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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 2018
"Microsoft's president Brad Smith said facial recognition technology needs to be regulated so the world doesn't turn into a Nineteen Eighty-Four
scenario with everyone's actions tracked and scrutinised. He told
attendees at WebSummit in Lisbon, Portugal that the way in
which facial recognition technology is developing and being used by more
businesses could be detrimental to the average person's privacy.. "For
the first time, the world is on the threshold of technology that
would give a government the ability to follow anyone anywhere, and
everyone everywhere. It could know exactly where you are going, where
you have been and where you were yesterday as well," Smith said. "And
this has profound potential ramifications for even just the
fundamental civil liberties on which democratic societies rely. Before
we wake up and find that the year 2024 looks like the book '1984',
let’s figure out what kind of world we want to create, and what are the
safeguards and what are the limitations of both companies and
governments for the use of this technology." 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 - 2018 - 2017 - 2016 - 2015 - 2014 - 2013 - 2012 - 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - 2008 & Earlier |
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"The US immigration system was
designed to track who comes into the country, not who leaves. For more
than two decades, authorities have been trying to find an effective way
to keep tabs on departing foreigners—and those who overstay their visas.
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now says it’s found a solution:
facial recognition. It expects to be able to scan 97% of commercial
passengers within the next four years, according to a report released by
the Department of Homeland Security today.... Critics say this CBP use
of artificial intelligence is an invasion to privacy. They worry about
how the information could be used. CBP says the images are encrypted and
that it only keeps them for a brief period of time." "If you're one of the millions
of people with a Google account, you have a Google Maps Timeline. It
might be blank — it's tied to the Location History setting that caused
more confusion than needed because of its name, and it checks in
periodically on every mobile device tied to your account once you've
agreed and opted in. For some people, this is helpful for things like
calculating mileage, for others, it may be a cool thing to see where
you've been. For law enforcement, though, it's become a way to cast a
very wide net when looking to see just who might have been around during
a crime according to an eye-opening piece by the New York Times.
It's not a foolproof way to catch the bad guys and a lot of the
details about how officials can use the information is a bit cryptic.
But a recent case in Phoenix sheds a little light on how the service is
being used, or abused, depending on your point of view. Google, like
every company in the U.S., has to provide any information that is
accompanied by a lawful subpoena. The company has a fairly good history
of fighting these subpoenas, but in the end, a lot of data gets handed
over when requested. Google's database of where you've been, internally
known as Sensorvault, helps the company show you location based
interests and ads. A new breed of warrant, which the NYT aptly calls
geofence warrants, taps into the Sensovault database in a way that would
make the framers of the fourth amendment shiver. Law enforcement can
take the location and time of a crime and have Google tell them who was
in the area. Google has a novel way to attempt to anonymize the data —
the company provides a set of tokens that portray an account that police
can track and then ask for more precise and identifying data for the
ones that fit the scope of an investigation based on other evidence,
such as video or eye-witnesses. The case profiled by the Times shows how
this can backfire — a man who lent his car to a person who committed a
crime and was unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when it was committed
was arrested and spent a week in jail as a suspect in a murder case." "Sneezes and homophones – words that sound like other words – are
tripping smart speakers into allowing strangers to hear recordings of
your private conversations. These strangers live an eerie existence, a little like the Stasi agent in the movie The Lives of Others.
They're contracted to work for the device manufacturer – machine
learning data analysts – and the snippets they hear were never intended
for third-party consumption. Bloomberg has unearthed
the secrets of Amazon's analysts in Romania, reporting on their work
for the first time. "A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to
help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands," the newswire
wrote. Amazon has not previously acknowledged the existence of this
process, or the level of human intervention. The Register asked Apple, Microsoft and
Google, which all have smart search assistants, for a statement on the
extent of human involvement in reviewing these recordings – and their
retention policies. None would disclose the information by the time of publication." "Security researchers have discovered a powerful surveillance app first designed for Android devices can now target victims with iPhones. The spy app, found by researchers at mobile security firm Lookout,
said its developer abused their Apple-issued enterprise certificates to
bypass the tech giant’s app store to infect unsuspecting victims. The
disguised carrier assistance app once installed can silently grab
a victim’s contacts, audio recordings, photos, videos and other device
information — including their real-time location data. It can be
remotely triggered to listen in on people’s conversations, the
researchers found. Although there was no
data to show who might have been targeted, the researchers noted that
the malicious app was served from fake sites purporting to be cell
carriers in Italy and Turkmenistan. Researchers linked the app to the makers of a previously discovered Android app, developed by the same Italian surveillance app maker Connexxa, known to be in use by the Italian authorities. The Android app, dubbed Exodus, ensnared hundreds of victims — either
by installing it or having it installed. Exodus had a larger feature
set and expanded spying capabilities by downloading an additional
exploit designed to gain root access to the device, giving the app near
complete access to a device’s data, including emails, cellular data,
Wi-Fi passwords and more, according to Security Without Borders."
A powerful spyware app now targets iPhone owners TechCrunch, 8 April 2019
"China has quite the reputation for
monitoring its citizens, and it feels like various parts of the country
are constantly figuring out new ways to use gadgets to that end — RFID
chips in cars, facial recognition sunglasses, and location-tracking
uniforms for students each made headlines in the past year. Now, you can
add sanitation workers with GPS-equipped tracking bracelets to the
list. On April 3rd, news broke that sanitation workers in Nanjing,
China’s Hexi district were being required to wear GPS-tracking smart
bracelets to not only monitor their location at all times, but audibly
prod them if they stopped moving for more than 20 minutes. Just one day
later, the South China Morning Post reports, public pressure had mounted
to the point that the local sanitation company decided to walk things
back a bit — but only by removing the most obnoxious part of the system.
Now, the bracelets will no longer say “please continue working” if a
worker decides to stay in one place, but they’ll reportedly still track
workers just the same." "The European Commission is onboard with new road-safety
regulations that
will mandate that vehicles are equipped with life-saving tech, which it
says could have as much impact as laws forcing car makers to install
seat belts. The new laws would require auto-makers to equip new vehicles
with cameras and sensors to control speed, assist drivers with lane
keeping and reversing, and monitor drowsiness and distractions from
smartphones. The laws would also mandate that cars, vans, trucks
and buses are equipped with an aircraft-like 'blackbox' to retain data
about accidents after they occur. Safety features covered under
the proposal are already available in many luxury models from the likes
of Tesla and BMW, but the rules would force manufacturers to include
them in cheaper vehicles, too.... As per The Guardian,
despite Brexit, the UK intends to adopt the EU regulations if they're
approved, which is likely to happen at the European Parliament in
September. The speed limiter, known as intelligent speed adaption
(ISA), relies on GPS and online maps to restrict the speed of a vehicle
to the road speed limit.... The cameras would also detect if a driver is distracted, monitoring for
example whether they're looking at a smartphone rather than keeping
their eyes on the road."
"Speed limiting technology looks set
to become mandatory for all vehicles sold in Europe from 2022, after new
rules were provisionally agreed by the EU. The Department for Transport
said the system would also apply in the UK, despite Brexit. The idea
that cars will be fitted with speed limiters - or to put it
more accurately, "intelligent speed assistance" - is likely to upset a
lot of drivers. Many of us are happy to break limits when it suits us
and don't like the idea of Big Brother stepping in... Under the ISA
system, cars receive information via GPS and a digital map, telling the
vehicle what the speed limit is. This can be combined with a video
camera capable of recognising road signs.....Safety measures approved by
the European Commission included intelligent
speed assistance (ISA), advanced emergency braking and lane-keeping
technology.... Under the ISA system, cars receive information via GPS
and a digital map, telling the vehicle what the speed limit is. This can
be combined with a video camera capable of recognising road signs. It's
already coming into use. Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot-Citroen,
Renault and Volvo already have models available with some of the ISA
technology fitted."
"About 1,600 people have been
secretly filmed in motel rooms in South Korea, with the footage
live-streamed online for paying customers to watch, police said
Wednesday. Two men have been arrested and another pair investigated in
connection with the scandal, which involved 42 rooms in 30
accommodations in 10 cities around the country. Police said there was no
indication the businesses were complicit in the scheme. In South Korea,
small hotels of the type involved in this case are generally referred
to as motels or inns. Cameras were hidden inside digital TV boxes, wall
sockets and hairdryer holders and the footage was streamed online, the
Cyber Investigation Department at the National Police Agency said in a
statement. The site had more than 4,000 members, 97 of whom paid a
$44.95 monthly fee to access extra features, such as the ability to
replay certain live streams. Between November 2018 and this month,
police said, the service brought in upward of $6,000. "There was a
similar case in the past where illegal cameras were (secretly installed)
and were consistently and secretly watched, but this is the first time
the police caught where videos were broadcast live on the internet,"
police said. South Korea has a serious problem with spy cameras and illicit filming.
In 2017, more than 6,400 cases of illegal filming were reported to
police, compared to around 2,400 in 2012. Last year, tens of thousands
of women took to the streets of Seoul and other cities to protest
against the practice and demand action, under the slogan "My Life is Not
Your Porn." In response, Seoul launched a special squad of women
inspectors who have been conducting regular inspections of the city's
20,000 or so public toilets to search for spy cameras, though some
critics have denounced the move as a superficial response to a societal
issue."
"Tim Berners-Lee is credited with creating the World Wide Web March
12, 1989, which means this week it hits its 30th birthday. Monday, the
eve of the anniversary, Berners-Lee spoke to a group of reporters,
according to AFP, discussing
the flaws surrounding his invention, such as misinformation, scams and
cybercrime, and the struggle for control over personal data. "You should
have complete control of your data. It's not oil. It's
not a commodity," Berners-Lee told reporters at CERN, according to AFP.
Berners-Lee predicted a grim reality if the public becomes disengaged in
the battle for privacy protection. "There is a possible future you can
imagine (in which) your browser
keeps track of everything that you buy," Berners-Lee warns. He continues
by saying in this situation, browsers will hold more information than
Amazon. In response to the growing personal data concern, where
information
could be bought or sold without consent from the owner, Berners-Lee
spearheaded the Solid project. “Solid empowers users and organizations
to separate their data from
the applications that use it. It allows people to look at the same
data
with different apps at the same time. It opens brand new avenues for
creativity, problem-solving, and commerce,” according to project’s website.
Users will be able to decide, according to AFP, key factors like where
and how they would share their own data. However, during Berners-Lee’s
Monday talk with reporters, he
expressed the most sensitive of data, like genetic information, would
need help from legislation for robust protection. "Sometimes it has to
be legislation which says personal data, you know, genetic data,
should never be used," Berners-Lee says."
"As the algorithms get more advanced — meaning they are better able to
identify women and people of color, a task they have historically
struggled with — legal experts and civil rights advocates are sounding
the alarm on researchers’ use of photos of ordinary people. These
people’s faces are being used without their consent, in order to power
technology that could eventually be used to surveil them....The latest
company to enter this territory was IBM, which in January released a
collection of nearly a million photos that were taken from the photo hosting site Flickr
and coded to describe the subjects’ appearance..... But some of the
photographers whose images were included in IBM’s
dataset were surprised and disconcerted when NBC News told them that
their photographs had been annotated with details including facial
geometry and skin tone and may be used to develop facial recognition
algorithms.....“None of the people I photographed had any idea their
images were being
used in this way,” said Greg Peverill-Conti, a Boston-based public
relations executive who has more than 700 photos in IBM’s collection,
known as a “training dataset.” ... Despite IBM’s assurances that Flickr
users can opt out of the database,
NBC News discovered that it’s almost impossible to get photos removed...
The company is not alone in using publicly available photos on the
internet in this way. Dozens of other research organizations
have collected photos for training facial recognition systems, and many
of the larger, more recent collections have been scraped from the web. Some
experts and activists argue that this is not just an infringement on
the privacy of the millions of people whose images have been swept up —
it also raises broader concerns about the improvement of facial
recognition technology, and the fear that it will be used by law
enforcement agencies to disproportionately target minorities. “People gave their consent to sharing their photos in a different
internet ecosystem,” said Meredith Whittaker, co-director of the AI Now
Institute, which studies the social implications of artificial
intelligence. “Now they are being unwillingly or unknowingly cast in the
training of systems that could potentially be used in oppressive ways
against their communities.”... In the early days of building facial recognition tools, researchers paid
people to come to their labs, sign consent forms and have their photo
taken in different poses and lighting conditions. Because this was
expensive and time consuming, early datasets were limited to a few
hundred subjects....As social media and user-generated content took over, photos of regular
people were increasingly available. Researchers treated this as a
free-for-all, scraping faces from YouTube videos, Facebook, Google
Images, Wikipedia and mugshot databases.... To build its Diversity in Faces dataset, IBM says it drew upon a collection of 100
million images published with Creative Commons licenses that Flickr’s
owner, Yahoo, released as a batch for researchers to download in 2014.
IBM narrowed that dataset down to about 1 million photos of faces that
have each been annotated, using automated coding and human estimates,
with almost 200 values for details such as measurements of facial
features, pose, skin tone and estimated age and gender, according to the
dataset obtained by NBC News.... It was difficult to find academics who would speak on the record about
the origins of their training datasets; many have advanced their
research using collections of images scraped from the web without
explicit licensing or informed consent....The dataset does not link the photos of people’s faces to their names,
which means any system trained to use the photos would not be able to
identify named individuals. But civil liberty advocates and tech ethics
researchers have still questioned the motives of IBM, which has a
history of selling surveillance tools that have been criticized for
infringing on civil liberties.... the company sells a system called IBM Watson Visual Recognition, which
IBM says can estimate the age and gender of people depicted in images
and, with the right training data, can be used by clients to identify specific people from photos or videos.... An Austrian photographer and entrepreneur, Georg Holzer,
uploaded his photos to Flickr to remember great moments with his family
and friends, and he used Creative Commons licenses to allow nonprofits
and artists to use his photos for free. He did not expect more than 700
of his images to be swept up to study facial recognition technology. “I
know about the harm such a technology can cause,” he said over Skype,
after NBC News told him his photos were in IBM’s dataset. “Of course,
you can never forget about the good uses of image recognition such as
finding family pictures faster, but it can also be used to restrict
fundamental rights and privacy. I can never approve or accept the
widespread use of such a technology.”... In the U.S., some states have laws that could be relevant.
Under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, for example, it
can be a violation to capture, store and share biometric information
without a person’s written consent. According to the act, biometric
information includes fingerprints, iris scans and face geometry. "This
is the type of mass collection and use of biometric data that can be
easily abused, and appears to be taking place without the knowledge of
those in the photos,” said Jay Edelson, a Chicago-based class-action
lawyer currently suing Facebook for its use of facial recognition tools.
So far neither of these laws has been rigorously tested. IBM declined
to comment on the laws....“You’ve really got a rock-and-a-hard-place
situation happening here,” said Woody Hartzog,
a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.
“Facial recognition can be incredibly harmful when it’s inaccurate and
incredibly oppressive the more accurate it gets.”.... The use of facial
recognition surveillance systems by law enforcement is so controversial
that a coalition of more than 85 racial justice and civil rights groups have called for tech companies to refuse to sell the technology to governments... “These systems are being
deployed in oppressive contexts, often by law enforcement,” said
Whittaker, of the AI Now Institute, “and the goal of making them better
able to surveil anyone is one we should look at very skeptically.”"
Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Millions of online photos scraped without consent NBC News, 12 March 2019 "Two popular smart alarm systems for cars had major security
flaws that allowed potential hackers to track the vehicles, unlock
their doors and, in some cases, cut off the engine. The vulnerabilities
could be exploited with two simple steps, security researchers from Pen Test Partners, who discovered the flaw, said Friday.... Like smart locks, TVs and cameras,
smart car alarms are susceptible to cyberattacks and security flaws.
The growth of smart devices, which integrate connected technology into
everyday devices, has made the internet of things an easy target and created a new type of security threat. On
Pandora's website, the company boasts it "uses a dialog code it is
impossible to hack it -- nobody did it yet and for sure nobody will."
But
Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, figured out that his team
didn't need to hack the smart alarm itself because the Pandora app left a
large opening. The researcher found a similar problem with Viper's app.
Both apps' API didn't properly authenticate for update requests,
including requests to change the password or email address. Munro
said that all his team needed to do was send the request to a specific
host URL and they were able to change an account's password and email
address without notifying the victim that anything happened. Once
they had access to the account, the researchers had full control of the
smart car alarm. This allowed them to learn where a car was and unlock
it. You don't have to be near the car to do this, and the accounts can
be taken over remotely, Munro said." "Philadelphia is the first major U.S. city to ban cashless stores,
placing it at the forefront of a debate that pits retail innovation
against lawmakers trying to protect all citizens’ access to the
marketplace. Starting in July, Philadelphia’s new law will
require most retail stores to accept cash. A New York City councilman is
pushing similar legislation there, and New Jersey’s legislature
recently passed a bill banning cashless stores statewide. A spokesman
for New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, declined to comment..."
"The National Security Agency is
preparing to potentially abandon a controversial surveillance program
exposed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the agency’s
director indicated. Paul Nakasone, head of both the NSA and U.S. Cyber
Command, vaguely discussed the future of the government’s once-secretive
system for obtaining and analyzing domestic telephone records, or
metadata, in light of a senior congressional aide recently claiming that
it was quietly suspended. “We are in a deliberative process right now,”
Mr. Nakasone said Wednesday at the RSA security conference in San
Francisco, attendees reported. “We’ll work very, very closely with the
administration and Congress to make recommendations on what authority
should be reauthorized.” Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, the NSA began secretly ordering U.S. telecommunication companies
to give the government copies of metadata detailing effectively every
call and text placed over domestic networks. The efforts were made
public through documents leaked to the media by Mr. Snowden in 2013
prior to being significantly reformed through legislation passed by
Congress in 2015, the USA Freedom Act, slated to sunset at the end of
the year. Luke Murry, a national security adviser to House Minority
Leader Kevin McCarthy, California Republican, said during an interview
last week that the NSA stopped using the system six months earlier and
that it is not guaranteed to be reauthorized by Congress before
expiring. NSA representatives previously declined to comment on Mr.
Murry’s remarks. Mr. Nakasone said he was “aware” of related reporting
on Wednesday but neither confirmed nor denied whether the surveillance
program is currently operational, The Daily Beast reported. The Justice
Department brought criminal charges against Mr. Snowden, 35, shortly
after he identified himself as the source of leaked NSA documents
published by news outlets in 2013. He was charged while traveling
abroad, granted political asylum by Russia and has not returned." "Is technological progress bad for human autonomy? That’s the question posed by Shoshana Zuboff in “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,”
a book that recounts the ways in which corporations and governments are
using technology to influence our behavior. Zuboff is just the latest
to chime in on “totalitarian technology” (or “total tech”), a term that
describes devices and algorithms by which individuals forfeit their
privacy and autonomy for the benefit of either themselves or some third
party. In the United States, total tech can be sorted into three different
categories, or “spheres” of life: consumer services, the workplace, and
government and politics. Total tech is pervasive in the increasingly data-driven world of retail. Many shopping apps tap into your phone’s GPS to access your location,
allowing retailers to send you advertisements the moment you’re walking
past their storefront. Personalized pricing enables retailers to charge
you the exact maximum that you would be willing to pay for a given
product. Your personal data isn’t safe at home, either: Digital
assistants like Amazon Alexa store your query history,
meaning they know everything from your unique shopping history to your
travel patterns to your music preferences. Employers are also using
total tech to track and monitor their workers. A growing number of
companies use biometric time cards that scan an employee’s fingerprint, hand shape, retina, or iris. UPS outfits its trucks with sensors that track the opening and closing of doors, the engine of the vehicle, and the clicking of seat belts. Amazon is patenting
an electronic wristband that would be used to track hand
movements—making sure, for instance, that a warehouse worker stays busy
moving boxes. Global freelancing platform Upwork runs a digital “Work Diary” program that
counts keystrokes and takes screenshots of workers’ monitors. Uptake of
total tech has been particularly striking in government and politics.
The New Orleans Police Department runs a “predictive policing” program that
uses Big Data to compile a heat list of potential criminal offenders.
The TSA operates its own total tech program, called Quiet Skies, which monitors and flags travelers based on “suspicious” behavior patterns.
Travelers can land themselves on the Quiet Skies list by changing their
clothes in the restroom, being the last person to board their flight,
or even inspecting their reflection in a terminal window. More
nefariously, software developed at Stanford University enables anyone to manipulate video footage in real time.
Now, anyone with a grudge could alter the facial expressions of a
prominent politician making a speech, and then dub in new audio that
completely changes the speech’s contents. Abroad, China is the poster child for extreme total tech programs. By 2020, China’s “social credit system”
will monitor the behavior of each and every citizen, keeping tabs on
everything from speeding tickets to social media posts critical of the
state. Everyone will then be assigned their own unique “sincerity
score”; a high score will be a requirement for
anyone hoping to get the best housing, install the fastest Internet
speeds, put their kids into the most prestigious schools, and land the
most lucrative jobs." "The Mail Cover Program allows
postal employees to photograph and send to federal law enforcement
organizations (FBI, DHS, Secret Service, etc.) the front and back of
every piece of mail the Post Office processes. It also retains the
information digitally and provides it to any government agency that
wants it—without a warrant. In 2015, the USPS Inspector General issued a
report saying that, “Agencies must demonstrate a reasonable basis for
requesting mail covers, send hard copies of request forms to the
Criminal Investigative Service Center for processing, and treat mail
covers as restricted and confidential…A mail cover should not be used as
a routine investigative tool. Insufficient controls over the mail cover
program could hinder the Postal Inspection Service’s ability to conduct
effective investigations, lead to public concerns over privacy of mail,
and harm the Postal Service’s brand.” Not only were the admonitions
ignored, the mail cover program actually expanded after the report’s
release. Indeed, in the months after that report was issued, there were
6,000 requests for mail cover collection. Only 10 were rejected,
according to the Feb. 2019 edition of Prison Legal News (P.34-35) . I
have some personal experience with
the Mail Cover Program. I served 23 months in prison for blowing the
whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program. After having been locked
up for two months, I decided to commission a card from a very
artistically-inclined prisoner for my wife’s 40th birthday. I sent it
about two weeks early, but she never received it. Finally, about four
months later, the card was delivered back to me with a yellow “Return to
Sender – Address Not Known” sticker on it. But underneath that sticker
was a second yellow sticker. That one read, “Do Not Deliver. Hold For
Supervisor. Cover Program.” Why
was I under Postal Service Surveillance? I have no idea. I had had my
day in court. The case was over. But remember, the Postal Service
doesn’t have to answer to anybody – my attorneys, my judge, even its own
Inspector General. It doesn’t need a warrant to spy on me (or my
family) and it doesn’t have to answer even to a member of Congress who
might inquire as to why the spying was happening in the first place. The
problem is not just the sinister nature of a government agency (or
quasi-government agency) spying on individuals with no probable cause or
due process, although those are serious problems. It’s that the program
is handled so poorly and so haphazardly that in some cases surveillance
was initiated against individuals for no apparent law enforcement
reason and that surveillance was initiated by Postal Service employees
not even authorized to do so. Again, there is no recourse because the
people under surveillance don’t even know that any of this is happening. Perhaps
an even more disturbing aspect of the program is the fact that between
2000 and 2012, the Postal Service initiated an average of 8,000 mail
cover requests per year. But in 2013, that number jumped to 49,000. Why? Nobody knows and the Postal Service doesn’t have to say. The
question, though, is not how many cases are opened under the Mail Cover
Program or even how many requests there are for the information. The
real question is, “How is this constitutional?” Perhaps a secondary
question is, “Why hasn’t anybody challenged the program in the courts?”
In general, Americans don’t–or at least haven’t–objected to a gradual
loss of civil liberties and constitutional rights. That has to stop.
When even the Post Office is spying on you, you know the republic is in
trouble." "A U.N. human rights expert has published a
draft list of questions to
measure countries’ privacy safeguards, a first step toward ranking the
governments that are potentially doing the most snooping on their own
citizens. Cannataci’s role investigating digital privacy was created by
the
council in 2015 after Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S.
surveillance, and he has strongly criticized surveillance activities by
the United States and other countries. As
the first person in the job, Cannataci set out an action plan for
tackling the task and said he planned to take a methodical approach to
monitoring surveillance and privacy laws to help him to decide which
countries to investigate..... The last question asks: “Does your country
have a police and/or
intelligence service which systematically profiles and maintains
surveillance on large segments of the population in a manner comparable
to that of the STASI in the 1955-1990 GDR (East Germany)?” Any country
answering “yes” to that would forfeit 1,000 points and should abolish
its system and start again, he wrote." "If you shop at Westfield, you’ve probably been scanned and recorded by
dozens of hidden cameras built into the centres’ digital advertising
billboards. The semi-camouflaged cameras can determine not only your age and gender
but your mood, cueing up tailored advertisements within seconds, thanks
to facial detection technology. Westfield’s Smartscreen network was developed by the French software
firm Quividi back in 2015. Their discreet cameras capture blurry images
of shoppers and apply statistical analysis to identify audience
demographics. And once the billboards have your attention they hit
record, sharing your reaction with advertisers. Quividi says their
billboards can distinguish shoppers’ gender with 90% precision, five
categories of mood from “very happy to very unhappy” and customers’ age
within a five-year bracket. Surveillance fears grow after Taylor Swift uses face recognition tech on fans. Mood is a particularly valuable insight for advertisers, revealing
shoppers’ general sentiment towards a brand and how they feel in
particular stores at certain times of the day. Unlike gender and age,
mood is harder to determine, sitting at around 80% accuracy. There are now more than 1,600 billboards installed into 41 Westfield
centres across Australia and New Zealand. Scentre Group, Westfield
Australia’s parent company, emphasises that all data collected is
anonymous and that they are using facial detection, not facial
recognition technology (FRT). This means generic information such as a shopper’s age and gender is
collected rather than the technology using photo-matching databases to
identify who customers are. A spokesperson would not confirm whether or
not Westfield would consider using FRT in the future. Retail companies are increasingly turning to facial detection and facial
recognition software to attract and engage a distracted audience.
Quividi’s host of international clients include Telstra, 7-Eleven,
Coca-Cola, oOH Media and HSBC bank. Terry Hartmann, vice president of Cognitec Asia Pacific, the company
that develops “market-leading face recognition technologies for
customers and government agencies around the world”, says using facial
detection commercially is no different to Facebook’s manipulation of
users’ online search history for targeted advertising. “You’re
not identifying who that person is, you’re just identifying the
characteristics of that person. That’s no different to Facebook popping
up ads you might be interested in and social media picking up people
based on their clicking habits or the shopping that they’ve done.” While
facial detection could be considered relatively benign, it is a step
closer to the more problematic FRT. Dr Dong Xu is the chair in computer
engineering at the University of
Sydney. He says that under optimum lighting and using high-quality photo
data bases, FRT is more accurate than humans at identifying faces and
can now recognise an individual from millions of photographs." "Now there is one more place where cameras could start
watching you — from 30,000 feet. Newer seat-back entertainment systems
on some airplanes operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and
Singapore Airlines have cameras, and it’s likely they are also on planes
used by other carriers. American, United and Singapore all said Friday
that they have never activated the cameras and have no plans to use
them. However, companies that make the entertainment systems are
installing cameras to offer future options such as seat-to-seat video
conferencing, according to an American Airlines spokesman. A passenger
on a Singapore flight posted a photo of the seat-back display last week,
and the tweet was shared several hundred times and drew media notice.
Buzzfeed first reported that the cameras are also on some American
planes. A United spokeswoman repeatedly told a reporter Friday that none
of its entertainment systems had cameras before apologizing and saying
that some did. Delta did not respond to repeated questions about some of
its entertainment systems, which appear to be identical to those on
American and United. The airlines stressed that they didn’t add the
cameras — manufacturers embedded them in the entertainment systems.
American’s systems are made by Panasonic, while Singapore uses Panasonic
and Thales, according to airline representatives. Neither Panasonic nor
Thales responded immediately for comment." "The Chinese government blocked
17.5 million would-be plane passengers from buying tickets last year as
a punishment for offences including the failure to pay fines, it
emerged. Some 5.5 million people were also barred from travelling by train
under a controversial “social credit” system which the ruling Communist
Party claims will improve public behaviour. The penalties are part of efforts by president Xi Jinping‘s
government to use data-processing and other technology to tighten
control on society. Human rights activists warn the system is too rigid
and may lead
to people being unfairly blacklisted without their knowledge, while US
vice-president Mike Pence last year denounced it as “an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life”."
"It
was a crowded primary field and Tony Evers, running for governor, was
eager to win the support of officials gathered at a Wisconsin state
Democratic party meeting, so the candidate did all the usual things: he
read the room, he shook hands, he networked. Then he put an electronic
fence around everyone there. The
digital fence enabled Evers’ team to push ads onto the iPhones and
Androids of all those attending the meeting. Not only that, but because
the technology pulled the unique identification numbers off the phones, a
data broker could use the digital signatures to follow the devices
home. Once there, the campaign could use so-called cross-device tracking
technology to find associated laptops, desktops and other devices to
push even more ads. Welcome
to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in
which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a
coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to
monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information
and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with
messages. “We
can put a pin on a building, and if you are in that building, we are
going to get you,” said Democratic strategist Dane Strother, who advised
Evers. And they can get you even if you aren’t in the building anymore,
but were simply there at some point in the last six months. Campaigns
don’t match the names of voters with the personal information they
scoop up — although that could be possible in many cases. Instead, they
use the information to micro-target ads to appear on phones and other
devices based on individual profiles that show where a voter goes,
whether a gun range, a Whole Foods or a town hall debate over Medicare.
The
spots would show up in all the digital places a person normally sees
ads — whether on Facebook or an internet browser such as Chrome. As
a result, if you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just
fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements
are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll
of campaigns. The information gathering can quickly invade even the
most private of moments. Antiabortion groups, for example, used the
technology to track women who entered waiting rooms of abortion clinics
in more than a half dozen cities. RealOptions, a California-based
network of so-called pregnancy crisis centers, along with a partner
organization, had hired a firm to track cell phones in and around clinic
lobbies and push ads touting alternatives to abortion. Even after the
women left the clinics, the ads continued for a month. That effort ended
in 2017 under pressure from Massachusetts authorities, who warned it
violated the state’s consumer protection laws. But such crackdowns are
rare. Data brokers and their political clients operate in an environment
in which technology moves much faster than Congress or state
legislatures, which are under pressure from Silicon Valley not to
strengthen privacy laws. The RealOptions case turned out to be a
harbinger for a new generation of political campaigning built around
tracking and monitoring even the most private moments of people’s lives.
“It is Orwellian,” said Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer, whose
office last month filed a lawsuit against the makers of the Weather
Channel app, alleging that the app surreptitiously monitors where users
live, work and visit 24-hours a day and sells the information to data
brokers. The apps on iPhones and Androids are the most prolific spies of
user whereabouts and whatabouts. But they aren’t the only ones. Take
televisions. In the 2016 election, campaigns began targeting
satellite-television ads to particular households. That technology was
credited with helping Sen. Bernie Sanders target voters to eke out a
surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in Michigan’s presidential
primary. Now, a person’s television may be telling candidates a lot more
than many people would care to share. Some newer smart-television
systems, including units made by Vizio, can monitor everything a person
watches and send the information to data brokers. Campaigns can buy that
information and use it to beam ads that either complement a narrative
broadcast by such networks as FOX News or MSNBC — or counter-program
against it. Or a campaign might look for frequent watchers of a
particular program — bass fishing championships, perhaps, or maybe “The
Bachelor.” Campaigns have long targeted viewers of particular programs
as likely to support their positions and have bought ads to air during
those shows. Now, however, knowing that a person watches a specific
program, a campaign can beam ads to the person’s television that would
show up the next time the device is turned on, even if the viewer was
watching some other show. Feuer said he was surprised to learn from a
reporter that political consulting firms are an eager market for
tracking information. “It means suddenly a campaign knows whether you
are going to a doctor, an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where you
worship and who knows what else,” Feuer said. At a time foreign agents
are commandeering American campaign tools and using them to sow
confusion and distrust among voters, Feuer said, the shift toward more
tracking and monitoring is particularly concerning.... Just
as the antiabortion organizations did around clinics, political
campaigns large and small are building “geo-fences” around locations
from which they can fetch the unique identifying information of the
smartphones of nearly everyone who attended an event. “I
don’t think a lot of people are aware their location data is being sent
to whomever,” said Justin Croxton, a managing partner at Propellant
Media, an Atlanta-area digital firm that works with political campaigns.
“The
good news is a lot of those people can opt out,” Croxton said. Privacy
advocates, however, say opting out can be nearly impossible, as most
device users are not even aware of which apps and phone settings are
causing them to be surreptitiously monitored, much less in position to
understand the intricacies of disabling all the tracking technology. “It
is often embedded in apps you would not expect to be spying on you,”
said Sean O’Brien, a technology and privacy scholar at Yale Law School.
“There is a question of how much people know is being grabbed from an
ethical standpoint, even if from a legal standpoint you have technically
agreed to this without knowing it.” Once
a data broker has identifying information from one device in hand, they
can quickly capture information about other, associated devices, such
as routers, laptops and smart televisions. Data brokers collect so much
location information off phones that they can track a person’s
whereabouts months into the past.... The fences can also be used to
narrowly target messages into small geographic areas. “If
we are sending out a piece of fundraising mail, we will fence the homes
where it is being sent for an entire week before,” McShane said.
Alternatively, McShane said, his firm might use a fence to build an
“echo chamber” for an advocacy group lobbying politicians. Fences
can be built around the homes, workplaces, and hangouts of legislators
and their families, enabling a campaign to bombard their devices with a
message and leave the impression that a group’s campaign is much bigger
in scope than it actually is. There
is also now a tool to grab a phone’s ID number as its user approaches a
digital billboard, so that a custom-tailored message can be
transmitted. Which
political campaigns and other clients receive all that tracking
information can’t be traced. A group of computer scientists at UC
Berkeley monitoring tens of thousands of apps has tried. Serge
Egelman, research director of the Usable Security & Privacy Group
at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, said his team
can unearth which opaque data brokerages are amassing information, but
not which political campaigns or interest groups buy it from them.
“There
are a lot of industries buying this data for things that most people
are not expecting,” Egelman said. Some might be trying to get you to
purchase a Volvo, while others aim to manipulate your vote. But none
disclose what they know about you and how. “That is the fundamental
problem,” Egelman said. “People can’t find that out.”" "Google has acknowledged that it made an error in not disclosing that one of its home alarm products contained a microphone. Product specifications for the Nest Guard, available since 2017, had made no mention of the listening device. But earlier this month, the firm said a software update
would make Nest Guard voice-controlled. On Twitter, concerned Nest
owners were told the microphone "has not been used up to this point”.
Business Insider was first to report the development. The
Nest Guard is one component in the Nest Secure range of home security
products. The system includes various sensors that can be monitored
remotely by the user. Nest Guard is an all-in-one alarm, keypad,
and motion sensor but, despite being announced well over a year ago,
the word “microphone” was only added to the product’s specification this
month. The change coincided with the announcement that it was now compatible with Google Assistant." "A Chinese surveillance firm is tracking the movements of more than
2.5 million people in the far-western Xinjiang region, according to a
data leak flagged by a Dutch internet expert. An online database
containing names, ID card numbers, birth dates and location data was
left unprotected for months by Shenzhen-based facial-recognition
technology company SenseNets Technology Ltd, according to Victor Gevers,
co-founder of non-profit organization GDI.Foundation, who first noted
the vulnerability in a series of social media posts last week. Exposed
data also showed about 6.7 million location data points linked to the
people which were gathered within 24 hours, tagged with descriptions
such as “mosque”, “hotel,” “internet cafe” and other places where
surveillance cameras were likely to be found. “It was fully open and
anyone without authentication had full administrative rights. You could
go in the database and create, read, update and delete anything,” said
Gevers. China has faced an outcry from activists, scholars, foreign
governments and U.N. rights experts over what they call mass detentions
and strict surveillance of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority and other
Muslim groups who call Xinjiang home.(tinyurl.com/y9zzouss). According
to its website, SenseNets works with China’s police across several
cities. Its Shenzhen-listed parent company NetPosa Technologies Ltd has
offices in a majority of Chinese provinces and regions, including
Xinjiang." "Some apps may track your activity over time,
even when you tell them to forget the past. And there's nothing you can
do about it. Roughly 17,000 Android apps collect identifying information that creates a permanent record of the activity on your device, according to research from the International Computer Science Institute that was shared with CNET. The data collection appears to violate the search giant's policy on collecting data that can be used to target users for advertising in most cases, the researchers said. The
apps can track you by linking your Advertising ID -- a unique but
resettable number used to tailor advertising -- with other identifiers
on your phone that are difficult or impossible to change. Those IDs are
the device's unique signatures: the MAC address, IMEI and Android ID.
Less than a third of the apps that collect identifiers take only the
Advertising ID, as recommended by Google's best practices for developers. "Privacy
disappears" when apps collect those persistent identifiers, said Serge
Egelman, who led the research. He said his team, which reported the
findings to Google
in September, observed most of the apps sending identifying information
to advertising services, an apparent violation of Google's policies.
The company's policies allow developers to collect the identifiers but
forbid them from combining the Advertising ID with hardware IDs without
explicit consent of the user, or from using the identifiers that can't
be reset, to target ads. What's more, Google's best practices for
developers recommend collecting only the Advertising ID. The behavior
fits into the tech industry's long history of creating
privacy measures that websites and app developers quickly learn to
bypass. Adobe, for instance, was forced to address Flash cookies in 2011 after complaints that the snippets of software could survive in your web browser even after you cleared all your cookies. Similar complaints arose in 2014 over Verizon's and AT&T's use of so-called "supercookies," which tracked users across multiple devices and couldn't be cleared. In 2012, Microsoft accused Google of circumventing its P3P web privacy standard, which let users of the Internet Explorer browser set their preferences for cookies....Data collected by mobile apps has provoked even broader scrutiny because of the explosion of smartphones and tablets. In January, Facebook and Google were both found to have used a developer tool to circumvent Apple's privacy rules and build iOS apps that collect user information. Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal
in 2018 and other privacy controversies have sparked greater scrutiny
over how data is being collected and used.... Egelman's team, which previously found around 6,000 children's apps
improperly collecting data, said Thursday that big-name apps for adults
are sending permanent identifiers to advertising services. The apps
included included Angry Birds Classic, the popular smartphone game, as
well as Audiobooks by Audible and Flipboard. Clean Master, Battery
Doctor and Cheetah Keyboard, all utilities developed by Cheetah Mobile,
were also found to send permanent info to advertising networks. All
of these apps have been installed on at least 100 million devices.
Clean Master, a phone utility that includes antivirus and phone
optimization services, has been installed on 1 billion devices.... A
Cheetah Mobile spokesman said in an email that its apps send a
device's Android ID to a company that helps it track installations of
its products. The information isn't used for targeted ads, and the
company complies with all relevant Google policies and laws, the
spokesman said. He added that the version of Battery Doctor
tested by the researchers was out of date; Cheetah Mobile updated the
app in 2018 to no longer collect the IMEI....The data collection
identified by Egelman and his team is similar to an issue that got Uber in trouble with Apple in 2015. According to The New York Times, Apple CEO Tim Cook was furious to learn that Uber
was collecting iOS users' hardware identifiers against Apple's policies
and threatened to remove the Uber app from the App Store.... The researchers configured a version of Android that let them track which identifiers an app collected and then ran thousands of apps on the modified software. Egelman
said that changing your Advertising ID should serve the same function
as clearing out your web browsing data. When you clear cookies, websites
you visited in the past won't recognize you. That stops them from
building up data about you over time. But you can't reset other identifiers, like the MAC address and IMEI.
The MAC address is a unique identifier that your device broadcasts to
internet connections like Wi-Fi routers. The IMEI is an identifier for
your specific device. Both identifiers can sometimes be used to prevent
stolen phones from accessing a cellular network. The Android ID is
another identifier that's unique to each device. It can be reset, but
only if you run a factory reset of your device." "As Amazon.com Inc. and Google work to place their smart speakers at the
center of the internet-connected home, both technology giants are
expanding the amount of data they gather about customers who use their
voice software to control other gadgets. For several years, Amazon and
Google have collected data every time someone used a smart speaker to
turn on a light or lock a door. Now they’re asking smart-home gadget
makers such as Logitech and Hunter Fan Co. to send a continuous stream
of information. In other words, after you connect a light fixture to
Alexa, Amazon wants to know every time the light is turned on or off,
regardless of whether you asked Alexa to toggle the switch. Televisions
must report the channel they’re set to. Smart locks must keep the
company apprised whether or not the front door bolt is engaged. This
information may seem mundane compared with smartphone geolocation
software that follows you around or the trove of personal data Facebook
Inc. vacuums up based on your activity. But even gadgets as simple as
light bulbs could enable tech companies to fill in blanks about their
customers and use the data for marketing purposes. Having already
amassed a digital record of activity in public spaces, critics say, tech
companies are now bent on establishing a beachhead in the home. “You
can learn the behaviors of a household based on their patterns,” says
Brad Russell, who tracks smart home products for researcher Parks
Associates Inc. “One of the most foundational things is occupancy.
There’s a lot they could do with that.”.... Smart speakers are among the
fastest growing categories of consumer electronics, led by Amazon’s
Echo and Google’s Home devices. That’s pushed the companies and their
Alexa and Assistant software deeper into debates about the tradeoffs
between useful services and the harvesting of personal data." "... one of the stories we were able to report using the Snowden
documents, one that received less attention that it should have, is an
active NSA program to collect the online sex activities, including
browsing records of porn site and sex chats, of people regarded by the
U.S. Government as radical or radicalizing in order to use their online
sex habits to destroy their reputations. This is what and who the NSA,
CIA and FBI are and long have been. If [Amazon's Jeff] Bezos were the political victim of
surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It
would also be deeply ironic. That’s because Amazon, the company that has
made Bezos the planet’s
richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in
building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance
state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and
thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power,
is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government
with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance
weapons. In December, 2017, Amazon boasted
that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which
it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in
large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world.
The ACLU quickly warned
that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping
governments deploy it.” “Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the
ACLU, “Rekognition can identify,
track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people
in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against
databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” The group warned:
“Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights
concerns.” In a separate advisory,
the ACLU said of this face-recognition software that Amazon’s
“marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of
authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China.” BuzzFeed obtained documents showing details
of Amazon’s work in implementing the technology with the Orlando Police
Department, ones that “reveal the accelerated pace at which law
enforcement is embracing facial recognition tools with limited training
and little to no oversight from regulators or the public.”Numerous
lawmakers, including Congress’ leading privacy advocates, wrote a letter
in July, 2018, expressing grave concerns about how this software and
similar mass-face-recognition programs would be used by government and
law enforcement agencies. They posed a series of questions based on
their concern that “this technology comes with inherent risks, including
the compromising of Americans’ right to privacy, as well as racial and
gender bias.” In a separate article about Amazon’s privacy threats, the
ACLU explained that the group “and other civil rights groups have
repeatedly warned that face surveillance poses an unprecedented threat
to civil liberties and civil rights that must be stopped before it
becomes widespread.” Amazon’s extensive relationship with the NSA, FBI,
Pentagon and other surveillance agencies in the west is multi-faceted,
highly lucrative and rapidly growing. Last March, the Intercept reported
on a new app that Amazon developers and British police forces have
jointly developed to use on the public in police work, just “the latest
example of third parties aiding, automating, and in some cases,
replacing, the functions of law enforcement agencies — and raises
privacy questions about Amazon’s role as an intermediary.”...Then there
are the serious privacy dangers
posed by Amazon’s “Ring” camera products, revealed in the Intercept
last month by Sam Biddle. As he reported, Amazon’s Ring, intended to be a
home security system, has “a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it
comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate
data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around —
and perhaps inside — their house.”... Bezos’ relationship with the military and intelligence wings of the U.S.
Government is hard to overstate. Just last October, his company, Blue
Origin, won a $500 million contract from the U.S. Air Force
to help develop military rockets and spy satellites. Bezos personally
thanked them in a tweet, proclaiming how “proud” he is “to serve the
national security space community.”.... Then there’s the patent Amazon
obtained last October, as reported by the Intercept, “that would allow
its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical
characteristics and emotional state based on their voice.” In
particular, it would enable anyone using the product to determine a
person’s accent and likely place of origin: “The algorithm would also
consider a customer’s physical location — based on their IP address,
primary shipping address, and browser settings — to help determine their
accent.”... Bezos’ relationship with the military and spying agencies
of the U.S. Government, and law enforcement agencies around the world,
predates his purchase of the Washington Post and has become a central
prong of Amazon’s business growth. Back in 2014, Amazon secured a
massive contract with the CIA when the spy agency agreed to pay it $600
million for computing cloud software. As the Atlantic noted at the time,
Amazon’s software “will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up
the intelligence community.”... Jeff Bezos is as entitled as anyone else to his personal
privacy. The threats from the National Enquirer are grotesque. If Bezos’
preemptive self-publishing of his private sex material reduces the
unwarranted shame and stigma around adult consensual sexual activities,
that will be a societal good. But Bezos, given how much he works and profits to destroy the privacy
of everyone else (to say nothing of the labor abuses of his company),
is about the least sympathetic victim imaginable of privacy invasion. In
the past, hard-core surveillance cheerleaders in Congress such as
Dianne Feinstein, Pete Hoekstra, and Jane Harman became overnight, indignant privacy advocates
when they learned that the surveillance state apparatus they long
cheered had been turned against them. Perhaps being a victim of privacy
invasion will help Jeff Bezos
realize the evils of what his company is enabling. Only time will tell.
As of now, one of the world’s greatest privacy invaders just had his
privacy invaded. As the ACLU put it: “Amazon is building the tools for
authoritarian surveillance that advocates, activists, community leaders,
politicians, and experts have repeatedly warned against.'” Many popular iPhone apps secretly record your screen without asking TechCrunch, 6 February 2019 "A man has been fined after refusing to be scanned by controversial facial recognition cameras being trialled by the Metropolitan Police. The force had put out a statement saying “anyone who declines to be scanned will not necessarily be viewed as suspicious”. However, witnesses said several people were stopped after covering their faces or pulling up hoods. Campaign group Big Brother Watch said one man had seen placards warning members of the public that automatic facial recognition cameras were filming them from a parked police van. “He simply pulled up the top of his jumper over the bottom of his face, put his head down and walked past,” said director Silkie Carlo.“There was nothing suspicious about him at all … you have the right to avoid [the cameras], you have the right to cover your face. I think he was exercising his rights.” Ms Carlo, who was monitoring Thursday’s trial in Romford, London, told The Independent she saw a plainclothed police officer follow the man before a group of officers “pulled him over to one side”. She said they demanded to see the man’s identification, which he gave them, and became “accusatory and aggressive”. “The guy told them to p*** off and then they gave him the £90 public order fine for swearing,” Ms Carlo added. “He was really angry.” A spokesperson said officers were instructed to “use their judgment” on whether to stop people who avoid cameras.... The Metropolitan Police has described the deployments as “overt” and said members of the public were informed facial recognition was being used by posters and leaflets. But no one questioned by The Independent after they passed through a scanning zone in central London in December had seen police publicity material, and campaigners claim the technology is being rolled out “by stealth”." Police stop people for covering their faces from facial recognition camera then fine man £90 after he protested Independent, 1 February 2019 "Two weeks after leaving her position as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. National Security Agency in 2014, Lori Stroud was in the Middle East working as a hacker for an Arab monarchy. She had joined Project Raven, a clandestine team that included more than a dozen former U.S. intelligence operatives recruited to help the United Arab Emirates engage in surveillance of other governments, militants and human rights activists critical of the monarchy. Stroud and her team, working from a converted mansion in Abu Dhabi known internally as “the Villa,” would use methods learnt from a decade in the U.S intelligence community to help the UAE hack into the phones and computers of its enemies. Stroud had been recruited by a Maryland cybersecurity contractor to help the Emiratis launch hacking operations, and for three years, she thrived in the job. But in 2016, the Emiratis moved Project Raven to a UAE cybersecurity firm named DarkMatter. Before long, Stroud and other Americans involved in the effort say they saw the mission cross a red line: targeting fellow Americans for surveillance. “I am working for a foreign intelligence agency who is targeting U.S. persons,” she told Reuters. “I am officially the bad kind of spy.” The story of Project Raven reveals how former U.S. government hackers have employed state-of-the-art cyber-espionage tools on behalf of a foreign intelligence service that spies on human rights activists, journalists and political rivals. Interviews with nine former Raven operatives, along with a review of thousands of pages of project documents and emails, show that surveillance techniques taught by the NSA were central to the UAE’s efforts to monitor opponents. The sources interviewed by Reuters were not Emirati citizens. The operatives utilized an arsenal of cyber tools, including a cutting-edge espionage platform known as Karma, in which Raven operatives say they hacked into the iPhones of hundreds of activists, political leaders and suspected terrorists. Details of the Karma hack were described in a separate Reuters article today. An NSA spokesman declined to comment on Raven. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment. The UAE’s Embassy in Washington and a spokesman for its National Media Council did not respond to requests for comment." Special Report - Inside the UAE’s secret hacking team of U.S. mercenaries Reuters, 30 September 2019 "Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access to network traffic in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits. Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” app. Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. The program is administered through beta testing services Applause, BetaBound and uTest to cloak Facebook’s involvement, and is referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas” — a fitting name for Facebook’s effort to map new trends and rivals around the globe. Seven hours after this story was published, Facebook told TechCrunch it would shut down the iOS version of its Research app in the wake of our report. But on Wednesday morning, an Apple spokesperson confirmed that Facebook violated its policies, and it had blocked Facebook’s Research app on Tuesday before the social network seemingly pulled it voluntarily (without mentioning it was forced to do so). You can read our full report on the development here.An Apple spokesperson provided this statement. “We designed our Enterprise Developer Program solely for the internal distribution of apps within an organization. Facebook has been using their membership to distribute a data-collecting app to consumers, which is a clear breach of their agreement with Apple. Any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked, which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.” Facebook’s Research program will continue to run on Android....Facebook first got into the data-sniffing business when it acquired Onavo for around $120 million in 2014. The VPN app helped users track and minimize their mobile data plan usage, but also gave Facebook deep analytics about what other apps they were using....Once installed, users just had to keep the VPN running and sending data to Facebook to get paid." Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them Tech Crunch, 30 January 2019 "Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. is testing a technology that embeds cameras, sensors and digital screens in the cooler doors in its stores, a new network of “smart” displays that marketers can use to target ads for specific types of shoppers. The refrigerator and freezer doors act as a digital merchandising platform that depicts the food and drinks inside in their best light, but also as an in-store billboard that can serve ads to consumers who approach, based on variables such as the approximate age the technology believes they are, their gender and the weather. This new technology could provide brick-and-mortar stores with a marketplace similar to online advertising. Ice cream brands could duke it out to get the most prominent placement when it is 97 degrees outside; an older man could see ads for different products than a younger woman. Cameras and sensors inside the coolers connected to face-detection technology also can determine which items shoppers picked up or looked at, giving advertisers insight into whether their on-screen promotions worked—and can let a retailer know quickly if a product has gone out of stock. .... The company says it only produces and stores anonymous metadata that describes the size and demographics of an audience, and doesn’t store or transmit image data or unique identifying information about shoppers. Walgreens also is posting a privacy statement and a concierge to answer customer questions near the coolers in its stores that test them, a Walgreens spokesman said. " Walgreens Tests Digital Cooler Doors With Cameras to Target You With Ads Wall St Journal, 11 January 2019 "At the tail end of 2018, Michigan approved Public Act 656, making electronic license plates legal. Yes, the stubbornly unchanging, unconnected rectangles that have been identifying cars for well over a century are finally getting a new look. The makeover, which comes courtesy of Silicon Valley startup Reviver Auto, is an Amazon Kindle–like display that bolts onto the front or back of the car, and does more than just show the standard plate number and state-celebrating miscellany. It lets you update the registration stickers on your car through an app instead of dealing with the DMV. It can display Amber alerts. It can be used as a miniature, knee-level billboard (when the car is parked). If someone steals the car, it can read “$NDHLP!” or the more serious “Stolen Vehicle.” It can double as your E-Z Pass, FasTrak, or whatever RFID-based device you use to pay tolls. It can track your car’s location, so you can keep tabs on your teenager. “It’s a platform that supports a lot of different functionality,” says Reviver cofounder and CEO Neville Boston. “I see it less as a license plate and more as a communication portal.” Digital displays have been allowed in California as part of a pilot program since last summer; Texas and Florida also permit them. Reviver hasn’t moved into those last two states yet, but Boston wants to have his product in six states by the end of the year, and is also looking to offer it in Canada and Dubai. His company dominates this market—when the California DMV asked for bids so it could offer this system, Reviver was the only bidder, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.Reviver’s plates, though, don’t come cheap. Deliveries won’t start until the spring, but you can preorder the basic RPlate for $499, or drop $799 on the RPlate Pro, which has more advanced telematics features....Cost and the inevitable privacy concerns that come with another location-tracking device may not slake consumers’ thirst for new gadgets, but it’s not clear that Reviver’s product does anything unique. Consumers who want insights into their travel patterns (plus data on fuel consumption and engine diagnostics) can get cheaper options that plug into the car’s OBD-II port, like Automatic, Autobrain, and Verizon Hum. Lots of automakers offer apps that provide similar data for their cars. The windshield-mounted devices most people use to pay for tolls cost about $30." Do You Need a Digital License Plate? One Startup Thinks So Wired, 21 January 2019 "The CEO of Israeli
spyware company NSO Group has admitted that its software was used to
spy on the Emir of Qatar. In an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth this weekend, Shalev
Hulio admitted that his company’s product was used to spy on Emir Tamim
Bin Hamad Al-Thani, as well as Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed Bin
Abdulrahman Al-Thani. The interview
disclosed that NSO’s “Pegasus” software – which can be used to remotely
infect a target’s mobile phone and then relay back data accessed by the
device – was used to intercept phone calls and text messages made by
both the Qatari foreign minister and the Emir. These conversations
reportedly concerned “hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom to Iran
and Hezbollah for the release of several Qataris,” some of which was
allegedly sent to the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’
Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani. This
spying was seemingly undertaken at the behest of the United Arab
Emirates (UAE). Hulio revealed that the Israeli Defense Export Control
Agency (DECA) authorised three deals with the UAE for the sale of NSO
software, despite the fact that DECA is only supposed to give
authorisation for the “purpose of fighting terrorism and crime”. These
deals – allegedly mediated by former senior Israeli defence officials
with close ties to a senior Emirati official – raised a total of $80
million in revenue for NSO. NSO’s Pegasus software has come under
increasing scrutiny in recent months after the product was revealed to
be complicit in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Though
Hulio stressed in the interview with Yedioth Ahronoth this weekend that
“Khashoggi was not targeted by any NSO product or technology, including
listening, monitoring, location tracking and intelligence collection,”
it appears that Saudi Arabia used NSO software to spy on many of
Khashoggi’s friends and associates. US whistle-blower Edward Snowden has
been at the forefront of these claims, telling the Israeli newspaper:
“I do not pretend that NSO is involved in hacking [directly] into
Khashoggi’s phone, so their denial does not take us to a different
conclusion. The evidence shows that the company’s products were involved
in hacking into the phones of [Khashoggi’s] friends Omar Abdel Aziz,
Yahya Assiri, and Ghanem Al-Masarir.”" For Owners of Amazon’s Ring Security Cameras, Strangers May Have Been Watching Too Intercept, 10 January 2019 "This week at CES, the international consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, a host of startup companies will demonstrate to global automakers how the sensor technology that watches and analyzes drivers, passengers and objects in cars will mean enhanced safety in the short-term, and revenue opportunities in the future. Whether by generating alerts about drowsiness, unfastened seat belts or wallets left in the backseat, the emerging technology aims not only to cut back on distracted driving and other undesirable behavior, but eventually help automakers and ride-hailing companies make money from data generated inside the vehicle.....It is not yet clear how consumers in the age of Facebook Inc (FB.O) and virtual assistants like Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) Alexa will react to the potentially disconcerting idea of being watched - then warned - inside a vehicle, especially as cars become living rooms with the advent of self-driving....Tesla owners have speculated about the Model 3’s currently inoperational interior camera, with some asking in forums whether “Big Brother” was watching.“Put a small piece of scotch tape on it ... and you can nose pick again ...” advised one post." Move aside, backseat driver! New tech at CES monitors you inside car Reuters, 8 January 2019 |
".... 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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