Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Prism threatens ‘sovereignty’ of all EU data

Caspar Bowden has been aggressively lobbying the EU Parliament over the implications of the FISA Amendments Act for some time. In short, the Act authorizes capturing data from ‘Electronic Communications Service Providers’ when the data possesses foreign intelligence value. The result is that business and personal information, in addition to information directly concerning ‘national security’, can be legitimately collected by the Agency. (For more, see pages 33-35 of this report.)

Caspar’s most recent article outlines the unwillingness of key members of the EU Parliament to take seriously the implications of American surveillance … until it ceases to be an issue for policy wonks, and one of politics. Still, the Parliament has yet to retract recent amendments that would detrimentally affect the privacy rights of European citizens: it will be interesting to see whether the politics of the issue reverse the parliamentarians’ decisions or if lobbying by corporate interests win the day.

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James Clapper, EU play-acting, and political priorities

Greenwald has an excellent piece pointing out just some of the hypocrisy surrounding the Snowden revelations. A taste:

The first NSA story to be reported was our June 6 articlewhich exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright lied to the US Senate– specifically to the Intelligence Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs – when he said “no, sir” in response to this question from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collectany type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

That Clapper fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself has now been forced by our storiesto admit that his statement was, in his words, “clearly erroneous” and to apologize. But he did this only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other words, what he’s sorry about is that he got caught lying to the Senate. And as Salon’s David Sirota adeptly documented on Friday, Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.

There has been a considerable amount of ‘flak’ – efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions that are favourable to established power – exhibited throughout the Snowden affair. It demonstrates quite powerfully that the Propaganda Model, written about in the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent remains a powerful tool of media analysis.

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Aside Humour

It’s A-OK, Right?

azspot:

Matt Bors

If he’s smiling, it must be OK. Right? Right?

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For $1,650 a month, subscribers will soon be able to fly as much as they want between four California cities, NPR’s Wendy Kaufman reports. Members (not “customers”) will be able to board as many times as they want to travel between San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles

Interesting. I can I only imagine how popular such an approach would be on some routes in Canada.

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Humour Videos

Mercer: Question Period Live

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Aside Quotations

2013.6.7

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited “metadata” is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens’ communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication. Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual’s network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)

Anyone trying to convince people “it’s only metadata” should be discounted as a fool or a government shill. Or perhaps as being both.

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Brent Rathgeber Quits Tory Caucus Over ‘Lack Of Commitment To Transparency’

Wow. The Tories better hope that this is really the extent to the rebellion (i.e. backbenchers’ awareness of how their power has been given away to the whip) and not the beginning of real caucuses that are willing to oppose the government.

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When the Whole World Has Drones

The proliferation of drone technology has moved well beyond the control of the United States government and its closest allies. The aircraft are too easy to obtain, with barriers to entry on the production side crumbling too quickly to place limits on the spread of a technology that promises to transform warfare on a global scale. Already, more than 75 countries have remote piloted aircraft. More than 50 nations are building a total of nearly a thousand types. At its last display at a trade show in Beijing, China showed off 25 different unmanned aerial vehicles. Not toys or models, but real flying machines.

When the Whole World Has Drones
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Quotations

2013.5.25

Getting better at something without feedback is very hard. Imagine practising penalty kicks by kicking the ball and then turning around before you saw where it landed; a year or two later someone would visit you at home and tell you where your kicks ended up. This is the kind of feedback loop we contend with when it comes to our privacy disclosures.

Cory Doctorow, “Privacy, public health and the moral hazard of surveillance”
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What Your Klout Score Really Means

Your Klout score is gaining in importance: A high one might bring perks, but a low one could dash your career dreams.

Something that hit me while I was reading this (other than how much I dislike Klout) is that companies are increasingly using the ‘service’ to discriminate between preferred and non-preferred customers. I can see a service like Klout developing in the future that is widely used by marketers, insurance agencies, and other groups interested in actuarial sales/risk analysis to mine social media information in order to assign scores that invisibly affect individuals’ daily behaviours and routines.

Hopefully things won’t be so invisible that consumer protection laws can’t be activated to dilute such behaviours. Even more hopefully, let’s pray that those laws still have the dulled teeth they have today when Klout on steroids is truly birthed.