Monday, December 30, 2013
Sunday, December 29, 2013
About Drones, what everybody should know...
"What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is a far cry from clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited clouds and perfect light.
This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure.
One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts.
We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle.
It's also important for the public to grasp that there are human beings operating and analysing intelligence these UAVs.
I know because I was one of them, and nothing can prepare you for an almost daily routine of flying combat aerial surveillance missions over a war zone.
UAV proponents claim that troops who do this kind of work are not affected by observing this combat because they are never directly in danger physically.
This is the point: "they are never directly in danger physically"... Once, when wars were fought in the traditional way, a soldier risked his life and had some kind of justification"I killed not to be killed."
This is no more war, this is legalized murder...
This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure.
One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts.
We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle.
It's also important for the public to grasp that there are human beings operating and analysing intelligence these UAVs.
I know because I was one of them, and nothing can prepare you for an almost daily routine of flying combat aerial surveillance missions over a war zone.
UAV proponents claim that troops who do this kind of work are not affected by observing this combat because they are never directly in danger physically.
This is the point: "they are never directly in danger physically"... Once, when wars were fought in the traditional way, a soldier risked his life and had some kind of justification"I killed not to be killed."
This is no more war, this is legalized murder...
Saturday, December 28, 2013
When digital rights are not supported by the law, they must be granted by technology.
"Digital liberty has lost the Lawfare fight. It must win the technical fight."
Former Guardian columnist Greenwald paid rueful due to his own onetime lack of encryption skills, but said that most journalists covering national security had been no different as recently as a year ago.
That has now changed, both among journalists and the interested general public.
“One of most significant outcomes of the last few months has been the increased awareness of the importance of encryption and privacy,” he said. “It’s a remarkable sea change.”
The power of the NSA and the security establishment is too strong, and democratic governments are proving unable to resist the seduction of surveillance-derived knowledge.
Third parties that are vulnerable to being co-opted by national sovereigns cannot be trusted.
No law protection, no trust in third parties, so how to fight the technical war?
No design should ever permit unprotected data to touch third party infrastructure anywhere, anytime, anyway, ever. Period.
Recognize that we now inhabit an environment in which there are effectively no legal protections of any kind against pervasive, omnipresent surveillance.
Build robust, distributed channels.
Make them end-user friendly.
Build systems that MANDATE third party deniability.
Build systems that are (relatively) trivial to audit.
Pillay, the first non-white woman to serve as a high-court judge in South Africa,has been asked by the UN to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, in the wake of the former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaking classified documents about UK and US spying and the collection of personal data.
The former international criminal court judge said her encounters with serious human rights abuses, which included serving on the Rwanda tribunal, did not make her take online privacy less seriously.
"Combined and collective action by everybody can end serious violations of human rights … That experience inspires me to go on and address the issue of internet [privacy], which right now is extremely troubling because the revelations of surveillance have implications for human rights … People are really afraid that all their personal details are being used in violation of traditional national protections."
The same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy
Former Guardian columnist Greenwald paid rueful due to his own onetime lack of encryption skills, but said that most journalists covering national security had been no different as recently as a year ago.
That has now changed, both among journalists and the interested general public.
“One of most significant outcomes of the last few months has been the increased awareness of the importance of encryption and privacy,” he said. “It’s a remarkable sea change.”
The power of the NSA and the security establishment is too strong, and democratic governments are proving unable to resist the seduction of surveillance-derived knowledge.
Third parties that are vulnerable to being co-opted by national sovereigns cannot be trusted.
No law protection, no trust in third parties, so how to fight the technical war?
No design should ever permit unprotected data to touch third party infrastructure anywhere, anytime, anyway, ever. Period.
Recognize that we now inhabit an environment in which there are effectively no legal protections of any kind against pervasive, omnipresent surveillance.
Build robust, distributed channels.
Make them end-user friendly.
Build systems that MANDATE third party deniability.
Build systems that are (relatively) trivial to audit.
Pillay, the first non-white woman to serve as a high-court judge in South Africa,has been asked by the UN to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, in the wake of the former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaking classified documents about UK and US spying and the collection of personal data.
The former international criminal court judge said her encounters with serious human rights abuses, which included serving on the Rwanda tribunal, did not make her take online privacy less seriously.
"Combined and collective action by everybody can end serious violations of human rights … That experience inspires me to go on and address the issue of internet [privacy], which right now is extremely troubling because the revelations of surveillance have implications for human rights … People are really afraid that all their personal details are being used in violation of traditional national protections."
The same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy
Friday, December 27, 2013
The future
How can you predict the future?
It is much simpler than you can believe.
Simply look at the past.
Everybody talks about the first quarter of 2014, the second quarter, many go as far as 2015 or 2016, but ALL agree that kicking the can down the road will end somehow.
It is enough to look at the past, the far away past, as far as the Roman Empire, or as close as the URSS or the DDR, they were small, then great (or almost) and then they just finished.
Any dictatorship has one limit: they eventually run out of other people's money.
The other people's money being a colony or many colonies or just own people's money.
You steal today, you steal tomorrow and one day there is nothing more to steal.
And it doesn't really matter how big is your police force, or your army, or how many drones you have, when you have no money to pay their salaries (or when the money you print has no more value) they just do not work for you anymore.
And eventually work AGAINST you.
Once dictators had SOMEWHERE to fly to, to hide in, but in this globalized world, when can they hide?
The very same tools they invented to spy on their enemies will be their own NEMESIS.
Who kills with a sword, will die by a sword.
It is much simpler than you can believe.
Simply look at the past.
Everybody talks about the first quarter of 2014, the second quarter, many go as far as 2015 or 2016, but ALL agree that kicking the can down the road will end somehow.
It is enough to look at the past, the far away past, as far as the Roman Empire, or as close as the URSS or the DDR, they were small, then great (or almost) and then they just finished.
Any dictatorship has one limit: they eventually run out of other people's money.
The other people's money being a colony or many colonies or just own people's money.
You steal today, you steal tomorrow and one day there is nothing more to steal.
And it doesn't really matter how big is your police force, or your army, or how many drones you have, when you have no money to pay their salaries (or when the money you print has no more value) they just do not work for you anymore.
And eventually work AGAINST you.
Once dictators had SOMEWHERE to fly to, to hide in, but in this globalized world, when can they hide?
The very same tools they invented to spy on their enemies will be their own NEMESIS.
Who kills with a sword, will die by a sword.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Internet: no more P2P
The Internet was born as a small, decentralized collective of computers.
It meant “ Independence of Cyberspace.”
Not anymore.
Two decades later, most communications flow through a small set of corporations—and thus, under the profound influence of those companies and other institutions.
Google, for instance, now comprises twenty-five per cent of all North American Internet traffic.
It has become a centralized “computer utility” that offers computing much the same way that power companies provide electricity.
Today, that model is largely embodied by the information empires of Amazon, Google, and other cloud-computing companies.
From independence of Cyberspace we have come to dependence from Cyberspace's utilities providers.
More and more Internet users now submit to terms-of-service agreements that give companies license to share their personal data with other institutions, from advertisers to governments.
We should call it "mea culpa"if it wasn't really others foul play's culpa.
In the U.S.(Europe follows), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a law that predates the Web, allows law enforcement to obtain without a warrant private data that citizens entrust to third parties—including location data passively gathered from cell phones and the contents of e-mails that have either been opened or left unattended for a hundred and eighty days.
The solution is to make the Internet more like it used to be—less centralized and more distributed.
Surely it won't end surveillance, but will make it harder to do it at such a large scale.
The challenge is to make decentralized alternatives that are as secure, convenient, and seductive as a Google account.
More secure won't be difficult, as alluring will be the not easy part.
The peer-to-peer architecture holds the potential for greatly improved privacy and security on the Internet.
But existing apart from commonly used protocols and standards can also preclude any possibility of widespread adoption.
It meant “ Independence of Cyberspace.”
Not anymore.
Two decades later, most communications flow through a small set of corporations—and thus, under the profound influence of those companies and other institutions.
Google, for instance, now comprises twenty-five per cent of all North American Internet traffic.
It has become a centralized “computer utility” that offers computing much the same way that power companies provide electricity.
Today, that model is largely embodied by the information empires of Amazon, Google, and other cloud-computing companies.
From independence of Cyberspace we have come to dependence from Cyberspace's utilities providers.
More and more Internet users now submit to terms-of-service agreements that give companies license to share their personal data with other institutions, from advertisers to governments.
We should call it "mea culpa"if it wasn't really others foul play's culpa.
In the U.S.(Europe follows), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a law that predates the Web, allows law enforcement to obtain without a warrant private data that citizens entrust to third parties—including location data passively gathered from cell phones and the contents of e-mails that have either been opened or left unattended for a hundred and eighty days.
The solution is to make the Internet more like it used to be—less centralized and more distributed.
Surely it won't end surveillance, but will make it harder to do it at such a large scale.
The challenge is to make decentralized alternatives that are as secure, convenient, and seductive as a Google account.
More secure won't be difficult, as alluring will be the not easy part.
The peer-to-peer architecture holds the potential for greatly improved privacy and security on the Internet.
But existing apart from commonly used protocols and standards can also preclude any possibility of widespread adoption.
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