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Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

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Re: Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

#21

Post by drats »

blhack wrote: post #8
alanh wrote: post #2

A long-held conspiracy theory of mine: While 99%+ of those watching broadcast or cable television never have the opportunity to buy Cisco equipment for their business, and much better suited advertising channels exist (IT magazines, even TechCrunch), Cisco spends a LOT of time & money advertising on TV. (Until recently, Cisco used other brands for consumer products, e.g. Linksys!) But if it’s not to reach the consume…

Oh come on. My completely non-technical boss looked at me a while ago and said "We should get a barracuda spam filter." Why? Why does he even know what this is? Why does he even know that spam filters exist? Because barracuda has their ads all over every airport I've ever been in. The same goes for cisco. If I put in a request for funding for some network gear, my boss wants to feel like he knows a bit about what I'm…

Another great way to reach your boss is to fund a Cisco Professor of E-Democracy just like Cisco actually do, right?

Re: Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

#23

Post by nopassrecover »

mvzink wrote: post #22

I really doubt the US would be inclined to limit its own options by condemning such acts by other countries and banning certain parts of the process.

You mean like pushing for other countries to not use land mines and cluster bombs but still using them itself?

Re: Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

#24

Post by nopassrecover »

"some services allow to downgrade from SSL gracefully" - Is this true? Does this ability not defeat the point of SSL? Why would this technology be built in?

"Traditional wiretapping of phone networks was combined with GSM location services: thousands of people are now getting subpoenas and are dragged to police stations for being on streets in the vicinity of protests." - Phone towers keep location logs?

Re: Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

#26

Post by fjh »

motters wrote: post #5

The battle for privacy was lost during the last decade - as in "we lost the war". http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2005/22C3-920-en-we_lost... The best we can hope for in future is a transparent or sousveillance society where an informational balance of power is maintained. Currently the main bottleneck is ISPs, and these are points of weakness where top-down control can be introduced to a greater or lesser extent…

It should be mentioned that Rop admitted at last year's congress that they were too pessimistic and that things are actually better than they looked back than. The German constitutional court has been surprisingly effective in stopping many of the government's surveillance initiatives, which no one really expected back then. Of course, none of this really contradicts your main point, but I thought the change of opinion of the speakers might be interesting.

Re: Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

#27

Post by varjag »

nopassrecover wrote: post #24

"some services allow to downgrade from SSL gracefully" - Is this true? Does this ability not defeat the point of SSL? Why would this technology be built in? "Traditional wiretapping of phone networks was combined with GSM location services: thousands of people are now getting subpoenas and are dragged to police stations for being on streets in the vicinity of protests." - Phone towers keep location logs?

Most notably Gmail allowed downgrading to insecure connection until the China affair. There are other mail, messaging and social services people use there, some of them regional (e.g. Russian), where perception of security threats is low.

Cell towers per se do not maintain any logs, it is just transceiver equipment connected to communication line. However telecom datacenters provide location services based on signal strength from the handset to cell towers in the area. Many operators make these services available commercially to customers, and the data is nearly always accessible to law enforcement upon request.

Wikipedia provides a good summary of the process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking

Re: Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

#28

Post by varjag »

joshuacc wrote: post #16
pmchiu wrote: post #3

"While the liberty movements in the West are busy enough doing good job fighting off the surveillance wave at home, the totalitarian customer segment remains steadily serviced, by the virtue of civil opinion there being discarded and silenced." That's a bold statement. I agree that liberty movements are fighting. But I don't think they are winning. We've definitely taken a few steps back in recent years. There are mo…

I don't think the author claimed that the liberty movements are winning, just that they don't have the resources to fight both at home and abroad.

Exactly. That said, any setback of surveillance in the West trickles down to less options available to dictators everywhere. The technology is developed first and foremost to the "home front" of developed nations, as they are the biggest market by far. Thus even local efforts of activists have potentially global impact.

Re: Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

#30

Post by motters »

eldenbishop wrote: post #17
srean wrote: post #4

I think one of the most well known and egregious example of large scale surveillance outfit is the Stasi. It's reported that there was one informer per every 6 and a half people. Possibly the highest ratio of all known examples. Stasiland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasiland is a fascinating read. And of course "The Lives of Others" is a must watch. If for no other reason than to experience an eloquent demonstratio…

You do realize this is peanuts compared to the amount of information the US collect on its own people today?

The technology and storage capacity of organisations like the Stasi in the 1980s is utterly trivial compared to what's possible now. Technology also greatly reduces the costs of spying, such that mass surveillance and "automatic policing" becomes economically viable without needing to employ an army of informants, investigators and people steaming open snail mail correspondence.
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