Category: Big Brother

Sundes gloomy look at the future of the Internet

At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and we’ve continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we can’t fix it — we can only make it slightly less awful.

That was pretty much the core of Pirate Bay’s co-founder, Peter Sunde‘s talk at tech festival Brain Bar Budapest.

TNW » Pirate Bay founder: We’ve lost the internet, it’s all about damage control now »

So, what else can Facebook do?

Facebook has presented a function for generating »heatmaps« of users at e.g. natural disasters. Techcrunch explains:

A new initiative from Facebook will provide aid organizations with location data for users in affected areas, such as where people are marking themselves safe and from where they are fleeing. It shows the immense potential of this kind of fine-grained tracking, but inescapably resurfaces questions of just what else the company could do with the data.

Naturally, it is a good thing if Facebooks collected data can be used for saving lives.

But you should remember that this sort of technology also can be used for surveillance and that similar data can be sold for commercial purposes, without your explicit consent.

Techcrunch: Facebook will share anonymized location data with disaster relief organizations »

Snowden on NSA leaker Winner

To hold a citizen incommunicado and indefinitely while awaiting trial for the alleged crime of serving as a journalistic source should outrage us all.

Motherboard » Snowden: Prosecuting NSA Leaker Reality Winner Is a ‘Fundamental Threat to the Free Press’ »

UK: May vs. human rights

Theresa May has declared she is prepared to rip up human rights laws to impose new restrictions on terror suspects, as she sought to gain control over the security agenda just 36 hours before the polls open.

The Guardian » May: I’ll rip up human rights laws that impede new terror legislation »

Theresa May should blame herself, not the Internet

To nobody’s surprise also the London Bridge assassins were known to the authorities. One of them has been in a tv-documentary about jihadism. And he was reported trying to convert children he met in a park to Islam. According to himself, he would be prepared to kill his own mother in the name of Allah.

Responsible for the authorities that are supposed to handle things like this was – between 2010 and 2016 – now Prime Minister Theresa May.

Today her only comment is that she would like to censor the Internet.

Censoring information and maximizing surveillance of the people is not the way to defend democracy. That would rather be to support the terrorists strive to destroy our open and free society. And it would do very little to stop religious radicalization.

To Theresa Mays defense, it should be said that it is not all that easy to know what to do. You can hardly lock people up who have not (yet) committed any crime. You cannot jail people because of their skin color, their cultural background, their faith or their political beliefs. And you should not punish entire ethnic groups because of the deeds of a few.

There must be better ways to defeat terrorism.

/ HAX

A few links:

London Bridge terrorist ‘was in Channel 4 documentary about British jihadis’ »

Theresa May Blames The Internet For London Bridge Attack; Repeats Demands To Censor It »

‘Blame the internet’ is just not a good enough response, Theresa May »

Tim Farron warns of win for terrorists if web is made surveillance tool »

Paging Theresa May

Aaron Swartz once said, “It’s no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works.”

BoingBoing: Theresa May wants to ban crypto: here’s what that would cost, and here’s why it won’t work anyway »

This, then, is what Theresa May is proposing:

• All Britons’ communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to interceptAny firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

• All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

• Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

• Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease — security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one’s findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

• All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

• Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

• Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

• Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

• Free/open source operating systems — that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors — must be banned outright

Political micro targeting – did you consent?

Further, there is something disturbing in this apparent ubiquitous acceptance of profiling by political parties. After all, did you ever consent for the content you post online, the words you type in your messages, the “likes” you post, the website you browse, the places you go, the things you buy, and the other “data points” that companies have on you to be used to profile you for political purposes? And are you confortable for this vast array of data (often seemingly irrelevant crumbs of our personalities) to be used to pigeonhole (and predict) your political leanings?

Privacy International: Hiding in plain sight — political profiling of voters »