Tag: surveillancestate

Europe wants to spy too

A main outcome of all these revelations will be that the amateurish spying services in europe will be built up:

It also seems to be difficult for German intelligence agencies to actually track the activities of the NSA. The Americans’ technical capabilities are in many ways superior to what exists in Germany. At the BFV domestic intelligence agency, not even every employee has a computer with an Internet connection. But now, the German agencies want to beef up their capabilities. There are already more than 100 employees at the BFV responsible for counterintelligence, but officials are hoping to see this double.

all the calls by eurocrats to not use american sites make a lot more sense now.

Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies

i have been amused how naive / hypocritical people have been around the world in assuming that their own governments aren’t spying on them. the funniest are the german politicians that sprout nonsense like the “right to be forgotten” while being fully aware of their own extensive spying.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, received the coveted software program XKeyscore from the NSA – and promised data from Germany in return

2013-12-05: as expected, other countries are working hard to close the gap with the NSA.

Yesterday the 2014-2019 defense bill passed first reading in the French National Assembly. It marks a strong shift towards total online surveillance. If passed, the bill will not only allow live monitoring of everyone’s personal and private data but also do so without judicial oversight, as the surveillance will be enabled through administrative request. The bill also turns permanent measures that were only temporary.

Spook blogging

aww, so cute, damage control mode:

Created at the direction of the President of the United States, IC ON THE RECORD provides immediate, ongoing and direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities carried out by the US Intelligence Community.

sure, whatever you say.

Inept cyberwar

Alexander runs the nation’s cyberwar efforts, an empire he has built over the past 8 years by insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger.

keith alexander is the pro to total information awareness amateur efforts from the early 2000s.

Who has your back?

In this annual report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation examined the policies of major Internet companies — including ISPs, email providers, cloud storage providers, location-based services, blogging platforms, and social networking sites — to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data. The purpose of this report is to incentivize companies to be transparent about how data flows to the government and encourage them to take a stand for user privacy whenever it is possible to do so.

On finding the Boston bombers

current events up in boston make me wonder why relatively little time has passed in tracking down the culprits. is it due to sousveillance? collaborative filtering? what will it mean for large scale facial recognition (a technology that is here but is held back)? is this the impetus for the transparent society, or something much worse? what boondoggles will come out of this, and what good, if any?

High res aerial surveillance

I doubt it will take more than a few years before the large metropolitan police forces have these. The NYPD could deploy 2 of those to have 24/7 high res coverage of Manhattan. And thus the militarization of police and the application of military innovation domestically continue. I remember ordering the EU report An appraisal of technologies for political control back in 1998 it seems so dated now.

The end of spycraft

that, and spring break ain’t the same anymore with everyone scared of being face tagged, eh? it’s called the transparent society and it is nearly here.

Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing the old paper ones. For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.

opsec is really dead:

the Kremlin was quickly able to identify new CIA officers in the US Embassy in Moscow — likely based on the differences in pay between diplomats, details on past service in “hardship” posts, speedy promotions and other digital clues,. Those clues could have come from access to the OPM data

Kill HTTP

The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have recognized. Requiring Internet companies to redesign and reconfigure their systems to facilitate government surveillance of Americans’ expressive activities is simply un-American.

2014-08-19: HTTP shaming. If appstore “reviews” were actually serious they’d block http apps.
2014-12-14: The civil war of our time. Another shot being fired: Proposal: Marking HTTP As Non-Secure

The attacks on fundamental freedoms to communicate that are represented by various government repression of the Internet around the world, and in the US by hypocritical legislation like PROTECT IP and SOPA (E-PARASITE), are fundamentally fascist in nature, despite between wrapped in their various flags of national security, anti-piracy profit protection, motherhood, and apple pie. Anyone or anything that is an enabler of communications not willingly conforming to this model are subject to attack by authorities from a variety of levels — with the targets ranging from individuals like you and me, to unbiased enablers of organic knowledge availability like Google. For all the patriotic frosting, the attacks on the Internet are really attacks on what has become popularly known as the 99%, deployed by the 1% powers who are used to having their own way and claiming the largest chunks of the pie, regardless of how many ants (that’s us!) are stomped in the process.

2015-01-28: Amen. 2015 will be less forgettable if we can kill off most HTTP sites.

New favorite Chrome Canary flag: chrome://flags/#mark-non-secure-as … non-secure! The way it should have been from the start.