It was a holiday week for July Fourth, but there was still plenty going on in the security world. WIRED took a deep look at a budding partnership[1] between the Army's Cyber Command and the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service group. DDS brings private-sector tech expertise to the government, and this new collaboration adds Army technologists to the mix to work on difficult development challenges for the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, a different DOD program run by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency provides mobile, desktop, and browser apps to dozens of US defense agencies through an ultrasecure app store[2] that has some crucial differences from commercial platforms.
WIRED also looked at where Congress and the Supreme Court may take privacy precedent and regulations[3] in the future as digital technologies alter the privacy landscape. Speaking of which, find an hour this weekend to do a quick and easy audit of your mobile and desktop apps[4]. Check up on what data they're able to access and collect from you, and make sure you're not running any programs that are overreaching.
There's more! As always, we’ve rounded up all the news we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Facebook Briefly Unblocked a Number of Blocked Accounts[5]
Facebook announced on Monday that a programming bug caused the service to briefly unblock a number of accounts that users had blocked. The glitch reportedly affected a small portion of Facebook users for just a week—but at the scale of Facebook, even "small" mishaps can have massive repercussions. The company said it notified a whopping 800,000 users that they may have been affected.
While the bug was live, affected