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Surveillance

Software that will Monitor, Students, Employees, Dissadents and Protestors.

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study matematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study matematics and philosphy, geography, natual history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture....." -- This was written in a letter to Abigail Adams from John Adams on May 12, 1780.

This is the story of your own anti-social behavior
and that of people like you.

Eben Moglen a law professor at Columbia University: “Spying for Free” a militant digital privacy advocate, founder of the uber-secure personal server FreedomBox, and the inspiration for the decentralized social network Diaspora. Everyone who uses Facebook, Twitter and the like shares the blame for the serious and ongoing global erosion of privacy enabled by the internet, he said. Banks aren’t the problem, he said; the users tempting banks with their Twitter and Facebook postings are the problem. As are reporters who write about privacy issues with social media without first closing their Facebook accounts.

The U.S. Secret Service is mandated by Congress to carry out two significant objectives: protection and investigations.

FBI seeks system to monitor social networking sites
The FBI is the latest in a long line of federal agencies seeking to monitor conversations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The bureau recently placed a request for information from technology companies to develop a system capable of automatically sifting through the torrents of “publicly available” data for keywords relating to terrorism, crime, and other matters of national security.

 

 

Privacy is the issue

Data is a privacy issue because we have an enormous ecological disaster created by badly-designed social media now being used by people to control and exploit human beings in all sorts of ways. That’s the consequence of social media structures which encourage people to share using centralized databases, and everything they share is held by someone who is no friend of theirs who also runs the servers and collects the logs which contain all the information about who accesses what, the consequences of which is that we are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve. And all of that data is being collected and sold by people whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know. Okay? That’s true of all this information all the time everywhere. The thing you’re working on is simply one of 100,000 implications of that disaster.

Did You Close Your Facebook Account?

Of course you can close your facebook account if you don’t want to be in a situation in which you are more heavily surveilled than the KGB or Stasi or Securitate or any other secret police ever surveilled anybody (indistinguishable) and what do you mean you ‘can’t'?

But you’re not going to do anything about that. So you’re using them and every time you tag anything or respond to anything or link to anything, you’re informing on your friends. You’re part of the problem, you’re not part of the answer. Why are you calling up to ask me about the problem you’re creating? Civic journalism should result in a better world. Journalists aren't closing their Facebook accounts. They are the problem. You know what the problem is. The problem is, even though you know what the problem is you’re continuing to make it worse. The problem is people like you who do know and go on making it worse. Right? Well, now you know. So you should stop now. And not only should you stop, you should get the people around you to stop. If you get the people around you to stop, they’ll get the people around them to stop and we’ll fix the problem. It’s like littering. You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you’re only hurting yourself I wouldn’t bother pointing it out to you. See, that’s the difference, okay? The reason that this all works is that even when you know you’re hurting other people, you’re too selfish to stop. And there are hundreds of millions of people like you. That’s why it works. What’s the damage?

You know what the problem is. People lost their homes. People lose their money. People lose their freedom. (??? -ed.) You know because you saw it, because you’re following this, that Facebook now acknowledges what we said for a long time and they didn't acknowledge, that every single photograph uploaded to Facebook is put through facial recognition software they call PhotoDNA which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking. You understand? So every time you upload a photograph to Facebook or put one on Twitter for that matter you are now ratting out anybody in that frame to any police agency in the world that’s looking for them. Some police agencies in the world are evil. That’s a pretty serious thing you’ve just done. But you do it all the time. And when I asked you to stop you tell me you can’t. You’re not going to do anything about fixing this problem. You’re going to claim that it’s just something you’re reporting and then you’re going to go right back to making it worse. And if you ever call me up again to ask me about yet another one of these things you’ll still be making it worse, because although you can report the problem you can’t take social responsibility for your part in causing the problem.
What you want to know is that somewhere there’s a regulator who might stop the bank. But you don’t want to hear that the regulator we really need to call upon is you, yourself. Right? You don’t want to write that in the newspaper. I guarantee you whatever story you file will treat this as a problem caused by everyone except the readers at The Observer and that will be false. The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that’s what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations. The commercial spying operations are used to empower people who have lots to get more from people who have less. They lead to a more unequal society. More unequal in economic terms and more unequal in political terms. The users, as with most stuff that’s dangerous that’s sold to people, the users are the victims and even the stuff you write which purports to be critical will do everything except telling people the central fact, which is they have to stop using.

GET OFF FACEBOOK WHILE YOU STILL CAN Facebook Timeline is crazy and scary.

“There’s no act too small to record on your permanent record,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard who studies how the Internet affects society. “All of the mouse droppings that appear as we migrate around the Web will be saved.”

800 million facebook idiots - Your own personal history laid out on a month by month timeline back to your birth.
What most users don’t know is that the new features being introduced are all centered around increasing the value of Facebook to advertisers, to the point where Facebook representatives have been selling the idea that Timeline is actually about re-conceptualizing users around their consumer preferences, or as they put it, "brands are now an essential part of people’s identities."

K12 Surveillance and College Surveillance Privacy Nightmare: Data Mine & Analyze all College Students' Online Activities

1984 surveillance tactics continue in schools by suggestions of sharing collected student data with fusion centers. There is another particularly invasive security idea being pitched to universities as a "crystal ball" to stop future violence — to data mine and analyze all college students' online activities.
It is not uncommon for schools to be equipped with metal detectors, cameras for video surveillance, motion detectors, RFID badge tracking, computer programs to check school visitors against sex offender lists, and infrared systems to track body heat after school hours and potentially hunt down intruders. No parent ever wants any possibility of a school tragedy, so other biometric systems in the name of security have been introduced. Iris recognition and fingerprint scans are being used to monitor students' Internet usage. In K - 12 schools, "new military and corrections technologies are quietly moving into the classroom with little oversight." It's making our schools a "fertile ground for prison tech," Mother Jones reported. "For millions of children, being scanned and monitored has become as much a part of their daily education as learning to read and write." All of this surveillance is supposed to keep students safe, but there are some states that would like to dump public school surveillance data into federally-funded fusion centers.
In fact, KC Education Enterprise reported that the "Kansas Fusion center wants to gather intelligence in public schools." At a Kansas Safe and Prepared School conference, Jeremy Jackson, who is associated with the Kansas Intelligence Fusion Center (KIFC), spoke on how schools could participate in and benefit from KIFC's "intelligence analysis and information sharing capabilities."

AxXiom for Liberty took it one step further by posting Oklahoma Fusion Center slides [PDF] like this one that listed schools as "nontraditional collectors of intelligence." The Oklahoma Information Fusion Center website called for entities from "primary and secondary schools, post-secondary schools, colleges and universities, and technical schools" to "provide information related to suspicious activities occurring on and around school grounds and campuses." But there are plenty of potential privacy problems like mission creep in regard to fusion centers.
Call for College Campuses to increase school surveillance.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Morris, a lieutenant with the University Police, proposed that colleges should collect and data mine their students' online activities as a potential way to predict and thereby prevent "large-scale acts of violence on campus." Just because companies and others already data mine publicly available information or services like Gmail include targeted advertising based on email contents, that makes it okay for colleges - academia - the sanctuary of intellectual and private thought - to data mine?

 

 

 

Censorware vs. privacy & anonymity

Surveillance:

Who has an iPhone, BlackBerry, or uses Gmail," then said: "you're all screwed. The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all those products.

The proper iTunes is not a Trojan but there is an fake update in the wild that installs the FinFisher software. 

Wikileaks docs reveal that governments use malware for surveillance

The latest round of documents published by Wikileaks offers a rare glimpse into the world of surveillance products. The collection—which Wikileaks calls the Spy Files—includes confidential brochures and slide presentations that companies use to market intrusive surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies. A report that Wikileaks published alongside the documents raises concern about the growing use of mass surveillance tools that indiscriminately monitor and analyze entire populations. The group also points out that some of the products described in the documents are sold to authoritarian regimes, which use them to hunt and track political dissidents. The details revealed by Wikileaks echo a recent report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that discussed the surveillance industry. The publication analyzed approximately 200 documents from 36 separate companies as part of a special investigative project called The Surveillance Catalog. The material released by Wikileaks corroborates much of what the WSJ reported, but includes a broader range of material.

 

American firm, Narus of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has sold Telecom Egypt "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment. Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients. The company is best known for creating NarusInsight, a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass, real-time surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time. Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway. Other Narus global customers include the national telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two countries that regularly register alongside Egypt near the bottom of Human Rights Watch's world report. "Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record," Steve Bannerman, Narus' marketing vice president, once boasted to Wired about the service. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on; we can reconstruct their (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls." Other North American and European companies are selling DPI to enable their business customers "to see, manage and monetize individual flows to individual subscribers." But this "Internet-enhancing" technology has been sought out by regimes in Iran, China and Burma for more brutal purposes.
In addition to Narus, there are a number of companies, including many others in the United States, that produce and traffic in similar spying and control technology. This list of DPI providers includes Procera Networks (USA), Allot (Israel), Ixia (USA), AdvancedIO (Canada) and Sandvine (Canada), among others. These companies typically partner with Internet Service Providers to insert DPI along the main arteries of the Web. All Net traffic in and out of Iran, for example, travels through one portal -- the Telecommunications Company of Iran -- which facilitates the use of DPI. <more>

Surveillance: Cell Phone Data Mapping

Surveillance: Raven Drones Long Range, Non-cooperative, Biometric Tagging, Tracking and Location Digital Drones that never forget a face and track you, based on how you look. If the military machines assemble enough information, and spot adversarial intent.

 

IP-address does not equal a person

IP-Address Is Not a Person, BitTorrent Case Judge Says
2011 A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the “pay-up-or-else-schemes” that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person.
In the last year various copyright holders have sued well over 100,000 alleged file-sharers in the United States alone. The purpose of these lawsuits is to obtain the personal details of the alleged infringers, and use this information to negotiate a settlement offer ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
Lawyers, the public and consumer advocacy groups have compared these practices to extortion, but nonetheless new cases are still being filed every month. This week, however, an interesting ruling was handed down by District Court Judge Harold Baker that, if adopted by other judges, may become a major roadblock for similar mass-lawsuits.

Hurt Locker File Sharing Lawsuit Lists Hockey Stadium IP Address - I'm reminded of how the Blues Brothers listed Wrigley Field as their home address on their DMV records. Life imitating art? http://www.techdirt.com/
It's a bit of a stereotype that Canadians love their hockey. But do they love it so much that they file share while attending hockey games? Recently, the movie studio Voltage Pictures decided to extend its braindead, shortsighted, shakedown of those it accuses (on weak evidence) of file sharing its movie, The Hurt Locker, to Canada. Voltage hired a law firm to go to court and identify who was behind 29 IP addresses. Of course, some individuals did a little investigating on the IP addresses and, as noted by Michael Geist, have apparently fingered one of the culprits: the Bell Centre in Montreal, better known as the home of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team. I'm guessing Voltage will just drop that IP address from the lawsuit, but it's another reminder that an IP address is not very useful evidence, in some cases. And, of course, anyone involved with the lawsuit could have c ecked the IP address themselves and realized what it resolved to -- providing yet more evidence that the folks filing these lawsuits aren't particularly clued in on the technology they're suing over.

State Farm app uses iPhone sensors to grade your driving habits
2011 State Farm claims it doesn't collect any information and won't adjust your insurance rates based on your score.

Monitor employees

In Pratt & Whitney, 26 AMR 36322, 12-CA-18446 (Feb. 23, 1998), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reported in an advice memorandum that a company's computer network was a "work area." Accordingly, rules prohibiting all nonbusiness use of e-mail on a company's network could be unlawful. The NLRB has found that policies discriminating against union activity on computer networks run afoul of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Employee monitoring that has the effect of selectively punishing labor organizing activities could violate the NLRA.

Video Surveillance

Employers increasingly attempt to install hidden surveillance cameras.

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