Tag: Quotation

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Quotations

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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Links Quotations

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.

…

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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Links

Heartbleed Ripped a Hole in the Internet | VICE Canada

The internet is currently atwitter with talk about Heartbleed bug, an encryption fault which caused a horrific ripple effect in the OpenSSL system that put your passwords on sites like RedTube, & Yahoo.

Chris Parsons nearly predicted the CRA’s vulnerability just before they decided to shut down their tax websites, while some of his colleagues and followers criticized the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre (CCIRC) for not alerting the public sooner, when it was already obvious the CRA was using a vulnerable version of SSL. Chris discussed the potential ramifications of the CRA’s Heartbleed vulnerability with me:

“A significant amount of highly sensitive tax-related personal information is passed through CRA’s online service gateways. A third-party could have, potentially, accessed logins and passwords of Canadians or the private keys of CRA’s services. The former set of information would let that party log into CRA and impersonate the person in question. The latter set of data could let the third-party decrypt previously captured client-server information and, as a result, decode not just passwords and logins but also the tax data that individuals provided to CRA.”

First time that I’ve been quoted (extensively) in Vice!

Source: Heartbleed Ripped a Hole in the Internet | VICE Canada

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Quotations

2014.3.24

The tax refund has become a big part of the income stream for many low-income Canadians. Many tax credits are distributed through the tax system. And it’s the least well-off who are eligible for a lot of those credits.

Low-income Canadians can get their tax returns prepared for free at the many free income tax clinics set up across the country during tax season. But because the clinics can’t give instant refunds, it can be a tough sell to have people wait a couple of weeks to get all their money.

“We try to tell them that they don’t need to pay $40 or $50 to get their taxes prepared, they can get it done here for free,” says Viji Naguleswaran, a community financial worker at St. Christopher House, which caters to lower-income residents in Toronto.

Still, it often comes down to personal circumstances. Are these people willing to give up some of that precious refund to get their hands on money now?

“The issue is cash flow,” says Rick Eagan, community development co-ordinator at St. Christopher House. “When you’re desperate, 15 days can make a big difference.”

Tom McFeat, “Are instant tax refunds worth the cost?”
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Links Quotations

Potholes abound on the road to car-to-car communication

The security design of the system as implemented in tests so far will require a national certificate infrastructure much like that used for preventing domain spoofing and securing the Web. It will require a database of certificates—like the X.509 certificates used in public key infrastructure (PKI)—to verify that devices are legitimate and make it possible to rescind permissions to ensure that no one can send out spoofed messages. If a certificate were to become compromised or if a manufacturer misconfigured a batch of V2V systems, the certificate authority would be able to revoke the associated certificate. This prevents spoofing much in the way that DNS SEC prevents the “poisoning” of Internet domain address tables by a rogue Domain Name Service server.

The problem is that no one has ever developed a PKI system large enough to handle every vehicle in the United States—every car, truck, bus, and motorcycle. The revocation table for expired or compromised certificates would have to be distributed constantly to cars to make sure they weren’t victimized by recorded data attacks or other systems that used hacked hardware to spoof traffic.

So far, there hasn’t been any agreement yet on how this PKI would distribute its certificates. Proposals have included having roadside systems issue certificates as vehicles drive by and having certificates sent to vehicles out-of-band over cellular connections. The latter would mean that every car in the country would have to have its own integrated cellular phone or that drivers would have to connect their phones regularly to the systems to ensure they didn’t get shut out of the network.

Oh yes, please: let’s build a mass communications network dependent on a (largely) creaky Certificate system, deploy the devices to the attackers (i.e. car owners), and just trust that no one’s gonna hack a mass, nation-wide, Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications network.

Also: taking bets on it being an escrowed certificate system. For public safety and all that good stuff.

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Quotations

2013.7.10

… the cultural, political, and privacy concerns raised by the new business alliances of search engines, social networks, and carriers cannot be translated into traditional economic analysis. They raise questions about the type of society we want to live in–a holistic inquiry that cannot be reduced to the methodological individualism of economics.

Frank Pasquale. (2010). “Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries.” Northwestern University Law Review 104(1).
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Aside Quotations

2013.4.8

Although some of the core supporters of that group are prone to violence and criminal behaviour, Catt has never been convicted of criminal conduct in connections to the demonstrations he attended. Nonetheless, Catt’s personal information was held on the National Domestic Extremism Database that is maintained by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. The information held on him included his name, age, description of his appearance and his history of attending political demonstrations. The police had retained a photograph of Mr Catt but it had been destroyed since it was deemed to be unnecessary. The information was accessible to members of the police who engage in investigations on “Smash EDO”.

In the ruling the Court of Appeal departs from earlier judgments by mentioning that the “reasonable expectation of privacy” is not the only factor to take into account in determining whether an individual’s Article 8 (1) right has been infringed. In surveying ECtHR case law, the Court noted that it is also important to check whether personal data has been subjected to systematic processing and if it is entered in a database. The rationale to include consideration of the latter two categories is that in this way authorities can recover information by reference to a particular person. Therefore, “the processing and retention of even publicly available information may involve an interference with the subject’s article 8 rights.” Since in the case of Catt, personal data was retained and ready to be processed, the Court found a violation of Article 8 (1) that requires justification.

Carolin Moeller, “Peaceful Protester’s personal data removed from extremism database”

The removal of Mr. Catt’s data from these databases is a significant victory for him and all those involved in fighting for citizens’ rights. However, the case acts as a clear lens through which we can see how certain facets of the state are actively involved in pseudo-criminalizing dissent: you’re welcome to say or do anything, so long as you’re prepared to be placed under perpetual state suspicion.

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Aside Quotations

Quote of the month

evgenymorozov:

From Warren McCulloch, one of the founding fathers of cybernetics:

“I don’t particularly like people, never have. Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all animals. I don’t see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun than he himself can, why they shouldn’t take over, enslave us, quite happily. They might have a lot more fun, invent better games than we ever did.”

quoted in Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor (New York: Knopf, 1972)

Techno-utopianism (dystopianism?) for the win.

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Quotations

2013.1.19

It’s not good to be on Power’s bad side, however. When you are on that side, Power piles on charges rather than shrugging off felonies as simple mistakes. Especially if what you do falls into the gray area of enforcing the letter as opposed to the principles of the law.

…

You can file all the petitions you like with the powers that be. You can try to make Power –whether in the form of wiretapping without warrants or violating international conventions against torture — follow its own laws. But Power is, as you might suspect, on the side of Power. Which is to say, Power never pleads guilty.

Ryan Singel, “Aaron Swartz and the Two Faces of Power”
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Quotations

2013.1.17

The same vulnerabilities that enable crime in the first place also give law enforcement a way to wiretap — when they have a narrowly targeted warrant and can’t get what they’re after some other way. The very reasons why we have Patch Tuesday followed by Exploit Wednesday, why opening e-mail attachments feels like Russian roulette, and why anti-virus software and firewalls aren’t enough to keep us safe online provide the very backdoors the FBI wants.

Matt Blaze and Susan Landau, “The FBI Needs Hackers, Not Backdoors”