-
Apple removes Parler from App Store, after Google — ‘we’re toast,’ says Parler | Boing Boing
“Apple and Google’s tougher enforcement could preclude such apps from becoming realistic alternatives to the mainstream social networks. They now face the choice of either stepping up their policing of posts — undercutting their main feature in the process — or losing their ability to reach a wide audience.”
- – By dr tech
-
“Users post violent and hateful content to Facebook and Twitter all the time, they argued — and no one was demanding those platforms get the boot from the app stores.”
- – By dr tech
-
Trump Twitter: Republicans and Democrats split over freedom of speech | Donald Trump | The Guardian
“Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Donald Trump’s account in the wake of the storming of Capitol Hill on Wednesday continues to stoke fierce debate, supporters and critics split on partisan lines as they contest what the suspension means for a cherished American tradition: freedom of speech.”
- – By dr tech
-
“In the midst of a global pandemic and an unprecedented misinformation glut, Google has decided to hide some Australian news sites from its search results. It is “experimenting” with the lone supply of fact-checked, accountable information Australians can access right now.”
- – By dr tech
-
Over 400,000 crime records could be affected by police computer error | Priti Patel | The Guardian
“More than 400,000 crime records could have been affected by a data blunder, with records for serious offences supposed to be kept forever accidentally deleted and police fearing criminals may not be caught, a letter from a senior officer reveals.
The records were accidentally deleted due to a coding error on 10 January, and the incident affects fingerprints, DNA, and arrest records on the police national computer (PNC).”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
Pecha Kucha – Is metadata enough to conduct remote-control war?
10 Jan
Posted by circuititgs as ITGS
Ever wondered whether you could just start a war with just drones and metadata? The US government sure wishes it could and I spent way too long researching the answer to this for my Pecha Kucha.
After recording for the third time, I realised I hadn’t talked much about the stakeholders but that’s because, after the US government, it almost ends there with potentially Turkey as other potential stakeholders to drones and when it comes to metadata, everyone is a stakeholder, with civilians, businesses, major tech giants and even the US government themselves being stakeholders to metadata, making the stakeholders feel almost too obvious. Perhaps the most surprising stakeholder I found during research was JSOC but none of this went into the recording.
-
Interactive Map: The Top Surveillance Cities Worldwide
“Since the world’s first CCTV camera was installed in Germany in 1942, the number of surveillance cameras around the world has grown immensely. In fact, it only took us 79 years to go from one camera to nearly one billion of these devices.
In the above interactive graphic, Surfshark maps out how prevalent CCTV surveillance cameras are in the world’s 130 most populous cities. “
- – By dr tech
-
Gun Detection AI is Being Trained With Homemade ‘Active Shooter’ Videos
“The point of creating this vast portfolio of digital gun art is to feed an algorithm made to detect a firearm as soon as a security camera catches it being drawn by synthetically creating tens of thousands of ways each gun may appear. Arcarithm is one of several companies developing automated active shooter detection technology in the hopes of selling it to schools, hotels, entertainment venues and the owners of any location that could be the site of one of America’s 15,000 annual gun murders and 29,000 gun injuries.”
- – By dr tech
-
Israel’s Virus Surveillance Tool Tests Its Democratic Norms | Voice of America – English
“In the early days of the pandemic, a panicked Israel began using a mass surveillance tool on its civilians, tracking people’s cellphones in hopes of stopping the spread of the coronavirus.”
- – By yeehaw
-
Singapore’s Covid Success Isn’t Easily Replicated – Bloomberg
-
Singapore Police Force can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations: Desmond Tan – CNA
“The Singapore Police Force (SPF) can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations”
- – By yeehaw
-
Singapore reveals Covid privacy data available to police – BBC News
“Officials had previously explicitly ruled out the data would be used for anything other than the virus tracking.
But parliament was told on Monday it could also be used “for the purpose of criminal investigation”.”
- – By yeehaw
-
“Vivian Balakrishnan on why he had earlier said that TraceTogether app data would only be used for COVID-19 contact tracing. The Home Affairs Ministry has since said the data could be used for criminal investigations.”
- – By yeehaw
-
What Does Big Tech Know About You? Basically Everything
“handy infographic showing the types of data each company admits to collecting”
- – By yeehaw
-
McAfee Finally On The Right Path
“McAfee became a wholly owned subsidiary of a chip manufacturer. Crazy right? “
- – By yeehaw
-
“Anonymised Facebook data on people’s travels could be used to identify the spread of Covid-19 in locations where health officials are not yet aware of it, a new Australian study has found.
Published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface on Wednesday, University of Melbourne researchers analysed anonymised population mobility data provided by Facebook as part of its Data for Good program to determine whether it could be a useful predictor in determining the spread of Covid outbreaks based on where people were travelling.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
-
Huawei tested AI to find Uighurs, alert Chinese police: Report – Business Insider
“The software reportedly could set off a “Uighur alarm” when it pinpointed someone from the minority group. Uighurs are a largely Muslim group, and have been subjected to extensive persecution by the hands of the Chinese government.”
- – By yeehaw
-
““China has a politically weaponized system of censorship; it is refined, organized, coordinated and supported by the state’s resources,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times. “It’s not just for deleting something. They also have a powerful apparatus to construct a narrative and aim it at any target with huge scale.”
“This is a huge thing,” he added. “No other country has that.”
“- – By dr tech
-
Apple loses copyright claims against ‘virtual iPhone’ maker, Technology – THE BUSINESS TIMES
“Corellium’s actions fell under an exception to copyright law because it “creates a new, virtual platform for iOS and adds capabilities not available on Apple’s iOS devices,” District Court Judge Rodney Smith in West Palm Beach ruled on Tuesday.”
- – By yeehaw
-
Apple supplier Lens Technology used forced Uighur laborers – The Washington Post
“One of the oldest and most well-known iPhone suppliers has been accused of using forced Muslim labor in its factories, according to documents uncovered by a human rights group, adding new scrutiny to Apple’s human rights record in China.”
- – By yeehaw
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
-
Spanish art show spotlights ‘hidden’ digital divide in pandemic – Art & Culture – The Jakarta Post
“About 54 percent of the global population used the internet last year, but less than a fifth of people in the least-developed countries were online, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency.”
- – By dr tech
-
“Spyware sold by an Israeli private intelligence firm was allegedly used to hack the phones of dozens of Al Jazeera journalists in an unprecedented cyber-attack that is likely to have been ordered by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to leading researchers.”
- – By dr tech
-
“Will Knight wrote. “Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey… . The car didn’t follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it.
“Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it’s also a bit unsettling, since it isn’t completely clear how the car makes its decisions…. What if one day it did something unexpected—crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why.” “
- – By dr tech
-
“This is called a supply-chain attack, because it targets a supplier to an organization rather than an organization itself – and can affect all of a supplier’s customers. It’s an increasingly common way to attack networks. Other examples of this sort of attack include fake apps in the Google Play store, and hacked replacement screens for your smartphone.”
- – By dr tech
-
“Scientists say they can deduce the lifestyle of an individual, down to the kind of grooming products they use, food they eat and medications they take, from chemicals found on the surface of their mobile phone.”
- – By yeehaw
-
Dozens sue Amazon’s Ring after camera hack leads to threats and racial slurs | Amazon | The Guardian
“Dozens of people who say they were subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their in-home Ring smart cameras were hacked are suing the company over “horrific” invasions of privacy.”
- – By dr tech
-
Samsung S21 Ultra spec leak confirms additional camera hardware – The Verge
“Samsung will need every advantage to compete with the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which we think is the best smartphone camera on the market today”
- – By immapotaeto
-
Twitter to wipe Trump’s followers before Biden handover – BBC News
“With millions of people following an account and Donald’s ‘fans’ being quite fanatical, it could be a clever move by Twitter to ensure that any potential negative and hate-fuelled tweets are neutralised before the new president-elect takes up his position”
- – By immapotaeto
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
-
“We are inured to the idea that professional environments have a built-in layer of surveillance, and now that this environment has merged with the home for many workers, some of these practices have started to look more extreme. But the discussion about surveillance should not start and end with the tools employers use to monitor people working from home. We should instead be asking: how necessary is any of this?”
- – By dr tech
-
Rival disinformation campaigns targeted African users, Facebook says | Technology | The Guardian
“Rival French and Russian disinformation campaigns have sought to deceive and influence internet users in the Central African Republic ahead of an election later this month, Facebook said on Tuesday.
Facebook said it was the first time it had seen foreign influence operations directly engage on its platforms, with fake accounts denouncing each other as “fake news”.”
- – By dr tech
-
Algorithms like YouTube’s content ID harm fair use, free speech, and creativity | Boing Boing
“Because YouTube is the dominant player in the online video market, its choices dictate the norms of the whole industry. And unfortunately for independent creators, YouTube has proven to be more interested in appeasing large copyright holders than protecting free speech or promoting creativity. Through its automatic copyright filter, Content ID, YouTube has effectively replaced legal fair use of copyrighted material with its own rules.”
- – By dr tech
-
Pushback Is Growing Against Automated Proctoring Services. But So Is Their Use | EdSurge News
““Our job as teachers and professors is not to surveil and police our students, but it’s to educate them,” he says. “You are assuming that students are trying to cheat—rather than assuming students are trying to learn and help them learn.”
He sees the growing adoption of automated proctoring tools as a continuation of a trend started by plagiarism-detection services like Turnitin, which he says were built on the assumption that students want to cheat and must be policed. But despite early pushback by students and some professors, plagiarism detection has become ubiquitous. Parry worries the same thing could happen with automated proctoring.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
-
“The researchers found that “increasing machine and AI readership … motivates firms to prepare filings that are more friendly to machine parsing and processing”. So far, so predictable. But there’s more: “firms with high expected machine downloads manage textual sentiment and audio emotion in ways catered to machine and AI readers””
- – By dr tech
-
We can reduce gender bias in natural-language AI, but it will take a lot more work | VentureBeat
“However, since machine learning algorithms are what they eat (in other words, they function based on the training data they ingest), they inevitably end up picking up on human biases that exist in language data itself.”
- – By dr tech
-
Iran says AI and ‘satellite-controlled’ gun used to kill nuclear scientist | Iran | The Guardian
-
“As part of her undergraduate research, Alice Xue studied whether a machine could pass a Visual Turing Test by producing images that people cannot tell were made by a machine. Xue trained an algorithm using 2,192 traditional Chinese landscape paintings collected from art museums. The resulting AI-generated paintings were mistaken for being made by humans 55 per cent of the time.”
- – By dr tech
-
How machine learning is allowing thousands of students to sit exams at home – BBC News
“The firm’s software uses machine learning (ML), an advanced form of artificial intelligence, to detect patterns in user behaviour that could indicate attempts to cheat. Its technology can also automatically mark multiple-choice answers and mathematics exams.
In addition, it checks each exam-sitter’s identity using the webcam, to ensure that no-one else is sitting the test for them. The Better Examinations program also temporarily restricts access to the internet, or certain websites and applications on each person’s computer. “
- – By dr tech
-
‘Being young’ leads to detention in China’s Xinjiang region | World news | The Guardian
“The IJOP is a massive database combining personal data scooped from automated online monitoring and information manually entered into a bespoke app by officials.
It includes information ranging from people’s physical characteristics to the colour of their car and their personal preference of using the front or back door to enter their house, as well as software they use online and their regular contacts.”
- – By dr tech
-
Columbia researchers find white men are the worst at reducing AI bias | VentureBeat
“Researchers at Columbia University sought to shed light on the problem by tasking 400 AI engineers with creating algorithms that made over 8.2 million predictions about 20,000 people. In a study accepted by the NeurIPS 2020 machine learning conference, the researchers conclude that biased predictions are mostly caused by imbalanced data but that the demographics of engineers also play a role.”
- – By dr tech
-
Sci-fi surveillance: Europe’s secretive push into biometric technology | World news | The Guardian
““Often the problem is that the topic itself is unethical,” said Gemma Galdon Clavell, an independent tech ethicist who has evaluated many Horizon 2020 security research projects and worked as a partner on more than a dozen. “Some topics encourage partners to develop biometric tech that can work from afar, and so consent is not possible – this is what concerns me.” One project aiming to develop such technology refers to it as “unobtrusive person identification” that can be used on people as they cross borders. ¨If we’re talking about developing technology that people don’t know is being used,” said Galdon Clavell, “how can you make that ethical?”
“
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
“Being alive entails risk and there will always be outliers” – Final Review
07 Dec
Posted by immapotaeto as ITGS
Institutional pressures are rules established by a particular institution that you must abide by. Schneier believed that you need universal laws to achieve social order, the example of that is social contract theory when people willingly grant government power compelling ppl to choose long term group interests over self-interest to protect all citizens, without this pressure, defectors will ruin things inevitably, one of the examples without it is. Laws are only as good as society’s ability to enforce them provided fines are being assessed and collected, jail time is being served, they only make sense when they come with consequences. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize for studying how societies deal with the trend of Tragedy of the commons. She also gave certain features of institutional pressure like:-
1.Everyone must understand the group interest and know what the group norm is
2.The group must be able to modify the norm
These pressures provide a basis for people to trust one another, for example, a certified doctor is more trusted. Like every other type of pressure, these fail too, for example, perfect security and the rate of crime being 0 doesn’t exist, you need a lot of institutional pressure to attain that leading to becoming a country like North Korea or no pressure like Somalia, they are two unhealthy extremes. The solution to this is to strike a balance between the polarities of interests.
Schneier ends this chapter with an interesting quote
“Sometimes and for some people, laws aren’t enough, sometimes the incentives to defect are worth the risk. That’s where technologies come in ”
Schneir likes to define Security systems as a way to technologically enhance natural defenses. They work even if a defector doesn’t realize that he/she is defecting. He concludes that eventually everything acts as a security system, for example, Morals as a preemptive intervention system, reputation as a detection system. Doubling our security budget, will not reduce defections risk, I feel it is different for everyone. Eventually, crimes only occur when passion overrides rationality. Security systems are often calls an experiential good because usually people dont understand the value of it until they have already bough , install and experienced it. The interesting example I liked was Robinhood, he is an example of a defector with a competing moral interest as his actions serve a greater good. One of the papers you will come across calls them “ Lethal Altruists “
Coming to organizations and corporations, Schneier talks about how every type of pressure influences a particular organization in numerous ways. And how security systems work differently as it works against the individuals inside the organization and not the organization as a whole. Societal dilemmas are different for every person, it is hard to match them in a big group of people similar to an organization which is teemed of.An example of this is the principal-agent problem, the principal hires an agent to pursue the principal’s interests. But because the competing interests are different, cooperation will be difficult. But few corporations never stop functioning because of defections in the society is a testament to how well societal pressures work here. Usually, moral, reputational, and institutional pressures fail against them Some examples of corporations who managed to prevent defections are:-
1.National security agency analyst Thomas Drake
2.Nancy Fern Oliveri – Apotex
3.Jeff Baird – New York city police
One of the notable quotes that were mentioned “Corporations have neither body to be punished nor souls to be condemned, they, therefore, do as they like “
Corporations have managed to deliberately manipulate institutional pressures so they can directly benefit from them, they basically are changing laws to suit their desire without adding any value, this technique is known as rent-seeking. The size of organizations is proportional to the power they possess, with power comes the ability to defect. The goal of societal pressure is that we want high level of trust in the society , but it is too complex for the intimate form of trust , hence we settle for cooperation and compliance. The perfect balance needed in any society is , the need of security with side effects , unintended consequences and other considerations. One of the most important concept related to societal pressure is Scale , when that increases , people are forced to shift from trust to predictability and compliance.
Schneier feels that talking about trust in humans is more important first , as that influences how humans trust the technology. He doesn’t talk about technology until the last few chapters. With the increase of development in technology , the amount of damage by the defector groes . Even thought security technologies were invented , we were now needed to trust not only an institution but also the system. With time , humans tolerance towards risk decreased. New innovations and new ideas increase the scope of defectors in several dimensions. to an extent that defectors start innovating and finding easier , reliable ways to attack , resulting in a security gap , which has constantly being increased with new innovations as technology is an element available to all. The solution to this is ,to design a societal pressure keeping in minds about certain features as follows
1.To understand the social dilemma
2.Consider all four pressures
3.Pay attention to scale
Foster empathy and community , increasing the moral and reputational pressures
5.Use of security systems to scale them
6.Finally harmonize institutional pressure across technologies and reduce the concentration of power by increasing transparency.
He concludes with saying that defectors will always exist and inevitably ruin everything for everyone , but we need to manage societal pressures to ensure they dont. Security is a process ,a never ending process not just a product. Trust is the key component of social capital society.
Dont you think we all defect in some point of our life , being selfish or just choosing self interest over everything , or our morality doesn’t always cooperate with the group norm . At the end of the day , the society needs defectors because we benefit from them .They are the outliers who resist popular opinions for morals or other reasons , who invent new technology counteracting others . Scheneir ends on a good of optimism that Defections represents an engine for innovation , an immunological challenge to ensure the health of the majority , a defense against the risk of monoculture and a catalyst for social change.Defectors are the reason of improving technology , we just need to control their possession of power .Ending
it with a quote rightly said by Martin Luther kIng. Jr ” The arc of history is long , but it bends towards justice. “
Schneier loves to emphasize on the basics , he wants to completely understand how humans work in different situations and then he connects it with technology. He mainly talks about secuirty , trust and cooperation from not only the human angle but also how animals in the historic period went about it. The soul and heart of this book were all the examples which were written by Schneier and how he analyses each one of them using historical theories. The book was solely based on the four types of pressures . He wrote about how they are created , modified and affect the society. This book proves that it is written by someone highly intellectual and is not a easy read. The two things I gained from this book was that , trust depends on how the society works and defectors shouldn’t always be considered negative , we need defectors to co-exist and grow in today’s world. It is a good book , if you love to research about how everything eventually connects to each other resulting on how we function in our day to day lives.
-
“Criminals often hide illicit data on the XBox in the hope that a gaming console will not be seen as a likely evidence target especially when conventional personal computers are present in the same premises, for instance”
- – By yeehaw
-
“It has been formed as a reaction to attempts by major tech platforms to clamp down on coronavirus disinformation – but the same tech outlets also help enable its reach: the Light’s distribution relies on a 5,000-strong private Facebook group where volunteers offer to hand out copies and post them through their neighbours’ doors.”
- – By dr tech
-
DeepMind AI cracks 50-year-old problem of protein folding | DeepMind | The Guardian
““It marks an exciting moment for the field,” said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s founder and chief executive. “These algorithms are now becoming mature enough and powerful enough to be applicable to really challenging scientific problems.”
AdvertisementVenki Ramakrishnan, the president of the Royal Society, called the work “a stunning advance” that had occurred “decades before many people in the field would have predicted”.”
- – By dr tech
-
“Recent studies concluded that the smoothness of a tablet screen leads to an alteration of handwriting features, whereby the impact on graphomotor execution varies according to the level of the writer’s handwriting skills”
- – By yeehaw
-
How empathy and creativity can re-humanise videoconferencing | Aeon Essays
“Looking back on my experience of videoconferencing, I still get an odd emotional pain. The feeling is a kind of shame. Not so much for my own wooden performance and the failure of the technology. But rather a feeling that we have all lost a bit of our humanity through it. My interest in these technologies is ethically motivated. I am not at all happy with the banal dehumanisation that results from bad videoconferencing experiences. If, for example, students and teachers can’t express their humanity in education, through its technologies, then we’re just not doing it right.”
- – By dr tech
-
As Algorithms Take Over More of the Economy, We Should Cede Control (Very) Carefully
“After being set an overarching goal like maximizing profit, they develop their own strategies based on experience of the market, often with little human oversight. The most advanced also use forms of AI whose workings are opaque even if humans wanted to peer inside.”
- – By dr tech
-
Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges – The Verge
“Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges”
- – By circuititgs
-
“The noise got so loud it caught the ear of parliament: the digital, culture, media and sport select committee opened an inquiry into the fairness of the “streaming economy”. “
- – By dr tech
-
More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru | Google | The Guardian
“The paper, co-authored by researchers inside and outside Google, contended that technology companies could do more to ensure AI systems aimed at mimicking human writing and speech do not exacerbate historical gender biases and use of offensive language, according to a draft copy seen by Reuters.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
Chapter 6: Edward Snowden and the Chamber of Secrets
Edward Snowden was a former NSA agent that ended up deciding one day that the government had to go. As an NSA agent, Edward had ultimate access to many files and in (date), he let them all out. He exposed that the government was hidden behind every major tech giant, funding them and drawing data from them through PRISM. After the leaks went out, Snowden was seen as a thorn in the side of the government and a hero by cypherpunks that wanted to get rid of the government. With all that was leaked of the major tech companies like Google and Facebook and their connections to government intelligence, recovery should’ve been impossible. After all, they were the ones supplying the CIA, NSA and other agencies information so surely they should’ve been murdered by Snowden’s leaks. Unsurprisingly, Google and Facebook played the blame game, stating and lying that the government had taken the information against their knowledge.
It worked.
Like a terribly written script to a movie like Suicide Squad, Edward Snowden happened to be a firm believer in technology and therefore didn’t believe that the tech giants had done something wrong but rather were being played by the ultimate puppet master, the US government. Somehow, someway, the man that was about to kill every single tech giant with a business model of user profiling had just given mercy by directing attention away from them. By focusing the attention wholly on the US Government, the government who was almost one and the same with Google and Facebook, just took the blows, absorbed the damage and let the tech companies recover. It was like trying to kill a hydra with a sword. When one head dies, two more take its place. Eventually, Snowden had to move to Moscow because the figurehead of the US government was allegedly hunting him. Snowden managed to hide there in Moscow, untraceable, all thanks to Tor
Chapter 7: The rise and fall of the Onion shield.
I’m going to split this summary into two sections because there are two stories at play here: The history of Tor’s success and how they fell.
Invisibility
Around (date), an illegal online businesses site named Silk Road, which sold drugs, child porn and other horrific things, run by a person named Dread Pirate Roberts, grew in popularity and found massive success. How did such an illegal site become so successful when the internet is so heavily surveilled? It used a separate web browser, private URL, Bitcoin to make transactions untraceable and most notably, Tor.
Tor was a VPN and more. The way it worked, a user would connect to Tor, have the address be sent to thousands of location and then end up at its destination. As Levine described it ‘From the outside, the Tor connection just appeared and if you tried to trace it back, Tor would act as a dead-end’. Because of this, Edward Snowden often promoted the usage of Tor as a tool against government surveillance. Google and Facebook both promoted Tor as well, despite having business models reliant on surveillance. Why? Because Tor was useless against them. If you used Silk Road’s measures, Tor would in fact make it impossible for your data to be taken but in the hands of the average person, many were likely to continue Googling their searches and using Facebook to contact friends or browse Twitter on the way to work etc. Simply put, if the average user just used Tor and did nothing different, Tor was useless against company surveillance. However, what was weirder still was the fact much of Tor’s funding came from the government it was supposedly hiding from. Levine made sense of this once he looked at Tor’s Origins
In the wake of the internet, it was decided almost immediately that the government should use it for spying. However, if spies couldn’t have privacy then it would be like seeing your assassin coming for you through sliding glass double doors. You can’t be an undercover agent if there isn’t any cover. Tor was the solution. Spawned by DARPA, a familiar name among the surveillance valley narrative, Tor would provide privacy to spies using the same technique it used today. However, there was a problem: if the only people that used Tor were spies then any connection that traced to Tor could be identified as a spy. This meant that in order for Tor to keep spies anonymous, it would need to branch into the public and of course, that’s exactly what happened. The Tor Project was finally made it to the form of a non-profit project while keeping its DARPA funding. Eventually, Tor managed to get funding from someone that wasn’t a military contractor: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). With the EFF’s funding, Tor now had a window to branch into the public. Despite being a privacy advocacy group, the EFF had actually helped the FBIA ‘pass the Communications Assistance Law Enforcement Act, which required all telecommunications companies to build their equipment so it could be wiretapped by the FBI’. Finally, in 2006, Dingledine had received the green-light for advancing Tor, backing by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which had initially formed to broadcast anti-communist propaganda everywhere possible in the Cold War. With the BBG now behind their backs, all Tor needed was a way to convince the public to relax about Tor, to forget the government funding and start using Tor, and what better way to convince people you aren’t with the government than make them believe you’re literally their greatest enemy. I’d imagine those were the thoughts of Dingledine as he saw the opportunity manifest in front of him
In 2008, Dingledine hired a man named Jacob Appelbaum to help improve Tor. However, it quickly became apparent that Appelbaum would be much better at marketing themselves as something that wasn’t just another string in the US Government’s web of power. Unlike most other Tor workers, Appelbaum ‘had flair, a taste for drama and hyperbole’. It would be Appelbaum who would be the first to promote Tor as a weapon against government oppression and evidence of Tor’s success would come with Silk Road. If an entire criminal business can be built on Tor, why wouldn’t it work for the average user? To many, Silk Road only confirmed that Tor worked on a massive scale.
However, there was another important aspect, Tor now could be used to ‘liberate’ people from government censorship. Sites like Facebook and Google, which were blocked in certain countries such as China, could now be accessed and users would be able to be influenced and in some cases, start revolutions on social media. Social media was now a handheld weapon for propaganda and nobody even noticed because it was so intertwined with our culture.
No strings on Me
In 2014, a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University managed to crack the code and get by Tor’s layers of defences. This caused Dingledine, the founder of Tor, to post an update to the ethics behind analysing Tor, effectively acknowledging that a group of students had just made it past Tor’s promise of ultimate privacy. Around the same time, a man named Ross Ulbricht was arrested for being Dread Pirate Roberts and of course, everything that he had done in his time with Silk Road including ‘money laundering, narcotics trafficking, hacking and murder’. If Tor was so secure, why would it need to update the policies behind accessing and researching people that use Tor and how could it be possible for Dread Pirate Roberts to be identified? Short answer: it wasn’t.
From the beginning, Tor had been kept in check by the government. When Silk Road grew in popularity, a DHS agent had already taken over the account of a Silk Road admin, therefore granting federal agencies an all-access pass into Silk Road. Similarly, Tor itself had always been subordinate to government surveillance because Google and Apple-owned the popular phone operating systems that Tor would run on, therefore all the data could be fed through PRISM to the CIA before any of it ever got encrypted by Tor. This meant that Tor’s security was a lie, a facade since all it really did was paint a target on your back. In class, I’ve often argued that having something to hide doesn’t always mean having something bad to hide. However, if you had something extremely wrong to hide then you’d take extreme measures to hide it. That was what the US government realised with Tor. Only if you had something bad to hide would you ever consider using Tor to hide? Through this simple psychological trick, the US government had just outplayed the guilty by creating a common hiding spot that it could keep tabs on at all times. Once Robert Ulbricht and Silk Road had been busted, many other clone sites got busted with it, allowing for 76 individuals to be prosecuted and ‘nearly three hundred child victims from around the world rescued from their abusers’. The Illusion of Tor’s security ended up being exactly what caused its downfall and due to the outreach of Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Tor would always be susceptible to surveillance from the exact companies and government it was supposed to protect users from.
In the end, Tor’s story ended up being a huge success for the US government, allowing for spies to get on with spying, letting foreign governments be challenged by their own citizens and identifying criminals from civilians through instinctive behaviour. Tor sets the bar for the most politically influential app and ultimately came just a few tiers too low in the hierarchy of power.
Epilogue: Disconnecting
Levine concludes with his visit to Mauthausen, Austria, a former Nazi-occupied city and the heart of Nazi Germany’s automated computer system that connected many concentration and labour camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. As Levine puts best ‘The IBM machines themselves did not kill people, but they made the Nazi death machine run faster and more efficiently.’
Concluding my time reading this book, I’d say I would never have started down this route if it hadn’t been for being suggested ‘The Great Hack’ – a Netflix documentary on Cambridge Analytica who manipulated the votes of both the 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit through social media and data analysis. ‘The Great Hack’ was the first to open my eyes to the reality that we’d all let ourselves get absorbed into the world of technology without ever taking a step back to look at it all. My friends often find I’m the hardest to contact, due in large part to me being one of few that can even stop the resist of social media. Yet, that still hasn’t stopped me from being absorbed into a world of technology and I often find if I pick up my phone, I often waste up to hours of time staring at my screen, completely oblivious to where my data goes. Surveillance Valley has really brought light to such a quiet topic, which has been seemingly forgotten with time. Hopefully, by reading this blog and my reviews of the main narratives of the book, you’ve come to at least consider the reality that you’re being surveilled constantly for data even when the lights are off and where the data goes.
Adobe Photoshop
Alzheimers
apocalypse
Book
brain
cells
Chrome
Copyright
digital
Digital Immigrant
Digital Native
electrodes
Facebook
Fats Million
Firefox
Google
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKgU6ubBgJA
Image editing
ITGS
Jaron Lanier
Lawrence
Lawrence Lessig
Lessig
Marc Prensky
networks
of
Photoshop
prensky
Privacy
Protocols
rat
Remix
robot
Schneier
scientist
Security
Spreadsheet
Trust
tweets
twitter
warcraft
world
wow
You Are Not A Gadget
YouTube Artificial Intelligence (35)
Arts Nd Entertainment (11)
Assignment (62)
Authenticity (11)
Blogroll (3)
Business/Employment (12)
Case Study (5)
Control (14)
Database (8)
Deadlines (4)
Delicious Links (212)
Education (27)
Equality (6)
Examinations (5)
Globalisation (13)
Health (10)
Integrity (8)
Intellectual Property (16)
IT Systems (35)
ITGS (961)
Just for Fun (36)
Models and Simulations (1)
People and Machines (44)
Policues and Standards (13)
Politics and Government (13)
Portfolios (5)
Presentation No Show (7)
Privacy (30)
Quiz (1)
Reliability (24)
Science Nd Environment (8)
Security (26)
Surveillance (4)
video (3)
Web 2.0 (13)
Wiki (2)
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
Recent Comments
- A history of forgetting: "Delete" by Viktor Mayer-schonberger overall summary
- A history of forgetting: "Delete" by Viktor Mayer-schonberger chapters 4-7 summary
- Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Chapter 6-7
- Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Chapter 4-5
- Liars and Outliers - Second Review
- Technology And Neoteny - What We Learn From Our Parents Is Important
- What's the value of things on the Internet?
- Surveillance Valley: A world of spies, lies and illusions
- Surveillance Valley - Internet Riots to Internet Rights
Net Neutrality – Help Save It!
Visit Our ITGS Wiki
Welcome…
Disclaimer: if there are any problems related to copyright or fair-use please contact me immediately and I will remove the offending content from the blog. All content created by Dr Tech is under the Creative Commons License
Categories
Help Feed the World!
Open Rights Group
Archives
Recent Comments
- on A history of forgetting: “Delete” by Viktor Mayer-schonberger overall summary
- on A history of forgetting: “Delete” by Viktor Mayer-schonberger chapters 4-7 summary
- on Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Chapter 6-7
- on Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Chapter 4-5
- on Liars and Outliers – Second Review
Translate
