Pinboard (guardiantech)

The anxieties of big data >> The New Inquiry

guardiantech — 2014-06-09T11:38:20+00:00

Kate Crawford:

The current mythology of big data is that with more data comes greater accuracy and truth. This epistemological position is so seductive that many industries, from advertising to automobile manufacturing, are repositioning themselves for massive data gathering. The myth and the tools, as Donna Haraway once observed, mutually constitute each other, and the instruments of data gathering and analysis, too, act as agents that shape the social world. Bruno Latour put it this way: “Change the instruments, and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them.” The turn to big data is a political and cultural turn, and we are just beginning to see its scope. But what do you do when you realize that all that data is not enough? From the Boston bombings to Malaysian Airlines flight 370, we know that data black holes exist. Even when there were direct tip-offs about the Tsarnaevs, the data didn’t set off the right red flags. These moments demonstrate why the epistemic big-data ambition — to collect it all — is both never-ending and deeply flawed.

This is the essay that was referred to by John Naughton in his piece on Sunday.

Reform government surveillance: an open letter to the US Senate

guardiantech — 2014-06-05T20:58:28+00:00

Dear Members of the Senate: It’s been a year since the first headlines alleging the extent of government surveillance on the Internet. We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But the balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish, and it must change.

A letter signed by the chief executives of AOL, Apple. Dropbox. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo.

Conversnitch turns covert surveillance into an art form >> theguardian.com

guardiantech — 2014-05-19T10:57:40+00:00

ICYMI, because this deserves to be read:

In his new book, Nowhere to Hide, the journalist Glenn Greenwald explains how he and the NSA contractor turned whistleblower put their phones in a freezer with the batteries disconnected to thwart spooks’ ability to operate phones remotely as microphones. But what would happen if the fridge itself was listening to your words? Two American artists are now taking that concept to a logical conclusion. Using only a credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer, a microphone and a Wi-Fi card hacked into a lightbulb fitting, and a piece of open source software hosted at Github, they have installed a listening device at an undisclosed spot in Manhattan, New York, and connected it to a Twitter feed.

FC3: Who’s Watching You? >> ongoing

guardiantech — 2013-08-22T16:55:02+00:00

Tim Bray (who works at Google):

Worried about being watched? Me too. So who’s doing it, and why, and what can they see, and what can you do about it?

A very neat rundown, well set out.

Forced Exposure >> Groklaw

guardiantech — 2013-08-20T21:32:46+00:00

Pamela Jones:

I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint.
If you have to stay on the Internet, my research indicates that the short term safety from surveillance, to the degree that is even possible, is to use a service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is under different laws than the US, laws which attempt to afford more privacy to citizens. I have now gotten for myself an email there, p.jones at mykolab.com in case anyone wishes to contact me over something really important and feels squeamish about writing to an email address on a server in the US.

What's odd is that there wasn't anything about what Groklaw did or published which suggested it would attract any NSA attention at all. But that's the explanation she's given. The domain registration runs out in October 2014: how long will it, and the comments, stay active?

What it means to be an NSA "target": new information shows why we need immediate FISA Amendments Act reform >> Electronic Frontier Foundation

guardiantech — 2013-08-09T21:51:18+00:00

First, at least this much is clear: a “target” under the FAA must be (a) a non-US person and (b) not physically located within the United States. A “person,” for purposes of the FAA, includes individuals as well as “any group, entity, association, corporation, or foreign power.” Under the FAA, the government can thus "target" a single individual (e.g., Vladimir Putin), a small group of people (e.g., Pussy Riot), or a formal corporation or entity (e.g., Gazprom).
So, when the NSA decides to “target” someone (or something), it turns its specific surveillance vacuum at them. The NSA then believes it can intercept and analyze all electronic communications of the target (telephone conversations, email conversations, chat, web browsing, etc) so long as the “target” is overseas and remains overseas. As others have noted, this includes conversations the “target” has with Americans, which would then be “incidentally” collected. Keep in mind this does not require a warrant or even the approval of a court, which is only one way Senator Feinstein's reassurance was demonstrably false. But there's still more.

More??

New Kiwi spook law allows domestic prying >> The Register

guardiantech — 2013-07-24T06:53:39+00:00

New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), which illegally spied on resident Kim Dotcom, is on the cusp of gaining sweeping new powers that include wiretapping NZ citizens.
The GCSB's domestic spying first came to light last year when it mistakenly tapped Dotcom's communications, not realising that his residency status at the time meant its actions were illegal. Rather than punish the organisation for its domestic snooping blunders, the New Zealand government has spent some time steering new laws through parliament to increase the GCSB's powers.

NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program >> The Washington Post

guardiantech — 2013-06-30T21:02:40+00:00

Returning to this point - and perhaps stirring it up again:

The FBI uses government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the NSA.

Government equipment on private company property? Wonder what the Group Of Nine (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Facebook) will say to that.

Think your Skype messages get end-to-end encryption? Think again >> Ars Technica

guardiantech — 2013-06-21T21:48:22+00:00

From May 2013:

If you think the private messages you send over Skype are protected by end-to-end encryption, think again. The Microsoft-owned service regularly scans message contents for signs of fraud, and company managers may log the results indefinitely, Ars has confirmed. And this can only happen if Microsoft can convert the messages into human-readable form at will.

We've since heard that it's much worse, of course.

Why the tech company 'denials' don't necessarily mean they weren't cooperating with NSA spying >> ThinkProgress

guardiantech — 2013-06-07T21:27:03+00:00

Following reports of a top secret program called PRISM that allows intelligence agencies to access a wide variety of supposedly private online communications, several of the tech companies implicated in the report have issued carefully worded statements denying the government has access to their servers or a backdoor method of entry. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) don’t have the ability to access their data.

It's all in the wording.

Welcome to the Bush-Obama White House: They're Spying on Us - NationalJournal.com

guardiantech — 2013-06-06T16:40:46+00:00

Ron Fournier:

And now this: The Guardian newspaper reports that the National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of tens of millions of customers of one of the nation's largest phone companies, Verizon.
If the story is accurate, the action appears to be legal. The order was signed by a judge from a secret court that oversees domestic surveillance. It may also be necessary; US intelligence needs every advantage it can get over the nation's enemies.
But for several reasons the news is chilling.
Verizon probably isn't the only company coughing up its documents. Odds are incredibly strong that the government is prying into your telephone records today.
Issued in April, the NSA order "could represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued," according to The Washington Post. "It also would confirm long-standing suspicions of civil liberties advocates about the sweeping nature of US surveillance through commercial carries under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."
This appears to be a "rubber stamp," order, reissued every few months since 2001. As is the case with all government programs, the systematic snooping into your telephone records is unlikely to ever expire without public outcry.

Going on since 2001? That's a long time.

European Parliament endorses stricter European export control of digital arms >> Marietje Schaake MEP's site

guardiantech — 2012-10-24T20:44:47+00:00

By endorsing amendments proposed by Dutch Member of European Parliament Marietje Schaake (D66/ALDE) the European Parliament wants EU export control regulation to include additional binding export controls for technologies that are used by authoritarian regimes to monitor, track and trace citizens. Companies should ask for export authorization if they have reasons to believe that certain exports might harm human rights. The Parliament also calls for an EU-wide application of the additional licensing requirements, EU Member States are obliged to block exports of technologies to countries facing emergency situations. “This is a big step forward in our battle against digital arms trade. It is unacceptable that regimes in Syria and Iran can use European technologies to violate human rights, let alone that European companies are actively involved in that”, Schaake says.

Good news if this has really been achieved through that move. Or will it just mean that other countries export the products to repressive regimes?

US law enforcement is tracking who calls, texts and emails whom more often than ever before >> Forbes

guardiantech — 2012-09-27T20:09:39+00:00

Law enforcement isn’t just interested in what Americans are saying on the phone or on the Internet. They’re also interested in whom they’re saying it to–a piece of information that conveniently doesn’t require a warrant to obtain. And according to newly released documents, the Feds are surveilling and mapping out those social connections more pervasively than ever before.

How the police can get a data dump of your passcode-locked iPhone >> YouTube

guardiantech — 2012-03-23T06:18:19+00:00

From the description: "Video giving details of how to detect the passcode and perform a dump and decryption of the iPhone together with new support levels for Android devices." You hope that only the police have this.

European Union Bans Exports to Syria of Systems for Monitoring Web, Phones >> Bloomberg

guardiantech — 2011-12-02T07:19:07+00:00

Syria crackdown gets Italy firm’s aid with US-Europe spy gear >> Bloomberg

guardiantech — 2011-11-03T23:55:18+00:00

"As Syria’s crackdown on protests has claimed more than 3,000 lives since March, Italian technicians in telecom offices from Damascus to Aleppo have been busy equipping President Bashar al-Assad’s regime with the power to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country. "Employees of Area SpA, a surveillance company based outside Milan, are installing the system under the direction of Syrian intelligence agents, who’ve pushed the Italians to finish, saying they urgently need to track people, a person familiar with the project says." The new arms traders: but it's online arms.

Met police using surveillance system to monitor mobile phones >> The Guardian

guardiantech — 2011-10-30T22:59:22+00:00

"Britain's largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area."