Articles about Privacy

The repercussions of last week's PRISM story continue to ricochet around the web. The latest domino to fall is that belonging to Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client. The organization announces sweeping actions against this news with a campaign designed to raise awareness on perceived privacy intrusions.

Mozilla's Alex Fowler, leader of privacy and public policy, announces "last week, media reports emerged that the US government is requiring vast amounts of data from Internet and phone companies via top secret surveillance programs. The revelations, which confirm many of our worst fears, raise serious questions about individual privacy protections, checks on government power and court orders impacting some of the most popular Web services".

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What a strange coincidence: Earlier this week, Smithsonian Channel's "Air Disasters" broadcast an episode about the downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983 -- at the height of the Cold War. Turns out the Soviet Union recovered the black boxes and hid them for a decade. I'm old enough to remember the Cold War and what the United States fought against. I told my wife: "Sometimes I really wish the Soviet empire still existed, so Americans had a measure for government bad behavior". A day later, the Guardian and Washington Post broke what likely is the biggest story about U.S. surveillance since the Watergate break in. The activity stinks of behavior opposed decades ago.

The National Security Agency spies on you, in secret, something many people suspected. The NSA monitors Internet servers, without warrants. In a Google+ comment today, Joe Betsill brilliantly and succinctly captures what changed: "There's a difference between suspicion and evidence". He links to an Electronic Frontier Foundation "Timeline to NSA domestic spying". I strongly suggest reading the EFF material, in addition to the Guardian and Washington Post investigative reports -- so that you are informed.

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…And I don’t feel fine. Tyranny has replaced liberty in the United States. Our rights are slowly being eroded. Not a day goes by without a new government scandal breaking in the news. As my colleague Mark Wilson reported yesterday, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been secretly spying on Verizon customers since April. The public was outraged -- and rightfully so. There was worry that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, according to a new report, it was just the tip. The rest of the iceberg is much larger -- and we are the Titanic heading right for it.

While the public was still wrapping their heads around the Verizon scandal, they were  informed by The Guardian of a far more devious and tyrannical program dubbed ‘PRISM’. According to the report, this program has been in effect since 2007. In that 6+ year span, the following companies have allowed themselves to be infiltrated:

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It sounds like something from the Cold War, but it is happening today. A top secret court order requires Verizon to hand over telephone records for millions of its subscribers to the NSA on an "ongoing daily basis". The order, in place since April this year, forces the telecom company to hand over a range of "tangible things" about phone calls placed within the US and to foreign countries.

This is not entirely unprecedented -- the recording of telephone data has long been used as a means of gathering intelligence during periods of war -- but this time things are a little different. Not only was the court order passed in secret, but there are no specific targets to the operation. It would be quite normal for the call of suspected terrorists or other criminals to be logged and recorded, but in this instance all phone calls are considered fair game.

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A study by CAST in conjunction with Rackspace reveals that users of wearable technology -- such as the Nike+ FuelBand and Jawbone UP -- feel using such devices boost their intelligence levels. The study looks at residents of the UK and US, and finds the wearable tech users not only feel cleverer, but also more self-confident.

These are not the only benefits the study unearths. US participants were generally rather more impressed with the benefits of wearable technology -- 71 percent of American users felt their health and fitness had improved as a result of using such devices, compared to 63 percent of those in the UK. More than half (53 percent) of US users believe wearable tech helps to improve intelligence, compared to just 39 percent of UK users.

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Symantec in conjunction with the Ponemon Institute has released a new study into the cost of data breaches. What it reveals is that whilst most of us worry about malware and hackers, it’s actually mistakes and system errors that cause the majority of breaches.

According to the survey, glitches and negligence between them accounted for 64 percent of last year’s data breaches. This includes employees leaking or mishandling information, violation of regulations, accidental data dumps and stolen or lost laptops.

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Dashlane, Inc has launched Dashlane 2.0 for desktop and Dashlane for Android 2.0.1, major new updates of its secure password management tool that allows users to securely store sensitive personal details such as online passwords and credit card information via free desktop and mobile apps.

Both builds gain a complete new user interface, the promise of a "massive jump" in product quality and support for two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator. In addition the desktop build gains a new Security Dashboard feature, while the Android version expands support for tablets and adds in-app browsing.

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These days, the ability to browse the web anonymously is built into most web browsers. Firefox has a special Private Browsing mode where no trace of your history -- including searches, downloads, web forms and cookies -- is kept, although any downloaded files and bookmarks will remain as evidence of your secret browsing session.

It’s certainly more robust than a general browsing session, but it’s not as secure as it might be. That explains the reasoning behind Private Browsing by PortableApps.com 3.0, a free add-on for Firefox Portable Edition for Windows.

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While it’s unlikely that the fate of your nation depends on it, there may be times when being able to pass on sensitive files to other people is a necessity. The obvious example is to encrypt those files in some way, either by storing them in a password-protected location or by encrypting them on the fly before passing them on.

The problem with this approach is that it’s rather visible. Your encrypted files by their very nature advertise the fact they contain some form of sensitive data, attracting unwanted attention. So what can you do about it? The answer lies with steganography, and a free tool for Windows called SteganPEG 1.0.

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The Dutch government has revealed plans to give the police extra powers to fight cybercrime. Under the proposed new law officers would be given the right to hack into computers, read emails, install spyware and delete files. They could also be authorised to tap VoIP calls and break into servers located outside the country if they were being used to host DDoS attacks.

The country’s Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten says that the powers would be used under strict control and that the approval of a judge would be needed before the police could carry out these actions.

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The Mozilla Foundation is accusing Gamma International, a UK-based software group, of making a false association between one of its products and the Firefox name.

Gamma International produces FinFisher, a program used by governments to obtain data in a covert way. FinFisher is often installed by disguising itself as an update to a well known program such as Firefox. Mozilla has now sent a cease and desist letter to Gamma claiming that its Firefox trademark is being violated and that the practice must end immediately.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of consumers, publishes its report on safety in the digital age. There are some winners and also some major losers this time around in the "Who has your back?" statement -- hint put down your cell phone, step away slowly and nobody gets hurt.

The annual report looks at major technology service providers' commitment to users' rights in the face of government data demands. EFF examines 18 companies' terms of service, privacy policies, advocacy, and courtroom track records and awards up to six gold stars for best practices in categories such as requiring a warrant for content, telling users about government data demands and publishing a transparency report.

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For the past three years Google has released transparency reports, which loosely translate to tattling on the government and other entities that attempt to extract information from the search giant. None are likely happy with this reporting, but it is all public record and fair game.

"Today, for the seventh time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove content from our services", states Google's legal director Susan Infantino.

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Not every business embraces BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). The reasons for rejecting it are usually down to security concerns -- firms are understandably worried about their data falling into the wrong hands if the device gets lost or stolen once it leaves the building.

Security specialist Symantec surveyed 236 attendees at this year’s Symantec Vision, its annual user and technical conference held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, to find out how companies were handling BYOD, and despite the small sample size the results were interesting:

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As we all recap the Boston bombing and manhunt events in our minds, looking for lessons learned, the one that sticks out in my head is the value of surveillance cameras. They were essential to catching the perpetrators and doing so quickly. More aggressive use of them might have resulted in even faster capture, and the civil rights and privacy concerns people express about them are hysterical overreaction.

The value of surveillance cameras was obvious almost immediately after the event. I remember many experts interviewed predicting that they would be used to narrow down suspects rather quickly. In fact, you don't need an expert to understand this. The only people who didn't seem to understand it well were the Tsarnaev brothers. They stayed in town and tried to go on with their lives, indicating that thought they wouldn't be detected. They must have freaked out when they saw their pictures on the news, but they still didn't get out of Dodge.

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