There’s a lot of confusion about the actual versus rhetorical security integrated with Apple’s iMessage product. I’ve tried to suggest, in the linked article, how Canadians can use our federal privacy laws to figure out whether Apple is, or the company’s critics are, right about the company’s security posture.
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Freelancers are second-class journalists—even if there are only freelancers here, in Syria, because this is a dirty war, a war of the last century; it’s trench warfare between rebels and loyalists who are so close that they scream at each other while they shoot each other. The first time on the frontline, you can’t believe it, with these bayonets you have seen only in history books. Today’s wars are drone wars, but here they fight meter by meter, street by street, and it’s fucking scary. Yet the editors back in Italy treat you like a kid; you get a front-page photo, and they say you were just lucky, in the right place at the right time. You get an exclusive story, like the one I wrote last September on Aleppo’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, burning as the rebels and Syrian army battled for control. I was the first foreign reporter to enter, and the editors say: “How can I justify that my staff writer wasn’t able to enter and you were?” I got this email from an editor about that story: “I’ll buy it, but I will publish it under my staff writer’s name.”
- Francesca Borri, Columbia Journalism Review. Woman’s Work.
FJP: A fast-paced, fiercely heartfelt essay on the downsides to freelance work abroad and the madness of war.
(via futurejournalismproject)
This speaks volumes about contemporary war reporting: not only are ‘dirty wars’ outsourced to freelancers, but the credibility linked to successfully covering them is either denigrated or obviated to the public.
From an editorial in the Cape Breton Post:
Elections Nova Scotia also touts “a dozen ways to vote.” But that’s a little misleading. Nine of those “ways” involve a write-in ballot.
Conspicuously, none include electronic voting. The significance of Doiron’s claim that Elections Nova Scotia’s changes will make it easier for people to vote fizzles when we consider the fact that electronic voting allows people to vote from virtually anywhere.
The Cape Breton Regional Municipality successfully implemented e-voting during the last round of municipal elections in 2012, with 26,949 — or 32.8 per cent — of CBRM electors voting electronically.
And as Postmedia News recently reported, Elections Canada has been touting Internet voting since 2008, although budget cuts put the kibosh on plans to introduce online voting in byelections held this year. But at least Elections Canada acknowledges the potential value of e-voting.
So, what are the chances of an elector voting electronically in a provincial election anytime soon?
“The registration and voting and the security — maintaining the integrity of the election — is still a very tricky game,” Doiron told the Globe and Mail. “And that’s one of the reasons that no provincial or federal authority has online voting yet because it’s just not secure enough for the kind of integrity we have to deliver.”
The CBRM had e-voting success. And at the federal level, barriers to implementing electronic voting seem to be more fiscal in nature than about security.
I’m curious as to how the author of this opinion piece concludes that fiscal issues are more significant than security issues. I presume that they are referring to Elections Canada’s decision to scrap an e-vote test, but despite not running the test the federal agency recognized that security was an issue with online voting.
These security challenges have been highlighted repeatedly: a recent election in Nova Scotia used online voting, and officials cannot guarantee that votes were recorded properly based on significant technical deficits. Similarly, voting events during the NDP Leadership election in 2012 suffered from third-party interference, which ultimately caused people to not vote. Moreover, even if the servers that recorded votes in both situations were secured all of the intermediary systems were not; consequently it is functionally impossible to assert that the malware-ridden computers that people vote on or intermediary network points didn’t alter voting outcomes.[1] This isn’t to say that malware or intermediary interference did affect the outcomes, but that the authoritative conclusions of online votes are much, much weaker than those reliant on paper ballots.
Voting matters. A lot. And folks that insist that we can ignore the security and privacy issues either don’t care enough to learn the detailed problems of online voting, or don’t seem to care that most verifiable online voting mechanisms enable the tracking of how people vote. That kind of tracking is something that a large number of people fought hard to excise from our democratic electoral systems. We invite it back in at our peril.
For more on this point, see “Online Voting and Hostile Deployment Environments” ↩
jakke said: Actually I don’t agree at all. That’s directly analogous to leveraging (some is a positive externality to credit, too much is a negative externality to risk, the threshold differs depending on whom you’re talking about) and we can regulate that.
The literature that has looked at the economic of privacy over the past decade or two has been absolutely dismal, insofar as efforts to operationalize the ‘value’ of privacy are pervaded with assumptions of rationality, comprehension, ability to enact privacy choices, and so forth. The literature on privacy more generally is still struggling – after 40+ years – to really move beyond squabbling about what ‘privacy’ even means. The consequence is that ascertaining the externalities linked to privacy infringements/violations/concerns/(term of the month) necessarily requires adopting one definition or another.
Unlike more ‘defined’ harms (e.g. X percentage of Y particulate in the water is linked to Z) those linked with privacy have a tendency to be more normative, and harder to measure as a result. Ascertaining what the chilling effect of corporate surveillance, or the consequences of non-transparency in how communications infrastructures subtly modulate discourse and association, is an exercise in theory as much as anything else. Consumers, for lots of good reasons, are poor rational actors in lots of areas, and privacy is argued to be one of those areas.
So the quotation was emergent from a (longer) argument concerning the efficacy of economic analyses of privacy and place such analyses have within the broader dimensions of the contested individual, communal, and intersubjective natures of privacy. It’s on these bases that economic analyses fall short: while they *might* improve the situation, marginally, what is improved will be regarded as perpetuating the harm by some, and being the wrong measure of alleviating harms by other.
A very helpful resource for deciphering ‘government-speak’ surrounding national security surveillance practices.
In the name of efficiency and good long-term planning, DHS is ensuring that its Predator Drones over the USA are able to distinguish persons from animals, evaluate whether such persons are armed, and are also integrating signals intelligence systems into the vehicles. From the article:
Homeland Security’s specifications for its drones, built by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, say they “shall be capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not,” meaning carrying a shotgun or rifle. They also specify “signals interception” technology that can capture communications in the frequency ranges used by mobile phones, and “direction finding” technology that can identify the locations of mobile devices or two-way radios.
The analysis and interdiction capabilities being integrated into drones may – prospectively – be considered legal. If they are legal then it should be clear that ethical and normative (to say nothing of constitutional) claims should be brought to bear on the basis that such expansions of government surveillance are almost certain to be used inappropriately and to the disadvantage of American citizens and residents alike.
The Internet of Things is moving apace and consumers are increasingly purchasing Internet-connected devices for their homes. In the case of SmartTVs it appears that manufacturers’ poor security design(s) could pose a direct threat to the network the TV is integrated with:
Since the well-known Javascript object XmlHttpRequest is available within the DAE, not only the TV is the target of possible attacks but also other networked devices in the user’s home network.
Using a timing-based approach, attackers are able to scan the user’s home network from the TV for other devices that are behind the user’s firewall and would not directly be visible from the internet. This could be used for user profiling and for finding further attack targets.
The next step for the attackers could be the reconfiguration of components in the local area network in order to facilitate further attacks via different vectors. For example the home router – which in many cases has no password protection when accessed from the LAN – could be reconfigured by the attacker to have no protection against attacks from the internet.
In order to gain personal information, attackers could access well-known services like UPnP or http in the user’s network via the connected TV. For example IP cameras or printers could be compromised using this technique.
Also using the XmlHttpRequest object, attackers can transfer all of the gained information to arbitrary Internet drop-zones, which would also expose the victim’s IP address.
As a lot of these attacks have been publicized in the context of browser hacking, there is a lot of available code on the Internet that might be used for also compromising Smart TVs.
While the researcher who’s done this work is presently posing SmartTVs as potential – rather than necessary, or actual – threats, now that the cat’s out of the bag it’s almost guaranteed that more people will be working on weaponizing your TV. Isn’t the pervasive connection of equipment to the Internet just great?
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Lockdown: RSS and Webstandards
An excellent piece that address how the Web is increasingly shifting from a domain of open standards that facilitated the free exchange of data and flight of users to proprietary standards designed to limits subscriber flight.
Caspar Bowden has been aggressively lobbying the EU Parliament over the implications of the FISA Amendments Act for some time. In short, the Act authorizes capturing data from ‘Electronic Communications Service Providers’ when the data possesses foreign intelligence value. The result is that business and personal information, in addition to information directly concerning ‘national security’, can be legitimately collected by the Agency. (For more, see pages 33-35 of this report.)
Caspar’s most recent article outlines the unwillingness of key members of the EU Parliament to take seriously the implications of American surveillance … until it ceases to be an issue for policy wonks, and one of politics. Still, the Parliament has yet to retract recent amendments that would detrimentally affect the privacy rights of European citizens: it will be interesting to see whether the politics of the issue reverse the parliamentarians’ decisions or if lobbying by corporate interests win the day.
Excited Pixels 