Category: Quotations

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Aside Quotations

2014.1.3

jakke said: This seems like he’s hoping referees will be sufficiently unfamiliar with the subject matter, no?

It’s a published piece; it landed in International Data Protection Law. And the people he acknowledges in the published piece are some of the experts who were – at the time, pre-Snowden – calling Swire’s article out for BS. I was at an event where his paper was critiqued as largely devoid of real, empirical, details which if included would have undermined many of the premises of the paper. But the paper was published (largely unchanged) regardless.

But peer-review…still not broken, am I right?

Categories
Aside Quotations

2014.1.3

To players of WoW (such as my sons), WOW is a fun game. They often wear headsets to talk with teammates while playing, and keep a chat window scrolling as well. To law enforcement, WoW (or any other similar game) can seem instead to be a global terrorist communications network. Players can talk and send chat messages, internationally, outside of the traditional telephone network and outside of the scope of CALEA. The architecture is based on what works for the game, and not what facilitates lawful access.

Peter Swire, “From real-time intercepts to stored records: why encryption drives the government to seek access to the cloud”

Of course, this statement is largely bunk given that the large companies (like Blizzard, the producers of World of Warcraft) tend to have lawful access guides. And Blizzard’s, in particular, is incredibly detailed (and humorous) and been around since at least 2009. It’s statements like the one quoted, above, that make Swire’s entire paper dubious: given the empirical deficiency of his paper (especially in light of Snowden) he should be required to either write an update to the paper and identity everything that was false in it, or just recant the old paper in its majority.

Categories
Quotations

2014.1.2

While policies may vary, the sensitive nature of the data produced does not. Traffic data analysis generates more sensitive profiles of an individual’s actions and intentions, arguably more so than communica- tions content. In a communication with another individual, we say what we choose to share; in a transaction with another device, for example, search engines and cell stations, we are disclosing our actions, movements, and intentions. Technology- neutral policies continue to regard this transactional data as POTS traffic data, and accordingly apply inadequate protections.

…

This is not faithful to the spirit of updating laws for new technology. We need to acknowledge that changing technological environments transform the policy itself. New policies need to reflect the totality of the new environment.

Alberto Escudero-Pascual and Ian Hosein, “Questioning Lawful Access to Traffic Data”
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Quotations

2013.12.24

Once we decide it’s OK to let a mob loose on anyone who’s offended us, the only people who are safe are those who never say anything at all.

Michelle Goldberg, Sympathy for Justine Sacco – The Nation (via chartier)

Mobs don’t lead to justice. They to politics of shame, dismissal of the rule of law, and (more often than not) a willingness to ‘ban’ actions, associations, and speech that is disliked if not illegal. Those rights have to be protected, regardless of how repugnantly they are used, so that democratic societies can operate as thriving environments of human dignity and freedom instead of nations where normalcy quiets the human spirit.

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Quotations

2013.12.24

Particularly relevant for Snowden’s whistleblower status is his efforts to reveal misconduct within official NSA channels. According to the interview, Snowden aired his misgivings as early as October 2012 with as many as 17 co-workers and superiors, challenging them with the sheer volume of domestic data being collected by the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT program. The challenges went nowhere. Six months later, he began contacting reporters. Contacted for comment, an NSA spokesman told the Post there was no record of the conversations.

Russell Brandom, “NSA leaker Edward Snowden: ‘I already won’”

The irony that the NSA lacks a record of those conversations is incredibly rich.

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Quotations

2013.12.19

…according to a former NSA employee, by 1995 the agency had installed sniffer software to collect various kinds of traffic at nine major Internet exchange points (IXPs). Terry Thompson, the NSA deputy director, also acknowledged in 2001 that the agency has taken to hiring technicians away from the private companies that run much of the World Wide Web, such as Cisco systems, and employing them to reverse engineer various communications technologies in order to locate vulnerabilities that the agency can exploit. This poached taken much be invaluable in sorting through the packetized and multiplexed flows of digital data.

Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping
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Quotations

2013.12.17

Some have suggested that the [Nova Scotia cyberbullying] law has to be so broad to capture all the harmful conduct and we should leave it to the courts and the cybercops to use their judgement in how it is applied. I’m sorry, but as soon as an employee of the government of Nova Scotia picks up the phone and tells a citizen to remove Charter protected speech from the internet, that crosses the line. That goes waaaaay over the line. Canadians have an absolute right to speak truth to power. Canadians have an obligation to call out politicians on hypocrisy and idiocy. An elected official like Lenore Zann, before publicly admonishing a minor, should educate herself about “copyrwite (sic) law”, fair dealing and the criminal code. (A bit of free advice: Bill C-12 isn’t the law yet and an image taken on a sound stage surrounded by a filming crew for the purpose of international broadcast on cable television likely does not qualify as an intimate image “in respect of which, at the time of the recording, there were circumstances that gave rise to a reasonable expectation of privacy”.)

David Fraser, “Nova Scotia politician alleges cyberbullying, calls the authorities on tweeting teen”
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Quotations

2013.12.11

That is what the Snowden leaks have exposed — a massive government operation to archive and analyze all the world’s communications. Opposing the surveillance state, and demanding the right as free citizens to know what our government is doing, is not a left- or a right-wing issue; it is one of tyranny versus liberty; it’s about whether we want to live in a communist-style surveillance state, or enjoy the rights and privileges of a free society.

Jesse Kline, “The spy who read my email”
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Quotations

2013.12.10

The factions · Suspicion aside, and bearing in mind that in the IETF people are supposed to speak for themselves not on behalf of organizations, and also that opinions are highly fragmented, there are some roughly-identifiable opinion clusters, not organized or anything; but describing them may help people understand what’s going on.

The Privacy Partisans are aggressive about doing whatever’s possible by way of counter-attack, and doing it now. This notably includes engineers from Firefox and Chrome, who say that for HTTP/2.0, they’re just gonna run authenticated and encrypted all the time, whatever anyone says.

The Cynics are unconvinced about the usefulness of the counterattack measures on the table. They think that the technology isn’t good enough, or the secret-key infrastructure is corrupt, or that Google and Facebook and so on should be seen as attackers, or developers are just too lazy and incompetent to get the deployment right.

The Enterpriseys are people who think that surveillance is necessary because there are situations where law or policy require it. Examples include prisons, businesses that want to control their employees’ Net access, and devops folks who want to monitor for malware or do load-balancing.

The Unconvinced just don’t see the need for aggressive privacy protection; they think it’s foolish to apply it to public static brochure-ware, or that it’s unethical to impose encryption on people without asking them, or that it’s insane to try to encrypt the Internet of Things: Printers and toasters and so on.

Tim Bray, “Counter-Surveillance”

Tim does a good job in breaking down the ‘factions’ associated with the IETF and how/whether the organization will be technically addressing the NSA spying revelations. It’s hard to understate how important the IETF’s current involvement is in light of their decision – between 1999-2001 – to largely turn a blind eye to interception equipment and the spying of citizens’ communications.

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Quotations

2013.11.26

It would appear as though the culture of deceit inside the Tory caucus extends far beyond who knew what and when about secret payments to Mike Duffy. The cyber-bullying bill is largely a cut-and-paste job from legislation that had been rejected by the Canadian public, and which the government had promised never to reintroduce. It limits our freedom and violates our right to privacy. Canadians should not stand for this.

Jesse Kline, “Jesse Kline: Tories bully Canadians into accepting Internet surveillance bill”