Posts Tagged ‘surveillance’
Peter Watts at Canada Privacy Symposium — ‘Burn the Data to the Ground’
A surprising and very interesting presentation about authoritarian surveillance — its link to fear, and being aware of hard-wired responses including dominance and anti-predator behaviours … with a side swipe at the roots of ‘religious belief’. I like Peter Watts’ approach to the topic, looking back at the powerful and another take on ‘only the […]
Blinding Flash of the Obvious re composing encrypted emails – Avoid auto-saved drafts
I recently reviewed Edward Snowden’s instructions for setting up and using PGP/encrypted email available on Vimeo: GPG for Journalists – Windows edition | Encryption for Journalists | Anonymous 2013. It’s a good tutorial. One of the points it makes about keeping your communications secure is a very important one: Don’t compose your message (pre-encryption) in […]
Read Nicky Hager’s search warrant
How we want it to be: How it sometimes is (click to read documents): Documents from New Zealand cops raided home of reporter working on Snowden documents by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher (The Intercept). Worth reading to see how our government’s actions are perceived. – P
Dirty Politics author’s house raided. Ten hour search by five detectives. Police say he’s ‘a witness’.
This is a sobering development. Police raiding journalists who publish material which is politically embarrassing to the ruling party. Is this New Zealand? Not Russia or Zimbabwe? The timing of the raid (leave aside ‘after the election’) when Hager was away in Auckland, suggests to me he may have been under surveillance. At one level that […]
The law of unintended consequences. Data security edition.
This report from Flashpoint: ‘Measuring the Impact of the Snowden Leaks on the Use of Encryption by Online Jihadists’ (available here as web page or PDF) concludes (SPOILER:) Meh, not so much. The Flashpoint report recounts how the use of encryption techniques by such groups — and the promotion by them of such techniques — […]
Allegations re mass surveillance by NZ’s GCSB
Here are the articles published by Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden about mass surveillance of New Zealand citizens by spy agencies that form part of the FIVE EYES intelligence alliance. These were released in the lead up to the anyway-you-look-at-it history-making event at Auckland Town Hall last night, ‘The Moment of Truth’ featuring Edward Snowden, […]
You really should watch this interview with Glenn Greenwald, despite the smears
It’s easy to fall for a rapid PR ‘framing’ response, especially from an experienced spin team like Prime Minister John Key’s media machine. This comment seems a fair description of what happens: Mr Key has been very quick with the personal attacks lately, hasn’t he? He has repeatedly described Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald as […]
Quinn Norton talking sense about ‘surveillance’
An important message and perspective delivered in an entertaining way. Good on her. Quinn Norton – When You Are the Adversary (52 mins) If your name isn’t Barton Gellman, Laura Poitras, or Glenn Greenwald, chances are that while the NSA may be a rights-violating threat to all, it’s not your actual, day-to-day adversary. Real world […]
Lovely work from ProPublica: The NSA Revelations All in One Chart
The NSA Revelations All in One Chart — ProPublica.org
An (extra) step in the right direction: Apple extending two-factor authentication to iCloud.com log-in
A while back, I enabled two-factor authentication to a number of my accounts following Mat Honan’s terrible hacking story.* This morning I noticed that, without any fanfare, Apple has extended that preference to the iCloud.com website portal … … so that to log in to iCloud, I need to have one of my ‘trusted devices’. […]
Umm, before you download that PDF from the NSA’s website …
I skim-read, and was just about to download the Transparency Report Regarding Use of National Security Authorities from a web page run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, when I remembered spotting this: [McAfeee] attributed the trend to Adobe’s greater popularity in mobile devices and non-Microsoft environments, coupled with the ongoing widespread […]
Listen to the spy movie soundtrack on this ad for the VYSK smartphone case
Making a buck out of people’s paranoia/rational fear of cyber warfare and espionage … and these (apparently) terribly insecure devices many of us carry with us everywhere. Vysk: Putting Privacy Back in Your Hands from Mustache Production on Vimeo. Read all about it: www.vysk.com (not an affiliate link). – P Update: Audio of soundtrack here: […]
What is your phone and your internet connection blabbing about you?
Early in the second part of PBS’s (highly recommended) ‘United States of Secrets‘ documentaries, The Guardian‘s reporter Ewan Macaskill recalled Edward Snowden’s reaction in his Hong Kong hotel to a simple question: Do you mind if I record our interview on my iPhone?: Ewan Macaskill — excerpt from PBS ‘United States of Secrets’ part 2 MP3 […]
Snowden on intelligence agencies ‘owning’ your smartphone
Here’s a clip from the Brian Williams/NBC interview with Edward Snowden on the vulnerability of smartphones to intelligence agencies … (as we discussed in Oh. The NSA ‘owns’ iPhones (but only if it can get its hands on them, for now). It’s worse than I thought. excerpt: Edward Snowden talks to NBC’s Brian Williams re […]
Andrea Vance on protecting your communications
Reporter of the Year Andrea Vance talked to Radio New Zealand’s Colin Peacock on Mediawatch about government surveillance of news media in an illuminating interview broadcast last Sunday. [Coincidentally, Vance was part of TV3’s The Nation political panel the day before.] Listening to the Mediawatch interview, one can’t help but be struck by the loss […]
