Tag: Surveillance

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Links Writing

Draft Paper: Do Transparency Reports Matter for Public Policy?

Telecommunications companies across Canada have begun to release transparency reports to explain what data the companies collect, what data they retain and for how long, and to whom that data is, or has been, disclosed to. This article evaluates the extent to which Canadian telecommunications companies’ transparency reports respond to a set of public policy goals, namely: of contextualizing information about government surveillance actions, of legitimizing the corporate disclosure of data about government-mandated surveillance actions, and of deflecting or responding to telecommunications subscribers’ concerns about how their data is shared between companies and the government. In effect, have the reports been effective in achieving the aforementioned goals or have they just having the effect of generating press attention?

After discussing the importance of transparency reports generally, and the specificities of the Canadian reports released in 2014, I argue that companies must standardize their reports across the industry and must also publish their lawful intercept handbooks for the reports to be more effective. Ultimately, citizens will only understand the full significance of the data published in telecommunications companies’ transparency when the current data contained in transparency reports is be contextualized by the amount of data that each type of request can provide to government agencies and the corporate policies dictating the terms under which such requests are made and complied with.

Download Telecommunications Transparency in Canada 1.4 (Public Draft) (Alternate SSRN link)

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Aside

2015.1.3

So…did GCHQ et al intercept and decrypt BBM messages, or were they just handed over?

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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 Writing

The Canadian SIGINT Summaries | Technology, Thoughts & Trinkets

The Canadian SIGINT Summaries | Technology, Thoughts & Trinkets :

Journalists with access to leaked documents have reported on the partnerships and activities undertaken by Canada’s foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), since October 2013. As a result of their stories we know that the Canadian government hosts collection facilities in its diplomatic outposts for American SIGINT operations, has co-ordinated with the NSA to monitor for threats to international summits that took place in Canada, and shares a cooperative relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA) to protect North America from foreign threats. CSE, itself, was found to be conducting signals intelligence and development operations against the Brazilian government, running experiments using domestically collected metadata to track Canadians’ devices, and automating both the discovery of vulnerable computer devices on the Internet for later exploitation and identifying network administrators’ Internet traffic.

The aforementioned revelations are just a sample of what Canadians have learned as journalists have reported on documents leaked to them by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers. But it has been challenging for even experts to keep track of the Canadian discoveries amongst the tidal wave of information concerning American and British SIGINT agencies. I have created and published a resource to help researchers and members of the public alike track mentions of CSE in documents that have been reported on by professional journalists.

Curious what has been revealed about Canada’s signals intelligence agency since Edward Snowden’s revelations began in summer 2013? Then check out The Canadian SIGINT Summaries. They’ll be updated as more information is available!

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Should you worry about social media surveillance?

Should you worry about social media surveillance?

Citizen Lab’s Christopher Parsons joins guest host Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss the Canadian government’s growing interest in the real-time contents of social

 

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Caught on Camera?

Caught on Camera?:

According to Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow and the managing director of the telecommunications transparency project at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, the broadest applications to date [of facial recognition technologies] involve tranches of official photos maintained by government agencies that issue identification documents, such as passports and driver’s licenses.

In recent years, he adds, facial recognition software has become substantially more sophisticated. The advent of so-called 3-D recognition techniques allows the software to make matches between official posed photos and informal, un-posed ones—e.g., images posted on social media sites. What’s more, these biometric algorithms, which can “learn” to recognize faces based on composites developed from multiple images, are no longer restricted to government security. Facebook has a facial recognition app, and at least two developers have built apps for Google Glass that purport to be able to run facial images through picture databases from dating sites or sex offender registries, Forbes reported earlier this year.

To date, this kind of cross-referencing hasn’t produced great results, says Parsons, although he adds that the latest generation “is better than it used to be.”

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And in Canada? Police in Vancouver successfully used facial recognition technology to identify looters during the Stanley Cup riot in 2011, drawing from videos submitted by bystanders as well as CCTV images. The technology was also deployed during the G8/G20 in Toronto. But Parsons points out that at date, there’s not enough data on general law enforcement applications to determine whether this sort of facial recognition is effective.

 

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Alberta Primetime – Increased surveillance powers in Canada

Alberta Primetime – Increased surveillance powers in Canada:

Discussing security, police surveillance, and the privacy of Canadians—is the federal government getting the balance right?

 

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Uber’s ‘God View’ Was Once Available to Drivers

Uber’s ‘God View’ Was Once Available to Drivers:

I reached out to Chris Parsons, a cybersurveillance researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, to discuss Uber’s God View and the ramifications for users.

“Uber understandably has infrastructure in place to monitor where its drivers are and a business case can be made for some degree of monitoring of how, and how often, their clients use the service,“ he said. “However, such data must be carefully controlled with strict security, privacy, and access safeguards. At this point it doesn’t appear that such have been stringently developed or applied.”

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“We know that national security and intelligence agencies are deeply interested in where people travel to, and in understanding the movement patterns of individuals regardless of their being identified as ‘targets’ of government surveillance,” Parsons continued. “And Uber’s seeming failure to secure its data—to the point where developers have already found ways of querying the data by reverse-engineering Uber’s mobile client software—would suggest that an intelligence or security service that was sufficiently motivated could do the same.”

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“There’s no evidence that such a security or intelligence service has ‘cracked’ Uber but past Snowden revelations have revealed that the NSA and its partners are voracious collectors of all kinds of tracking data,” Parsons concluded. “There’s no reason why these agencies wouldn’t be as interested in Uber’s data as other services’ data that could identify where, and how often, people travel around their cities and around the world.”

 

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New Documents Show Thousands of Unreported Wiretaps by Canadian Cops

New Documents Show Thousands of Unreported Wiretaps by Canadian Cops:

Christopher Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow with The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, called the finding a missing link in our understanding of the scope of electronic surveillance in Canada.

“Wiretap data is, in theory, being recorded. But subscriber data and CDR data—neither of those have to be recorded under government statue,” Parsons explained. “There’s nothing in the legislation that will require agencies to record how often they got those court orders.”

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Microsoft, BlackBerry and Cogeco, who were also presents at the meeting between Public Safety and industry stakeholders, did not respond to a request for comment.

“I think what’s most telling is it seems that the parties that have the best records of anyone in Canada is corporate Canada,” Parsons said. “These are the people who are being forced to use their resources to provide assistance to law enforcement, and law enforcement can’t even be bothered to record and disclose themselves how often this is going on.“

 

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Aside Humour

stopdataretention:

Who you email/txt, where you go, what sites you visit – stored by govt for 2 yrs under new laws.