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Filmmaker plans “Eyeborg” eye-socket camera

March 9, 2009 /

A Canadian filmmaker plans to have a mini camera installed in his prosthetic eye to make documentaries and raise awareness about surveillance in society.

Rob Spence, 36, who lost an eye in an accident as a teen-ager, said his so-called Project Eyeborg is to have the camera, a battery and a wireless transmitter mounted on a tiny circuit board. http://www.eyeborgblog.com/

“Originally the whole idea was to do a documentary about surveillance. I thought I would become a sort of super hero … fighting for justice against surveillance,” Spence said.

“In Toronto there are 12,000 cameras. But the strange thing I discovered was that people don’t care about the surveillance cameras, they were more concerned about me and my secret camera eye because they feel that is a worse invasion of their privacy.”

Spence, in Brussels to appear at a media conference, said no part of the camera would be connected to his nerves or brain.

Full Story: Reuters

(via Phase II)

Google Latitude to Cops: ‘I Don’t Remember’

March 5, 2009 /

Google is promising that its new location-reporting service Latitude, which lets you broadcast where you are to your friends, will have a memory leak and won’t remember anything.

That’s a feature, not a bug. The intention is to make sure Latitude doesn’t become an honeypot for cops wanting to be able to easily find out where you have been or even say the names of everyone who attended, or was near, a political protest.

The policy, created in consultation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts Latitude on equal privacy footing with Loopt, a popular friend-finding service that predates Latitude. Both services now overwrite your previous location with your new location, and don’t keep logs.

Full Story: Wired

Interview with a former adware developer

January 30, 2009 /

So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. Now, those threads can communicate with one another, they would check to make sure that the BHO was there and up, and that the whatever other software we had was also up.

Full Story: Philosecurity

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Obama Signals His Reluctance to Look Into Bush Policies

January 12, 2009 /

President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.

But Mr. Obama also said prosecutions would proceed if the Justice Department found evidence that laws had been broken.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama broadly condemned some counterterrorism tactics of the Bush administration and its claim that the measures were justified under executive powers. But his administration will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.

In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”

Full Story: New York Times

(via Cryptogon)

I would be very interested in hearing what Biden has to say about this quote now: “I think we should be acquiring and accumulating all the data that is appropriate for possibly bringing criminal charges against members of this administration at a later date.”

Oregon to pursue mileage tax

December 30, 2008 /

Terrible idea for so many reasons…

“As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system.”

According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax. […]

A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.

Full Story: Albany Democrat Herald

(via Cryptogon)

Oregon to pursue mileage tax

December 30, 2008 /

Terrible idea for so many reasons…

“As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system.”

According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax. […]

A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.

Full Story: Albany Democrat Herald

(via Cryptogon)

Obama Will Fight For Wiretap Immunity, Bush Lawyer Tells Judge

December 2, 2008 /

Justice Department attorney Carl Nichols didn’t get through his first full sentence defending the constitutionality of retroactive immunity for spying telecom carriers before U.S. district judge Vaughn Walker interrupted to ask about President-elect Barack Obama.

“We are going to have new attorney general,” Walker interjected in Tuesday morning’s hearing in a San Francisco courthouse. “Why shouldn’t the court wait to see what the new attorney general will do?”

At issue in the latest hearing in the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for alleged complicity in illegal wiretapping is whether Congress has the right to free the nation’s telecoms from the lawsuits pending against them.

Nichols is arguing that Obama’s Justice Department will continue to defend the immunity statute. (Obama voted for the bill but held his nose on the immunity provisions.)

“The Department of Justice rarely, if ever, declines to defend the constitutionality of a statute,” Nichols said. “It’s very, very unlikely for a future DOJ to decline to defend the constitutionality of this statute.”

Obama Will Fight For Wiretap Immunity, Bush Lawyer Tells Judge | Threat Level from Wired.com.

Make a Faraday Cage Wallet

October 17, 2008 /

From Wired How-To Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

You already have your tin foil hat, and you’re pretty sure no one can find you on the Google. However, there’s one detail you may not have thought of, and that’s those pesky RFID chips.

RFID tags identifying who and — gasp! — where you are can be found in passports, ATM cards, credit cards and some state-issued ID cards. The same technology will possibly even be used in paper money in the near future.

With the right equipment, these chips can be read from afar by data snoops or your friendly government official. A Faraday cage is sufficient for blocking such eavesdropping.

Here’s how to hide yourself from both the baddies and The Man.

Full Story: Wired

‘Environmental volunteers’ will be encouraged to spy on their neighbours

September 4, 2008 /

Advertisements looking for people to sign up for the unpaid “environmental volunteer” jobs have been posted across the country in recent months.

Critics said the scheme is encouraging a Big Brother society where friends and neighbours will be encouraged to “snoop” on one another.

The recruitment drive follows news that the Home Office is granting police powers to council staff and private security guards, allowing then to hand out fines for low-scale offences and ask for personal details.

Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Snooping on your neighbours to report recycling infringements sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi’s copybook.

Full Story: Telegraph

(via Cryptogon)

America’s Army: Free Video Game, Social Engineering Tool, Surveillance Platform

July 29, 2008 /

When players walk into Army sponsored tournaments, the government knows more about them then they may suppose. The game records players’ data and statistics in a massive database called Andromeda, which records every move a player makes and links the information to their screen name. With this information tracking system, gameplay serves as a military aptitude tester, tracking overall kills, kills per hour, a player’s virtual career path, and other statistics. According to Colonel Wardynski, players who play for a long time and do extremely well may “just get an e-mail seeing if [they’d] like any additional information on the Army.” The “America’s Army” web site, however, is quick to point out that the Army respects players’ privacy. The Army claims that player information is not linked to a person’s real world identity unless that person volunteers their identity to a recruiter. But it is not clear that recruiters have to give any sort of discloser that a voluntary relinquishing of one’s name is also an invitation to a player’s statistical information. Answering seemingly innocent questions from recruiters in “America’s Army” chat rooms or at state fairs about one’s screen name may divulge personal information without intending to.

Full Story: Truthout

(via Cryptogon)

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