You may notice a lot of sites today have “blacked out” or are otherwise protesting the PIPA and SOPA acts being considered in the US Senate and House of Representatives.
If you are not familiar with the acts you really need to be. Please take time to visit the EFF pages on SOPA and PIPA here and in more detail here.
The job you save could be your own.
This story about how the TSA not only searched a woman’s bags, but also went through her check book and receipts is quite infuriating (but not really surprising). The USA flying situation has already degraded into a farcical mix of incompetence and fascism that could only be surpassed by the society in Terry Gilliam’s classic “Brazil”. And I’m not sure it surpasses it by all that much.
And we all will soon get to experience the electronic equivalent of a strip search once they roll out the new body scanners.
The worst part of all this is that the TSA’s policy seems to be that if you react with anything other than meek acceptance they will call the police. The consistent code words are “elevated behavior”.
If your behavior isn’t elevated after interacting with the TSA, there’s something wrong with you. If only we would wake up and fire the lot of them.
The London Olympics games have unveiled the mascots for the 2012 games. All I can say is WOW. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean that in the creepy, ugly, panopticony way.
I suppose it only appropriate that a country whose surveillance network causes the Chinese government to say “whoa, too much” should create an Olympic mascot that resembles a strange hybrid of the All Seeing Eye of Sauron and a Teletubby.
Identity Woman is talking about the chilling nature of the new everything is recorded society. She makes the good point that this Participatory Panopticon may have the effect of making people afraid to speak their mind. But she could not have picked a worse example in Van Jones.
Van Jones did not resign because of an unguarded moment between friends. There was no purloined letter. No surreptitious cell phone video. Van Jones is no Michael Phelps.
He was forced to resign because of very public statements that he made intentionally to specific audiences for specific political aspirations. Those statements are now viewed as damaging to the political aspirations of his boss so he must go.
Presenting one face to a group of constitutes while presenting a different face to others is much harder under the rules of the participatory panopticon.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Posted in Privacy, Surveillance
Tagged Media, Particpatory Panopticon, Privacy, Surveillance
One of the creepier aspects of the previous administration was the perceived influence of companies such as Halliburton. Is Google the Halliburton of this administration? Is it a company that is perceived to have undue influence in how the government conducts business?
That feeling comes across in this article about the government reconsidering it’s use of cookies:
Some privacy groups say the proposal amounts to a “massive” and unexplained shift in government policy. In a statement Monday, American Civil Liberties Union spokesman Michael Macleod-Ball said the move could “allow the mass collection of personal information of every user of a federal government website.”
Personally I have never liked the broad banning of cookies on government site. It seems to reduce the usability of web sites for little gain in privacy. Especially now that most recent browsers have a “porn mode” there doesn’t seem much need to maintain the ban.
But there is a perception that Google is driving this change. That is not a good thing.
Apparently Alexandra VA is making another stab at speed camera revenue enhancement (hat tip to DC Camera Fraud):
In two weeks, a for-profit company will begin mailing traffic tickets to the owners of vehicles passing through three Alexandria intersections. The private company, American Traffic Solutions, Inc., operates the traffic cameras, makes the initial decision who is guilty, mails the tickets, collects the fines and then gives the city a cut of the windfall.
This isn’t the first time Alexandria has tried to cash in on photo enforcement. Between 1998 and 2005, Alexandria’s cameras snapped more than 50,000 citations.
Make no mistake; this is all about the money. Everywhere speed cameras have been tried they have resulted in more accidents than before. But there is good news in VA at least. According to state law you really don’t have to pay the fines:
Fortunately, there is some good news for motorists who might receive a ticket in the mail after toodling through Old Town. As The Washington Times reported four years ago, state law says a private company may not simply drop a ticket in a mailbox and expect it to be considered valid service. Unless a driver receives a hand-delivered copy, the citation can be thrown away without consequence. Depriving Alexandria and its revenue-collecting partner of cash is the surest way to ensure this unsafe program disappears for good.
Posted in Freedom, Privacy, Skeptic, Surveillance
Tagged Freedom, Privacy, Red Light Cameras, Surveillance
Scott Bradner has some interesting thoughts on the recent Kindle dust-up and relates it to other cases of “different rules”:
The underlying issue here is that Amazon, among many others, see the rules for digital as different than those for other things. It would never have crossed Amazon’s collective mind to grab a physical book from you if the company had shipped you one that it did not have the right to sell. But, maybe because it could, Amazon just did what it has the ability to do without thinking to see if the ability to do something automatically meant that it was the right thing to do.
Amazon is not alone in confusing the ability to do something with the idea that it is the right thing to do. It would be inconceivable that the U.S. Post Office would be required to make and save a record of who sent and received every letter it handled. Yet, just because it can be done, a number of law enforcement officials have called for laws that require ISPs to do just that with e-mail.
Posted in DRM, Privacy, Security, Surveillance
Tagged Data Privacy, DRM, Kindle, Privacy
Apparently there are iPhone apps and GPS systems that alert drivers to speed and red-light cameras. The powers-that-be are not amused:
Area drivers looking to outwit police speed traps and traffic cameras are using an iPhone application and other global positioning system devices that pinpoint the location of the cameras.
That has irked D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier, who promised her officers would pick up their game to counteract the devices, which can also help drivers dodge sobriety checkpoints.
“I think that’s the whole point of this program,” she told The Examiner. “It’s designed to circumvent law enforcement — law enforcement that is designed specifically to save lives.”
No, no they are not. They are specifically designed to increase city and county revenues. And that money will not be parted with easily.
Posted in Freedom, Skeptic, Surveillance
Tagged Freedom, Red Light Cameras, Skeptic, Surveillance
Do green jackboots hurt less when descending repeatedly onto your face? The reason I wonder is this:
The boys in green are coming as the Environment Agency sets up a squad to police companies generating excessive CO2 emissions.
The agency is creating a unit of about 50 auditors and inspectors, complete with warrant cards and the power to search company premises to enforce the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), which comes into effect next year.
Decked out in green jackets, the enforcers will be able to demand access to company property, view power meters, call up electricity and gas bills and examine carbon-trading records for an estimated 6,000 British businesses. Ed Mitchell, head of business performance and regulation at the Environment Agency, said the squad would help to bring emissions under control. “Climate change and CO2 are the world’s biggest issues right now. The Carbon Reduction Commitment is one of the ways in which Britain is responding.”
And there is this special feature:
It will also be able to demand energy bills from utilities without the companies under investigation knowing they are being watched.
How delightful.
The UK is about to discover that the easiest way for companies to reduce energy usage is to off-shore much of their labor. This will not end well for them.
Posted in Environment, Freedom, Global Warming, Skeptic, Surveillance
Tagged Freedom, Global Warming, Skeptic, Surveillance
Here is a disturbing idea from Cisco:
Chambers and Chief Demonstration Officer Jim Grubb showed off a camera from FLIR Thermal Infrared Camera Systems that can measure people’s body temperatures. If these cameras were installed at tollbooths to examine drivers, and networked with other such sensors, they could build a picture of how many people in an area had fevers that might indicate a disease such as the flu, he said.
Note that this data could be correlated with the transponder IDs to determine not only how many people have a fever but which specific individuals likely do. Although the intentions may be benign, this is an unacceptable violation of privacy.
Just because I take a toll road does not mean I am giving the government the consent for a remote medical exam.
