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State Surveillance Thread


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9 hours ago, snowychap said:

Every authoritarian everywhere and yet to come dreams of this attitude.

Good. I am glad people like that are in charge and not people who would prefer to let criminals and terrorists do whatever the hell they like. 

I wonder how many of you might feel different if your child or parent was murdered in a Paris style attack. I guarantee there will be a whole host of questions about why we weren't monitoring then. 

And pleas don't go on about another rant about how most attacks were carried out by known people. 

1) as I said nothing is perfect,  people will get through and fortunately unlike in many many other countries we don't just go arresting people until we have definite proof. 

2) OK most attacks are by known people but you have no idea of how many attacked DID NOT happen because the surveillance picked them up. 

If one parent is tucking their child in tonight unknowing that without some kind of surveillance they would have been killed 2 months ago by a bomb in The Bullring I say bring it on and I frankly don't give a toss about any wooly thinking and hearsay about how effective it is. 

You can reply if you like but I will not.  I feel extremely strongly about this,  you have opposite views so it's pointless trying to convince each other, but at least we can disagree in relative safety. 

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37 minutes ago, sidcow said:

You can reply if you like but I will not.

Good as there are only so many times I can bear to read the kind of utter rot that you've posted.

38 minutes ago, sidcow said:

fortunately unlike in many many other countries we don't just go arresting people until we have definite proof

The trial comes after arrest.

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Just going to need to put some cameras in your bedroom Sidcow. You know, security and all that. If we're not going to have an expectation of privacy in digital communications, it seems ridiculous being able to bypass it by simply talking in person. We'd better sort that out pronto.

Edited by Davkaus
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1 hour ago, sidcow said:

Good. I am glad people like that are in charge and not people who would prefer to let criminals and terrorists do whatever the hell they like.

This is a false premise. Whilst that remains the basis of you framing your argument we can all agree with the sentiment. It's just that's not the issue at all and no one in here is suggesting that it should be.

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There are a bunch of Islamic lads* who are fully sure in their position and unwilling to argue about it because they are right also. Saving/protecting girls by covering them up head to toe, yay! Fighting fire with fire, eh @sidcow

 *lassies too, and Islamic in that they are the current bete noire.

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3 hours ago, limpid said:

...Also all the device manufacturers...

... In China, with the components made there too? Your smart home will become part of Beijing's bot army :)

The Russians claimed they'd intercepted Chinese made kettles and irons that contained suspect chips.

The Russians were accused of giving out phone chargers containing spy gear to G20 delegates.

The Chinese have also announced they will developing their own cutting edge ICs in future and not just utilising Western chip designs.

The reasons for the last point could be entirely unrelated, business or pride perhaps? Possibly a little mistrust of the likes of Texas Instruments, ARM and Intel as well? It's Intel's processors at the heart of China's current monster supercomputer.

 

Or do the Tories want to watch me oggling Tube8?

The World's gone mad after all.

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Orwell the Prophet

 

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/ill-never-bring-my-phone-on-an-international-flight-again-neither-should-you-e9289cde0e5f#.kmk049dux

Quote

On his way through through the airport, Customs and Border Patrol agents pulled him aside. They searched him, then detained him in a room with a bunch of other people sleeping in cots. They eventually returned and said they’d release him if he told them the password to unlock his phone.

 

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On 15/02/2017 at 19:00, sidcow said:

you have no idea of how many attacked DID NOT happen because the surveillance picked them up. 

As an aside, we do have an idea actually. it was 10 in the last 2 years. and 12 since 2013. And 294 people have been convicted or various naughtiness related to plotting etc. it was all over the news a couple of months ago.

What's clear is that there is a constant stream of threats - from religionists, nutters, other states and so on. I don't think anyone's arguing otherwise.

The differences seem to be over how much of our freedom or rights "we" are prepared to trade in, for "promises" of improved threat deterrence and reduction.

At some point on the curve, if we're monitored, controlled, restricted etc. then we've lost and the enemy has won.

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  • 3 weeks later...

You lot see the "Vault 7" documents from wikileaks? I've not seen much in it that reveals too much new information, it seems more variations on the same themes we have already seen. 

I have seen people saying that it is a scandal that they are finding zero day vulnerabilities in commercial software and deliberately leaving them open.  TBH if your day job spying it would be a scandal for the secret service to announce every vulnerability they find. They would just become a very expensive (to the tax payer) free if charge (to the it industry) consultant.

 

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1 hour ago, Xela said:

You mean MI5 have been watching me wank off in front of my smart TV? :blush:

there's at least seven of us on here that have subscribed to the live feed

it's the only reason I got a 3D tv

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10 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

there's at least seven of us on here that have subscribed to the live feed

it's the only reason I got a 3D tv

I never realised there was a market for someone simultaneously tommy tanking and sobbing at the same time. 

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Just now, Xela said:

I never realised there was a market for someone simultaneously tommy tanking and sobbing at the same time. 

I got there from Japanese porn. I wanted to see more and more crying but less pixilation.

 

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Cigarette papers are good temporary lens covers.

Heavy breathers can use a little of the glue to stop them blowing away during vinegar strokes.

18 minutes ago, Xela said:

I never realised there was a market for someone simultaneously tommy tanking and sobbing at the same time. 

Niche markets are where the money is.

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  • 1 year later...

Bit of a long one might be of interest.

Quote

“I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets

Berners-Lee has seen his creation debased by everything from fake news to mass surveillance. But he’s got a plan to fix it.

“For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears the consummate academic—communicating rapidly, in a clipped London accent, occasionally skipping over words and eliding sentences as he stammers to convey a thought. His soliloquy was a mixture of excitement with traces of melancholy

:snip:

Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it. While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.

For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted.

This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new software, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future. Sometime this November, he estimates, half the world’s population—close to 4 billion people—will be connected online, sharing everything from résumés to political views to DNA information. As billions more come online, they will feed trillions of additional bits of information into the Web, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever.

“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places,” he told me. The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

 

:snip:

What made the Web powerful, and ultimately dominant, however, would also one day prove to be its greatest vulnerability: Berners-Lee gave it away for free; anyone with a computer and an Internet connection could not only access it but also build off it. Berners-Lee understood that the Web needed to be unfettered by patents, fees, royalties, or any other controls in order to thrive. This way, millions of innovators could design their own products to take advantage of it. And, of course, millions did. Computer scientists and academics picked it up first, building applications that then drew others. Within a year of the Web’s release, nascent developers were already conceiving of ways to draw more and more users. From browsers to blogs to e-commerce sites, the Web’s eco-system exploded. In the beginning it was truly open, free, controlled by no one company or group. “We were in that first phase of what the Internet could do,” recalls Brewster Kahle, an early Internet pioneer who in 1996 built the original system for Alexa, later acquired by Amazon. “Tim and Vint made the system so that there could be many players that didn’t have an advantage over each other.” Berners-Lee, too, remembers the quixotism of the era. “The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission,” he said. “That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.”

The power of the Web wasn’t taken or stolen. We, collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every signed user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology. Facebook, Google, and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens online, from what we buy to the news we read to who we like. Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways. Shortly after the 2016 election, Berners-Lee felt something had to change, and began methodically attempting to hack his creation. Last fall, the World Wide Web Foundation funded research to examine how Facebook’s algorithms control the news and information users receive. “Looking at the ways algorithms are feeding people news and looking at accountability for the algorithms—all of that is really important for the open Web,” he explained. By understanding these dangers, he hopes, we can collectively stop being deceived by the machine just as half the earth’s population is on board. “Crossing 50 percent is going to be a moment to pause and think,” says Berners-Lee, referring to the coming milestone. As billions more connect to the Web, he feels an increasing urgency to resolve its problems. For him this is about not just those already online but also the billions still unconnected. How much weaker and more marginalized will they become as the rest of the world leaves them behind?

 

:snip:

The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Web. Working with a small team of developers, he spends most of his time now on Solid, a platform designed to give individuals, rather than corporations, control of their own data. “There are people working in the lab trying to imagine how the Web could be different. How society on the Web could look different. What could happen if we give people privacy and we give people control of their data,” Berners-Lee told me. “We are building a whole eco-system.”

For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding. “One person turns up every few days. Some of them have heard about the promise of Solid, and they are driven to turn the world upside down,” he says. Part of the draw is working with an icon. For a computer scientist, coding with Berners-Lee is like playing guitar with Keith Richards. But more than just working with the inventor of the Web, these coders come because they want to join the cause. These are digital idealists, subversives, revolutionaries, and anyone else who wants to fight the centralization of the Web. For his part, working on Solid brings Berners-Lee back to the Web’s early days: “It’s under the radar, but working on it in a way puts back some of the optimism and excitement that the ‘fake news’ takes out.”

It’s still the early days for Solid, but Berners-Lee is moving fast. Those who work closely with him say he has thrown himself into the project with the same vigor and determination he employed upon the Web’s inception. Popular sentiment also appears to facilitate his time frame. In India, a group of activists successfully blocked Facebook from implementing a new service that would have effectively controlled access to the Web for huge swaths of the country’s population. In Germany, one young coder built a decentralized version of Twitter called Mastodon. In France, another group created Peertube as a decentralized alternative to YouTube. “I resent the control corporations have over people and their everyday lives. I hate the surveillance society we have accidently brought upon ourselves,” says Amy Guy, a coder from Scotland who helped build a platform called ActivityPub to connect decentralized Web sites. This summer, Web activists plan to convene at the second Decentralized Web Summit, in San Francisco.

Berners-Lee is not the leader of this revolution—by definition, the decentralized Web shouldn’t have one—but he is a powerful weapon in the fight. And he fully recognizes that re-decentralizing the Web is going to be a lot harder than inventing it was in the first place. “When the Web was created, there was nobody there, no vested parties who would resist,” says Brad Burnham, a partner at Union Square Ventures, the renowned venture-capital firm, which has started investing in companies aiming to decentralize the Web. “There are entrenched and very wealthy interests who benefit from keeping the balance of control in their favor.” Billions of dollars are at stake here: Amazon, Google, and Facebook won’t give up their profits without a fight. In the first three months of 2018, even as its C.E.O. was apologizing for leaking user data, Facebook made $11.97 billion. Google made $31 billion.

For now, chastened by bad press and public outrage, tech behemoths and other corporations say they are willing to make changes to ensure privacy and protect their users. “I’m committed to getting this right,” Facebook’s Zuckerberg told Congress in April. Google recently rolled out new privacy features to Gmail which would allow users to control how their messages get forwarded, copied, downloaded, or printed. And as revelations of spying, manipulation, and other abuses emerge, more governments are pushing for change. Last year the European Union fined Google $2.7 billion for manipulating online shopping markets. This year new regulations will require it and other tech companies to ask for users’ consent for their data. In the U.S., Congress and regulators are mulling ways to check the powers of Facebook and others.

But laws written now don’t anticipate future technologies. Nor do lawmakers—many badgered by corporate lobbyists—always choose to protect individual rights. In December, lobbyists for telecom companies pushed the Federal Communications Commission to roll back net-neutrality rules, which protect equal access to the Internet. In January, the U.S. Senate voted to advance a bill that would allow the National Security Agency to continue its mass online-surveillance program. Google’s lobbyists are now working to modify rules on how companies can gather and store biometric data, such as fingerprints, iris scans, and facial-recognition images.

The forces that Berners-Lee unleashed nearly three decades ago are accelerating, moving in ways no one can fully predict. And now, as half the world joins the Web, we are at a societal inflection point: Are we headed toward an Orwellian future where a handful of corporations monitor and control our lives? Or are we on the verge of creating a better version of society online, one where the free flow of ideas and information helps cure disease, expose corruption, reverse injustices?

It’s hard to believe that anyone—even Zuckerberg—wants the 1984 version. He didn’t found Facebook to manipulate elections; Jack Dorsey and the other Twitter founders didn’t intend to give Donald Trump a digital bullhorn. And this is what makes Berners-Lee believe that this battle over our digital future can be won. As public outrage grows over the centralization of the Web, and as enlarging numbers of coders join the effort to decentralize it, he has visions of the rest of us rising up and joining him. This spring, he issued a call to arms, of sorts, to the digital public. In an open letter published on his foundation’s Web site, he wrote: “While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people—and can be fixed by people.”

When asked what ordinary people can do, Berners-Lee replied, “You don’t have to have any coding skills. You just have to have a heart to decide enough is enough. Get out your Magic Marker and your signboard and your broomstick. And go out on the streets.” In other words, it’s time to rise against the machines.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets

 
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  • 2 years later...
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For the last two years police and internet companies across the UK have been quietly building and testing surveillance technology that could log and store the web browsing of every single person in the country.

The tests, which are being run by two unnamed internet service providers, the Home Office and the National Crime Agency, are being conducted under controversial surveillance laws introduced at the end of 2016. If successful, data collection systems could be rolled out nationally, creating one of the most powerful and controversial surveillance tools used by any democratic nation.

Wired

Nobody could have seen this coming.

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