psybelle

how the hell do we bell the tyger?

2013-06-16T16:57:36Z

Damn. Now it's content as well as "just metadata"...

This is clearly unconstitutional.

Grayson is wonderful, and he's not a lone voice in questioning the current practices. But I don't know if there's enough support behind him to actually roll back any of the excesses of the current surveillance binge... The NSA seems to have rubberstamp approval for just about anything it wants (read as absolute power) and has absolutely been corrupted by it; when non-violent dissenters (like #occupy) and vocal environmentalists are targeted, you know that the main concern is protecting the power base of the organization rather than the country as a whole.

Dissent is not a criminal act. Protest is not a criminal act. And expecting our elected officials to uphold their oaths to defend the Constitution and serve the people should not be naive idealism...

comments

everybody needs to reread Orwell.

2013-06-08T20:55:22Z

Orwell got it right.

This is the roadmap, the instruction manual. We all cheat somewhere, we all perform criminal acts in our day-to-day lives, we are all at risk.

comments

'nuff said

2013-06-06T23:18:32Z

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

comments

time to get loud:

2013-02-20T22:30:01Z

If you're a Comcast customer and you do NOT approve of CISPA, let Comcast know.

Write letters, make phonecalls, vote with your feet if you can; because Comcast is now supporting CISPA.

comments

heads-up!! Alameda County

2012-12-03T20:34:53Z

Sheriff wants a drone for surveillance: see the attachment to Item 22.

Part 7 (page 3) of the Attachment:
Funding in the amount of $31 ,646 will be allocated to the Alameda County Sheriffs Office to purchase an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS), weighing less than 4lbs, equipped with live video downlink. The Unmanned Aerial System consists of an unmanned aircraft, the control system, a control link and other related support equipment. Unmanned Aerial Systems save money, enhance safety, save lives and can be utilized across a myriad of public safety disciplines to include the Homeland Security Arena. This system will provide real-time situational analysis for first responders to include search and rescue missions, tactical operations, disaster response, recovery and damage assessment, explosive ordnance response, wild land and structure fire response and response to Hazmat incidents. The UAS can enhance the safety of first responders and citizens alike and will enhance our ability to respond.

comments

today's trawl:

2012-10-10T18:16:55Z

(AKA cleaning up the desktop):

Worth every second of 5+ minutes of your time. "How to live after the party's over" - this. Great soundbite, succinct summary, and one of the things I'm working towards...

Yup. I'm saying it again. police state, panopticon, surveillance society, orwell

On the other hand, there is this... I trust Zimmerman, believe that ex-Navy Seals want security for their brethren. But I'm going to wait for the peer review before thinking about $20 per month.

comments

lightbulb moment...

2012-09-23T19:07:06Z

So. There's facial recognition software, voice recognition software, gait recognition software. There are facilities for archiving all this information, software for integrating it (follow the tags).

There's increased surveillance, both routine and on the ground. (link covering RNCCTV, REAL ID, undercover cops - very 1984)

And, as always, the "big three" of terrorists, organized crime, and pedophiles is trotted out as justification... I've come to the conclusion that they're right, sort of.

The quote of the day is, "Prisons are like universities, they're only profitable if you put butts in the seats.” Criminalizing the general populace, the surveillance, the militarization of municipal police forces - none of this would be happening if people weren't profiting from it.

Privatizing prisons, turning incarceration into a profitable business - this changes the narrative of social control, of being a good citizen, the very basis of what Law and Government do in ways that I just can't wrap my brain around. The narrative breaks in ways that induce severe cognitive dissonance; I literally cannot think about this. One clear thought, though, is that lobbying to make laws to incarcerate more people, deprive them of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" just to get rich - is deeply criminal. That is the organized crime that is driving the surveillance state.

comments

another reason not to go to New York

2012-09-16T19:55:59Z

I think ~~Mayor~~ Emperor Bloomberg is taking this "private army" thing too far.

scary NYPD bus posters:
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/A267XnoCYAAXTaK.jpg

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/247390407305072641

I'd love to see what the rest of the series looks like...

comments

thinky...

2012-09-10T04:16:49Z

... And I'm explicitly asking for help clarifying this stuff.

I'm obviously interested in privacy issues (and I'm obviously interested in things that don't fit in the neat box of the status quo); given the way that dissent and critique have been conflated with "security risks" and "terrorists" there's an obvious overlap between privacy and security issues....

There's a marvelous piece on security culture that actually covers a lot of privacy issues as well, should be required reading for anybody who knows somebody who's a part of any subculture.

One decent working definition of privacy states that an individual A gets to control who else knows what bits of their personal information. And security has to do with mitigating harm to that individual A from the (controlled/not) dissemination of information; security culture has to do with not just personal security but the security of a community/subculture as a whole - the security and privacy of each of its members.... but it's based on the concept and practice and respect of personal privacy.

And... for as much as I live in the special left-coast bubble that is my hometown, that doesn't mean a whole lot when folks in Utah who donated to Prop(h)8 got nasty letters from queerfolk (political donations mean your name, address, and recipient of donation are a matter of public record), when the names and salaries of state employees (like me, and more than one of my friends) are also a matter of public record. We could just as easily be targeted by disgruntled folk and it could easily be worse than just a nasty letter (and the internet *never* forgets).

What functional differences do you see between security and privacy? What general sorts of things do you thing should be private (for yourself, for others)? What do you consider to be "best practices" for security, for privacy?

comments

time to step away from the keyboard...

2012-08-25T18:07:35Z

I love the reviewers... No, really.

(Kinda reminds me of when I confused the hell out of some poor clerk at Walgreens, asking her what made the particular umbrella I was buying a "man's" umbrella...)

That seems to be the one bright spot this morning in an otherwise grim intarnets...

Award-winning film-maker Poitras on William Binney (Can't wait for the full-length piece to come out!)

Big data has its uses. The trick is to limit the crossreferencing, the uses it gets put to... and that may well be impossible.

I would love to see the conventioneers be surveilled even half as much as the protestors... Of course, I suppose there's not much besides opportunity stopping other folks from using the technology, as well... I don't think I know anybody in Florida, though.

*sigh* Google search terms: Boston, TSA, cancer
I may ask the TSA folk if they're issued any kind of dosimeters or exposure badges the next time I fly (and opt out).

comments

of course it gets more tangled... and less truthy

2012-08-21T00:58:32Z

Remember Cubic? And its various spin-offs and subsidiaries and associated companies like Abraxas and Trapwire and Ntrepid, the webwork of interlocking major shareholders and board-members?

The selling of surveillance requires fear as a marketing technique.

I wish the legend on the diagram wasn't so hard to read. One of dots looks like it might be labeled PBS, Occupy Oakland is a little clearer.

Anarchist (or more complex forms) appears 11 times in this short document, violent is used 9 times, illegal is 6, protest (and protestors) shows up 10 times (only once NOT in the context of anarchist or violent or illegal). Peaceful shows up 3 times... Agenda, much? (How many of the #occupy folk are anarchists? How much of the violence at #occupy events was perpetrated by people in uniform? HOW MUCH is protest, dissent being stigmatized?)

(And, just to point out the obvious: while that pretty association map is probably fiction, not made by monitoring connections in social media... Don't think they're not watching.)

comments

It's Unca Walt, too!

2012-08-16T21:12:03Z

Facial recognition at Disney (not clear from the article if Identix is the company responsible for the equipment), municipal monitoring all over the continent (Michigan, outskirts of Vancouver, as well as NYC, Vegas, etc...).

I want a broad-brimmed hat fitted with low-power IR LEDs that spell out "Presumed Innocent" around the brim - I think it could be done with fiber optics without too much trouble.

comments

missed this one last year:

2012-08-16T15:24:16Z

Apparently, today is the second annual "Wave at the Security Cameras Day"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vzuq40BRlw&feature=youtu.be

("Because surveillance means security.")

comments

personal freedom roundup...

2012-08-15T02:52:21Z

I'm going to ignore the NYT whitewashing of Trapwire. Also going to ignore Cubic's claims that they're not associated with Trapwire (too much overlap on various boards between Trapwire, Abraxis, Cubic, Ntrepid, etc for them to claim no association whatsoever).

I've seen claims that the things Trapwire brags about are just not technically feasible... and to that, I say 1) bullshit (and if it isn't possible now, facial recognition is improving to the point that this technology will be biting the naysayers in short order), and 2) there's still a problem.

We do have increasing surveillance, everywhere. Surveillance undercuts the presumption of innocence, one of the basic tenets of the legal system (the counter to "if you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is "if I'm not doing anything illegal, you've got no business surveilling") and tends to discourage dissent. (You wouldn't want that to go on your permanent record, would you?)

Which brings up the next issue. You get recorded by a camera somewhere. Then what? Who owns the camera? What happens to that image, the location and time-stamp, that data? Who owns the data? It's digital, can be replicated infinitely; where does it go? Who stores it, keeps it, guards it, sells it? How long do they keep it? (Are corporations/NGOs covered by FOIA? I was in several Las Vegas casinos not that long ago, and a number of them are Trapwire customers - how do I find out if I was recorded? Can I get my records expunged or corrected?)

There's more, of course... but I'm grumpy enough, going to stop now.

comments

Really?

2012-08-11T19:44:17Z

Apparently, my face is not "sensitive or personally identifiable information."

Because... this is a company that bragged about its hot-shit face-recognition software and has the stated purpose of integrating security camera images and phoned-in tips for analysis of suspicious patterns of behavior. Anything that allows them to say, "Oh, look, #994199 is back again, and taking pictures with a better camera this time!" means they HAVE TO be storing what I would consider to be personally identifiable information....

comments

well. (updated) (again)

2012-08-10T22:04:05Z

Trapwire seems to have become a 'splody thing since this morning's linkage...

http://www.businessinsider.com/trapwire-everything-you-need-to-know-2012-8

http://reason.com/blog/2012/08/10/creepy-spying-system-revealed-by-wikilea

http://www.dailydot.com/news/trapwire-surveillance-wikileaks-twitter/

http://storify.com/superwarrant/threeprong-trapwire-removal-strategy
(several pages in, this gets fun - sf0-style RPG, anybody?)

more: http://publicintelligence.net/unravelling-trapwire/
(see also trapwire.net, for as long as that lasts...)

... and, why NDAA is so important.

comments

things to brighten your morning...

2012-08-10T15:47:32Z

NOT.

Warrantless wiretapping is permissible... ..for some values of "permissible".

And, of course, it's not just wiretapping: looks like it might not be just emails in that complex in Utah... (well, not really - I'm guessing the company might be keeping them in Texas, though...)

Is your bookcase properly sanitized?

comments

he's no Abbie Hoffman...

2012-07-14T18:38:11Z

But even without the entertainment value, I applaud.

comments

the Internet is forever...

2012-07-03T02:58:52Z

There's a remarkable and creepy story in the NYTimes about "posture photos" that may well be a lesson for our times as far as privacy issues go.

Nude photos may not be a big deal to the majority of the under-30 crowd. But everybody has "youthful indiscretions", things that an individual may wish had been done differently even if the event is not overtly shame-inducing after the fact. And I can see the equivalences between those photos (still not dead after 50+ years, even though photos and negatives can be destroyed) and records of txts and emails and browsing history, idle searches and shopping history and f*c*book indiscretions, which can be copied and stored indefinitely and covertly, without any sort of "paper trail" to follow back or recourse for hacked accounts (or simply maturing).

Somebody who is a better writer than I am needs to tackle this, explore the resonances and parallels, pull the definition of "privacy" into the 21st century, into the age of networked everything and data whose only "home" is the cloud.

comments

shell game

2012-04-27T17:43:02Z

So, ja, please let your senators know that passing CISPA is a bad idea.

CNET breaks it down, and of course EFF has talking points (as does the Massachusetts Pirate Party).

But, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

comments

Y'know...

2012-04-24T17:56:18Z

... There just aren't that many terrorists and pedophiles.

And the teach-in at the Whitney is fabulous, though chilling (and a great follow-up to the DemocracyNow! interviews). And when William Binney is freaked out, says "We have no Fourth Amendment," I worry...

comments

... and people wonder why I don't do fcbook.

2012-03-30T18:57:15Z

Because f*c*book (among others) enables tools for stalkers...

Of course, f*c*book isn't the real problem (as if there's only one "real" problem). Not having control over my data is a problem (have you put your name in spokeo?); rape culture is a problem. Kyriarchy is a problem....

comments

moar linkspam (minimal, this time)

2012-02-04T03:14:08Z

And people wonder why I'm interested in Faraday Cage purses and wallets.

More ruminations on Google's new "privacy" policy... I may be mis-remembering, but it seems to me that Google's been happy to roll over at a suggestion from Big Government, without the prod of anything so pointy as court orders; this sort of data aggregation just means that Uncle Sam doesn't have to be bothered with spying on us, and somebody else gets to profit from the process. Not happy about that.

comments

don't have to put up with evil...

2012-01-27T23:15:06Z

I was hoping for something like this!

http://lifehacker.com/5876794/going-google+free-the-best-alternatives-to-google-services-on-the-web

Feel free to add your suggestions here...

(ohgosh, I don't know why we might want to do that...)

comments

definitely not done yet...

2012-01-23T23:42:48Z

The war against surveillance can never stop.

Yeah, no. This is appalling... way worse than warrantless GPS monitoring (which was declared unconstitutional). VPN and Tor, here I come...

At this point, I think I need to do a bit of research into Lamar Smith, other bills he may have sponsored...

comments