Note the survey results at the top of the story about Bozeman City job requirements. I’m surprised that 1% actually voted in favor of the policy. 98% have voted against:

Applying for a job with the City of Bozeman? You may be asked to provide more personal information than you expected.

That was the case for one person who applied for employment with the City. The anonymous viewer emailed the news station recently to express concern with a component of the city’s background check policy, which states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate.

European regulators regularly point to the US as a primitive and lax country in terms of the right to privacy. Stories like this just drive the nail in. The employer actually asked for the applicant to surrender their password? That is more than a violation of privacy, it actually begs the question of integrity and authenticity. How many people were allowed access to the passwords? Beyond that, one has to wonder how passwords were stored securely and when they allowed users to change the password. The value of this test is questionable as well since it is based on a record that the user can actively manipulate before and after, unlike a driving record. Clearly Bozeman is in serious need of some security consulting.

News broke yesterday that Nokia and Siemens had enabled Iran to do deep packet inspection. The sale of this capability has been defended as an integral part of technology required for network access. In other words, when Iran invests in core communications infrastructure it will inevitably get the ability to look inside and reshape the traffic that it now carries.

Whether or not you agree with the politics of this situation, very interesting analysis is possible as demonstrated by Arbor. They have posted a map of recent Iranian Traffic Engineering and also noted why Iran is unlikely to completely block off communication:

Iran has significant commercial and technological relationships with the rest of the world. In other words, the government cannot turn off the Internet without impacting business and perhaps generating further social unrest.

That means Iranian traffic is highly likely to be manipulated and monitored instead of blocked. This is a much higher level of sophistication in security terms, as I explained before with regard to cell phones in prisons. I would therefore expect to see counterintelligence used for things like Twitter misinformation, as I explained before with regard to protests in Egypt and the militias in Somalia.