Thursday 26th of December 2024
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restrictions...

From Cory Doctorow... The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing

This talk was delivered at Google in August, and for The Long Now Foundationin July 2012. A transcript of the notes follows.

I gave a talk in late 2011 at 28C3 in Berlin called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing"

Extract:...

Surveillance in the middle of the network is nowhere near as interesting as surveillance at the edge. As the ghosts of Messrs Hayek and Marx will tell you, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening at the coal-face that never makes it back to the central office.

Even "democratic" governments know this. That's why the Bavarian government was illegally installing the "bundestrojan" — literally, state-trojan — on peoples' computers, gaining access to their files and keystrokes and much else besides. So it's a safe bet that the totalitarian governments will happily take advantage of boot-locking and move the surveillance right into the box.

You may not import a computer into Iran unless you limit its trust-model so that it only boots up operating systems with lawful intercept backdoors built into it.

Now, with an owner-controls model, the first person to use a machine gets to initialize the list of trusted keys and then lock it with a secret or other authorization token. What this means is that the state customs authority must initialize each machine before it passes into the country.

Maybe you'll be able to do something to override the trust model. But by design, such a system will be heavily tamper-evident, meaning that a secret policeman or informant can tell at a glance whether you've locked the state out of your computer. And it's not just repressive states, of course, who will be interested in this.

Remember that there are four major customers for the existing censorware/spyware/lockware industry: repressive governments, large corporations, schools, and paranoid parents.

The technical needs of helicopter mums, school systems and enterprises are convergent with those of the governments of Syria and China. They may not share ideological ends, but they have awfully similar technical means to those ends.

read more: http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

hardware and software censure...

In a nutshell, its hypothesis was this:

• Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them.

• We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body.

• This means that all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too—and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this:

"Make it so that self-driving cars can't be programmed to drag race"

"Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can't make harmful organisms or restricted compounds"

Which is to say: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out."

But there's a problem. We don't know how to make a computer that can run all the programs we can compile except for whichever one pisses off a regulator, or disrupts a business model, or abets a criminal.

read more: http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

collecting data for the 5-eyes countries...

The notes, published today by Guardian Australia, suggest that Australia was open to pooling bulk data that almost certainly includes information about Australian citizens.

Clearly indicating the different attitudes between the intelligence partners, the Canadians insisted that bulk collection could only be shared if information about its citizens was first "minimised”, meaning deleted or removed. The various techniques used in "minimisation" help protect citizens' privacy.

The GCHQ memo taker, reporting on this, said that “bulk, unselected metadata presents too high a risk to share with second parties at this time because of the requirement to ensure that the identities of Canadians or persons in Canada are minimised, but re-evaluation of this stance is ongoing”.

By contrast, DSD, now renamed the Australian Signals Directorate, offered a broader sweep of material to its partners.

DSD offered to share bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata – although there were specific caveats. The note taker at the meeting writes: “However, if a ‘pattern of life’ search detects an Australian then there would be a need to contact DSD and ask them to obtain a ministerial warrant to continue.”

A "pattern of life" search is more detailed one – joining the dots to build up a portrait of an individual’s daily activities.

It is technically possible to strip out the metadata of Australian nationals from bulk collection methods used by the 5-Eyes countries, such as cable taps – ensuring the information is not stored, and so could not be pulled in to searches and investigations by agents.

The Snowden documents reveal Australia’s intelligence services instead offered to leave the data in its raw state.

Australian politicians have insisted that all surveillance undertaken is in accordance with the law.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/revealed-australian-spy-agency-offered-to-share-data-about-ordinary-citizens