Global treaty may make your ISP spy on you

Documents from talks on a secret global copyright deal have leaked online, various sources are reporting. The documents discussed are said to confirm that internet service providers could be compelled to constantly sift through their customers’ data looking for copyright transgressions. The European Union’s data protection chief has said that such requirements could curtail individuals’ civil liberties…ISPs told New Scientist in December that such technology will not only slow downloads, but puts in place technology that could be used for snooping and censorship.

Read more on PC World…

I found this interesting set of quotes from the extreme right wing.

A short excerpt—a quote from George Bush Sr.:

"I don’t know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

Highly recommended reading.

Inforworld writes about how Microsoft has collaborated with the NSA in the development of Windows Vista’s security:

The U.S. agency best known for eavesdropping on telephone calls had a hand in the development of Microsoft’s Vista operating system, Microsoft confirmed Tuesday.
The National Security Agency (NSA) stepped in to help Microsoft develop a configuration of its next-generation operating system that would meet U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) requirements, said NSA Spokesman Ken White.
[...]
Still, the NSA’s involvement in Vista raises red flags for some. “There could be some good reason for concern,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “Some bells are going to go off when the government’s spy agency is working with the private sector’s top developer of operating systems.”
Part of this concern may stem from the NSA’s reported historical interest in gaining “back-door” access to encrypted data produced by products from U.S. computer companies like Microsoft.
In 1999, U.S. Congressman Curt Weldon said that “high level deal-making on access to encrypted data had taken place between the NSA and IBM and Microsoft,” according to EPIC’s Web site.
With Vista expected to eventually power the majority of the world’s personal computers, it would be tempting for the government agency to push for a way to gain access to data on these systems, privacy advocates say.

More info from Microsoft here.

This problem is not new and exists even in earlier versions of Windows like Windows XP. The German military has even banned Microsoft software because they belive that the NSA is using Windows to spy.

I’ve been too busy to write much lately, but wanted to take a minute to direct readers to an interesting blog that I found today called Function Creep. Check it out.

Are you worried that electronic voting machines are undermining American democracy? You should be.

Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland Democratic legislator, was shocked when she opened her mail Wednesday morning.

Inside, she discovered three computer discs. With them was an anonymous letter saying the discs contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland’s new electronic voting machines.

“My understanding is that with these disks a malicious person could skew the outcome of an election,” Kagan said.

Diebold, the company that makes the voting machines, told ABC News, “These discs do not alter the security of the Diebold touch-screen system in any way,” because election workers can set their own passwords.

But ABC News has obtained an independent report commissioned by the state of Maryland and conducted by Science Applications International Corporation revealing that the original Diebold factory passwords are still being used on many voting machines.

[...]

Computer experts and government officials have voiced serious concerns that if these machines malfunction, no paper record will exist for a recount. Even worse is the fear that an election could be hacked.

Princeton University researchers using an Accuvote TS — a touch screen version of the Diebold machine — showed how easy it would be to deploy a virus that would, in seconds, flip the vote of any election.

Read the full story on ABC news: Electronic Voting Machines Could Skew Elections.

I was browsing videos on Google Video and came across this one. I hope it provides a good laugh.

Google has developed a prototype of a system that can use your computer’s microphone to eavesdrop on you. The eavesdropping system would listen for sounds that it could then process in order to target advertising to you based on what TV program you are watching. Of course, an eavesdropping system could be expanded for other uses also. TechnologyReview.com has an article on the Google eavesdropping software:

“Their prototype software, detailed in a conference presentation in Europe last June, uses a computer’s built-in microphone to listen to the sounds in a room. It then filters each five-second snippet of sound to pick out audio from a TV, reduces the snippet to a digital “fingerprint,” searches an Internet server for a matching fingerprint from a pre-recorded show, and, if it finds a match, displays ads, chat rooms, or other information related to that snippet on the user’s computer.”

Google claims that they are not gathering enough information to really spy on people:

“When word of the research first appeared in the media, some bloggers and other technology watchers reacted with horror; many assumed that the background conversation picked up by the microphone in Google’s system would be uploaded to Google. But the technology makes it impractical; at four bytes, the fingerprints don’t contain enough information to reconstruct the original sounds in a room. “Some people did get the impression that we had an open microphone that was going to listen in on them,” says Norvig.”

But — consider how fast technology is progressing. I remember when 1Mb 3.5 inch floppy disks were high tech. With the gear I have in my laptop bag at this moment I now have the equivelent storage space of 180,512 3.5 inch floppy disks. Bandwidth and memory are going to be even cheaper in the near future. A computer eavesdropping system, like the one that Google is developing, will not have limitations on how much information it can collect and store.

The privacy implications are terrible.

A video that will leave you speechless:

“A partial transcript:

Are there computer programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?

Yes.

How do you know that to be the case?

Because in October of 2000, I wrote a prototype for Congressman Tom Feeney [R-FL]…

It would rig an election?

It would flip the vote, 51-49. Whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted to win.

And would that program that you designed, be something that elections officials… could detect?

They’d never see it.”

See the video of testimonial here.

Read the shocking affidavit [PDF].

Read an interview with Clinton Curtis.

Read the article on Wired.

Read a shocking article about the issue on 43rdstateblues.com (also has more external links about it).

Read coverage of the Clint Curtis issues at bradblog.com, including the original breaking story.

I discovered an article on Bruce Schneier’s blog that refers to an ABC article about how innocent people are being placed on ‘Watch List’ to meet quota.

From ABC News:

“You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

‘Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong,’ said one federal air marshal….

What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR?

‘That could have serious impact … They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious,’ said Don Strange, a former agent in charge of air marshals in Atlanta. He lost his job attempting to change policies inside the agency.”

Spychips.com has a couple of interesting PDF files online describing IBM’s patent application: “Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items”:

“A method and system for identifying and tracking persons using RFID-tagged items carried on the persons. Previous purchase records for each person who shops at a retail store are collected by POS terminals and stored in a transaction database. When a person carrying or wearing items having RFID tags enters the store or other designated area, a RFID tag scanner located therein scans the RFID tags on that person and reads the RFID tag information. The RFID tag information collected from the person is correlated with transaction records stored in the transaction database according to known correlation algorithms. Based on the results of the correlation, the exact identity of the person or certain characteristics about the person can be determined. This information is used to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas.”

In short, Big Brother keeps track of all the products that you buy in a database. When you walk into a store, the RFID chips in your clothes, ID cards, credit cards (and later in your implanted chip(s)), will be read by the store’s Big Brother scanners and added to the database. Your identity will be determined, and other sensitive personal data will be cunningly extracted with radio waves.