Category Archives: Privacy & Surveillance

Saturday: Fight back against government surveillance!

Reprinted from the Massachusetts Pirate Party.

This year is the 22nd anniversary of the signing of the PATRIOT Act made possible by the 9/11 attacks. Since then, government and corporate surveillance continues to expand. We will join Pirates nationwide to push back on the effort to surveill our public spaces by mapping the surveillance cameras in East Boston. Join us!

At noon on September 16th, we will meet at the East Boston Public Library at 365 Bremen Street, East Boston. It is an eight minute walk from the Airport MBTA Blue Line stop. The library has a link you can use to get directions there.

We will then divide up into teams and fan out to map cameras. We encourage everyone to wear a mask and social distance.

Register now so we know you are coming!

On Sunday, we hope you will join us in Acton for a relaxing afternoon talking, eating and, weather permitting, swimming in a pool. Register separately. Attendance at the East Boston outing is not required. It is potluck, so if you want to bring something, add to our etherpad.

We posted instructions for how to use several camera mapping apps on your phone so you can get ready. Check out what we have mapped so far at cctv.masspirates.org!

Boston Facial Recognition Ban Hearing Today

Reposting this from the Massachusetts Pirate Party. If you live in Boston, do contact your city councilor and tell them to support this ordinance. Details below.

Today at 3pm, Boston City Council’s Committee on Government Operations will discuss a proposed ordinance to ban face surveillance in Boston. The hearing will be by Zoom meeting and the public may watch this meeting via live stream at boston.gov/city-council-tv.

It is too late to address the committee, but you can still provide written testimony. Details below. The ACLU put together a toolkit for activists that includes model testimony. There are also public education resources available at https://aclum.org/presspause.

Please attend the hearing and help out in the following ways:

  1. Sign and share the ACLU’s petition in support of the campaign: https://action.aclu.org/petition/ban-face-surveillance-boston;
  2. Encouraging your friends and family in Boston to provide testimony in support of this ordinance;
  3. If you live in Boston, contact your city councilor and tell them to support this ordinance. You can find a list and email them at https://www.boston.gov/departments/city-council. The ACLU has a toolkit for activists that includes contact information for the city councilors.

Written comments may be sent to the Committee or staff email (below) and will be made a part of the record and available to all Councilors.

Email:  ccc.go@boston.gov/christine.odonnell@boston.gov Attn:  Christine O’Donnell, Docket #0683 

Fax Number:  617-635-4203 Attn:  Christine O’Donnell, Docket #0683 

Mail Address:  Docket #0683, City Council, City Hall, 5th Floor, Boston MA  02201

Protecting Your Digital Identity Workshop

Recently I gave a workshop on protecting your digital identity for the 2019 Digital Literacy Fall & Winter Workshop series run by the Somerville Media Center and the Somerville Public Library.

You can download a slightly updated version of my slide deck.

If you would be interested in such a workshop for your community, non-profit group or company, please feel free to contact me at jokeefe at jamesokeefe dot org and I would be happy to setup a time or help find other members of the Somerville Cryptoparty group to teach.

Visualizing Clinton Emails As A Means of Investigating the Future

The the MIT Media Lab Macro Connections group created a data visualization tool for the Clinton/Podesta/DNC emails that Wikileaks made available.  It is well worth a look. Thanks to Saul for bringing this research to my attention.

Cesar A. Hidalgo, the professor on the project, wrote about what he learned from it.  A few quotes stood out for me:

These emails are relevant because Clinton was a person in charge of doing a security job, and anyone working on a security job, is not supposed to communicate using an unsecured or unauthorized channel. This should be obvious, since each extra channel of communication increases the vulnerability of the system by increasing the probability that messages are intercepted. So the reason why Clinton’s emails are a big deal is because a person in charge of security should not be using an unsecure channel, and those who argue from that perspective have a valid point. The fact that the emails were hacked and exposed validates that point.

Which gets to the point we (the Pirate Party) made when the Podesta emails first came out, since, in a sense, we are all in charge of our own security:

As a Pirate, I found professor Hidalgo’s statement that his motivation for this effort “comes from my support for a society where people have direct access to relevant sources of information through well-designed data visualization tools” aligns well with my own philosophy. We cannot know what our government and our representatives are doing in our name without access to the information they have, presented in a way that people can intelligently make their own assessments of it.

In thinking about how we increase people’s power over our government, I found this statement interesting as well:

So what I got from reading some of Clinton’s email is another piece of evidence confirming my intuition that political systems scale poorly. The most influential actors on them are spending a substantial fraction of their mental capacity thinking about how to communicate, and do not have the bandwidth needed to deal with many incoming messages (the unresponded emails). This is not surprising considering the large number of people they interact with (although this dataset is rather small, I send 8k emails a year and receive 30k. In this dataset Clinton is sending only 2k emails a year).

Our modern political world is one where a few need to interact with many, so they have no time for deep relationships — they physically cannot. So what we are left is with a world of first impressions and public opinion, where the choice of words matter enormously, and becomes central to the job. Yet, the chronic lack of time that comes from having a system where few people govern many, and that leads people to strategize every word is not Clinton’s fault. It is just a bug that affects all modern political systems, which are Ancient Greek democracies that were not designed to deal with hundreds of millions of people.

In my mind the solution to this issue is to setup systems so that people are able to make more decisions about government. Not faulty marketplace democracy with its one dollar one vote, but true democracy of one person one vote. Proportional representation instead of winner take all elections. Sadly, I find many adherents of the two old political parties don’t get this. We have a long road to travel until we get there, but we will.

Two good short stories about privacy & the corporate nanny state

Two short stories that bring together the pitfalls of big data and the internet of things.

  • One Star, about what to do when your self-driving taxi decides to drive you to the police because you fit a profile instead of your destination;
  • Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things, takes the fact that Target knows when you are pregnant and runs with it in a most paternalistic conclusion.

First they came for an iPhone 5c

Posting here and at masspirates.org.

The FBI got a judge to order Apple to create a custom iOS version so they can decrypt the work iPhone 5c of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. They want Apple to push out a custom version that will disable the delays between wrong pin entries and the ten wrong pin tries and the phone gets wiped security feature. Apple is fighting it.

This Tuesday the Pirate Party is joining with Fight for the Future to protest the judge’s order. We will meet at 5:30pm at the Apple Store, 815 Boylston Street in Boston. Join us and stand up for your privacy and right to keep your data encrypted and secure.

Considering that ISIS didn’t know about the attack, it is doubtful there is much on the phone that will help them get other leads. The FBI can already request the metadata (who was called, when, how long, from where) for Farook’s communications using the phone or any other service the shooters used. The mobile phone providers are always willing to provide that information, often for a fee. Whatever other info they need, the NSA has likely gathered it with their mass surveillance program. FBI could use the NSA’s data to identify what other information they need and then get a subpoena to get the data legally, though unconstitutionally.

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It isn’t as if the Federal government hasn’t used parallel construction in the past.

The phone was owned by Farook’s employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, and someone there reset the phone in an attempt to gain access. Had they not, the FBI could have backed up the data to Apple’s iCloud service and gained access to it. It isn’t clear who made the decision to reset the password.

Which is all good for the FBI, because it gives them the excuse they need to force Apple to modify iOS to make it easier to break into, and set a precedent for getting a backdoor in any phone, even newer ones. Once those backdoors are there, anyone can take advantage of them whether the security services of other countries, criminals or abusive ex-boyfriends. That process may already have begun with China.

So please come out this Tuesday and join the Pirate Party, Fight for the Future and others to protest the judge’s order. We will meet at 5:30pm at the Apple Store, 815 Boylston Street in Boston. The more people who stand up for privacy and encryption, the stronger is our message.

More articles to read on this subject: