Now with two tickets to see this Munk Debate on May 2, 2014!
Categories
Tag: Surveillance
Categories
2014.3.13
The term “identifiers” is NSA jargon for information relating to an individual, such as telephone number, email address, IP address and username as well as their name.
The document – which is undated, though metadata suggests this version was last updated in June 2012 – does not say whether the oversight process it mentions has been established or whether any searches against US person names have taken place.
James Ball and Spencer Ackerman, “NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone calls”
Perhaps foolishly, but I find it amusing that metadata is being used to evaluate how/when other metadata identifiers were being used to track the world’s populations…
Internet companies have hung up on a call by privacy advocates to reveal the extent to which they share subscriber information with police, security services and government.
On January 20, 2014 the Citizen Lab along with leading Canadian academics and civil liberties groups asked Canadian telecommunications companies to reveal the extent to which they disclose information to state authorities. This post summarizes and analyzes the responses from the companies, and argues that the companies have done little to ultimately clarify their disclosure policies. We conclude by indicating the subsequent steps in this research project.
The most recent posting about our ongoing research into how, why, and how often Canadian ISPs disclose information to state agencies.
Categories
2014.2.18
Oakland is a poor city; it can’t really afford its extravagant police force, and it certainly couldn’t afford its DAC [Domain Awareness Centre].
Surveillance trickles down in more than one way. At a time when Oakland is closing schools and dealing with more than $50 million in budget shortfalls, the DAC is made possible by DHS grants. These same grants have been militarizing the police all over America as well as giving them wide surveillance capabilities — capabilities that haven’t translated into much terrorism prevention, but have been aggressively brought to bear on protesters all over the nation in the 15 years since the Battle of Seattle in 1999.
In one of the most revealing moments of these baby Big Brothers, a FOIA request for Oakland City mails about the DAC revealed that none of the talk was about crime – no mention of murders, assaults, thefts, or the violent crime Oakland officials express constant frustration with. Instead, there was talk of tracking protests and labor strikes. The internal desires of Oakland’s minders revealed a frustration with the dissent that finds such powerful political expression in Oakland, and strategies for heading it off.
“I have also made it clear that the United States does not collect intelligence to suppress criticism or dissent,” Obama said in his speech Friday. Whether that is true or not for his NSA and Cybercommand, the Obama Executive has had no problems with funding such efforts at the local level.
Quinn Norton, “NSA Reform: What Could Have Been And What We’ve Got”
Christopher Parsons, Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow, reacts to the assessment that it is okay Wi-Fi data was collected at airports.
My appearance on CTV yesterday, talking about the CSEC Commissioner’s statement that it’s perfectly legal for the foreign signals intelligence agency to collect Canadians’ metadata.
Categories
2014.2.13
Dr. Christopher Parsons, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affair, University of Toronto, Canada: “Our democratic governments have been caught massively spying on innocent individuals around the world. In the process, citizens’ willingness to exercise rights of speech, association, and collective action have been chilled. By reforming governments’ behaviours in a concerted, global, fashion we can push back against this surveillance, surveillance that currently threatens to suffocate our democracies.”
Katitza Rodriguez, “International Community Unites to Protest Big Brother”
Categories
2014.2.12
Shaping ideas is, of course, easier said than done. Bombarding people with ads only works to a degree. No one likes being told what to think. We grow resistant to methods of persuasion that we see through—just think of ads of yesteryear, and of how corny they feel. They worked in their day, but we’re alert to them now. Besides, blanket coverage isn’t easy to achieve in today’s fragmented media landscape. How many channels can one company advertise on? And we now fast-forward through television commercials, anyway. Even if it were possible to catch us through mass media, messages that work for one person often fail to convince others.
Big-data surveillance is dangerous exactly because it provides solutions to these problems. Individually tailored, subtle messages are less likely to produce a cynical reaction. Especially so if the data collection that makes these messages possible is unseen. That’s why it’s not only the NSA that goes to great lengths to keep its surveillance hidden. Most Internet firms also try to monitor us surreptitiously. Their user agreements, which we all must “sign” before using their services, are full of small-font legalese. We roll our eyes and hand over our rights with a click. Likewise, political campaigns do not let citizens know what data they have on them, nor how they use that data. Commercial databases sometimes allow you to access your own records. But they make it difficult, and since you don’t have much right to control what they do with your data, it’s often pointless.
This is why the state-of-the-art method for shaping ideas is not to coerce overtly but to seduce covertly, from a foundation of knowledge. These methods don’t produce a crude ad—they create an environment that nudges you imperceptibly. Last year, an article in Adweek noted that women feel less attractive on Mondays, and that this might be the best time to advertise make-up to them. “Women also listed feeling lonely, fat and depressed as sources of beauty vulnerability,” the article added. So why stop with Mondays? Big data analytics can identify exactly which women feel lonely or fat or depressed. Why not focus on them? And why stop at using known “beauty vulnerabilities”? It’s only a short jump from identifying vulnerabilities to figuring out how to create them. The actual selling of the make-up may be the tip of the iceberg.
Zeynep Tufekci, “What tear gas taught me about Twitter and the NSA: It’s time to rethink our nightmares about surveillance”
In the post-Snowden era of Internet privacy, Parsons and others are continuing the often difficult and unpopular work of pulling back the veil of government surveillance. Students across the country, continent, and indeed, the world, are aware of the new status quo, but may not have considered the full privacy implications of increased access to information online. It is, unfortunately, easy to ignore the droning of television anchors or the frequently updated headlines of news sources as they appear on Facebook and Twitter, especially when the medium lends itself to distraction. The irony, of course, is that as these stories appear, they are swiftly buried under an infinite stream of online information.
From the editorial board at The Varsity, U of T’s student newspaper.
Excited Pixels 