Posts Tagged ‘Privacy’
One Nation, Under Surveillance
By Michael Hampton for the homeland stupidity blog:
What have you got to hide? The answer may shock you: If you’re like most Americans, you have far more than you realize that you need to be hiding, and not doing so may be putting you and your family in grave danger.
In his new book, Three Felonies a Day, attorney Harvey Silverglate holds that the typical American professional commits an average of three federal crimes a day, just going about their daily business, without even realizing it. And the only thing keeping them out of prison — make that keeping you out of prison — is the fact that federal prosecutors haven’t looked at you yet. “No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch,” reads a statement on the book’s Web site, “and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.”
[more at the homeland stupidity]
Chicago’s Camera Network Is Everywhere
William Bulkeley reports on yet another city falling victim to a techno-panopticon, in the Wall Street Journal:
A giant web of video-surveillance cameras has spread across Chicago, aiding police in the pursuit of criminals but raising fears that the City of Big Shoulders is becoming the City of Big Brother.
While many police forces are boosting video monitoring, video-surveillance experts believe Chicago has gone further than any other U.S. city in merging computer and video technology to police the streets. The networked system is also unusual because of its scope and the integration of nonpolice cameras.
The city links the 1,500 cameras that police have placed in trouble spots with thousands more—police won’t say how many—that have been installed by other government agencies and the private sector in city buses, businesses, public schools,…
U.S. Justice Dept. Asked for IndyMedia’s Visitor Lists
Kevin Bankston writes on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website:
Can the U.S. government secretly subpoena the IP address of every visitor to a political website? No, but that didn’t stop it from trying.
In a report released today, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston tells the story of a bogus federal subpoena issued to independent news site Indymedia.us, and how the site fought back with EFF’s help. Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com also has the story.
The report describes how, earlier this year, U.S. attorneys issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Indymedia.us administrator Kristina Clair demanding “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, potentially identifying every person who visited any news story on the Indymedia site. As the report explains, this overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal…
Feds’ Search of Twittering Anarchist Upheld
Ryan Singel writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
Federal authorities can resume combing through the notebooks, memory cards and computers of a twittering anarchist being investigated for violating an anti-rioting law, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday.
U.S. district court judge Dora L. Irizzary found no reason to throw out the government’s search of the home of a 41-year old social worker who used the micro-publishing service Twitter to help anti-globalization protestors at the recent G-20 convention, clearing the way for the feds to look through the evidence they collected. Madison and his attorney sought to have his possessions returned unexamined, on the grounds the search violated his constitutional rights to free speech.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force raided Elliott Madison’s house in a dawn raid on October 1, seizing myriad computers, unpublished…
Teacher Claims Fingerprinting Is ‘Mark of the Beast’
From Wired:
A 22-year veteran kindergarten teacher in the Texas Bible Belt could lose her job for refusing, on religious grounds, to give fingerprints under a state law requiring them.The evangelical Christian, Pam McLaurin, is fighting a looming suspension, claiming that fingerprinting amounts to the “Mark of the Beast,” and hence is a violation of her First Amendment right to practice her religion. Her case is similar to a lawsuit by a group of Michigan farmers, some of them Amish, challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are also the devil’s mark.
The latest case is the first in which a teacher is refusing fingerprinting on religious grounds, the woman’s lawyer said. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to decide whether the First Amendment is implicated in fingerprinting, especially…
Your Medical Records Are Stored Online and Sold in the Open Market
Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
When patients visit a physician or hospital, they know that anyone involved in providing their health care can lawfully see their medical records. But unknown to patients, an increasing number of outside vendors that manage electronic health records also have access to that data, and are reselling the information as a commodity.
The revelation comes in a recent New York Times article about how so-called “scrubbed” patient data isn’t as anonymous as people think. The piece focuses primarily on how anonymized data can be cross-bred with other publicly available databases, such as voting records, which subverts the anonymity. Buried near the end of the article is the news that medical data is collected, anonymized and sold, not by insurance agencies and health care providers, but by…
Protesting Against U.K. Police Tactics
From The Guardian:
Worried about police surveillance? Then use data protection laws to take action – we only have the rights we assert.Today’s Guardian splash revealed that the police are gathering and storing the personal information and images of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests. This wasn’t news to me and my case offers a “how to”, for any individuals interested in discovering what data the police hold on you.
I was shocked and a little afraid when I first noticed the police taking photos of me on demonstrations, back in 2000. There were police officers outside public meetings and benefit gigs too, in uniform, photographing and seemingly taking notes on my arrival and departure. I wondered why were they gathering all that information on me, just for showing up…
Privacy Is Dead, And Social Media Hold Smoking Gun
Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable, makes a very controversial argument in his opinion piece for CNN.com:
A U.K. firm is set to launch a camera to capture every moment of a person’s life. While you may reel at the privacy implications, I’d wager that the high price of not capturing and sharing every moment of our lives will soon dwarf the cost to our privacy.
The SenseCam, worn on a cord around the neck, will retail for $820 and capture an image every 30 seconds. Originally developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, the technology has been licensed to Oxford-based Vicon, which will produce a version for Alzheimer’s and dementia researchers by the year’s end and a consumer version in 2010.
It’s easy to see the associated risks of a life-logging…
Britons Start To Fight Back Against the Surveillance State
Having grown up in Britain, pre-surveillance state, it’s amazing to me that during the last twenty years the British have just meekly accepted the ever-increasing and encroaching surveillance powers used by all levels of government in the U.K. But at long last there’s some resistance, at least at the local level, as reported by the New York Times:
Poole, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.
A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.
But the intrusions visited on…
Who’s in Big Brother’s Database?
James Bamford reviews The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid in The New York Review of Books:
On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.
Unlike Borges’s “labyrinth of letters,” this library expects few visitors. It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.” Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank…
America’s Top Insane Census Conspiracy Theories
Huffington Post has compiled the eight craziest 2010 census-related conspiracy theories to gain media traction. Including:
One of the most infamous Census conspiracy theories was spread by Rep. Michele Bachmann — that the census would lay the groundwork for World War II-style internment camp.
The American Daily Review suggests that the Census GPS is a way to help United Nations personnel round people up after Obama lets foreign troops control the country.
Michelle Malkin suggests Obama aims to use the Census to undermine [U.S.-Mexico] border control and give “the Left” a “permanent ruling majority” with the help of undocumented immigrants
Anti-tax activist Neal Boortz thinks the Census is being used to take away your property and give it to the “moochers.”
U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon and Twitter
Noah Shachtman writes on Wired’s Danger Room:
America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t…
Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit
Ryan Singel writes on Wired’s Threat Level:
The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.
Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to quash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of the Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.
The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records:
“The communications…
