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Time to Wake Up - Your Privacy is Gone |
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There are many forums today, operated by IT and communications professionals, which circulate and discuss events and information on internet data risks, the interception of communications, and the general resulting loss of privacy. Much of this relates to hackers, criminal or otherwise, but much also relates to a carefully-planned government system of intrusion into, and monitoring of, what used to be our personal affairs. An alarming picture is evolving of the disappearance of privacy in our communications. Email accounts, SMS messages, mobile phone calls, Skype calls, instant messaging services like MSN, and all information residing on our mobile phones, ipads, and even personal computers, are not only accessible but are often monitored, extracted, sifted and stored - by people whom we do not know, in circumstances of which we are not informed, and for purposes which they refuse to discuss. As Evgeny Morozov wrote in "Political Repression 2.0", "What we need is a recognition that our reliance on surveillance technology domestically - even if it is checked by the legal system - is inadvertently undermining freedom in places where the legal system provides little if any protection." The rapid and astonishing development of the internet and mobile technology have effected changes in our society which are leading to places still only dimly understood - and the dangers of which are only dimly appreciated. We didn't anticipate the hackers, the phishers, the internet scammers, but we also didn't anticipate the benefits to the shadowy world of the surveillance industry. Nor did we anticipate the political benefits, the fatal attraction these new media would present to those whose goal is the destabilisation of nations. Today, we face not only data and financial losses, or identity theft, but a more alarming loss of anonymity where thousands of small or even trivial bits of personal information can be mined and pooled to strip most of our privacy. Even worse, the military, the spooks, neocons and fascists, now have the tools to a potential gold mine of surveillance, interference and political destabilisation - the ability to, with full anonymity, instigate political and economic upheaval almost anywhere in the world. And it is fair to say that we also failed to imagine, much less to anticipate, the benefits of that same anonymity we took for granted, to those who now use it for the dissemination of propaganda, for misinformation, the muzzling of truth, and a variety of reprehensible political purposes. One need look only at the US military program of Twitter "sock puppets", the purpose of which is to deceive and cause chaos on an international scale. According to Eric Corley, publisher of the hacker quarterly, 2600, a quarter of all the hackers in the US have been recruited by federal authorities. To do what? The VOA has surrendered its imperial mandate and passed the baton to Google, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Skype, RapLeaf Inc., itunes, Flash, email and MSN. We have always known it was possible, though we assumed it was prohibited, for authorities to intercept and record our phone conversations and and SMS messages. It is distressing to discover just how available are the necessary tools, and how limited the prohibitions on such activity. Not only do we have no legal protection, we will most likely never be aware of this monitoring. We now know that it is possible to remotely activate various features of a smart phone, such as the recording function and the GPS - even if the phone is turned off - and without awakening the phone or giving any signal that this action is occurring. And we know that the conversations thereby recorded can be transmitted to another phone and all traces of that activity deleted. This became public because the FBI used it to trap some Mafia members, and the technique slipped out in the courtroom. Since then, many have verified this. We know that our physical location can be, and sometimes is, monitored and recorded, on a 24-hour basis using both the phone companies' cell network logs and the GPS function on our own phones. From an article in Time Magazine, titled, "What Your Cell Phone Could Be Telling the Government": "When you carry a cell phone, it is constantly sending signals about where you are. It "pings" nearby cell-phone towers about every seven seconds so it can be ready to make and receive calls. When it does, the phone is also telling the company that owns the towers where you are at that moment - data the company then stores away indefinitely. There is also a second kind of locational data that phone companies have, thanks to a GPS chip that is embedded in most smart phones now. This is even more accurate - unlike the towers, which can only pinpoint a general area where you may be - GPS can often reveal exactly where you are at any given moment within a matter of meters." US Federal agencies claim they can, by remotely activating the GPS function, trace a mobile phone owner to within only a few meters, 24 hours a day. After a period of monitoring, they can pinpoint where you live, where you work, where you have lunch, the routes you normally take, the places you frequent or inhabit, and the friends you visit. And by downloading your contact lists and intercepting your calls, emails and messages, they can soon know who all your friends and contacts are, where you meet them, and - unless all of you remove the batteries from your phones - what you discuss. Records are maintained indefinitely of all email addresses and phone numbers used, all instant messaging accounts, as well as the contact information for every person you know - both personal and business. These same authorities claim that, if they are interested, they can not only know where to find you at any time of any day, but can construct a profile of virtually your entire behavioral pattern, just from recording and examining all of your communication and movement history over a period of time. Combined with this, the knowledge of all your internet activity, including all searches, all clicked links, all websites visited, they boast they can know you better than you know yourself. You shouldn't find any of this comforting. We now know that Google (at least) and (more likely) all ISPs, scan, sift, store and forward, the content of all your emails. The Washington Post, in its recent "Top Secret America" series, on which it had hundreds of reporters working for more than two years, stated that each day more than 1.7 billion messages were forwarded to the NSA and CIA for cataloguing, sorting and permanent storage. We know now that Google, and possibly all US search engines, save every search term and every clicked link for about 40 years. Google admits doing this, but refuses to discuss its reasons or the use to which they put this information. The Atlantic Magazine recently ran an article in which was documented Google's ability to reconstruct an entire 6 years of email history (4 Gb of data) that had been maliciously deleted by a hacker. It appears possible, if not likely, that every email you've ever sent is still stored somewhere and can be made available to undisclosed third parties without your knowledge or consent. Google collected e-mails and other personal information from unsecured wireless networks while taking photographs for its Street View mapping service. The company admitted it had for years collected people's online activities from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries, prompting police investigations around the globe. No believable evidence was presented that this practice was inadvertent, nor does any proof exist that this practice has ceased. Facebook officials now admit that they have been creating a running log of all the web pages that each of their 800 million or so members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook web page for any reason. All of this collected information is made available to the US government, including its agencies like the CIA, which is why some countries, like China, restrict access to these social media websites. Facebook's data collection is among the most detailed. Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and director of Software Freedom Law Center, calls Facebook "one big database of hundreds of millions of people containing the kind of information far beyond what the secret police in 20th-century totalitarian regimes had." The company knows which social contacts are closest to you and can guess your moods, he said. And if you're obsessively checking another person's profile at the same time he or she is doing the same with yours, Moglen claims, "Facebook can even tell you're going to have an affair before you do." Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes declined to comment on specific data-gathering and retention policies but said the privacy policy makes clear that the company may disclose information. We now know that Skype has a back door that can expose your location, identity and the content you're downloading, and will permit anyone with the necessary tools to intercept and record all your phone conversations. RapLeaf is an online tracking company that gathers minute detail on individual Americans. The company can build extraordinarily intimate databases on people by tapping voter-registration files, shopping histories, social-networking activities and real estate records, among other things. And the company transmits that data to many other firms. For example, a company might come to RapLeaf with an email-address mailing list, and RapLeaf will provide detailed personal information about the people on that list. In one case, RapLeaf transmitted data about an individual to at least 23 data and advertising companies after she logged into Pingg, according to a WSJ analysis of the computer code. Data gathered and sold by RapLeaf can be very specific. According to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, RapLeaf's segments included a person's household income range, age range, political leaning, and gender and age of children in the household, as well as interests in topics including religion, the Bible, gambling, tobacco, adult entertainment and "get rich quick" offers. In all, RapLeaf segmented people into more than 400 categories Both Facebook and MySpace send data to RapLeaf, though both sites claim they prohibit applications from sharing user data with outside data companies. We now know that Apple itunes has a Trojan Horse that gives governments access to your computer and files, and a "flaw" that has for years allowed government spying on citizens in the US and UK. The iTunes software you probably have on your computer has a purposely built-in back door that allows governments to surreptitiously log into your computer and prowl around through your personal data and files. And of course, virtually everyone allows iTunes to go through firewalls and other security protections that would otherwise prevent malicious intrusion. A British company called Gamma International boasts in one of its marketing videos of its ability to send a "fake iTunes update" that can infect computers with surveillance software. The company has marketed this hacking software to governments that exploited the vulnerability, and which is installed on more than 250 million machines worldwide. We now know about Carrier IQ, an interception and tracking software which is installed on more than 150 million phones - mostly in the US - which captures "metrics" that are undefined but include all keystrokes - and forwards this information regularly to network operators and other unidentified third parties. The design of Adobe Fash would let Adobe, presumably under request from authorities, remotely turn on your mic/camera. The intent is built-in to outsource a critical access control decision to a third party. Some Western readers, most notably Americans, will have an ideological bias against China, cherising the thought that this country engages in censorship and prevents freedom of speech. I believe there are serious qualitative differences between China and the West, with respect to these media. Consider the repeated US accusations, from Hillary Clinton and others, that "China" - presumably meaning the government - was "hacking into the Google gmail accounts of dissidents". Did anyone stop to think HOW Mrs. Clinton (or Google) could possibly know which gmail accounts belonged to "dissidents"? There are only two possible answers: either they didn't know and were making sweeping accusations without foundation, or they did know. And the only way they could know, would be if they themselves were intercepting and reading all these emails - for the very purpose of identifying "dissidents" who might be of use to them. There are no other possibilities. I see it a bit like the military expenses for these two countries. The US pursues military supremacy to rule the world. China pursues it, not to expand an empire, but to ensure no empire will conquer it again. China is reacting to destabilising threats (real or imagined - I would say, real); while the US is not under threat. The US actions are aggressive, and are not aimed at external (or internal) terrorists but primarily at its own population. This is police state stuff. When we begin watching and spying, not on those who are suspected of doing wrong, but on everyone with the thought that someone, somewhere may think of doing wrong, that's a very different thing. China is trying to eliminate platforms that provide opportunities for foreign states (Read USA) to interfere; there is no coordinated effort to police all minds, as apparently exists today in the US. China reacts only if and when it sees an enemy; the US assumes everyone is the enemy and is looking for proof. China will not become a Fascist state; the US is well on its way now. I think that's the difference. The reason the Chinese government restricts access to these American (and they are all American) social media platforms should be obvious to most readers. They are tools used by the US today, just as the VOA has been for decades, to cause unrest and dissention, encourage political subversion and sedition, enlisting help from apparent "dissidents" (traitors, in fact) to betray their own country. The US Government, the CIA and the US Military use these media platforms in attempts to corrupt the allegiance of a people by attempting to destroy their loyalty and patriotism, to turn them against their own government, and to use them as pawns to undermine the foundation of their own country. If that sounds like excessive rhetoric to you, consider the well-documented evidence now available that these same social media, wielded as weapons by agencies of the US government, were a primary factor in instigating the unrest in Serbia, the "Color Revolutions" in Eastern Europe, the various "Arab Spring" uprisings in the Middle East and Eastern Africa, and the stillborn "Jasmine Revolution" in China - some 12 or 13 in all. From an article at salon.com: "Hypocrisy from the U.S. Government — having U.S. officials self-righteously impose standards on other countries which they routinely violate - is so common and continuous that the vast majority of examples do not even merit notice. But sometimes, it is so egregious and shameless - and sufficiently consequential - that it should not go unobserved. Such is the case with the speech delivered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday at a Conference on Internet Freedom held at the Hague, a conference devoted to making "a stand for freedom of expression on the internet, especially on behalf of cyber dissidents and bloggers." Clinton has been flamboyantly parading around for awhile now as the planet’s leading protector of Internet freedom; yesterday she condemned multiple countries for assaulting this freedom and along the way actually managed to keep a straight face as she said things like this: [T]he right to express one’s views, practice one’s faith, peacefully assemble with others to pursue political or social change – these are all rights to which all human beings are entitled, whether they choose to exercise them in a city square or an internet chat room. . . . This is an urgent task. It is most urgent, of course, for those around the world whose words are now censored, who are imprisoned because of what they or others have written online, who are blocked from accessing entire categories of internet content, or who are being tracked by governments seeking to keep them from connecting with one another. But when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the internet is diminished for all of us. What we do today to preserve fundamental freedoms online will have a profound effect on the next generation of users. . . ." Copyright 龙信明。 2010-2012. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to post this text on non-commercial community internet sites, provided the oritinal source (www.bearcanada.com) is stated, and the URL is posted to the original article. The content must remain intact and this copyright note displayed. Skype flaw reveals users' location, file-downloading habits - Joan Goodchild, CSO Online, 1 Dec 2011 A team of researchers has uncovered an issue that imperils Skype users' privacy by putting their location and identity up for grabs. They have found code in Skype that can expose your location, identity and the content you're downloading. Microsoft, which owns Skype, says they are working on the problem. The issue was uncovered earlier this year by a team of researchers from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), MPI-SWS in Germany and INRIA in France and included Keith Ross, Stevens Le Blond, Chao Zhang, Arnaud Legout, and Walid Dabbous. The team presented the research in Berlin recently at the Internet Measurement Conference 2011 in a paper titled "I know where you are and what you are sharing." The researchers found several properties of Skype that can track not only users' locations over time, but also their peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing activity, according to a summary of the findings on the NYU-Poly web site. Earlier this year, a German researcher found a cross-site scripting flaw in Skype that could allow someone to change an account password without the user's consent. ... Original Article This web page is in French, Use the Google Chrome translation feature. Original Article Gordon Peterson II: Original Article We now know that an Apple iTunes "flaw" has for years allowed government spying on citizens in the US and UK. A British company called Gamma International boasts in one of its marketing videos of its ability to send a "fake iTunes update" that can infect computers with surveillance software. The company has marketed this hacking software to governments that exploited the vulnerability, and which is installed on more than 250 million machines worldwide. The hacking software, FinFisher, is used to spy on intelligence targets' computers. It is known to be used by British agencies, by the US CIA, and apparently by Egypt's secret police, among others. Original Article (Telegraph) Surveillance Company Says It Sent Fake iTunes, Flash Updates Original Article Hacked! James Fallows, *The Atlantic*, Sun, 25 Dec 2011 Original Article As e-mail, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the "cloud" - remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity - a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years' worth of hacked and deleted e-mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now-and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future. Carrier IQ (CIQ) sells rootkit software included on many US handsets sold on Sprint, Verizon and more. Devices supported include android phones, Blackberries, Nokias, Tablet devices and more ... Carrier IQ is able to query any metric from a device. Original Article Original Article "From a technical perspective, it's simply wrong for a design to outsource a critical access control decision to a third party. My computer should decide what sites can turn on my camera and microphone, not one of Adobe's servers. The policy side is even worse. What if the FBI wanted to bug you? Could they compel Adobe to make an access control decision that would turn on your microphone?" Original Article (CirleID / Steven Bellovin) (via NNSquad) Facebook's "Like" and Twitter's "Tweet" buttons permit their makers collect data about websites people visit. From USA Today: Original Article Facebook's "Like" and Twitter's "Tweet" buttons allow Internet users to share content. But they also let their makers collect data about websites people visit. Original Article Twitter to hire White House liaison to help policymakers 'tweet more effectively': Original Article The company, which has yet to employ anyone outside of San Francisco, is looking for someone to be the “closest point of contact with a variety of important people and organisations looking to get the most out of Twitter on both strategic and highly tactical levels”, according to the job advert. The ‘Government Liaison’ will be responsible for helping Twitter understand what it can do “to better serve candidates and policymakers across party and geographical lines”. They will also “support policymakers use of Twitter to help them communicate and interact with their constituents and the world” and help set the culture and approach of a “fledgling public policy department”. Arianna Huffington, True Patriot . . . and Mark Zuckerberg's Best Friend Original Article What Facebook and Google know and whom they tell Original Article Political Repression 2.0: The US and the Internet: Still No. 1 Original Article Why Governments Are Terrified of Social Media: Social Media in the Crosshairs in the USA: by Lauren Weinstein Click Here In addition to the rosy narrative celebrating how Facebook and Twitter have enabled freedom movements around the world: What Your Cell Phone Could Be Telling the Government: Original Article US Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet: Original Article Google report reveals British government web snooping: Original Article Original Article Original Article Original Article Original Article Original Article Users are regularly signing up for Big Brother-like tech that could result in the loss of insurance coverage or worse. "But the worst risk is what people aren't talking about: Big Brother-type technology used to monitor specific individuals and shape their behavior through penalties and rewards. If the government were doing this, we'd have people in the streets, but in the hands of private companies, these seductive methods convince people to naively agree to being controlled." Original Article |