Even simpler to hook the black box up to a GPS receiver that the car probably already has.It also sounds pretty benign, even useful. But unlike Weires, I'm a technology guy -- and I have a very acute sense of how seemingly harmless new technologies have a tendency to metastasize into something far nastier and, usually, end up invading our privacy or diminishing our freedoms. And, perhaps due to my own driving history, the story of Weires and his black box had sirens going off in my head.
Think of the worst possible scenarios, and whatever you come up with has a good chance of happening. For example, you know those random checkpoint stops that the police set up every year around the holidays to catch drunks. I've never been a big fan of them, mostly for civil liberties reasons, but like most people I endure this little inconvenience for the perceived larger good.
But what about a checkpoint where the cop walks up, plugs his laptop into your car and then tickets you for going over the speed limit three times last week? Put up some "smart" speed signs that send out signals to your car's black box and it would be simple to make the comparison. Like that one?
Privacy
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Oh, this is just lovely...
You may have heard of the TSA's new insta-porn device, which bounces low-energy x-rays off of your skin when you go through airport screening, producing an image of your body that looks remarkably like... a very detailed (but somewhat ghostlike and bluish) naked human body. For a while now they've been trying to calm the objections by insisting that the images will have the sensitive areas of the image, breasts and genitals, blurred, plus using same-gender screeners to look at the images.
However, now that they are actually deploying the system for a live trial, they admit that the images are not blurred. Oh, and those separate screeners? They will rely on human signals from other TSA agents to determine the gender of the person being screened. I wonder how long it will take before no one bothers to signal for gender? But it's OK, says the TSA. The screeners won't be allowed to take cameras or cell phones into the screening booth. How long will that rule last in an agency that can't keep even a single employee from stealing over a quarter-million dollars from luggage? Including a $47,000 camera? If they can get a professional-grade TV camera out of the secure area, they can get a cell phone camera in. Oh, and the screeners will be watching the machine in a private booth, where you won't be able to see or object to their inevitable antics. I wonder how much you could get on ebay for skin-radar pictures of a naked Angelina Jolie, for example? I'm sure we'll find out soon enough. |
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Unclear on the concept...
I've posted (or at least thought about posting; I can't be bothered to actually find the post) about a welcome mat with the words "Come back with a warrant" on it. As someone who values my own rights and privacy, that would be my natural and instinctive response to a police officer making inquiries about a search of my home -- because consenting to a search when you are under suspicion is never a good idea.
But Patterico, who actually works as a prosecutor in California in addition to blogging, thinks such a welcome mat would constitute probable cause for a warrant in and of itself. That's why I'm a Libertarian, not a Republican. Asserting one's constitutional rights should never be grounds for suspicion. If the government didn't have probable cause for a search before being denied permission, the fact that it was denied doesn't give any additional evidentiary weight in favor of a warrant. To disregard this is to render Constitutional rights meaningless. If any refusal can be considered evidence for a compulsory search, then there is no right to refuse a search. |
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What once was old is new again...
It seems the press is pounding the streets with the story that the NSA is evesdropping on Americans. Again. Several bloggers have already pegged this story as being quite similar to one that dropped a few months ago, related to the NSA evesdropping on international calls to or from Al Qaeda members. Others have explained the legal arguments used to convince judges it's legal. Lots of panties are bunched.
Those of you who have been reading this site for some time will not be surprised that I oppose such monitoring. That we are at war with a terrorist organization does not materially change that fact; blanket surveillance is wrong regardless of justification. I'm perfectly OK with evesdropping on conversations with terrorists so long as the letter of the law, including the Constitution, is followed; but blanket surveillance of Americans without probable cause is wrong. So, sure, I don't like what the NSA is doing. I just don't see why it's suddenly news, at least without the sudden intervention of political expediency. You see, the NSA has been doing this for a long, long, long time. I first learned about it under the Clinton administration. I doubt it started there, or with Bush I before him. There's an article on the subject from 1988. It is the NSA's job to conduct traffic analysis and broad-scale surveillance, and the legal justifications to get around Constitutional limits were different then but the capabilities probably are not -- except that national technical means, as author Tom Clancy euphemized, have probably advanced significantly. You'd think the reporters acting so outraged about this hadn't ever realized our intelligence apparatus had this capability. Maybe they hadn't. Ignorance or malice? It's hardly a new question to be asking about the news media these days, and that's just sad. So why aren't I worked up about it? I recognize that nothing has really changed. Sure, I'd like surveillance programs like this to be shut down. Unfortunately I'm convinced this is a losing battle. It's much simpler, not to mention technically better, to simply encrypt everything. "Can't" trumps "not allowed to".
2006-05-15
| matthew@triggerfinger.org
| 1 trackbacks
| 0 comments
| Privacy
| United States
| Analysis
pentermine linked with phentermin |
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Not many people would volunteer to wear the classic prisoner's anklet that reports their location to a satellite monitoring system regularly. It would be, rightly, considered an invasion of privacy -- something society imposes on convicted criminals who pose a demonstrated threat to innocent people. But millions of people carry cell phones with them everyone and don't give it a second thought.
Perhaps they don't realize that their cell phone is a tracking technology almost as powerful as the monitoring devices used on prisoners. Technology firms in the UK are already marketing this as a "service", one that covers not only where the cell phone is now but where it has been in the past. While those services claim to require consent, the underlying technology does not, and that means governments (and private parties through the court system) will have access to the data with no consent required and most likely no opportunity to contest the release. Brin's The Transparent Society is looking more prophetic by the day.
2006-04-30
| matthew@triggerfinger.org
| 1 trackbacks
| 0 comments
| Privacy
| UK
| News
phentemine linked with phenterine |
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Colorado is considering legislation that would require ISPs to maintain records of the IP address provided to each customer for 180 days. Presumably these records would be available to law enforcement upon request -- and the usual tendency for such things is to not require a warrant for the information, at least not in practice. Corporations aren't exactly eager to refuse to provide data to law enforcement, unless it would somehow cost them money to do so.
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Radiation searches...
There's some controversy over whether radiation sensors require warrants when used by police searches. Volokh suggests
that the standard should be based on precedents about heat sensors
pointed at homes (warrants are required), combined with those that
indicate serious crimes don't get exceptions for being serious
crimes. I agree with that principle, but I think radiation is
distinguishable; among other things it poses an independent health
hazard in high enough levels.
While, say, directing X-rays through a building to a receiver on the other side would clearly be an unconstitutional search, merely checking for excessive radiation levels outside a building is quite reasonable and should be admissible in court. The precedents for heat sensors are also correct; heat sensors are substantially more invasive (because many normal and legal activities generate detectable heat), and the level of heat at which a public health hazard exists is generally quite visible to the naked eye in the form of smoke and flame. Once you start stepping on to (public spaces of) private property in order to conduct such a search, however, things rapidly become more complex. I would still be OK with people carrying detectors that can register hazardous-to-health levels of radiation, chemical agents, etc, so long as they remain in areas truly open to the public and don't need to make false representations in order to gain entry. I say this because, as a private citizen, I might well want to carry a radiation detector along with me as an early warning of radiation hazard, if I could do so cheaply, and if there was a perceived risk -- consider, for example, the laboratory facilities at many universities. Hat tip to Lay Lines for the story. |
Washington politicians are once again seriously considering imposing a national identification card - and it may well become law before the end of the 108th Congress. The much-hailed 9/11 Commission report released in July recommends a federal identification card and, worse, a "larger network of screening points" inside the United States. Does this mean we are to have "screening points" inside our country where American citizens will be required to "show their papers" to government officials? It certainly sounds that way! As a practical matter, we already have a national ID card: we just subcontract the issuance to the states and link it to some silly criteria designed to weed out people who are too dumb to drive. But that almost-kinda-sorta state has some significant advantages over a real national ID, and those advantages are instructive on the benefits of maintaining a strong state government rather than a strong federal government. Under the current, state-based system, the people with real authority are very close to you. They live in your state, and in the US, that means they are within a few hours drive at most. If you don't like what they're doing, you can lobby them, or try to get them kicked out of office during the next election. If you are having a problem with the appointed officials, you can go over their heads to the politicians who appointed them. And you have a chance of actually making a difference, because you're competing for influence with other residents of your state rather than all 300 million people in the US. With a federal system, though, the people with real power are the people in Washington. You can't reach them except by telephone, unless you are willing to travel possibly thousands of miles to voice your opinion. Your local officials will have no power to set policy. The disaster that our federal government has become will intrude even further into your life. Go read the whole thing. Ron Paul's speeches are powerful. |
Why does this worry me? It's simple enough: the FBI has moved from taking its list of terrorists out to possible terrorist contact points and asking about the names on it... to demanding the complete customer lists and doing the search themselves. Once the FBI has that information, they can use it for whatever they want. If they use it to catch terrorists, that's a good thing. If they use it for other purposes, that's not such a good thing. But the fact that they made this demand, and the manner in which they made it, is striking. It implies:
So by my criteria, this little expedition is just fishing. They don't know who, what, or where -- at least not within any acceptable level of precision. In fact, I'm willing to bet they had just two pieces of information: "Las Vegas" and the approximate time of some allegedly-planned attack. And in response to this they want to trawl through the customer lists of every hotel in Vegas.
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Somehow, these companies keep getting the idea that "adding it to their privacy policy" constitutes the only appropriate action. We don't want to be informed that our airline has just given all of our personal data to the government... we want our private travel information to be kept, well, private. Simple math is all that is required to see that terrorists cannot be detected through data mining. It's one thing to start from a list of millions of customers and try to extract from those the few thousand who might be interested in a special price on a ticket to Tahiti; it's quite another to take that same list and try to identify the 19 hijackers on the one flight they plan to hijack. You will inevitably end up harassing thousands of false positives -- people who innocently happen to eat middle eastern food and wear the wrong type of sneakers. |
This is a brief examination of "contact managers", ie, websites that invite their users to upload contact lists and provide services based on that data. It focuses on the very real privacy risks created by those services, and the disturbing (but hardly surprising) fact that, far from wanting to minimize privacy concerns, these services seek to maximize their privacy invasion. All in order to maximize their profits, of course. |
As a practical matter, seizing an entire server to use as evidence is almost a necessity; there's not really any other way to ensure that data on that server is both safe from alteration and available to both prosecution and defense. Most "evidence" on a server consists of log files or the files left over by a hacker after breaking in, and both of those types of evidence are almost necessarily deleted over time by a properly run system. The people whose information is actually on that server will see it differently. If a server gets taken, everyone who accessed it will have their data examined as least cursorily (to see if their data is evidence). In theory, if the evidence isn't covered by the current search warrant, it's supposed to be ignored -- but who wants to bet on that actually happening, once it's been examined, if the investigating officer finds something a little suspicious about it? And even if there's nothing suspicious about it, there are still a lot of things you don't want random people reading. The first-line answer: use encryption. The problem with that is that the police won't be able to read it either, and that's going to put you in the suspicious list by itself; not to mention, most people don't have even the first idea how to use encryption for their email. There isn't a good answer for this yet. But there will be, and it's pervasive, server-managed encryption. Implemented properly, such a system would allow the truly private to use their own encryption mechanisms, but allow those who aren't as concerned to use encryption managed by their email address provider. Using such a system, when presented with an email warrant, the owner of the server could decrypt only the emails to or from the specific email addresses named. No one else would have their privacy violated. It's not as secure for the end-user, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current situation. Of course, that won't stop law enforcement from simply taking the whole thing, at least for now. |
No particular quibble with this usage, but the potential these devices have -- that is, to track our whereabouts on an ongoing basis, because each person is carrying a tiny transponder device that can be picked up at ez-pass boothes and elsewhere -- is pretty scary. |
In the US, this is still more of a horror story than a real threat. |
An appeals court this week put the brakes on an FBI surveillance technique that turns an automobile driver's on-board vehicle navigation system into a covert eavesdropping device, after finding that the spying effectively disables the system's emergency and roadside assistance features.
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RFID Journal has learned that the U.S. Department of Defense plans to ask its top 100 suppliers to put RFID tags on pallets, cases and big-ticket items. The military intends to spell out its plans in detail sometime next summer, but it is believed that tagging could begin in 2005. RFID tags in general are a significant privacy risk, but use for inventory control in the military isn't such a big deal... except in that the military use could inject a huge amount of money and support into the technology. |
Every child in England will be given a unique identifying number attached to an electronic file of personal information about their lives, under plans announced yesterday to avoid a repetition of the murder of Victoria Climbié. Remember, every cry to "save the children" is a cry to imprison the adults. |
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The police don't ever like anonymonity, so remember not to trust services like this too far. In this case, though, open-source enabled people to learn what was happening -- which deserves kudos to the open-source methods. |
What many Americans don't realize is that their enthusiastic consumerism does a lot more for the interests of national security (search) than keeping the economy strong. Long after credit card bills are paid and checking accounts replenished, the information retailers collect about customers in those increasingly intrusive mini-interrogations at the cash register--zip codes, phone numbers, purchases, even point of purchase requests for email addresses and Social Security numbers--remains bouncing around networks of computer databases, permanently traceable and trackable by the government. |
This proposal is a clear attempt to outlaw anonymous speech. Never lose sight of the fact that everything that happens on the internet is speech. Requiring people to expose their personal information on domain registrations is a tool of control, NOT a reasonable requirement. |
This case has amicus briefs from the Cato Institute, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many others. It's an important case, because it touches on the core right of a free people to remain free from arbitrary demands by government officials. |
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I've posted about this case before. Today was just for oral arguments, not handing down a decision, but some of the questions asked by the justices are... disturbing. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (news - web sites) pointed out the court never has given police the authority to demand someone's identification, without probable cause they have done something wrong. But she also acknowledged police might want to run someone's name through computers to check for a criminal history. Why is this disturbing? Clearly, because a person's criminal history has literally no bearing on whether or not they are currently engaged in an illegal activity. If you have probable cause to believe a crime was committed, then you can investigate that crime, but you have to do it on the basis of present evidence rather than past acts. More troublesome is that the information available from a person's identity is tremendous: "A name is now no longer a simple identifier; it is the key to a vast, cross-referenced system of public and private databases, which lay bare the most intimate features of an individual's life," Rotenberg told the court in a filing. In case you're having trouble picturing this, consider that with your identity in hand, the police have access to:
Publicola has a long post about the 5th-amendment implications of Hiibel's conviction (the conviction is the basis for the appeal to the Supreme Court) here. I'll second it and add the codicil that demands for identification in the absence of a crime are clearly an unreasonable search by the terms of the 4th amendment. If the officer is justified in committing a physical search of the individual, he can clearly obtain that person's identification (if they are carrying any) and make use of that. But if he can't physically search the person legally, then how can he demand the contents of that person's wallet? |
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Why does the FBI want to know what people are reading? |
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