“Universal strong encryption will protect all of us -- our innovation, our private thoughts, and so many other things of value -- from thieves of all kinds,” but there also are many costs associated with the use of encryption, FBI Director James Comey wrote in a post for the Lawfare blog on Monday. “Public safety in the United States has relied for a couple centuries on the ability of the government, with predication, to obtain permission from a court to access the ‘papers and effects’ and communications of Americans,” Comey wrote. When the government can no longer see an individual’s communications, while respecting Fourth Amendment rights, public safety is affected, he said. The Islamic State group in Syria is recruiting and “tasking dozens of troubled Americans to kill people, a process that increasingly takes part through mobile messaging apps that are end-to-end encrypted, communications that may not be intercepted, despite judicial orders under the Fourth Amendment,” he said. It’s not just the Islamic State, but criminal actors throughout the U.S. and world “can communicate with impunity in a world of universal strong encryption,” he said. The American people will decide if the public safety benefits outweigh the privacy costs of universal strong encryption, but from his perspective, Comey said, strong encryption “will inexorably affect my ability” to keep people safe.

ICANN Vice President-Domain Names Services & Industry Cyrus Namazi acknowledged the presence of ongoing campaigns against controversial portions of an initial report by the Generic Names Supporting Organization’s Policy Development Process Working Group on Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues (PPSAI). Privacy advocates are urging Internet users to file comments opposing a portion of the PPSAI report that explores whether to recommend that ICANN bar owners of domain names that point to commercial websites from using privacy and proxy services’ information on the WHOIS registration database. Privacy advocates are also opposing a portion of the PPSAI report that explores whether to require registrars to release domain name owners’ information for websites without a court order when a website violates IP rights, distributes malware or engages in illegal activities (see 1507010065). “The debate will continue until the report is final, and we encourage any and all to voice their opinion,” Namazi said in a statement Wednesday. “This type of discourse is a critical element of the multistakeholder model.”

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab coined the term “digital amnesia” to describe the phenomenon of forgetting information that Americans trust a digital device to store and remember for them, the company said Wednesday in a report. That the phenomenon is so prevalent points up the need for Americans to adequately protect their devices with “readily available IT security products,” but protection of the sort that Kaspersky and others sell is lacking, the report said. Kaspersky canvassed 1,000 U.S. consumers aged 16 to 55 online in May and found that 91 percent “can easily admit their dependency on the Internet and devices as a tool for remembering and an extension of their brain,” it said. And 44 percent said their smartphone holds almost everything they need to know or recall. “Not surprisingly, the study also found that the loss or compromise of data stored on digital devices, and smartphones in particular, would leave many users devastated,” the company said. But in the study, 28 percent admitted they don’t protect any of their devices with “additional security,” it said. The firm said it found just one in three installs extra IT security on a smartphone, one in five on a tablet.

Ten of the top 20 fastest broadband regions in the world are in the U.S., said a recent report from Akamai, according to an analysis of the data from NCTA. Delaware, Washington, D.C., and Virginia come in at three, four and five on the list with average peak connection speeds of 85.6, 79.2 and 79 Mbps respectively. Singapore is No. 1 with 98.5 Mbps. Maryland and California are 19 and 20 on the list with average peak connection speeds of 64.4 and 64.3 Mbps, NCTA said. The rankings are reflective of infrastructure and technology, as well as basic geography, it said. Each of the nations at the top of the list is small and densely populated while many of the U.S. states on the list share similar geography, the analysis from NCTA said.

U.N. member states began meetings Wednesday in New York on preparations for the U.N.’s Dec. 15-16 meeting on outcomes of the past 10 years of implementation of the World Summit on the Information Society. The December meeting “will take stock of the progress made in the implementation of WSIS outcomes and to address potential information and communications technology gaps and areas for continued focus, as well as challenges, including bridging the digital divide and harnessing ICTs for development,” the U.N. said in a news release. Preparatory meetings Wednesday and Thursday were meant to consult with “relevant” WSIS stakeholders and determine areas where further focus is needed, the U.N. said.

“Don’t send verification codes to anyone via text or email,” wrote Kristin Cohen, chief of the FTC's Office of Technology Research and Investigation, in a blog post Wednesday. Verification codes should be used only on the login page, Cohen said. Individuals who get a verification code they didn’t request should tell the provider, she said, because it could be a sign someone is tampering with the account. It’s possible a hacker with an individual’s email address and mobile number can pretend to be an individual’s email provider and send a text asking for a verification code to unlock the email account, Cohen said. The hacker can learn a lot of information looking through an email account or change email settings so emails are forwarded directly to the hacker, she said.

Email phishing campaigns appearing to be from the Office of Personnel Management and the identity protection firm CSID increased after last month's announcement that OPM suffered breaches, said the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (U.S.-CERT) in an alert Tuesday. “For those affected by the recent data breach, the legitimate domain used for accessing identity protection services is https://opm.csid.com.” Users should visit the OPM website for more information and report suspicious emails to U.S.-CERT, it said.

After reports the intelligence community was resistant to integrate its systems with those operated by the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) due to security concerns before recent breaches at OPM occurred, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow in Government Studies Benjamin Wittes questioned in a blog post Tuesday why “nobody in the intelligence community bothered, it seems, to help secure OPM’s systems.” If the Director of National Intelligence’s office thought the data OPM managed wasn't secure, why not secure those systems, Wittes asked. Though he says OPM isn’t without fault, “identifying intelligence targets in the federal government and securing them against professional intelligence adversaries is really the job of others in the federal government, and at least some of those others had their eyes on this problem,” he said. “The more I think about it, the less I think it makes sense to blame OPM for the failure here, and the more I think the intelligence community itself must take responsibility for it -- particularly for any portions of the breach or breaches that involve data for security clearance background checks,” Wittes said. The Office of the DNI didn't comment.

SoundHound announced Apple Music integration with its music app Tuesday. An “Apple Music -- Listen Now” option, available on the home page and within song pages, links to Apple Music, where users can stream music of artists discovered through SoundHound features including music identification, personalized history, top charts and music maps, said SoundHound. Users will also be able to stream Beats 1 Radio from within song pages, said the company.

Cisco plans to buy OpenDNS, a San Francisco-based Internet security company, for $635 million in cash, assumed equity and retention-based incentives, to "add broad visibility and threat intelligence," Cisco said in a news release Tuesday. The purchase was spurred by Cisco's desire to "reduce the time to detect and respond to threats, and mitigate risk of a security breach" by combining its security capabilities with OpenDNS' "broad visibility, unique predictive threat intelligence and cloud platform," Cisco said. The buyer said it expects to complete the deal in Q1.