Police Could Get Your Location Data Without a Warrant. That Has to End:
Your cell phone records every location you visit if the phone’s location services are turned on, which is more often than not. Called cell-site location information, this data is tracked on both Android devices and iPhones. The information can be quite telling; it might show the location of your home, your office, and other places you visit often. The problem is that it can teach police about a person’s behavior and then can be used against them. In some states, the data can be used without a warrant.
Source: Wired
Oliver Stone asks moviegoers to power down phones—and leave them off:
“That’s not all it does,” Stone says as the background music turns darker and the camera begins rapidly jumping between angles. “It allows certain parties to track your every move every time you make a call or send a text. We are giving them access. The information you’ve put out into the world voluntarily is enough to burn your life to the ground. This will be our undoing.”
Source: Ars Technica
What Happens When the Surveillance State Becomes an Affordable Gadget?
“Every beat cop, every police car on every police force is going to have one of these passive interceptors in the car or on their utility belt,” Rigmaiden says. For surveillance to become truly democratized, he reasons, “it has to be as easy as installing an app on your phone. I think somebody somewhere would have to decide, I’m going to make this easy for people to do. And then they’d do it.”
He’s hardly alone in this view. “The next step for the technology is to go into the hands of the public, once it gets cheap enough,” says Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Companies are always going to try to find new markets for their technologies. And there are lots of people who want to spy on their neighbors or their spouses or their girlfriends.”
What Happens When the Surveillance State Becomes an Affordable Gadget?
“Every beat cop, every police car on every police force is going to have one of these passive interceptors in the car or on their utility belt,” Rigmaiden says. For surveillance to become truly democratized, he reasons, “it has to be as easy as installing an app on your phone. I think somebody somewhere would have to decide, I’m going to make this easy for people to do. And then they’d do it.”
He’s hardly alone in this view. “The next step for the technology is to go into the hands of the public, once it gets cheap enough,” says Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Companies are always going to try to find new markets for their technologies. And there are lots of people who want to spy on their neighbors or their spouses or their girlfriends.”
What Happens When the Surveillance State Becomes an Affordable Gadget?
“Every beat cop, every police car on every police force is going to have one of these passive interceptors in the car or on their utility belt,” Rigmaiden says. For surveillance to become truly democratized, he reasons, “it has to be as easy as installing an app on your phone. I think somebody somewhere would have to decide, I’m going to make this easy for people to do. And then they’d do it.”
He’s hardly alone in this view. “The next step for the technology is to go into the hands of the public, once it gets cheap enough,” says Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Companies are always going to try to find new markets for their technologies. And there are lots of people who want to spy on their neighbors or their spouses or their girlfriends.”
Then there’s India. Once the government started buying cell-site simulators, the calls of opposition-party politicians and their spouses were monitored. “We can track anyone we choose,” an intelligence official told one Indian newspaper. The next targets were corporate; most of the late-night calls, apparently, were used to set up sexual liaisons. By 2010 senior government officials publicly acknowledged that the whole cell network in India was compromised.
Source: bloomberg.com
Last week, as Baltimore braced for renewed protests over the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) prepared for battle. With state-of-the-art surveillance of local teenagers’ Twitter feeds, law enforcement had learned that a group of high school students was planning to march on the Mondawmin Mall. In response, the BPD did what any self-respecting police department in post-9/11 America would do: it declared war on the protesters.
Over the course of 24 hours, which would see economically devastated parts of Baltimore erupt in open rebellion, city and state police would deploy everything from a drone and a “military counter attack vehicle” known as a Bearcat to SWAT teams armed with assault rifles, shotguns loaded with lead pellets, barricade projectiles filled with tear gas, and military-style smoke grenades. The BPD also came equipped with “Hailstorm” or “Stingray” technology, developed in America’s distant war zones to conduct wireless surveillance of enemy communications. This would allow officers to force cell phones to connect to it, to collect mobile data, and to jam cell signals within a one-mile radius.
The continued massive growth of connected mobile devices is shaping not only how we communicate with each other, but how we look, behave, and experience the world around us. —A World Transfixed by Screens by Alan Taylor
The impoverished African nation of Eritrea has the lowest rate of cellphone ownership in the world, less than 1 percent of its people can go online, and its journalists are so terrified of offending the president that even reporters for the state-run news media live in perpetual fear of arrest.
In North Korea, the government prohibits almost all Internet access and is so obsessive about purging inconvenient facts from public view that it has airbrushed the leader’s uncle, executed for treason in late 2013, from all historical photo archives.
Source: The New York Times