(29 Jun 2021)
· Leaders in Australia, the UK, Indonesia, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Singapore and other public and private sector members have come together to collaborate and share best practices to reduce the spread of child sexual exploitation and abuse online, violent extremist and terrorist content, and health misinformation
Who among us has not considered shoving a camera into our underwear… but for the greater good… on the public’s dime?
(August 23, 2023)
The Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems (SMART ePANTS) program represents the largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles (AST) that feel, move, and function like any garment. Resulting innovations stand to provide the Intelligence Community (IC), Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies with durable, ready-to-wear clothing that can record audio, video, and geolocation data.
(August 29, 2023)
The bill is working its way through Congress, and it’s important we understand what it does and doesn’t do.
(Jul 25th 2023)
„40 Senators have sponsored a bill to make sure you have to upload your driver’s license before you can use your First Amendment on the internet. That’s what they want. That’s what this bill is.
This bill is designed to make sure that they have your home address before you can actually post about ANYTHING on the internet.“
(October 20, 2014)
One day, as I surfed the web on my laptop and lamented how long it takes a YouTube video to load, I found myself wondering if employees of the US government — DoD researchers, DoE scientists, CIA spies — are also beholden to the same congestion and shoddy peering that affects everyone else on the internet. Surely, as hundreds of scientists at Fermi Lab near Chicago wait for petabytes of raw data to arrive from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, they don‘t suffer interminable connection drops and inexplicable lag. And, as it turns out, they don‘t: the US government and its national laboratories all have exclusive access to ESnet — a shadow internet that can sustain 100-gigabits-per-second transfers between any of the major Department of Energy labs. And today, the DoE announced that the 100-gigabit ESnet will be extended across the Atlantic to our Old World comrades, who occasionally manage to dazzle us with their scientific endeavors.
(25.04.2023)
– child porn
– animal porn
– spy shit
– illegally and arbitrarily stolen communications, secrets, private information and other intellectual, creative, spiritual and personal property (formely called thoughts, identity, mind and soul, and stuff)
– deceitful law drafts, that potentially could be talked into parliamentarian dummies, in order to sell those laws on the other hand to a bunch of idiots as some kind of aid, protection or rescue for anybody, so that everybody´s applauding when they are subjected to an electronic colony, police state and feudalism.
And remember: if they are progessives, they let you do it!
(Mar 27, 2021)
In the short term, Europe may be able to shrug off the illegality of its data-sharing practices under the GDPR, and please privacy advocates with adequacy reviews, but in the long term the violation of Europe’s own data privacy crownpiece is sure to harm its international credibility.
(April 8, 2021)
To much of the rest of the world, however, this competition is little more than evil versus evil. The U.S. government has also practiced mass surveillance; big U.S. technology companies have adopted a surveillance-based business model, exploiting people’s data in the name of free service; and the Five Eyes, an intelligence coalition comprised of the United States and Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, has sought to undermine encryption by pressuring companies to give governments backdoor access to all digital communications. In this dismal global race to the digital bottom, the biggest losers are ordinary technology users all over the world.
(08 February 2022)
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The agreement came after the European Union, which participates in the G7, inched closer this month to passing legislation to regulate AI technology, potentially the world‘s first comprehensive AI law that could form a precedent among the advanced economies.
„We want AI systems to be accurate, reliable, safe and non-discriminatory, regardless of their origin,“ European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday.
Anbieter können in ihrem Bericht an die DEA nach eigenem Ermessen entscheiden, welche Informationen sie weitergeben. Gleichzeitig enthält der Gesetzentwurf aber auch eine Liste mit Informationen, die einem solchen Bericht beiliegen sollten. Dazu gehören etwa Mail- und IP-Adressen, Zahlungsinformationen, der geographische Standort sowie ein kompletter Auszug der betreffenden Inhalte. Diese Informationen kann die DEA dann auch an andere Strafverfolgungsbehörden weiterleiten.
Die Daten sollen nicht nur weitergegeben, sondern auch vom Provider an einem „sicheren Ort“ für 90 Tage nach Einreichung bei der DEA gespeichert werden. Im Gesetzentwurf ist jedoch auch vermerkt, dass die DEA eine Verlängerung der Speicherung beantragen kann, wenn sie beabsichtigt, gegen Nutzer*innen zu ermitteln oder die Daten an andere Behörden weiterzuleiten.
Nutzer*innen wissen derweil nichts von der Weiterleitung ihrer Daten.
In many ways, this is similar to the CyberTipline for CSAM that requires websites to report details if they come across child sexual abuse material. But, CSAM is strict liability content for which there is no 1st Amendment protection. Demanding that anything even remotely referencing an illegal drug transaction be sent to the DEA will sweep up a ton of perfectly protected speech.
Worse, it will lead to massive overreporting of useless leads. I’ve mentioned just recently that we get a ton of attempted spam comments here at Techdirt, over a million in just the last six months alone. A decent percentage of these appear to be pushing what are likely to be illegal drugs. Now, we catch the vast majority of these in the spam filter, and they never reach the site. And, I don’t think a mere spam comment alone would reach the level of knowledge necessary to trigger this law, but the point is that there’s potential that our lawyers would warn us that to protect ourselves from potentially ruinous liability for failing to report these spam messages to the DEA, they’d recommend we basically flood the DEA with a bunch of the spam messages we received just to avoid the risk of liability.
Additionally, the FBI and Interpol both recently spoke out against encrypted chat apps and lawmakers in the U.K. and European Union are considering laws like the EARN IT Act that could also decrease the availability of encryption.
All these developments could open the next front in the war over encryption that has flared up over the past decade, often pitting law enforcement against civil liberties groups in the U.S. and abroad.
The laws also expose the lack of federal protections for everyone’s security, privacy, and freedoms online, regardless of age, says Bailey Sanchez, policy counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum, another DC-based think tank. (Current federal laws prohibit websites from collecting data on users under the age of 13.)
“Someday that 17-year-old is going to turn 18, and unless they’re in a handful of states, there is no privacy law that applies to them,” she says.
(18.04.2023)
It’s “protect the children” season in Congress with the return of KOSA and EARN IT, two terrible bills that attack the internet, and rely on people’s ignorance of how things actually work to pretend they’re making the internet safer, when they’re not. Added to this is Senator Dick Durbin’s STOP CSAM Act, which he’s been touting since February, but only now has officially put out a press release announcing the bill (though, he hasn’t released the actual language of the bill, because that would actually be helpful to people analyzing it). (…)
Notice what’s not talked about? It’s not mentioned how much law enforcement has done to actually track down, arrest, and prosecute the perpetrators. That’s the stat that matters. But it’s missing.
They will say that they‘ve engaged with LGBTQ groups (true) and addressed all concerns with the bill (NOT TRUE!!!)
Das clientseitige Scannen ist ein faustischer Pakt, der die Prämisse der Ende-zu-Ende-Verschlüsselung zunichtemacht. Denn dieser Pakt schreibt eine zutiefst unsichere Technologie vor, die es einer Regierung ermöglicht, buchstäblich jede Äußerung zu überprüfen, bevor sie ausgesprochen wird.
(Dec 20, 2022)
(Nov 28, 2022)
Specifically, the letter says that the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) „would undermine those goals for all people, but especially children, by effectively forcing providers to use invasive filtering and monitoring tools; jeopardizing private, secure communications; incentivizing increased data collection on children and adults; and undermining the delivery of critical services to minors by public agencies like schools.“
Mit einer „Cybercrime Convention“ wollen die Vereinten Nationen eine netzpolitische Grundlage für den Planeten legen. Menschenrechtler*innen sehen in dem Vorhaben „gruselige Ideen“. Sie warnen unter anderem vor Vorratsdatenspeicherung und staatlichem Hacking.
(June 20, 2022)
– Cons
– Registration requires a phone number
– E2E encryption only for Secret Chats
– Servers are not open source
– Logs IP Address and other user data (use a good VPN service)
– May be sharing data with government agencies
(1985)
In February, 1985, we carried out an eavesdropping experiment in London, in cooperation with the British Broadcasting Corporation. Part of the results were shown in the programme „Tomorrow‘s World.“ A small van was equipped with a 10 metre high pump mast to which a VHF band III antenna was clamped (10 dB gain). The received signal was fed through an antenna, amplified (18 dB) and displayed on a television screen inside the van.
For obvious reasons we cannot give information on the data picked up during the experiment. The results can be
summarized as follows:
• It is possible to eavesdrop on the video display units or terminals in buildings from a large distance, using a car fitted up for the purpose.
• Although the experiment was carried out in broad daylight and many people watched us, nobody asked what we were doing.
(20.7.2014)
USA, 1943. Mitten im Zweiten Weltkrieg.
In einem Labor der 1877 vom Schwiegervater Alexander Graham Bells gegründeten Bell Company (heute der Weltkonzern AT&T), die für das 1860 gegründete Signal Corps der US Armee arbeitet, testet ein Wissenschaftler der Bell Company das 1925 von der US Armee in Dienst gestellte verschlüsselnde Text-Kommunikationssystem SIGTOT. Es arbeitet nach dem US Patent #1,310,719 für ein „geheimes Signalsystem“ des Bell Technikers Gilbert S. Vernam aus 1919 und benutzt zur Verschlüsselung ein Bell Gerät namens 131-B2.
An jenem Tage des Jahres 1943 bemerkt nun der für die US Armee arbeitende Wissenschaftler der Bell Company ein technisches Phänomen, welches bis heute fast der gesamten Weltbevölkerung unbekannt ist, obwohl es die Sicherheit, die Privatsphäre, die Gesellschaften, die Staaten, die Sicherheit und das Leben von heute 7 Milliarden Menschen unmittelbar berührt und gefährdet:
jedes Mal wenn er über den verschlüsselnden Text-Kommunikations-Apparat SIGTOT einen Buchstaben eintippt, schlägt in einem entfernten Teil des Labors ein Oszilloskop aus. Und zwar fünf Mal, für jedes Zeichen pro Sekunde („baud“). Als er die angezeigten Spannungsspitzen näher analysiert, stellt er fest, dass er die in den Text-Kommunikations-Apparat der Armee per Hand eingetippten und anschließend verschlüsselten Texte aus der Entfernung unverschlüsselt mitlesen kann.
(1972)
Now, let´s go back to the beginning. During World War II, the backbone systems for Army und Navy secure teletypewriter communications were one-time tapes and the primitive crypto-equipment SIGTOT. For encrypting, the Services used a Bell-telephone mixing device, called 131-B2. When one of these mixers was being tested in a Bell laboratory, a researcher noticed, quite by accident, that each time the machine stepped, a spike appeared on an oscilloscope in a distant part of the lab. After he examined these spikes more carefully, he found that he could read the plain text of the message being enciphered by the machine.
November 28, 2022
Re: Opposition to S. 3663’s Threats to Minors’ Privacy and Safety Online
Dear Majority Leader Schumer, Chairwoman Cantwell, and Ranking Member Wicker:
We, the undersigned organizations, believe that the privacy, online safety, and digital well-being of children should be protected. However, S. 3663, the “Kids Online Safety Act” (KOSA), would undermine those goals for all people, but especially children, by effectively forcing providers to use invasive filtering and monitoring tools; jeopardizing private, secure communications; incentivizing increased data collection on children and adults; and undermining the delivery of critical services to minors by public agencies like schools. We oppose this bill.
(29 Nov 2022)
Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), introduced the legislation in February in response to media reports and subcommittee hearings on social media companies‘ practices that the lawmakers say put kids at risk.
„Big Tech has brazenly failed children and betrayed its trust, putting profits above safety,“ Blumenthal said at the time. „The Kids Online Safety Act would finally give kids and their parents the tools and safeguards they need to protect against toxic content — and hold Big Tech accountable for deeply dangerous algorithms.“
(November 17, 2022)
Over the past week, I’ve been hearing about a major push by activists and lawmakers to include the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) in the year-end “must pass” omnibus law. Earlier this week, one of the primary parents pushing the bill walked on Jake Tapper’s show on CNN and stumbled for it. And Axios’ recent report confirms that lawmakers are trying to put it on the Lameduck omnibus, or possibly the NDAA (although it has absolutely nothing to do with defense spending).
(November 14, 2022)
The report analyzes the U.S. EARN IT Act, which is likely to be reintroduced in the new Congress next year; the UK Online Safety Bill; and an EU scanning proposal to prevent child abuse online. All three would impose monitoring obligations for online services that would amount to de facto prohibitions on end-to-end encryption, according to the Center.