The National Security Agency has just released an important set of rules and procedures for electronic surveillance by the DOD (of which NSA is a

It is a big-deal doc but it also appears to be more a housekeeping update of the previous one rather something that makes major substantive changes, unless I’m missing something, so my current plan is to tweet for specialists rather than write a NYT article for general readers./2
These procedures govern, at a 30,000-foot level, DOD/NSA surveillance that is authorized by Executive Order 12333 because it uses techniques that fall outside the sort of national-security wiretapping that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) regulates. /3
FISA covers collection inside the US from a wire of coms w/ at least one end on domestic soil. So this is for all the other stuff, like collection abroad, certain satellite interceptions, & warrantless bulk collection of foreign-to-foreign coms as they transit the US network./4
The previous procedures date back to 1988 and were signed by then-AG Edwin Meese and then-deputy secretary of defense William Taft. (They were released in 2014 as part of the Snowden fallout.)/5
https://t.co/uZ5Cny2Ldk
The 1988 version had been created to deal with the revolution in communications caused by the transition to fiberoptic network technology. (For more, see the secret post-FISA history of US surveillance law/policy/tech in Chapter 5 of my book “Power Wars.”) /6
The 1988 Meese-Taft rules were called the “Classified Annex” to DOD Manual 5240.01. This new version is less censored & is called the “Redacted Annex” – in part bc some classified stuff, e.g. transit authority, appears to have been pushed off into a different implementing doc. /7
The new version was signed by Bill Barr and Mark Esper. It is getting pushed out at the end of the Trump administration, as often happens with things officials have been working for years and want to wrap it up before they walked out the door./8
However, as I understand it, this update is not Trumpy. It is something civil servants have been working on since the Obama admin and that just ran into a lot of delays. Here is what Glenn Gerstell, who was the NSA’s general counsel until recently, emailed me: /9
Minor mystery solved: In Sept, out of the blue, Trump issued a directive “clarifying” that the NSA could hunt for coms of Americans being held hostage abroad. Turns out that was bc in finalizing this, DOJ worried that this longstanding practice lacked explicit authorization./10
But the diffs between the old & new rules seem to be largely about codifying changes since 1988 (creation of ODNI, FISA Amendments Act), adding discussion of existing training, & codifying practices we've knew about since Snowden, like contact chaining thru US person metadata./11
That’s what I got for now./12

More from Tech

Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
THREAD: How is it possible to train a well-performing, advanced Computer Vision model 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗣𝗨? 🤔

At the heart of this lies the most important technique in modern deep learning - transfer learning.

Let's analyze how it


2/ For starters, let's look at what a neural network (NN for short) does.

An NN is like a stack of pancakes, with computation flowing up when we make predictions.

How does it all work?


3/ We show an image to our model.

An image is a collection of pixels. Each pixel is just a bunch of numbers describing its color.

Here is what it might look like for a black and white image


4/ The picture goes into the layer at the bottom.

Each layer performs computation on the image, transforming it and passing it upwards.


5/ By the time the image reaches the uppermost layer, it has been transformed to the point that it now consists of two numbers only.

The outputs of a layer are called activations, and the outputs of the last layer have a special meaning... they are the predictions!

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