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This is truly exceptional news!
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Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
Via The Tyee:
Last September I filed FOIs that got me blacklisted for a time, depriving voters of facts they deserve.
You should read Bob’s article in case you’re curious about why the press, academics, and active citizens laugh at the ‘transparency’ into government operations made possible by access to information, or freedom of information and access, laws.
I would note: one of my colleagues has had a federal access request open for seven years at this point. Our work on license place recognition equipment, at the federal level, has been open almost two years, with no end in sight. There have been repeated ‘inappropriate’ (read: illegal, except it’s not illegal if the police do it, right?) closures of our file, and personal involvement by the federal information commissioner.
ATIP and FOI laws are a joke, and a bad ones at that.
For anyone curious about (some of) the absurdity concerning policing in BC, this is a must read. Rob continues to do excellent work investigating the lack of accountability in the governance of BC authorities, this time showing how the police continue to do end-runs around access requests pertaining to their lobbying activities.
If you’re invested in post-secondary education, the letter from the Philosophy department at San Jose State is one of the best articulations of why the MOOC-phenomenon could seriously threaten the quality of education provided by Universities.
Via Techdirt:
Good news, everyone. The terrorists will win and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to help. Of course, his speech is all about not letting the terrorists win. But he’s giving them exactly what they want.
Bloomberg is an incredibly worrying political figure. He’s gone from earlier this year stating the privacy is important, but cannot be maintained in the face of expanding police surveillance, to this:
“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex word where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”
This is the second time in very recent memory that he, on the one hand, supports a notion of privacy while, on the other, asserts that privacy has to be increasingly limited to enjoy ‘security’. This is an absolutely false dichotomy, and is often linked to blasé efforts to ‘secure’ a population in ineffective, inefficient, or incorrect ways. Strong security protections can and should be accompanied by equally strong privacy protections; we need to escape the dichotomy and recognize that privacy and security tend to be mutually supportive of one another, at least when security solutions are appropriately designed and implemented.
As if having the caloric details of your sex life posted publicly wasnât enough, new research has exposed additional security vulnerabilities in the popular Fitbit fitness tracking devices.
The ability to hack these devices, at the outset, seems silly: who would bother?
But as more and more organizations provide these to employees, to individuals they insure, and so forth, the desire to ‘game the system’ will increase. The problem is less along the lines of ‘you can capture this data’ – though that is a privacy concern – and more along the lines of ‘how can I beat the system reliably to advantage myself’.
Own a Google Glass? Perhaps this is the shirt you should be wearing at all times.
Excited Pixels 