Category: Quotations

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What’s worse than a cookie? A ‘perma-cookie’

What’s worse than a cookie? A ‘perma-cookie’:

Last fall, Verizon in the U.S. was found to be using the headers to cash in on the mobile advertising market and deliver targeted ads to customers.

It was later revealed that other advertisers, unaffiliated with Verizon’s own advertising program, were taking advantage of the headers to then track and target cellphone users for ads, even if customers had opted out.

Privacy experts also worry about the potential for governments and criminals to hijack the data.

Christopher Parsons, the managing director of a telecom transparency project run out of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, says that national security services and agencies “already track Canadians, Americans and citizens of other nations using unencrypted identifying information and there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t use perma-cookies for similar tracking purposes.”

 

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La NSA espionnerait les communications de Rogers et RBC

L’Agence nationale de sécurité américaine (NSA) tente de tracer la carte du trafic des communications de plusieurs entreprises mondiales, dont le géant des télécommunications canadien Rogers et la Banque Royale du Canada (RBC), selon un document secret, a rapporté le Globe and Mail mardi.

…

«C’est une préparation du champ de bataille, afin de pouvoir l’investir plus tard, croit Christopher Parsons, un chercheur de l’université de Toronto interrogé par le quotidien. Il s’agit d’observer l’entrée et la sortie des communications d’un réseau et de dire “Okay, voici les endroits où nous devons entrer.”»

Rogers et RBC disent n’avoir aucune raison de croire que leurs systèmes informatiques ou données de clients ont été compromises. «Si une telle surveillance a réellement lieu, nous trouverions cela très troublant», a néamoins affirmé Patricia Trott, porte-parole pour Rogers.

La NSA espionnerait les communications de Rogers et RBC
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What’s the big deal about Hillary using her personal email at work?

What’s the big deal about Hillary using her personal email at work?

Christopher Parsons, a Toronto-based cybersecurity expert with the think tank Citizen Lab, explained the security difference between a personal and official government email.

“The core security advantage is that the U.S. government will be attuned to the risk of her communications being deliberately targeted and, as such, would have a chance to maximize protections afforded to her communications,” Parsons said. “Moreover, data sent and received in U.S. government systems could be protected according to the sensitivity of the communications. So when sending classified or secret documents, a higher standard of care could have been provided.”

I would note that I don’t work at a think tank: I work at the University of Toronto, within the Munk School of Global Affairs.

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2015.1.6

We understand that cellphone searches are sometimes necessary to obtain important evidence. But the same is true of searching your home. The most invasive searches tend to be the most useful, precisely because of their invasiveness. The U.S. Supreme Court recently recognized this in a unanimous decision requiring a warrant for cellphone searches. As a society, we’ve decided that police need a warrant to search your home, barring exceptional circumstances. But the underlying assumption – that our homes, not our phones, contain our most private information – is increasingly untrue. Should police search our homes, we would not be alone among our generation were our first thought: “Oh god – is my phone there?”

Anisah Hassan and Josh Stark, “Phones are more private than houses – so shouldn’t be easier to search”
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2015.1.2

Our relationship with Facebook, Google and Amazon isn’t symmetrical. We have no power to define the relationship and have zero say in how things work. If this is how commercial companies treat humanity, what can we expect from governments that are increasingly normative in what they expect from their citizens? Our governments have been taken hostage by the same logic of productivity that commercial companies use. With the inescapable number of cameras and other sensors in the public space they will soon have the means to enforce absolute compliance. I am therefore not a strong believer in the ‘sousveillance’ and ‘coveillance’ discourse. I think we need to solve this problem in another way.

Hans de Zwart, “Ai Weiwei Is Living In Our Future: Living under permanent surveillance and what that means for our freedom”
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2014.11.26

The debate about cyber-security in political science and international relations has been very visible among policy elites. Policy-makers and their advisers read Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. However, political and social scientists often do not appreciate the technical details of network breaches, or security setups in critical infrastructure and industrial plants.

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Most political scientists also lack the technical skills to call out poor- quality company reports or government documents. Instead, too many scholars seem happy to engage in self-referential theoretical debates of little relevance to anybody else – for instance, on the ‘securitisation’ of cyber-security.

Robert M. Lee and Thomas Rid. (2014). “OMG Cyber!: Thirteen Reasons Why Hype Makes for Bad Policy,” The RUSI Journal 169(5).

I cannot overstate how emphatically I agree with this general assessment of political science analyses of digital security issues.

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The Canadian Government Wants to Pay More People to Creep Your Facebook

The Canadian Government Wants to Pay More People to Creep Your Facebook:

But government social media monitoring could very easily cross over into a legal gray area. Christopher Parsons, a cybersurveillance researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said the collection of personal data from online sources needs to be rigorously justified, and even when it is, the data needs to be handled and stored safely.

“The government can’t just collect information about Canadians—even from public sourced data repositories such as social media—just because it wants to,” said Parsons in an email to me. “There have to be terms set on the collection, handling, disclosure, and disposal of personal information that the government wants to gather. As a result, even when data is collected for legitimate reasons that doesn’t mean the data can then be used in any way that the government (subsequently) decides.”

Strict oversights into how the government gleans and uses this intelligence—even in the service of testing policy reactions, as Parsons thinks this service will likely do—is required.

According to Parsons, that comes in the form of internal “privacy impact assessments” related to the specific social media surveillance program.

“Government agencies are supposed to conduct such assessments before collecting Canadians’ personal information and explain the specifics of how and why they will collect Canadians’ personal data,” said Parsons.

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In the medium term, it appears Canadians can count on more of their tweets to be sucked up into a government social media surveillance system—then potentially shared across government departments.

Parsons told me that the sharing of the personal data of Canadian, in general, is only becoming more pervasive across government agencies.

“There has been a marked increase in the sharing of personal data between and across different departments because information is initially being collected for vague or far-sweeping reasons. Were social media information collected for similarly vague reasons then the government could then try to expansively share collected information across government,” he said.

 

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2014.10.28

Elizabeth May, then the sole Member of Parliament representing the Green Party, tells the story of MPs of various party affiliations inquiring of her as to how she decides how she is going to vote on any particular bill or motion. She replies that she reads the bill, studies it, consults with her constituents, sometimes asks questions of the sponser, and then comes to her position. Incredulous, MPs from other parties exlaim about how labour intensive that must be and how much easier it is to simply follow the voting instructions provided by the party whips! Undoubtably that is true. However, I believe most constituents would be shocked to discover that their elected representatives are voting automatons, often too disengaged to even follow what item they are voting on.

Brent Rathgeber, Irresponsible Government: The Decline of Parliamentary Democracy in Canada
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2014.9.4

And then there’s the sheer randomness of it all. Some services you can’t access for no apparent reason, others are so slow that you can’t figure out if they’re blocked or just snail-paced. And as I experience this, I wish some of our politicians and media people, those who see net neutrality as the enemy, I wish they’d come here and experience what a radical version of non-neutrality is. Again, I have a VPN service to overcome most of this (at the cost of speed) but most people don’t and/or can’t afford one.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that not enshrining net neutrality is the equivalent of doing what the Chinese (or Iranian, or Indian) government does. But I look at the UK’s blocking mechanisms supposed to protect children but really targeting just about any kind of site for arcane reasons that no one can figure out, and I think that what I have here is an extreme version of the same thing.

Benoit Felton, “Behind the Great Firewall”
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2014.9.2

The Great Celebrity Naked Photo Leak of 2014 – or perhaps we should call it The Great Celebrity Naked Photo Leak of August 2014, given that this happens so often that there won’t be only one this year – is meant to remind women of their place. Don’t get too high and mighty, ladies. Don’t step out of line. Don’t do anything to upset or disappoint men who feel entitled to your time, bodies, affection or attention. Your bared body can always be used as a weapon against you. You bared body can always be used to shame and humiliate you. Your bared body is at once desired and loathed.

Roxane Gay, “The Great Naked Celebrity Leak of 2014 Is Just the Beginning”