Dick Cheney’s House: The Vice President’s digs at Number One Observatory Circle are obscured through pixelation in Google Earth and Google Maps at the behest of the U.S. government. However, high-resolution photos and aerial surveys of the property are readily available on other Web sites. [...]
The city of Utrecht in the Netherlands: Some sites say that the ban on this Dutch city was an apparent mistake, but it does hold relevance as an ancient city and has served as the religious center of the Netherlands since the eighth century. [...]
HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) Antenna Array on the Alaska/Yukon Border: This is part of the site for HAARP, which studies ionospheric-radio science.Miscellaneous
Shizzow encourages users to accompany each location update with a short message describing their current activity. The added context is super helpful in real life social applications, and it elevates Shizzow above a simpler service like Fire Eagle, which just provides location data, and Brightkite, which is being used more like Twitter with location attached. By contrast, Shizzow puts location at the fore.
A Canadian filmmaker plans to have a mini camera installed in his prosthetic eye to make documentaries and raise awareness about surveillance in society.
Rob Spence, 36, who lost an eye in an accident as a teen-ager, said his so-called Project Eyeborg is to have the camera, a battery and a wireless transmitter mounted on a tiny circuit board. http://www.eyeborgblog.com/
“Originally the whole idea was to do a documentary about surveillance. I thought I would become a sort of super hero … fighting for justice against surveillance,” Spence said.
“In Toronto there are 12,000 cameras. But the strange thing I discovered was that people don’t care about the surveillance cameras, they were more concerned about me and my secret camera eye because they feel that is a worse invasion of their privacy.”
Spence, in Brussels to appear at a media conference, said no part of the camera would be connected to his nerves or brain.
Google is promising that its new location-reporting service Latitude, which lets you broadcast where you are to your friends, will have a memory leak and won’t remember anything.
That’s a feature, not a bug. The intention is to make sure Latitude doesn’t become an honeypot for cops wanting to be able to easily find out where you have been or even say the names of everyone who attended, or was near, a political protest.
The policy, created in consultation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts Latitude on equal privacy footing with Loopt, a popular friend-finding service that predates Latitude. Both services now overwrite your previous location with your new location, and don’t keep logs.
So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. Now, those threads can communicate with one another, they would check to make sure that the BHO was there and up, and that the whatever other software we had was also up.
President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
But Mr. Obama also said prosecutions would proceed if the Justice Department found evidence that laws had been broken.
As a candidate, Mr. Obama broadly condemned some counterterrorism tactics of the Bush administration and its claim that the measures were justified under executive powers. But his administration will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.
In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”
“As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system.”
According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax. [...]
A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.
“As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system.”
According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax. [...]
A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.
Justice Department attorney Carl Nichols didn’t get through his first full sentence defending the constitutionality of retroactive immunity for spying telecom carriers before U.S. district judge Vaughn Walker interrupted to ask about President-elect Barack Obama.
“We are going to have new attorney general,” Walker interjected in Tuesday morning’s hearing in a San Francisco courthouse. “Why shouldn’t the court wait to see what the new attorney general will do?”
At issue in the latest hearing in the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for alleged complicity in illegal wiretapping is whether Congress has the right to free the nation’s telecoms from the lawsuits pending against them.
Nichols is arguing that Obama’s Justice Department will continue to defend the immunity statute. (Obama voted for the bill but held his nose on the immunity provisions.)
“The Department of Justice rarely, if ever, declines to defend the constitutionality of a statute,” Nichols said. “It’s very, very unlikely for a future DOJ to decline to defend the constitutionality of this statute.”
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You already have your tin foil hat, and you’re pretty sure no one can find you on the Google. However, there’s one detail you may not have thought of, and that’s those pesky RFID chips.
RFID tags identifying who and — gasp! — where you are can be found in passports, ATM cards, credit cards and some state-issued ID cards. The same technology will possibly even be used in paper money in the near future.
With the right equipment, these chips can be read from afar by data snoops or your friendly government official. A Faraday cage is sufficient for blocking such eavesdropping.
Here’s how to hide yourself from both the baddies and The Man.
Advertisements looking for people to sign up for the unpaid “environmental volunteer” jobs have been posted across the country in recent months.
Critics said the scheme is encouraging a Big Brother society where friends and neighbours will be encouraged to “snoop” on one another.
The recruitment drive follows news that the Home Office is granting police powers to council staff and private security guards, allowing then to hand out fines for low-scale offences and ask for personal details.
Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Snooping on your neighbours to report recycling infringements sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi’s copybook.
When players walk into Army sponsored tournaments, the government knows more about them then they may suppose. The game records players’ data and statistics in a massive database called Andromeda, which records every move a player makes and links the information to their screen name. With this information tracking system, gameplay serves as a military aptitude tester, tracking overall kills, kills per hour, a player’s virtual career path, and other statistics. According to Colonel Wardynski, players who play for a long time and do extremely well may “just get an e-mail seeing if [they'd] like any additional information on the Army.” The “America’s Army” web site, however, is quick to point out that the Army respects players’ privacy. The Army claims that player information is not linked to a person’s real world identity unless that person volunteers their identity to a recruiter. But it is not clear that recruiters have to give any sort of discloser that a voluntary relinquishing of one’s name is also an invitation to a player’s statistical information. Answering seemingly innocent questions from recruiters in “America’s Army” chat rooms or at state fairs about one’s screen name may divulge personal information without intending to.
Myth No. 1: This bill is a compromise.
Myth No. 2: We need the bill to intercept our enemies abroad.
Myth No. 3: The courts will still review the telecom cases.
Myth No. 4: The Democrats must fold because of the November election.
Myth No. 5: The law will be the “exclusive means” for surveillance.
“Many people are uncomfortable with the march of the surveillance state - but a Manchester band has used it to their advantage.
Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets. With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.
They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester - including on a bus - and proceeded to play to the cameras. Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.”
Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.
With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.
They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester – including on a bus – and proceeded to play to the cameras.
Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.
The New Normal is an art show in Germany on the subject of privacy in the post 9/11 world. Above:
Submitting oneself to security measures can be turned upside down by adopting what Hassan Elahi calls an “aggressive compliance.” Elahi daily points a mocking finger to absurd security measures with the real-time self-tracking website he set up in a bid to demonstrate to the FBI investigator that he’s not spending his time traveling to the Middle East and plotting some attack in the U.S. The models features in Sharif Waked’s Chic Point Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints video seem to have adopted a similar strategy.
As a promotion for the new Cory Doctorow book Little Brother, Instructables is running a series of related “how to” articles, including:
How to blend in with crowds
How to lie to authority figures
Encrypt your Gmail Email!
How to locate pinhole cameras
Spice Mister
Avoiding Camera Noise Signatures
How to Start A Flash Mob
How to block/kill RFID chips
Photo-emulsion Screen Printing
What to do if the police stop you
It’s shaping up to be an “anarchist cookbook” for the 21st century.
This story’s been in high circulation on the blogosphere lately:
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
Thousands of foreigners are being allowed to work in high security parts of Britain’s airports without passing proper criminal record checks, it was disclosed last night.
Despite warnings that terrorists would try to recruit people working “airside” in terminals – with direct access to aircraft and baggage – no attempt has been made to check whether foreign workers have committed any offences abroad.
The vetting process checks only for crimes committed in Britain. Foreign workers – arriving from inside or outside the European Union – are not checked in their country of origin.
This means that someone with a conviction for firearms or explosives offences committed abroad could, for example, take a job loading bags on to aircraft at Heathrow, Gatwick or any other airport, provided they had committed no crimes here.
“Miranda is a black box-like arrest documentation device that records video, audio, motion, impact, location, and other data and streams it over cell phone data networks to third party observers such as the ACLU.”
The site was created by Witness, a Brooklyn-based group founded by the globe-trotting pop star Peter Gabriel in 1992. Conceived in the wake of the Rodney King beating, the group initially focused on getting camcorders into the hands of human rights activists around the world. The goal, in Gabriel’s phrase, was to create a network of “Little Brothers and Little Sisters” to keep an eye on Big Brother’s thugs. He rapidly discovered that distributing tools wasn’t enough. To be really effective, you need a network.
“What we learned over the first four or five years was that the promise that Rodney King represented couldn’t be realized just by providing cameras to human rights groups,” says Sam Gregory, Witness’s 33-year-old program director. “In the absence of technical training, they couldn’t produce video that would be used by news organizations and they couldn’t craft the stories that would engage audiences.” The group did manage to place some footage in the news media, but even then it had trouble leveraging those appearances into actual change.
(I started this back when Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo!, but I’ve only just not gotten a chance to finish up).
We all know about the potential “Big Brother”hood of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!. Here are four other organizations with massive databases or the potential to collect extensive personal data.
Amazon, the other data hoarders - Amazon has perhaps the most complete database of the web outside of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. They own Alexa, which keeps detailed statistics on web traffic of the entire web. Alexa helps maintain archive.org, which includes an extensive backup of as much of the web as possible. They also have their own Google-based search engine a9 and host database apps. And all of this is just gravy for their extensive consumer data from amazon.com.
eBay, merchant monopoly - So far the government has resisted Internet sales tax. But eBay’s cut of their auctions and Paypal transactions almost constitutes a sales tax in and of itself considering the number of transactions that use these services. Also, they own what amounts to the biggest Internet telco, Skype. They have (or have the potential to collect) data on who buys what, who pays who what, and who calls who. To top it all off, they own an approximate 25% share in Craig’s List (and they own a Craig’s List competitor, Kijiji).
Wikipedia Foundation, truth and authority incorporated - Wikipedia is on its way to “owning” truth. We all probably know better, but we’ll all still trust Wikipedia entries without checking references more often than we should. In many cases, I search Wikipedia on a subject before I search Google - and more often than not, a Wikipedia entry is the top listing for a topic on Google. Often I’ll never even end up looking at a Google search for a subject because I’ll just look at the references and external links from a Wikipedia article. I believe Wales’s side of this story, but the potential for conflict of interest at Wikipedia is huge. The transparency and “crowd sourced” accountability temper this, but to what extent? It’s worth noting they now have a private wing - Wikia, which has started a search engine service.
IAC/Interactive Corp , or: who? - This huge company owns dozens of recognizable Internet brands, but hardly anyone has heard of them. If they started pooling all their data and mining it, what could they do? They’ve got one of the “other” big search engines, ask.com. They’ve got huge reserves of data for potential mining of social information from sites like match.com and evites, which could give them data on par with Myspace or Facebook. They’ve got a popular web based RSS reader, Bloglines. They could mine all sorts of consumer preference data from sites like Citysearch, Lending Tree, and the home shopping network. One of their businesses already attracted criticism years ago and remains a juggernaut in its niche: Ticketmaster.
“I’m in the university town of Wageningen, about to have the least private lunch of my life, and a Dutchman is playing tricks with my mind. ‘Would you like coffee?’ he says, all cryptically. ‘No, water will be fine,’ I reply, because I’m not going to be manipulated. A bottle of water turns up with four beakers, all black but different shapes. The Dutchman is smirking, barely able to contain his excitement as he waits for my next move.
If I choose the tall one, it probably means I have issues with the size of my penis. If I choose the short, stubby one, it probably means the same. I choose the one closest to me. The Dutchman nods to himself. ‘What does all that mean?’ I ask. ‘Well, you were on edge because I was smirking,’ says the Dutchman, smirking at the fact that smirking was part of his test.
‘And you were uncomfortable because all the beakers are black, which is the colour we associate with death. The different shapes should have no real significance they hold the same amount of water but subconsciously, you were making false assumptions about one holding more than the other. It was interesting.’ At least it had nothing to do with my penis. Welcome to the Restaurant of the Future, a multi-million-pound experiment that could, and probably will, change the way we eat.”
“A pilot project in social networking, which involves wirelessly monitoring people in a closed environment, will commence in March, 2008 at the University of Washington’s computer science building. The RFID Ecosystem project will provide long-term, in-depth research of user-centered RFID systems in relation to fields such as society and technology. Volunteers will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings, enabling RFID readers to monitor their whereabouts. One of the main questions this research faces is whether or not the utility aspect of this monitoring system outweighs the participants’ potential loss of privacy, and how can this loss of privacy be minimized?”
