This is one of the most amazing websites that I’ve come across: for those of us who routinely work from coffee shops, it lists whether or not there are plentiful power outlets as well as passwords for wifi.
Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
Hanjin accounts for about 3 percent of shipping containers globally. It’s big enough that U.S. retailers are worried that delays will shorten the busy holiday shopping season as they wait for goods to arrive. And U.S. exporters now anticipate a 50 percent hike in shipping fees, according to Peter Friedmann, executive director of the U.S. Agricultural Transportation Coalition.
There are lots of reasons for the bankruptcy – including lots of extra ships being in the water right now and a slowdown in the global economy – but this should be cause for concern if only because it showcases the magitude of some of the world’s economic issues right now.
IMSI Catcher Report Calls for Transparency, Proportionality, and Minimization Policies:
The Citizen Lab and CIPPIC are releasing a report, Gone Opaque? An Analysis of Hypothetical IMSI Catcher Overuse in Canada, which examines the use of devices that are commonly referred to as ‘cell site simulators’, ‘IMSI Catchers’, ‘Digital Analyzers’, or ‘Mobile Device Identifiers’, and under brand names such as ‘Stingray’, DRTBOX, and ‘Hailstorm’. IMSI Catchers are a class of of surveillance devices used by Canadian state agencies. They enable state agencies to intercept communications from mobile devices and are principally used to identify otherwise anonymous individuals associated with a mobile device and track them.
Though these devices are not new, the ubiquity of contemporary mobile devices, coupled with the decreasing costs of IMSI Catchers themselves, has led to an increase in the frequency and scope of these devices’ use. Their intrusive nature, as combined with surreptitious and uncontrolled uses, pose an insidious threat to privacy.
This report investigates the surveillance capabilities of IMSI Catchers, efforts by states to prevent information relating to IMSI Catchers from entering the public record, and the legal and policy frameworks that govern the use of these devices. The report principally focuses on Canadian agencies but, to do so, draws comparative examples from other jurisdictions. The report concludes with a series of recommended transparency and control mechanisms that are designed to properly contain the use of the devices and temper their more intrusive features.
I’m not going to lie: after working on this with my colleague, Tamir Israel, for 12 months it was absolutely amazing to publicly release this report. What started as a 1,500 word blog post meant to put defense lawyers on notice of some new legislation transmogrified into a 130 page report that is the most comprehensive legal analysis of these devices that’s been done to date. It’s going to be interesting to see what the effects of it are for cases currently being litigated in Canada and around the world!
The Toronto Star:
Lawful access is “a real thorny issue,” said University of Ottawa law professor Craig Forcese, a national security law expert, in an interview with the Star.
“For years I’ve been saying we’ve got to deal with it, and you can’t deal with it without investing people in a discussion, because the best-organized civil liberties organizations in Canada right now are privacy groups,” said Forcese.
“And if you go ahead unilaterally and start tabling stuff in Parliament, you’re going to have a replay of the disaster of the last decade in Parliament where nothing ever got passed, except the cyberbullying bill which didn’t address all the issues.”
Parliament did a lot over the last decade. Including passing lawful access legislation following more than 10 years of public debate that included numerous public consultations (i.e. not just with civil liberties organizations).
That civil liberties groups – which by definition argue hard against infringements of constitutional rights – did their jobs is to be congratulated not smeared.
The results were stark. All but one of the aphid colonies that were not tended by ants went extinct. Of the surviving aphid colony, only one aphid remained. Without ants to protect them, the aphids were eaten by predators like ladybug larvae and parasitoid wasps. Apparently, ants remove these predators from their herds when they come to milk the aphids for honeydew. The ants win, the aphids win, but the mugwort suffers. A version of this scenario plays out all over the world, where ant invasions often mean aphid invasions, too.
Ants: the protectors of the aphid world, apparently.
This also explains a lot about the challenges I’ve experienced dealing with aphid infestations in the past!
It was a bad week for millions of Android phone users. Two critical vulnerabilities were disclosed but remain unpatched in a large percentage of devices, while, separately, malicious apps were downloaded as many as 2.5 million times from Google’s official Play Marketplace.
The vulnerabilities, which are similar in severity to the Stagefright family of bugs disclosed last year, have been fixed in updates Google began distributing Tuesday. A large percentage of Android phones, however, aren’t eligible to receive the fixes. Even those that do qualify don’t receive them immediately (the September updates are currently not available as over-the-air downloads for either of the Nexus 5X devices in my household). That gives attackers crude blueprints for exploiting vulnerabilities that remain unpatched on millions of devices.
The bag of hurt continues unabated.
In Texas, the EFF highlights how state and local law enforcement agencies have free access to ALPR equipment and license plate data maintained by a private company called Vigilant Solutions. In exchange, police cruisers are retrofitted with credit-card machines so that law enforcement officers can take payments for delinquent fines and other charges on the spot — with a 25 percent processing fee tacked on that goes straight to Vigilant. In essence, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local cops with the technology used to identify and detain the driver.
“The ‘warrant redemption’ program works like this,” the EFF wrote. “The agency is given no-cost license plate readers as well as free access to LEARN-NVLS, the ALPR data system Vigilant says contains more than 2.8-billion plate scans and is growing by more than 70-million scans a month. This also includes a wide variety of analytical and predictive software tools. Also, the agency is merely licensing the technology; Vigilant can take it back at any time.”
That’s right: Even if the contract between the state and Vigilant ends, the latter gets to keep all of the license plate data collected by the agency, and potentially sell or license the information to other governments or use it for other purposes.
Another case of the private surveillance sector overcoming state institutions, and to the detriment of citizens’ rights to privacy.
Even so, the effort is raising concern from safety experts who say the technology has major limitations that can be very dangerous. Self-driving cars have trouble seeing in bad weather. Sudden downpours, snow and especially puddles make it difficult for autonomous vehicles to detect lines on pavement and thereby stay in one lane.
Walker Smith added that self-driving cars have sometimes confused bridges for other obstacles. “People need to understand both the potential and the limitations of these systems, and inviting them inside is part of that education,” he said.
The vehicles also have difficulty understanding human gestures — for example, a crosswalk guard in front of a local elementary school may not be understood, said Mary Cummings, director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab, at a Senate hearing in March. She recommended that the vehicles not be allowed to operate near schools.
Then there’s a the human factor: Researchers have shown that people like to test and prank robots. Today, a GPS jammer, which some people keep in their trunks to block police from tracking them, will easily throw off a self-driving car’s ability to sense where it is, Cummings said.
Current self-driving cars often cannot see which lane they’re in, if it’s raining. They don’t understand what a bridge is versus other road-terrain. They don’t understand what a cross-walk guard is. And they are reliant on a notoriously brittle location technology.
What can go wrong with testing them in urban centres then, exactly?
Russian Hackers Now Targeting U.S. Think Tanks That Specialize in Russia:
“Any respectable think tank has been hacked,” Lewis told Defense One on Monday. “The Russians just don’t get the idea of independent institutions, so they are looking for secret instructions from Obama. Another benefit is they can go to their bosses and show what they took to prove their worth as spies.”
Any respectable think tank is proud to have such garbage security that the intellectual property it hopes to profit from, to say nothing of political advocacy, is available to unauthorized third parties.
Right….
Another new factor is the presence of Canadians in CSE’s hunting grounds. CSE was unable to assist during the FLQ crisis in 1970—it had no capability to monitor Canadians. In the post-2001 era, that is no longer true: the Internet traffic of Canadians mixes with that of everybody else, and CSE encounters it even when it is trying not to. When operating under judicial warrants obtained by CSIS or the RCMP, it deliberately goes after Canadian communications. CSE also passes on information about Canadians collected by its Five Eyes partners.
A special watchdog—the CSE Commissioner—was established in 1996 to monitor the legality of CSE’s activities. Over the years, Commissioners have often reported weaknesses in the measures the agency takes to protect Canadian privacy, but only once, last year, has a Commissioner declared CSE in non-compliance with the law.
Whether CSE’s watchdog is an adequate safeguard for the privacy of Canadians is a matter of continuing debate. One thing, however, is clear: As CSE enters its 71st year, the days when its gaze faced exclusively outward are gone for good.
Bill Robinson has done a terrific job providing a historical overview of Canada’s equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA). His knowledge of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is immense.
Canadians now live in a country wherein this secretive institution, the CSE, is capable of massively monitoring our domestic as well as foreign communications. And, in fact, a constitutional challenge is before the courts that is intended to restrain CSE’s domestic surveillance. But before that case is decided CSE will analyze, share, and act on our domestic communications infrastructure without genuine public accountability. As an intelligence, as opposed to policing, organization its methods, techniques, and activities are almost entirely hidden from the public and its political representatives, as well as from most of Canada’s legal profession. A democracy can easily wilt when basic freedoms of speech and association are infringed upon and, in the case of CSE, such freedoms might be impacted without the speakers or those engaging with one another online ever realizing that their basic rights were being inhibited. Such possibilities raise existential threats to democratic governance and need to be alleviated as much as possible if our democracy is to be maintained, fostered, and enhanced.
