Wired Security Spoken Edition

Last April, while security researcher Patrick Wardle was attending the RSA security conference in San Francisco, a Taiwanese friend who lived in the city asked to meet for coffee, and for his help with what she described as a serious problem: China, she said, was hacking her iPhone. Wardle, a former NSA staffer and a prominent Apple-focused hacker who founded Digita Security, had heard that request from paranoid friends and acquaintances plenty of times before, making him naturally skeptical. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Looking back at the first six months of 2018, there haven't been as many government leaks and global ransomware attacks as there were by this time last year, but that's pretty much where the good news ends. Corporate security isn't getting better fast enough, critical infrastructure security hangs in the balance, and state-backed hackers from around the world are getting bolder and more sophisticated. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was a holiday week for July Fourth, but there was still plenty going on in the security world. WIRED took a deep look at a budding partnership between the Army's Cyber Command and the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service group. DDS brings private-sector tech expertise to the government, and this new collaboration adds Army technologists to the mix to work on difficult development challenges for the Department of Defense. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The annual iOS refresh is on the way—Apple has previewed it, beta testers have installed it, and the rest of us should get iOS 12 when iPhones arrive in September. While features such as winking 3-D emoji and screen-time limits for your apps might take much of the attention when the software arrives, iOS 12 is a major step forward in one other crucial area: smartphone security. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You probably spend a lot of your day inside apps: catching up on the news, playing music and movies, keeping in touch with friends, racing cartoon characters around a track, and so on. Every once in a while though, it's worth running an audit on these apps to make sure they're not overreaching and going beyond their remit—collecting more data about you and controlling more of your devices than you'd like. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Privacy is a squishy concept, one that constantly evolves with the times—and with changing technologies. Advances in how we store and communicate information shift expectations around what we can keep to ourselves, and what the rest of the world is able to know. The disruption of established privacy norms is nothing new: People were concerned when the postcard came out, for example, because they believed mail should be private. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every day, companies like Google and Apple wage a constant battle to keep malicious apps out of their marketplaces and off people's phones. And while they do catch a lot of malware before it does any damage, there are always a few nasty infiltrators that manage to sneak by and end up getting downloaded by thousands of consumers. No one wants these mistakes to happen, but when you're a crucial app store for the Department of Defense, these mistakes can't happen. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It has been, to be quite honest, a fairly bad week, as far as weeks go. But despite the sustained downbeat news, a few good things managed to happen as well. So we'll start with those. California has passed the strongest digital privacy law in the United States, for starters, which as of 2020 will give customers the right to know what data companies use, and to disallow those companies from selling it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nicole Camarillo was touring the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland in early 2017 when a young captain—I’ll call him Matt, due to the sensitivity of his position—crossed her path. I’ve got to talk to that kid, Camarillo remembers thinking. Just weeks before, she’d seen Matt deliver a presentation on a tool he was developing to counter enemy drone strikes in the Middle East. The technology, he explained, was being developed on a “shoestring budget. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In March 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a type of National Security Agency bulk monitoring known as "upstream" surveillance. More than three years after the ACLU originally filed the suit, the case is still mired in procedural and bureaucratic limbo. But on Friday, a hearing over one such roadblock in Maryland district court could bring long-awaited progress. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

California lawmakers unanimously passed a new privacy bill on Thursday that would give residents of the state more control over the information businesses collect on them and impose new penalties on businesses that don’t comply. It is the first law of its kind in the United States. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee want Matt Oczkowski, a former employee of the now defunct consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, to answer questions about how his new company, Data Propria, uses consumer data. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the current Supreme Court’s longest-serving member, announced his retirement Wednesday, paving the way for Trump to shape the future America’s highest court . Nominated by former President Ronald Reagan in 1987, the 81-year-old justice has served as the crucial swing vote in a number of landmark cases, including rulings that legalized same-sex marriage and preserved abortion rights. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You've probably never heard of the marketing and data aggregation firm Exactis. But it may well have heard of you. And now there's also a good chance that whatever information the company may possess about you, it recently leaked onto the public internet, available to any hacker who simply knew where to look. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Monday, police in Florida abandoned a pilot program that had put Amazon’s facial recognition powers at their disposal. On Wednesday, representatives from the country’s most powerful technology companies will gather in San Francisco to take a hard look at the industry’s approach to privacy. And on Thursday, the California legislature will vote on a bill that would grant internet users more power over their data than ever before in the United States. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are more Wi-Fi devices in active use around the world—roughly 9 billion—than there are human beings. That ubiquity makes protecting Wi-Fi from hackers one of the most important tasks in cybersecurity. Which is why the arrival of next-generation wireless security protocol WPA3 deserves your attention: Not only is it going to keep Wi-Fi connections safer, but also it will help save you from your own security shortcomings. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In a highly anticipated decision released Friday, the US Supreme Court updated Fourth Amendment protections for the digital era. In a 5-4 ruling, the court decided in Carpenter v. United States that the government generally needs a warrant in order to access cell site location information, which is automatically generated whenever a mobile phone connects to a cell tower and stored by wireless carriers for years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What's that? A week with nearly as much good news as bad in the world of privacy and security? It's true! Especially the privacy part. On Friday, the Supreme Court issued a hotly anticipated ruling in Carpenter v. United States, establishing that the government will need to get a warrant if it wants to track your location with cell sites. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Lawmakers in California have introduced a sweeping privacy bill to the state legislature that would give Californians unprecedented control over their data and reign in the power of their Silicon Valley neighbors. Introduced by state assemblyman Ed Chau and state senator Robert Hertzberg, the bill would allow California residents to find out what information businesses and data brokers collect about them, where that information comes from, and how it's shared. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2015, the United States and China agreed to a digital truce that banned hacking private companies to steal trade secrets. And though the agreement has been touted as a success, it hasn't stopped Chinese state-sponsored hackers from pushing the envelope of acceptable behavior. Moreover, it certainly hasn't slowed types of hacking that fall outside the purview of the accord. Lately, it seems, that means defense intelligence gathering. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices