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NLPWESSEX, natural law publishing |
nlpwessex.org |
| "I don't think in the last two or three hundred years we've faced
such a concatenation of problems all at the same time.... If we are to solve the issues that are ahead of us, we are going to need to think in completely different ways." Paddy Ashdown, High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina 2002 -2006 BBC Radio 4, 'Start The Week', 30 April 2007 |
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| SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY NEWS www.nlpwessex.org/docs/surveillancesocietynews.htm |
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Surveillance Society News Reports |
Introduction 'Surveillance & The Corrosion Of Democracy'
"Fears that the
United States, Britain and other English-speaking countries are using a
cold-war eavesdropping network to
gain a commercial edge roused passions across Europe today, even after
Washington and London roundly
denied the notion. The subject kept the European
Parliament in Brussels entranced
for hours and drew banner headlines
across the continent. One political
cartoon showed Britain in bed with
the United States, despite Britain's
membership in the European Union. The hubbub grew from a report
prepared for the European Parliament that found that communications
intercepted by a network called
Echelon twice helped American
companies gain an advantage over
Europeans. " "Everywhere
in the world, every day, people's phone calls, emails and
faxes are monitored by Echelon, a secret government surveillance
network. No, it's not fiction straight out of George Orwell's 1984.
It's reality, says former spy Mike Frost in an interview broadcast on 60
Minutes on Sunday, Feb. 27. 'It's not the world of fiction. That's the
way it works. I've been there,' Frost tells CBS News 60 Minutes
Correspondent Steve Kroft. 'I was trained by you guys,' says the former Canadian intelligence
agent, referring to the United States' National Security Agency.
The
NSA runs Echelon with Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand as a
series of listening posts around the world that eavesdrop on terrorists,
drug lords and hostile foreign governments. But to find out what
the bad guys are up to, all electronic communications, including those
of the good guys, must be captured and analyzed for key words by super
computers. That is a fact that makes Frost uncomfortable, even
though he believes the world needs intelligence gathering capabilities
like Echelon. 'My concern is no accountability and nothing, no safety
net in place for the innocent people who fall through the cracks,' he
tells Kroft... Democracies usually have laws against spying on citizens.
But Frost says
Echelon members could ask another member to spy for them in an end run
around those laws. For example, Frost tells Kroft that his
Canadian
intelligence boss spied on British government officials for Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher. '(Thatcher) had two ministers that she said,
quote, 'they weren't on side,' unquote...So my boss...went to McDonald
House in London and did intercept traffic from these two ministers,'
claims Frost. 'The British Parliament now have total deniability. They
didn't do anything. We did it for them.' America politicians
may
also have been eavesdropped on, says Margaret Newsham, a woman who
worked at Menwith Hill in England, the NSA's largest spy station. She
says she was shocked to hear the voice of U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond
(R.-S.C.) on a surveillance headset about 20 years ago. 'To my
knowledge, all (the intercepted voices)...would be...Russian, Chinese...
foreign,' she tells Kroft. The exposing of such possible abuses
of Echelon will surely add to the growing firestorm in Europe over the
system. On
Feb. 23, the European Parliament issued a report accusing the U.S. of
using Echelon for commercial spying on two separate occasions, to help
American companies win lucrative contracts over European competitors.
The U.S. State Department denies such spying took place and will not
even acknowledge the existence of the top secret Echelon project. Rep.
Porter Goss (R.-Fla), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
which has oversight of the NSA, does acknowledge that the U.S. has the
capability to pick up any phone call, and that even his own
conversations could have been monitored."
"There is a huge difference between
legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement - where individuals are
targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion - and these programs of dragnet
mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies
forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying,
social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power." "The head of MI6 has said the
information revolution represents both an "existential threat and a golden
opportunity". In rare public comments Alex
Younger, who took over as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in 2014, said it
had fundamentally changed the operating environment for the intelligence community.... Intelligence officials also warned the "internet of things" would
bring new threats. Chris Inglis, former deputy director of the US National Security
Agency, said people should "just say no" to having household appliances hooked
up to the internet." "The
majority of the UK cabinet were never told the security services had been secretly
harvesting data from the phone calls, texts and emails of a huge number of British
citizens since 2005, Nick Clegg has disclosed. Clegg
says he was informed of the practice by a senior Whitehall official soon after becoming
David Cameron’s deputy in 2010, but that“only a tiny handful” of cabinet
ministers were also told – likely to include the home secretary, the foreign
secretary and chancellor. He said he was astonished to learn of the capability and asked
for its necessity to be reviewed. The
former deputy prime minister’s revelation in the Guardian again raises concerns
about the extent to which the security services felt they were entitled to use broadly
drawn legislative powers to carry out intrusive surveillance and keep this information
from democratically elected politicians. The government finally admitted on Wednesday that the mass surveillance
of British citizens began in 2001 after 9/11 and was stepped up in 2005, using powers
under national security directions largely hidden in the 1984 Telecommunications Act. It is not known if government law officers sanctioned the use of the act
in this way, but it appears the intelligence and security committee responsible for
parliamentary oversight was not informed, adding to the impression of a so-called deep
state operating outside the scrutiny of parliament." "British spooks intercepted emails from US and UK media organisations and
rated ‘investigative journalists’ alongside terrorists and hackers as potential security threats, secret
documents reveal. Internal advice circulated by intelligence chiefs at the Government spy
centre GCHQ claims ‘journalists and reporters representing all types of news media
represent a potential threat to security’. Intelligence
documents leaked by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden also show that British
security officers scooped up 70,000 emails in just 10 minutes during one interception
exercise in 2008. " "Given
that spies can routinely break through just about any security software, virtually all
Internet users are at risk of a data attack.... Intelligence agencies have adopted 'plausible deniability' as their
guiding principle for Internet operations. To ensure their ability to do so, they seek to
make it impossible to trace the author of the attack. It's a stunning approach with which
the digital spies deliberately undermine the very foundations
of the rule of law around the globe. This approach threatens
to transform the Internet into a lawless zone in which superpowers and their secret services operate according to their
own whims with very few ways to hold them accountable for their actions." "Even
if you power off your cell phone, the U.S. government can turn it back on. That's what
ex-spy Edward Snowden revealed in last
week's interview with NBC's Brian Williams. " "The head of the FBI says he understands why people worry about the scope
of the government's powers, and in fact, he agrees with them. 'I
believe people should be suspicious of government power. I am,' Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday
morning. 'I think this country was founded by people who were worried about government
power so they divided it among three branches,' he added. ...Comey assumed his top post shortly after the Snowden revelations came
to light last summer. " "When it comes to communication
[former US President Jimmy] Carter is evidently a man of his generation, shunning
electronic devices for snail mail. He told [satirist Stephen] Colbert that he had recently
written a letter to Pope Francis.... and steers clear of e-mail for fear of being
monitored by the National Security Agency. The suggestion caused something of a stir in
America and prompted a swift denial from the intelligence agency's director. Carter is yet
to be convinced, noting that regulations controlling the Government's scope to spy on
private communications had been significantly relaxed since he passed them. 'They are not monitoring me now but they
record every message that you transmit in America - and
probably in Great Britain as well - and later if they want to monitor that message they
can do so,' he says." ".... in reality NSA has been collecting word for word 'content' of the
American citizens. So that is something the NSA is lying about. And they've lied about the abuses in the past. NSA has targeted congress, they've targeted the Supreme Court. They've targeted top level generals and admirals. They've
targeted the press and the media. And a whole bunch of other folks: lawyers and law firms. This was between 2002 and 2005 which I was witness to when I
held that sort of information in my hand. NSA is not talking about that either.... The meat of the issue is the network to do this is still intact. So
the capability exists. Even if you believe this President is the most benevolent in the
world, what about the next President, and the one after that and the one after that, and
the potential for abuse with future Presidents? When
this system, this monster that we've set up, still exists, anyone down the line can use
that monster to basically turn our country into a totalitarian police state. I mean 'all
the way' police state. So in my opinion we have to kill this baby in the cradle right now. That means unplug all these nodes around the country and say we will not
go after domestic communications, except when we have a warrant ... [against an]
individual because we have 'probable cause' they've committed a crime.... Like Ben
Franklin [one of the 'founding fathers' of the United States] said, if you're going to
give up your freedom and liberty for security you deserve neither .... When I made my oath
[of office] it was to make sure I protected the constitution of the United States 'against
enemies both foreign and domestic'.... The agency I
worked for [the NSA] is now an domestic enemy of our constitution. And it's just a
horrific thing that's happened. It has to stop." "A
US official has acknowledged that the NSA likely scoops up data on congressional telephone
communications but stopped short of saying whether
such action extended to calls made by President Barack Obama. The tense exchange occurred
on Tuesday during a hearing on the status of the administration's reforms of the bulk data
collection programme exposed last year by former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden. " "MacAskill asked Snowden, almost as an
afterthought, whether there was a UK role in this mass data collection. It didn't seem
likely to him. MacAskill knew that GCHQ had a longstanding intelligence-sharing
relationship with the US, but he was taken aback by Snowden's vehement response. 'GCHQ is worse than the NSA,' Snowden said. 'It's even more
intrusive.'.'" "The power to secretly create
government propaganda is among the many hacking tools revealed in the latest batch of
Edward Snowden documents. British spies can
manipulate online polls -- or trick the world into thinking a video or web page is going
viral. A collection of hacking tools -- some
of which are specifically suited to spreading disinformation -- were exposed in a leaked
2012 document provided by Snowden to The Intercept. " "GCHQ, Britain’s electronic spying agency, intercepted and stored images
of 1.8m Yahoo users taken from their personal webcams even though most of them were not
suspected of wrongdoing, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show. A
secret programme called 'Optic Nerve', run in conjunction with the US National Security Agency, recorded
millions of webcam images from ordinary internet users as many as one in 10 of them
sexually explicit 'in bulk', the UK’s Guardian
newspaper reported on Thursday. 'Optic Nerve' tapped into Yahoo users’ accounts and took still images from their
computer webcams every five minutes. Yahoo reacted
angrily to the revelations, denying all knowledge. A spokesperson for the company said the
covert surveillance programme represented 'a whole new level of violation of our
users’ privacy'. " 'The Death Pangs Of Democracy' "Former
U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA
spying scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in
a suspension of American democracy. 'America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,' he said at an event
in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored by the Atlantik
Bruecke, a private nonprofit association working to further the German-U.S.
relationship. The association's name is German for
'Atlantic bridge.' Carter’s remarks didn't appear in the American mainstream press
but were reported from Atlanta by the German newsmagazine Der
Spiegel, whose Washington correspondent Gregor Peter Schmitz said on Twitter he was present at
the event. The story doesn't appear in the English-language section of the Spiegel website
and is only available in German." "Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff,
has launched a blistering attack on US espionage at the UN general assembly.....She was imprisoned and tortured for her role in a guerilla movement
opposed to Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1970s. 'In
the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and
opinion, and therefore no effective democracy. In the absence of the respect for sovereignty, there is no basis for the
relationship among nations.'" In The Pre-Digital Age "MI5
used hidden electronic surveillance equipment to secretly monitor 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet and at least five Prime Ministers... The
extraordinary disclosure comes despite a succession of parliamentary statements that no
such bugging ever took place. And it follows a behind-the-scenes row in which senior
Whitehall civil servants – backed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown – attempted to
suppress the revelation..... top-secret files held by the Security Service show it
installed electronic listening devices in three highly sensitive areas of No10 – the Cabinet Room, the
Waiting Room and the Prime Minister’s study. It
means that for nearly 15 years, all Cabinet meetings, the offices of senior officials and
all visitors to the Prime Minister – including foreign leaders – were being
bugged. The disclosure is highly shocking in its own
right but it will also bring genuine concerns as to why the Cabinet Office still wants to
suppress it. Comments from MI5 chief Jonathan Evans suggest that the attempted block was
not done on grounds of national security but for wider public interest reasons.This must raise the possibility that the bugging was carried out for
political purposes and officials do not want to admit it went on in the past because
similar operations are continuing today.... the eavesdropping devices that were first installed in Downing Street
in July 1963 at the request of the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. It is unclear
why Macmillan made the extraordinary request... In all, the equipment monitored the
most sensitive areas of Downing Street for around 15 years. It was finally removed on the
orders of James Callaghan in about 1977, the year after he took office. The files do not make it clear whether Prime Ministers Heath and
Wilson knew there were surveillance devices in No10....
After Wilson stepped down, he co-operated with a book suggesting there had been a plot by
Right-wing intelligence officers to undermine him. The claim was later supported by former
senior MI5 officer Peter Wright in his banned Spycatcher memoir. It also prompted
Callaghan, Wilson’s successor, to launch an investigation into the allegations. The
MI5 files indicate that it was Callaghan who finally ordered the surveillance devices to be
removed from Downing Street. Despite this, Callaghan made a statement to the House of
Commons denying that No10 had ever been bugged." "When Harold Macmillan called in MI5
in 1963 and
asked it to bug his office, he thought the whole world was coming apart.... Macmillan felt
he could not trust anybody – but turned for counsel to Dick White, director-general of foreign intelligence service MI6. It is possible that White
suggested installing the listening devices in No10 as some kind of insurance policy.....
The level of official paranoia at the time cannot be underestimated. But it is the
revelation that the bugs were still in place in
Downing Street during Harold Wilson’s two administrations, between 1964 and 1970 and
1974 to 1976, which is the most startling. Wilson believed that elements of the Establishment and members of MI5 and
MI6 were plotting against him.... Now, despite countless official denials, it appears that
Wilson – whose claims that he was under surveillance are often dismissed as the ramblings of an ill and paranoid man –
was right." "Paul
Scott, the late syndicated columnist, was so paranoid about the CIA wiretapping his Prince
George’s County home in the 1960s that he’d make important calls from his
neighbor’s house. His teenage son Jim Scott
figured his dad was either a shrewd reporter or totally nuts. Not until nearly 45 years
later did the son learn that his father’s worries were justified. The insight came in
2007 when the CIA declassified a trove of documents popularly called 'the family jewels.' The papers detailed the
agency’s unlawful activities from long ago, including wiretapping the Scott home in District Heights. The operation even had a code name: 'Project Mockingbird.' Jim was floored: The CIA really did eavesdrop
on Dad. Now Jim, 64, a retired Navy public relations officer who lives in Anne Arundel
County, is waging an operation of his own against the agency. For the past five years, he has sought to declassify and make public any documents Langley
might still have on his father and why he was wiretapped..... Between
March 12, 1963, and June 15, 1963, phone bugs were installed at the Allen and Scott homes
and their Capitol Hill office. But this was no rogue operation: CIA Director John McCone
approved the operation 'under pressure,' the
documents said, from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. And Kennedy planned it with Robert McNamara, the defense secretary and Vietnam War architect.
The wiretap identified many of the reporting team’s sources: a dozen senators; six
congressmen; 11 congressional staffers; 16 'government employees,' including a staff
member at the White House and some at the vice president’s office; and 'other
well-placed individuals,' the documents said. " So What's It Like Now? "The House of Commons office of Damian
Green, the Tories' immigration spokesman, is routinely swept for electronic bugging
devices, along with other offices belonging to senior Conservatives, amid fears of covert monitoring, The Independent
on Sunday has discovered. Anger surrounding the
shadow immigration minister's arrest last week escalated dramatically last night over
suspicions of a major bugging scandal inside the Palace of
Westminster. The IoS
understands that even before his surprise arrest on Thursday Mr
Green was aware that his Commons office, phone calls and emails could be under
surveillance because of the sensitive nature of his job. The fresh revelations rocked the Commons just days before the high point
of the parliamentary calendar, the Queen's Speech, which takes place on Wednesday. Tory
leader David Cameron last night said the Prime Minister must denounce the arrest of Mr
Green or risk charges of hypocrisy because he 'made his career' from Whitehall leaks.
Writing in the News of the World, Mr Cameron added: 'If this approach had been in place in
the 1990s, then Gordon Brown would have spent most of his time under arrest.' Several offices within the Commons and Portcullis House belonging to
senior Tory MPs and officials are checked regularly by security experts for listening devices and other surveillance equipment. The IoS has learnt that there are
'major concerns' at the highest levels of the Tory party over suspected monitoring by the authorities.
Any such monitoring may not be illegal but would be hugely controversial. Last night, a Conservative MP wrote to Gordon Brown demanding an
urgent review of the Wilson doctrine, the convention that protects MPs from phonetapping
but does not cover other surveillance techniques. It
is not known whether a covert device has ever been found during searches. But if the
suspicions are proved right, it would have major implications for the protection of
parliamentary privilege. Ben Wallace, the Conservative MP for Lancaster & Wyre, said
the Wilson doctrine, which dates back to 1966, needed to be changed to cover all forms of surveillance,
not just intercepting of calls. He said: 'It is
disturbing that the authorities
may have exploited the difference between surveillance and intercept in order to pursue
Members of Parliament over the past 10 years.'" The Arrival Of 'Turnkey Totalitarianism' "People think, well, yeah, I use Facebook, and maybe
the FBI if they made a request, could come and get it, and everyone is much more aware of
that because of [former CIA Director] Petraeus. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that all the time nearly everything people do on the
internet is permanently recorded, every web search. Do you know what you were thinking one
year, two days, three months ago? No, you don’t know, but Google knows, it
remembers.... You know, the Stasi had a 10 per cent
penetration of East German society, with up to 1 in 10 people
being informants at some time in their life. Now in countries that have the highest
internet penetration, like Iceland, more than 80 per cent of people are on Facebook,
informing about their friends. That information doesn’t
[simply] go nowhere. It’s not kept in Iceland, it’s sent back into the US where
it IS accessed by US intelligence and where it is given out to any friends or cronies of
US intelligence – hundreds of national security letters every day publicly declared
and being issued by the US government.... We have this position where as we know knowledge is power, and
there’s a mass transfer as a result of literally billions of interceptions per day
going from everyone, the average person, into the data vaults of state spying agencies for
the big countries, and their cronies – the corporations that help build them that
infrastructure. Those groups are already powerful, that’s why they are able to build
this infrastructure to intercept on everyone. So they are growing more powerful,
concentrating the power in the hands of smaller and smaller groups of people at once,
which isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s extremely
dangerous once there is any sort of corruption occurring in the power. Because absolute power corrupts, and when it becomes corrupt, it can
affect a lot of people very quickly. Bill Binney, National Security Agency whistleblower, who was the research head of the
National Security Agency’s Signals Intelligence Division, describes this as a ‘turnkey totalitarianism’, that all
the infrastructure has been built for absolute totalitarianism. It’s just the matter of turning the key..... in general I think the
prognosis is very grim. .... What's necessary is
that the critical accountability components of society that stop it from going down the
tubes entirely, that those people are protected. Those include corruption investigators, journalists, activists, and political
parties. These have got to be protected. If they are
not protected, then it's all lost.... if we are not
able to protect a significant number of people from mass state spying, then the basic
democratic and civilian institutions that we are used to – not in the West, I am no
glorifier of the West, but in all societies – are going to crumble away. They will crumble away, and they will do so all at once. And that's an
extremely dangerous phenomenon. " "James Bamford
has a way of digging up the facts that lend credence to America’s worst privacy fears
about its own government. Now the author and
investigative reporter who wrote the definitive portraits of the National Security Agency
in his books The
Puzzle Palace, Body
of Secrets and The
Shadow Factory has drawn a picture of ubiquitous surveillance that seems mind-boggling
even by NSA standards. In his just-published cover story for
Wired, Bamford lays out the NSA’s plans for
a vast new facility in Bluffdale, Utah that aims to become a storage and analysis hub for the record-breakingly
massive collections of Internet traffic data that the NSA
hopes to gather in coming years not from just foreign networks, but domestic ones as well.
The story adds confirmation to what the New York Times revealed in 2005: that the NSA has
engaged in widespread wiretapping of Americans with the consent of firms like AT&T and
Verizon. But more interestingly–and more troubling in
the eyes of many who value their privacy–it details the Agency’s plans to crack
AES encryption, the cryptographic standard certified by the NSA itself in 2009 for
military and government use and until now considered uncrackable in any amount of time
relevant to mortals. ..... The NSA project now aims
to break the 'exaflop barrier' by building a supercomputer a hundred times faster than the
fastest existing today, the Japanese 'K Computer.' That code-breaking system is projected
to use 200 megawatts of power, about as much as would power 200,000 homes." Each Year It Gets Worse 2017 "Mobile phone data could be used in
place of census questions in the future, a report from the Office for
National Statistics (ONS) suggests. The information would allow the ONS
to track where people live and work. The ONS tested the idea as part of a
government-backed project looking at other data sources for the census. The report said it used commuter flow data from Vodafone users,
collected over four weeks in March and April 2016, in three London
boroughs.... Commuter flows starting or ending in the south London
boroughs of
Southwark, Croydon and Lambeth were analysed and compared to data from
the last census in 2011. An individual's home location was based
on where the phone was located during the night or when switched on in
the morning, while a work location was set to where a phone was found
between standard working hours, Monday to Friday."
2016 "Most
of the world’s international phone calls, internet traffic, emails, and other
communications are sent over a network of undersea cables that connect countries like
giant arteries. At spy outposts across the world, the NSA and its partners tap into these
cables to monitor the data flowing through them. But Menwith Hill is focused on a
different kind of surveillance: eavesdropping on communications as they are being
transmitted through the air. According to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept
from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Menwith Hill has two main spying capabilities. The
first is called FORNSAT, which uses powerful antennae contained within the golf ball-like
domes to eavesdrop on communications as they are being beamed between foreign satellites.
The second is called OVERHEAD, which uses U.S. government satellites orbiting above
targeted countries to locate and monitor wireless communications on the ground below
— such as cellphone calls and even WiFi traffic....
As of 2009, Menwith Hill’s foreign satellite surveillance mission, code-named
MOONPENNY, was monitoring 163 different satellite data links. The
intercepted communications were funneled into a variety of different
repositories storing phone calls, text messages, emails, internet browsing histories,
and other data. It is not clear precisely how many communications Menwith Hill is capable
of tapping into at any one time, but the NSA’s documents
indicate the number is extremely large. In a single 12-hour period in May 2011, for
instance, its surveillance systems logged more than 335 million metadata records, which
reveal information such as the sender and recipient of an email, or the phone numbers
someone called and at what time. To keep information about Menwith Hill’s
surveillance role secret, the U.S. and U.K. governments have actively misled the public
for years through a “cover story” portraying the base as a facility used to
provide “rapid radio relay and conduct communications research.” A classified U.S. document, dated
from 2005, cautioned
spy agency employees against revealing the truth. “It is important to know the
established cover story for MHS [Menwith Hill Station] and to protect the fact that MHS is
an intelligence collection facility,” the document stated. “Any reference to
satellites being operated or any connection to intelligence gathering is strictly
prohibited.”... roughly 600 of the personnel at
the facility are from U.K. agencies, including employees of the NSA’s British
counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.... a new “collection posture” was introduced at the
base, the aim being to “collect it all, process it all, exploit it all.” In
other words, it would vacuum up as many communications within its reach as technologically
possible.... Fabian Hamilton, a member of Parliament
based in the nearby city of Leeds.......told The Intercept that he found the
secrecy shrouding Menwith Hill to be “offensive.” The revelations about the role
it has played in U.S. killing and capture operations, he said, showed there needed to be a
full review of its operations. “Any nation-state that uses military means to attack
any target, whether it is a terrorist, whether it is legitimate or not, has to be
accountable to its electorate for what it does,” Hamilton said. “That’s the basis of our Parliament, it’s the basis
of our whole democratic system. How can we say that Menwith can carry out operations of
which there is absolutely no accountability to the public? I don’t buy this idea that
you say the word ‘security’ and nobody can know anything. We need to know what
is being done in our name.”" Police anti-extremism unit monitoring senior Green party figures Guardian, 28 April 2016 "The
UK's security services, including GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, have been unlawfully collecting and
using mass datasets of personal information for more than 10 years. The Investigatory
Powers Tribunal has ruled in a judgement published online that the
bodies had been collecting data without safeguards or supervision. The setups of 'Bulk
Communications Data' (BCD) and 'Bulk Personal Datasets' by the agencies did not comply
with the right to privacy (Article
8) in the European Convention on Human Rights..... Both types of datasets have
been used as part of criminal investigations, but have been criticised by privacy advocates for being overly
intrusive. The tribunal added that the massive
datasets (BPD) "include considerable volumes of data about biographical details,
commercial and financial activities, communications and travel"........ The court's ruling comes as the government's Investigatory Powers Bill (IP Bill)
is in the final stages of becoming
law – it is currently passed through the House of Commons and is being
debated by the House of Lords. The Bill has been heavily criticised
by numerous
committees and officials. Powers included in the IP Bill include bulk collection of data,
the ability to remotely hack mobile phones and computers, and the storing of website
history. The law is the first time these powers have been specifically written into
law." 2015 "The
British government quietly changed anti-hacking laws to exempt GCHQ and other law
enforcement agencies from criminal prosecution, it has been claimed. Details of the change
were revealed at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal which is hearing a challenge to the
legality of computer hacking by UK law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The Government amended the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) two months ago." 2014 "Britain's
signals intelligence division is stealing screenshots from hundreds of thousands of
innocent Yahoo users' webcam videos, according to the Guardian newspaper, which also
reported that the years-long operation has swept up a huge haul of intimate photographs.
The newspaper said GCHQ has been scooping up the sensitive images by intercepting video
chats such as the kind offered by Yahoo Messenger, an effort codenamed OPTIC NERVE. ........The Guardian said that OPTIC
NERVE was intended at least in part to identify
targets using automatic facial recognition software as they stared into their computer's
webcams. But the stockpiling of sexually explicit images of ordinary people had
uncomfortable echoes of George Orwell's 'Nineteen
Eighty-Four,' where the authorities — operating
under the aegis of 'Big Brother' — fit homes with cameras to monitor the intimate
details of people's personal lives. 'At least Big Brother had the decency to install his
own cameras,' British media lawyer David Banksy said in a message posted to Twitter after
the revelations broke. 'We've had to buy them ourselves.' The
collection of nude photographs also raises questions about potential for blackmail. America's National Security Agency has already acknowledged that some
analysts have been caught trawling databases for inappropriate material on partners or
love interests. Other leaked documents have revealed
how U.S. and British intelligence discussed leaking embarrassing material online to
blacken the reputations of their targets. GCHQ
refused to answer a series of questions about OTPIC
NERVE, instead returning the same boilerplate answer
it has given to reporters for months." 2013 “There are a lot
more stories to come, a
lot more documents that will be covered. It’s
important that we understand what it is we’re publishing, so what we say about them
is accurate.... It is literally true, without
hyperbole, that the goal of the NSA and its partners in the English-speaking world is to
eliminate privacy globally. They want to make sure
there is no communication that evades their net.” "Edward Snowden
is to deliver this year’s Channel 4 Alternative Christmas Message, the broadcaster
has confirmed. The whistleblower, who revealed the
mass surveillance programmes organised by the US and other governments, will broadcast his
message at 4.15pm on Christmas Day. In his first TV interview since [fleeing] to Russia in
May, Snowden lays out his vision for why privacy matters and why he believes mass
indiscriminate surveillance by governments of their people is wrong.... During his
address, Snowden says: 'Great Britain’s George
Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the
book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us are nothing compared to what
we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go.
Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will
grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to
have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that’s a
problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who
we want to be.'...The Alternative Christmas Message
will broadcast on Channel 4 at 4.15pm on Christmas Day. It will be available to view on
4oD later today." "James
Goodale has a message for journalists: Wake up. In his new book, Fighting for the Press
(CUNY Journalism Press, 2013), Goodale, chief counsel to The New York Times when its
editors published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, argues that President
Obama is worse for press freedom than former President Richard Nixon was. The Obama administration has prosecuted more alleged leakers of national
security information under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations
combined, a course critics say is overly aggressive. Former
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a March op-ed that the administration
'has a particular, chilling intolerance' for those who leak. If the Obama administration
indicts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act,
Goodale argues, the president will have succeeded where Nixon failed by using the act to
'end-run' the First Amendment.'" "Europeans,
take note: The U.S. government has
granted itself authority to secretly snoop on you. That’s according to a new report
produced for the European Parliament, which has warned that a U.S. spy law renewed late
last year authorizes 'purely political
surveillance on foreigners' data' if it is
stored using U.S. cloud services like those provided by Google, Microsoft and Facebook....
According to [Caspar] Bowden, the 2008 FISA
amendment created a power of 'mass surveillance'
specifically targeted at the data of non-U.S. persons located outside America, which applies to cloud computing. This means that U.S.
companies with a presence in the EU can be compelled under a secret surveillance order,
issued by a secret
court, to hand over data on Europeans. Because non-American citizens outside the
United States have been deemed by the
court not to fall under the search and seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment, it
opens the door to an unprecedented kind of
snooping. 'It's like putting a mind control
drug in the water supply, which only affects non-Americans,' says Bowden... Most
countries’ spy agencies routinely monitor real-time communications like emails and
phone calls of groups under suspicion on national security grounds. However, what makes FISA different is that it explicitly
authorizes the targeting of real-time communications and dormant cloud data
linked to 'foreign-based political organizations'—not just suspected terrorists or foreign government agents. Bowden says
FISA is effectively 'a carte blanche for anything that furthers U.S. foreign policy
interests' and legalizes the monitoring of
European journalists, activists, and politicians who are engaged in any issue in which the United States has a stake. FISA,
according to Bowden, expressly makes it lawful for the United States to do 'continuous mass-surveillance of ordinary lawful
democratic political activities,' and could
even go as far as to force U.S. cloud providers like Google to provide a live 'wiretap' of
European users’ data." 2012 "[British] Home Secretary Theresa May said the proposed surveillance law would 'save lives' ....
But the committee's MPs and peers are likely to encourage the police
and law enforcement agencies to work out a much simpler scheme that the public can trust.
The message is likely to be 'go back to the drawing board and come and talk to us when you
have something fresh'. As regular Register readers
will know, the surveillance plans now being re-examined have been touted to successive
governments by the intelligence services for years with little change to any details other
than the name. The MPs are likely to offer fierce opposition to the proposals, which would
allow the Home Office to wire network traffic probes into the public internet anywhere it
chose, for this or any successor government to use for any purpose it chose....The report will be another setback for the Home Secretary: in 2010 the
former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord Macdonald was asked to review her plan to
monitor citizens online. He previously
called the project to mine the UK internet: A paranoid
fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. This database would be an unimaginable hellhouse of personal private
information. It would be a complete readout of every citizen's life in the most intimate
and demeaning detail.... The two panels' highly
critical reports will be an expected disappointment for the Home Office. They are the latest in a series of spectacular disasters for career spy Charles Farr, who three years ago had hoped
to land the top job at the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and become 'C'." "The cable boxes
of the future could be able to detect when viewers are cuddling on the sofa and
automatically serve adverts for contraceptives. U.S. cable provider Verizon has applied to
patent a set-top box technology that can observe what's going on in the room and show
viewers adverts based on what it detects. In U.S. Patent Application 20120304206 the company
suggests it could detect when people are 'cuddling' then show 'a commercial for a romantic
getaway vacation, a commercial for a contraceptive, a commercial for flowers [...] etc.'. The technology would integrate a range of sensors into their products,
including thermal imaging cameras, microphones and motion sensors, to detect the mood
their audience and tailor media content to suit. Privacy
campaigners called the new technology a 'privacy nightmare waiting around the corner' and
called for it to be reined in 'before consumers lose control for good'. It has disturbing
echoes of George Orwell's dystopia 1984, where the population were constantly watched by
authorities through cameras integrated in their television screens.... This needs to be reined in
before consumers lose control for good.'" "Everything we
do on the Internet leaves a trail back to us. Search engine entries, shopping lists,
e-mail addresses and so much more which is ripe for the taking. Now governments and their
intelligence agencies want a piece of that action and they have new tools to ascertain our
intentions and possible future actions.... There
have been a series of related and interesting developments in the field of global
intelligence gathering. The NSA is building a brand new data center in Utah in order to
connect with some new intelligence sharing systems such as the Defense Intelligence
Enterprise and the Global Information Grid.... most
people would not appreciate their private conversations end
up on foreign military or intelligence networks.... It goes on all the time, you could look at Project Echelon, Project
Groundbreaker, Project Trailblazer and many others. Why do you think that the head of the
CIA is gloating about being about to glean intelligence through your devices and
net-centric applications. It is a gold mine for them and they have reaped a bonanza from
it. CIA director David Petraeus put his cards on the
table because he hinted about the next target, it
will be all of data from the smart meters that have been put in place in the past few years. It
wouldn’t be hard to tell how many people are living in a certain home from
electricity records or which appliances are used the most. Will we be deemed terrorists
from some poorly programmed profiling software based on our paper and data trail? Mistakes
happen all the time, from faulty no-fly lists to swat team wrong door raids." "When people download a film from Netflix to a
flatscreen, or turn on web radio, they could be alerting unwanted watchers to exactly what
they are doing and where they are. Spies will no
longer have to plant bugs in your home - the rise of
'connected' gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people 'bug' their own homes, says CIA director David Petraeus. The CIA claims it will be able to
'read' these devices via the internet - and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the
home. Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps - and
chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in
everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells. The
resultant chorus of 'connected' gadgets will be able to be read like a book - and even
remote-controlled, according to CIA Director David Petraeus, according to a recent report by Wired's 'Danger Room' blog. Petraeus says that web-connected gadgets will 'transform' the art of
spying - allowing spies to monitor people automatically
without planting bugs, breaking and entering or even donning a tuxedo to infiltrate a
dinner party. ' 'Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it
properly applies to these technologies,' said Petraeus. 'Particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. Items of interest
will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such
as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy
harvesters - all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and
high-power computing.' Petraeus was speaking to a
venture capital firm about new technologies which aim to add processors and web
connections to previously 'dumb' home appliances such as fridges, ovens and lighting
systems. This week, one of the world's biggest chip
companies, ARM, has unveiled a new processor built to work inside 'connected' white
goods." 2011 "Sir Richard
Dearlove, Britain’s former chief spymaster has said the country should start spying
on its Eurozone neighbours to protect the economy as the common currency is wracked by
national defaults. Sir Richard Dearlove, who served
as head of MI6 until 2004, said that Britain must not be 'squeamish' about using the
intelligence services to defend its economic interests. The former C said central banks
like the Bank of England maintained extensive networks of contacts to secure information
on future developments. But specialist intelligence agencies should also undertake the
task of financial security. 'I am addressing the future of the euro and how defaults
affect us economically,' he told the Global Strategy Forum. 'Efficient central bankers
should be able to handle themselves but I am indicating they could and might need help
from time to time on the currency issue.' Sir Richard added that 2008 financial crisis had
changed his views on the role of intelligence agencies in protecting the economy. Britain
needed to be 'forewarned and forearmed’ in anticipation of a future crisis. He said:
'I don’t think we should be squeamish about using all means to protect ourselves
financially.'.... As one of the highest regarded global spy agencies, the Secret
Intelligence Service, or MI6, has deep ties with its intelligence counterparts across
Europe. Sir Richard acknowledged that MI6 was a leader in efforts to integrate
Europe’s intelligence agencies. By ordering the
foreign intelligence agency to actively spy on its partners, the government would risk a
backlash from the country’s closest neighbours and allies. Countries vulnerable to
quitting the euro would be sure to view the move as an act of selfishness at a time of
national weakness.... Sir Richard noted that the Bank of England had effectively intelligence
capabilities – though it did not classify these
activities as spying. As such MI6 would play a subordinate
role to the Bank. Sir
Richard was appointed head of MI6 in 1999 and was head of the organisation during the
September 11 attacks on the US by al Qaeda. When he retired in 2004, the final year of his
career had been overshadowed by controversy over the dossier used by the government to
accuse Iraq of pursuing a secret Weapons of Mass Destruction programme.' 2010 "The
top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money
it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how
many agencies do the same work.... In Washington and
the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under
construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent
of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of
space." "Fraudulent bankers are more of a
danger to society than terrorists and the failure to reassure people that their money is
safe is an 'absolute failure of public policy', a former Director of Public Prosecutions
says today. Writing in The Times, Sir
Ken Macdonald says that the systems for regulating markets and for prosecuting market
crime have completely broken down...In his article, Sir Ken lambasts the 'liberty-sapping addictions' of the Home Office and the
'paranoiac paraphernalia of national databases and ID cards'. He also attacks the rush to 'bring in lots of terror law, the tougher the
better'. Rather than ensuring that people's money and financial security 'will not be
stolen from them', legislators wanted 'criminal justice to be an auction of fake
toughness', he says. Sir Ken has previously criticised government plans to extend the time
that terrorism suspects could be held without charge beyond 28 days; and, recently, plans for increased surveillance and data retention." 2009 "A
former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism and trying to bring in laws that restrict civil liberties. In an
interview in a Spanish newspaper, published in the Daily Telegraph, Dame Stella Rimington,
73, also accuses the US of 'tortures'....Dame Stella, who stood down as the director
general of the security service in 1996, has previously been critical of the government's
policies, including its attempts to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42
days and the controversial plan to introduce ID cards. 'It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks,
rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws
which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the
objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a
police state,' she told the Spanish newspaper La
Vanguardia...." "With Google’s Latitude, parents
will be able to swoop down like helicopters on their children, whirr around their heads
and chase them away from the games arcade and back to do their French verbs....However
Orwellian it sounds, don’t worry. The police and
security services can already track you down from your phone without any help from Google..." "Over the past few days, at trade
fairs from Las Vegas to Seoul, a constant theme has been the unstoppable advance of 'FRT',
the benign abbreviation favoured by industry insiders. We learnt that Apple's iPhoto
update will automatically scan your photos to detect people's faces and group them
accordingly, and that Lenovo's new PC will log on users by monitoring their facial
patterns....So let's understand this: governments and
police are planning to implement increasingly accurate surveillance technologies that are
unnoticeable, cheap, pervasive, ubiquitous, and searchable in real time. And private businesses, from bars to workplaces, will also operate such
systems, whose data trail may well be sold on or leaked to third parties - let's say,
insurance companies that have an interest in knowing about your unhealthy lifestyle, or
your ex-spouse who wants evidence that you can afford higher maintenance payments. Rather
than jump up and down with rage - you never know who is watching through the window - you have a duty now, as a citizen, to question this stealthy rush towards permanent
individual surveillance. A Government already
obsessed with pursuing an unworkable and unnecessary identity-card database must be held
to account." 2008 "Our
privacy is being invaded by the world's security services in every second of every day, as a
routine matter. Vast quantities of information are
collected by commercial enterprises such as Google or Tesco. Against these invasions of our privacy we have little or no
protection." 'Stalin's Delight' "The
FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal
investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's
microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. ......Kaplan's opinion said
that the eavesdropping technique 'functioned whether the
phone was powered on or off.' Some handsets can't be fully
powered down without removing the battery.....Security-conscious
corporate executives routinely remove the batteries from their cell phones, he added....A BBC article from 2004
reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. 'A
mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful,
undetectable bug,' the article said, 'enabling them to be activated at a later date to
pick up sounds even when the receiver is down.'........
A 2003 lawsuit revealed that
the FBI was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems
like General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers' conversations. When FBI agents
remotely activated the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not
tell that their conversations were being monitored. Malicious hackers have followed suit.
A report
last year said Spanish authorities had detained a man who write a Trojan horse that
secretly activated a computer's video camera and forwarded him the recordings." "Cellphone users
say they want more privacy, and app makers are listening. No, they're not listening to
user requests. They're literally listening to the sounds in
your office, kitchen, living room and bedroom. A new class of smartphone app has emerged
that uses the microphone built into your phone as a covert listening device -- a 'bug,' in
common parlance. But according to app makers, it's not a bug.
It's a feature! The apps use ambient sounds to figure out what you're paying attention to.
It's the next best thing to reading your mind. The issue was brought to the world's
attention recently on a podcast called This Week
in Tech. Host Leo Laporte and his panel shocked listeners by unmasking three popular apps that activate your phone's microphone to collect sound patterns from inside your home, meeting, office or
wherever you are. The apps are Color, Shopkick and IntoNow, all of which activate the
microphones in users' iPhone
or Android
devices in order to gather contextual information that provides some benefit to the user.
Color
uses your iPhone's or Android phone's microphone to detect when people are in the same
room. The data on ambient noise is combined with color and lighting information from the
camera to figure out who's inside, who's outside, who's in one room, and who's in another,
so the app can auto-generate spontaneous temporary social networks of people who are
sharing the same experience. ... So, what's possible
with current technology? By listening in on your phone, capturing 'patterns,' then sending
that data back to servers, marketers can determine the following: * Your gender, and the
gender of people you talk to. * Your approximate age, and the ages of the people you talk
to. * What time you go to bed, and what time you wake up. * What you watch on TV and
listen to on the radio. * How much of your time you spend alone, and how much with others.
* Whether you live in a big city or a small town. *What form of transportation you use to
get to work." "Security
researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go
– and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to
the owner's computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and
longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone
who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements
using a simple program. For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data
stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the
phone's operating system, released in June 2010. 'Apple has made it possible for almost
anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or
computer to get detailed information about where you've been,' said Pete Warden, one of
the researchers. Only the iPhone records the user's
location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered
the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on
Wednesday. 'Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google's] Android phones and
couldn't find any,' said Warden." |
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'We Need A New Way Of Thinking' - Consciousness-Based Education |
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Latest Developments In 'Turnkey Totalitarianism' |
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Current - 2017 - 2016 - 2015 - 2014 - 2013 - 2012 - 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - 2008 & Earlier |
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| 2018 |
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"South Wales Police has been testing an automated facial recognition
system since June 2017 and has used it in the real-world at more than
ten events. In the majority of cases, the system has made more incorrect
matches than the times it has been able to correctly identify a
potential suspect or offender. ..... Automatic systems that scan people's faces in public and try to make
matches are at an early stage in the UK. In China, systems are more
advanced with a BBC News reporter being located, during a stunt, within just seven minutes...... South Wales Police, in its privacy assessment
of the technology, says it is a "significant advantage" that no
"co-operation" is required from a person. Its system is comprised of two
CCTV cameras that are connected to a laptop or server. The CCTV feed is
recorded and faces are pulled from the footage, which is compared
automatically against a watch list. This list, formed of a database, can
be comprised of thousands of facial images... In the future, the police force says, it may be possible to integrate
the facial recognition technology with databases from other sources. It
says the Police National Database (which has more than 19 million
images), the Automatic Number Plate Recognition database, passport or
driving licence could be added to its system..... But the use of the system raises privacy considerations. "It is accepted
that civil rights [sic] may start to voice concerns over the invasion
of privacy by this technology," the Welsh police force's privacy
assessment of its own system says.... South Wales Police isn't the only UK constabulary that has been testing
facial recognition systems in public places.... The automated facial recognition systems being used at public events are
separate to police uses of face matching technology that uses other
images: such as social media photos, or pre-recorded CCTV footage. In
2012, the High Court ruled it was unlawful for millions of photos of
innocent people to be kept on police databases. At present, these can
only be removed if a person makes a complaint to police." "For several months, [Orlando International] airport has worked with British Airways to
test facial-recognition, or biometric screening. Recently, the Greater
Orlando Aviation Authority moved to equip the airport as the first in
the nation to use the technology for all international flights inbound
and outbound. The experience of the novel technology in an
otherwise timeworn routine was remarked upon by an elderly British
Airways passenger, who clutched a burgundy passport splayed at its photo
page, where a boarding pass was tucked, both ready for the customary
presentation.... John Newsome, the airport’s chief information officer, said all of
the airport’s 25 carriers with foreign flights and the two border
checkpoints will be equipped for biometric screening through this
summer. The decision means spending $4 million on gates and high-definition cameras for departing and arriving international
flights.... In an era of online breaches of privacy, theft of financial
information
and fears of government surveillance, Orlando International and Customs
and Border Protection are readily equipped with talking points about
what happens with those high-definition snapshots taken for biometric
screening....Customs and Border Protection has a suggestion for
passengers with concerns about biometric screening: Request a manual
check. Within the past year, biometric screening also has been piloted
by
Delta at JFK and Atlanta international airports, Lufthansa at Los
Angeles International, and by JetBlue in Boston. Addressing the
accuracy of its facial-recognition technology, the agency has reported
that the “percent of successful matches is in the high 90s.” "The UK government's surveillance regime has been dealt another blow
as the High Court in England today ruled the Snooper's Charter unlawful –
and gave the government six months to fix it. Handing down the judgment, Lord Justice Rabinder Singh said that Part 4 of the Investigatory Powers Act
(IPA), which relates to retention of communications data, was
incompatible with EU law, and gave the government until 1 November 2018
to remedy it. The ruling is the latest instalment in a long-running and complex
legal battle between the government and various privacy campaign groups
over the state's extensive surveillance laws. In this case, brought by civil rights group Liberty,
the court considered the powers granted to the government to force
internet firms and telcos to store data on communications – like
location info and records of when and to whom calls or messages were
made – for up to a year. These powers came into force on 30 December
2016. Lord Justice Singh and Justice David Holgate ruled
that Part 4 was incompatible with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights
for two reasons: ministers can issue data retention orders without
independent review, and this can be done for reasons other than serious
crime.... The government has refused to see the ruling as a defeat on the grounds that it has already conceded
the Act doesn't comply with European laws. Back in November, it
proposed a set of changes it thinks will bring the Act in line, for
instance by creating a new body, the Office for Communications Data
Authorisation, to review and approve notices. But it did lose its request, made during the February
hearing, that it be given until April 2019 to enact the changes. The
judges today ruled that they "see no reason why the legal framework
cannot be amended before April 2019", even if some practical
arrangements take longer.... Liberty, meanwhile, is already working up the next phase of its
challenges to the IPA – which refers to parts 5, 6 and 7, government
hacking, bulk warrants and bulk personal data set warrants – and has
today launched a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the battle."
"Across China, facial-recognition technology that can scan the
country’s entire population is being put to use. In some cases, the
technology can perform the task in just one second. Sixteen cities, municipalities, and provinces are using a
frighteningly fast surveillance system that has an accuracy rate of
99.8%, Global Times reported over the weekend. “The system is fast enough to scan China’s population in just one
second, and it takes two seconds to scan the world’s population,” the
Times reported, citing local Chinese newspaper Worker’s Daily. The system is part of Skynet, a nationwide monitoring program
launched in 2005 to increase the use and capabilities of surveillance
cameras. According to developers, this particular system works regardless of
angle or lighting condition and over the last two years has led to the
arrest of more than 2,000 people. The use of facial-recognition technology is soaring in China where it is being used to increase efficiencies and improve policing. Cameras are used to catch jaywalkers, find fugitives, track people’s regular hangouts, and even predict crime before it happens.
Currently, there are 170 million surveillance cameras in China and,
by 2020, the country hopes to have 570 million – that’s nearly one
camera for every two citizens. Facial recognition technology is just a
small part of the artificial intelligence industry that China wants to
pioneer. According to a report by CB Insights, five times as many AI patents were applied for in China than the US in 2017." "A couple of years after it
happened, Australian citizens are finally
being (indirectly) informed their government harvested cell site
location info to track their daily activities. This isn't the work of an
intelligence agency or a secretive law enforcement effort. Instead,
it's an (unannounced) partnership between the Australian Bureau of
Statistics (which handles the Australian Census) and a cellphone service
provider. The provider apparently willingly turned over cell site info
without a court demand, government mandate, or consultation with its
customers....Supposedly, the information has been anonymized. It
obviously hasn't been completely stripped of personal information. The slide deck
[PDF] detailing the effort notes the data can be broken down by age and
sex. The anonymization claim is made without any support from the ABS,
which still has yet to provide any further info -- much less a privacy
impact assessment -- via its website."
"While the Cambridge Analytica scandal rumbles on,
Facebook is quietly asking users in the EU and Canada to let it use its
facial recognition to scan their faces and suggest tags in photos. It
isn't the first time Mark Zuckerberg's firm has tried to get access to
millions of Europeans' facial data. Facebook tried
to bring facial recognition to people in the EU back in 2011, but it
stopped doing so a year later after privacy campaigners raised concerns
that the feature was not compatible with data protection laws. Now
Facebook is hoping it can bring facial recognition back to the EU, as
long as it secures explicit consent beforehand....But some have criticised Facebook
for making it too easy for users to accept the new requests without
really understanding how their data is being used – which sounds very
similar to how much of Cambridge Analytica scandal started.... Facebook users in the US have had their facial data
tracked since 2011 and if users want to opt out, they have to click
‘manage settings’ and go through another page before changing their
privacy settings. But also in the US, Facebook is being met with resistance over the use of facial recognition technology. The company is facing a class action lawsuit
alleging that it gathered biometric information without users explicit
consent. On April 16, 2018, District Judge James Donato in California
ruled that Facebook users in Illinois are allowed to bring forward a
case arguing that Facebook’s collection of face data violates Illinois’
Biometric Information Privacy Act. If it is found to be violating the
act, Facebook could be faced with a fine of billions of dollars.
Facebook’s facial recognition technology works by analysing images and
videos in which a particular person has been tagged, and then generating
a unique number called a ‘template’. This template is then compared
with other photos and videos on Facebook, and if the algorithm finds a
match then that user’s name may appear as a tag suggestion..... Despite
the backlash against its widespread data collection, Facebook is
also exploring other ways of other ways of using facial recognition
technology. In a patent published in November 2017, the company
described using facial recognition as way of verifying payments in
shops. Last year it also tested using facial recognition to allow people
to recover their account details just by using their face to verify
their identity." ".... over the last five years a secretive
surveillance company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer
has been quietly building a massive facial recognition database
consisting of faces acquired from the giant social network, YouTube and
countless other websites. Privacy activists are suitably alarmed. That database forms the core of a facial recognition service
called Face-Int, now owned by Israeli vendor Verint after it snapped up
the product's creator, little-known surveillance company Terrogence, in
2017. Both Verint and Terrogence have long been vendors for the U.S.
government, providing bleeding-edge spy tech to the NSA, the U.S. Navy
and countless other intelligence and security agencies....Though
Terrogence is primarily focused on helping intelligence agencies and law
enforcement fight terrorism online, LinkedIn profiles of current and
former employees indicate it's also involved in other, more political
endeavours. One ex-staffer, in describing her role as a Terrogence
analyst, said she'd "conducted public perception management operations
on behalf of foreign and domestic governmental clients," and used "open
source intelligence practices and social media engineering methods to
investigate political and social groups." She was not reachable at the
time of publication. And now concerns have been raised over just how
Terrogence has grabbed all those faces from Facebook and other online
sources. What's apparent, though, is that Terrogence is yet another
company that's been able to clandestinely take advantage of Facebook's
openness, on top of Cambridge Analytica, which acquired information on
as many as 87 million users in 2014 from U.K.-based researcher Aleksandr
Kogan to help target individuals during its work for the Donald Trump
and Ted Cruz presidential campaigns. "It raises the stakes of face
recognition - it intensifies the potential negative consequences,"
warned Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU). "When you contemplate face recognition that's
everywhere, we have to think about what that’s going to mean for us. If
private companies are scraping photos and combining them with personal
info in order to make judgements about people - are you a terrorist, or
how If Terrogence isn't solely focused on terrorism, but has a political
side to its business too, its facial recognition work could sweep up a
vast number of people. That brings up another particularly worrying
aspect of the business in which Terrogence operates: the dawn of "the
privatisation of blacklisting," warned Stanley. "We've been fighting
with the government for years over due process on those lists... people
being put on them without being told why and not being sure how those
lists are being used," he told Forbes.likely are you to be a shoplifter
or anything in between - then it exposes everyone to the risk of being
misidentified, or correctly identified and being misjudged.""
These Ex-Spies Are Harvesting Facebook Photos For A Massive Facial Recognition Database Forbes, 16 April 2018 "Seeking
to build an identification system of unprecedented scope, India is
scanning the fingerprints, eyes and faces of its 1.3 billion residents
and connecting the data to everything from welfare benefits to mobile
phones. Civil
libertarians are horrified, viewing the program, called Aadhaar, as
Orwell’s Big Brother brought to life. To the government, it’s more like
“big brother,” a term of endearment used by many Indians to address a
stranger when asking for help. For
other countries, the technology could provide a model for how to track
their residents. And for India’s top court, the ID system presents
unique legal issues that will define what the constitutional right to
privacy means in the digital age. To Adita Jha, Aadhaar was simply a
hassle. The 30-year-old environmental
consultant in Delhi waited in line three times to sit in front of a
computer that photographed her face, captured her fingerprints and
snapped images of her irises. Three times, the data failed to upload.
The fourth attempt finally worked, and she has now been added to the 1.1
billion Indians already included in the program. Ms.
Jha had little choice but to keep at it. The government has made
registration mandatory for hundreds of public services and many private
ones, from taking school exams to opening bank accounts. “You almost
feel like life is going to stop without an Aadhaar,” Ms. Jha said.
Technology has given governments around the world new tools to monitor
their citizens. In China, the government is rolling out ways to use facial recognition and big data
to track people, aiming to inject itself further into everyday life.
Many countries, including Britain, deploy closed-circuit cameras to
monitor their populations....The potential uses — from surveillance to managing government benefit
programs — have drawn interest elsewhere. Sri Lanka is planning a
similar system, and Britain, Russia and the Philippines are studying it,
according to the Indian government.... Opponents
have filed at least 30 cases against the program in India’s Supreme
Court. They argue that Aadhaar violates India’s Constitution — and, in
particular, a unanimous court decision last year that declared for the
first time that Indians had a fundamental right to privacy. Rahul
Narayan, one of the lawyers challenging the system, said the government
was essentially building one giant database on its citizens. “There has
been a sort of mission creep to it all along,” he said." "When Mark Zuckerberg appeared
before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week in the
aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, he tried to describe
the difference between "surveillance and what we do." "The difference is
extremely clear," a nervous-looking Zuckerberg said. "On Facebook, you
have control over your information... the information we collect you can
choose to have us not collect." But not a single member of the
committee pushed the billionaire CEO about surveillance companies who
exploit the data on Facebook for profit. Forbes has uncovered one case
that might shock them: over the last five years a secretive surveillance
company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer has been
quietly building a massive facial recognition database consisting of
faces acquired from the giant social network, YouTube and countless
other websites. Privacy activists are suitably alarmed. That database
forms the core of a facial recognition service called Face-Int, now
owned by Israeli vendor Verint after it snapped up the product's
creator, little-known surveillance company Terrogence, in 2017. Both
Verint and Terrogence have long been vendors for the U.S. government,
providing bleeding-edge spy tech to the NSA, the U.S. Navy and countless
other intelligence and security agencies....That same marketing page
was online in 2013, according to internet archive the Wayback Machine,
indicating the product is at least five years old. The age of the
product also suggests far more than 35,000 videos and photos have been
raided by the Face-Int technology by now, though Terrogence co-founder
and research lead Shai Arbel declined to comment for this article.
Though Terrogence is primarily focused on helping intelligence agencies
and law enforcement fight terrorism online, LinkedIn profiles of current
and former employees indicate it's also involved in other, more
political endeavours. One ex-staffer, in describing her role as a
Terrogence analyst, said she'd "conducted public perception management
operations on behalf of foreign and domestic governmental clients," and
used "open source intelligence practices and social media engineering
methods to investigate political and social groups." She was not
reachable at the time of publication.... "It raises the stakes of face
recognition - it intensifies the potential negative consequences,"
warned Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU). "When you contemplate face recognition that's
everywhere, we have to think about what that’s going to mean for us. If
private companies are scraping photos and combining them with personal
info in order to make judgements about people - are you a terrorist, or
how likely are you to be a shoplifter or anything in between - then it
exposes everyone to the risk of being misidentified, or correctly
identified and being misjudged." Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney
at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that if the facial
recognition database had been shared with the US government, it would
threaten the free speech and privacy rights of social media users." "This is a wake-up call for a generation. The revelation of Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of Facebook data to target American voters on behalf of Donald Trump in 2016 shines a torch on the jungle where we have become prey for the online carnivores to which we reveal our secrets. The
chairman of the Commons culture committee yesterday called on
Facebook’s warlord, 33-year-old multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, to
attend personally to give evidence about his company’s behaviour, though
there seems more chance of an appearance by Vladimir Putin.....those of us who spurn social media are almost as vulnerable. Every day
that we place things online, Amazon bombards us with come-ons that
emphasise its omniscience about what we read, watch, spread on the
garden, use in the house.... Cambridge Analytica’s gift to the Trump
victory appears to have been to empower his campaign to target
‘persuadable voters’, sparing canvassers from wasting effort on
irreconcilable Democrats. It has been
said for centuries that knowledge is power, yet Hitler’s Gestapo and
Stalin’s secret police knew far less about their fellow citizens than
does Facebook, which doesn’t have to photograph them outside their home,
tap their phones, or steal government files. Spies seem redundant in
the net age. What matters for us now is
to move beyond shock and disgust about the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook
revelations, and consider what can be done to make such companies
behave better. Investigating and, if appropriate, charging the bosses of Cambridge
Analytica will be the easy part, because they are based in Britain..... Even if Cambridge Analytica, or Facebook,
are damaged as much as they deserve to be by this scandal, there are
countless other online data markets where they came from. If
any of us wishes to conceal anything about ourselves, this can be
achieved only by making sure that information does not appear on a
computer. Yet every detail of our
finances, health record, employment history is stored somewhere out
there, and can never be totally secure." "Computer speakers and headphones make passable microphones and can be used to receive data via ultrasound and send signals back, making the practice of air gapping sensitivite computer systems less secure. In an academic paper published on Friday through preprint service ArXiv, researchers from Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev describe a novel data exfiltration technique that allows the transmission and reception of data – in the form of inaudible ultrasonic sound waves – between two computers in the same room without microphones. The paper, titled, "MOSQUITO: Covert Ultrasonic Transmissions between Two Air-Gapped Computers using Speaker-to-Speaker Communication," was written by Mordechai Guri, Yosef Solwicz, Andrey Daidakulov and Yuval Elovici, who have developed a number other notable side-channel attack techniques. These include: ODINI, a way to pass data between Faraday-caged computers using electrical fields; MAGNETO, a technique for passing data between air-gapped computers and smartphones via electrical fields; and FANSMITTER, a way to send acoustic data between air-gapped computers using fans. Secret data transmissions of this sort expand on prior work done by National Security Agency on TEMPEST attacks, which utilize electromagnetic, magnetic, acoustic, optical and thermal emanations from electronic devices to collect and transmit data. MOSQUITO, the researchers explain, demonstrates that speakers can covertly transmit data between unconnected machines at a distance of up to nine meters. What's more, the technique works between mic-less headphones – the researchers say their work is the first to explore headphone-to-headphone covert communication. Speakers, the paper explains, can be thought of as microphones working in reverse: Speakers turn electrical signals into acoustic signals while microphones turn acoustic signals into electrical ones. And each includes a diaphragm to assist with the conversion, which can help reverse the process. Modern audio chipsets, such as those from Realtek, include an option to alter the function of the audio port via software, the paper explains. This capability is referred to as "jack retasking." "The fact that loudspeakers, headphones, earphones, and earbuds are physically built like microphones, coupled with the fact that an audio port’s role in the PC can be altered programmatically, changing it from output to input, creates a vulnerability which can be abused by attackers," the paper explains. Malware, thus, may be able to reconfigure a speaker or headphone to act as a microphone, provided the device is passive and unpowered. That's a significant caveat since most modern PCs have active, powered speakers; headphones and earbuds generally have passive speakers, as do some older PCs. In an email to The Register, Mordechai Guri, one of the paper's authors, head of R&D at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Cyber-Security Research Center, and chief scientific officer at Morphisec, said, "The main problem involves headphones, earphones and earbuds since they are reversible and can become good pair of microphones (even when they don't have an integrated mic at all)." Using frequencies ranging from 18kHz to 24kHz, the researchers were able to achieve a data transmission rate of 166 bit/sec with a 1 per cent error rate when transmitting a 1Kb binary file over a distance of three meters. At distances ranging from 4 to 9 meters, that same error rate could only be achieved with a 10 bit/sec transmission rate, largely as a consequence of interference from environmental noise. The paper discusses several mitigation techniques, all of which have limitations, including designing headphones and speakers with on-board amplifiers (which prevents use as a mic), using an ultrasonic jammer, scanning for ultrasonic transmissions, preventing jack retasking via software, and completely disabling audio hardware via the UEFI/BIOS. Disconnecting speakers, headphones and the like represents the most practical solution, Guri said, "but this is not always feasible." Monitoring the ultrasonic band is a good theoretical and academic solution, he added, but has potential problems. "In practice, it will raise many false alarms," he said. Guri said ultrasonic malware does not appear to be very common. "A few years ago, a security researcher claimed that he found ultrasonic malware in the wild. It was dubbed BadBios. But in any case, it was claimed to be able to communicate between two laptops with both speakers and microphones." Inaudible audio is more likely to be used for marketing, and has prompted the development of defensive code called Silverdog. It's an ultrasonic firewall in the Google Chrome browser that's designed to block ultrasonic beacons (uBeacons), employed for cross-device tracking." Air gapping PCs won't stop data sharing thanks to sneaky speakers The Register, 12 March 2018
"A security researcher has ported three leaked NSA exploits to work on
all Windows versions released in the past 18 years, starting with
Windows 2000. The three exploits are EternalChampion, EternalRomance, and
EternalSynergy; all three leaked last April by a hacking group known as
The Shadow Brokers who claimed to have stolen the code from the NSA. Now, RiskSense security researcher Sean Dillon (@zerosum0x0)
has modified the source code for some of these lesser-known exploits so
they would be able to work and run SYSTEM-level code on a wide variety
of Windows OS versions." "Secure end-to-end encrypted comms is a desirable technology
that
governments should stop trying to break, especially as there's other
information to slurp up on crims, UK politicians were told this week.
Blighty's former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David
Anderson, told the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee
on Tuesday that there are plenty of sources of intelligence for law
enforcement to get their hands on, rather than banging the drum for
backdoors in communications. In what has now become a frustratingly standard question
from politicians about tech companies' role in the war on terror,
Anderson was asked if he thought the state would ever get access to
encrypted messages for security purposes. "No," he replied. "Because end-to-end encryption is
not only a fact of life, it is, on balance, a desirable fact of life.
Any of us who do our banking online, for example, are very grateful for
end-to-end encryption." The debate, Anderson continued, was sometimes wrongly
"portrayed in very black and white terms, as if the world is going dark
and because of end-to-end encryption we're all doomed". He argued that although the loss of information the
state can gather from the content of someone's communications is "very
significant", it is tempered by the mass of other data it can slurp from
elsewhere. "I mean who would have thought 30 years ago you could
track somebody's movements all around London by Oyster card? And you
don't even need the Oyster anymore, because you can get the location
data from the phone company. It's almost as good as having someone on
their tail the whole time." "He said that the most striking of these measures are those contained in the controversial Investigatory Powers Act,
which allow public authorities to gain access to 12 months' worth of a
person's internet connection records from their provider. "The more
people spend their lives online, the more revealing that behaviour
becomes," Anderson said." * Location-based sound recording through the microphone of an infected device – recording starts when the device enters a specified location * Abuse of Accessibility Services to steal WhatsApp messages * Ability to connect an infected device to Wi-Fi networks controlled by the attackers *...Skygofree is a strain of multi-stage spyware that gives attackers full remote control of an infected device..... "The implant carries multiple exploits for root access and is also capable of taking pictures and videos, seizing call records, SMS, geolocation, calendar events and business-related information stored in the device's memory," the firm added. The malware is even programmed to add itself to the list of "protected apps" so that it is not switched off automatically when the screen is off, circumventing a battery-saving feature that might otherwise limit its effectiveness. The attackers also appear to have an interest in Windows users. Researchers found a number of recently developed modules targeting Microsoft's OS." Android snoopwar Skygofree can pilfer WhatsApp messages The Register, 16 January 2018 "Daniel
Dunn was about to sign a lease for a Honda Fit last year when a detail
buried in the lengthy agreement caught his eye. Honda
wanted to track the location of his vehicle, the contract stated,
according to Dunn — a stipulation that struck the 69-year-old Temecula,
Calif., retiree as a bit odd. But Dunn was eager to drive away in his
new car and, despite initial hesitation, he signed the document, a
decision with which he has since made peace. “I don’t care if
they know where I go,” said Dunn, who makes regular trips to the grocery
store and a local yoga studio in his vehicle. “They’re probably
thinking, ‘What a boring life this guy’s got.’ Dunn may
consider his everyday driving habits mundane, but auto and privacy
experts suspect that big automakers like Honda see them as anything but.
By monitoring his everyday movements, an automaker can vacuum up a
massive amount of personal information about someone like Dunn,
everything from how fast he drives and how hard he brakes to how much
fuel his car uses and the entertainment he prefers. The company can
determine where he shops, the weather on his street, how often he wears
his seat belt, what he was doing moments before a wreck — even where he
likes to eat and how much he weighs.Though drivers may not
realize it, tens of millions of American cars are being monitored like
Dunn’s, experts say, and the number increases with nearly every new
vehicle that is leased or sold. The result is that carmakers have
turned on a powerful spigot of precious personal data, often without
owners’ knowledge, transforming the automobile from a machine that helps
us travel to a sophisticated computer on wheels that offers even more
access to our personal habits and behaviors than smartphones do."
"The
House of Representatives voted on Thursday to extend the National
Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program for six years with
minimal changes, rejecting a push by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to
impose significant privacy limits when it sweeps up Americans’ emails
and other personal communications. The
vote, 256 to 164, centered on an expiring law that permits the
government, without a warrant, to collect communications from United
States companies like Google and AT&T of foreigners abroad — even
when those targets are talking to Americans. Congress had enacted the
law in 2008 to legalize a form of a once-secret warrantless surveillance
program created after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001." |
".... if you look around and see what the world
is now facing I don't think in the last two or three hundred years we've faced such
a concatenation of problems all at the same time..... if we are to solve the issues
that are ahead of us, we are going to need to think
in completely different ways. " "Individual peace is the unit of world
peace. By offering Consciousness-Based
Education to the coming generation, we can promote a strong foundation for a
healthy, harmonious, and peaceful world.... Consciousness-Based education is not a luxury.
For our children who are growing up in a stressful, often frightening, crisis-ridden
world, it is a necessity." |
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NLPWESSEX,
natural law publishing |
