Entries Tagged "surveillance"

Page 79 of 94

Privacy and the "Nothing to Hide" Argument

Good essay:

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the “nothing to hide” argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the “nothing to hide” argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The “nothing to hide” argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the “nothing to hide” argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

Posted on July 13, 2007 at 7:11 AM • View Comments

Story of the Greek Wiretapping Scandal

I’ve blogged a few times about the Greek wiretapping scandal. A system to allow the police to eavesdrop on conversations was abused (surprise, surprise).

Anyway, there’s a really good technical analysis in IEEE Spectrum this month.

On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.

The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy. [See sidebar “CEOs, MPs, & a PM.”]

The victims were customers of Athens-based Vodafone-Panafon, generally known as Vodafone Greece, the country’s largest cellular service provider; Tsalikidis was in charge of network planning at the company. A connection seemed obvious. Given the list of people and their positions at the time of the tapping, we can only imagine the sensitive political and diplomatic discussions, high-stakes business deals, or even marital indiscretions that may have been routinely overheard and, quite possibly, recorded.

[…]

A study of the Athens affair, surely the most bizarre and embarrassing scandal ever to engulf a major cellphone service provider, sheds considerable light on the measures networks can and should take to reduce their vulnerability to hackers and moles.

It’s also a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of one of the most elusive of cybercrimes. Major network penetrations of any kind are exceedingly uncommon. They are hard to pull off, and equally hard to investigate.

See also blog entries by Matt Blaze, Steve Bellovin, and John Markoff; they make some good security points.

EDITED TO ADD (10/22): More info:

The head of Vodafone Greece told the Government that as soon as it discovered the tapping software, it removed it and notified the authorities. However, the shutdown of the equipment prompted strong criticism of Vodafone because it had prevented the authorities from tracing the taps.

Posted on July 10, 2007 at 12:34 PM • View Comments

Surveillance Cameras that Obscure Faces

From Technology Review:

A camera developed by computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, would obscure, with an oval, the faces of people who appear on surveillance videos. These so-called respectful cameras, which are still in the research phase, could be used for day-to-day surveillance applications and would allow for the privacy oval to be removed from a given set of footage in the event of an investigation.

An interesting privacy-enhancing technology.

Posted on June 26, 2007 at 7:41 AM • View Comments

4th Amendment Rights Extended to E-Mail

This is a great piece of news in the U.S. For the first time, e-mail has been granted the same constitutional protections as telephone calls and personal papers: the police need a warrant to get at it. Now it’s only a circuit court decision—the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio—it’s pretty narrowly defined based on the attributes of the e-mail system, and it has a good chance of being overturned by the Supreme Court…but it’s still great news.

The way to think of the warrant system is as a security device. The police still have the ability to get access to e-mail in order to investigate a crime. But in order to prevent abuse, they have to convince a neutral third party—a judge—that accessing someone’s e-mail is necessary to investigate that crime. That judge, at least in theory, protects our interests.

Clearly e-mail deserves the same protection as our other personal papers, but—like phone calls—it might take the courts decades to figure that out. But we’ll get there eventually.

Posted on June 25, 2007 at 4:13 PM • View Comments

Direct Marketing Meets Wholesale Surveillance

A $100K National Science Foundation grant to Geosemble Technologies, Inc.

SBIR Phase I: Exploiting High-Resolution Imagery, Geospatial Data, and Online Sources to Automatically Identify Direct Marketing Leads

Abstract: This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will conduct a feasibility study to demonstrate that by combining currently available high-resolution imagery, geospatial data (e.g., parcel data or structure data), and other related online data sources (e.g., property tax data or census data), it is possible to automatically generate highly targeted direct marketing leads for a variety of markets. The plan is to approach this problem by (1) aligning existing geospatial sources with the high-resolution imagery in order to determine the exact location and determine the address of the parcels seen in the imagery, (2) extracting the relevant features from the imagery to provide appropriate leads, such as determining the presence or absence of a swimming pool, the type of roofing materials used, or what types of cars are parked in the driveway, and (3) bringing in other sources of data, such as property tax assessment data to provide additional context.

The primary focus of the phase I project will be to demonstrate the use of machine learning technology for identifying features in high-resolution imagery that can be used for direct marketing. High-resolution aerial imagery is now being widely collected and is available for low cost or in some cases is even free. The challenges are to first to align parcel data with the high resolution imagery to identify the exact address and boundaries of a property, and second to develop feature extraction techniques that can exploit the contextual information to accurately identify novel features, such as roofs, cars, pools, landscaping, etc., that can be used for direct marketing. The ability to accurately identify features in imagery and then relate them to specific properties as well as related sources of information will allow a targeted direct marketing product to be built. The end users of this product will be companies seeking to market products directly to residential consumers. This includes product and services relating to home improvement, both exterior and interior, as well as those products relating to residents of the home, that can be gleaned from imagery available for the parcel in question. This is a large market and includes everyone from home improvement stores to roofing companies, construction companies, automobile dealers, tree trimmers, landscapers, and pool construction companies. Beyond direct marketing, the technology can also be used for other applications that combine imagery, geospatial data, and structured information. For example, it could used for mosquito abatement, which is important to stop the spread of West Nile Virus, by identifying large pools of stagnant water, associating those hazards with the appropriate address, and then mailing abatement notifications to the residents.

Posted on June 19, 2007 at 3:52 PM • View Comments

License Plate Cloning

It’s a growing problem in the UK:

“There are different levels of cloning. There is the simple cloning, just stealing a plate to drive into say the Congestion Charge zone or evade a speed camera.

“It ranges up to a higher level which is the car criminal who wants to sell on a stolen car.”

Tony Bullock’s car was cloned even though his plates were not physically stolen, and he was threatened with prosecution after “his” car was repeatedly caught speeding in Leicester.

He said: “It was horrendous. You are guilty until you can prove you’re not. It’s the first time that I’ve thought that English law is on its head.”

Metropolitan Police Federation chairman Glen Smyth said the problem has grown because of the amount of camera-based enforcement of traffic offences, which relies on computer records on who owns which car.

Posted on June 11, 2007 at 1:52 PM • View Comments

Remote Metal Sensors Used to Detect Poachers

Interesting use of the technology, although I’m sure it has more value on the battlefield than to detect poachers.

The system consists of a network of foot-long metal detectors similar to those used in airports. When moving metal objects such as a machete or a rifle trip the sensor, it sends a radio signal to a wireless Internet gateway camouflaged in the tree canopy as far as a kilometer away. This signal is transmitted via satellite to the Internet, where the incident is logged and messages revealing the poachers’ position and direction are sent instantly to park headquarters, where patrols can then be dispatched.

Posted on June 6, 2007 at 11:06 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.