Wayne Rash

It’s a rare happy day here in Washington. While the Congress was at loggerheads about a trade deal, the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia has turned down a motion by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) that would block implementation of the Federal Communications Commission order placing Internet service providers under Title II […]

Howard County, Md.—I’m standing in a compound surrounded by enough mechanized equipment that it looked like a military operation preparing for battle. To be more exact, it was a compound occupied by what might seem like a herd of farm animals. In front of me, parked next to a huge red tractor-trailer was a COW, […]

Oxon Hill, MD— It should be no surprise when marketing executives for security vendors say that whatever it is their company sells is the best way to bolster data security. That is, after all, their job. That view certainly prevailed at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit held at Gaylord Convention Center just outside […]

In one sense, the breach of some 4 million personnel records from the Office of Personnel Management earlier this year probably isn’t going to put the financial information of a lot of federal employees at risk. That’s the good news. But the rest of the news is very bad. With a few exceptions, essentially every […]

Privacy advocates everywhere are celebrating. The passage of the USA Freedom Act by the Senate and the signing by the President mean that there will be changes to the way the intelligence community collects phone data and the way the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court works— eventually. But now, right after the bill has passed into […]

The good news, if you’re a civil libertarian, is that Section 215 of the Patriot Act officially expired at midnight on May 31. The bad news, if you’re a civil libertarian, is that the National Security Agency isn’t stopping its collection of phone data for long. If you’re familiar with how things work in Washington, […]

In its effort to go Apple one better, Samsung appears to have gone to a great deal of trouble to make its new Galaxy S6 smartphone a lot like the iPhone 6, presumably to appeal to the same audience. To outdo the iPhone, the S6 has a camera with twice as much resolution at 16 […]

In a background briefing on May 27, Federal Communications Commission officials announced a new effort proposed by Chairman Tom Wheeler to virtually eliminate all automatically dialed calls as well as nearly all unsolicited calls to wireless and wireline phones in the United States. The new rules would give phone owners new power to stop unwanted […]

It was the last hours of the last day before a congressional recess when the U.S. Senate considered two different actions regarding the USA Patriot Act, the law that among other things allowed the National Security Agency to collect telephone metadata from nearly everyone, nearly anywhere. One action would have extended the Patriot Act is […]

At first, Rick Boucher’s idea seemed too good to be true. The former Democratic Congressman from Virginia was proposing an idea so radical that I had to check my notes to make sure I hadn’t been daydreaming. The concept was a bipartisan bill that would give both Democrats and Republicans something each party wants and […]

The best approach the airlines should follow in securing their onboard networks is to prevent the hackers among their passengers from doing any damage with the assumption they are going to find a way to break in. That’s the advice provided by Dave Bennett, CTO of IONU Security, a company that provides secure network technology […]

By now you’ve likely heard the denials about how a well-known hacker was able to break into an airliner’s flight control systems from within the passenger cabin, and about the resulting FBI investigation. Chances are very good that those denials are wrong. But it’s also true that the vast majority of those who say it’s […]