How Britain Exported Next-Generation Surveillance

Well that clinches my decision.

I've been getting around on public transit for quite a long time, but have been thinking of getting a car.

Now I've decided not to.

I'm a generally law-abiding citizen, but I simply do not wish to be tracked. How would you feel were someone to follow you around everywhere you went? Even if they kept their distance, never spoke to you our overtly harmed you in any way, it would be very disturbing.

That I find particularly creepy, so I blackhole many of the analytics servers with my /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 hosted-pixel.com 127.0.0.1 cdn.hosted-pixel.com

When web bugs first appeared, there was a huge public outcry. Now that they call it "analytics" or "big data" everyone seems cool with it.

However I can't block everything with hosts; some of the tracking scripts come from the same hosts as I actually use. I'm planning to write a firefox addon which will do stuff like remove the Facebook "Like" buttons. Even if I don't click the button, Facebook knows that it served me the script.

Hey thanks - I owe you one.

Very interesting article. I've been thinking about this more often recently (perhaps it's watching the 31C3 talks that do it) and I find that I'm becoming increasingly conflicted over the whole issue of surveillance.

On one level, my gut instinct is "mass surveillance of innocent people is wrong"... But the moment I think of it from the law enforcement point of view, I realise how desperately I'd want that bulk data and how damn useful it would be.

I can easily see myself, in another lifetime, being the one who said "Hey, you know if we stick a camera here, I can get a computer to read the number plates and beep if it sees a car we need to stop." - That's nothing other than a great use of technology to do what a human could do, but much more efficiently. A good hack, nothing not to like about it at all.

At first it'd seem only reasonable to use that technology ONLY to flag vehicles that were known to be of interest at the time. Keeping dates/times/plates of innocent vehicles might not be right. But then again... How seductive to sling all that data into a database. How powerful, how efficient, how god damned _useful_ it would be to be able to go back in time and, for any given number plate, rule a vehicle's presence in or out of suspicion. OK, clearly a possibility of "wrong place, wrong time" for the unlucky, but an equal chance of such historical information actually verifying an alibi, proving that a person of interest is as innocent as they claim.

The extent to which you could get a whole lot of law enforcement done, purely with a big database and some well-written SQL queries... It's seductive. If I were law enforcement, I'd want that /so/ bad.

I wasn't a fan of "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" before the Snowden revelations, or after. But today I find myself realising just how useful the results of such surveillance /could/ be. I wonder if I've just given in, taken the cowardly way out and somehow convinced myself to be comfortable with the idea of such intrusion because it's obviously never going to end, or whether my mind on the subject has been genuinely changed.

Quite a quandary. Still not sure where I stand on the issue now.

Only in London and for good reason, having people pay by cash each stop takes up a ridiculous amount of time on popular routes.