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Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
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Slashdotted!
It’s always nice to see my writing highlighted amongst my peers 🙂
While the technology that the IT World article discusses isn’t terribly novel – I was given a paper conducted by grad students on this topic a few years ago, and they had a working prototype of similar systems – I find it incredibly worrying that ambient information that smartphones expel is being used for purposes in excess of why the information is transmitted in the first place. We don’t live in a (Western) world where lacking a cell phone is common; for many people a mobile phone is critical to their business or livelihood. Indeed, when you go to other areas of the world where mobile penetration is even higher because of exorbitant costs associated with laying down fibre, mobiles are even more important on a daily basis.
As such, and any suggestion like “if you don’t want to be tracked, don’t own a phone” misses the point around privacy concerns related to mobile phone tracking. In effect, it shouldn’t be up to the individual to unilaterally defend themselves from further expansions of private surveillance capabilities. Instead, those capabilities should be limited by law, by regulation, and by a minimalistic sense of ethics. Tracking where people are walking, and giving them an option to opt-out of tracking by visiting a website they’ve never heard of and digging into its depths is not a sufficient way to ‘empower’ individuals.
So, the takeaway from this post is that Industry Canada’s proposed modifications significantly expand the volume and types of communications that ISPs must be able to intercept and preserve. Further, the Department is considering expanding interception requirements across all wireless spectrum holders; it needn’t just affect the LTE spectrum. We also know that Public Safety is modifying how ISPs have to preserve information related to geolocational, communications content, or transmission data. Together, these Departments’ actions are expanding government surveillance capacities in the absence of the lawful access legislation.
Industry Canada’s and Public Safety’s changes to how communications are intercepted should be put on hold until the government can convince Canadians about the need for these powers, and pass legislation authorizing the expansion of government surveillance. Decisions that are made surrounding interception capabilities are not easily reversed because once the technology is in place it is challenging to remove; as such, the government’s proposed modifications to intercept capabilities should be democratically legitimated before they are instantiated in practice.
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2013.2.11
Reality turned out to be much more complicated. What we forgot is that technology magnifies power in both directions. When the powerless found the Internet, suddenly they had power. But while the unorganized and nimble were the first to make use of the new technologies, eventually the powerful behemoths woke up to the potential – and they have more power to magnify. And not only does the Internet change power balances, but the powerful can also change the Internet. Does anyone else remember how incompetent the FBI was at investigating Internet crimes in the early 1990s? Or how Internet users ran rings around China’s censors and Middle Eastern secret police? Or how digital cash was going to make government currencies obsolete, and Internet organizing was going to make political parties obsolete? Now all that feels like ancient history.
Bruce Schneier, “Power and the Internet”
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2013.2.10
It saddens me that America’s so-called government for the people, by the people, and of the people has less compassion and enlightenment toward their fellow man than a corporation. Having been a party myself to subsequent legal bullying by other entities, I am all too familiar with how ugly and gut-wrenching a high-stakes lawsuit can be. Fortunately, the stakes in my cases were not as high, nor my adversaries as formidable as Aaron’s, otherwise I too might have succumbed to hopelessness and fear. A few years ago, I started rebuilding my life overseas, and I find a quantum of solace in the thought that my residence abroad makes it a little more difficult to be served.
Bunnie Huang, “A Moment of Silence for Aaron Swartz”
Via the Washington Post:
“You have potentially millions of Androids making their way into the work space, accessing confidential documents,” said Christopher Soghoian, a former Federal Trade Commission technology expert who now works for the ACLU. “It’s like a really dry forest, and it’s just waiting for a match.”
The high degrees of fragmentation in the Android ecosystem are incredibly problematic; fragmentation combined with delays in providing updates effectively externalizes the security-related problems stemming from mobile OS vulnerabilities on individual owners of phones. Those owners are (typically) the least able parties in the owner/carrier/manufacturer/OS creator relationship to remedy the flaws. At the moment, Google tends to promptly (try) to respond to flaws. The manufacturers and vendors then have to certify and process any updates, which can take months. It’s inexcusable that these parties can not only sit on OS updates, but they can continue to knowingly sell vulnerable phones.
Imagine if, after a car line was reported to have some problem that required the line’s recall and refurbishment, dealers continued to sell the car. They didn’t even notify the person buying the car that there was a problem, just that ‘enhancements’ (i.e. the seat didn’t eject when you hit something at 60Km/hr, plus a cool new clock display on the dashboard) were coming. The dealers would be subject to some kind of legal action or, failing that, consumers could choose to work with dealers who sold safe cars. Why, exactly, aren’t phone carriers being subjected to the same scrutiny and held to the same safety standards?
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On Choosing a Maiden Name
Credit card company: What’s your mother’s maiden name? Me: Donkey Kong Bumper Boat. Them: Uh, yes. What? Me: I’m in security.
Steve Werby (@stevewerby) February 7, 2013
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Marketing: Confusion
Now the Microsoft Surfaces make sense. One’s for play and work, while the other… wait.
photo via Jonathan Hoover
Marketing: Confusion.
Excited Pixels 