Anti-drone street artist arrested in NYC for satirizing NYPD

A street artist in NYC has been arrested on 56 counts of forgery in connection with his campaign this fall, putting up posters around the city that satirized NYPD’s potential use of drones for surveillance.  Forensics teams and a counter-terrorism unit were deployed to apprehend him, at lord knows what expense to taxpayers… which would seem to justify his point about police overreach and the surveillance state.

Collusion tracks the trackers

There’s a cool experimental Mozilla plugin called Collusion which lets you see what other sites are being told about your web browsing habits as you surf around.  Even with ad-blocking and do-not-track and a host of other privacy enhancing features turned on, the list of notified trackers grows pretty darned quickly!

The Corporate Surveillance State

A completely creeptastic article from the NY Times on how Target can figure out that your 16 year old daughter is pregnant before she’s willing to talk to you about it, based on what she’s buying and when.  Big Brother isn’t a mustachioed Stalinist, he’s a mild-mannered statistician attending corporate board meetings and sending out personalized coupon books that purposefully camouflage just how much his computers know about you and your so-called “private life”.

Corporate Spy Agencies and NGO Spies

A vast signals intelligence industry exists, and will sell its wares (including satellite data interception and undersea fiber-optic cable tapping) to any and all comers.  Ironically, they were infiltrated by agents from Privacy International, a London-based NGO.  Apparently the industry isn’t yet using its own technology to defend against critics.  One has to wonder how long that situation will last.

Chaos Computer Club analyzes government malware

A scathing review of an official German government trojan by the Chaos Computer Club.  They decompiled the binaries and reverse-engineered the software, and found that not only did it fail to comply with the German constitutional court’s mandate to limit its capabilities, but was so poorly designed and secured as to enable “even attackers of mediocre skill” to completely compromise any machine on which it had been installed.  Clearly not the best of German engineering!

Open source phone/laptop anti-theft software

The Prey Project is an open source package that lets you turn your laptop or phone into a location aware spying machine, tracking its own motions, and reporting on the usage of the person in possession — screenshots, webcam photos, network captures, etc. — in the event that it is stolen or lost.  Sounds great!  Of course, it also lets you turn somebody else’s computer into a spying machine, so you can watch them, if you can manage to get it installed without their knowing.  Kind of creepy… given that they’ve got a “pro” version that lets you track hundreds of machines simultaneously.

Links for the week of October 19th, 2010

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Continue reading Links for the week of October 19th, 2010

Links for the week of February 21st, 2010

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Continue reading Links for the week of February 21st, 2010