Copyright Issues

Should the United States increase the number of H-1B visas and green cards so international skilled workers can become permanent residents?

The basic point underlying the issues is that U.S. has an immense shortage of highly skilled labor ever year and the current percentage of fresh graduates from the STEM field is far less when compared to this huge requirement. Immigrants has always been a boost to U.S. economy. Providing more opportunities for highly skilled workforce to enter U.S. via H1B and work based Green cards, is thus vital.

Concepts copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
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What measures need to be taken to make sure that offshore outsourcing does not adversely affect American jobs?

Offshore outsourcing is a highly debated topic. It would be nice if we reflect on the reasons that has lead to offshore outsourcing -

1. Highly skilled workforce for cheap labor – As Matt, pointed in his post, most of the developing countries offers education that is highly specialized and with focus on international job economy. Difference in dollars and x currency, leads to a favorable situation for companies

2. Current restrictions and huge backlogs in H1Bs and job based Green Cards – If U.S. doesn’t take necessary steps to provide more opportunities for the highly-skilled workforce to migrate into U.S., companies will continue to outsource.

3. Inadequate number of high-tech workers in U.S. – Research shows that there is about 190,000 unfilled IT jobs in the US today due to a shortage of qualified high-tech workers. Companies resort to outsourcing to fill in immediate gaps in HR.

Now looking at possible recommendations to remedy the situation of U.S. economy getting affected, the following steps may be taken -

1. Focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) based education – As the article indicates, children should be encouraged to pursue these fields right from their school education. Provide more funding and scholarships to students who pursue these career paths. This will eventually lead to increased pool of highly skilled workers at reasonable rates.

2. Increase the number of immigrant job visas which will reduce outsourcing for skilled labor.

3. Establish legislative measures to regulate outsourcing so that companies are required to fill in certain percentage of U.S. natives, if sufficient skills are available.

My point on shortage of skilled workers was based on close examination of this report from Office of Technology Policy, the Federal agency working to maximize technology’s contribution to America’s economic growth. Hope that makes some sense.

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
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Where should cyberlaw enforcement be centered?

I appreciate the study conducted by UCSD that it provides some striking insights into operation of scam engines and their origin stations. Based on this research, policies should be devised to regulate ISPs not to provide services for hosting such websites. Enforcing this policy cannot be done from a centralized location. Why don’t we share the knowledge to other research Universities across the world and create action plan to conduct mass study across the world? Thoughts?

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
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How pervasive is phishing, and what actions have the authorities taken to eliminate it?

Antiphishing.org links us to various useful means to counter phishing. skimming through the website, here are two things that interested me -

1. The phishing and crime-ware map, which shows world-wide distribution.

2. GAIN technology from InternetPerils which claims highly effective ways to monitor internet traffic using efficient data pattern analysis. Good tool that can be considered for usage by FBI data-fusion efforts.

Phishing on Myspace as this article -MySpace phishing scam targets music fans – exposes how far this has gone. The attack is done by circulating spam email to gather credit card information. What makes the situation worse is that the method used in these attacks is simple and doesn’t involve much programming efforts.

Provision to monitor credit info is also a good idea. I have a concern though regarding accessing one’s credit score more often to tracks malicious activities. Would it lead to lowering of the credit score. I have this option to monitor my credit score on my bank account. I have noticed that my credit got reduced when I used to check my credit info more often. Am I doing something wrong here?

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
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Should the US recognize criminal law sanctions from other countries when those countries accuse US citizens of violating the other country’s laws?

Cyber-Crime and its big brother – “Cyber-warfare”, have so conquered the ever expanding and versatile cyberspace that we need to establish new international polices and regulations which will enable easy coordinated crime-fighting between nations. Its not about questioning who is accusing who, rather the grave situation here to find am amicable solution for international peace keeping. I personally think that CSIA is formed with this intention and that all nations should support it, including U.S.

As we have seen in the previous lectures and discussions, Internet crimes and the policies that regulate it are insufficient until we create policies that has a global reach. Major areas of concerns are again privacy and national jurisdictions.

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
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USA Patriot Act and Data mining

I think its the USA PATRIOT Act that gives the right to do this kind of data mining. This actually amended a handful of other Acts such as -

• Wiretap Statute (Title III):
• Electronic Communications Privacy Act
• Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
• Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
• Family Education Rights and Privacy Act
• Pen Register and Trap and Trace Statute
• Money Laundering Act
• Immigration and Nationality Act
• Money Laundering Control Act
• Bank Secrecy Act
• Right to Financial Privacy Act
• Fair Credit Reporting Act

This is as per USA PATRIOT Act as reflected upon in the article – The USA PATRIOT Act

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
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What limitations should be imposed on datamining of email traffic patterns?

E-mail traffic is one of the main target of intelligence surveillance to detect terrorist and other malicious activities. Its rather easy and result oriented when compared to wiretapping of other data streams. This is because mails send or received can be easily linked to a chain that it belongs to. It can be used to identify the community that the email belong to. I would personally suggest unlimited right to analyze any suspicious traffic identified by pattern analysis. Various accepted methods are being experimented to effect this.

Rather than directly wiretapping and analyzing the content of individual mail in detail, the suggested method is to “look for the critical links that form bridges or betweenness of separate groups” (Muir, 2003). This would bring out a group of people communicating stuff that can include terrorist activities. Suggested method is to use automated pattern analysis to detect for suspicious communication and if any such is identified, intelligence force may use CALEA to further take actions.

Here’s a link to ‘Process Mining’ that introduces a new method of result oriented data-mining to uncover social networks from e-mail traffic. The method works on event logs created by e-mail clients and tries to uncover social relationships that connects people, potentially applicable to trace terrorist groups.

Process mining as applied to email-traffic is to -

1. Create event logs out of email (subject, To-from ids, send/received dates, mail headers etc) such as those handled by MS Outlook, usually dumped into a database.

2. Use the so called ProM framework to mine the event log to uncover social relationships.

It is also true that there should be limitations applied to data mining that will not search for specific content in an email, as there are privacy concerns attached to it. All data mining techniques are to be “privacy-preserving”. Here’s a nice article – Privacy preserving data mining -, in which they outline the current state of this procedure that could be effectively utilized for a controlled data mining in intelligence surveillance, including e-mail traffic.

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
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Should wiretapping of US citizen internet usage require a warrant?

First of all, I don’t think a search warrant is surely required in such a case as it is against Fourth Amendment. Now after 9/11, the issue of national security became top priority and CALEA was passed with the motive of intelligence gathering and interception of terrorist activities via electronic surveillance. Considering the terrorist’s strength in utilizing inter-networks for communication, intelligence gathering/transfer and other activities a warrantless wiretapping might be required to plot the malicious activity. However the defendant should be given the opportunity to go for appeal and if proved innocent, action should be taken against government authority for violating Fourth amendment right.

As far as I understood from the literature, CALEA is more really about establishing a situation in which lawful interception or wiretapping is allowed on communication channels such as phone network or VoIP. Section 103 of CALEA clearly states that – the carriers need to establish means which can “expeditiously isolate and enable the government, pursuant to a court order or other lawful authorization, to intercept, to the exclusion of any other communications, all wire and electronic communications carried by the carrier ….” So I believe a search warrant or similar lawful notice will be supplied to the party before wiretapping is done.  

Here’s is the wiretap report submitted by US courts – 2006 Wiretap report. Its interesting to note state-wise data on how many intercepts were made, who authorized the intercepts, what was it for, date and number days of interception and so on. The report makes clear that only lawful intercept is allowed, not necessarily through a written search warrant. The report also shows law statutes based on which each authorization is made.

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
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Will intelligence add-ons to the internet make it easier for hackers to penetrate the internet for criminal purposes?

Here’s a special report that analyzes how the Internet can facilitate terrorist operations – http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr116.html . It reveals the ways in which terrorists exploit Internet resources for various activities. It’s shocking to read how they have been so Internet savvy and have been utilizing it for psychological warfare to recruitment, networking to fundraising and data-mining and networking to planning and coordination.

Here is an excerpt from the report – “al-Qaeda cells now operate with the assistance of large databases containing details of potential targets in the U.S. They use the Internet to collect intelligence on those targets, especially critical economic nodes, and modern software enables them to study structural weaknesses in facilities as well as predict the cascading failure effect of attacking certain systems”. Terrorists and criminal groups are much advanced in conducting the so called ‘cyber-warfare’. Given such a situation, they are sure to be capable of circumventing any intelligence add-ons that the government establish in the network.

As the lecture states, the world of hacking has been now in the hands of black hats and crackers. As governments apply wiretapping to detect criminal activity, these groups might also have similar techniques to sniff out intelligence, especially military, government, economy and business. Adding intelligence to the Internet without sound security will be truly a disaster. Enemy is equally powerful. We need to devise technology to detect and thwart any terrorist networking activities or web-sites on the Internet. Impose ban and offer no support for groups/websites/nations that support terrorist activities. I think CALEA and the changes that it made to make wiretapping possible without a search warrant, lawful, easier is actually a thoughtful decision even though there is mixed feelings.

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Get all articles from www.getallarticles.com. Be informed and gain knowledge. Good resource for research and reviews.

Using Technology to combat terorrism?

Here’s a special report that analyzes how the Internet can facilitate terrorist operations – http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr116.html . It reveals the ways in which terrorists exploit Internet resources for various activities. It’s shocking to read how they have been so Internet savvy and have been utilizing it for psychological warfare to recruitment, networking to fundraising and data-mining and networking to planning and coordination.

Here is an excerpt from the report – “al-Qaeda cells now operate with the assistance of large databases containing details of potential targets in the U.S. They use the Internet to collect intelligence on those targets, especially critical economic nodes, and modern software enables them to study structural weaknesses in facilities as well as predict the cascading failure effect of attacking certain systems”. Terrorists and criminal groups are much advanced in conducting the so called ‘cyber-warfare’. Given such a situation, they are sure to be capable of circumventing any intelligence add-ons that the government establish in the network.

The world of hacking has been now in the hands of black hats and crackers. As governments apply wiretapping to detect criminal activity, these groups might also have similar techniques to sniff out intelligence, especially military, government, economy and business. Adding intelligence to the Internet without sound security will be truly a disaster. Enemy is equally powerful. We need to devise technology to detect and thwart any terrorist networking activities or web-sites on the Internet. Impose ban and offer no support for groups/websites/nations that support terrorist activities. I think CALEA and the changes that it made to make wiretapping possible without a search warrant, lawful, easier is actually a thoughtful decision even though there is mixed feelings.

Article copyright (c) 2010 – 2020 – Deepesh Joseph (deepeshjoseph@yahoo.com)
Get all articles from www.getallarticles.com. Be informed and gain knowledge. Good resource for research and reviews.