A practical and secure multi-keyword search method over encrypted cloud data

Cloud computing technologies become more and more popular every year, as many organizations tend to outsource their data utilizing robust and fast services of clouds while lowering the cost of hardware ownership. Although its benefits are welcomed, privacy is still a remaining concern that needs to be addressed. We propose an efficient privacy-preserving search method over encrypted cloud data that utilizes minhash functions. Most of the work in literature can only support a single feature search in queries which reduces the effectiveness. One of the main advantages of our proposed method is the capability of multi-keyword search in a single query. The proposed method is proved to satisfy adaptive semantic security definition. We also combine an effective ranking capability that is based on term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) values of keyword document pairs. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is proved to be privacy-preserving, efficient and effective

Delivering on Open Government: The Obama Administration's Unfinished Legacy

This report examines progress made during President Obama's first term toward open government goals outlined in a comprehensive set of recommendations that the open government community issued in November 2008, titled Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda. We examine activity in the three main areas of the 2008 report: creating an environment within government that is supportive of transparency, improving public use of government information, and reducing the secrecy related to national security issues

Cross Border Data Flows: Could Foreign Protectionism Hurt U.S. Jobs?: Hearing Before the Subcomm. On Commerce, Mfg. & Trade of the H. Comm. on Energy & Commerce, 113th Cong., Sept. 17, 2014 (Statement of Laura K. Donohue)

Documents released over the past year detailing the National Security Agency’s telephony metadata collection program and interception of international content under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) directly implicated U.S. high technology companies in government surveillance. The result was an immediate, and detrimental, impact on U.S. firms, the economy, and U.S. national security. The first Snowden documents, printed June 5, 2013, revealed that the U.S. government had served orders on Verizon, directing the company to turn over telephony metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The following day, The Guardian published classified slides detailing how the NSA had intercepted international content under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The type of information obtained ranged from E-mail, video and voice chat, videos, photos, and stored data, to Voice over Internet Protocol, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity, and online social networking details. The companies involved read like a who’s who of U.S. Internet giants: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. More articles highlighting the extent to which the NSA had become embedded in the U.S. high tech industry followed. In September 2013 ProPublica and the New York Times revealed that the NSA had enjoyed considerable success in cracking commonly-used cryptography. The following month the Washington Post reported that the NSA, without the consent of the companies involved, had obtained millions of customers’ address book data: in one day alone, some 444,743 email addresses from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and 22,881 from other providers. The extent of upstream collection stunned the public – as did slides demonstrating how the NSA had bypassed the companies’ encryption, intercepting data as it transferred between the public Internet and the Google cloud. Further documents suggested that the NSA had helped to promote encryption standards for which it already held the key or whose vulnerabilities the NSA understood but not taken steps to address. Beyond this, press reports indicated that the NSA had at times posed as U.S. companies—without their knowledge—in order to gain access to foreign targets. In November 2013 Der Spiegel reported that the NSA and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had created bogus versions of Slashdot and LinkedIn, so that when employees from the telecommunications firm Belgacom tried to access the sites from corporate computers, their requests were diverted to the replica sites that then injected malware into their machines. As a result of growing public awareness of these programs, U.S. companies have lost revenues, even as non-U.S. firms have benefited. In addition, numerous countries, concerned about consumer privacy as well as the penetration of U.S. surveillance efforts in the political sphere, have accelerated localization initiatives, begun restricting U.S. companies’ access to local markets, and introduced new privacy protections—with implications for the future of Internet governance and U.S. economic growth. These effects raise attendant concerns about U.S. national security. Congress has an opportunity to redress the current situation in at least three ways. First, and most importantly, reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would provide for greater restrictions on NSA surveillance. Second, new domestic legislation could extend better protections to consumer privacy. These shifts would allow U.S. industry legitimately to claim a change in circumstance, which would help them to gain competitive ground. Third, the integration of economic concerns at a programmatic level within the national security infrastructure would help to ensure that economic matters remain central to national security determinations in the future

Resettlement of young people leaving custody: Lessons from the literature

This literature review aims to set out the research and practice evidence about effective resettlement services for children and young adults and can be used to inform future policy and practice to ensure service delivery is evidence based. The findings of the review will help to steer the focus of Beyond Youth Custody’s research over the duration of the programme and act as a baseline to assess how our understanding has advanced in terms of what works in facilitating the transition from youth custody to the community and beyond. In addition, the review highlights some examples of good practice, as well as the emerging key principles of effective resettlement provision

Tips for Working with Jobseekers Newly Released from Prison

People who have been recently released from prison face a number of serious barriers to employment such as long gaps in work history and the stigma of a criminal record. The Transitional Jobs strategy has shown promise in helping people reentering from prison gain valuable work experience and stay out of prison by providing recently released prisoners with immediate paid income, work experience, work readiness training and supportive services

Can You Hear Me Now? : Expectations of Privacy, False Friends, and the Perils of Speaking Under the Supreme Court\u27s Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence

Part I of this article offers a brief history of the development of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and the Court\u27s articulation and application of what has come to be known as the exclusionary rule, which forbids some (but not all) government use of evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Part II focuses on the false-friend cases, elaborating the Court\u27s reasoning and showing why, although the most famous cases involve varying kinds of activity from electronic recording to eavesdropping to simple reporting of the false friend\u27s observation, the Court\u27s method has united these cases under a single analytical rubric. Part III discusses the unavoidable implication of the Court\u27s approach, and Part IV examines whether there is a principled way out of the dilemma that the Court\u27s reasoning has created. It concludes that there is, but the solution requires recognizing two unstated assumptions that undergird the Court\u27s jurisprudence in this area, assumptions that, when exposed to light, are highly questionable. The Court needs to reconsider how expectations of privacy really work. It has tended to view expectation of privacy as an all-or-nothing proposition, so that for Fourth Amendment purposes, lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to one person connotes that there cannot be a reasonable expectation with respect to anyone else. The Article suggests that this approach does not reflect the way that either those who wrote and ratified the Fourth Amendment or the majority of Americans today think about privacy. The Supreme Court should recognize, therefore, that when the government employs false friends to gather evidence for use in a criminal case, it does no more than to undertake a search with other eyes and ears and a seizure with other hands. It is a government intrusion all the same. Accordingly, the Fourth Amendment\u27s warrant requirement, which demands probable cause and the acquiescence of a neutral magistrate in the proposed search, should apply in full force

The Wiltshire Wills Feasibility Study

The Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office has nearly ninety thousand wills in its care. These records are neither adequately catalogued nor secured against loss by facsimile microfilm copies. With support from the Heritage Lottery Fund the Record Office has begun to produce suitable finding aids for the material. Beginning with this feasibility study the Record Office is developing a strategy to ensure the that facsimiles to protect the collection against risk of loss or damage and to improve public access are created.<p></p> This feasibility study explores the different methodologies that can be used to assist the preservation and conservation of the collection and improve public access to it. The study aims to produce a strategy that will enable the Record Office to create digital facsimiles of the Wills in its care for access purposes and to also create preservation quality microfilms. The strategy aims to seek the most cost effective and time efficient approach to the problem and identifies ways to optimise the processes by drawing on the experience of other similar projects. This report provides a set of guidelines and recommendations to ensure the best use of the resources available for to provide the most robust preservation strategy and to ensure that future access to the Wills as an information resource can be flexible, both local and remote, and sustainable

Unauthorized Employment in the United States: Issues, Options, and Legislation

[Excerpt] As immigration reform and the illegal alien population have gained congressional and public attention in the past several years, the issue of unauthorized employment has come to the fore. It is widely accepted that most unauthorized aliens enter and remain in the United States in order to work. Thus, eliminating employment opportunities for these aliens has been seen as key to curtailing unauthorized immigration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 amended the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to add provisions, sometimes referred to as employer sanctions, that made it unlawful for an employer to knowingly hire, recruit or refer for a fee, or continue to employ an alien who is not authorized to work. These provisions also established a paper-based employment eligibility verification system, known as the I-9 system, which requires that employers examine documents presented by new hires to verify identity and work eligibility, and complete and retain I-9 verification forms. There is general agreement that the I-9 process has been undermined by fraud. Employers violating INA prohibitions on unauthorized employment may be subject to civil or criminal penalties. The Department of Homeland Security\u27s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (DHS/ICE) is responsible for enforcing the INA prohibitions on unauthorized employment. Building on the employment verification system established by IRCA, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) directed the Attorney General to conduct three pilot programs for employment eligibility confirmation. Under the Basic Pilot program (known now as E-Verify), the only one of the three pilots still in operation, participating employers verify new hires\u27 employment eligibility by submitting information about these workers that is checked against Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if applicable, DHS databases. E-Verify is scheduled to terminate on March 6, 2009, in accordance with Division A of the Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009. A variety of options has been put forth to curtail unauthorized employment and related practices, a selection of which is discussed in this report. Some of these options would build on the current employment eligibility verification system; these include making electronic verification mandatory, increasing existing penalties, or increasing resources for worksite enforcement. Others represent new approaches to address unauthorized employment, such as shifting responsibility for employment eligibility verification from employers to the federal government. Multiple bills related to unauthorized employment have been introduced in the 111th Congress. Among them, the Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009 (H.R. 1105), as introduced and as passed by the House, includes a provision to extend E-Verify through September 30, 2009. Several other provisions on the E-Verify program, including provisions to extend the program until November 2013 and to require that none of the funds made available under the act be used to enter into a contract with an entity that does not participate in E-Verify, were included in the House-passed version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (H.R. 1). These provisions, however, were not included in the Senate-passed version of H.R. 1 or in the final enacted version of the bill. This report will be updated as developments warrant