medical – Jupiter Broadcasting

ANGELA: This is Womens’ Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we’re interviewing Darci Freedman and she works at the same company as me. She’s actually my bosses’ boss, so it’s pretty fun to get her on and talk about the awesome ways the company was founded , and how we’ve involved women right from the get go and all the kind of cool things we do as a company.
ANGELA: Yes indeed. It is a good interview. But, before we get into it, I just want to mention that you can support this network and this show by going to Patreon.com/today. I think our lowest subscription, and you might be able to go lower, but our lowest subscription is $3.00 a month, and that supports all the shows on the network. It keeps us up and going. We have a lot of technology podcast, other ones, that you can check out in addition to Women’s Tech Radio, and just show your support for the show there.
PAIGE: And we got started with the interview today by asking Darci what her role is at the company.
DARCI: I manage a team of about a dozen people who handle the acquisition of content for a proprietary platform that is targeted towards non-legal regulatory professionals in the compliance arena. So, a lot of big data.
ANGELA: Wow, that is a title. That’s great.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: That says a lot and nothing at the same time.
DARCI: I know.
PAIGE: And it’s so beautifully jargonized.
ANGELA: It is, yes. That’s exactly.
PAIGE: So, for full disclosure for everybody on the show, Darci is actually one of my bosses, and so we work for the same company. And I am one of those people that she managers in her awesome way to help acquire this content — although, you make it sound like we’re pirates. I know of like it. We’re going to acquire content.
ANGELA: Arrg.
PAIGE: Which we’re not.
ANGELA: I know.
P; We use open government data to do this awesome work.
DARCI: Yes.
PAIGE: So, I know Darci, that you have kind of an interesting non-traditional story. You are actually not a technical person by background. What is your actual background?
DARCI: All right, here it is. It’s interesting. I’m an attorney. I am a former litigator. Actually, the way I say it is I’m a reformed litigator. Which, if you were a legal audience you’d be laughing hysterically at. But, I was a health lawyer, and basically I had the corporate job where the hours were enormous and the time commitment was just huge, and it just took a huge chunk out of me personally to do that. And I was, you know, I really enjoyed it, but after I had my first child I just really didn’t see how it was going to jive practicing and that level of commitment, and kind of the drain on me personally and in my personal life with how I wanted to raise my child. So, I actually stopped working for eight months after I had my first child. And I didn’t do anything. And that wa really weird.
PAIGE: Except be a parent, which is a full-time job.
ANGELA: Which is enough.
DARCI: Well, right. Yes. I didn’t do anything for air quotes “work”. Of course, I was doing a ton at home with my son and I had a kind of extreme situation with his birth, but when I started thinking I would like to get back to my intellectual pursuits and start something professionally, I had a relationship with somebody and he had a startup company. It was in the health arena. He said, why don’t you come work for us and start doing some writing. You know, you’re a subject matter expert in this area, come on and do some writing. And so, that’s how i started. I actually worked with a couple of other attorneys at this startup and anybody in startup experience knows, it’s kind of all hands on deck. You go in, you’re not in a defined role. You throw in any help you can render in any way that is needed at the given moment. And so, I started learning about the platform. How we acquired content for it. And things just kind of snowballed from there.
PAIGE: So this was a tech startup that you got involved with?
DARCI: Yes, and then it was later — I think it was 2007 we were acquired by a large Dutch based publishing company and, you know, I’ve been at the company for almost a dozen years now, and it’s been really interesting time to watch publishing and traditional print-based communications and tools, and the transformation of that into electronic products and workflow tools. So, we kind of — we were this startup that was acquired by this big publishing company, and we really pushed the envelope, because we didn’t have this huge project plan with dates planned out for ten years. That’s just not how we operated. And we really kind of were — we were known in the beginning as a bit of rabble rousers, because we didn’t conform to this kind of corporate ideal, and the normal way that a publishing company did things.
PAIGE: It’s almost like you got to come on — you know, we talk about technical debt, and it’s almost like the other company had publishing debt.
DARCI: They did, and they still do. I think most publishing companies are still working to move towards electronic, but to me print was something that I had only done in my legal background and it was not something that I did at this startup. We were all electronic. Indeed, the person who founded the company had another company — another startup at a different point in time, and he was the first person to put the federal register, which is this huge daily document that the federal government puts out that says here are the laws, and rules, and regulations from all of these agencies for the day. And that used to be only in print. I mean, just huge rainforest that were killed publishing that. And he put that federal register online in electronic form, and so he was very innovative. And he had this fabulous model, which was exactly in tune with what I wanted. He thought, there are all these really, really talented technical and non-technical women that want to raise families, and want to have a great work life balance, and he hired them. And he hired them into all of these different kind of scenarios. You could work from home, you could be in the office, you could work at night, you could work during the day when your children were sleeping if you were at home watching them. And he really capitalized on a lot of talent that otherwise really didn’t have an outlet or a place to go.
PAIGE: I didn’t know that actually. That’s really fantastic. So, do you think that made a huge difference with the way the company was kind of founded and got started, like to have that flexibility, but also to have that female talent onboarded so easily?
DARCI: It absolutely did. And I benefited from that model, and it is exactly how I operate today. In fact, I think when I came on board, other the actual founder of the company, I don’t think that there was — there was only one other man. Everybody else was a woman, and they were all over the country. At that time I think it was Denver Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire. Texas, and that is still the way I operate today. I just want people that are really talented. And there are a lot of really talented women out there, but here are these kind of barriers that we bump into.
ANGELA: Right, Paige briefly kind of talked to me about what you guys do, and it definitely applies to me, or applied to me, I guess. I worked in the medical industry for a while and I got to learn the retail side of it. What we would do is we would go onto like the DSHS website and print out these massive fee schedules, like you said, a forest, you know?
DARCI: Yes.
ANGELA: And everybody would have one at their desk. We had these desktop things where you could hole punch and then slide sections in, and it would be about 12 inches long full of all these different things. And we’d have to tab the pages, and of course, they release a new one almost every quarter. How does what you guys do change that?
DARCI: Well, in the beginning, because your example is right on. Fee schedules, code boos, that’s right up our alley. We have a whole line of coding and reimbursement products. I actually have to fight against that type of historical perspective on a daily basis. This just happened to me yesterday. I will literally have people that scan and PDF pages of the hard copy code book and send it to me and say, it doesn’t look like this. We need to make it look like this. These are people that I work with in the products that we’re developing. And I have to say, no we’re not trying to make — the online electronic experience in looking at a book, you have to move away from the antiquated notion that all you’ve done is take the book and put it up online. I mean, that’s a PDF.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: That’s very different from a workflow tool. A book that is in electronic format that you can actually use. So, that’s something we’re constantly struggling with. And the way that we kind of get — I push the envelope. We ask those questions. Why? Why would I reproduce exactly what’s in the book?
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: I mean, unfortunately I have to buy — I buy those books so that I can say, but yeah look, this is — it doesn’t work the way they’ve set it up. Let’s restructure or modify some of the meta tagging so that we get search results in a certain way, and kind of get people away from the notion of, oh the book is electronic, it’s online, but it should be exactly the same as the hard copy.
ANGELA: Right, well to support that, what we’d have to do, specifically if we were shipping diapers. There’s a lot of age restrictions and quantity restrictions on that on a monthly basis. But also ,certain ICD-9 codes have to be used with it, and then that determines — and then also HCPCS codes. So, you have to use the fee schedule, the ICD-9 book and the — you know, so having an online resource — none of them say — the ICD-9 code doesn’t say, you also need to choose this HCPCS code with it, or this quantity limitation. What I did, which is like sudo what you guys do, is I modified our proprietary software so that it had identifier codes that would automatically tell the customer service rep, hey it has to be this diagnosis, or hey it’s this quantity. You know, you can’t have more than 150 or whatever. So, I tried and I made a cheat sheet that combined all three of those resources that really helped streamline then. But, I am super excited. I really want to check out your product now, because I think it could really help. I still have a relationship with that former employer.
PAIGE: That’s hilarious. You just named three of the things that make my head hurt, because I go in and I’m the person that does all the interlinking between ICD-9 codes and HCPCS and our current regulations.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh, yeah.
DARCI: It’s a lot. We do have a set of tools and a set of reimbursement calculators that we’ve developed that work, as Paige just indicated, in conjunction with the more explanatory material you might read out of the code book.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: ANd so, we put in different elements in the UI that flag things for folks.
ANGELA: Exactly. Right.
DARCI: So, you know, a little red flag, literally. If you want to code this, you have to think about this. It’s extremely complicated. I will tell you, I had — this is something that I fight against a lot. It’s really interesting. I have really, really talented developer types that we work with and we’re doing a revamp of some of those tools and calculators. We have a database fellow that, I mean, he knows the ins and outs of Medicare and Medicaid and all of — you know, ICD-9, ICD-10, HCPCS, CPT. I mean, he just knows it. He has a subject matter expertise, and then he’s a database guy. We hired him specifically because of that expertise. He was getting in pulled in all of these other directions and I kept hitting a wall. I kept saying to these folks, you know, we need this fellow back to work on these products. He was hired for this. Oh, we have other database folks. They’re used to working with really complicated data. They can dig into it. And we exposed it to them and they were like, wow the health care Medicare, Medicaid, medical coding, reimbursement payment is extremely complicated, and they backed right off and said wow you really do need to oftentimes have some underlying subject matter expertise in order to handle this type of data.
ANGELA: Yep. And I know, I worked on a federal grant in King County for a little while, here in Washington, called New Freedom. I was actually the pioneering purchasing agent for that. I would meet with the people going on to the program and try to figure out what they should their government dollars to make them more independent. That was the new freedom part. It was really hard, because I had come from mainly the retail side of things. Not necessarily services. And now I could offer a wide range of, you know, they could hydrotherapy or massage, different things. And it was so hard to find the fee schedules and know that I had the right one and figure out what they could get covered and not have to use their dollars for.
PAIGE: We’ve kind of talked about two different angles of your job. You work with a publishing company and you work in the medical field. Which of the two do you think it’s been harder to drag into technology?
DARCI: I would say publishing, without a doubt. And the reason for that is simply financial. For Medicare and Medicaid, the government has — generally, when they make a change and they want a program or a payment system to go electronic and be more modern in that sense, they do incentive programs. So, we will pay you more if you move in this direction. And then, they have a period of time that’s kind of — then the incentive payment goes away and if you aren’t where you need to be from an electronic perspective, you will get a penalty. So, that’s how they do it. So, they’ve been — providers and folks in health care industry payers/payees, they’ve been motivated by dollars. Publishing, I think it took them a long time to wake up to the fact that they weren’t going to be able to sale books on paper forever. I mean, really.
PAIGE: Yeah, I have to say, being in some of the meetings I’ve been in, it was really surprising to me that meetings this year people are still talking about growing the print publishing business.
ANGELA: Mm-hmm.
DARCI: Mm-hmm. I know that our company has made it a decisive part of their BDP to move from print to electronic. The dollars show that that’s where you need to be. And not just electronic, right? So, we need to move beyond, you know, I tend — we all fall prey to using these terms, but not just electronic, to workflow tools. Things that you can — that just integrate into your job and make it easier. So, that’s where we hope to be headed. There are a lot of barriers there, but there are some really good things that have been going on too. We — Paige, not on the team you’re on directly, but on some of the other teams that I manage, we have started with agile scrum and that’s helped a lot. That’s helped a lot and brought us a lot forward with development activities, but you still run into some walls with management who want a nice waterfall timeline.
ANGELA: Speaking of, what is Paige’s work ethic. No, I’m just kidding. I thought I’d slide that in there somewhere.
PAIGE: That was very subtle.
ANGELA: Yeah, I know, right?
DARCI: Well, you know, so here, I will kind of indirectly respond to that. We are a thin and trim team of people, and we handle a huge volume of data compared to some of our counterparts in other parts of the company. We may have been rabble rousers initially, but when you look at our bottom line in terms of the number of people that we have on the team and the actual content that they process, the volume of data is just huge compared to some of the other parts of the company that really get bogged down in process. So, to that end, we are a highly producing team and it’s because of the people. I really think it’s because they have a lot of flexibility. I always say when I’m hiring somebody, you need to have some core business hours that you’re available for meetings and whatever else, but I’m flexible. You can work when you want. You can work the hours that you want. We have some of those mad programer types who are working at 2:00 a.m. and that’s when they’re beautiful stuff is outputted. And then we have others who keep to a more traditional schedule, but I think that in part it’s that flexibility. That recognition of creativity. Which, I think people don’t often think goes along with a tech role or a tech background. I think they think of some person in front of a keyboard and all these white numbers running up on the screen, but there’s a lot of creatively in tech and I think you just kind of have to let that happen and out of it these amazing things come. That’s what I think of my team and everybody who’s on it.
PAIGE: Yeah, the flexibility at the company is what keeps me creative, keeps me going, so I totally agree. I think being a modern facing company and having a remote workforce and managing it so well has been an amazing experience for me to be part of. I wasn’t sold on remote work before, but now it’s part of my life.
DARCI: I think ten years ago, I mean I was working remotely ten years ago. I think that now — ten years ago people used to say, working you have to manage that and not everybody can work remotely. Everybody can work remotely. You just have to have management and a team that are in communication and that’s all you really need. There’s a lot of to-do that’s often made about remote teams. A lot of that is logistics, and I don’t really think that people need to be in an office, as long as you’ve got the open lines of communication going. I think then you’re good.
ANGELA: What tool do you use most to keep in communication with your team?
DARCI: For development purposes we use VersionOne for all of our tracking of our backlog items. It has a conversation tool and we use that, I would say primarily.
PAIGE: And VersionOne, for people who don’t know, is an agile software development process management tool.
ANGELA: Is it the number 1 or spelled out? Do you know? Number 1?
DARCI: Oh, it is spelled out.
PAIGE: It is spelled out, yeah.
ANGELA: You had a 50/50 chance there Paige.
DARCI: I think it’s all –
PAIGE: It’s bookmarked on my browser.
DARCI: I think it’s all one word too with the –
PAIGE: Yeah, VersionOne.
DARCI: And then, of course, we use some of the other chat type of tools. But I would say in VersionOne there’s a lot of conversation that happens in that tool. There’s a dedicated kind of team meeting room that you can design and we use that quite actively.
PAIGE: My team uses Skype a lot.
DARCI: Yeah.
PAIGE: So, Darci, we’ve talked some about being the small lean machine team inside the bigger company, and being kind of originally founded as a women’s centric company. Have you found transitioning into the bigger company with kind of it’s more traditional setup with gender norms difficult or have you had any pushback there?
DARCI: It’s a yes and no answer. The head of our company is a woman. The head of the business unit that I’m in is a woman, but those aren’t per se the tech parts of the organization. So, from that perspective that’s really heartening that I work for a company where the CEO is a woman, and the lead in my business unit is also a woman. And there are several other women in key roles. Not as much in the technical part of the company. And that’s been a little bit disheartening. We had kind of a restructuring in the last few years, and I remember my first exposure to the more kind of technical unit that kind of came out of that. And going into a meeting and being very exciting and having the head of that put up a slide deck so that we could see who all of his people were. And I just remember thinking, wow that’s pretty white, and that’s pretty male, and middle aged. It was really a little off-putting. So, we’re working to change that. I have a lot of really talented people on my team that I can see moving up through the ranks that I try to get a lot of exposure to. I think that’s one of the things that I really try — I try to do it for my entire team, is really get them exposure to the other parts of the company and other technical groups and organizations in the company, so that they can hopefully rise up through the ranks. But I think there are unfortunately some barriers there. I’ve experienced them myself. Sometimes they’re really subtle. Sometimes they’re more overt, like an org chart that reveals that it’s just all men.
PAIGE: What would an example of a subtle one look like?
DARCI: Actually, it just happened fairly recently. Basically we had — there was a technical issue with a resource and he was being kind of cross-utilized and we needed him on something, and he was supposed to be a dedicated resource to our project. Myself and my business counterpart, who happens to be a woman, reached out to our appropriate chain of command and flagged the issue. Ended up in a telephone call with a bunch of other senior level managers and myself and the other person who had raised the issue. And I got on the phone and it was just one of these conversations where it started — you know, it’s a very subtle thing. It’s actually been in the news a lot lately, this notion of subtle prejudice or subtle sexism. The Google conference that they had where their CEO kept interrupting their CTO, and he did that much more than he interrupted anybody else on the panel. It was kind of one of the things like that. They weren’t aware of the nomenclature and the tone with which they were handling the conversation. And it was — instead of it actually being an issue, it was let’s get on the phone ladies and let’s talk about the facts. Let’s try to tone down the emotion. It was that kind of tone to the whole conversation.
PAIGE: Wow.
DARCI: And I just kept getting angrier and angrier as the conversation went on, because I thought, I don’t understand what’s going on here. I have a valid issue based in hard numbers that I can show to you. I”m not being emotional. You know, it was that kind of thing. And i called them out on it. I instilled a lot of panic in the few moments that I called them out on it, but I just said I need to raise your attention to an issue, and I don’t know if you’re aware of what you’re doing here. Here’s what you’re doing. You’re starting the conversation off saying that we need to talk in facts. Somehow suggesting that the two women on the phone and the issue that they have raised is not fact based, it’s more emotion based. And then you’re using language like that. I think we were described on the phone as acting like the walking wounded and needing to tone things down and rachet back the rhetoric. All of these kind of phrases and terms that you would — I just was like okay, it’s not 1920.
ANGELA: Right, meant to knock you down a peg.
DARCI: Right. Do you realize what you’re doing? And I had calls — of course they freaked out right, because I called them on it. I had a couple of good calls afterwards with the individuals that were on the phone. One, who was very thoughtful and said I didn’t realize what I was doing, but I have four daughters and they’re just starting their careers, and I want to understand where you’re coming from and what you’re thinking, explain it to me. And we had a really great conversation. The other person, I think, that i had a conversation with, he thinks of himself as a lot more involved than he actually is — tried to tell me that that’s how he always runs his calls.
ANGELA: Oh my goodness.
DARCI: And if I’m on a call with other folks, I will see that they are run indeed the same way.
PAIGE: Well, either way, regardless of if you’re a woman or not, that’s not a great way to handle a call.
ANGELA: No.
DARCI: I agree. I agree, but it definitely had that related to kind of patronizing and you guys are emotional and you can’t really handle this kind of thing. I was like, whoa what is going on here? So, even in a company that is trying to evolve, those kinds of things happen. To me, the most important way to handle those things is to call people out on it. I think we have developed in some way this culture that — where you get this negative backlash for saying anything, right? And I’m just not going to be a part of that. If I feel uncomfortable with the way something is going down, I’m going to let you know.
PAIGE: If you see something say something, right?
DARCI: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: No, I totally — it’s the biggest problem with privileges. You don’t understand that you have privilege if you have it.
DARCI: Right.
PAIGE: The only way to see it is to not have it.
ANGELA: Right. Or to be called on it.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s — exactly.
DARCI: Yeah.
ANGELA: Perspective shift.
PAIGE: It’s our responsibility too to participate in the conversation. We can’t just sit back and say we wish things were different.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: Absolutely. I think it’s really important — I have these two little — I ended up with two sons, and a male dog, and two male cats, and my husband.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
DARCI: So it’s like the alpha-male. I work really hard in trying to call their attention to these kinds of things. Even if it’s just really simple language things.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and from there you can do the show dropdown and find all the Women’s Tech Radio shows. You can also use the contact form to contact us directly, or you can email us WTR@jupiterbroadcasting.com.
PAIGE: The Jupiter Broadcasting website also has our RSS feed or you can find us on iTunes. We’re also heywtr.tumblr.com for transcripts of the show, or you can follow us on Twitter @heywtr.

The post Reformed Litigator | WTR 24 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Legal Cannabis Fallout | Unfilter 128

chris — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 22:44:24 +0000

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A major downside to the legalization of Marijuana is being missed by mainstream commentators & it’s an issue of critical importance. We explain our position from ground zero.

Plus the tragic shooting in France, another look at the falling price of oil, the Sony hack & of course much, much more!

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A photo posted by Jupiter Broadcasting (@jupiterbroadcasting) on Jan 1, 2015 at 8:18pm PST

News

Police hunt three Frenchmen after 12 killed in Paris attack | Reuters

Police are hunting three French nationals, including two brothers from the Paris region, after suspected Islamist gunmen killed 12 people at a satirical magazine on Wednesday, a police official and government source said.

The hooded attackers stormed the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly known for lampooning Islam and other religions, in the most deadly militant attack on French soil in decades.

French police staged a huge manhunt for the attackers who escaped after shooting dead some of France’s top cartoonists as well as two police officers. About 800 soldiers were brought in to shore up security across the capital.

The three men being sought include two brothers aged 32 and 34 as well as a man aged 18 from the area of the northeastern city of Reims, the government source told Reuters.

Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris | Informed Comment

The horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, along with two policemen, by terrorists in Paris was in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public.

The Gasoline Price Crash Continues

CRUDE INVENTORIES:

Crude oil inventories decreased by 3.1 million barrels to a total of 382.4 million barrels. At 382.4 million barrels, inventories are 24.5 million barrels above last year (6.8%) and are well above the upper limit of the average range for this time of year.

**GASOLINE INVENTORIES: **

Gasoline inventories increased by 8.1 million barrels to 237.2 million barrels. At 237.2 million barrels, inventories are up 10.2 million barrels, or 4.5% higher than one year ago.

Former US cybersecurity official gets 25 years for child porn charges

On Monday, a federal judge in Nebraska sentenced the former acting director of cybersecurity for the US Department of Health and Human Services to 25 years in prison on child porn charges.

Timothy DeFoggi, who was convicted back in August 2014, is the sixth person to be convicted in relations to a Nebraska-based child porn Tor-enable website known as PedoBook. That site’s administrator, Aaron McGrath, was sentenced to 20 years last year by the same judge. McGrath famously did not have an administrator password, a mistake that federal investigators were easily able to make use of.

US Airstrikes against ISIS Destroy 184 Humvees and 58 Tanks

At least 184 Humvees, 58 tanks and nearly 700 other vehicles have been destroyed or damaged in the more than 1,600 airstrike missions that have hit more than 3,200 ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria since bombing began last Aug. 8, the U.S. Central Command said Wednesday.

In addition, a total of 26 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 79 artillery and mortar positions, and 673 infantry fighting positions were destroyed, CentCom officials said.

On Tuesday, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said that the cumulative effects of the airstrikes had put ISIS on the defensive and severely restricted the terror group’s ability to communicate and maneuver. The airstrikes have averaged about 11 daily since President Obama authorized them to begin on Aug. 8.

FBI reveals ‘sloppy’ mistakes that connect North Korea to Sony hack

Comey added that the hackers behind the attack, who referred to themselves the Guardians of Peace, made a key “mistake” multiple times when sending emails to Sony employees and publishing leaked data from Sony online.

“Several times they got sloppy,” Comey said at a cybersecurity conference in New York City. “Either because they forgot or they had a technical problem, they connected directly and we could see them. And we could see that the IP addresses that were being used to post and to send the emails were coming from IPs that were exclusively used by the North Koreans.”

“They shut it off very quickly once they saw the mistake,” he added. “But not before we saw where it was coming from.”

FBI explains how it linked North Korea to the Sony Pictures hack

FBi director: "Some serious folks suggested we have it wrong" on #SonyHack "They don't have the facts that I have hey don't see what I see"

— Kaja Whitehouse (@kajawhitehouse) January 7, 2015

Comey isn’t willing to spill the beans on everything since it might show how the US collects intelligence, but he’s quick to chide critics who suggest the hack came from somewhere else (such as an inside job) based solely on the publicly available details. “They don’t see what I see,”

Schneier on Security: Did North Korea Really Attack Sony?

I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the US government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it.

Clues in the hackers’ attack code seem to point in all directions at once. The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks. Korean language in the code also suggests a Korean origin, though not necessarily a North Korean one, since North Koreans use a unique dialect. However you read it, this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It’s easy to fake, and it’s even easier to interpret it incorrectly. In general, it’s a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the “evidence” to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.

No, North Korea Didn’t Hack Sony – The Daily Beast

The FBI and the President may claim that the Hermit Kingdom is to blame for the most high-profile network breach in forever. But almost all signs point in another direction.

Taking a look at these addresses we find that all but one of them are public proxies. Furthermore, checking online IP reputation services reveals that they have been used by malware operators in the past. This isn’t in the least bit surprising: in order to avoid attribution cybercriminals routinely use things like proxies to conceal their connections. No sign of any North Koreans, just lots of common, or garden, internet cybercriminals.

It is this piece of evidence—freely available to anyone with an enquiring mind and a modicum of cyber security experience—which I believe that the FBI is so cryptically referring to when they talk about “additional evidence” they can’t reveal without compromising “national security”.

Essentially, we are being left in a position where we are expected to just take agency promises at face value. In the current climate, that is a big ask.

If we turn the debate around, and look at some evidence that the North Koreans might NOT be behind the Sony hack, the picture looks significantly clearer.

First of all, there is the fact that the attackers only brought up the anti-North Korean bias of “The Interview” after the media did—the film was never mentioned by the hackers right at the start of their campaign. In fact, it was only after a few people started speculating in the media that this and the communication from North Korea “might be linked” that suddenly it did get linked. My view is that the attackers saw this as an opportunity for “lulz”, and a way to misdirect everyone. (And wouldn’t you know it? The hackers are now saying it’s okay for Sony to release the movie, after all.) If everyone believes it’s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die. It’s the perfect smokescreen.

The hackers dumped the data. Would a state with a keen understanding of the power of propaganda be so willing to just throw away such a trove of information? The mass dump suggests that whoever did this, their primary motivation was to embarrass Sony Pictures. They wanted to humiliate the company, pure and simple.

High Note

Mother: Medical marijuana is a ‘miracle drug’ for my son

At least three bills are expected to be before lawmakers in Olympia during the upcoming legislative session that could provide clarity to the legal gray area surrounding medical marijuana.

Right now, medical marijuana is largely unregulated in Washington state. Recreational stores complain that medical retail shops aren’t required to pay taxes or jump through the same administrative hoops. Without legal clarity, medical marijuana stores face the threat of being shut down.

Medical Marijuana a Challenge for Legal Pot States – NYTimes.com

A year into the nation’s experiment with legal, taxed marijuana sales, Washington and Colorado find themselves wrestling not with the federal interference many feared, but with competition from _medical marijuana_or even outright black market sales.

In Washington, the black market has exploded since voters legalized marijuana in 2012, with scores of legally dubious medical dispensaries opening and some pot delivery services brazenly advertising that they sell outside the legal system.

And the number of patients on Colorado’s medical marijuana registry went up, not down, since 2012, meaning more marijuana users there can avoid paying the higher taxes that recreational pot carries.

They’re looking at reining in their medical systems and fixing the big tax differential between medical and recreational weed without harming patients.

“How can you have two parallel systems, one that’s regulated, paying taxes, playing by the rules, and the other that’s not doing any of those things?” said Rick Garza of the Washington Liquor Control Board, which oversees recreational pot.

The difficulty of reconciling medical marijuana with taxed recreational pot offers a cautionary tale for states that might join Washington and Colorado in regulating the adult use of the drug.

Seattle officials have signaled that they intend to start busting delivery services that flout the law and recently sent letters to 330 marijuana businesses warning them that they’ll eventually need to obtain state licenses or be shut down.

Tacoma has also announced plans to close dozens of unregulated pot shops.

Key lawmaker’s proposal: medical pot shops without dried pot

A bill being filed this week by Sen. Ann Rivers would create licenses for medical marijuana dispensaries and require product testing that’s at least as strict as what the state requires in its recreational marijuana stores. But the medical stores could only sell edibles and marijuana concentrates, such as oil — no dried bud. The products would be sales-tax-free.

The bill makes a wide array of changes. Among them: creating a registry of medical marijuana patients and providers, and tightening restrictions on health professionals who authorize medical use. It would have the state Health Department determine what levels of THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive compound, and what ratio of THC to other compounds would be OK for products sold in medical outlets.

It would also strictly limit cooperative gardens. Under current law, such gardens can have up to 10 patients or 45 plants, but there’s no limit on how many cooperative grows are allowed on one property. That loophole has been cited as a reason for the proliferation of medical grows serving hundreds or thousands of patients.
Under Rivers’ bill, cooperative gardens would be limited to four people, one garden per tax parcel

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Thanks for the holiday show : unfilter

The post Legal Cannabis Fallout | Unfilter 128 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Don’t Fire IT | TechSNAP 193

chris — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 18:51:04 +0000

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More and more data breaches are leading to blackmail but the stats don’t tell the whole story. We’ll explain.

Plus the latest in the Sony hack, and the wider reaction. Plus a great batch of emails & much, much more!

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— Show Notes: —

Illinois Hospital being blackmailed with stolen Patient Data

“An Illinois hospital says someone attempted to blackmail it to stop the release of data about some of its patients.”
The hospital chain received an anonymous email asking for a substantial amount of money in order to prevent the release of patient data. A sample of the data was included in the email as proof
“The hospital says it immediately notified law enforcement agencies.”
“An investigation discovered the data relates to patients who visited Clay County Hospital clinics on or before February 2012. A hospital representative declined to disclose how many people are involved but said the data is limited to their names, addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth. No medical information was compromised in the breach”
“The hospital believes the data has not been released so far. It didn’t disclose how the data was obtained but said an audit by an outside expert concluded the hospital hadn’t been hacked.”
The age of the data suggests that the compromise may have involved backups and/or cold storage
It is not clear of the Hospital stores the older data themselves, or if they rely on a 3rd party provider that may have been compromised
“A recent report by the Identity Theft Report Center found that by early December there had been 304 breaches so far this year in the U.S. healthcare sector. That’s 42 percent of the 720 breaches reported across the country. But, in part because of the massive breaches at major retailers, the entire healthcare sector only accounted for 9.7 percent of all records compromised in reported breaches so far in 2014.”

Sony cancels the release of “The Interview” – plays the victim

Sony has apparently cancelled the release of the film that is apparently the cause of the hack of their systems
A number of cinemas had declined to screen the file after vague threats of physical violence were made
“We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public,” Sony’s statement continues. “We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.”
If they stand for freedom of expression, they wouldn’t have cancelled the movie
A number of people believe that the hackers may have found something especially damaging to Sony, and Sony is hoping to avoid the disclosure
Bruce Schneier – “It’s really a phenomenally awesome hack—they completely owned this company,”
“this is like Snowden, only with Sony.” He said that releases from the hack could go on for months.
That seems to suggest that the hackers will soon leak something that will look very, very bad for the company, Schneier says.
Earlier this week, Sony sent a letter to news outlets reporting on the leaks, saying that they could face prosecution for downloading stolen information. That letter, Schneier said, was a signal that the worst is still to come.
Gawker posts a copy of the threatening letter
“The fact that they sent that letter tells me there is stuff still to be found that Sony is terrified of. There’s some really bad stuff in there—stuff they did, stuff they said, stuff that’s illegal. Someone [from Sony] is going to jail for this.”
Reaction to the Sony hack is beyond the realm of stupid – This is not terrorism
Cisco analysis of Wiper malware used at Sony
Newer version of Wiper malware signed with stolen Sony certificate
ThreatPost Digital Undergound Podcast – Details of the Sony Breach
The leak has also covered a number of different plans and plots by the MPAA
Inclusing the MPAA’s post-SOPA plan to make ISP DNS Servers block sites

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The post Don’t Fire IT | TechSNAP 193 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Gupta: Weed Hypocrisy | Unfilter 63

chris — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 22:04:01 +0000

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The War on Drugs has never looked more antiquated after receiving a major blow in public opinion, and by the Justice Department. And while the nation moves forward on the issue, ground zero of Cannabis legalization takes a step backward. We’ll reflect on what might be a legitimate turn for the better, in one of the larger embarrassments for the United States.

But first: An interview with Lavabit’s founder brings into focus the depth and reach of the Obama Administration’s attempt to cover up their warrantless surveillance programs.

Plus our follow up, your feedback, and much much more.

On this week’s Unfilter.

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— Show Notes —

NSA Fallout

NSA ‘secret backdoor’ paved way to U.S. phone, e-mail snooping

Today’s top-secret document leaked by Snowden reveals that “procedures approved on 3 October 2011 now allow for use of certain United States person names and identifiers as query terms when reviewing collected FAA 702 data.”

FAA 702 is a reference to section 702 of a 2008 law that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those amendments created a warrantless surveillance process that could be employed by NSA analysts, but Congress never intended it to be used domestically against American citizens: A congressional report accompanying the law claimed it allows electronic surveillance only of “persons located outside the United States in order to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

“The panel will not report to the DNI. As the DNI’s statement yesterday made clear, the review group will brief its interim findings to the president within 60 days of its establishment, and provide a final report with recommendations no later than December 15 2013.”

She added: "As we announced on Friday, the review group will be made up of independent, outside experts. The DNI’s role is one of facilitation, and the group is not under the direction of or led by the DNI.

“The members require security clearances and access to classified information so they need to be administratively connected to the government, and the DNI’s office is the right place to provide that. The review process and findings will be the group’s.”

Levison said he started Lavabit 10 years ago to capitalize on public concerns about the Patriot Act, offering customers a paid service — between $8 and $16 a year — that would encrypt their emails in ways that would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement agents to decipher. He said that until he shut down, his small company was generating about $100,000 in revenue annually with about 10,000 users paying for the encryption service.

But inviting Hayden to do exactly that is what establishment media outlets do continually. Just yesterday, Face the Nation featured Hayden as the premiere guest to speak authoritatively about how trustworthy the NSA is, how safe it keeps us, and how wise President Obama is for insisting that all of its programs continue. As usual, no mention was made of the role he played in secretly implementing an illegal warrantless spying program aimed directly at the American people.

Michael Hayden, Former NSA Chief: After A Major Attack, U.S. Likely To Seize More Surveillance Powers

You’ve got this metadata. It’s now [currently] queried under very, very narrow circumstances. If the nation suffers an attack, there are other things you could do with that metadata. There are other tools. So in that kind of emergency perhaps you would go to the court and say, ‘In addition to these very limited queries we’re allowed to do, we actually want to launch some complex algorithms against it.’"

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WEED

Sanjay Gupta Changed His Mind On Weed – Business Insider

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, says he was wrong to ignore marijuana’s medical potential when he wrote an opinion piece in 2009 called "Why I would Vote No on Pot

Sanjay Gupta Shows the Medical Marijuana Tide is Turning – Stephanie Slade (usnews.com)

Polling shows people are increasingly open to the notion that not all drugs should be outlawed. A survey by Pew Research Center back in March found a majority of Americans – 52 percent – now say marijuana should be legal. More strikingly, 72 percent agreed that government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are worth, and three in four agreed the drug has “legitimate medical uses.”

Today in America, one in every 15 black men is behind bars.

WEED: A Dr. Sanjay Gupta Special – YouTube

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta cuts through the smoke and travels around the world to uncover the highs and lows of cannabis.

New Questions in Hastings Death

Michael Hastings Writing Expose On CIA Chief John Brennan When He Died

Michael Hastings was working on an expose on CIA director John Brennan at the time of his suspicious death, the wife of the Rolling Stone journalist said on Monday.

Last month, a source sent San Diego 6 News an email from Fred Burton, the president of CIA contractor Straffor. The email claims that Brennan was leading the “witch hunts” against journalists.

Text of the email, which was posted on WikiLeaks, read: “Brennan is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources.”

Michael Hastings’ 911 Callers and New Video Confirm Large Explosions – YouTube

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The post Gupta: Weed Hypocrisy | Unfilter 63 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Keeping You Distracted | Unfilter 13

chris — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 22:06:41 +0000

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We look at the tricks and distractions the campaigns and media use to keep the public focused on their pet topics.

In ACT 1: We unfilter the media\’s talking points around the tragic shooting that took place this last week in the south of Milwaukee. Plus the story behind the bad week medical marijuana had, and some news updates from around the world.

In ACT2: Is the media robbing the American people of their opportunity for a rational, and effective public discussion? This week using the lens of the reignited gun-control debate we\’ll ask some hard questions.

In ACT 3: Some follow up on a few stories from the recent weeks.

All that and much more, in this week\’s Unfilter.

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Show Notes:

ACT ONE:

Tech Related News:

Googlers to Begin Commuting in Self-Driving Cars
Google Creates Interactive Visual About Small Arms Trade
NASA\’s Mars Rover Crashed Into a DMCA Takedown top story on the Unfilter Reddit this week

ACT TWO: Election Year Distractions

ACT THREE: Feedback

Song pick(s) of the week:

Save Me Now by Blood Angel released under a creative commons license
Only A Pawn In Their Game by Bob Dylan
Only A Pawn In Their Game by Bob Dylan on Amazon UK
Correction from last week I (Dan) said that my intro to podcasting presentation at the Syracuse Innovators Guild was going to be on the 14th. However, it going to be this Saturday August 11th from 6:00PM to 8:00PM at the Syracuse Innovators Guild Makerspace located at 3650 James st Suite 111, Syracuse, NY the class is open to everyone so if you in the area and interested in learn how on earth I end up on Unfilter along with other stuff I’ve learned about podcasting please stop by.

Follow the Team:

Filterfree.ME show Blog
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Follow DanFilterFree on identi.ca if you want to know when he is at the Syracuse Innovators Guild if you want to stop by send him a PM and he will make sure the doors are open. Learn more about our upcoming events at https://www.meetup.com/Syracuse-Innovators/.
Chase’s Geek Stuff
Michael Vail\’s Website

If you don’t already have a Dropbox account help Dan out by signing up using this link and then installing Dropbox

The post Keeping You Distracted | Unfilter 13 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Cannabis Prohibition | Unfilter 1

chris — Sat, 19 May 2012 14:27:00 +0000

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We look at the history of the controversial weed, life before it was illegal, how it became illegal, what keeps it that way, and why it\’s all finally changing.

Plus – We introduce the new show, chat about some of our plans, and more!

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ACT ONE: Devil Weed

ACT TWO: Times are Changin

More and more medical uses
Poll: New Yorkers favor legalizing medical marijuana but are skeptical about gas drilling
- 67% of men vs 61% of women
- 66% of whites as opposed vs 60% of non-whites
- 73% of households making $100,000 or more vs 53% of households Less than $29,999
A Great Argument for Legalizing Marijuana

ACT THREE: About the Show

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Song pick of the week: Drug Free America by NOFX

Next Week: Security Theater Critics

The post Cannabis Prohibition | Unfilter 1 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.