Category: Privacy, Surveillance, & Security

Directly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we cautioned the public and politicians to be “wary of any attempt to rush through new surveillance and law enforcement powers.” With depressing predictability, we’ve already seen that happen across the continent. Nowhere, however, has the attempt to bypass democratic debate been more blatant than in the United Kingdom, where a handful of unelected peers has taken the language of an old and discredited Internet surveillance proposal, and attempted to slam it, at outrageously short notice, into the wording of a near-complete counter-terrorism bill.

Source: Britons: You Have 72 Hours to Stop The Snooper’s Charter | Electronic Frontier Foundation

CIA snooped on Senate staffers investigating CIA torture practices.

The review board concluded there was simply a misunderstanding, that the CIA believed it could search the computers being used by staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. … The review said that the CIA’s position was that it had “obligations under the National Security Act” and a legal duty to scour the computers “for the presence of Agency documents to which SSCI staff should not have access.”

Source: Shocking: CIA clears CIA in Senate hacking brouhaha | Ars Technica

Industry and government say “collect everything.” History suggests this is a bad idea.

We used to try to protect people at each stage of data processing—collection, analysis, sharing. Now, it’s collect first and ask questions later.

There is a moral lag in the way we treat data. Far too often, today’s discrimination was yesterday’s national security or public health necessity.

Over time, tens of thousands of runaway slaves would escape bondage on the Underground Railroad. How many of them would have made it in the age of big data?

In the spring of 1940, Japanese Americans received visits from census examiners. … by and large, Japanese-Americans cooperated with the census. After all, by federal law, census data was subject to strict use restrictions: The Census Bureau was required to keep personal information confidential. Their trust was misplaced

There was a time when it was essentially illegal to be gay. … These examples may seem extreme. But they highlight an important and uncomfortable fact: Throughout our history, the survival of our most vulnerable communities has often turned on their ability to avoid detection.

Privacy is a shield for the weak.

Source: Big Data, Underground Railroad: History says unfettered collection of data is a bad idea. by Alvaro M. Bedoya

This essay is the first of a series of reports from The Nor, an investigation into paranoia, electromagnetism, and infrastructure.

When you get in trouble for looking at the cameras, you stop looking at the cameras. But you should really be looking at the cameras.

One of the defining characteristics of the Wall is that it is not, and cannot be, voluntary. While some of the strategies listed here are based on cooperation with the Wall system (tachyometers, navigation and check-in apps, fitness monitors and wearable computers), these are always the accompaniment or introduction to mandatory systems, and are best seen as elective, collaborative trials rather than early adoption or individualistic disruption. Each successive Wall is only erected when the relevant technologies and social systems have arisen that no longer depend on consent.

Source: The Nor » All Cameras Are Police Cameras by James Bridle