psybelle

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...

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.

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.

... 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?

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.)

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.")

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....

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?

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.