… home of the brave.

(1) After serious and longlasting privacy discussion regarding data of passengers flying from Europe to the United States, there is a new agreement now. The US is provided with data like name, address and credit card number by default. However, “sensitive data” like religion or sexual orientation underlie “very severe restrictions”, the restrictions being: they can only be saved up to 15 years, and can be given to other countries. The German minister of interior says the new agreement is a success. And I agree: if handing over very personal data to the US which then stores the data for up to 15 years and is allowed to hand it over to other countries isn’t “severely restricted”, I don’t know what is (German source).

(2) The US police is using unmanned drones. Probably that isn’t new, but it fits together with the today’s news. What this means for you is: no matter who you are and what you do, you are automatically accused of being a criminal. There is very little privacy left, at home or outside. You are a suspect, from the day you are born. Many people listed convincing evidence that general surveillance does not decrease crime rates, so did I. Look for it, the Swedish and English police publish reports regularly in which they have to admit that all the surveillance really doesn’t help, is a massive waste of tax-payers money, and infringes upon basic human rights.
Stand up for your privacy. Not because you want to hide something. Because you have the right for privacy.

“For decades, U.S. courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant. They have ruled that what a person does in the open, even behind a backyard fence, can be seen from a passing airplane and is not protected by privacy laws.”

(Sidenote: Russian bloggers are using unmanned drones in Moscow at the moment to stream the protests live on the internet, because Russian media do not report about the demonstrations of up to 80.000 people in Russia’s capital)

(3) The FBI seems to be using information from the App CarrierIQ that is installed on “millions of phones” (second source).

Analysis done by an engineer intern working at facebook in 2010.

(Click for high resolution)

This article sums up very nicely that google is providing different people with different “truths” about subjects like climate change, depending on your personal google history:

So if last time you looked up climate change and chose to open something by, say, Marc Morano, then Senator Inhofe, and then the Drudge Report, which would all poo-poo climate change, google thinks, “oh, this moron likes denier news about climate change,” and next time, more of its top suggestions for your search will be skewed even further to the right.
As you keep heading further into la-la land, Google is there, holding your hand, assuring you that indeed, this is the objective, google-able truth. Two people with different search histories get two entirely different sets of google “facts” for the identical search terms.
– Susan Kraemer, “How Google is Making the Climate War Worse”

Last week, something very special happened, and it is worth remembering: the organization “Chaos Computer Club” managed to get the sourcecode of the software “German Trojan Horse” (Bundestrojaner), which is used by the German state to invade the privacy of its citizens and find things out about people (e.g. if they are involved in illegal activities).

The idea of this trojan horse is that you hack the computer of a citizen, install this trojan horse on it, and then you have full surveillence of that person’s life. You can even use the camera of a laptop to take pictures of the room, or record audio if the computer has a microphone.

The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has declared many of the functions of this software illegal (because they break the constitution) in 2008, and the government reacted to that and changed the software.

Or did they? A few days ago the software leaked to the CCC, they analyzed the program, and published a 23page statement. I will not translate this here, but to sum it up:

• The program still has most of the functions that were declared to be anti-constitutional; you could also say, the government ignored the order of the highest German court on purpose (yes, “the government”. I’m aware that only few people knew of this, but they are in the government, and the government has to take responsibility for the actions of his members, especially when are the main guys).
• The software is badly written, leading to the fact that it can be hyjacked by other people with bad intentions and abused – it has plenty of security issues.
• The way the program works is that it abolishes certain defenses, leaving the computer open to other attacks.
• The program enables the state to STORE ALIEN DATA on the computer. I cannot stress this enough, and I am sure you are aware of what this means (it takes 2 minutes to store data on a computer which will ruin this person’s life forever).
• The data is transferred over servers hosted in the US, giving other countries potentiall access to sensitive data of German citizens.

The main point: people who are experts in the field warned about this, precisely about all these points, when we were debating whether we needed something like a state trojan horse or not. Everything they said has come true now.

Next time they say something, stop acting like they are hallucinating weirdos who lost their mind, and listen to them. They might look funny, and some of them don’t shower as often as you would like it, but they are among the most important people of a modern society.
A big shoutout to the CCC.

Spread the word, let other people know what is happening. This is important.
If you want to know more, Fefe has a very comprehensive overview of links. For my English-speaking friends, here are two American sources (1, 2).

PS.: Thank you, government, for making sure that the Pirate Party will be elected into parliament September 2013. You are doing a great job. <3

Update: Thomas Stadler on his Internet-Law blog with a devastating statement.

Once the stuff of science fiction and high-tech crime fighting, facial recognition technology has become one of the newest tools in marketing, even though privacy concerns abound.
[...]
The Venetian resort, hotel and casino in Las Vegas has started using it on digital displays to tailor suggestions for restaurants, clubs and entertainment to passersby.
– Source: LA Times

It seems to be widely used in Japan already, Kraft Foods Inc. and Adidas announced their plan to start using the system this year to “push their products”.

Welcome to the future. Isn’t it amazing?
………. not.

Elections in Berlin in ten days – poll results:

(Apologies, dear international readers – German politics. Just skip this one if you don’t know what is going on.)

Link of the day:
Cynical-C.com

A website listing “One star Amazon reviews of classic movies, music and literature.”

Catcher in the Rye:

I am very open minded when it comes to literature (I even read through Mein Kampf without any objection) but I just hated this book! If it wasn’t required reading, I would have stopped on the fourth page! I think Salinger could have done much better!

The old man and the sea:

I couldn’t have cared less what happened to the old man, the fish, the boat, or Ernest Hemmingway. It was a titanic struggle to get through the book–way harder than anything the old man had to face. James Joyce does stream of consciousness a whole lot better–and I hate Joyce’s writing too.

I leave you with this question. What if I had posted this under my pseudonym? Why should that have made a difference? I would have written the same words, but ironically, I could have added some more personal and perhaps persuasive arguments which I dare not make under this account. Because I was forced to post this under my real name, I had to weaken my arguments; I had to share less of myself. Have you ever met “Kee Hinckley”? Have you met me under my other name? Does it matter? There is nothing real on the Internet; all you know about me is my words. You can look me up on Google, and still all you will know is my words. One real person wrote this post. It could have been submitted under either name. But one of them is not allowed to. Does that really make sense?

Behind every pseudonym is a real person. Deny the pseudonym and you deny the person.
– Kee Hinckley, posted on Google+

(originally found here (Google+), reposted here, via Netzpolitik.org)

Two researchers from the University of California Davis, Hao Chen and Lian Cai, have successfully divined the keystrokes on an Android on-screen keyboard by measuring the wiggles, jiggles, and vibrations picked up by the device’s accelerometer. This is significant because the data from accelerometers is not thought of as a potential attack vector, and is thus freely available to any application on any smartphone or tablet.

via extremetech.com