Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmTwitter Likes Deleter2020-02-03T14:41:28+00:00
http://twitter-likes-deleter.glitch.me/
jmlikes twitter social-media snooping via:anildash privacyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:911668910adf/'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel J. Solove :: SSRN2017-05-25T09:47:44+00:00
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
jmIn this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
Via Fred Logue]]>law philosophy privacy security essay papers daniel-solove surveillance snoopinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b98059c5a106/IPBill ICRs are the perfect material for 21st-century blackmail2016-11-17T15:51:31+00:00
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/11/investigatory-powers-act-privacy-disaster-waiting-to-happen/
jmICRs are the perfect material for blackmail, which makes them valuable in a way that traditional telephone records are not. And where potentially large sums of money are involved, corruption is sure to follow. Even if ICR databases are secured with the best available technology, they are still vulnerable to subversion by individuals whose jobs give them ready access.
This is no theoretical risk. Just one day ago, it emerged that corrupt insiders at offshore call centres used by Australian telecoms were offering to sell phone records, home addresses, and other private details of customers. Significantly, the price requested was more if the target was an Australian "VIP, politician, police [or] celebrity."
]]>blackmail privacy uk-politics uk snooping surveillance icrs australia phone-recordshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:35c1a26a4666/Snooping powers saw 13 people wrongly held on child sex charges in the UK2016-09-28T13:34:00+00:00
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3780810/Snooping-powers-saw-13-people-wrongly-held-child-sex-charges-blunders.html
jmBlunders in the use of controversial snooping powers meant 13 people were wrongly arrested last year on suspicion of being paedophiles. Another four individuals had their homes searched by detectives following errors in attempts to access communications data, a watchdog revealed yesterday.
Other mistakes also included people unconnected to an investigation being visited by police and delayed welfare checks on vulnerable people including children whose lives were at risk, said the Interception of Communications Commissioner. [....] A large proportion of the errors involved an internet address which was wrongly linked to an individual.
Of the 23 serious mistakes, 14 were human errors and the other nine ‘technical system errors’.
]]>surveillance ip-addresses privacy uk daily-mail snooping interception errorshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0438861928ed/Law to allow snooping on social media defies European court ruling2016-07-08T12:54:16+00:00
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/law-to-allow-snooping-on-social-media-defies-european-court-ruling-1.2712580
jmBut there’s lots in this legislation that should scare the public far more. For example, the proposal that the legislation should allow the retention of “superfluous data” gathered in the course of an investigation, which is a direct contravention of the ECJ’s demand that surveillance must be targeted and data held must be specifically relevant, not a trawl to be stored for later perusal “just in case”.
Or the claim that interception and retention of data, and access to it, will only be in cases of the most serious crime or terrorism threats. Oh, please. This was, and remains, the supposed basis for our existing, ECJ-invalidated legislation. Yet, as last year’s Gsoc investigation into Garda leaks revealed, it turns out a number of interconnected pieces of national legislation allow at least 10 different agencies access to retained data, including Gsoc, the Competition Authority, local authorities and the Irish Medicines Board.
]]>surveillance ireland whatsapp viber snowden snooping karlin-lillington facebook internet data-retentionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:36a1043fbb01/Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks' malware checklist / Boing Boing2016-02-03T14:02:06+00:00
https://boingboing.net/2016/02/02/doxxing-sherlock-3.html
jmThe problem with this is that once you accept this framing, and note the happy coincidence that your paymasters just happen to have found a way to spy on everyone, the conclusion is obvious: just mine all of the data, from everyone to everyone, and use an algorithm to figure out who’s guilty. The bad guys have a Modus Operandi, as anyone who’s watched a cop show knows. Find the MO, turn it into a data fingerprint, and you can just sort the firehose’s output into ”terrorist-ish” and ”unterrorist-ish.”
Once you accept this premise, then it’s equally obvious that the whole methodology has to be kept from scrutiny. If you’re depending on three ”tells” as indicators of terrorist planning, the terrorists will figure out how to plan their attacks without doing those three things.
This even has a name: Goodhart's law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Google started out by gauging a web page’s importance by counting the number of links they could find to it. This worked well before they told people what they were doing. Once getting a page ranked by Google became important, unscrupulous people set up dummy sites (“link-farms”) with lots of links pointing at their pages.
]]>adversarial-classification classification surveillance nsa gchq cory-doctorow privacy snooping goodharts-law google anti-spam filtering spying snowdenhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4d0273cfe1c7/Why is Safe Harbour II such a challenge? - EDRi2016-02-02T14:07:00+00:00
https://edri.org/safe-harbour-negotiations/
jmThe only possible deal that is immediately available is where the European Commission agrees a politically expeditious but legally untenable deal, creating a time bomb rather than a durable deal, to the benefit of no one. In absence of reforms before an agreement, individuals’ fundamental rights would remain under threat.
]]>edri law eu ec ecj surveillance snooping us-politics safe-harborhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3bfa4a8d3933/Big Brother is born. And we find out 15 years too late to stop him - The Register2015-12-18T10:21:05+00:00
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/16/big_brother_born_ntac_gchq_mi5_mass_surveillance_data_slurping/?page=2
jmDuring the passage of RIPA, and in many debates since 2000, Parliament was asked to consider and require data retention by telephone companies, claiming that the information was vital to fighting crime and terrorism. But Prime Minister Tony Blair and successive Home Secretaries David Blunkett and Jack Straw never revealed to Parliament that at the same time, the government was constantly siphoning up and storing all telephone call records at NTAC.
As a result, MPs and peers spent months arguing about a pretence, and in ignorance of the cost and human rights implications of what successive governments were doing in secret.
]]>ripa big-brother surveillance preston uk gchq mi5 law snoopinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:60d4dadb7f74/From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities2015-09-28T10:44:14+00:00
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities/
jmsurveillance gchq security privacy law uk ireland karma-police snoopinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fa717c5f6646/FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance2014-11-17T00:01:03+00:00
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance
jmThe entire letter could have been taken from a page of GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG)—though perhaps as an email or series of tweets. The British spying agency GCHQ is one of the NSA’s closest partners. The mission of JTRIG, a unit within GCHQ, is to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt enemies by discrediting them.” And there’s little reason to believe the NSA and FBI aren’t using such tactics.
The implications of these types of strategies in the digital age are chilling. Imagine Facebook chats, porn viewing history, emails, and more made public to discredit a leader who threatens the status quo, or used to blackmail a reluctant target into becoming an FBI informant. These are not far-fetched ideas. They are the reality of what happens when the surveillance state is allowed to grow out of control, and the full King letter, as well as current intelligence community practices illustrate that reality richly.
]]>fbi surveillance mlk history blackmail snooping gchq nsahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:35a53b2fced5/Yes, Isis exploits technology. But that’s no reason to compromise our privacy | Technology | The Observer2014-11-10T15:40:42+00:00
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/09/isis-exploits-technology-no-reason-compromise-privacy
jmFrom the very beginning, Isis fanatics have been up to speed on [social media]. Which raises an interesting question: how come that GCHQ and the other intelligence agencies failed to notice the rise of the Isis menace until it was upon us? Were they so busy hoovering metadata and tapping submarine cables and “mastering the internet” (as the code name of one of their projects puts it) that they didn’t have time to see what every impressionable Muslim 14-year-old in the world with an internet connection could see?
]]>gchq guardian encryption nsa isis technology social-media snooping surveillancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:27fe5cfc0208/New AWS Web Services region: eu-central-1 (soon)2014-07-06T21:37:07+00:00
http://www.nilsjuenemann.de/2014/07/new-aws-region-eu-central-in-germany.html
jmaws germany privacy ec2 eu-central-1 nsa snoopinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:93abcfa46f94/NSA: Linux Journal is an "extremist forum" and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance2014-07-04T09:16:32+00:00
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extremist-forum-and-its-readers-get-flagged-extra-surveillance
jmDasErste.de has published the relevant XKEYSCORE source code, and if you look closely at the rule definitions, you will see linuxjournal.com/content/linux* listed alongside Tails and Tor. According to an article on DasErste.de, the NSA considers Linux Journal an "extremist forum". This means that merely looking for any Linux content on Linux Journal, not just content about anonymizing software or encryption, is considered suspicious and means your Internet traffic may be stored indefinitely.
This is, sadly, entirely predictable -- that's what happens when you optimize the system for over-sampling, with poor oversight.]]>false-positives linuxjournal linux terrorism tor tails nsa surveillance snooping xkeyscore selectors oversighthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c5ec3c5b6761/SpideyApp2014-05-14T23:14:14+00:00
http://signup.spideyapp.com/
jman Android-based stingray (IMSI catcher) detector that uses machine learning to detect the presence of stingray devices which can be used to eavesdrop on cellular communication.
In pre-launch right now. Via EthanZ via Antoin
]]>imsi-catcher stingray surveillance via:ethanz snooping spying privacy mobilehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bb80670fdfd2/DRI wins their case at the ECJ!2014-04-08T09:43:05+00:00
http://www.digitalrights.ie/ecj-says-eu-mandated-mass-surveillance-entails-interference-fundamental-rights-practically-entire-european-population/
jmThe Court has found that data retention “entails a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data” and that it “entails an interference with the fundamental rights of practically the entire European population”. TJ McIntyre, Chairman of Digital Rights Ireland, said that “This is the first assessment of mass surveillance by a supreme court since the Snowden revelations. The ECJ’s judgement finds that untargeted monitoring of the entire population is unacceptable in a democratic society.”
[...] Though the Directive has now been struck down, the issue will remain live in all the countries who have passed domestic law to implement the data retention mass surveillance regime. Digital Rights Ireland’s challenge to the Irish data retention system will return to the High Court in Dublin for the next phase of litigation.
]]>dri digital-rights ireland eu ecj surveillance snooping law data-retentionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:45e5c16a6fbc/European Parliament passes a vote calling for the EU/US SWIFT agreement to be suspended2013-10-23T13:17:28+00:00
http://www.greens-efa.eu/nsaswift-scandal-10789.html
jm"the European Parliament has today sent a clear message that enough is enough. The revelations about NSA interception of SWIFT data make a mockery of the EU's agreement with the US, through which the bank data of European citizens is delivered to the US anti-terror system (TFTP). What is the purpose of an agreement like this, which was concluded in good faith, if the US authorities are going to circumvent its provisions?
"The EU cannot continue to remain silent in the face of these ongoing revelations: it gives the impression we are little more than a lap dog of the US. If we are to have a healthy relationship with the US, based on mutual respect and benefit, EU governments must not be afraid of defending core EU values when they are infringed. EU leaders must finally take a clear and unambiguous stance on the NSA violations at this week's summit."
]]>swift banking data eu us nsa interception surveillance snooping diplomacyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9993d4a5c6b5/The US fears back-door routes into the net because it's building them too | Technology | The Observer2013-10-13T21:09:26+00:00
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/13/us-scared-back-door-routes-computers-snowden-nsa?CMP=twt_gu
jmone of the most obvious inferences from the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica recently is that the NSA has indeed been up to the business of inserting covert back doors in networking and other computing kit.
The reports say that, in addition to undermining all of the mainstream cryptographic software used to protect online commerce, the NSA has been "collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products". These reports have, needless to say, been strenuously denied by the companies, such as Cisco, that make this networking kit. Perhaps the NSA omitted to tell DARPA what it was up to? In the meantime, I hear that some governments have decided that their embassies should no longer use electronic communications at all, and are returning to employing couriers who travel the world handcuffed to locked dispatch cases. We're back to the future, again.
]]>politics backdoors snowden snooping networking cisco nsa gchqhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:179eb9c9496b/GCHQ report on 'MULLENIZE' program to 'stain' anonymous electronic traffic2013-10-04T21:25:33+00:00
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/gchq-report-on-mullenize-program-to-stain-anonymous-electronic-traffic/502/
jmgchq nsa snooping sniffing surveillance user-agent http browsers leakshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1836ffc3861d/The Snowden files: why the British public should be worried about GCHQ2013-10-03T21:12:06+00:00
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/edward-snowden-files-john-lanchester
jmWhen the Guardian offered John Lanchester access to the GCHQ files, the journalist and novelist was initially unconvinced. But what the papers told him was alarming: that Britain is sliding towards an entirely new kind of surveillance society
]]>john-lanchester gchq guardian surveillance snooping police-state nsa privacy governmenthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f6bdda50f454/Edward Snowden's E-Mail Provider Defied FBI Demands to Turn Over SSL Keys, Documents Show2013-10-02T22:44:15+00:00
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/
jmLevison lost [in secret court against the government's order]. In a work-around, Levison complied the next day by turning over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout in 4-point type. The government called the printout “illegible” and the court ordered Levison to provide a more useful electronic copy.
Nice try though! Bottom line is they demanded the SSL private key. (via Waxy)]]>government privacy security ssl tls crypto fbi via:waxy secrecy snoopinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:76c117049917/Schneier on Security: Reforming the NSA2013-09-16T20:56:38+00:00
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/reforming_the_n.html
jmRegardless of how we got here, the NSA can't reform itself. Change cannot come from within; it has to come from above. It's the job of government: of Congress, of the courts, and of the president. These are the people who have the ability to investigate how things became so bad, rein in the rogue agency, and establish new systems of transparency, oversight, and accountability.
Any solution we devise will make the NSA less efficient at its eavesdropping job. That's a trade-off we should be willing to make, just as we accept reduced police efficiency caused by requiring warrants for searches and warning suspects that they have the right to an attorney before answering police questions. We do this because we realize that a too-powerful police force is itself a danger, and we need to balance our need for public safety with our aversion of a police state.
]]>nsa politics us-politics surveillance snooping society government police public-safety police-statehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d8465ab2e400/Former NSA and CIA director says terrorists love using Gmail2013-09-15T22:43:55+00:00
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/15/former-nsa-and-cia-director-says-terrorists-love-using-gmail/
jmAt one point, Hayden expressed a distaste for online anonymity, saying "The problem I have with the Internet is that it's anonymous." But he noted, there is a struggle over that issue even inside government. The issue came to a head during the Arab Spring movement when the State Department was funding technology [presumably Tor?] to protect the anonymity of activists so governments could not track down or repress their voices.
"We have a very difficult time with this," Hayden said. He then asked, "is our vision of the World Wide Web the global digital commons -- at this point you should see butterflies flying here and soft background meadow-like music -- or a global free fire zone?" Given that Hayden also compared the Internet to the wild west and Somalia, Hayden clearly leans toward the "global free fire zone" vision of the Internet.
well, that's a good analogy for where we're going -- a global free-fire zone.]]>gmail cia nsa surveillance michael-hayden security snooping law tor arab-springhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f519af062ed9/Necessary and Proportionate -- In Which Civil Society is Caught Between a Cop and a Spy2013-09-12T21:24:11+00:00
https://medium.com/weird-future/9b913057c28c
jmModern telecommunications technology implied the development of modern telecommunications surveillance, because it moved the scope of action from the physical world (where intelligence, generally seen as part of the military mission, had acted) to the virtual world—including the scope of those actions that could threaten state power. While the public line may have been, as US Secretary of State Henry Stimson said in 1929, “gentlemen do not open each other’s mail”, you can bet that they always did keep a keen eye on the comings and goings of each other’s shipping traffic.
The real reason that surveillance in the context of state intelligence was limited until recently was because it was too expensive, and it was too expensive for everyone. The Westphalian compromise demands equality of agency as tied to territory. As soon as one side gains a significant advantage, the structure of sovereignty itself is threatened at a conceptual level — hence Oppenheimer as the death of any hope of international rule of law. Once surveillance became cheap enough, all states were (and will increasingly be) forced to attempt it at scale, as a reaction to this pernicious efficiency. The US may be ahead of the game now, but Moore’s law and productization will work their magic here.
]]>government telecoms snooping gchq nsa surveillance law politics intelligence spying internethttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c815633d2fdb/NSA: Possibly breaking US laws, but still bound by laws of computational complexity2013-09-11T21:42:58+00:00
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1517
jmI didn’t clearly explain that there’s an enormous continuum between, on the one hand, a full break of RSA or Diffie-Hellman (which still seems extremely unlikely to me), and on the other, “pure side-channel attacks” involving no new cryptanalytic ideas. Along that continuum, there are many plausible places where the NSA might be. For example, imagine that they had a combination of side-channel attacks, novel algorithmic advances, and sheer computing power that enabled them to factor, let’s say, ten 2048-bit RSA keys every year. In such a case, it would still make perfect sense that they’d want to insert backdoors into software, sneak vulnerabilities into the standards, and do whatever else it took to minimize their need to resort to such expensive attacks. But the possibility of number-theoretic advances well beyond what the open world knows certainly wouldn’t be ruled out. Also, as Schneier has emphasized, the fact that NSA has been aggressively pushing elliptic-curve cryptography in recent years invites the obvious speculation that they know something about ECC that the rest of us don’t.
]]>ecc rsa crypto security nsa gchq snooping sniffing diffie-hellman pki key-lengthhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:aca1fd6e4fb2/How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis — And Can We Resist It?2013-09-08T21:06:52+00:00
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/black-budget-what-exactly-are-the-nsas-cryptanalytic-capabilities/
jmAssuming the hypothetical NSA breakthroughs don’t totally break public-cryptography — and that’s a very reasonable assumption — it’s pretty easy to stay a few steps ahead of the NSA by using ever-longer keys. We’re already trying to phase out 1024-bit RSA keys in favor of 2048-bit keys. Perhaps we need to jump even further ahead and consider 3072-bit keys. And maybe we should be even more paranoid about elliptic curves and use key lengths above 500 bits.
One last blue-sky possibility: a quantum computer. Quantum computers are still toys in the academic world, but have the theoretical ability to quickly break common public-key algorithms — regardless of key length — and to effectively halve the key length of any symmetric algorithm. I think it extraordinarily unlikely that the NSA has built a quantum computer capable of performing the magnitude of calculation necessary to do this, but it’s possible. The defense is easy, if annoying: stick with symmetric cryptography based on shared secrets, and use 256-bit keys.
]]>bruce-schneier cryptography wired nsa surveillance snooping gchq cryptanalysis crypto future key-lengthshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d291541b9f3f/Big data is watching you2013-09-08T20:38:32+00:00
https://twitter.com/darachennis/status/376357502968791040/photo/1
jmvia:darachennis street-art graffiti big-data snooping spies gchq nsa arthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:59781f974844/Perhaps I'm out of step and Britons just don't think privacy is important | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer2013-09-08T20:37:12+00:00
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/07/britons-privacy-not-important?CMP=twt_gu
jmThe debate has been stifled in Britain more successfully than anywhere else in the free world and, astonishingly, this has been with the compliance of a media and public that regard their attachment to liberty to be a matter of genetic inheritance. So maybe it is best for me to accept that the BBC, together with most of the newspapers, has moved with society, leaving me behind with a few old privacy-loving codgers, wondering about the cause of this shift in attitudes. Is it simply the fear of terror and paedophiles? Are we so overwhelmed by the power of the surveillance agencies that we feel we can't do anything? Or is it that we have forgotten how precious and rare truly free societies are in history?
]]>privacy uk politics snooping spies gchq society nsa henry-porterhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:14be9cdacc93/Schneier on Security: The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet2013-09-05T22:15:21+00:00
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_brea.html
jmThe new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They're doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics.
It's joint reporting between the Guardian, the New York Times, and ProPublica.
I have been working with Glenn Greenwald on the Snowden documents, and I have seen a lot of them. These are my two essays on today's revelations.
Remember this: The math is good, but math has no agency. Code has agency, and the code has been subverted.
]]>encryption communication government nsa security bruce-schneier crypto politics snooping gchq guardian journalismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2617942fe6b5/GCHQ tapping at least 14 EU fiber-optic cables2013-08-28T22:23:11+00:00
http://international.sueddeutsche.de/post/59603415442/british-officials-have-far-reaching-access-to-internet
jmSüddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) had already revealed in late June that the British had access to the cable TAT-14, which connects Germany with the USA, UK, Denmark, France and the Netherlands. In addition to TAT-14, the other cables that GCHQ has access to include Atlantic Crossing 1, Circe North, Circe South, Flag Atlantic-1, Flag Europa-Asia, SeaMeWe-3 and SeaMeWe-4, Solas, UK France 3, UK Netherlands-14, Ulysses, Yellow and the Pan European Crossing.
]]>sz germany cables fiber-optic tapping snooping tat-14 eu politics gchqhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d553525b1ddc/Groklaw - Forced Exposure ~pj2013-08-20T13:21:19+00:00
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
jmI 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. But both emails still work. It's your choice.
My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible. I'm just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write. I've always been a private person. That's why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours.
Oddly, if everyone did that, leap off the Internet, the world's economy would collapse, I suppose. I can't really hope for that. But for me, the Internet is over. So this is the last Groklaw article. I won't turn on comments. Thank you for all you've done. I will never forget you and our work together. I hope you'll remember me too. I'm sorry I can't overcome these feelings, but I yam what I yam, and I tried, but I can't.
]]>nsa surveillance privacy groklaw law us-politics data-protection snooping mail kolabhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:19fe44c0f951/David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face | Alan Rusbridger | Comment is free | The Guardian2013-08-19T22:29:24+00:00
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters
jmThe man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.
Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's work.
The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like "when".
We are not there yet, but it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources. Most reporting – indeed, most human life in 2013 – leaves too much of a digital fingerprint. Those colleagues who denigrate Snowden or say reporters should trust the state to know best (many of them in the UK, oddly, on the right) may one day have a cruel awakening. One day it will be their reporting, their cause, under attack. But at least reporters now know to stay away from Heathrow transit lounges.
]]>nsa gchq surveillance spying snooping guardian reporters journalism uk david-miranda glenn-greenwald edward-snowdenhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:51a61b027f2b/How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut - Forbes2013-08-14T21:51:42+00:00
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/4/
jmKatz-Lacabe wasn’t impressed. Palantir’s software, he points out, has no default time limits -- all information remains searchable for as long as it’s stored on the customer’s servers. And its auditing function? “I don’t think it means a damn thing,” he says. “Logs aren’t useful unless someone is looking at them.” [...]
What if Palantir’s audit logs -- its central safeguard against abuse -- are simply ignored? Karp responds that the logs are intended to be read by a third party. In the case of government agencies, he suggests an oversight body that reviews all surveillance -- an institution that is purely theoretical at the moment. “Something like this will exist,” Karp insists. “Societies will build it, precisely because the alternative is letting terrorism happen or losing all our liberties.”
Palantir’s critics, unsurprisingly, aren’t reassured by Karp’s hypothetical court. Electronic Privacy Information Center activist Amie Stepanovich calls Palantir “naive” to expect the government to start policing its own use of technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Lee Tien derides Karp’s argument that privacy safeguards can be added to surveillance systems after the fact. “You should think about what to do with the toxic waste while you’re building the nuclear power plant,” he argues, “not some day in the future.”
]]>palantir data-retention privacy surveillance state cia forbes andy-greenberg eff epic snoopinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:926d84dca49c/London orders rubbish bins to stop collecting smartphone data2013-08-13T09:22:28+00:00
http://www.thejournal.ie/rubbish-bins-collecting-smartphone-data-1033856-Aug2013/
jmAUTHORITIES IN LONDON’S financial district have ordered a company using high-tech rubbish bins to collect smartphone data from passers-by to cease its activities, and referred the firm to the privacy watchdog. The City of London Corporation, which manages the so-called “Square Mile” around St Paul’s Cathedral, said such data collection “needs to stop” until there could be a public debate about it.
(via Daragh O'Brien)]]>via:dobrien privacy phones wifi mac-address data-protection data-retention renew london bins snooping sniffinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3670cf3b5281/Building a panopticon: The evolution of the NSA’s XKeyscore2013-08-09T14:10:18+00:00
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/building-a-panopticon-the-evolution-of-the-nsas-xkeyscore/
jmpanopticon xkeyscore nsa architecture scalability packet-capture narus sniffing snooping interception lawful-interception li tappinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dd0ed3afe027/ICO’s Tame Investigation Of Google Street View Data Slurping2013-07-22T09:47:43+00:00
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/ico-google-street-view-wi-fi-investigation-failures-122287
jm“People will yet again be asking whether Google has been let off without the kind of full and rigorous investigation that you would expect after this kind of incident,” Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch, told TechWeekEurope. “Let’s not forget that information was collected without permission from thousands of people’s Wi-Fi networks, in a way that if an individual had done so they would have almost certainly have been prosecuted. It seems strange that ICO [the UK's Data Protection regulatory agency] did not want to inspect the [datacenter] cages housing the data, while it is also troubling that Google’s assurances were taken at face value, despite this not being the first incident where consumers have seen their privacy violated by the company.”
]]>privacy google ico regulation data-protection snooping wifi sniffing network-traffic street-viewhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c98fc319ae00/small town council in Oz has been snooping on mobile phone records to catch litterbugs and owners of unregistered pets2013-07-10T21:12:47+00:00
http://www.wyndhamweekly.com.au/story/1628329/experts-slam-wyndham-councils-data-snooping/
jmPrivacy advocates have slammed Wyndham council for spying on residents’ mobile phone data and email records almost 50 times in the past three years, “not to hunt down terrorists but to catch litterbugs and owners of unregistered pets”. Figures from the attorney-general’s department reveal Wyndham is the only Victorian council that has been snooping on personal data, seizing residents’ information 31 times during 2010-11 and 2011-12.
Council’s acting chief executive Kelly Grigsby told the Weekly there had been another 18 authorisations in the past 12 months to chase people for unauthorised advertising, unregistered pets and illegal littering.
]]>victoria australia oz privacy snooping data-retention metadata overreachhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bb1d7e4ad765/Liberty issues claim against British Intelligence Services over PRISM and Tempora privacy scandal2013-06-25T21:04:13+00:00
http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/media/press/2013/liberty-issues-claim-against-british-intelligence-servic.php
jmJames Welch, Legal Director for Liberty, said:
“Those demanding the Snoopers’ Charter seem to have been indulging in out-of-control snooping even without it – exploiting legal loopholes and help from Uncle Sam.
“No-one suggests a completely unpoliced internet but those in power cannot swap targeted investigations for endless monitoring of the entire globe.”
Go Liberty! Take note, ICCL, this is how a civil liberties group engages with internet issues.]]>prism nsa gchq surveillance liberty civil-liberties internet snoopinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5a437425f21a/Skype's principal architect explains why they no longer have end-to-end crypto2013-06-24T14:06:20+00:00
http://markmail.org/message/exc3srjkx3uu66bz?q=android
jmskype p2p mobile architecture networking internet snooping crypto via:ip via:kragen phones windowshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:eb89b6f3e5d1/Tunisian government harvesting usernames and passwords2011-01-05T11:08:19+00:00
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201101/6651/Tunisian-government-harvesting-usernames-and-passwords
jmtunisia via:pjakma security snooping surveillance https javascripthttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:28b2a2691bd8/Draft Functional Spec of Hadopi "securisation" software2010-07-30T10:35:47+00:00
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//www.numerama.com/magazine/16363-exclusif-le-document-secret-de-l-hadopi-sur-les-moyens-de-securisation.html%3Futm_medium%3Dbt.io-twitter%26utm_source%3Ddirect-bt.io%26utm_content%3Dbacktype-tweetcount&hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=UTF-8
jmhadopi piracy filtering snooping big-brother 1984 via:adulau vpn tor blocklistshttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2ffa8e3aa4ed/