From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007):
There’s a huge difference between nosy neighbors and cameras. Cameras are everywhere. Cameras are always on. Cameras have perfect memory. It’s not the surveillance we’ve been used to; it’s wholesale surveillance. I wrote about [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, politics, security | No Comments »
From James Bamford’s “Big Brother Is Listening” (The Atlantic: April 2006):
This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court—made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States—as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The court’s job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, law, politics, security, technology | No Comments »
From Ryan Singel’s “Point, Click … Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates” (Wired News: 29 August 2007):
The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The surveillance system, [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, law, politics, security | No Comments »
From Heather Knight’s “S.F. public housing cameras no help in homicide arrests” (San Francisco Chronicle: 14 August 2007):
The 178 video cameras that keep watch on San Francisco public housing developments have never helped police officers arrest a homicide suspect even though about a quarter of the city’s homicides occur on or near public housing property, [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, politics, security | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Anonymity and the Netflix Dataset” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2008):
The point of the research was to demonstrate how little information is required to de-anonymize information in the Netflix dataset.
…
What the University of Texas researchers demonstrate is that this process isn’t hard, and doesn’t require a lot of data. It turns out that [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security | No Comments »
From BBC News’ “CCTV boom ‘failing to cut crime’” (6 May 2008):
Huge investment in closed-circuit TV technology has failed to cut UK crime, a senior police officer has warned.
Det Ch Insp Mick Neville said the system was an “utter fiasco” - with only 3% of London’s street robberies being solved using security cameras.
Although Britain had [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | No Comments »
From BBC News’ “Council admits spying on family” (10 April 2008):
A council has admitted spying on a family using laws to track criminals and terrorists to find out if they were really living in a school catchment.
A couple and their three children were put under surveillance without their knowledge by Poole Borough Council [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Hacking Computers Over USB” (Crypto-Gram: 15 June 2005):
From CSO Magazine:
“Plug an iPod or USB stick into a PC running Windows and the device can literally take over the machine and search for confidential documents, copy them back to the iPod or USB’s internal storage, and hide them as “deleted” files. Alternatively, the [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here’s another contender from Julian Bleecker …
“Blogjects” – objects which emit data about their use.
Related posts
Word of the day: lucubration
Word of the day: cunctative
Word of the day: creative destruction
Word of the day: aposiopesis
Wikipedia defines fascism
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business, technology | Comments Off
From Seth David Schoen’s “Wiretapping vulnerabilities” (Vitanuova: 9 March 2006):
Traditional wiretap threat model: the risks are detection of the tap, and obfuscation of content of communication. …
POTS is basically the same as it was 100 years ago — with central offices and circuit-switching. A phone from 100 years ago will pretty much still work today. [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, law, technology | Comments Off
From Kim Zetter’s “The NSA is on the line — all of them” (Salon: 15 May 2006):
As fireworks showered New York Harbor [in 1976], the country was debating a three-decades-long agreement between Western Union and other telecommunications companies to surreptitiously supply the NSA, on a daily basis, with all telegrams sent to and from the [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, politics, security, technology | Comments Off
From Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg’s “Echelon’S Architect” (Cryptome: 21 May 2002):
After that, [Bruce McIndoe] started to design Echelon II, an enlargement of the original system.
Bruce McIndoe left the inner circle of the enormous espionage network in 1998, a network run by the National Security Agency, the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, in cooperation with [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, technology | Comments Off
From PR Newswire’s “OnStar Achieves Another First as Winner of Good Housekeeping’s ‘Good Buy’ Award for Best Servic” (3 December 2004):
Each month on average, OnStar receives about 700 airbag notifications and 11,000 emergency assistance calls, which include 4,000 Good Samaritan calls for a variety of emergency situations. In addition, each month OnStar advisors respond to [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From “Big Brother eyes ‘boost honesty’” (BBC News: 28 June 2006):
The feeling of being watched makes people act more honestly, even if the eyes are not real, a study suggests.
A Newcastle University team monitored how much money people put in a canteen “honesty box” when buying a drink.
They found people put nearly three times as [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, commonplace book, security | Comments Off
From Melissa Meagher’s “State Worker Spies on Boss, Loses His Job“:
For 22 years, [Vernon] Blake was a System Administrator for the Alabama Department of Transportation. It was a job he loved, with the exception of his supervisor. …
The running joke around the office? The boss blew off meetings and projects to play games on his [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Charles R. Smith’s “Big Brother on Board: OnStar Bugging Your Car“:
GM cars equipped with OnStar are supposed to be the leading edge of safety and technology. …
However, buried deep inside the OnStar system is a feature few suspected - the ability to eavesdrop on unsuspecting motorists.
The FBI found out about this passive listening feature [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 January 2004):
Last month Bush snuck into law one of the provisions of the failed PATRIOT ACT 2. The FBI can now obtain records from financial institutions without requiring permission from a judge. The institution can’t tell the target person that his records were taken by the FBI. And [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, politics, security | Comments Off
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
The Traveler describes for the first time in any book the secret computational immunology programs being developed in Britain. These programs behave like the leucocytes floating through our bloodstream. The programs wander through the Internet, searching, evaluating, and hiding in a person’s home PC, until they [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
The passports contain a radio frequency identification chip (RFID) so that all our personal information can be instantly read by a machine at the airport. However, the State Department has refused to encrypt the information embedded in the chip, because it requires more complicated technology that [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
And everywhere we go, there are surveillance cameras – thousands of them – to photograph and record our image. Some of them are “smart” cameras, linked to computer programs that watch our movements in case we act differently from the rest of the crowd: if we [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, technology | Comments Off