Slashdot: Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist!

February 3, 2012 — xanthippa

Here is another example of the Western governments’ war on its citizens.

Yes, war.

It sickens me that governments are now openly saying that if you shield your screen from the view of others, this makes you a terrorism suspect!

This creates precisely the type of environment where hacker-vigilaties will be not just tolerated, but positively embraced by a population that feels increasingly under attack by the very institutions created to ensure their individual rights.

Let’s not make any mistakes about it:  it is not Twitter and Google who are increasingly censoring us, the members of online communities.  Even though they facilitate access to the virtual world of the web, they are themselves physical corporations which exist in the real world, very much subject to the whims of real-world governments.

As such, they are subject to the arbitrary rules which various governments impose on corporations operating within their physical boundaries.

It is unreasonable for us to expect that these corporations will put the freedom on the internet above their ability to physically survive…

So, you may blame them for buckling – but don’t blame them for imposing the censorship itself:  the blame lies directly with our governments, our regulating bodies, and us, the citizens, who permit this encroachment!

The solution?

We must all fight to prevent all governments from usurping jurisdiction over the internet, the way they have been doing!

How?

I don’t know.  Yes, I have been thinking about this for a long time, but there simply is no clear answer.

The easiest solution I suspect would be to continue the efforts to create alternatives to the ‘pipelines’ that ISPs use to deliver internet connections, but the more people try to solve this, the more actual attempts there are to make the web truly uncontrollable and impossible to be regulated by anyone or anything anywhere, the better chance there is of success.

So – keep your elective representatives responsible – and keep hacking!

Posted in freedoms, opression, politics, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

SOPA: uniting the internet against collusion by big business and big government

December 15, 2011 — xanthippa

SOPA

Sounds so innocuous:  Stop Online Piracy Act.

After all, ‘Pirates’ are all ‘bad’, so anything to get them off ‘our internet’ must be ‘good’, right?

We, surely, the Orwellian language is only a part of the trick here.

The SOPA hearings are being held today and it is difficult to believe that anyone who does not directly benefit financially from this legislation would be willing to support it.  The effect of this legislation would be to chill free speech in ways to give Richard Warman and his Section 13 co-oppressors wet dreams in perpetuity!

Right now, even with the ‘moderate’, much less draconian legislation in place, the copyright infringement laws are being used to silence critics of big business – or even just independent voices (lest they become critical in the future).

In this example, a DMCA claim was used to censor a daily tech news episode which criticized a big-music corporation:  under the law, a mere DMCA claim was enough to force a takedown of the episode for a minimum of 10 days.  If you are running a daily news show, 10 days is an eternity…  At least, under the DMCA rules, the news show could appeal to a judge…

And, of course, we all know that the US government has been known to censor a blog for over a year, denying them due process of law to get their property restored and name cleared.

Just to add injury to injury:  not only are you guilty until proved innocent under SOPA, getting to court to prove your innocence will be much harder.  And even if you were victorious and the courts found you innocent of all charges, you would not have a recourse to sue for damages suffered as the result of the false SOPA accusation!

Is this type of legislation even needed?

The Swiss government certainly does not think so:  they have gone the opposite route.  After studying the data for a long time, these legislators have concluded that downloading music/videos for personal use is not just perfectly legal, they claim it actually channels money away from copyright holders and  helps the music/movie industry in the long run.

Even US judges are suggesting that if you buy a DVD, you just might be allowed to rip it under ‘fair use’ doctrine!

And what about the people who have been the most vociferous about the need for crippling the internet in the name of copyright protection?  Surely, they themselves do not indulge in the very behaviour they wish to stamp out with knee-jerk legislation like ‘three accusations and you are permanently banned from the internet’, right?

Well, not exactly.

“French President Nicholas Sarkozy is a man who has championed some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legislation in Europe. But today it’s revealed that the occupants of his very own office and home are responsible for a nice selection of pirate downloads using BitTorrent. Three strikes? Those with access to the Presidential Palace’s IP addresses have already doubled that quota. “

But, surely, those entertainment legacy industry movers and shakers who have lobbied the legislators for SOPA – the ones who claim that downloading movies and music for free would bankrupt them – surely they are not doing this themselves, are they?

Of course they are!

“With increasing lobbying efforts from the entertainment industry against BitTorrent sites and users, we wondered whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others. After some initial skimming we’ve discovered BitTorrent pirates at nearly every major entertainment industry company in the US, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment and NBC Universal. Busted.”

And those ‘evil Pirates’ – they must be up to even more vile things…

…but only if you call building a school and bringing high-speed internet connection to a small farming village (which only had one dial-up connected computer for the whole village before) to be a bad thing…

Let’s hope the unanimous screams of protest from the citizens of the internet get heard!

Posted in freedoms, opression, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Mark Lemire and Section 13: report from Federal Court hearing on 13th of December, 2011

December 14, 2011 — xanthippa

Free Dominion has a discussion with several reports about the Tuesday hearing in Federal Court in  Richard Warman’s ongoing case against Mark Lemire, which has run into a snag:  the question whether Section 13 of the Human Rights Code (the thought-crime section) is Constitutional or not.

Connie Fournier reports that the cast was large:  from CCLA and BCLA to Doug Christie on stage, from BigCityLib to free-speech bloggers in the audience.  Here is a little quote from her report:

“During this time, the judge listened intently and didn’t interrupt. His face was inscrutable. The funniest moment of the hearing came when the lawyer for B’nai Brith said that Section 13 is “a ringing endorsement of free speech”. Everyone in the audience snorted and snickered uncontrollably. (Probably only one person in the audience was a censor and the rest were free speech supporters or media).”

An excerpt from Narrow Back’s  report:

“At 11:00 we returned to hear from the African Legal Clinic. They talked about “irradicating discrimination” for “deeper social concerns” “improvement of the condition of less fortunate people” blah blah, etc. They also talked about S13 as a “conciliatory process”. I just wrote down: “Ha!” “

And here is a part from Mark Fournier’s post:

“A couple of intervenors in favour of state censorship put in their two cents and then Richard Warman got up and complained that just because the CHRC did a terrible job of administering Section 13 his rights shouldn’t be violated. The irony was breathtaking.”

Read the whole reports – along with what people are saying about it – at Free Dominion!

Posted in corruption, freedoms, opression, politics, society. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

When can raising charity money for orphans land you in a ‘re-education camp’?

December 14, 2011 — xanthippa

When you live in a land ruled by Sharia!

Zilla of the Resistance has the story.

(Check it out and have a listen to the music:  I rather like the tune I suspect is the ‘swing classic’ ‘Clementine’ done in Indonesian punk – a definite improvement over the original!)

Via:  BCF

Quite apart from this story, it is important for us, Westerners, to understand that in lands ruled by Sharia, ‘charity’ does not work the same way it does in our part of the World.

This does not mean that Muslims are not charitable people:  not at all!

And it does not mean that in countries with Muslim populations, people do not perform charitable acts for the sake of helping their fellow human beings, regardless of race or creed.  They do – and we have many stories of Muslim women helping Westerners (men, women and children) who were in Japanese prison camps during WWII!

Rather, as Sharia rules every single aspect of life of those unfortunate to live under its oppression, so it has very specific and rigid rules for ‘charity’.

Let me illustrate this with an example:  following the Tsunami a few years ago, people in Bengal (I refuse to use the new colonial name for the country) were upset that many Western charities got volunteers on the ground and started providing aid.  The Bengali fear was that these aid groups were there trying to steal their children…

Many in the West were perplexed by this:  why would the people there refuse aid, willingly provided without any strings attached?

Because right now, Bengal is under Sharia.  And Sharia strictly differentiates between ‘Muslim charities’ and ‘non-Muslim charities’.

It is forbidden, under Sharia, for Muslim charities to help non-Muslims – and for non-Muslim charities to help Muslims (though, to be honest, non-Muslim charities do face a lot of regulatory interference under Sharia and are thus prevented from being as effective in providing aid as Muslim charities are).  Therefore, when non-Muslim charities attempted to aid Muslims in Bengal, the response among the population was confusion and fear – and, ultimately, rejection of much help.  The problem was finally resolved by the non-Muslim charities simply giving the money and aid materiel to Muslim charities, who then operated on the ground…

Another ‘perplexing’ example came even more recently, during the terrible flooding in Pakistan.  Even as money poured into the county through Red Cross, there were appalling stories of whole non-Muslim families starving – even in regions where food aid was plentiful.  Again, people in ‘The West’ could not make heads-or-tails of this and many wrote these stories off as propaganda.

Not so.

The primary channel for the aid funds was The International Red Cross.

In Sharia countries, the Red Cross partners with its affiliated Islamic charity, the Red Crescent, and channels all aid through it.

In Pakistan, which is for all practical purposes governed by Sharia, the Red Crescent operates as an Islamic charity under Sharia does.  That means that Mosques are used as the centres from which the aid (from food on down) is distributed.

To most of us, this does not seem particularly odd:  Mosques serve as community centres, so they are centrally located and accessible.  Plus, they have the room to store the supplies to be distributed, so this would be a logical place to distribute aid from, right?

Plus, under Sharia, the Red Crescent is only permitted to distribute aid through a Mosque.  So, it is not just the ‘logical’ course of action, it is the only permitted course of action.  And the Red Crescent did make various statements to the effect that everyone who came to them for aid, received aid!

So, what was the problem that caused the non-Muslims to starve?

Under Sharia, a non-Muslim may not enter a Mosque!

Not being permitted to enter the place from which the aid from Western countries was being distributed, non-Muslims could either starve or convert to Islam…

I suspect there is a lot more about ‘charity under Sharia’ we just don’t know…

Posted in freedoms, opression, religion. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

FOI request for FBI use of data secretly collected from smart phones: denied!

December 13, 2011 — xanthippa

A while back, I  posted about CarrierIQ and its ‘rootkit of all evil’.

In it are links which demonstrate how CarrierIQ has embedded code into smart phones which runs in the background and is not easily accessible to the phone’s user (with no notification to the user that it is running, much less choices to ‘opt out’).  This code records everything the phone is used for and reports this information back to CarrierIQ – even if the user is not in any contract with the company, or has indeed ever heard of its existence.  This information contains:

  • GPS information
  • incoming and outgoing phone calls
  • details of internet access and use, including encrypted data (like passwords)
  • all keystroke information

In another post, I have written about INDECT:  the EU’s proposed regime of continuous surveillance of member states’ citizenry for the purpose of identifying ‘unusual behaviour’, which would then be brought to the attention of police for ‘follow up’.  ‘Unusual behaviour’ would include (but not be limited to):

  • lingering too long in public areas
  • abnormal transit system use
  • internet habits that include visiting potentially ‘antisocial websites’
  • associating with ‘antisocial elements’
  • abnormal shopping habits

(In that post, I also provide a link to an article about CarrierIQ’s attempt to silence the researcher who first published information about its surveillance practices.)

The potential for abuse is so strong, it is difficult to overstate it…it seems that, increasingly, legislation is being drafted and passed all around the world not to safeguard against it, but to take advantage of it.

Here is an analysis (by a lawyer) of SOPA, just one such proposed pieces of legislation (in the USA) and the ways in which it breaches the constitution.

But if you are still not convinced that police agencies are warrantlessly accessing vast amounts of private data collected about citizens without their permission or knowledge, here is another piece of information you should consider:

‘A recent FOIA request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or deployed by Carrier IQ” was met with a telling denial. In it, the FBI stated it did have responsive documents – but they were exempt under a provision that covers materials that, if disclosed, might reasonably interfere with an ongoing investigation.’

Indeed.

Our constitutions were written with the specific purpose of protecting the civil rights of citizens from their governments.  Most of us have forgotten this:  and our governments are increasingly passing laws which circumvent (if not directly breech) our unalienable rights which all written constitutions (starting with the Magna Carta) are but imperfect expressions of.

We need to wake up and oppose this passive tolerance of the increasingly corrupt and oppressive surveillance society – before it is too late!

H/T:  Tyr

Posted in corruption, freedoms, opression, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

US government abandons due process as it censors a polular blog for over a year

December 8, 2011 — xanthippa

This is truly astonishing – and why SOPA and similar such nonsense must be opposed by all pro-free-speech people!!!

‘Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

But, in a story that’s been in the making for over a year, and which we’re exposing to the public for the first time now, this is exactly the scenario that has played out over the past year — with the only difference being that, rather than “a printing press” and a “magazine,” the story involved “a domain” and a “blog.”‘

Read the full story at TechDirt – and weep, because this is not the only such case.

Then get ready to fight against oppression of free speech under ALL its guises!

Posted in freedoms, opression, technology. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Have you heard about INDECT?

December 5, 2011 — xanthippa

If you haven’t heard about INDECT ( Intelligent Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment), you are not alone – especially if you are on this side of the pond.

Or you might have heard of it and dismissed it as some sort of a paranoid conspiracy theory…which is exactly what some, including Wikipedia, imply it to be.

On the other hand, WikiLeaks takes it deadly seriously.  As does European Digital Rights (EDRI).

If you happen to be unaware that items like phones send constant streams of information about you – including installing a hidden keylogger – back to corporations you may have no commercial relationship with, here is an article with a video that shows, step-by-step, how this is being done. (Yes, when this information was first published, CarrierIQ tried to shut the source up with threats of lawsuits.)

And just to help you relax when you bring home a new video-game console…consider their enhanced sensory abilities (lip-reading, facial expression analysis to measure emotional states, enhanced speech recognition) in conjunction with the ‘back doors’ being built in to so many of our digital devices.

But, I digress…

The EU is planning to gather information about its citizens from ‘open sources’ (social media, chat-rooms, blogs) as well as public surveillance systems (like CCTV cameras to the GPS devices that they wish to legislate to be mandatory in every vehicle in order to ‘monitor traffic patterns’), their surfing habits, their shopping habits (remember all those ‘loyalty cards’?), to all other policing methods.  Then they plan to run this mass of data through some algorithms which will analyze the language used by specific citizens with their public behaviours (say, like sitting in a public place for longer than ‘normal’) and online preferences, cross-reference it all and come up with ‘automated dossiers’ which will alert police officers to go check out specific citizens deemed to have ‘abnormal behaviour’.

All this is to be done by an arms-lenght (translation:  completely unaccountable) agency which is as transparent as tar, overseen by a police-agency dominated board.  As this agency is an EU creature, all the member states would be compelled to give it full access to citizen information, from financial to DNA databases.

Of course, we know this is the direction our society is moving in – but I suspect most of us have not been aware of the degree to which this has already been happening and just how lacking we are in any privacy rights.

Perhaps we ought to pay more attention…

H/T:  HackerNews

Posted in corruption, freedoms, opression, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Daniel Hannan: Political Arrest in Croatia?

December 3, 2011 — xanthippa
Posted in corruption, opression, politics. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Pat Condell: The Gathering Storm

December 3, 2011 — xanthippa
Posted in atheism, freedoms, opression, politics. Tags: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

xda-developers: The Rootkit of All Evil – CIQ

November 18, 2011 — xanthippa

Do you have a smart phone?

Then you might want to read this article at xda-developers about CIQ (CarrierIQ), which proclaims on their own website:

“…we give Wireless Carriers and Handset Manufacturers unprecedented insight into their customers’ mobile experience.”

 

‘Unprecedented’ is right!

It is understandable that any business would like to have a deep insight into their customers’ needs and desires in order to serve them better: satisfying customers is good for business.

However, customers also have a right to – and most have at least some expectation of – privacy.

The problem arises when customers are not even aware of the volume and detail of information about them that their mobile devices routinely report to their carriers: this lopsided information level makes any meaningful discussion about privacy vs data-mining virtually meaningless.

From the article:

“This [CIQ software] is given root like rights over the device, which means that it can do everything it pleases and you will have nothing to say about it.”

“…Because of all the metrics that could be obtained via the different triggers, that same network admin will not just know that you got a dropped call at 5 pm in California, but he/she will also know where in California you were located, what you were doing with your phone at that given time, how many times you accessed your apps until that time, and even what you have typed in your device (no, this last one is not an exaggeration, this thing can act as a key logger as well). Scared already? If not, here is a snippet of some…”

“…what kind of permissible purpose is out there that can allow a company to legally place a key logger on something and use it when you are not even getting service out of them?”

 

And, of course, we know no person or corporation would ever abuse any information they get access to!

Read the full article and weep.

H/T:  CodeSlinger

 

Posted in corruption, freedoms, opression, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »
« Older posts
Newer posts »