What an aboslute joke. I think this warrants a little more than some “quick thoughts”. Amazon is facilitating the assmbly of a surveillance state. Period. There was no public oversight.
Here’s what the EFF had to say.
What an aboslute joke. I think this warrants a little more than some “quick thoughts”. Amazon is facilitating the assmbly of a surveillance state. Period. There was no public oversight.
Here’s what the EFF had to say.
I still cannot for the life of me figure out why people share their Venmo transactions publicly.
Our mobile location data is no longer private and I can’t help but feel like this genie is never going back in. It also begs the question of whether it matters how much Apple makes privacy important.
Kinda makes you wonder about all those Alexa devices, eh? Amazon isn’t doing itself any favors. I’m getting rid of mine and I won’t be the only one.
Amazon Teams Up With Law Enforcement to Deploy Dangerous New Facial Recognition Technology
You thought Cambridge Analytica was scary. Bloomberg just published a long read on Palantir.
If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance
America’s National Security Agency gathers unfathomable mountains of Internet communications from fiber optic taps and other means, but it says it only retains and searches the communications of “targeted” individuals who’ve done something suspicious. Guess what? If you read Boing Boing, you’ve been targeted. Cory Doctorow digs into Xkeyscore and the NSA’s deep packet inspection rules.
Between reading Boing Boing and using Tor, I guess I’m suspicious.
The NSA has turned the fabric of the internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They’re limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible.
The surveillance landscape is far worse than it has ever been and I feel like everything we do is now observable. All of our transactions and communications are all fused together into total information awareness apparatus. I don’t think any of this can be fixed merely by the application of cryptography. It is going to require some push back in the policy space. We are going to have to have Congress react to this and we need to get the population to react, perhaps through the economic consequences we face of losing a lot of business for American internet companies. Maybe American internet companies can push back because of economic harm that comes with the rest of world turning its back on us.
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Instead of complying, Lavabit shuts down. Help them out by donating to their legal defense fund.
So now who do we use for email?
The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government’s intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage.
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For anyone not freaked out about the NSA just having metadata on every email you’ve sent and received in Gmail, make sure you take a look at this little project/experiment some MIT students put together. The graphic you see above is a diagram of who I email, how often I’ve emailed with them and how and if they are related to other people I’ve emailed with. I removed the name labels, but you can view the diagram with names as well. This is approximately 10 years of email. So yeah, just having metadata can tell someone a lot. MIT lets you delete the info. The US government does not.
BTW, something I figured out was that because I had Gmail (on the web) configured to only give access to my 1000 most recent emails via IMAP, I had to remove that limitation in order to give this project access to all of my email.
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time.