What the fuck is wrong with you people?
Privacy
This Just In: Teachers not allowed to have a life outside of school.
Jan 22nd
How’s this for being totally unfair:
A Brownsville high school teacher has been suspended for 30 days without pay after she appeared in a picture someone else posted on Facebook that included a male stripper at a bridal shower.
[...] Board member Stella Broadwater says the suspension is appropriate because the photo became public, but member Sandra Chan says it was too harsh because the teacher had no control over the photo being posted.
via Teacher suspended over stripper photo – Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
It’d be one thing if the teacher had printed out this picture and passed it around to her students, but to be suspended because someone else posted the picture on Facebook is pretty stupid. Granted I’ve not seen the picture in question, but I’m not sure it should matter much. Short of staying home and never doing anything outside of work, I’m not sure how she had any control over the posting of the pic.
This also reflects one of the problems with Facebook’s move towards removing the privacy options that it has traditionally made available to its users. As these barriers come down you’ll be reading about more and more news items like this as pictures that were once thought to be limited to family and friends become viewable by the public at large.
There are already a number of sites popping up to chronicle embarrassing Facebook postings including Failbook.com from the folks who brought us I Can Has Cheezeburger? I mean, do you really want wall updates like this one viewable by the whole world?
It’s embarrassing enough that your mom knows you’re brushing up on AMAZING SEX, but what happens when a potential employer is able to do a Google search and has this come up? At least the Failbook.com folks remove last names and blur pics. Google isn’t going to do that.
OK, I’ve gotten off on a tangent here so allow me to wrap this up. The point I’m trying to make is that, sure, the idiot in the above screenshot probably shouldn’t have posted something like that if he didn’t want folks (including his mom) to know about it, but the teacher that got suspended didn’t post the picture that got her in trouble and that’s not fair. Which is basically my point.
Wired’s Mathew Honan experiments with Location-Aware software.
Jan 27th
One of the features of the newer iPhone’s and Google Android based cellphones allow the phone, and any applications you’re running on it, to determine where you are to varying degrees of precision. Using a combination of cell towers (500 meters), Wi-Fi (30 meters), and GPS (10 meters) and various software packages that make use of that info you can literally broadcast your whereabouts to the whole world pretty much continuously.
This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, both good and bad, and has attracted a growing group of people practicing a Location-Aware Lifestyle. Wired magazine’s Mathew Honan decided to try spending a few weeks living the lifestyle to see what it was like:
The location-aware future—good, bad, and sleazy—is here. Thanks to the iPhone 3G and, to a lesser extent, Google’s Android phone, millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what—and who—is in the immediate vicinity. That old saw about how someday you’ll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now.
Simply put, location changes everything. This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.
I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible. For a few weeks, whenever I arrived at a new place, I would announce it through multiple social geoapps. When going for a run, bike ride, or drive, I would record my trajectory and publish it online. I would let digital applications help me decide where to work, play, and eat. And I would seek out new people based on nothing but their proximity to me at any given moment. I would be totally open, exposing my location to the world just to see where it took me. I even added an Eye-Fi Wi-Fi card to my PowerShot digital camera so that all my photos could be geotagged and uploaded to the Web. I would become the most location-aware person on the Internets!
People, particularly younger folks, already put out a lot of information about themselves on the Internet. I’m guilty of this myself with this blog. Not only do I have my real name on it, but there’s a fairly detailed history of the major ups and downs of my life over the past seven years in the archives. Everything from my best friend being needlessly killed by a traffic cop and how I dealt with the loss to my eventual downsizing from Ford Motor Company and the long struggle to get back on my feet. My politics and religious outlook are extensively documented as is the general area that I live in. SEB is the number one search result on Google when you type in “Les Jenkins” followed by some poor bastard who shares my name that works at Colorado One Mortgage.
For all that I put on SEB there are some folks who put me to shame particularly on sites like Facebook and MySpace. You may recall a few months back an entry I wrote about a woman who had been emailing me about her “psychic visions” of my future. I mentioned in a comment that I was able to track down where she lives (to a specific street address), how big a house she owns, how much she bought it for, how many pets she has, what musical instrument she’s trying to teach herself to play, what books shes been reading, her daughter and son-in-law’s name, where they lived, when their wedding was supposed to happen, and a whole host of other personal info with nothing more than her email and IP address. That’s pretty impressive, but even that pales to what some folks make available and then when you add location-awareness into the mix you make it all that much more immediate. Which could have its downside:
The trouble started right away. While my wife and I were sipping stouts at our neighborhood pub in San Francisco (37.770401 °N, 122.445154 °W), I casually mentioned my plan. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to announce to everyone that you’re leaving town without me, are you? A lot of weirdos follow you online.”
Sorry, weirdos—I love you, but she has a point. Because of my work, many people—most of them strangers—track my various Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, and blog feeds. And it’s true; I was going to be gone for a week on business. Did I really want to tell the world that I was out of town? It wasn’t just leaving my wife home alone that concerned me. Because the card in my camera automatically added location data to my photos, anyone who cared to look at my Flickr page could see my computers, my spendy bicycle, and my large flatscreen TV all pinpointed on an online photo map. Hell, with a few clicks you could get driving directions right to my place—and with a few more you could get black gloves and a lock pick delivered to your home.
To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.
Think about that for a moment. Her being in an apartment would make any attempts at larceny a bit more difficult, but what if she lived in a single family home in a suburb? Take the geo-location data on the pictures and look it up in Google Maps—yes you can use latitude and longitude in Google Maps—drop down to Street View and you could even see what the house looks like so long as Google has been through that neighborhood. Above and beyond simply showing folks where to go to score a nice flat screen TV, this could also potentially be used to allow people to find you anywhere you happen to be making it a boon for potential rapists, stalkers, and plain old crazy people. Those, of course, are worst-case scenarios so let’s not dwell on them too much. Instead just consider how creepy it is that Honan was able to pick a perfect stranger out in a park and with just a little effort peer at the filthy living room in her apartment.
The technology is not without its upside though. Honan talks in the article about how it actually made him more social as friends who had seen he’d be in their area would turn up to hang out for a few minutes and touch base. Additionally some of the tools he was using allowed him to learn more about the area he was in, find the cheapest gas prices, and discover new places to eat he’d never realized were there before. And it’s not as though you have to make use of the tools that expose your precise location every second of the day. The whole article is worth a read if for no other reason than to educate yourself on what’s possible. Right now you have to put some work into setting yourself up to be so exposed, but developers are working to make doing stuff like that easier all the time so it may not be too long before you could set yourself up to broadcast your location constantly without realizing it.
It never hurts to be well-informed.
This is what a surveillance society looks like.
Sep 24th
The U.K. has a shitload of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) almost everywhere you go. One local artist who realized that he was monitored almost constantly by the police decided to see how long it would take them to notice an 8 foot tall alien wandering on an empty street so he got some friends together and made it happen:
In short, it didn’t take very long for police to show up and they weren’t thrilled at the prank. Watching the video brings home just what living in such a society would be like for anyone who’s at all out of the ordinary. The idea of being constantly watched is chilling indeed and there are many who would love to replicate that sort of thing here in America. It’s already started in some places around the country. I suppose on the one hand it’s a good thing that the police are able to notice and respond to a potential threat so quickly, but it’s so easily abused and the hassle of dealing with countless false alarms is sure to cause many of them to discourage anything that would require them to waste time checking it out. Things like walking around in an 8 foot alien costume.
It also shows how unrealistic Doctor Who is. A police box suddenly appearing out of no where would be swarmed by the police within moments by the looks of it, let alone anything truly alien looking.
Found via Gizmodo.
Turns out we’re already living in a surveillance state.
Jul 9th
The new FISA “compromise” bill that the Senate is about to pass makes me angry just to think about, but deep down I’ve long suspected that our government pretty much spies on us with impunity already. This Baltimore Sun news article pretty much confirms that suspicion:
“There’s virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn’t in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance,” said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. “We’re operating in a brave new world.”
[...] The Bush administration argues that the privacy and civil liberties protections in place for surveillance not covered by the FISA rules are “unprecedented.” In addition to the data-mining, use of financial transaction databases and satellite imagery, the surveillance includes monitoring the travel patterns of airline passengers.
[...] But critics say the safeguards don’t always work. Some blunders in the use of such protections have become public. New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright wrote in January about one such experience. In 2002, while he was researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on al-Qaida, two members of an FBI terrorism task force arrived at his home. Why, they asked, had his daughter been speaking with someone in the United Kingdom who was in touch with suspected al-Qaida operatives?
It wasn’t his daughter, he told them flatly. Wright himself had made the calls. And the person he contacted was a British civil rights lawyer who had asked him not to speak with her clients, some of whom are relatives of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant.
“My daughter is no terrorist – she went to high school with the Bush twins,” Wright said. “I was taken aback. They were apparently monitoring my phones.”
Wright said he was particularly surprised because he was aware of protections supposedly in place to conceal his name and other identifying information that would have been gathered during the creation of transcripts of the call.
Wright said he doubted the government would have been able to get a warrant for the information, and he said he didn’t know how the FBI obtained his daughter’s name, let alone got the impression that she was communicating with the British lawyer.
It’s somewhat ironic to note that the new FISA bill actually has more civil liberties protections than the other domestic spying programs that aren’t covered by it. It makes me feel foolish for getting so worked up about the new FISA rules because, really, the cows got out of the barn a long time ago. There’s been reports of various abuses and misuses of these programs for years now and every time a government agency gets new powers, such as the FBI and its “security letters” thanks to the Patriot Act, it’s usually not too long before we hear about them being abused. If anything I suppose I should be angry that the new FISA bill provides the government with even more power it can abuse, not that they haven’t abused the system under the old rules already. They’re just trying to make it quasi-legal to do so now that everyone knows about it.
Director of National Intelligence says he must spy on you to keep you safe!
Jan 17th
This article from ArsTechnica about an interview the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, gave to The New Yorker will send a few shivers down your spine:
US intel chief wants carte blanche to peep all ‘Net traffic – ArsTechnica.com
While short on specifics, the New Yorker piece recognizes that any plan requiring the kind of authority McConnell envisions is apt to be a hard sell: “Americans will have to trust the government not to abuse the authority it must have in order to protect our networks, and yet, historically the government has not proved worthy of that trust.” McConnell acknowledges that his initiative is bound to spark debate that will make recent wrangling over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act seem like “a walk in the park compared to this.”
How broad are the powers needed to keep our servers safe? According to the article, in order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” he said. Giorgio warned me, “We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”
Sayings like that, says security guru Bruce Schneier, “are why the police aren’t in charge; security and privacy are complimentary. Privacy is part of our security against government abuse. If they were really zero-sum, we would have seen mass immigration into East Germany.”
If the Director gets his way he’ll be looking at every single bit of data you send over the Internet. All in the interest of keeping you safe, of course. Never would they abuse that power. Honest. You can trust them. Really.
And if you believe that…
Being “annoying” online - now against the law.
Jan 9th
Do you post on blogs? Send jokes to colleagues? Say anything at all that might be construed by anyone as objectionable?
Well, from now on you had better do it under your own name and not a pseudonym or there could be fines and/or jailtime in your future (read the Cnet article here). It seems that on January 6th of this year “president” Bush signed a law called the ‘Violence against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act” which has an section embedded in it (section 113 to be precise) which is titled “Preventing Cyberstalking”. So far everything I have written here seems pretty innocuous, designed to keep women and girls from being stalked and harrassed by online predators, and I’m all for that. If I had ANY trust in our current pro-torture, pro-spying, pro-empire, criticism averse administration I might not even bat an eye at this. But I don’t have any trust left.
How do you define annoying? If I asked 10 people for specific examples of what annoys them I am willing to bet I would get 10 different answers. Something that I find annoying, like prosteletizing, might be sacrosanct to someone else – so who decides? Bush probably finds it annoying that his spy ring has been exposed. I find it absolutely necessary and downright patriotic. Since the audiences for his townhall meetings are preselected I bet he finds surprise questions and contrary opinions annoying. I find them amusing.
Because I always post my annoying opinions under my own name, Eric Paulsen, I am safe from fines and jail time (at least in theory), but… why make it necessary that an “annoying” post be under a persons real name and not a psuedonym? Why would an administration that was developing the Total Information Awareness database (an enormous datamining tool), that thinks it is okay to tap the phone calls and read the e-mails of American citizens, and is trying to give the Executive branch limitless powers (“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier…just as long as I’m the dictator…” G. W. Bush—Washington, DC, Dec 18, 2000) want your real name attached to an “annoying” post. That’s a real puzzler there. Yup, a real puzzler.
Well, here’s another post for my NSA file. 
Patriot Act Shenanigans
Aug 27th
I have been opposed to the Patriot Act ever since its inception. Here is just another news item to support that view. Proponents of the Patriot Act would have you believe that it is only used for “safety” purposes and only targets suspicious behavior. First of all, who gets to define what constitutes “suspicious” behavior? How often have governments in the past abused their access to such private information regarding their citizens? While not downplaying the threat of terrorism, I am much more likely by the order of many magnitudes to die in a car accident than as the result of a terrorist action. I am inclined to agree with Franklin’s sentiments about those who are willing to give up freedom for security deserve neither. Anyway, here are some highlights from the news story.
A member of the American Library Association has sued the Justice Department to challenge an FBI demand for records, but the USA Patriot Act prohibits the plaintiff from publicly disclosing its identity or other details of the dispute, according to court documents released Thursday.
I have subscribed to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) newsletters for the last several years. It seems that librarians are doing more to try to protect our fundamental privacies than the average citizen is. This is not the first case of a librarian bucking the feds over an overly invasive search of a patron’s browsing records. Gee, how convenient for the feds that we “merely” ordinary citizens can’t even know what the dispute is over.
Justice Department and FBI officials have repeatedly declined to identify how many times Patriot Act-related powers have been used to seek or obtain information from libraries, but they have strongly urged Congress not to limit their ability to do so.
No doubt they do this because the results would show that overwhelmingly their “fishing” excursions are less than useful and further erode the original freedoms, privacies, and liberties that we used to enjoy.
The lawsuit, originally filed under seal in Connecticut on Aug. 9, focuses on the FBI’s use of a document called a “national security letter,” which allows investigators to demand records without the approval of a judge and to prohibit companies or institutions from disclosing the request. (emphasis mine) Restrictions on the FBI’s ability to use NSLs were loosened under the Patriot Act.
Wow, they get to act as judge, jury, and executioner. How fortuitous! This is very similar to other provisions of the unPatriot Act where LEO can search your home and computer while you are not present and they don’t even have to notify you at the time. “Fourth Amendment, what Fourth Amendment?”, chuckled George as the Patriot Act was made into law. He was further heard to say, “Hell, I can’t even count past three- that damned Bill of Rights and Constitutional guarantees crap just confuses me. It’s much easier just to ignore it.”
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said during Senate testimony in April that the Justice Department “has no interest in rummaging through the library records or medical records of Americans” but that “libraries should not become safe havens” for terrorists or other criminals.
Gonzales said at the time that the FBI had never asked for records under a provision of the Patriot Act known by critics as the “library provision,” which allows the government to demand records from a variety of businesses, including libraries, in intelligence probes.
But that provision is separate from the one that governs the kind of letter used in the Connecticut case.
As he crossed his fingers behind his back. What a bunch of lying thieves! Well, hopefully, the neo-cons are on the wane and we will see the return of true conservatives who are interested in reining in Big Brother and protecting the rights and freedoms of individuals.
School uses RFID to keep track of students
Feb 10th
Calif. school requires radio ID tags for students
SUTTER, Calif. – The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.
The short gist of the article is that a school has introduced RFID as a means of tracking students.
Security:
There are fears of people using RFID to “stalk” the students. But if I am not wrong the RFID range is not too far, so if someone was stalking the kids, it would be more effective and easier to use the old fashion way of skulking about in the shadows. Of course there are some who argue that if one can develop a long range tracking device that can be implanted into a child, there will be many parents seeking to buy such devices.
Query – If such a device exist and you have a child who does not mind being “implanted” because she/he is such a sweetie patotie who does not want mommy or daddy to be unnecessarily worried and that she/he feels that such a device is akin to a “guardian angel” would you want your kid to be implanted?
Query – What are the thoughts of the children, for those people that have school age going children on carrying such a device.
1984 and Big Brother:
I never really understood why the moment people talk about tracking or Identification Numbers everyone starts talking about 1984. After all in the utopic universe of Star Trek, all the people have the tracking device of the communication badge. As they say, its 12pm on a school day, do you know where your children are? Or what about “LoneStar” (the “tracking” device for your car, if I managed to get the name correct). Even the cellphones, which almost everyone seems to be carrying can track its signal to obtain the person’s location.
“TheSystem”
What if one is able to track the movement of everyone but such information is kept in the computer database and that one is only allowed to access them under a court order, say in the instances where the person is being charged with a crime. Is it so bad? Sure it may seem bad for one’s privacy to the extent that a non-sentient computer system knows your movement but as stated above a person’s movement can be tracked.
Query – If such a system exists would you be for it or against it.
The Mark of the Devil
Here is something which I was wondering. Some people seem to believe that RFID is the so called mark of the devil. So can a student refuse to carry the RFID on grounds of religion? What if someone was to interpret a religion to state that students cannot be held after school say for detention. How far can religion go? In areas of education, specifically evolution, it seems that it can go all the way. But in areas where the purpose is for the safety and security of children it would seem that religion may not extend that far.
Edit: I have edited the text to correct some horrific typing errors.
Please Don’t Smile
Dec 13th
In the process of renewing my passport, I came across an interesting development within the State Department. It seems that many Americans have been entirely too happy as of late and they want to change that. Actually, they are just changing the guidelines for identification photos. As of January 1st, passport photos that portray a smiling subject will no longer be accepted.
ABC News – You better not crack a smile in your passport photo
December 3, 2004 — If you’re traveling out of the country in the near future you know what you have to do, check out that passport to make sure it’s still valid. And while you’re at it, take a good look at your old passport picture. Are you smiling? If you are, when you get your next photo taken, you won’t be.
That’s right. From now on the state department says we should wipe that smile off our face. They say it’s because when we smile, in a sense, we change our faces and we really don’t look exactly like us.
“No smiling, no frowning. The passport agency wants to see the person’s natural face in a relaxed state,” said Karen O’Brien, manager “Travisa” Office in Chicago.
They say it has nothing to do with extra security. It’s just so immigration officers can more easily compare the real you with the photo you. So don’t go “cheese.”
“Nothing to do with security”? I’d say it has everything to do with security. As a matter-of-fact, I’d say it has everything to do with Facial Recognition.
Following 9/11 there were a bevy of security companies competing to waste earn our tax dollars. Biometric industries seized the opportunity to peddle their wares and move into the Homeland Security Agency spotlight. In June of 2002, the government sponsored a conference with all the biometric industry leaders and the focus was on facial recognition. This is where FERET comes in to play.
The FERET program ran from 1993 through 1997. Sponsored by the Department of Defense’s Counterdrug Technology Development Program through the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA), its primary mission was to develop automatic face recognition capabilities that could be employed to assist security, intelligence and law enforcement personnel in the performance of their duties. Source: http://www.frvt.org/
The FERET program was terminated for several reasons: high cost, failure rate and privacy concerns were the major factors. Following the conference in 2002, the FERET program was given new life and is now being used in collaboration with private companies. The deployment seems to be moving ahead even though DARPA has openly stated that the improvements in accuracy have been minimal. Companies such as Ratheon and Imagis have been closing key deals with government agencies. It will only be a matter of time before security personnel know who you are before you even know they’re present. Just don’t smile.
Color laser printers include the unit’s serial number on every printout.
Nov 23rd
Here’s something I didn’t know before now, but it explains a lot: Apparently all color laser devices—printers, copiers, etc.—sold since 1995 have been encoding their serial number into every printout made from them so counterfeit documents can be traced by the government back to the source.
Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company’s laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the “serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots” in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.
“It’s a trail back to you, like a license plate,” Crean says.
The dots’ minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light—say, from a keychain laser flashlight—on your page and use a magnifier.
There have been a number of money and check frauds over the past several years which the Secret Service seemed to be able to crack wide open with amazing ease and speed and now we know why. The color laser printers used tattled on the suspects. Needless to say, this gives one pause to wonder how many other devices have similar “features” in them. It’s not even so much that I have a problem with this technology being in place as much as I have a problem with not knowing about it as it is ripe for abuse in the wrong hands. Something to think about the next time you make a print from a color laser printer or copier.
Found via Boing Boing.
Recent Comments