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Tag: Surveillance
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US Looking to Expand CALEA?
From the New York Time we find that American officials are campaigning for updates to CALEA, a surveillance bill that was passed in 1994. The officials claim updates are needed because
some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that caused technical problems for surveillance.
…
Albert Gidari Jr., a lawyer who represents telecommunications firms, said corporations were likely to object to increased government intervention in the design or launch of services. Such a change, he said, could have major repercussions for industry innovation, costs and competitiveness.
“The government’s answer is ‘don’t deploy the new services — wait until the government catches up,’ ” Mr. Gidari said. “But that’s not how it works. Too many services develop too quickly, and there are just too many players in this now.”
In essence, it appears that the US government is advocating for updates to their laws that are similar to provisions in Canada’s lawful access legislation. The tabled Canadian legislation includes provisions that preclude interception capabilities from degrading over time (Section 8), mandate that interception capabilities continue to meet government requirements as telecommunications services providers upgrade their services (Section 9), and require new software and product offerings to be compliant with interception demands (Section 11). It would seem that, without these provisos, CALEA is showing its age: ISPs are deploying services that ‘break’ existing wiretap capabilities and that it takes some time to restore those capabilities. ISPs innovate, and then surveillance catches up.
Of course, it’s useful to remember that none of the details surrounding the FBI’s problems in maintaining wiretaps is really made clear in the article. The sources that the reporter draws upon are primarily from law enforcement agencies and, as we have seen in Canada and in prior US legislative gambits, such agencies are prone to overstating problems and understating their complicity in generating/maintaining them. It’s also unclear just how ‘impaired’ investigations actually were. In essence, a full accounting of the alleged problems is needed, and the accounting ought to be public. If the American public is going to shell out more money for surveillance, and potentially endanger next-generation telecommunications services’ innovative potentials, then the government has to come totally clean about their allegations so that a rational and empirically-grounded debate can occur.
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The problem … was that the surveillance technology sold to Iran in 2008 is standard “lawful intercept” functionality required by law in Europe, so that police can track criminals. Unfortunately, with the same technology in the hands of a regime that defines “crime” broadly to include political dissent and “blasphemy,” the result is an efficient antidissident surveillance machine.
Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
Steve Stecklow, for Reuters, has an special report discussing how Chinese vendor ZTE was able to resell American network infrastructure and surveillance products to the Iranian government. The equipment sold is significant;
Mahmoud Tadjallimehr, a former telecommunications project manager in Iran who has worked for major European and Chinese equipment makers, said the ZTE system supplied to TCI was “country-wide” and was “far more capable of monitoring citizens than I have ever seen in other equipment” sold by other companies to Iran. He said its capabilities included being able “to locate users, intercept their voice, text messaging … emails, chat conversations or web access.”
The ZTE-TCI documents also disclose a backdoor way Iran apparently obtains U.S. technology despite a longtime American ban on non-humanitarian sales to Iran – by purchasing them through a Chinese company.
ZTE’s 907-page “Packing List,” dated July 24, 2011, includes hardware and software products from some of America’s best-known tech companies, including Microsoft Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Oracle Corp, Cisco Systems Inc, Dell Inc, Juniper Networks Inc and Symantec Corp.
ZTE has partnerships with some of the U.S. firms. In interviews, all of the companies said they had no knowledge of the TCI deal. Several – including HP, Dell, Cisco and Juniper – said in statements they were launching internal investigations after learning about the contract from Reuters.
The sale of Western networking and surveillance equipment/software to the Iranian government isn’t new. In the past, corporate agents for major networking firms explained to me the means by which Iran is successfully importing the equipment; while firms cannot positively know that this is going on, it’s typically because of an intentional willingness to ignore what they strongly suspect is happening. Regardless, the actual sale of this specific equipment – while significant – isn’t the story that Western citizens can do a lot to change at this point.
Really, we should be asking: do we, as citizens of Western nations, believe that manufacturing of these kinds of equipment is permissible? While some degree of surveillance capacity is arguably needed for lawful purposes within a democracy it is theoretically possible to design devices such that they have limited intercept and analysis capability out of the box. In essence, we could demand that certain degrees of friction are baked into the surveillance equipment that is developed, and actively work to prevent companies from producing highly scaleable and multifunctional surveillance equipment and software. Going forward, this could prevent the next sale of significant surveillance equipment to Iran on grounds that the West simply doesn’t have any for (legal) sale.
In the case of government surveillance inefficiency and lack of scaleability are advantageous insofar as they hinder governmental surveillance capabilities. Limited equipment would add time and resources to surveillance-driven operations, and thus demand a greater general intent to conduct surveillance than when authorities have access to easy-to-use, advanced and scalable, surveillance systems.
Legal frameworks are insufficient to protect citizens’ rights and privacy, as has been demonstrated time and time again by governmental extensions or exploitations of legal frameworks. We need a normatively informed limitation of surveillance equipment that is included in the equipment at the vendor-level. Anything less will only legitimize, rather than truly work towards stopping, the spread of surveillance equipment that is used to monitor citizens across the globe.
We recently learned that the Australian government had blocked Huawei from tendering contracts for Australia’s National Broadband Network. The government defended their position, stating that:
As such, and as a strategic and significant government investment, we have a responsibility to do our utmost to protect its integrity and that of the information carried on it.
Of note, internally Huawei had been a preferred choice but the company was ostensibly blocked for political/security, rather than economic, reasons. This decision isn’t terribly surprising given that American, Australian, and United Kingdom national intelligence and security agencies have all come out against using Huawei equipment in key government-used networks. The rationale is that, even were a forensic code audit possible (and likely wouldn’t be, on grounds that we’re talking millions of lines of code) it wouldn’t be possible to perform such an audit on each and every update. In effect, knowing that a product is secure now isn’t a guarantee that the product will remain secure tomorrow after receiving a routine service update. The concern is that Huawei could, as a Chinese company, be compelled by the Chinese government to include such a vulnerability in an update. Many in the security community suspect that such vulnerabilities have already been seeded.
Does this mean that security is necessarily the real reason for the ‘national security card’ being played in Australia? No, of course not. It’s equally possible that calling national security:
- let’s the government work with a company that it already has ties with and wants to support;
- is the result of the government being enticed – either domestically or from foreign sources – to prefer a non-Huawei alternative;
- permits purchases of a non-Huawei equipment from vendors that are preferred for political reasons; perhaps buying Chinese goods just wouldn’t be seen as a popular move for the government of the day.
Moreover, simply because Australia isn’t tendering contracts from Huawei doesn’t suggest that whatever equipment is purchased will be any more secure. In theory, were Cisco equipment used to power the National Broadband Network then the American government could similarly compel Cisco to add vulnerabilities into routers.
In part, what this comes down to is who do you trust to spy on you? If you see the Americans as more friendly and/or less likely to involve themselves closely in your matters of state, then perhaps American companies are preferred over your economic and geographical next-door neighbours.
I should note, just in closing, that Huawei has contracts with most (though not quite all) of Canada’s largest mobile and wireline Internet companies. Having spoken with high-level governmental officials about security concerns surrounding Huawei’s equipment there seems to be a total lack of concern: just because GCHQ, NSA, and ASIO have publicly raised concerns about the company’s equipment doesn’t seem to raise any alarm bells or worries with our highest government officials.
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Google Chrome Addons Fingerprinting
Krzysztof Kotowicz has recently published the first part of a Chrome hacking series. In what went up mid-March, he provides the proof of concept code to ID the addons that users have installed. (The live demo – avoid if you’re particularly privacy conscious – is here.) There are various advantages to knowing what, specifically, browser users are running:
- It contributes to developing unique browser fingerprints, letting advertisers track you passively (i.e. without cookies);
- It enables an attacker to try and compromise the browser through vulnerabilities in third-party addons;
- It lets websites deny you access to the site if you’re using certain extensions (e.g. a site dependent on web-based ad revenue might refuse to show you any content if you happen to be running adblock or Ghostery)
Means of uniquely identifying browsers have come and gone before, and this will continue into the future. That said, as more and more of people’s computer experiences occur through their browsers an ever-increasing effort will be placed on compromising the primary experience vector. It will be interesting to see if Google – and the other major browser vendors – decide to see this means of identifying customer-selected elements of the browser as a possible attack vector and consequently move to limit addon-directed surveillance.
German WW1 surveillance pigeon.
Some of the earliest ‘arial drones’ that were deployed in combat zones.
If C-30 passes, Canadians too will get to enjoy their own free lifetime supply of surveillance.
Charts: Sexy Ladies of the TSA
Don’t be alarmed..
This invasion of privacy is for your safety..
Trust us..
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IBM and Intelligence Cities
IBM’s efforts to add ‘intelligence’ to cities – and thus make them more manageable – is an ongoing effort. While what they’ve developed in Rio is interesting, I suspect that several facets of the ‘defence mechanism’ obfuscate residents’ economic realities.
Specifically, the video notes that residents of favelas may receive text messages that warn of oncoming disasters. This is good, but misses the point that a warning system without a capacity to absorb/protect residents who are fleeing poorly-build environments is effectively useless.
While the IBM ‘smart city’ project may make the city more intelligent, and improve daily operations, such intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean that the city can temporarily house residents of favelas in ‘safe’ areas of the city if a major disaster occurs. Unfortunately, the sale of technology in this video obfuscates this key truth of disaster preparation.
Excited Pixels 