Nah. What can be a success or not is not predictable.
True, but looking at the widespread scale of these revelations, and some of specific ‘consumer’ options (face recognition software for Facebook etc) it comes off as heavily engineered to be of us for what it has and is being used for (spying on us all). But whatever each of us cares to believe does not really matter as the fact it is and has been happening (and will continue to happen) IS the important part, if we care about our Democracies and civil liberties. If we are happy with living in Police States then all that is probably not so important?
‘Top Democrat on House intelligence panel offers new NSA reform plan’:
Supporters of a stalled congressional effort to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ metadata are looking warily at an alternative proposal by a key NSA advocate purporting to seek the same goal.
This week, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, who represents the Maryland district home to the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters, came out in favor of a remedy for the controversial surveillance.
Ruppersberger, in interviews with the Washington Post, National Journal and Politico, said he was working to craft a proposal that would require court orders for government requests for Americans’ phone records – perhaps on an individual basis – from the telephone companies, without requiring the companies to expand retention of their customer records beyond current practice.
It’s an idea that on its face aligns with what privacy advocates have wanted since the Guardian exposed the NSA bulk phone records collection in June, thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden.
Sadly for the rest of the world (outside the USA), we will get no protections, even if the responsibility for the level of spying rests in American hands. I guess if your not American you must be an enemy of America or something? So your rights do not matter?
As much as I despise the amoral world of intelligence, spying on other countries, allies or not, is exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Naturally, if you Americans ever catch our beloved CSIS or CSEC spying on you, we can expect a measured, magnanimous and forgiving reaction from you, right? Right?
Oh i know what the purpose of the intelligence agencies is, but much like the economically globalised world we now live in that pattern has started to appear in these less usual places, we (western) all share intel with one another, help each other etc, except it is very one way traffic with the USA as the principle driver/pusher of such tactics, and from the American point of view (Political and man in the street), they really do not seem to care about our (allies) rights compared to their own. I just find that disturbing, especially as we are talking about a country that is not only the worlds leading Super Power, but also does crap like Gitmo and ‘The War on Terror’ (which is very Orwellian in language and purpose).
I think what i would like to see from the UK and European powers is legal challenges and suits to all this spying stuff to force some protection on our own citizens rights in this ‘brave new world’ America is creating, because we can be sure their own legal system and political hand wringing over all this will not even consider the rest of us.
An interesting piece in the guardian about the MOD’s program of cyber warfare:
The Ministry of Defence is developing a secret, multimillion-pound research programme into the future of cyberwarfare, including how emerging technologies such as social media and psychological techniques can be harnessed by the military to influence people’s beliefs.
Programmes ranging from studies into the role of online avatars to research drawing on psychological theories and the impact of live video-sharing are being funded by the MoD in partnership with arms companies, academics, marketing experts and thinktanks.
The Guardian has seen a list of those hired to deliver research projects, which have titles such as Understanding Online Avatars, Cognitive and Behaviour Concepts of Cyber Activities, and Novel Techniques for Public Sentiment and Perception Elicitation.
The projects are being awarded by a “centre of excellence” managed by BAE Systems, which has received about £20m-worth of MoD funding since 2012. The MoD plans to procure a further £10m-worth of research through the centre this year.
While the centre commissions a wide range of research, such as studies of alcohol consumption in the armed forces, a substantial stream of research comes under the heading of “information activities and outreach”. The term is significant in that it has its roots in Britain’s 2010 strategic defence review and national security strategy. Its aims include understanding the behaviour of internet users from different cultures, the influence of social media such as Twitter and Facebook and the psychological impact of increased online video usage on sites such as YouTube.
Typical targets, for now, would include groups of young internet users deemed at risk of being incited or recruited online to commit terrorism.
Not a surprise by any means, as you can ‘feel’ the influence of the usa versions of this around the internet, but interesting to see some details.
‘US tech giants knew of NSA data collection, agency’s top lawyer insists’:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/us-tech-giants-knew-nsa-data-collection-rajesh-de
Its seems that the NSA can corrupt a CEO, executive or a single technician, and making him force to lie to everyone else. So you never know. Maybe your coworker work for the NSA, maybe your boss, maybe the people behind you. If you are on a open source project, maybe that hard working guy is a NSA mole.
So that CEO, or executive, or technician knows, but not the whole company. The dude is basically betraying everyone in the company, and the customers.
It’s disingenuous to force some people in a huge organization to work for you, place a gag order on those persons and then claim that the organization knows about it and thus implies that the company was fine with it.
It’s probably the truth though.
Terrorism is real and is the NSA.
That backdoor that can cause a horrible accident? the NSA created it.
France’s intelligence services may be behind an e-mail spying operation that was aimed at Iran’s nuclear program but also ensnared other targets, including a francophone Canadian media outlet, says a report in the French newspaper Le Monde.
I hope the francophone media outlet in question is La Presse; the Frenchies would have discovered what we over here already know: “Whatever you write, skew Liberal.”
When you wrap up as ‘a service’, a states ability to collect vast sums of information on you and your family, you are already in a police state. Facebooks DeepFace:
Heh:
Facebook announced last week that it has developed a program called “DeepFace,” which researchers say can determine whether two photographed faces are of the same person with 97.25 percent accuracy.
According to Facebook, humans put to the same test answer correctly 97.53 percent of the time – only a quarter of a percent better than Facebook’s software.
The takeaway: Facebook has essentially caught up to humans when it comes to remembering a face.
If you’re Chinese, I guess you can carry on undetected, then.
No, seriously, ban this crap. Europe has done so already.
Eh? No, it’s absolutely not banned in the EU.
Google image search does it, for instance.
Google+ has an option where it’ll look for your face in uploaded photos and auto-tag it. They say it’s opt-in only and you get to approve the tags before they’re publicly posted. But even if you don’t opt in there’s nothing to stop them from autoidentifying people and using that for building a profile, targeted advertising, or giving it up to the NSA for reasons of national security.
I have vague recollection of someone (maybe on Qt3 or maybe another forum) who posted a picture that wasn’t of themselves to their Google or Youtube profile and it said it didn’t appear to be a picture of a person. Then it asked for a full on face shot at ridiculously high resolution.
I think they’re just warming up for when they’ll have gigapixel cameras monitoring every major city.
There once was a time that would be considered paranoia.
That was me. The pic i uploaded was a complete side-on profile of when i had a huge beard (as i wanted to use that as an ‘in-joke’ with someone i was commenting on a youtube channel), but it seemed to want a face-on picture. I could still use the side on profile, but it was interesting to see that system complain to me about it! The exact wording was “This picture does not appear to contain a face, do you want to upload another?” it felt very George Orwell/Huxley! I kept it up (the side on profile) for a while, but now just use a non human pic for my youtube profile, it feels safer. Something i do around the internet in general.
This is all part of my amusement (and artcile posting in this thread) about the tech companies ‘outrage’ at the NSA revelations. Your i-phone tracks your movements, i believe you can even buy apps to make it collect that info in more detail (nothing better than getting people to pay to be spied on!), the Xbox-one wanted to be able to ‘see you’ and your family in your homes, google does what it does, facebook is pushing the facial recognition stuff etc. Basically it seems pretty much the whole modern tech industry is, in part, about data collection of private and personal information for use by our spying agencies, and they know about it, and now we are slowly getting to understand it too. ---------------------------------------------
‘China wants explanation on allegations of US spying’:
Quite a funny headline if you understand just how much hacking and spying China does these days!
China wants explanation about spying.
I can’t even come up with an analogy it’s so fucking stupid.
We should give them an explanation: “We were interested in what you were up to, and this was the easiest way to figure it out.”
I’m pretty sure that’s the official line, Tin ;)
Quite an interesting read in relation to where we are now in our own ‘free’ western societies, especially in relation to information gathering and storage by governmental bodies etc:
‘The man who went looking for freedom’:
Fighting the system used to be dangerous anywhere in Eastern Europe. For one protester from a small Romanian village it was disastrous - and also for his family, whose every word was recorded by the secret police. Carmen Bugan, who found the transcript of her childhood, tells their story.
Soon after my brother’s birth in February 1983 my father, Ion Bugan, was faced with the biggest decision he ever had to make.
Should he and my mother continue secretly typing anti-communist manifestos on an illegally-owned typewriter and distributing them around Romania? Or should he go to Bucharest to take on Ceausescu all by himself, without telling anyone a word about it?
Thirty years on we still live with the legacy of my father’s choice. And with the discovery of an intimate, horrifying story of our lives written by the secret police, the Securitate.
ACLU puts up an NSA library: https://www.aclu.org/nsa-documents-search
The sheer casualness of the content is what chills me. Basically, a roomful of tech guys sitting around, looking at PowerPoints, figuring out how to own you, all in a day’s work.
“The Owning the Net (OTN) Project
provides the technological means for NSA/CSS to gain access to and
securely return high value target communications.”