maddogs hideaway

I just got back from South Sudan. Most of the country has no access to  electricity, let alone the Internet. For those lucky enough to have a cell  phone, it is usually charged in the market where smart shopkeepers use a  generator to charge the cell phones. Privacy concerns are not huge in a country  that uses cell phones sparingly.

I came back and reviewed my mountain of email and was shocked at the email  from a list serve I subscribe to. It is like the frog in the crock pot. When the  heat is turned up a bit at a time, the frog doesn’t notice he is being  cooked.

Biometrics  databases:

“[The Electronic Frontier Foundation] has been closely following the FBI’s  work to build out its Next Generation Identification (NGI) biometrics database,  which would replace and expand upon the Integrated Automated Fingerprint  Identification System (IAFAS). The new program will include multiple biometric  identifiers, such as iris scans, palm prints, face-recognition-ready photos and  voice data, and that information will be shared with other agencies at the  local, state, federal and international levels. The face recognition component  is set to launch in 2014.

“‘[Next Generation Identification] will result in a massive expansion of  government data collection for both criminal and noncriminal purposes,’ says EFF  staff attorney Jennifer Lynch, who testified before the U.S. Senate on the  privacy implications of facial recognition technology in July of last year.  ‘Biometrics programs present critical threats to civil liberties and privacy.  Face-recognition technology is among the most alarming new developments, because  Americans cannot easily take precautions against the covert, remote, and mass  capture of their images.’”

From Netcraft via Dave Farber on encrypted data:

“Millions of websites and billions of people rely on SSL to protect the  transmission of sensitive information such as passwords, credit card details and  personal information with the expectation that encryption guarantees privacy.  However, recently leaked documents appear to reveal that the NSA, the United  States National Security Agency, logs very high volumes of Internet traffic and  retains captured encrypted communication for later cryptanalysis. The United  States is far from the only government wishing to monitor encrypted internet  traffic: Saudi Arabia has asked for help decrypting SSL traffic, China has been  accused of performing a MITM attack against SSL-only GitHub, and Iran has been  reported to be engaged in deep packet inspection and more, to name but a  few.

“The reason that governments might consider going to great lengths to log and  store high volumes of encrypted traffic is that if the SSL private key to the  encrypted traffic later becomes available – perhaps through court order, social  engineering, successful attack against the website, or through cryptanalysis –  all of the affected site’s historical traffic may then be decrypted at once.  This really would open Pandora’s Box, as on a busy site a single key would  decrypt all of the past encrypted traffic for millions of people.”

From Cironline on the ability to read license plates and feed them to data “fusion  centers”:

“The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log  thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it  had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009  that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their  driveway.

“That photograph, Katz-Lacabe said, made him ‘frightened and concerned about  the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.’ The single patrol car  in San Leandro equipped with a plate reader had logged his car once a week on  average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and  location.”

On the ability for the NSA to keep and later listen to a billion phone calls  a day:

“The NSA has a ‘brand new’ technology that enables one billion cell phone  calls to be redirected into its data hoards, according to the Guardian’s Glen  Greenwald, who told a Chicago conference that a new leak of Snowden’s documents  was ‘coming soon.’

“Calling it part of a ‘globalized system to destroy all privacy,’ and the  enduring creation of a climate of fear, Greenwald outlined the capabilities of  the NSA to store every single call while having ‘the capability to listen to  them at any time.’”

From IntelliHub on taking a photo of a police station:

“Randall Thomas told Photography is Not a Crime he was taking photos to  prepare for an upcoming trial stemming from a January arrest in which police  deleted his footage after he had recorded them making an abusive arrest.

“Not that any of that was the cop’s business who harassed him Saturday for  taking photos outside the Police Service Area 3 Housing Bureau in Brooklyn.

“Thomas was placed in a cell and held for almost an hour before he was  released with two citations for disorderly conduct, one for blocking traffic,  the other for obscene language – as if that is not protected by the First  Amendment.

“Regardless, the video Thomas recorded with his smartphone shows he did not  block traffic nor use obscene language in his interaction with Officer Soto,  which begins at 4:30.”

All of these reports are from less than one week’s collection made by Dave  Farber’s list serve.

We are frogs, and we are being cooked by our government.

It’s time to jump out of that pot and organize the good, old-fashioned way we  did in the 1960s.

We need our government to hear us, not though cell phone data collection or  facial recognition software, but from our protests on the streets.

We’d better do this before they know when we are leaving our houses to go to  that demonstration.