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Tag: Police
Surveillance technologies are a double-edged sword, one that often lack a hilt guard.
According to the report, a top German security official installed a trojan on his own daughter’s computer to monitor her Internet usage. What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing—well, at least until one of the daughter’s friends found the installed spyware. The friend then went after the dad’s personal computer as a payback and managed to get in, where he found a cache of security-related e-mails from work. The e-mails, in turn, provided the information necessary for hackers to infiltrate Germany’s federal police.
That was bad, but it got worse. The hackers got into the servers for the “Patras” program, which logs location data on suspected criminals through cell phone and car GPS systems. Concerned about security breaches, the government eventually had to take the entire set of Patras servers offline.
A critical read about the contemporary aims of intelligence and policing communities to expand their technical surveillance capabilities whilst reducing legal oversight of their activities. A snippet:
This post casts new light on government agency claims that we are “going dark.” Due to changing technology, there are indeed specific ways that law enforcement and national security agencies lose specific previous capabilities. These specific losses, however, are more than offset by massive gains. Public debates should recognize that we are truly in a golden age of surveillance. By understanding that, we can reject calls for bad encryption policy. More generally, we should critically assess a wide range of proposals, and build a more secure computing and communications infrastructure.
Go read the whole piece. It’ll take a few minutes, but it’ll be some of the best minutes you’ve spent today.
Excited Pixels 