July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

FC: Maine National Guard bars Green Party leader from flying
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.wartimeliberty.com/article.pl?sid=01/11/03/1813233 Military Bars Green Party Leader from Flying posted by declan on Saturday November 03, @12:36PM from the airports-are-now-a-no-speech-zone dept. As one of the U.S. Green Party's top officials, Nancy Oden is used to controversy. But Oden never expected to be hassled by National Guard troops at her hometown airport of Bangor, Maine on Thursday and barred from flying out of it. She thinks it's because of a Green Party statement she co-authored that ran in the local newspaper. The statement calls for universal health care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to "U.S. military incursions" including the bombing of Afghanistan. (The Green Party has labeled the U.S. military action an act of "state terrorism.") Oden's unsuccessful attempt to fly to Chicago for a Green Party national meeting follows a Philadelphia man's unpleasant experience after reading the wrong book at an airport, a California journalist's headaches for daring to take photos inside an airport, and the arrest of another man in Germany for bringing politically-unacceptable reading material to an airport. Also see Indymedia coverage of Oden's experience; the transcript of our interview with her from her home in Jonesboro, Maine is below. --- Interview of Nancy Oden by Declan McCullagh November 3, 2001 (Ed. Note: Nancy Oden is a top U.S. Green Party official and a member of the party's coordinating committee. An organic farmer, peace activist, and all-around firebrand, she lives in Jonesboro, Maine.) _________________________________________________________________ "Just a few weeks ago I had a piece in the Bangor paper. It's on our website, greenparty.org... I submitted it under my name alone. It's a fairly radical piece; that's what I do. I'm a political and environmental activist. "I walked into the Bangor airport. What I saw was National Guard folks all over carrying machine guns... The atmosphere was very tense... This was Thursday... I went over to the American Airlines ticket counter way down at the end. Nobody else was there, except the clerk. I gave him my name. He didn't even ask for photo ID. It was almost like they were expecting me. He put it into the computer. He stayed on the computer a long time, like 10 minutes. "He put an S on the boarding pass, for search. He said, 'You've been picked for having your bag searched.' ... I said to him, 'This wasn't random, was it?' He said, 'No you were in there to be searched, no matter what.' I went over to baggage to put my bags through the X-ray and then went into the boarding area. "There was this National Guard guy there. He yells over at me, so everyone can hear, 'Bring your bags over here.' You know how they are when they're all puffed up with themselves. He said, 'Hurry up,' so I slowed down some more. "I put my bags on the table. The two women employees were standing there. [I tried to help them with a stuck zipper.] He grabbed my left arm, he started yelling in my face, 'Don't you know what happened? Sep. 11, don't you know thousands of people died?' I said, 'You can't do that.' He went to grab my arm, and I said, 'Don't touch me.' I saw an older airline guy shake his head, 'No,' and he backed off. "That insulted his little manhood. He could not force me to listen to his idiot ideas on Sep. 11, whatever it was he wanted to say. So he was angry. I hadn't done anything except pull away from him... I think he was trying to provoke me. They did the wand thing, they were done, and I heard him say real soft, 'Don't let her on the plane,' like he was talking to himself. "Then I go to get on the plane since we're all done and everything, and the American Airlines ticket guy says,' You can't get on the plane.' I say, 'Why not?' ... He says, 'Because this guy says you didn't cooperate with the search.' ... I said, 'Didn't you see him grab my arm?' He said, 'No, your back was to me.' "He said, 'Maybe we can get you on the 4:00 plane, it's the last one today.' I felt, okay, let's put up with this aggravation now and I'll go to Chicago and we'll see what we can do... Then this little guard guy, it wasn't enough to stop me, wasn't done with me. He said, 'Come with me.' I followed very slowly, I sat down for a while. I said I'm carrying these bags; I need a rest... It's called passive resistance. "He went and found the airport police to come and talk with me. He went and got six other National Guard guys and they all approached me. Here are these six untrained, ignorant, don't-know-how-to-deal-with-the-public, machine-gun-armed young guys in their camouflage suits with their military gear hanging off of it. "I looked up and started laughing, 'Is all this for me, guys? What is this about?' There was this big burly guy, he was in front. He said, 'You didn't cooperate with the search.' ... I said what he did was grabbed my arm, and I backed away... He said he only hit your arm. I said even if that's all he did, he's not allowed to do that. He can't hit my arm and demand I listen to him. "They had the airport policeman tell me, 'You're not flying out of this airport today.' ... Of course I had cooperated; why do I care if they search my bags? ... What I didn't like was being singled out because of my political views. They couldn't arrest me because there was no reason for that. They had people who saw there was nothing to arrest me for. They wanted to get back at me somehow because I was not a subservient female, because I questioned their manhood. "I went to the American Airlines guy and said, 'Is this just today?' He said, 'I don't know.' One clerk said, 'You could drive to Boston [five hours away] and see if you can get out of there.' "I never made it out of Bangor. I had to turn around and drive 100 miles back home... The fact that they gave the other airlines my name... They told me they did that... That's incredible." ### ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----

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[FoRK] Google buys Keyhole
by J. Andrew Rogers 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Finally. I've been sitting on this story for weeks, and I was looking forward to this morning because there is a lot about this deal that is worth talking about, particularly with regard to how this fits into Google's portfolio. Even though I knew about the deal, I have no clue as to the reasoning why Google bought them. All the talk about them being a "map provider" is a bit of nonsense, since Keyhole is a hell of a lot more than a map provider. If they wanted maps they could have gone to the source, since it isn't like Keyhole creates their own map data -- Keyhole is more of a data integrator. Salient points: - Keyhole is fussy Windows-only client software (something that won't change soon), which appears to be a departure from Google's normally web-centric applications. - Keyhole can consume some serious bandwidth, and isn't really something that will scale to average home use (in many different ways) without wholesale re-architecting of the system. - Keyhole has terabytes of very interesting databases, many of which are not public. For example, the US DoD has become fond of using Keyhole to process all sorts of reconnaissance, intelligence, and battle planning data. And more Federal agencies and foreign governments are moving to do the same. I've maintained for some time that Google is very aggressively trying to position themselves as a very deep data-mining operation, and are facilitating that by arranging that as much data as possible flow through their systems. I've stated in the past that they have the potential to be super-evil, if only because of the access they are being granted to vast ranges of data, which many people seem more than happy to grant. From that perspective, I find the above points worrisome. It will be very interesting to see what they do with this. cheers, j. andrew rogers _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Worried about being watched? You already are
by Brian Randell 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dave: This article, from today's (UK) Guardian, about the extent of existing and planned use of automatic car number plate recognition in the UK, might be of interest to IP. cheers Brian >Worried about being watched? You already are > >Objections to road pricing include fears about privacy. But number- >plate recognition is in use now > >SA Mathieson >Thursday February 15, 2007 >The Guardian > >More than 1.3m people have signed an online petition against road- >pricing - part of the objection to it being that it would require >the government to track all vehicle journeys. But police forces >have been tracking motorists for a decade - and are in the process >of joining up their systems nationally. > >In 1997, the City of London Police introduced automatic number- >plate recognition (ANPR) cameras on roads at the edge of the City. >These cameras are now used by police nationwide, both in vehicles >and at fixed locations. Forces use ANPR for anti-terrorism work and >it is also used to enforce London's congestion charge. > >The National ANPR Data Centre, run by the Association of Chief >Police Officers with funding from the Home Office, will centralise >all ANPR data from the 43 forces in England and Wales - although >not from the London congestion charge - and the system is set to go >live in stages between April and July. > >Checks on numberplates > >It will draw on several thousand cameras, according to John Dean, >the association's national co-ordinator on ANPR. Individual forces >already run real-time checks on every plate read. The City of >London police use 20 fixed ANPR sites and three mobile units: >"We're reasonably content that everything gets covered in the >City," says chief superintendent Alex Robertson of around 100,000 >daily vehicle movements. Registrations are checked against hotlists >from the Police National Computer, including vehicles of interest >to the police for crimes such as burglary or theft of petrol. The >check takes four seconds. "If we get a match, that comes back to >our control room," says Robertson. "We assess it, and decide if >it's a priority at that time." > >The data is also stored for later analysis: if a vehicle is used >for a crime in the City, the force should have an image of it >entering the area, which may also show the driver and passenger. >Robertson says this can help both include and exclude people and >vehicles from an inquiry. > >Given the way ANPR works, the national centre will not know about >every vehicle journey from start to finish, and those that do not >pass a camera will not be traced. What it will have is around 9m >sightings a day initially, with the capacity for 50m a day. The >details will be kept for two years, both at the data centre and by >the force concerned. > >The central system uses an Oracle database, with data for analysis >extracted to a Postgres database to avoid affecting core >performance, and custom-written Java software with specific police >networks rather than the internet used to send and receive data. > >For every sighting, a "plate patch" - a photo of the numberplate - >is also stored as a check: the technology aims to be 95% reliable >for UK plates, although this falls slightly in adverse conditions >and with foreign plates. Plate patches can be used as corroborative >evidence in court. > >The national centre will allow analysis that has been difficult to >do across police force boundaries. Dean gives the example of three >similar crimes that have been committed within one force's area, >all of which took place near ANPR cameras. The police checked the >vehicles scanned around the times of the crimes and were compared: >"There were two vehicles that were seen in the vicinity at those >times," Dean says, adding: "One was responsible for that crime." > >It will also carry out automated data-mining, including a search >for cloned vehicles: these can result in an innocent person >receiving speeding fines or worse. The software will look for >impossibly quick journeys: if the same plate is read in London, >then 10 minutes later in Liverpool, it will be added immediately to >a hotlist. "The clone will be identified even before an innocent >person is targeted, we hope," says Peter Wilson, assistant national >ANPR co-ordinator. . . . full article at: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2012729,00.html Cheers Brian -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/ ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/@now Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] Worried about being watched? You already are
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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[liberationtech] In Ex-Soviet States, Russian Spy Tech Still Watches You
by Ronald Deibert 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Libtech FYI In Ex-Soviet States, Russian Spy Tech Still Watches You b" BY ANDREI SOLDATOV AND IRINA BOROGAN b" 12.21.12 http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/russias-hand/all/ "Manned by the countrybs main security service, the FSB, this bSystem of Operative Search Measuresb has been in use for more than two decades. But recently, SORM has been upgraded. It is ingesting new types of data. It is being used as Moscowbs main tool for spying on the countrybs political protesters. And it has become extremely useful in the quest to make sure that the Kremlinbs influence in the former Soviet Union continues long into the second regime of Vladimir Putin." A joint investigation by Agentura.Ru, CitizenLab and Privacy International. Ronald Deibert Director, the Citizen Lab and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies Munk School of Global Affairs University of Toronto (416) 946-8916 PGP: http://deibert.citizenlab.org/pubkey.txt http://deibert.citizenlab.org/ twitter.com/citizenlab r.deibert(a)utoronto.ca -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[liberationtech] Stanford Magazine - Can I Get Some Privacy? - March/April 2013
by Yosem Companys 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=59976 How much do Internet companies know about us, and what do they plan to do with the information? If only we knew. By Brian Eule, Stanford Magazine ASSUMING YOU POSSESS a cell phone and a computer and a credit card, the following scenario, or something like it, might sound familiar. Your morning begins with coffee and a bagel and the morning paper, perhaps read on a laptop. You click on stories about Egyptian unrest, the firearms industry and Downton Abbey. Two other websites are open on your desktop. One of them shows your Facebook account. You notice that you've been "tagged" in a photo from last week's poker game, in a pose that suggests one too many beers. Meanwhile, a friend has sent you a link to an article in the Onion that zestfully parodies a well-known senator. You "like" it. You head out for your daily commute. At the toll booth, a Fastrak device validates the code on your car and records the date and time of your arrival. You stop for gas. You swipe your debit card. The pump asks for your ZIP code and you type it in. As the 20-gallon tank fills, you pull out your smartphone and do a quick search for a weekend flight to Chicago. Along with the flight schedules and airfares, an advertisement appears about a local concert at the same venue where you attended a performance last month. In the first two hours of your day, computers have recorded that you are a likely watcher of PBS, you drink alcohol and you have a penchant for irreverent humor. They know you drive a large vehicle and probably have family in the Midwest. They know when you go to work and the route you take. It's 8 a.m. and you've already left a sizable virtual fingerprint. Now add the dozens of other electronic transactions you make in a given daybevery website you visit, every item you purchase online, all the searches you do, all the posts you make on social media sitesbplus those of all your friends. Multiply that by hundreds of days of Internet activity. Throw in motor vehicle records, mortgage documents, credit scores, medical diagnoses. What does your profile look like now? Data about all of us lives online, in "clouds," on our web browsers and in others' databases. Cell phones show our physical location and track the places we have been. Websites display the address and price of home purchases, along with the buyer and seller. Advertising agencies know the web pages we have visited and the text we have entered online. Increasingly, and with increasing sophistication, companies are collecting, analyzing and selling data about tens of millions of people. And most of those people have no idea when or how it's happening. "I don't think that people understand all the information that's out there about them," says Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. "People might not think that you can put it all together, but they're wrong. It's increasingly easy to figure out who people are. There is a treasure trove of information out there that is available." The interdisciplinary CIS is helping to expose the massive asymmetry between the average consumer's understanding and practices that might threaten their privacy. Its scholars, along with privacy advocates in the nonprofit sector, are pushing for more transparency and stricter industry standards in how data is collected and used. Concern about privacy intrusions often originates from an innocuous-sounding source: cookies. So named because of the "crumbs" of information they collect, cookies are codes imbedded in a computer hard drive that track web activity. They are legal and in many ways beneficial. For example, cookies "remember" passwords so repeat users of a site don't have to type it in every time they return. They save user preferences and enable basic Internet conventions like a shopping cart that makes online buying easier and less time-consuming. But a third party, unbeknownst to the user, also can set cookies that follow that user from site to site, gathering information about him or her. The proliferation of this practice has spawned a new business category: data brokers. These companies harvest public records along with web activity of all kinds, then mash it up with algorithms designed to help clients target potential customers with advertisements. Although individual names aren't attached to this data, scholars say there is sufficient information to tease out a person's identity. "Web browsing history is inextricably linked to personal information," wrote Jonathan Mayer, a Law School student and a PhD student in computer science, and Stanford computer science professor John C. Mitchell, in a paper last year for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on Security and Privacy. "The pages a user visits can reveal her location, interests, purchases, employment status, sexual orientation, financial challenges, medical conditions, and more. Examining individual page loads is often adequate to draw many conclusions about a user; analyzing patterns of activity allows yet more inferences." AT AN EXTREME, piecing together information that exists about each of us can be used for identity theft. But that's rare in comparison to more typical concerns regarding the lack of control over who sees what personal information, how they use it and what decisions they base on it. Aleecia M. McDonald, director of privacy at the CIS, notes that banks might charge a higher mortgage rate for a customer whose friends on Facebook had negative credit events. Or, web merchants might adjust the price of products based on a customer's ZIP code. Much of the concern, McDonald notes, resides in the uncertainty over how all of the information will eventually be employed. It's not just the things they disclose that people find troubling; "it's also this data leakage about what they do online and what they're interested in, their intellectual history and then also their friends," McDonald says. "They don't know where the data is going, they don't know how it's used, and they don't know what happens 10, 20, 40, 50 years from now." Inferences based on what a user does online and who their friends are can be misleading. Car insurance companies already vary premiums based on demographics, but what if a user's Internet searches also informed a risk assessment? Taken out of context, most of us have conducted searches that might look suspicious if revealed in raw form. Employers are allowed to ask a job applicant to log in and show them their Facebook page during an interview. What if they also could see your search history? Might a college reject an applicant based on additional information that now lives online? Earlier this year, Facebook announced a feature it called "graph search" which allowed users to search for others who have "liked" various topics or checked in at specific locations. Privacy advocates howled. Here was information people might have voluntarily shared, but did not expect to be catalogued. Information once known only to close friends might now more easily be found by strangersband paired with other information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that champions consumers' digital rights, used the example of a graph-search-enabled query for "People who work at Apple, Inc. who like Samsung Mobile," information that, if shared, might put those employees in an awkward position. For its part, Facebook is encouraging all users to revisit their privacy settings, which locks down some of what others could find via graph search. Google logs massive amounts of information about its users and, "regularly receives requests from governments and courts around the world to hand over user data," according to the company's transparency reports. In the second half of 2012, Google received requests for information on more than 33,000 users' accounts and complied with 66 percent of those. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2010 found that, "the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning." Twelve of them, it noted, installed more than 100. Privacy concerns may vary by age. McDonald speculates that younger generations might be most vigilant about protecting their privacy from their parents. The middle generation might be most concerned with what employers or health care providers might learn about them. Regardless of age, much of the issue centers around control, or lack of it. "The question, on some level, is 'Whose data is it?' " McDonald says. And the problem isn't confined to for-profit companies. Last October, Mayer noticed an article in the New York Times about the use of third-party trackers by the Obama and Romney campaigns. Both campaigns claimed they had safeguards in place to protect users' anonymity. Mayer didn't buy it. "This seemed pretty implausible to me," he says. "It was frustrating, at this level of politics, that they were making this claim." So he fired up an open source platform he had created, called FourthParty, that measures dynamic web contentbsites whose offerings vary based on different information provided by the user or the programband monitors interactions with web applications. Mayer had to give himself a screen name, so he went with "Leland Stanford." Then he entered some information and tried to see what ended up in the page codes that got passed along. Within a day, Mayer had confirmed his hunch. On both campaign sites, personal informationbin some instances a user's name, in others an address or ZIP codebwas included in the page web address that was given to the third-party trackers. Mayer didn't think it was an intentional privacy breach, but he felt the parties should have known better than to claim they could keep the data anonymous. Facebook presents a particular dilemma. The site is extraordinarily popular in part because it fosters connections by inviting people to share information. But its reach and aggressiveness in collecting user data are troubling, says Mayer. His research indicates roughly half of web browsers are logged into Facebook while users are visiting other pages. Each time those users visit a page that also has a Facebook icon, the information is sent back to Facebook. Even if the user doesn't click on that icon. In the absence of strong controls, what are consumers to do to protect themselves? One strategy: Pay for privacy. Start-ups such as Reputation.com will scrub personal information from online databases for a fee. But while some people are willing to pay, critics say consumers need better options. "Having to pay a fee in order to engage in a retrospective effort to claw back personal information doesn't seem to us the right way to go about this," David Vladeck, then director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, said at a congressional hearing in 2010. Deleting cookies from one's computer is only a half measure. There are still other fingerprints left behind, Mayer says. Which version of which web browser they use, which Windows updates they have, which plugins they installed, the order of the updates they downloaded, and so on, all create a unique trail of sites visited. "Consumers by and large have no idea what's going on," he asserts. Scholars at CIS are actively working to strengthen individuals' remedies. Each Wednesday, members of an international World Wide Web working group on tracking protection dial in to a conference call. Their mission is to "improve user privacy and user control by defining mechanisms for expressing user preferences around Web tracking and for blocking or allowing Web tracking elements." Representatives from academia and industry, including people from Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google and Mozilla, try to agree on a set of recommendations for the field. McDonald and Mayer both participate. Much of the discussion stems from a relatively simple idea that Mayer and Arvind Narayanan, a former postdoc at Stanford, now an affiliate scholar at the CIS and professor at Princeton, helped demonstrate. Around 2007, in response to increased tracking on the web, privacy advocates explored a Do Not Track program that would provide website users a means of blocking trackers. It would work much like the Do Not Call registry adopted to protect consumers from intrusive telephone marketers. It seemed more sensible to work from the user end, rather than having each company offer an opt-out, but many in the industry thought it was impossible to do. Mayer and Narayanan began writing on the subject, describing on a blog how it would work: A header in an HTTP field, the building block of the web, would signal the computer not to collect information, thus enabling users to opt out of tracking of all kinds. They tried to show companies ways they could respond to protect their businesses. It is "a simple technology that is completely compatible with the existing web," they wrote. "We believe regulation is necessary to verify and enforce compliance with a user's choice to opt out of tracking." In a "Do Not Track Cookbook," which they posted online, Mayer and Narayanan proposed limiting identifiers to each website to prevent tracking from one place to another. A 2010 FTC report recommended implementing a Do Not Track mechanism; several web browsers have adopted its use, but compliance is voluntary and its effectiveness has been limited. UNLIKE SOME COUNTRIES that have codified a comprehensive right to privacy, Jennifer Granick notes, the United States has no universal privacy law. Instead, it relies on a patchwork of regulations and the Fourth Amendment, which states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." But the Fourth Amendment applies only to intrusions from the government. And most federal privacy statutes apply only to specific sectors, such as health care, education or communications and therefore fail to adequately protect personal data on the Internet. The oddest origin of such a statute relates to video rental records and stems from the days of Robert Bork's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In 1987, Michael Dolan, then a reporter for the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in Washington, D.C., walked into a local video store he knew Bork and his wife frequented and requested a list of the couple's video rentals. The subsequent article he wrote, describing Bork based on 146 videos he had presumably watched, did little to define the man, other than revealing a yen for Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant. But it caused a stir among the nation's legislators, who were suddenly concerned about their own privacy. Within a year, Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act to prohibit "wrongful disclosure of video tape rental or sale records" without a customer's consent. The Act recently returned to the floor of Congress, with an amendment that makes it easier for companies like Netflix to have consumers share their online video viewing as a means of delivering suggestions that fit their tastes. The law in general is still catching up to the technology. In early February, the California Supreme Court ruled that Apple could legally require some personal information as a means of validating users and preventing fraud. However, the majority opinion suggested that new laws might be necessary to adequately protect consumer privacy. Narayanan tries to make a clear distinction between privacy research and privacy advocacy. He believes in an individual's choice, and thus transparency and consumer awareness are important. He also is quick to point out that technology advancements can improve privacy options. At the start of the privacy class he teaches each year, he shares an example. The novel Fifty Shades of Grey might have been stigmatized by its graphic sexual content, Narayanan tells his students, but because it first was released as an e-book, people were able to read it on tablets or e-readers without other people knowing. Then, when the book became popular enough that there was no stigma attached, it was published in print. "The narrative of technology killing privacy is, at best, dramatically overstated," Narayanan says. "For every example of technology hurting privacy, there's one of technology helping privacy." Another example: Self-checkout kiosks used in some large retailers and grocery stores that allow shoppers to make purchases without a store clerk knowing what they've bought. These examples present an interesting paradox: While reading Fifty Shades of Grey on a Kindle feels more private, there is still an electronic record of the purchase. Compare that to buying it at a bookstore, with cash. A clerk might know you like steamy novels but that's where the "record" of your purchase ends. As technology is adopted more widely, old ways are made obsolete or, in some cases, disappear altogether. But that limits our ability to avoid the technology, and the attendant privacy concerns, if we chose to do so. Solving the privacy conundrum would be easier if the solution didn't also encroach on the ability of companies to prosper, and to deliver new and interesting methods of entertainment, social engagement and commerce that consumers happily embrace. The same technological developments that raise privacy questions also add convenience to many ordinary tasks. They enable instantaneous communication. Social media sites work because of the participation of all of our friends, sharing photos and updates that we enjoy receiving. What's the answer? Control and transparency were major themes of a 2012 government report titled "A Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights" that aimed to establish "a baseline of clear protections for consumers and greater certainty for companies." The report stated that "Consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it" as well as a right "to easily understandable and accessible information about privacy and security practices." The report recognized and attempted to account for the benefits of data collection and to find ways of protecting privacy without thwarting innovation. But it warned that if companies don't adopt measures themselves, further regulatory scrutiny is likely. Those warnings are coming true. Last July Congress began an inquiry into data mining practices. In October, a similar probe was launched into nine data brokers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation expects several pieces of legislation to go before Congress over the next year, including amendments to existing bills that would mandate a warrant for obtaining private electronic communications such as old emails. Minnesota Sen. Al Franken recently introduced The Location Protection Privacy Act of 2012 that would potentially prevent smartphone apps from tracking a cell phone's location and sending it to a third party without consent. Another major player is the Electronic Privacy Information Center, whose president and executive director Marc Rotenberg, JD '87, has testified before Congress on many issues related to consumer privacy. "I think the next couple of years will be formative for the next decade after," CIS's McDonald says. But forecasts about how business interests and privacy concerns ultimately will be reconciled are cloudy at best. And the proverbial slippery slope is getting more treacherous all the time. "I would expect that targeting advertising is just the beginning of what could be done with this data," McDonald says. She worries "that we will look back later on and go, 'remember when it was so simple? It was only advertising.'" Brian Eule, '01, is a frequent contributor to Stanford. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[tor-talk] Orweb v2 - now supports Android 2.x and 3.x
by Nathan Freitas 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I mentioned this at the Tor Dev meeting, and now we have a build out. The big news is that you can use this on any Android device without root. Just install Orbot, connect to Tor, then install this, and you are ready to browse like an onion. The main issue we are concerned about tracking down is DNS leaks with how we are proxying. We have to use HTTP/S proxy support for now, but it does seem to be resolving names via Tor, since .onion addresses do work. >From here, I'll be talking more with mikeperry about all of the possible things we can do to further lockdown webkit, which is the basis for rweb. You can grab the direct binary and sig from: https://github.com/guardianproject/Orweb/downloads ******** Orweb v2 (0.2.1) - now supports Android 2.x and 3.x Use with Orbot on any Android device without any complex configuration. It just works right out of the box.. err, market! Also blocks flash and optionally javascript, and other malicious downloads. Integrates directly with DuckDuckGo.com's search hidden service for private, anonymous searching. updated market page: https://market.android.com/details?id=info.guardianproject.browser&feature=… Directly binary download: https://github.com/guardianproject/Orweb/Orwebv2-280711-0.2.1.b.apk/qr_code Source and project: https://github.com/guardianproject/Orweb/tree/v0.2.1 Orweb is a privacy enhanced web browser that support proxies. When used with the Orbot (Tor on Android) app, this web browser provides enhanced privacy features. Through Tor, it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked. It also blocks cookies, keeps no local history, disables Flash, and requires only Internet permissions, keeping you safe from malicious content. Finally, beyond Tor, it can support any HTTP proxy server. What's in this version: - added Android 2.x and 3.x support - new localization / languages - integrated DuckDuckGo.com search engine - new icon! /** * * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License * version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. * * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the * GNU General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA */ _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[tor-talk] Orweb v2 - now supports Android 2.x and 3.x
by Nathan Freitas 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I mentioned this at the Tor Dev meeting, and now we have a build out. The big news is that you can use this on any Android device without root. Just install Orbot, connect to Tor, then install this, and you are ready to browse like an onion. The main issue we are concerned about tracking down is DNS leaks with how we are proxying. We have to use HTTP/S proxy support for now, but it does seem to be resolving names via Tor, since .onion addresses do work. >From here, I'll be talking more with mikeperry about all of the possible things we can do to further lockdown webkit, which is the basis for rweb. You can grab the direct binary and sig from: https://github.com/guardianproject/Orweb/downloads ******** Orweb v2 (0.2.1) - now supports Android 2.x and 3.x Use with Orbot on any Android device without any complex configuration. It just works right out of the box.. err, market! Also blocks flash and optionally javascript, and other malicious downloads. Integrates directly with DuckDuckGo.com's search hidden service for private, anonymous searching. updated market page: https://market.android.com/details?id=info.guardianproject.browser&feature=… Directly binary download: https://github.com/guardianproject/Orweb/Orwebv2-280711-0.2.1.b.apk/qr_code Source and project: https://github.com/guardianproject/Orweb/tree/v0.2.1 Orweb is a privacy enhanced web browser that support proxies. When used with the Orbot (Tor on Android) app, this web browser provides enhanced privacy features. Through Tor, it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked. It also blocks cookies, keeps no local history, disables Flash, and requires only Internet permissions, keeping you safe from malicious content. Finally, beyond Tor, it can support any HTTP proxy server. What's in this version: - added Android 2.x and 3.x support - new localization / languages - integrated DuckDuckGo.com search engine - new icon! /** * * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License * version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. * * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the * GNU General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA */ _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[silk] Trolling as counter-terrorism
by Udhay Shankar N 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

No comment. Udhay http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/counterterrorism-trolls/all/ Newest U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy: Trolling By Spencer Ackerman July 18, 2012 | In the decade since 9/11, the U.S. government has used a wide variety of tactics against terrorists. Itbs invaded countries where they operated (and ones where they didnbt). Itbs tried to win the backing of foreign populations in which the terrorists hide. And itbs sent commandos and deadly flying robots to kill them one by one. One thing it hasnbt done, until now: troll them. Within the State Department, a Silicon Valley veteran has quietly launched an improbable new initiative to annoy, frustrate and humiliate denizens of online extremist forums. Itbs so new that it hasnbt fully taken shape: Even its architects concede it hasnbt fleshed out an actual strategy yet, and accordingly canbt point to any results itbs yielded. Its annual budget is a rounding error. The Pentagon will spend more in Afghanistan in the time it takes you to finish reading this sentence. But it also represents, in the mind of its creator, a chance to discourage impressionable youth from becoming terrorists b all in an idiom they firmly understand. And if it actually works, it might stand a chance of cutting off al-Qaidabs ability to replenish its ranks at a time when it looks to be reeling. The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the State Department and Viral Peacebs creator, tells Danger Room he wants to use b logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them.b Think of it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage. Outside the first Viral Peace/Generation Change seminar in Davao City, Philippines, April 2012. Photo: Crishyl Ann/Facebook Al-Qaidabs influence has waxed and waned during the past decade, but its adherents, both current and potential, have gradually drifted online. Forums like the password-protected Shumukh site host extremist bulletin boards, where regulars debate the finer points of jihadist theory and boast of grandiose plans to assassinate senior U.S. officials. The denizens of those forums might be scrubs. But the online havens are, increasingly, the town square for extremism, especially as drones and commandos batter the terroristsb physical sanctuaries. Al-Qaidabs Yemen branch publishes an English-language web magazine; its Somali branch recently joined Twitter. The U.S. has thought of several strategies for confronting the not-so-new wave of online extremism, from apparent DDoS attacks on extremist websites to infiltrating them using fake jihadi personas. The White Housebs broad counterterrorism strategy, meanwhile, all but ignores the internet. Amanullah has a different view. You donbt necessarily need to deface the forums if you can troll them to the point where their most malign influences are neutralized. In an interview at a Washington coffee shop near his State Department office, Amanullah explains that online extremists have b an energy, theybve got a vitality that frankly attracts some of these at-risk people,b Amanullah says. b It appeals to macho, it appeals to peoplebs rebellious nature, it appeals to people who feel downtrodden.b Creating a comparable passion on the other side is difficult. But itbs easier if the average online would-be jihadi has his mystique challenged through the trial by fire that is online ridicule. To Jarret Brachman, itbs an idea with promise. Brachman is one of the leading researchers of online jihadism. The people who post to the forums are b are massive narcissists [who] need constant ego boosts,b Brachman says b and, like other online blowhards, they tend to talk outside their areas of presumed expertise. Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas bomber, used to bloviate on an Islamic forum about b love and marriageb while simultaneously complaining about his moribund love life. And that makes Abdulmutallabbs virtual contemporaries vulnerable to trolling b hopefully, before they can command attract an audience. The jihadi braggarts b keep the momentum, the anger and the virulence going in forums, and they have a disproportionate impact, so if you can get rid of them, itbll pay dividends,b Brachman says. But not every extremist forum is alike. Will McCants, a former State Department official now at the CNA think tank and another scholar of online jihadism, argues Amanullahbs pupils canbt focus on the hardcore extremist forums like Shumukh. b The admins will immediately take downb posts that challenge the jihadi narrative, McCants tells Danger Room. b For something like that to work, it would have to be in more mainstream fora where extremists are trying to recruit,b like the conservative muslm.net, where b you can engage and the admins wouldnbt necessarily take you offline.b But all that is several steps ahead of Viral Peace at the moment. Viral Peace doesnbt have a strategy yet. And to hear Amanullah and his colleagues tell it, the State Department wonbt be the ones who come up with one. Itbs better, they argue, to let Muslims in various foreign countries figure out which message boards to troll and how to properly troll them. Americans wonbt know, say, the Tagalog-language Internet better than Filipinos; and as outsiders, they wonbt have the credibility necessary to actually make an impact. The best the State Department can do is train good trolls b which Amanullah began to do this spring. That means taking a big risk. If Viral Peace works as intended, with the trainees taking control of the program, Amanullah and the State Department will have little control over how the program actually trolls the terrorists. And the first wave of meetings in Muslim countries shows how far the program has to go. Inside a Viral Peace meeting in the Philippines, April 2012. Photo courtesy of Humera Khan. It makes sense that someone like Amanullah would think about pwning terrorists. A 44-year old proud Muslim and proud California geek, he was the editor-in-chief of the web magazine Altmuslim; started an online restaurant-rating service called Zabihah thatbs like a Halal version of Yelp; and launched a business service called Halalfire to drive advertising to the Muslim consumer market. Long before he arrived at the State Department in October 2010, he was profiled in Newsweek, which described the bookshelves at his El Cerrito home as b lined with copies of Wired magazine and Jack Kerouac novels.b In April, Amanullah dispatched two young associates, Humera Khan of the U.S.-based counter-radicalization think tank Muflehun and the playwright and essayist Wajahat Ali, to set the idea into practice. They took a quickie tour of Muslim nations to meet young local leaders who might be interested in confronting extremism. It was a pilot program for Viral Peace and a related program of Amanullahbs called Generation Change. The idea was to connect notable people b rising stars in the arts, business and culture fields, who had an online following b with one another and to people who focused on counterterrorism. b You donbt need to teach this generation how to use social media. They know how to use Twitter. They know how to use Facebook,b says Khan, who participated in Viral Peace in her individual capacity. b The whole [Viral Peace] curriculum is about learning what strategy is.b Except that the first wave of Viral Peace didnbt yield a strategy. In Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia b Ali went to Pakistan as well b the opening meetings brought together about 30 people per country, selected by the State Department and Amanullahbs own social networks, for sprawling brainstorming sessions. Some of them were just about how Muslim communities are perceived in their own countries. And some participants didnbt place counterterrorism at the top of their agendas. b Yes, there were issues of extremismb discussed, Khan says. b But by and large, the people felt that if you could deal with economics, education, making sure the rights of the underprivileged were maintained, it would take care of a lot of the other problems.b That may be, but itbs also far afield from trolling the trolls. Amanullah accepts that mission creep is a risk. But, he contends, if you want to get the most effective people denouncing jihadis online, itbs a risk worth accepting. And unlike the U.S. government, they stand the better chance of getting lurkers to think of them as b actually a cool group of people to be in,b as Amanullah puts it. Whatbs more, Amanullah has basically no budget. Viral Peace, a global program, has mere thousands of dollars in annual seed money so far; the Obama administration is asking for about $85 billion for the Afghanistan war next year. Participants are staying connected via Facebook, with minimal U.S. government presence as a middleman; Amanullah wants to expand to more countries soon. But itbs not clear where Viral Peace fits in Obamabs broader counterterrorism strategy: White House officials declined repeated requests to comment for this story. Amanullah sees it as a supplement to existing counterterrorism efforts b not a replacement for, say, drone strikes in Yemen b and he also concedes that his project will take a long time before it starts to pay counterterrorism dividends. But Amanullah doesnbt view that as an unconquerable obstacle. He thinks of counterterrorism like a venture capitalist might. b I come from Silicon Valley, from the start-up environment. I want to prove you can do small, inexpensive, high-impact projects that donbt just talk about the problem but solve the problem,b he says. b And solve it the right way: not with the governmentbs heavy hand but by empowering local people to do what they already know to do but donbt know how.b -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[liberationtech] Request for comments - a #CryptoParty-oriented keysigning protocol
by Uncle Zzzen 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I have an idea for a keysigning protocol that IMHO can better suit http://cryptoparty.org events than the "traditional" ones. http://thedod.noblogs.org/post/2012/08/31/request-for-comments-unique-card-… Please comment (preferably at the post) if you see faults it it, possible attacks in it, etc. This is not theoretical. We might have an event soon :) http://666kb.com/i/c6rz797sd8mqa42pi.jpg Thanks, The Dod -- "Power to the people doesn't come with a standard plug" -- Abu Zeresh -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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