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And now: Total Control

By on September 17, 2014 in Big Brother, Privacy, surveillance

Indect is an EU funded program for surveillance. Or rather for control. Pre Crime style.

This is a program coordinating many different elements and procedures…

  • CCTV and surveillance drones.
  • Various data bases (e.g. information from data retention)
  • Automated behaviour analysis.
  • Analysis of citizens web activities.
  • Mass surveillance NSA style.

And today, media reports suggest that the American FBI is ready to launch its new Facial Recognition System. (Links: 1» | 2» | 3»)

With such a technology finally in place Indect can take a significant step towards completion. And society will take yet another step towards a total control state.

Let’s hope that all our leaders–politicians and bureaucrats–are good, decent people. And that all those who will follow also are. Because if not, we have given people in high places a horrendous weapon against the people.

Read more about Indect here: Wikipedia» | Incect»

Or watch this video from Anonymous…


(Youtube»)

This is not Science Fiction. This is not conspiracy theories. It’s official. And it’s happening right now.

/ HAX

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Swedish ISP forcing EU Commission to act on data retention

By on September 12, 2014 in Data Retention, EU, Privacy, surveillance

As you can see from the blog post below, the EU Commission is avoiding the data retention dispute. The European Court of Justice has declared it illegal and in breach with human rights. This is being ignored by some EU member states–such as the UK and Sweden–who have no intention of ending blanket data retention.

But now the Commission will have to get on top of this controversy. Today Swedish ISP Bahnhof and the 5 July-foundation have filed a formal complaint, urging the Commission to take measures to end Swedish data retention.

This will take matters to a new level. The European Commission is obliged to uphold the EU treaties. And as the Charter of Fundamental Rights prohibits data retention (according to the ECJ)–there should be no alternative for the Commission, other than to act against member states not complying with this ban.

From the press release…

“We will fight in Swedish courts to the end but this is not about Bahnhof and our rights. It is about every citizen’s human rights. Bahnhof has always stood up for privacy of communications. We do not intend to retain traffic data about our customers and we are confident that we have the backing of the EU Charter and Court of Justice.”

Read the press release from Bahnhof and the 5 July-foundation here »

/ HAX

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EU: Commission dodging data retention dispute

By on September 11, 2014 in Data Retention, EU, Privacy

EU member states closely associated with US/NSA mass surveillance (such as the UK and Sweden) have made it clear that they have no plans to end mass retention of data about all citizens all tele- and data communications. (The scheme was introduced with the EU data retention directive*.)

This will put the EU Commission between a rock and a hard place.

The Commission is the guardian of the treaties. One integrated part of the EU treaties is the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. And the European Court of Justice has invalidated the EU directive on data retention–as it is in breach of human rights, according to the Charter.

So, what will the guardians of the treaties do?

For now, there has been nothing but silence from the Commission. Will it continue to dodge the issue, leaving the data retention issue to the member states?

The people in Berlaymont might want to. But I don’t think they can.

It ought to be irrelevant if the breach of the Charter is in an EU directive or in member states national legislation. The Charter trumps both.

This is the opinion of the lawyers at the European Council, the German secretary of justice, the Austrian supreme court and many others. The group of European data protection authorities–the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party–has given a statement along the same lines…

“…national data retention laws and practices should ensure that there is no bulk retention of all kinds of data and that, instead, data are subject to appropriate differentiation, limitation or exception.”

There you have it.

Blanket data retention is a big no-no.

Sooner or later, the European Commission will have to confront EU member states who persist in carrying out this form of mass surveillance.

/ HAX

* Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC.

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Is it legal… just because they say it is?

By on August 18, 2014 in Big Brother, Democracy, NSA & Snowden, Privacy

There are some interesting similarities when it comes to mass surveillance in the US and in NSA partner countries. There is no doubt that system and judicial designs often are copied directly from the US system.

As an example, in Sweden the Government talking point is that it assumes that (the Swedish NSA partner) FRA is conducting its mass surveillance in accordance with the law.

Yeah, right. The legality of NSA as well as FRA surveillance lies with secret courts, with no effective representation of civil rights or the public interest. In the US it’s the FISA Court and in Sweden the FRA Court.

And here is the “beauty” of it all: What the secret courts says is legal is legal.

So, mass surveillance carried out is legal in a formal sense–regardless of what’s going on.

That is how Sweden has managed to cram hostile IT attacks on systems in other countries into a law that mentions nothing of the sort. If the secret court says it’s legal, it doesn’t matter what laws Parliament has set down.

This is not how things are to be carried out in a democracy. Rules should be decided in an open, democratic process. And the people must be able to hold politicians accountable.

The way mass surveillance is managed in the NSA sphere, it short-circuits democracy as well as rule of law.

This is utterly unacceptable.

/ HAX

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When do you become a terrorist?

By on July 31, 2014 in Big Brother, Big Government, Democracy, NSA & Snowden, Privacy

We have learned that mass surveillance and shady intelligence operations are not just about national security. The wider term “national interest” is often used and it is obvious that some practices in this area are used to curb dissent.

The NSA has engaged in surveillance of economic targets. In my country, Sweden, surveillance laws openly mention national economic interest. Intelligence organisations, counter espionage and the police often have a clearly stated objective to preserve existing structures and status quo in society.

Obviously we can expect some interesting conflicts in this field.

Wikileaks is a high profile example. Truth about what’s really going on is not popular with politicians and in the government apparatchik. So they use what resources they have to silence or to discredit the messenger.

And what will happen when governments realize that they are losing their grip on money?

It doesn’t have to be a breakdown of the traditional monetary system. (Though, it might be.) My guess is that a wider adoption of digital currencies would be enough do the trick. That would move power from the state to citizens in a way most governments cannot tolerate.

Take Cyprus as example: It wouldn’t have been possible for the Cypriot government to confiscate a large portion of citizens bank deposits if people had been using Bitcoins instead of Euros.

Or imagine what will happen if people move to adopt digital currency because it is more stable than government fiat money. This would cause serious political problems. Probably to the extent where governments won’t have it anymore.

The mere possibility that something (that politicians don’t really understand) could undermine national currencies and our centralized, controlled economies will be considered a major worry. Possibly big enough for governments to let the dogs loose. And if that happens, the digital currency community will be considered and treated like other threats to society. Like terrorists.

It will not only be individuals. From the Snowden files we have learned that governments now are labeling categories of people as terrorists, with no need for proof of any “wrongdoing” on an individual level.

Anonymity and cryptography are other concerns for government, that might be serious enough for it to pick a fight over. And tomorrow will bring other, brand new challenges to government power and authority.

We do live in interesting times.

Personally I consider decentralized systems, openness, pluralism, privacy and civil rights to be crucial for a free, democratic and tolerable society. Important enough to fight for. But I also know our enemies. So I fear that we might be in for a bumpy ride.

/ HAX

Some links:
Blacklisted: The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist »
Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Supporters »
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations »

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The coming revolution must be user friendly

By on July 26, 2014 in decentralization, Internet, Privacy, Uncategorized

I’m into privacy issues and the fight for a free and open Internet from a political background. Even though I’m not a complete technical idiot, I really don’t know what’s going on under the hood. Show me a command line, and I will freeze without a clue what to do about it.

So, I’m like most people.

At the same time, the world badly needs some tech-based change. We need to build platforms for digital currencies, as alternative to government fiat-money. We need to rise the prize for surveillance by building decentralized systems, by making encryption the default option and by developing various P2P solutions.

At present, this is far beyond the ordinary user.

Ergo: We need to make privacy orientated technology user friendly.

Last year international information activist Smári McCarthy made this very point in his keynote at FSCONS 2013. A few extracts…

“Most people don’t care about technology, they care about doing the things that are meaningful to them. They don’t want to spend all day fiddling with GnuPG’s parameters or figuring out whether their XMPP session is being transferred over SSL. They don’t want to know about IPSec or AES.”

“No. They want to be farmers, or merchants, or dentists or doctors. They want to teach our children languages and mathematics. They want to build houses or spaceships or plumbing or bridges or roads. They don’t have time to work with bad technology that we made badly because we didn’t care about them.”

“What’s worse: when companies that don’t care about those people either give them highly usable software that doesn’t respect their fundamental rights, most people will go for it because despite its failings, it at least gets the job done. If what we offer them as an alternative is not at least as good in terms of getting the job done – from the perspective of a nontechnical user, it does not matter at all how ideologically pure our offering is.”

Spot on.

I like to believe that I’m at least as smart as people in general. Still, I prefer to have some qualified guidance when diving into these things.

As a matter of fact, I had Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge to install everything on my Linux laptop. And to guide me into PGP. And Swedish Internet icon (and 5 July chairman) Oscar Swartz to get my Mac to act in a reasonably safe way. I might have managed myself. But it would have been a slow and very painful process.

But people in general don’t give a fuck. They choose user friendliness before privacy. They are happy if whatever they get from the Mediemarkt shelfs works, no matter how exposed it is to government surveillance.

To fight back, privacy oriented options and solutions supporting an free and open internet must be the best ones. They must be ordinary peoples natural and carefree choice.

This said with the greatest respect for all the fine people who are putting their time and energy into fighting Big Brother command line by command line.

/ HAX

Smári McCarthy at FSCONS 2013: Engineering Our Way Out of Fascism »

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“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control”

By on July 11, 2014 in Big Brother, NSA & Snowden, Privacy

This is a must read. The Guardian runs a piece about NSA whistleblower William Binney. A few extracts…

“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

“Binney recently told the German NSA inquiry committee that his former employer had a “totalitarian mentality” that was the “greatest threat” to US society since that country’s US Civil War in the 19th century. Despite this remarkable power, Binney still mocked the NSA’s failures, including missing this year’s Russian intervention in Ukraine and the Islamic State’s take-over of Iraq.”

Read the whole piece here »

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How to kill free information and privacy by stealth

By on July 6, 2014 in Freedom of Speech, Privacy

A few years ago Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Bank of America pulled the money plug for Wikileaks. There was no legal way for the US Government to stop Wikileaks from spreading disruptive facts. So they called in some corporate friends to help.

Now, I do believe that companies have the right to decide who they want to engage in business with. Nevertheless, there is a problem when market dominant companies do so to limit free speech. And Government pressing them to do so is clearly a democratic problem.

In the Wikileaks case we (I used to work for the Pirate Party in the European Parliament) fought in the political arena to bring attention to this. And in a moment of clarity the EU Parliament adopted a resolution (opinion) stating that such action is problematic.

The adopted EP text by Engström et al.

32. Considers it likely that there will be a growing number of European companies whose activities are effectively dependent on being able to accept payments by card; considers it to be in the public interest to define objective rules describing the circumstances and procedures under which card payment schemes may unilaterally refuse acceptance;

If this resolution will lead to any actual political action is unclear. But we tried.

(Later an Icelandic court partly repealed the money embargo against Wikileaks.)

But, as it turns out, this was not an isolated incident. Recently PayPal pulled the plug again. This time the target was the end-to-end encrypted NSA-safe email service ProtonMail. The reason stated was that PayPal is in doubt about the legality of encrypted e-mail, according to US law.

This is a huge issue, in so many ways.

Now, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland. And it is developed by some pretty weighty people, such as MIT, Harvard and CERN researchers.

It is highly questionable if US law is applicable in this case. And, anyhow, if in some strange way it is – this issue should be settled in court.

Here lies a major problem with this kind of outsourced execution of political power. There is no rule of law. (There is not even any law to relate to.) There are no prior proper judicial proceedings. And there is no possibility for redress.

In the ProtonMail case PayPal froze some 275,000 USD. And there is apparently nothing to do about it.

On a similar note, payment providers have blocked the payment channels for VPN services in some countries.

And there are some other, smaller examples from my country, Sweden, where payment providers pulled the money plug for clients that they find to be morally questionable. Among others this has happened to a small company selling DVD horror movies (!) and a web based shop for sex toys.

In these cases, it is not even a question about what is legal. Here it is up to corporate policy makers in board rooms to decide. Often they rely on rather dim, square and uneasy “moral” standards. (E.g. not to upset the US christian right.) And these standards are enforced by multinationals on an international, world wide scale by terms of service.

What to do?

Well, you could call for politicians to draft laws stating that dominant payment providers may not refuse clients who provide goods or services not breaching local law. But doing so might be questionable in principle and difficult in practice. And knowing my politicians, I’m not sure exactly what they actually would deliver if asked to regulate in this field.

Then we have the possibility of consumer boycotts. But for boycotts to be successful, there must be some competition for consumers to turn to. And in this field, there is almost none. It is also doubtful if the general public would get on board, to make a boycott effective enough.

The third option is to turn to digital currency, such as BitCoin. This is by far the best option. Or it would be, if it was more widely adopted. We might get there, but we are not there yet.

So… we have some serious problems here, with no perfect or yet functioning solutions.

But there is one thing we can do, right now: We can raise our voices. We can explain the problem. We can get media interested. We can make this a exhausting PR-issue for the industry. We can make this not only an issue of free speech and privacy, but also about free enterprise for the rest of society. We can name and shame Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others who give them self power over our very civil liberties.

Spread the word.

/HAX

Update: They just did it again… »

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“A denial of privacy operates to severely restrict one’s freedom of choice”

By on July 5, 2014 in Privacy

“To begin with, people radically change their behavior when they know they are being watched.  They will strive to do that which is expected of them. They want to avoid shame and condemnation. They do so by adhering tightly to accepted social practices, by staying within imposed boundaries, avoiding action that might be seen as deviant or abnormal.

The range of choices people consider when they believe that others are watching is therefore far more limited than what they might do when acting in a private realm. A denial of privacy operates to severely restrict one’s freedom of choice.”

Glenn Greenwald in No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State.

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