, the FCC redacted every internal conversation about the 2017 incident between FCC employees, citing either attorney-client communications or deliberative process privilege. (The FOIA exemption appears to be very liberally applied, as it is typically reserved for discussions in which “governmental decisions and policies are formulated.”)

The agency also redacted every discussion between staff last year regarding how to respond to inquiries about the incident from U.S. senators; all internal discussions about how to respond to members of the press; as well as an internal newsletter from the day after the agency claims it was attacked.

Demonstrating how overeager the agency is to redact emails from public records, its attorneys also redacted a year-old Politico newsletter in full:

In addition to being acquired by American Oversight, the records were produced in a lawsuit brought by BuzzFeed reporter Kevin Collier, who told Gizmodo that he intends to challenge the redactions in court. (Collier is represented pro bono by New York attorney Dan Novack, who also represents Gizmodo in an ongoing case against the FBI.)

“Some of these messages are probably correctly redacted, but avoiding potential embarrassment is not a legitimate reason for the government to conceal an email,” Austin Evers, American Oversight’s executive director, said. “We were skeptical of the FCC’s explanations about its online comment system issues last May, and it’s clear that we still don’t have the full story about what happened.”

Read the full collection of FCC emails below.

Got a tip about the FCC? Contact the reporter: dell@gizmodo.com

As it wrestled with accusations about a fake cyberattack last spring, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) purposely misled several news organizations, choosing to feed journalists false information, while at the same time discouraging them from challenging the agency’s official story.

Internal emails reviewed by Gizmodo lay bare the agency’s efforts to counter rife speculation that senior officials manufactured a cyberattack, allegedly to explain away technical problems plaguing the FCC’s comment system amid its high-profile collection of public comments on a controversial and since-passed proposal to overturn federal net neutrality rules.

The FCC has been unwilling or unable to produce any evidence an attack occurred—not to the reporters who’ve requested and even sued over it, and not to U.S. lawmakers who’ve demanded to see it. Instead, the agency conducted a quiet campaign to bolster its cyberattack story with the aid of friendly and easily duped reporters, by spreading word of an earlier cyberattack that never happened.

The FCC’s system was overwhelmed on the night of May 7, 2017, after comedian John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, directed his audience to flood the agency with comments supporting net neutrality. In the immediate aftermath, the agency claimed the comment system had been deliberately impaired due to a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). Net neutrality supporters, however, accused the agency of fabricating the attack to absolve itself from failing to keep the system online.

The system similarly crashed after Oliver ordered his viewers to the FCC website in 2014. The FCC, at the time led by Democrat Tom Wheeler, determined that the comment system had been affected by a surge of internet traffic. The issue was compounded, sources told Gizmodo, by a weakness in the system’s out-of-date software.

Importantly, the agency never blamed a malicious attack for the system’s downtime in 2014—not in any official statement.

But in May 2017, under the Trump-appointed chairman, Ajit Pai, at least two FCC officials quietly pushed a fallacious account of the 2014 incident, attempting to persuade reporters that the comment system had long been the target of DDoS attacks. “There *was* a DDoS event right after the [John Oliver] video in 2014,” one official told reporters at FedScoop, according to emails reviewed by Gizmodo.

David Bray, who served as the FCC’s chief information officer from 2013 until June 2017, assured reporters in a series of off-the-record exchanges that a DDoS attack had occurred three years earlier. More shocking, however, is that Bray claimed Wheeler, the former FCC chairman, had covered it up.

According to emails from Bray to reporters, Wheeler was concerned that if the FCC publicly admitted there was an attack, it would likely incite “copycats.”

“That’s just flat out false,” said Gigi Sohn, former counselor to Chairman Wheeler. “We didn’t want to say it because Bray had no hard proof that it was a DDoS attack. Just like the second time.”

Bray’s exchanges with reporters, which took place via email, were obtained by American Oversight, a watchdog group, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Gizmodo reviewed the more than 1,300 pages of records last week.

Neither Bray nor the FCC responded to requests for comment.

In August, Gizmodo revealed that Bray had been the anonymous source behind reports that the FCC had been “hacked” in 2014. Multiple FCC sources—including a security contractor who worked on the comment system at the time—confirmed that no evidence was ever found showing a malicious attack caused the system’s downtime during Oliver’s show.

Multiple sources said that Bray, the senior official responsible for maintaining the comment system, had alone pushed the cyberattack narrative internally. When he was unable to produce proof, they said, he reached out to a reporter. After requesting anonymity, Bray contradicted the agency’s official story, claiming an attack was responsible. The conflicting accounts led to confusion in the press over whether Oliver’s call-to-action was actually responsible for the FCC’s technical failures.

“The security team was in agreement that this event was not an attack,” a former FCC security contractor told Gizmodo of the 2014 outage. “The security team produced no report suggesting it was an attack. The security team could not identify any records or evidence to indicate this type of attack occurred as described by Bray.” The contractor’s statements were supported by Sohn and confirmed by two other sources with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named or quoted.

Bray is not the only FCC official last year to push dubious accounts to reporters. Mark Wigfield, the FCC’s deputy director of media relations, told Politico: “there were similar DDoS attacks back in 2014 right after the Jon Oliver [sic] episode.” According to emails between Bray and FedScoop, the FCC’s Office of Media Relations likewise fed cooked-up details about an unverified cyberattack to the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal apparently swallowed the FCC’s revised history of the incident, reporting that the agency “also revealed that the 2014 show had been followed by DDoS attacks too,” as if it were a fact that had been concealed for several years. After it was published, the Journal’s article, authored by tech reporter John McKinnon, was forwarded by Bray to reporters at other outlets and portrayed as a factual telling of events. What’s more, Bray emailed the story to several private citizens who had contacted the FCC with questions and concerns about the comment system’s issues.

In doing so, the FCC was apparently using the Journal as a way to bolster their own unsubstantiated claims, which the agency’s security staff, and its former leadership, had internally dismissed.

In several emails, the FCC encouraged journalists to compare the 2017 incident to a DDoS attack on the Pokémon Go mobile game a year before. Michael Krigsman, a columnist for ZDNet, took the bait, despite the FCC continuing to withholding any proof an attack occurred. Krigsman wrote, unqualifiedly: “It’s similar to the distributed denial of service attack on Pokemon Go in July 2016.”

(In later exchanges with Bray, Krigsman turned on one of his own colleagues, who had published a story about the FCC’s refusal to release proof there was an attack. In one email, Krigsman encouraged the FCC to demand a correction for the story, while instructing Bray to complain to his colleague’s boss. Amazingly, Krigsman then encouraged the FCC to publicly admonish his own publication.)

Krigsman’s own flattering piece about Bray was, like the Journal’s report, circulated to security reporters and described as a “good article that does get the technical facts correct on what happened.”

Bray’s claim that Wheeler knew that DDoS attacks had occurred, but withheld it from the public “out of concern of copycats,” is an allegation that has never been made publicly. It is also refuted by numerous former and current FCC officials with whom Gizmodo spoke recently and over the past year.

Wheeler declined our request to comment.

Bray’s claim about Wheeler also appears in a draft copy of a blog post written by Bray on Chairman Pai’s behalf. It appears to have never been published online. One line from the draft reads: “This happened in 2014, though at the time we chose not to talk about the automated programs denying service to the commenting system since we didn’t want to invite copycats.”

As with Bray’s claim about a 2014 attack, the FCC has repeatedly failed to present any evidence that its servers—which, unlike in 2014, now reside on a cloud infrastructure—were bombarded by malicious traffic following Oliver’s net neutrality segment last year. However, in response to inquiries from Senators Ron Wyden and Brian Schatz last year, the FCC stated that the disruption was caused by what it called “a non-traditional DDoS attack.” (Bray was also the first official to claim a DDoS attack occurred in May 2017.)

The agency said it detected “patterns of disruptions that show abnormal behavior outside the scope of a lobbying surge,” which it said included an “extremely high level of atypical cloud-based traffic” directed toward the comment system’s API interface. “From our analysis of the logs, we believe these automated bot programs appeared to be cloud-based and not associated with IP addresses usually linked to individual human filers,” the agency said.

The FCC has refused to release any documentation showing an investigation into the comment system’s downtime occurred. According to the FCC, the FBI declined to investigate the matter, saying it “did not appear to rise to the level of a major incident that would trigger further FBI involvement.” The FBI declined to confirm or deny any contact with the FCC about the issue.

The fact that an investigation at the FCC would have been carried out by an official who had earlier refused to accept the formal findings of the FCC’s own security professions, and then anonymously leaked claims contradicting them, only further casts suspicion on the FCC’s story.

Last July, the agency refused to release more than 200 pages of documents related to the incident in response to a FOIA request filed by Gizmodo. In a formal letter, the agency claimed that while its IT staff had observed a cyberattack taking place, those observations “did not result in written documentation.” A federal watchdog investigation, which is ongoing, followed in October.

In the more than 1,300 emails released to American Oversight last month, the FCC redacted every internal conversation about the 2017 incident between FCC employees, citing either attorney-client communications or deliberative process privilege. (The FOIA exemption appears to be very liberally applied, as it is typically reserved for discussions in which “governmental decisions and policies are formulated.”)

The agency also redacted every discussion between staff last year regarding how to respond to inquiries about the incident from U.S. senators; all internal discussions about how to respond to members of the press; as well as an internal newsletter from the day after the agency claims it was attacked.

Demonstrating how overeager the agency is to redact emails from public records, its attorneys also redacted a year-old Politico newsletter in full:

In addition to being acquired by American Oversight, the records were produced in a lawsuit brought by BuzzFeed reporter Kevin Collier, who told Gizmodo that he intends to challenge the redactions in court. (Collier is represented pro bono by New York attorney Dan Novack, who also represents Gizmodo in an ongoing case against the FBI.)

“Some of these messages are probably correctly redacted, but avoiding potential embarrassment is not a legitimate reason for the government to conceal an email,” Austin Evers, American Oversight’s executive director, said. “We were skeptical of the FCC’s explanations about its online comment system issues last May, and it’s clear that we still don’t have the full story about what happened.”

Read the full collection of FCC emails below.

Got a tip about the FCC? Contact the reporter: dell@gizmodo.com

When it comes to high-tech surveillance, identity theft, and financial crimes, humanity lives in a hell of its own making. Technology here in the second decade of the 21st century has created a world where our personal information is constantly getting exposed. And for what benefit? The “convenience” of being able to pay our bills online. But we can’t say we weren’t warned. People in 1966 saw where all of this automation was heading.

A short editorial in the September 19, 1966 issue of the Sandusky Register newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio predicted that life was about to get worse as information, especially financial information, became more centralized.

The editorial noted that although the “com­puter age” was “in its infancy,” the computerization of financial information would lead to more robbery, more embezzlement, and a complete “assault on personal privacy.” And we can’t say they were wrong.

From the September 19, 1966 issue of the Sandusky Register in Ohio:

It had to happen sooner or later in this age of industrial espionage, but it is still disquieting to learn that spies already are at work pick­ing the brains of electronic compu­ters.

This revelation came from a meeting on computer privacy spon­sored by the Federal Bar Associa­tion in Washington. One instance cited was a computer expert who programmed his firm’s computer to provide himself with thousands of dollars in free communications services. His embezzlement by computer was not discovered until a friend tipped the firm.

Sufficient numbers of other cases have been uncovered to cause concern that the revolution in infor­mation storage has opened new vis­tas for the unscrupulous. The com­puter age is in its infancy. By the time it is in full bloom a few years from now, most written records will have been replaced by central banks which can divulge the inner­most secrets of an individual or a firm literally at the push of a but­ton.

Banks have never been able to completely safeguard against rob­bery or embezzlement, but they protect their customers with insur­ance. What insurance can compen­sate a person whose life’s secrets have been spilled to a blackmailer, or a firm whose secret processes or customer list have been sold to a competitor?

Many persons are concerned by the assault on personal privacy by electronic listening devices. These instruments are child’s play com­pared to the possibilities in compu­ter espionage.

The Internal Revenue Service, which has a questionable history of divulging its records to many feder­al and state agencies anyway, now has 68 million tax returns stored in one computer operated by a 30-man team. The IRS has found certain of its confidential tax information being passed to private investiga­tors.

Every man, it is said, has his price. That goes double for compu­ters controlled by men.

Yes, it sounds a little dated. But this was 1966, three full years before the first host-to-host connection of the ARPANET between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. And the issues being raised are some of the exact issues that we’re living through today. We were warned in 1966, and 1971, and 1975. Humanity was repeatedly warned and we didn’t take note.

Electronic surveillance through “listening devices”? Check. Financial institutions having too much control of your private data? Check. The IRS leaking confidential tax information? Well, that one wouldn’t be so bad if it allowed the American people to learn about President Trump’s tax returns and his many conflicts of interest around the globe. But we’re not that lucky.

It turns out we got all of the worst parts of their prediction except for the one that might help Americans the most. It seems like something to keep in mind the next time someone predicts that technology will only help humanity as we crawl our way to the 2020s.