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Big Brother Everywhere
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com
The other day, a friend of mine, who was installing Skype on a new computer, was baffled when Skype suggested all sorts of contacts that weren’t on his Skype contact list but in his address book. This weekend, the Wall Street Journal provided an answer in its article on the voluminous personal information Facebook apps pilfer from users and their friends.
“Apps are gateways,” it said. Address book info, location, even sexual preferences ... nothing is safe. And not just of the user but also of the user’s friends—privacy settings don't stop your personal data from being grabbed by apps your friends are using. Turns out, the Skype app picks up address book data along with whatever else it can find.
The app economy is big bickies, as my friends from down under might say, with estimated revenues of $20 billion in 2011. Silicon Valley and San Francisco are hotbeds for app developers, and some of them are getting funded, and a select few have successful exits, such as photo-sharing app Instagram that ended up on Facebook’s shopping list for a cool billion.
At watering holes or events where developers and entrepreneurs hang out, the conversation often bounces across the app economy and the “cloud” it relies on, that notion of amorphous servers that handle storage and processing needs off site. Yet, the cloud is not amorphous. It is composed of companies with real people, servers, and computers, and some of the people are hanging out at bars, and soon they tell you how they access data their users have uploaded.
Cloud-based services brag about SSL encryption and make you sign in with complex passwords to make you feel secure, but like banks, their employees and data-mining algorithms can access your data stored on their servers to be monetized in some way. That’s the nature of the cloud on the commercial side.
But the government, which has largely been left behind in this quest for personal data, jumped into the fray with different and most likely less efficient methods. Examples abound. The latest—and most worrisome for international travelers—is Glenn Greenwald’s story about the travails that journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras experiences every time she returns to the US. Among her documentaries were “My Country, My Country” which was filmed in Iraq and was nominated in 2007 for an Academy Award, and “Oath” which focused on two brothers in Yemen. “Poitras’ intent all along with these two documentaries was to produce a trilogy of War on Terror films,” Greenwald writes. And that got her on a list of Americans who receive special attentions from the Department of Homeland Security.
Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her.... Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke.
They also confiscated her electronic devices, including her camera, presumably searched and copied whatever was on them, before returning them often days later. And she wasn’t the only one. During an 18-month period from 2008-2010, more than 6,600 passengers—almost half of them US citizens—had had their electronic devices searched without search warrant, according to the ACLU.
For the government, that’s a lot of work to obtain the data of only six Americans a day—considering how much information millions of Americans give up every minute by using their smartphones, Facebook accounts, Google products, and thousands of other services, or whenever they click on ads or get on the internet, or simply walk into a store with their smartphone.
It would be much more efficient for the government to automatically grab every bit of information pulsing through the networks and store it on servers where powerful computers can break encryptions, translate foreign languages, and data-mine it ad infinitum. Which, if it isn’t happening already, will be happening soon, according to Wired Magazine: the National Security Agency is building its Utah Data Center in “immense secrecy” as a “final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade” to “intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications,” even domestic communications by Americans. A $2 billion project. Perhaps one of those shovel-ready stimulus ones.
How far will the government go in trying to extract the last bit of information from its people? At this point, it appears to be lagging behind the commercial sector where big corporations and even startups that come and go obtain information because people hand it to them—eagerly or very unwittingly. And so an insidious and at once funny privacy issue erupted in France, or more precisely in a tiny village in Maine-et-Loire, with worldwide resonance. Read.... Can’t Even Urinate in his own Yard Anymore.
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Or the government could buy the information from private companies that collect them.
Another source of profits.
Government agencies don't have to buy it nowadays, including the Federal Reserve. Any "secure" cloud storage or application companies that gather any data of any value have "sidesucker" network intercept units installed already. The sidesucker units catch any analytically formed data joined statistically that the network raw data "scoop units" at the service provider Point-of-Presence would not have sensed.
You do understand that your comment sounds like something straight out of a William Gibson novel?
Upvoted.
I'm not familiar with William Gibson, just stating what I know and the machine names are standard intelligence gathering equipment informal name types.
I'll have to look him up. If he's isn't an American, I'll bet he has dual citizenship to bail quickly, something some of us can't do when the time comes to emigrate.
Not only will border officials vacuum all the data off of your devices but your local constabulary
http://www.dailytech.com/UPDATED+US+Police+Begin+Warrantless+Phone+Data+...
we sure have come a long way from IBM's Hollerith-based card tabulating machines
http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2011/06/rassenamt_02.jpg
Thank God IBM is no longer in a position of influence and control.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDFf4eClROk&sns=em
"You paperz? Ve must see your paperz!"
I'm a 29 year old lesbian from Florida who loves Joe Biden and I drink Mountain Dew.
13/f/cali here.
First of all this is not an American issue, it is an Anglosphere issue. The US/UK/CA/AU/NZ Anglo alliance that has dominated the world since 1945. Otherwise known as the Five-Eyes of Echelon.
All member states of the Anglosphere are currently high tech surveillance based police states. Human liberty does not exist in the Anglosphere. All are serfs that exist at the pleasure of their masters in the top .001%.
So packing up your bags and running off to Canada is laughably ineffective if your goal is to regain your human dignity and liberty from the Anglo fascist police state.
Second of all, the internet has become a giant spy net for the Anglo empire. It is one part play ground for the proles and one part data mining operation for the police state. It is exceedingly difficult for the average computer/internet user to protect themselves given that they do not understand the technology. The best move is not to play at all. The Chinese government, in fact, believes the internet was created explicitly for this purpose - to masquerade as this free network of ideas while being in reality nothing but a spy net and propaganda tool to spread Western ideaology.
For the vast majority of you it is better than you do not believe my words. It is better that you take the blue pill and live in ignorance. After all, what good does this knowledge do you given your complete inability to do anything about the situation? Leave Zero Hedge and the rest of the "alternative media" behind. The truth will only create anxiety in your simple little minds. It is better that you exist in the main stream, believing the main stream media and official version of history.
Go argue about abortion and gays. Let the big boys do the heavy intellectual lifting and decide what wars your children will fight and what your economic policy will be. Democracy is an illusion in the Anglosphere. You have more say in who wins American Idol than you do in foreign or economic policy.
Be good little sheep. Serve your masters. Breed the next generation of slaves. And sleep.
and for those off line there are always Drones
First Man Arrested With Drone Evidencehttp://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/04/09/first-man-arrested-with-d...
This is a true story. I was living about 20 miles from Lakota, ND last summer when this happened.
inside joke?
http://tinyurl.com/7erxdaj
The government will drown in the ever metastasizing ocean of swill that is being produced by the dumbed down American population. The stupidity and mindless drivel of the typical phone user simply increases in the great garbage can of the intelligence community. Who knows, perhaps the new supercomputers in utah will have AI built right into the chips to detect and delete valley girl talk and all the other low IQ drivel and dreck that mass marketing of computers and smart phones inevitably produces.
As they say - a meaningful piece of data is ever more difficult to find.
What intelligence is left is then hiding in plain view like several grains of sand at the bottom of a vast ocean.
they likely don't have too much interest in Ashley and Josh, but if you name is Ivandjiiski or Taibbi or even Mr Lennon Hendrix that's a different story - as for the capabiltiy to distill, sort and store data, well that's a given so when Ashley grows up and behaves in a manner that the authorities disapprove that full frontal she sexted to Tiffany will be just a clik away
The most powerful thing that they do. If you make noise and won't play ball, they reveal a skeleton of yours.
They will not use their power like a hammer.
Hell, you don't even have to have any skeletons. One accusation of kiddie porn is about enough to bring anyone down.
Oh, and they can sneak into your house if they want, and do not have to tell you.
Of course, it will probably be done through a back door into your computer (COFEE type program) remotely and they can make you into whatever they want.
pods
The gov could have bought 2 Instagrams for that money!
Why are government employees constantly figuring out ways to fuck American citizens over? Don't they understand that they are our employees and we contribute to their salaries? With employees like them, we should fire all their asses. We don't need employees that constantly attack us and our wallets.
Michael, I know from personal experience that it's the system and not the individual employee which is the problem. I used to care very deeply about doing a good job for my employers and made myself available for service as often as possible. It doesn't take very long to discover that employees such as myself are soon marked for elimination by the powers that be, as we make the rest look bad. All too soon you are confronted with the choice of getting with the program and selling your soul to the devil, or getting out while you still have some vestiges of sanity.
BTW, I had a citizen confront me once over a job which was not progresssing at a rate he desired. In the course of the conversation, he dragged out the "I pay your salary" line; I was prepared. "Sir, given the population and my salary and benefits, I have figured that every person in this area contributes exactly twenty five cents to my pay package per year. If I give you your quarter back, will you go away and leave me alone?" He left...and I got to keep the quarter!
Very good question. Why are federal government employees constantly coming up with ways to fuck over Americans? That sort of question deserves its own web site.
Because they are being paid to do so. Most of them aren't making the connection between what they do today and the 'down the road result' it might have in terms affecting American liberty. Most believe they're doing it for the good of the country and to fight those eeevol terrzits.
Most of them also don't make the connection that much of their efforts may also be used against THEM. Those that do consider that possibility inevitably rationalize it with 'I've got nothing to hide, so it doesn't affect me' logic. A steady job with not-too-shabby benefits is a powerful thing to willingly give up on principle. Certainly not in a society that currently has over 1,000 people lined-up waiting to take that job the minute it gets surrendered.
The government is only a little behind
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
Too much information for the government to process. The best private companies in the world have like 2% hit rate on info, Google made billions after managing to squeeze it to 3%. Data is growing exponentially.
Plus I've seen the ads for working at the NSA for cyrptos and engineers; 60-90k a year after years of experience. Fresh grads from state schools working at an unknown company make more, the best make ~200k at a Google or Facebook. No one worth a damn will work for peanuts in the middle of the desert.
"Begone. You have no power here."
- Glinda
My boss considers himself to be the best IT guy he knows. He thinks he could be an IT director. He loves his "free" dropbox account. He mandated that all employees use a Gmail account for company email and shares company information via Google Docs. What's not to love, right? He's even put much of our proprietary documents on both Dropbox and Google Docs - things he would never willingly share with the USG or an outside entity, things he would fire an employee for unauthorized disclosure. There's one born every minute....
Your boss sounds like a man of visions.
There's one born every minute....
Evidently there are a lot more than one.
But, hey, Google is BIG, that must mean that they are safe. Right?
FFfffuuuuccckkk...
It's as if you were working for the exact same company I am.
+1000
Shocking, utterly shocking!!
More news from the Land of the used to be Free, were government strictly respects its limited and enumerated powers.
Who told you that?
Who told you that?
Bet it was the same people who told me during my decade or two of daily conditioning: the government "school" system.
What's amazing is how many losers sit around take part in this crap. Seriously, you get a kick our of spying on your Countryman? This Country is full of losers and unmen! Sissy boys, from Karl "pudge boy" Rove on down.
"For the government, that’s a lot of work to obtain the data of only six Americans a day"
That's exactly what they want you to think. Far too many otherwise informed people believe the government to be a conglomeration of inept buffoons, blindly clamoring about in the dark for tidbits and leftovers. This is not so.....
All the information in the world cannot make up for lack of wisdom.
Wisdom trumps folly in the end, so there is no worry here, though the "smarter world" is an irritant, no doubt.
Those who live by the drone will die by the drone.
The ratio is generally 1 hard working white man doing all the work for every 5 incompetent affirmative action welfare junkies sitting around doing nothing collecting pay checks. Sadly, that ratio is sufficient for the government to be deadly dangerous.
Before you can be free to be wise, it is wise to be free. This requires:
1. democratic process
2. rule of law
3. equal representation
4. freedom of choice (religion / lifestyle etc as relative to others' similar rights of freedom)
It is perhaps poignant at this moment to assess to what extent the above foundation stones, from which all free world constitutions draw their vitality, are realized in our life today - a sober thought for sober times
"Democracy" is a religious chant; dogma.
"Rule of law" can mean many things, most of them bad (though not all of them).
"Representation" is and has always been a crock. Institutions do what they always do, whether you are supposed to represented or not.
Your #4 is quite good.
From the great John Locke:
All men are naturally in a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.
True that.... Liberty and freedom should be the main focus.
What Hilter could've done with this technology, oh wait, it is happening again but under a different name
The U.S. imported a good portion of the 3rd Reich Technology, Science, Methodology, Projects and Experimentation after Germany was defeated in WWII (Operation Paperclip).
As you allude, What Hitler would have done is being done now and has been for a long time.
same result too. LOSING.
Crazy shit, ain't it? And it just seems to get worse by the day, and we just seem to keep taking it.. Maddening!
It is crazy. I read daily, here and elsewhere how 'the people' are going to rise up. Horseshit.
The TeeVee, for the most part tells Americans what to do. How else does this clown in charge have 50% approval?
If this ass hat is re-elected you can kiss guns goodbye. And just about everything else.
I read how people are going to rise up...I suggest we're all mostly chicken shits who will watch it all be taken from them.
Why, we're doing it now? How have WE let it go this far. There will be no great revolution...it is here and it's going fine.
Reagan said it best, 'this is the last outpost of freedom, if we fail there is no where else to go".
And don't tell me about living in the hills of mexico.
You haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till they marry Total Awareness to tiny quadrotors you can't quite see. Five years or less. That's all we've got left. See the link.
http://mobile.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/quadrotor...
And so it was that SKYNET was born.
That link gave me nightmares, and I'd already seen most of it and knew all about it. Just closer and closer...
Great Video's. It will be interesting to see what the Chinese do with this technology....
I saw a video of drones a few months ago but they were not this advanced. After viewing the videos, thing that struck me the most was the thougth that it is likely (considering what they did with building construction already) that it will be the Chinese who will commercialize this technology....