psybelle: (. . .)
June 5th isn't entirely over yet, right?

This is awesome: Reset the Net.

(boingboing has a nice piece here: http://boingboing.net/2014/06/05/today-is-the-day-we-reset-the.html)

So, yeah… i'm gong to be downloading the set and seeing how easy the various parts are to implement (because, yes, there's a bunch of stuff I could have done but haven't yet). And if I run into more than three snags, I'm going to put out a public call for a "reset party" (along the lines of a cryptoparty) and ask that somebody who knows these tools help out…


And… I'm going to ask that you all consider using these tools, as well (if you're not doing so already). To use a last-century model, these sorts of tools have the utility of a fax machine: one lonely fax machine is worthless, but the more fax machines there are in the world, the more machines each one can talk to. Encrypted email does absolutely nothing if the recipient's machine is not secure, but as more people use secured / crypto systems, they become logarithmically more useful. And while you, personally, might not "have anything to hide" there are a lot of folks who are not so privileged and whose only "wrongdoing" is a lack of conformity (whether through being queer, or not white, or not fitting in the standard binary gender profiles, or being female and loud, or being involved in a local green/political/economic protest, or ...). As Doctorow says, Those who have nothing to hide have a duty to protect the privacy of those who do.

The damage that surveillance does to freedom of speech and freedom of thought is huge. But we can reroute around some of the damage...
psybelle: (. . .)
Ethics and Power in the Long War

This is a transcript of dymaxion's speech (complete with a few interesting typos); I'm hoping a recording of it gets posted.... She is clear about a lot of her basic assumptions, pulls together information from a lot of places, and makes the point that there is now just too much at stake for anybody in tech to claim to be apolitical. And she does that very well.


She also sets a high bar... pushed me out of my comfort zone more than once. But I'm up for that, I need that.

One group.

Aug. 1st, 2013 01:13 pm
psybelle: (shit.)
In one area. 100 times a week. That'd be approximately 14 times a day, every day (20 times a day if they take weekends off)... OK, so, maybe it's not one group in one area. But that then begs the question of who "they" are, if "they" aren't "the Feds" - especially when so many agencies are disavowing participation in this particular action....


This is the original story. It's chilling in the way a first-person (well, second-hand) can be...



This is not right.

UPDATE: Techcrunch claims that it's the (former) employer that turned in the suspicious searches, rather than that the behavior was scraped from Google.

So we have husband, wife, and son (20 year old guy) all using the same "work-place computer" for these "suspicious searches"? Really???


THIS IS NOT RIGHT.
psybelle: (sweeney todd)
I don't think we can completely starve the beast. But we can maybe make it shrink a little...

Defund the NSA! (There's a nifty script for making the phonecall...)


Of course, EFF has more info, including a bit about a decoy amendment that needs to be voted down...
psybelle: (shit.)
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...
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.

'nuff said

Jun. 6th, 2013 04:11 pm
psybelle: (. . .)
"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!"

*sigh*

Jun. 6th, 2013 09:41 am
psybelle: (shit.)
So... the big story that broke while I was having a lovely dinner last night is the revelation of FBI demands that Verizon hand over all call records to the NSA. Let me quote: The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

This is not calls between foreign nationals and somebody in the US, this is not calls made to another country, this is not calls made by suspicious persons. This is metadata on all calls made in the US, on an ongoing and daily basis. (And, yes, metadata is important.)


Disclaimer time: my cellphone is courtesy of Verizon. But... an anonymous insider characterized this order as a rubber-stamp renewal of an ongoing set of orders dating back to 2006; if you think the other telcos haven't received similar orders and haven't been coughing up the same sort of info for the past 6+ years, you're fooling yourself. Likewise, email and other "online communications" have less legal protection than phone calls; don't think that Google/Gmail and f*c*book are exempt.... (more at the Times and at Democracy Now)



And, of course, my Senator DiFi claims this is all to protect Americans.... I'd like a list of the liberties and freedoms she thinks she's defending.


(edit: forgot an important linkie!! Bruce Schneier nails it again in talking about what we don't actually know about the NSA's spying program data collection. And he makes the important point that, "Whistle-blowing is the moral response to immoral activity by those in power. " Revealing the truth is a moral imperative; there are ways to do so in relative safety. Supporting the people who reveal ugly truths is also a moral imperative; if you aren't comfortable speaking out, you can give money to organizations like
EFF and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.)
psybelle: (snark)
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.
psybelle: (shit.)
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.
psybelle: (. . .)
(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.
psybelle: (. . .)
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.
psybelle: (shit.)
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...
psybelle: (. . .)
10 questions to which we deserve real answers, and will probably never be answered... (I suspect that @d_seaman would give it a go, but he's nowhere near being an elected official yet.)
psybelle: (. . .)
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).
psybelle: (. . .)
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.)
psybelle: (shit.)
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.
psybelle: (. . .)
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.")
psybelle: (shit.)
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.

Really?

Aug. 11th, 2012 12:33 pm
psybelle: (. . .)
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....

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