Author: Christopher Parsons

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

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I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.

I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton:

During a 33-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I served presidents of both parties — three Republicans and three Democrats. I was at President George W. Bush’s side when we were attacked on Sept. 11; as deputy director of the agency, I was with President Obama when we killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.

I am neither a registered Democrat nor a registered Republican. In my 40 years of voting, I have pulled the lever for candidates of both parties. As a government official, I have always been silent about my preference for president.

No longer. On Nov. 8, I will vote for Hillary Clinton. Between now and then, I will do everything I can to ensure that she is elected as our 45th president.

The securocrats are increasingly throwing their hats in the Clinton camp. And I suspect that Trump will use this to fire up his own base by discounting those same securocrats as democratic patsies, despite many democrats having railed against the heads of the CIA, NSA, and other agencies over the years following 9/11.

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With Remote Hacking, the Government’s Particularity Problem Isn’t Going Away

Crocker’s article is a defining summary of the legal problems associated with the U.S. Government’s attempts to use malware to conduct lawful surveillance of persons suspected of breaking the law. He explores how even after the law is shifted to authorize magistrates to issue warrants pertaining to persons outside of their jurisdictions, broader precedent concerning wiretaps may prevent the FBI or other actors from using currently-drafted warrants to deploy malware en masse. Specifically, the current framework adopted might violate basic constitutional guarantees that have been defined in caselaw over the past century, to the effect of rendering mass issuance of malware an unlawful means of surveillance.

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Dear activists, please stop telling everyone Telegram is secure

Dear activists, please stop telling everyone Telegram is secure:

Telegram was not wrong in promoting its security features back in 2013 – end-to-end encryption in mobile chat apps was rare back then. Since then, however, other chat apps have caught up and in many cases surpassed its security features. This isn’t to say Telegram doesn’t have its merits – neither Whatsapp nor Signal have support for channels (public groups) or bots, and Telegram does have a handy, Snapchat-like, self-destruct feature for conversations. But to recommend Telegram, without reservation, to protesters and activists is simply irresponsible. Dear activists: please stop telling people Telegram is more secure – either stick with WhatsApp or direct people to Telegram’s “Secret Chat” feature.

A good, and quick, piece written to explain the deficiencies of Telegram as opposed to its competing – and more secure and equally usable – chat applications.

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Researchers Are Chipping and Surveilling NYC’s Rats

Researchers Are Chipping and Surveilling NYC’s Rats:

Parson’s and his team use traps baited with pheromones—not food—to capture the rats. They know where to place the traps because rats frequently navigate the dark tunnels where they live not with their eyes, but with their fur. Rubbing themselves against walls creates a trail that’s visible with an ultraviolet dark light. According to the study the trail glows blue–white if it’s fresh, yellow–white if old. The trap has a sensor attached to it that alerts the researcher by cell phone when a rat has been caught.

Once a rat has been caught, a mobile lab is deployed. Inside researchers wearing thick gloves render the rat unconscious by dipping the rat trap in a plastic induction container filled with isoflurane, a kind of ether. An unconscious rat is an easy rat to draw specimens from. Before it wakes up, the rat blood is drawn and an RFID chip is implanted.

An interesting bit of news in addition to previous writing on rats.

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Rape Culture Is Surveillance Culture

Scaachi Koul has written a piece that draws on her own experiences of men attempting to prey on her because she is a woman and while she engages in socially normal behaviour. Men who sought to prey on her were explicit in attempting to determine how they could take advantage, drug, or otherwise use her body without attempting to secure her genuine consent.

Koul’s writing makes clear the very normal, human, experiences of being targeted by men and how the intent of those attackers and potential attacker is normalized in contemporary society. The result is that Koul — and other women just like her — must treat social scenarios as a possible environments for attack or abuse. Her lived reality thus turns even seemingly benign situations into ones filled with risk. Koul’s ability to write as clearly and powerfully as she does should make clear to anyone who absolves sexual abuse on grounds of drinking that alcohol is not the problem: men who have internalized their own privilege and power and treat women as objects around them to be used are the problem.

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How a file-sharing lawsuit against Rogers threatens your Internet privacy: Geist | Toronto Star

In the next stage of the copyright wars in Canada, Voltage is moving forward with its efforts to use a reverse class-action lawsuit to reveal the identities of thousands of people the company alleges have infringed on Voltage’s copyright. If the company is successful it will open up a new way for companies to access information about subscribers while simultaneously indicating the relative weakness of the privacy protections baked into Canada’s recent copyright legislation.

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Cybercrime Overtakes Traditional Crime in UK

Cybercrime Overtakes Traditional Crime in UK:

The NCA’s Cyber Crime Assessment 2016, released July 7, 2016, highlights the need for stronger law enforcement and business partnership to fight cybercrime. According to the NCA, cybercrime emerged as the largest proportion of total crime in the U.K., with “cyber enabled fraud” making up 36 percent of all crime reported, and “computer misuse” accounting for 17 percent.

…

“The ONS estimated that there were 2.46 million cyber incidents and 2.11 million victims of cyber crime in the U.K. in 2015,” the report’s authors wrote. “These figures highlight the clear shortfall in established reporting, with only 16,349 cyber dependent and approximately 700,000 cyber-enabled incidents reported to Action Fraud over the same period.”

While there is a persistent issue associated with counting ‘cyber’ events, that UK organizations are highlighting this kind of fraud and espionage so prominently does indicate a real problem is being faced by organizations.

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Russia passes ‘Big Brother’ anti-terror laws

Russia has passed legislation which functionally adopts many of the worst — and largely discredited — surveillance provisions that Europe adopted in the past and is now abandoning. Specifically, Russian telecoms will be required to retain data traffic information for 6 months, as well as assist government agencies decrypt information. The law will also (further) penalize those who support terrorist activities or engage in other types of social disturbances: the problem is that such accusations are increasingly used to target those disliked by the government as opposed to those whom are actually supporting terrorism or the destruction of Russian society.

It will be particularly interesting to see what, if any, effect the EU has on Russia’s new law. Will the law, which flagrantly violates human rights, inhibit Russia’s ability to trade with EU member nations or will the infringement be ignored? Or will the EU be so consumed by the Brexit that it cannot — or will not — turn its attention to one of its largest trading partners?

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Meet Moxie Marlinspike, the Anarchist Bringing Encryption to All of Us

Meet Moxie Marlinspike, the Anarchist Bringing Encryption to All of Us:

In March, Brazilian police briefly jailed a Facebook exec after WhatsApp failed to comply with a surveillance order in a drug investigation. The same month, The New York Times revealed that WhatsApp had received a wiretap order from the US Justice Department. The company couldn’t have complied in either case, even if it wanted to. Marlin­spike’s crypto is designed to scramble communications in such a way that no one but the people on either end of the conversation can decrypt them (see sidebar). “Moxie has brought us a world-class, state-of-the-art, end-to-end encryption system,” WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton says. “I want to emphasize: world-class.”

For Marlinspike, a failed wiretap can mean a small victory. A few days after Snowden’s first leaks, Marlin­spike posted an essay to his blog titled “We Should All Have Something to Hide,” emphasizing that privacy allows people to experi­ment with lawbreaking as a precursor for social progress. “Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100 percent effective, such that any potential offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed,” he wrote. “How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same-sex marriage should be permitted?”

We live in a world where mass surveillance is a point of fact, not a fear linked with dystopic science fiction novels. Moxie’s work doesn’t blind the watchers but it has let massive portions of the world shield the content of their communications – if not the fact they are communicating in the first place – from third-parties seeking to access those communications. Now unauthorized parties such a government agencies are increasingly being forced to target specific devices, instead of the communications networks writ large, which may have the effects of shifting state surveillance from that which is mass to that which is targeted. Such a consequence would be a major victory for all persons, regardless of whether they live in a democratic state or not.

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Policy – Privacy Paranoia: Is Your Smartphone Spying On You?

Policy – Privacy Paranoia: Is Your Smartphone Spying On You?:

Privacy alarmism is one act in a bigger spectacle. In alarmists’ minds, something could go terribly wrong, and although it never has nor is it likely to happen, we should change the world and imposed new political and bureaucratic order to prepare for it. Privacy concerns in general are fertile breeders of this pattern, and have already inflicted on us useless and expensive laws like HIPPA and FERPA. Now, privacy alarmism has set its sights on the biggest prize: the shrinking of Big Data.

While I’m glad that the author has apparently never suffered an issue linked to a privacy infringement, the same cannot be said for an enormous percentage of the world’s population. Mass intrusion, with and without consent, into communications privacy is a prominent issue internationally because of how private and public bodies alike exploit information that is collected.

We are functionally experimenting on the entire population when collecting and applying math to enormous datasets: to say that there has been no harm, ever, to date is possible. But doing so functionally depends on ignoring the lived reality of many of the persons impacted by big data and digital technology.