Tag: Surveillance

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Quotations

2013.12.11

That is what the Snowden leaks have exposed — a massive government operation to archive and analyze all the world’s communications. Opposing the surveillance state, and demanding the right as free citizens to know what our government is doing, is not a left- or a right-wing issue; it is one of tyranny versus liberty; it’s about whether we want to live in a communist-style surveillance state, or enjoy the rights and privileges of a free society.

Jesse Kline, “The spy who read my email”
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Quotations

2013.12.10

The factions · Suspicion aside, and bearing in mind that in the IETF people are supposed to speak for themselves not on behalf of organizations, and also that opinions are highly fragmented, there are some roughly-identifiable opinion clusters, not organized or anything; but describing them may help people understand what’s going on.

The Privacy Partisans are aggressive about doing whatever’s possible by way of counter-attack, and doing it now. This notably includes engineers from Firefox and Chrome, who say that for HTTP/2.0, they’re just gonna run authenticated and encrypted all the time, whatever anyone says.

The Cynics are unconvinced about the usefulness of the counterattack measures on the table. They think that the technology isn’t good enough, or the secret-key infrastructure is corrupt, or that Google and Facebook and so on should be seen as attackers, or developers are just too lazy and incompetent to get the deployment right.

The Enterpriseys are people who think that surveillance is necessary because there are situations where law or policy require it. Examples include prisons, businesses that want to control their employees’ Net access, and devops folks who want to monitor for malware or do load-balancing.

The Unconvinced just don’t see the need for aggressive privacy protection; they think it’s foolish to apply it to public static brochure-ware, or that it’s unethical to impose encryption on people without asking them, or that it’s insane to try to encrypt the Internet of Things: Printers and toasters and so on.

Tim Bray, “Counter-Surveillance”

Tim does a good job in breaking down the ‘factions’ associated with the IETF and how/whether the organization will be technically addressing the NSA spying revelations. It’s hard to understate how important the IETF’s current involvement is in light of their decision – between 1999-2001 – to largely turn a blind eye to interception equipment and the spying of citizens’ communications.

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Aside Links

The Oddities of CBC’s Snowden Redactions | Technology, Thoughts & Trinkets

The CBC redacted the Snowden documents concerning NSA surveillance during the G8/G20. While I can agree that some of the redactions were appropriate the majority that were made seem excessive.

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Videos

IETF 88 Technical Plenary: Hardening The Internet

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Aside Humour

Nothing to See Here!

David Parkins, The Globe and Mail

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Links

The Politics of Deep Packet Inspection: What Drives Surveillance by Internet Service Providers? | Technology, Thoughts & Trinkets

My dissertation is now available to the public!

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Links Writing

Did Canadian Oil Companies Get a Tip-Off from CSEC?

The Globe and Mail reports on discussions in the Canadian Senate. Specifically, Liberal Senator Wilfred Moore asked:

“Can the [Senate] leader enlighten this chamber as to what was done with the data obtained by CSEC from the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy?”

…

Alleging that CSEC’s “cyberhacking” was intended to probe Brazil’s claims about discovering billions of barrels of oil in a new offshore-field find, Mr. Moore noted that no Canadian or U.S. corporations have joined the bidding for drilling rights in an auction that was held earlier this week in Brazil.

This is an incendiary question. If it turns out that Canadian companies didn’t bid because CSEC found Petrobras has overestimated the oil reserves in the Libra field, or if CSEC found that it was going to be harder to extract the oil that stated by the Brazilian government, then it’s a very, very big deal on the basis that the Canadian government (and extension of the department of national defence) would then be engaging in espionage on the behalf of Canadian companies.

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Links Writing

NSA Revelations Kill IBM Hardware Sales in China

For several months there have been warnings that the NSA revelations will seriously upset American technology companies’ bottom lines. Though not directly implicated in any of the leaks thus far it appears that IBM’s Chinese growth predictions have just been fed through a wood chipper. From Zerohedge:

In mid-August, an anonymous source told the Shanghai Securities News, a branch of the state-owned Xinhua News Agency, which reports directly to the Propaganda and Public Information Departments of the Communist Party, that IBM, along with Oracle and EMC, have become targets of the Ministry of Public Security and the cabinet-level Development Research Centre due to the Snowden revelations.

“At present, thanks to their technological superiority, many of our core information technology systems are basically dominated by foreign hardware and software firms, but the Prism scandal implies security problems,” the source said, according to Reuters. So the government would launch an investigation into these security problems, the source said.

Absolute stonewalling ensued. IBM told Reuters that it was unable to comment. Oracle and EMC weren’t available for comment. The Ministry of Public Security refused to comment. The Development Research Centre knew nothing of any such investigation. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology “could not confirm anything because of the matter’s sensitivity.”

…

This is the first quantitative indication of the price Corporate America has to pay for gorging at the big trough of the US Intelligence Community, and particularly the NSA with its endlessly ballooning budget. For once, there is a price to be paid, if only temporarily, for helping build a perfect, seamless, borderless surveillance society. The companies will deny it. At the same time, they’ll be looking for solutions. China, Russia, and Brazil are too important to just get kicked out of – and other countries might follow suit.

Now, IBM et al. aren’t necessarily purely victim to the NSA’s massive surveillance practices: there likely are legitimate domestic market changes that are also affecting the ability of Western companies to sell product in China and other Asian-Pacific countries. But still, that NSA can be used to justify retreats from Western products indicates how even companies not clearly and directly implicated in the scandals stand to lose. One has to wonder whether the economic losses that will be incurred following the NSA revelations are equal to, or exceed, any economic gains linked to the spying.

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Links

Greater Oversight Required for Canada’s Spy Agencies

This is the kind of introspection and critique that all backbenchers should be able to present to the public. They shouldn’t be forced to leave their party caucus to do so.

Source: Greater Oversight Required for Canada’s Spy Agencies

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Writing

How Not To Defend Your Signals Intelligence Agency

Many Canadians, at this point, will have heard that our foreign signals intelligence agency has reportedly been spying in Brasil. Specifically, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) has been accused of using “email and phone metadata to map internal communications within Brazil’s Mines and Energy Ministry through a software program called Olympia.” This has created quite a stir and forced the federal government of Canada to defend itself, and CSEC’s actions.

However, at a technology conference the head of CSEC tried to pacify Canadians by stating that there was already appropriate oversight of the agency’s actions. Referring to the independent commissioner overseeing CSEC, John Foster said, the commissioner “and his office have full access to every record, every system and every staff member to ensure that we follow Canadian laws and respect Canadians’ privacy.”

Foster is playing a game with Canadians. And it’s not a very good one. Given the CSEC reputedly engages in more ‘transactions’ each day than all of the banks in Canada combined, and given the relative size of the commissioner’s staff (usually a dozen or less) compared to CSEC’s staff (roughly 2,000), and the blurriness of the law guiding CSEC’s actions, I really can’t imagine how Canadians could possibly be reassured from Foster’s statements. No, what is clear is that rather than wanting to have a meaningful discussion – perhaps acknowledging deficiencies in oversight, the need to mediate CSEC’s actions so they align with Canada’s foreign policy positions, or something along those lines – he has purely said that Canadians should be satisfied with how things are today.

If Mr. Foster wants to be taken seriously then perhaps as a first, very small, bit of ‘goodwill’ he will disclose how exactly CSEC respects Canadians’ privacy: information on how this is ensured was redacted in documents from CSEC (see page 23). Providing the plaintext would be one first, good, step towards actually – instead of rhetorically – assuaging concerns Canadians might have over how signals intelligence is conducted in Canada.