Category: Quotations

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Aside Quotations

2014.2.18

“We are assessing Public Mobile pricing right now and looking at product offerings,” Joe Natale, Telus’ executive vice-president and chief commercial officer, said Thursday in a conference call with analysts to discuss the company’s fourth quarter results.

“We have made a commitment to keep the $19 unlimited voice plan in the market through 2014, but we will be looking at all the various aspects of Public Mobile rate plans and making sure we strike the right balance between doing what’s right for Public Mobile customers and putting forth a set of economic considerations with the Telus organization.”

Nicholas Kyonka, “Telus working on Public Mobile integration” (subscription required)

Whenever I read ‘balance between our acquired customers and our own economic considerations’ I almost immediately translate to ‘the acquired customers are gonna enjoy the economic benefits of rate hikes.’

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Quotations

2014.2.18

Oakland is a poor city; it can’t really afford its extravagant police force, and it certainly couldn’t afford its DAC [Domain Awareness Centre].

Surveillance trickles down in more than one way. At a time when Oakland is closing schools and dealing with more than $50 million in budget shortfalls, the DAC is made possible by DHS grants. These same grants have been militarizing the police all over America as well as giving them wide surveillance capabilities — capabilities that haven’t translated into much terrorism prevention, but have been aggressively brought to bear on protesters all over the nation in the 15 years since the Battle of Seattle in 1999.

In one of the most revealing moments of these baby Big Brothers, a FOIA request for Oakland City mails about the DAC revealed that none of the talk was about crime – no mention of murders, assaults, thefts, or the violent crime Oakland officials express constant frustration with. Instead, there was talk of tracking protests and labor strikes. The internal desires of Oakland’s minders revealed a frustration with the dissent that finds such powerful political expression in Oakland, and strategies for heading it off.

“I have also made it clear that the United States does not collect intelligence to suppress criticism or dissent,” Obama said in his speech Friday. Whether that is true or not for his NSA and Cybercommand, the Obama Executive has had no problems with funding such efforts at the local level.

Quinn Norton, “NSA Reform: What Could Have Been And What We’ve Got”
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Links Quotations

2014.2.14

Christopher Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow at the Citizen Lab, told The Varsity that “Metadata at this point, is as or more invasive in its collection and analysis than the content of a communication. Any suggestion that because its metadata, it’s any less invasive, just isn’t true.”

“If you were to monitor the metadata coming out of my phone for a day, it would be a lot more revealing than any actual content. This would include things like where I was, when I made the phone calls, how long they were, who I made them to, and who those people talked to,” said Parsons. Using this information, Parsons said, intelligence agencies can determine movement patterns, browsing tendencies, shopping and lifestyle habits, all without figuring out specifically what was said in the conversation.

The Citizen Lab’s campaign for government surveillance oversight has been at the heart of the debate on consumer telecommunications and Internet privacy. Last week, they issued an open letter to several Canadian phone and Internet service providers (ISPs). The letter asked them to publicize the extent of customer information divulged to law enforcement and other intelligence agencies. When contacted by The Varsity for further comments on the Citizen Lab’s campaign, Jennifer Kett, Senior Manager at Rogers Media Relations said they were currently reviewing the request. She added: “We take the privacy and security of our customers’ personal information very seriously. We require a properly executed warrant to disclose customer information to law enforcement or any other body. If we believe that a request is overreaching we will take steps to challenge it.” Kett declined to provide further details when asked, saying that the review of the Citizen Lab’s request was pending. Bell Canada did not respond to multiple contact attempts.

Amitpal Singh, “U of T academics at forefront of online privacy battle”
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Links Quotations

2014.2.13

Dr. Christopher Parsons, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affair, University of Toronto, Canada: “Our democratic governments have been caught massively spying on innocent individuals around the world. In the process, citizens’ willingness to exercise rights of speech, association, and collective action have been chilled. By reforming governments’ behaviours in a concerted, global, fashion we can push back against this surveillance, surveillance that currently threatens to suffocate our democracies.”

Katitza Rodriguez, “International Community Unites to Protest Big Brother”
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Quotations

2014.2.12

Shaping ideas is, of course, easier said than done. Bombarding people with ads only works to a degree. No one likes being told what to think. We grow resistant to methods of persuasion that we see through—just think of ads of yesteryear, and of how corny they feel. They worked in their day, but we’re alert to them now. Besides, blanket coverage isn’t easy to achieve in today’s fragmented media landscape. How many channels can one company advertise on? And we now fast-forward through television commercials, anyway. Even if it were possible to catch us through mass media, messages that work for one person often fail to convince others.

Big-data surveillance is dangerous exactly because it provides solutions to these problems. Individually tailored, subtle messages are less likely to produce a cynical reaction. Especially so if the data collection that makes these messages possible is unseen. That’s why it’s not only the NSA that goes to great lengths to keep its surveillance hidden. Most Internet firms also try to monitor us surreptitiously. Their user agreements, which we all must “sign” before using their services, are full of small-font legalese. We roll our eyes and hand over our rights with a click. Likewise, political campaigns do not let citizens know what data they have on them, nor how they use that data. Commercial databases sometimes allow you to access your own records. But they make it difficult, and since you don’t have much right to control what they do with your data, it’s often pointless.

This is why the state-of-the-art method for shaping ideas is not to coerce overtly but to seduce covertly, from a foundation of knowledge. These methods don’t produce a crude ad—they create an environment that nudges you imperceptibly. Last year, an article in Adweek noted that women feel less attractive on Mondays, and that this might be the best time to advertise make-up to them. “Women also listed feeling lonely, fat and depressed as sources of beauty vulnerability,” the article added. So why stop with Mondays? Big data analytics can identify exactly which women feel lonely or fat or depressed. Why not focus on them? And why stop at using known “beauty vulnerabilities”? It’s only a short jump from identifying vulnerabilities to figuring out how to create them. The actual selling of the make-up may be the tip of the iceberg.

Zeynep Tufekci, “What tear gas taught me about Twitter and the NSA: It’s time to rethink our nightmares about surveillance”
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Links Quotations

U of T steps into Internet privacy conversation

In the post-Snowden era of Internet privacy, Parsons and others are continuing the often difficult and unpopular work of pulling back the veil of government surveillance. Students across the country, continent, and indeed, the world, are aware of the new status quo, but may not have considered the full privacy implications of increased access to information online. It is, unfortunately, easy to ignore the droning of television anchors or the frequently updated headlines of news sources as they appear on Facebook and Twitter, especially when the medium lends itself to distraction. The irony, of course, is that as these stories appear, they are swiftly buried under an infinite stream of online information.

From the editorial board at The Varsity, U of T’s student newspaper.

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Quotations

2014.2.11

Each Five Eyes partner collects information over a specific area of the globe in accordance with their national priorities, but their collection and analysis activities are orchestrated to the point that they essentially act as one. Precise assignments are not publicly known, but research indicates that Australia monitors South and East Asia emissions. New Zealand covers the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. The UK devotes attention to Europe and Western Russia, while the US monitors the Caribbean, China, Russia, the Middle East and Africa.

As it did during the Cold War, Canada’s arctic territory provides considerable sigint advantage. Canadian Forces Station Alert, on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, was originally an arctic weather station, but began sigint duty by eavesdropping on northern regions of the Soviet Union in 1958. Alert remains active today, collecting information from the interior of Russia and China.20 Other Canadian sigint assets reach into Latin America and out into the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans.

James Cox, “Canada and the Five Eyes Intelligence Community(.pdf)”
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Links Quotations

Potholes abound on the road to car-to-car communication

The security design of the system as implemented in tests so far will require a national certificate infrastructure much like that used for preventing domain spoofing and securing the Web. It will require a database of certificates—like the X.509 certificates used in public key infrastructure (PKI)—to verify that devices are legitimate and make it possible to rescind permissions to ensure that no one can send out spoofed messages. If a certificate were to become compromised or if a manufacturer misconfigured a batch of V2V systems, the certificate authority would be able to revoke the associated certificate. This prevents spoofing much in the way that DNS SEC prevents the “poisoning” of Internet domain address tables by a rogue Domain Name Service server.

The problem is that no one has ever developed a PKI system large enough to handle every vehicle in the United States—every car, truck, bus, and motorcycle. The revocation table for expired or compromised certificates would have to be distributed constantly to cars to make sure they weren’t victimized by recorded data attacks or other systems that used hacked hardware to spoof traffic.

So far, there hasn’t been any agreement yet on how this PKI would distribute its certificates. Proposals have included having roadside systems issue certificates as vehicles drive by and having certificates sent to vehicles out-of-band over cellular connections. The latter would mean that every car in the country would have to have its own integrated cellular phone or that drivers would have to connect their phones regularly to the systems to ensure they didn’t get shut out of the network.

Oh yes, please: let’s build a mass communications network dependent on a (largely) creaky Certificate system, deploy the devices to the attackers (i.e. car owners), and just trust that no one’s gonna hack a mass, nation-wide, Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications network.

Also: taking bets on it being an escrowed certificate system. For public safety and all that good stuff.

Categories
Quotations

2014.1.29

But no politician should ever apologize for stealing a good policy idea. And it is a good idea. It is a brave idea, courageous even, which is usually enough to start political antennae tingling in veterans whose modus operandi is to never do anything for the first time.

John Ivison, “With Senate caucus expulsion, Trudeau is testing the depth of the water with both feet ”
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Links Quotations

Supreme Court Hearings – Matthew David Spencer v. Her Majesty the Queen

Case # 34644 Matthew David Spencer v. Her Majesty the Queen (December 9, 2013) At issue is Whether section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was violated. The appellant downloaded child pornography from the internet using a peer-to-peer file-sharing software program. The appellant stored child pornography in a shared folder and did not override the default settings that made the folder accessible to others. Since the files were accessible to other users they could therefore be downloaded. A police officer searched the shared folder and discovered the pornographic files. The officer couldn’t identify the owner of the folder but was able to determine that the IP address being used was assigned by Shaw Communications. The police wrote to Shaw and requested information identifying the assignee at the relevant time. Shaw Communications identified the user as the appellant’s sister. The police obtained a warrant and searched her residence, where they seized the appellant’s computer. The appellant was charged with possession of child pornography and making child pornography available.

An interesting case, especially when read against the scholarship that examines the Charter and PIPEDA implications of disclosing subscriber data absent a court order.