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Canadian ISPs Won’t Tell You Much About Your Own Data

Canadian ISPs Won’t Tell You Much About Your Own Data:

Ever wondered how long your telecom provider retains your user data? Or if law enforcement has requested your records?

…

This “Access My Info” tool was launched in June, and now, responses have started to trickle back in.

“We’re starting to be able to compare and contrast some of the larger company’s responses,” Parsons said.

Using either Parsons’ form letter, or the AMI tool, subscribers can request that their telecom providers clarify the types of data they collect, tell them how long they retain such data, provide copies of relevant records, and whether their information has been disclosed to law enforcement or government agencies. But perhaps unsurprisingly, policies and practices tend to differ from one provider to the next.

“I think that the letters from TekSavvy are comprehensive. They’re not trying to play games,” Parsons said, referring to the responses sent out by one of Canada’s smaller  internet service providers. “They’re actually taking seriously the questions that individuals are making and not trying to blow them off. That stands in variance with, I would say, almost every other member of the industry.”

Parsons said that in other responses, “the detail that is present, or is more often the case, absent, is really quite breathtaking. The only thing I have from Bell is a one page sheet that’s almost worse than useless. It almost doesn’t respond to the customer’s question.”

Parsons told me that discerning how long certain types of data are retained has proven particularly hard, for example.

“Retention schedules matter. How long you store data should not be a top secret corporate secret, because it’s about citizens,” said Parsons. ”Here we’re talking about basic, basic, basic privacy information. How long do you store information about me? None of these companies aside from TekSavvy have tried to comprehensively respond to that question.“

This is a detailed piece by Matt Braga, and one that I’d highly recommend if you’re interested what the Telecom Transparency Project has (and hasn’t) learned about Canadian telecommunications companies’ data retention schedules.

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Telus joins transparency push by sharing demands for customer info

Telus joins transparency push by sharing demands for customer info :

Christopher Parsons, a research fellow with Citizen Lab, which is part of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, says he commends Telus for following through on a commitment to release a report this summer and for its call for industry standards on such disclosures.

“The trick is, however, that we’re still missing Bell Canada, which is the largest telecommunications provider in the country,” he said. “Clearly, there’s an industry movement in Canada and all across North America toward these transparency reports and Bell Canada needs to be on board.”

…

Mr. Parsons says any industry standard around reporting should also include disclosure about how long the companies retain customer information.

TELUS is to be congratulated for following through on their promise to release a transparency, report, as well as for committing to publishing future reports. At this point, two of the largest telecom in Canada (Rogers and TELUS) along with a leading independent telecom (TekSavvy) have released transparency reports: where’s Bell and all the smaller companies?

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Stop trying to sell me wrist-worn smartphones

Stop trying to sell me wrist-worn smartphones :

Everyone seems to be going down the same route of trying to shrink smart technology to the size of a watch instead of working to smarten up the watches we already have. It’s approaching the problem from the wrong direction, which might explain why the solutions we’ve seen so far have all been inadequate in some way or another. Mostly it’s about the size. Today’s smartwatches contain the best miniaturized technology available, but remain too large — even if they do try to patch over it with fine leather straps, polished metal designs, and gorgeous AMOLED screens.

It absolutely baffles me who, exactly, smart watches are being designed for. The notion that something would be buzzing on my wrist (in my own, very anecdotal case) hundreds of times a day as I receive email, retweets, LinkedIn invites, text messages, hangouts messages, and so forth is absolutely absurd. That’s noise that I want to avoid or minimize, not enhance and maximize.

I own one, very nice, watch that I wear on special circumstances. It’s beautiful and is powered by kinetic motions. It’s light enough that it doesn’t annoy the hell out of me, but heavy enough that it’s comfortable on my wrist. And, in all cases, it doesn’t beep, buzz, or otherwise interfere with my daily life.

To my mind, the ‘rationale’ for smart watches is really predicated on the absurd sizes that smartphones are reaching. With phones increasingly being sold with 5 inch, or larger, screens the devices are eyesores whenever they’re pulled out and their screens examined.

That’s a very, very bad rationale to build a product on and (to my mind) indicates the failure of smartphone design. And the solution that failure isn’t smart watches but more humane-sized phones.

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Listening In: The Navy Is Tracking Ocean Sounds Collected by Scientists

Listening In: The Navy Is Tracking Ocean Sounds Collected by Scientists:

A network of Internet-connected undersea microphones is picking up more than whale songs.

This is one of the coolest surveillance/national security/academic research-related news article I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommended!

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From The Unsealed ‘Jewel v. NSA’ Transcript: The DOJ Has Nothing But Contempt For American Citizens

From The Unsealed ‘Jewel v. NSA’ Transcript: The DOJ Has Nothing But Contempt For American Citizens:

Hey, I’m sorry the leaks have made it harder for these agencies to do whatever the hell they want, but they are all part of a government that’s supposed to be accountable to the citizens picking up the check. But when faced with unhappy citizens and their diminished rights, all the DOJ’s lawyers can say is that the public doesn’t know shit and has no right to question the government’s activities.

The government has somehow managed to come to a conclusion others reached weeks ago – there’s more than one leaker out there. GOOD. Burn it down. In the DOJ’s hands, the government isn’t by or for the people. It’sdespite the people. The DOJ can’t be trusted to protect the balance between privacy and security. As it sees it, what the public doesn’t know will likely hurt it, and it’s damned if it’s going to allow citizens to seek redress for their grievances.

While I don’t agree with the whole ‘burn-the-DOJ-down’ mentality, that this is an increasingly mainstream opinion regarding key US government institutions is deeply problematic. Such attitudes are indicative of a population no longer seeing itself reflected in its government which is, in turn, a recipe for social conflicts.

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Canada Spies on Israel’s Enemies

Canada Spies on Israel’s Enemies:

A new report in The Intercept revealed that CSEC, Canada’s NSA, spies on Israel’s enemies. But what does that entail? And is it within CSEC’s mandate to do so?

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I reached out to Chris Parsons, a prominent cybersecurity and surveillance researcher from Toronto’s Citizen Lab, to discuss CSEC’s role in Israel’s military offensives. He told me there are “at least two ways” that CSEC would be involved in helping out Israel. One of which would be to provide INSU with a tracking program, or specific databases, to help spy on targets and persons of interest, which would have been developed by CSEC. As we learned from the free airport WiFi presentation, which was more about tracking targets as they log into various WiFi access points around the world than it was about surveilling airport travelers in particular, CSEC does have these capabilities in their wheelhouse.

Parsons went on to say that CSEC could also assist Israel by “providing some sort of expertise with how to use databases that are shared out to the Israeli intelligence community.” Simply put, Canada may be giving the Israelis tech support for the spying systems we’re giving them. In terms of whether or not this kind of assistance is within CSEC’s mandate, Parsons told me: “As you’re aware, the Canadian government has identified Hamas as a terrorist organization and as such, it would make sense for CSEC to be engaged in the monitoring of their locations and their electronic systems that Hamas is believed to be using. So in that sense, it should fit within CSEC’s mandated intelligence-gathering.”

But even with Hamas on a designated terror list, the complexities surrounding our Canadian surveillance agency spying on Palestinian targets opens up major issues of privacy; specifically when you consider how a target is selected, and how sure government powers need to be before a person is added to a list of terrorists. As Parsons told me, there is the “very serious question of how exactly individuals are identified as valid targets or not… How many individuals are swept up into the monitoring?”

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Working Anything but 9 to 5

Working Anything but 9 to 5:

SAN DIEGO — In a typical last-minute scramble, Jannette Navarro, a 22-year-old Starbucks barista and single mother, scraped together a plan for surviving the month of July without setting off family or financial disaster.

In contrast to the joyless work she had done at a Dollar Tree store and a KFC franchise, the $9-an-hour Starbucks job gave Ms. Navarro, the daughter of a drug addict and an absentee father, the hope of forward motion. She had been hired because she showed up so many times, cheerful and persistent, asking for work, and she had a way of flicking away setbacks — such as a missed bus on her three-hour commute — with the phrase, “I’m over it.”

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But Ms. Navarro’s fluctuating hours, combined with her limited resources, had also turned their lives into a chronic crisis over the clock. She rarely learned her schedule more than three days before the start of a workweek, plunging her into urgent logistical puzzles over who would watch the boy. Months after starting the job she moved out of her aunt’s home, in part because of mounting friction over the erratic schedule, which the aunt felt was also holding her family captive. Ms. Navarro’s degree was on indefinite pause because her shifting hours left her unable to commit to classes. She needed to work all she could, sometimes counting on dimes from the tip jar to make the bus fare home. If she dared ask for more stable hours, she feared, she would get fewer work hours over all.

An excellent, if damning, piece on the hardships associated with ‘flexible’ scheduling and low-paying jobs.

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Facebook Messenger app sparks privacy concerns

Facebook Messenger app sparks privacy concerns:

Christopher Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs’ Citizen Lab, said the fact that Facebook is asking for access to so much data is not surprising given the way the Android operating system works, but said users’ concerns over privacy are still legitimate.

“People enjoy the functionality of the app, but they’re sort of shocked when they ascertain or remember that ‘Oh yeah, this is what I actually have to give up in order to use contemporary, full-scale social media,’ ” he said.

Parsons, who is also managing director of Munk’s Telecom Transparency Project, said the odds of the data accessed by Facebook falling into the wrong hands are slim, describing its cyber-security staff as among the most aggressive and well-financed in the world.

Still, he said companies like Facebook could do a much better job at explaining to users why it needs their permission for so many different functions. It could, for example, offer a scaled-down version of its terms and conditions written in a language that anyone can understand, said Parsons.

He said even though more and more people have realized over the past week the extent of the Messenger requirements, it’s unlikely that Facebook will see a mass exodus of users.

“People may feel they don’t have any actual option, because if they don’t download the app, they can’t communicate with their social network,” said Parsons.

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The Only Thing Worse Than Getting a Ph.D. in Today’s Academic Job Market

The Only Thing Worse Than Getting a Ph.D. in Today’s Academic Job Market:

Dissertations—some 250 pages of original research in the humanities, and topping 400 in the social sciences—are objectively, indisputably difficult. It sometimes takes years just to collect data or comb through the necessary archives, and then the damn thing must be written, often in total isolation. Dissertations are not impossible, but they are very hard, and most people in the world—including, perhaps, you, my friend—cannot complete one.

…

… there are the inner hindrances, the ones that cause procrastination, and then shame, and then paralysis. Here’s my favorite: believing, erroneously, that one must read and master every single word of existing scholarship before even beginning to write. Here’s my least favorite (which happens to my clients all the time): refusing to turn in any chapter that isn’t perfect, and thus not turning in anything at all—which results in the adviser getting irate, which puts even more pressure on the student to be even more perfect, ad infinitum. This is how dissertations are stalled, often forever.

So what can be done to fix this? The Izzy Mandelbaums of academia may argue the system is fine the way it is: In a field that requires extended independent work to succeed, the trial by fire of the dissertation is an apt initiation. (“All aboard the pain train!”) But does it have to be this way? I see no reason why, for example, more dissertation advisers couldn’t be enthusiastic about seeing early drafts, to provide guidance and support. Some already do this (mine did), but far too many of my clients say their advisers won’t even look at anything that isn’t “polished.” Every adviser who says this is part of the problem.

Another step in the right direction would be not just to hold dissertation workshops, but also to make them mandatory. A lot of grad students are simply too paralyzed (or ashamed to admit they don’t know what they’re doing) to attend one of their own volition. A mandatory workshop frees them to get the help they need, without having to admit they need help.

The belief that someone has ’failed if they do not complete their doctoral degree is absolutely frustrating and absurd; I’ve seen brilliant people leave not because they couldn’t write, not because they couldn’t publish, but because there were bureaucratic hoops they were emotionally ill-suited to handle. And instead of working with them – people who could have easily been the next leaders of their respective fields, and who were already emerging as such as doctoral students – they were instead cast aside. This is pre-defence of comprehensive exams, pre-defence of dissertation proposal, and thus way before the defence (or writing of) their dissertation itself.

For those ‘stuck’ at the dissertating point, I think that having regular (ideally weekly) meetups is incredibly helpful for successful completion, second in value only to regular (ideally bi-weekly) meetings with one’s supervisor. I was blessed to have an outstanding advisor who was willing to read early-draft work and provide valuable feedback, with most feedback returned in 2 weeks or so of me giving it to him. He shared with me thoughts and guidance, as well as tactics for moving forward. Sometimes I didn’t understand why he wanted what he wanted, to the point where it sometimes took years for me to implement the changes. Not because I didn’t want to, not because I wasn’t willing to (somewhat) blindly accept his proposed revisions, but because I wasn’t at a stage to understand what he was even proposing. Only by having regular, ongoing, contact with both dissertating peers and one’s supervisor does such nuance and advice become tangible and real in my experience.

The other helpful thing about regular peer-based meetings is you can set weekly goals, monthly goals, and semester-length goals. And you just chip away at them, every week. Ideally the group has at least one person who can drive a meeting so it’s quick and efficient and often asks pain-in-the-ass questions (e.g. It’s great that you’re working on that conference paper, but can you state how it fits with the dissertation, and what working on that paper will do over the next week/month/term in terms of advancing the dissertation)? In my experience, when I ran such meetings, they would take the following format:

  • meet at coffee shop, order coffee (5–10 minutes)
  • go around the table, reminding the group what each person committed to accomplishing and then asking whether each member met their goals (5–10 minutes)
  • go back around the table, getting members to commit to next week’s/month’s goals (5–10 minutes)
  • meeting adjourned
  • Total time: 15–30 minutes

Our meetings typically had been 4–7 people and, for those who attended and committed regularly, worked out well. We also had a deal where if you failed to accomplish any of your weekly goalsyou bought someone a coffee next week. It was a very small, but useful, measure to ensure that each person accomplished at least one of their goals set the prior week. And, if they failed, to have some ‘pain’ associated with that failure.

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Inside Citizen Lab, the “Hacker Hothouse” protecting you from Big Brother

Inside Citizen Lab, the “Hacker Hothouse” protecting you from Big Brother:

Starting out in the basement of the Munk School of Global Affairs with a handful of students in the Spring of 2001, Deibert’s Citizen Lab now operates out of a third-story office on Bloor Street, on the northwest edge of the University of Toronto campus. But like the agencies its members often criticize, Citizen Lab has collaborators operating everywhere, supplying information about how state power is being exercised in cyberspace.

Deibert doesn’t mind the comparison. In fact, much of his inspiration for the Lab came from working inside the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs in the mid-‘90s, where he studied the use of satellite reconnaissance for arms control verification. The working group he was part of conceptualized a kind of “earth monitoring system” to enforce bans on nuclear testing—a worldwide system of satellites, underwater fences, and seismic stations designed to hold entire nations to account.

…

Still, when it comes to what a “people’s intelligence agency” might look like, it’s hard to find a better template than the one created by Citizen Lab. And its hacker ethos is reflected in those it calls its allies.

One of the better descriptions of some of what we do, on a daily and ongoing basis, at the Citizen Lab.