Want to see a (small) element of how your personal information is collated by major companies around the world? Watch the video and find out.
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Tag: Surveillance
Without presenting a single shred of evidence that Canadian police need any more power than they already have (arguable too much as it is, if Toronto’s disastrous G20 summit is any indication), you are being asked to believe that handing law enforcement agencies a blank cheque to snoop through your life is actually for your own good.
This is, of course, nonsense. Passing legislation whose only benefit is police convenience comes nowhere close to justifying the dismantling of Canadians’ privacy rights.
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Experts Again Unlawful Access in Canada
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.
Punching through The Great Firewall of T-Mobile:
T-Mobile UK are moving towards a mobile network which works (technically) in a very similar manner to the Great Firewall of China.
…
Most people don’t run their own server. If you don’t, then you’re pretty screwed.
On a technical level, what T-Mobile is doing is pretty cool (assuming it is, in fact, the same techniques as China is using to attack TOR of late) but is otherwise pure evil. T-Mobile’s behaviours are a clear indication of why strong network neutrality rules are absolutely necessary: without regulations and punishments carriers will happily screw their customers if it might save, or make, the carriers a buck.
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Surveillance is not itself sinister any more than discrimination is itself damaging … there are dangers inherent in surveillance systems whose crucial coding mechanisms involve categories derived from stereotypical or prejudicial sources.
~D. Lyon. (2003). Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. New York: Routledge. Pp. 2.
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2012.1.9
We must go further [than simply demanding transparency] and inject public values into development cycles while also intentionally hobbling surveillance technologies to rein in their most harmful potentialities.
Transparent Practices Don’t Stop Prejudicial Surveillance
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Google “Surveillance” Monster
Google “Surveillance” Monster
Of course, we do need to remember that surveillance in and of itself isn’t necessarily sinister: it’s when a surveillance practice’s coding mechanisms involve categories derived from stereotypical/prejudicial sources that we most need to worry.
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E-Snooped Upon
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews states that the government’s proposed lawful access legislation is on a par with a phonebook linking phone numbers to a residential address. This is highly misleading (The Poop On E-Snoop – letters, Dec. 3).
Anyone can look up information in the phonebook, but they cannot compel Rogers or Bell to turn over “phone record” data that the government is after. The minister has not noted that his proposal would expand “phone records” from three items (name, address, telephone number) to 11. We are familiar with what those three items mean, but how many can decode the mysterious acronyms of digital and mobile communications: the IP address, the MIN, the SPIN, the ESN, the IMEI, the IMSI, the SIM? The minister isn’t talking about phone records, but about giving authorities access to a range of identifiers that tell a great deal about our personal lives. So, can we please have a debate about the Internet instead of one about “phonebooks”?
Colin Bennett, Christopher Parsons, “E-snooped upon”
Excited Pixels 