This Might Be the Eye-Opener You So Badly Need.

Many of us approach online privacy with a "who would be interested in boring old me" attitude. That's the internet equivalent of whistling past the graveyard.

Check out data consultant Dylan Curran's expose on what Facebook and, especially, Google knows about you.

I’ll just do a short summary of what’s in the thousands of files I received under my Google Activity. 

First, every Google Ad I’ve ever viewed or clicked on, every app I’ve ever launched or used and when I did it, every website I’ve ever visited and what time I did it at, and every app I’ve ever installed or searched for.

They also have every image I’ve ever searched for and saved, every location I’ve ever searched for or clicked on, every news article I’ve ever searched for or read, and every single Google search I’ve made since 2009. And then finally, every YouTube video I’ve ever searched for or viewed, since 2008.

This information has millions of nefarious uses. You say you’re not a terrorist. Then how come you were googling Isis? Work at Google and you’re suspicious of your wife? Perfect, just look up her location and search history for the last 10 years. Manage to gain access to someone’s Google account? Perfect, you have a chronological diary of everything that person has done for the last 10 years. 

This is one of the craziest things about the modern age. We would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us. But we just went ahead and did it ourselves because – to hell with it! – I want to watch cute dog videos.

After you read Curran's plainly harrowing account, ask yourself why your government allows these companies, that pose such an obvious and enormous threat to the privacy of its citizens, to operate in our country. The Corporatist States of America are a write off, a lost cause, but surely Canada could, in conjunction with Europe, ban this sort of privacy intrusion and make Google and Facebook pay a hefty price for defying them. Collectively they have enough clout to bring the software giants to heel.  Not acting quickly and forcefully is a dereliction of their duty to us all.

Is This a Battle We've Already Lost Without Knowing It?

Okay they're listening and I've unwittingly let them in my house.

We were somewhat troubled to learn, several years ago, that certain game consoles had cameras that could allow others to watch what people were doing without them knowing of it.

Now I might have fallen for something along the same lines.  I've developed a heart issue that is somewhat sleep related.  I read about this fitness tracker plus thingee offered by Jawbone, the UP3, that has additional sensors that monitor, record and report things such as resting heart rate and detailed sleep data according to light, deep and REM sleep and waking intervals.

The software is amazing. It provides daily reports on activity, exercise, sleep, heart rate and such. These stats are then crunched into weekly and monthly summaries.  All this info is stored in "the cloud" for up to five years or at least you can supposedly access five years of your own data.

The other morning I woke up parched and immediately downed two glasses of water.  When I looked at the morning UP3 summary, I was surprised that my resting heart rate was a good bit higher than normal.  My smartphone app then went on to conclude that I had probably become dehydrated and urged me to drink 8 glasses of water that day.  I have to say I was pretty impressed.

The Cloud.  That's a network of remote servers and that's about all you'll ever know about them.  They're supposedly secure but don't tell that to the celebrities who risque selfies were hacked and then leaked online.

Now I'm not particularly worried.  I don't see how anyone would be interested in my health data or could possibly benefit by stealing it.  That said, I think others could be quite vulnerable.  Employers are becoming more focused on the health of their workers or those applying for openings.  What about insurers?  They really want that information and they don't have a great reputation for being too scrupulous about getting it.

Some months ago my daughter received an invitation through Amazon Prime (US) to purchase an Amazon Echo device at half price.  These are apparently much sought after.  She wasn't interested but she thought it would be great for me, living alone and all.

It's a black cylinder sort of thingee that operates by voice command.  Some of its functions resemble iPhone's Siri or Android's "Okay Google."  You can ask it things like directions to some destination or trivia such as who won the 1956 World Series and it spews out the info.

The Amazon Echo goes a few steps beyond.  You might turn your smartphone off to save battery power between charges but the Echo is plugged in so it's always on.  You activate it by saying its name "Alexa."  It has a wonderful voice synthesis technology that doesn't sound robotic.  You can ask Alexa for information.  If you're cooking you might need to know how many grams in an ounce or how many teaspoons in a tablespoon, that sort of thing.  Trivia is a specialty.  Whose faces are on Mt. Rushmore, that sort of thing, or who succeeded Joseph Stalin - your sense of curiosity is the limit.  It'll summarize the latest news, give you the local weather, tell you want time it is in Dublin or Tokyo.  It has a bluetooth speaker so it'll play whatever music you request, handy when you're doing something time consuming like making a batch of ravioli.

Amazon, of course, is a mega retailer so it's not surprising that Alexa can make up shopping lists.  "Alexa, put paper towels on my shopping list."  Done.  Then, when you're ready to go the shopping list is on your cell phone and you're away to the races.  Once you set up an account with Amazon, Alexa can also order directly from Jeff Bezo's outfit.  "Alexa, order Pears Soap from Amazon Prime." After that you just wait for the parcel to show up at your doorstep.

It all sounds too good to be true and it probably is.  Your communications with Alexa can go out via bluetooth and wind up somewhere in the Cloud.  I'm damned sure Amazon will be logging everything you put on your shopping lists, building up your consumer profile to target you for advertising.

What would happen if you began each morning with "Alexa, how can I contact al Qaeda?" or "Alexa, what household ingredients are required to make explosives?"  In this era of total information awareness is there some computer out there, maybe a horde of them, scouring the ether for these sorts of buzzwords, identifying the source, adding them to watch lists?

The thing is, I'm not sure Alexa and I are going to have a wonderful relationship. I might just wind up having to drown her in the bathtub - not that I would know anything about that sort of thing you understand.

Mother Jones' Modest Proposal

Like me, you probably share that sinking feeling that privacy is gone for good, dead without so much as a fight.  If you want a reasonable degree of privacy any more you have to live self-sustainably in a cabin on a lake deep in the forest and hope you're not outside when the satellite passes overhead snapping pictures.  If, on the other hand, you're reading this, somewhere that's being noted and added to everything else that has been noted about you including your utility bills, medical records and that last credit card statement.

 At times it seems our kids couldn't care less.  Theirs is the world of disconnected connectivity where social networking, texting and instant messaging offer acceptable substitutes for real facetime interaction.  I'm sure there's an algorithm somewhere that predicts, with remarkable accuracy, what colour shirts they'll be wearing a week next Saturday; and whom they'll text first, second and third and by when.   A total loss of privacy equals the revelation of predictability. 

So, if we've lost the war without so much as a fight, what are we to do?  Kevin Drum of Mother Jones argues we must accept that surveillance is inevitable but demand that all data be transparent - and public.

Government eavesdropping isn't the only thing we have to worry about. We're also subjected to steadily increasing data collection from private actors. It's true that, unlike a government, a corporation can't put you on a no-fly list or throw you in jail. But there are at least a couple of reasons that corporate surveillance can be every bit as intrusive as the government variety—and possibly every bit as dangerous too.

First, if Target can analyze your shopping habits to figure out if you're pregnant—and it can—another company might figure out that you're in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and then start badgering you to buy worthless insurance policies. Multiply that by a thousand and "targeted advertising" doesn't seem quite so benign anymore.

Second, there's nothing that prevents the government from buying up all this information and combining it with its programs into an even bigger surveillance octopus. That was the goal of the Orwellian-named Bush-era program known as Total Information Awareness. It was officially killed after a public outcry, but as we now know, it never really went away. It just got split apart, renamed, and dumped into black budgets.

Even the NSA itself is in on the action: The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the agency collects more than just phone records and data packets. Via internet service providers and financial institutions, it also gathers web search records, credit card transactions, and who knows what else. In addition, the NSA has long maintained a deep collaboration with the leading-edge data mining companies of Silicon Valley. And why not? As the New York Times put it, both sides realize that "they are now in the same business."

Can we save privacy?

 I call this the "David Brin question," after the science fiction writer who argued in 1996 that the issue isn't whether surveillance will become ubiquitous—given technological advances, it will—but how we choose to live with it. Sure, he argued, we may pass laws to protect our privacy, but they'll do little except ensure that surveillance is hidden ever more deeply and is available only to governments and powerful corporations. Instead, Brin suggests, we should all tolerate less privacy, but insist on less of it for everyone. With the exception of a small sphere within our homes, we should accept that our neighbors will know pretty much everything about us and vice versa. And we should demand that all surveillance data be public, with none restricted to governments or data brokers. Give everyone access to the NSA's records. Give everyone access to all the video cameras that dot our cities. Give everyone access to corporate databases.

This is, needless to say, easier said than done, and Brin acknowledges plenty of problems. Nonetheless, his provocation is worth thinking about. If privacy in the traditional sense is impossible in a modern society, our best bet might be to make the inevitable surveillance more available, not less. It might, in the end, be the only way to keep governments honest.

Interesting points except that governments today are not in the business of being honest - or open.  As our own Shifty Steve's former and future BFF, Tom Flanagan, pointed out, Shifty is a sneak thief, making change incrementally so that no one notices until it's too late.   Flanagan also expounded on Shifty's habit of proposing change and then doing absolutely nothing or saying one thing and then doing whatever in hell suits him.

And, while governments don't respect your privacy, they fully value what they take from you.   It's useful to them and it can be very useful against you should they perceive that need.  Likewise, made public, all that data could be even more useful against them.  Remember these are the people who made us realize the need for Freedom of Information legislation and, even then, they resist.

Harper's Auto-Generated Enemies Lists

If you're Stephen Harper you can assume that what you consider "enemies" would include pretty much the entire membership of organizations such as the Council of Canadians.  So why would you waste time amassing enemies lists when you can force these organizations to do it for you?

This e-mail I received from the CoC neatly explains the situation:

A new federal Not-for-Profit Corporation Act (NFP Act) came into effect in 2009. Every federally incorporated not-for-profit, including the Council and all other social justice and environmental organizations, must amend their by-laws to conform to this Act by 2014.

A huge issue for everyone – and why I’m writing you today – is that under this new Act every organization must make the name and contact information, including email address, of every one of its members available to any other member on request. The NFP Act supersedes the Privacy Act. With an organization as large and open as the Council, we believe this means that information on our membership, including your contacts, could become public and available to those who might use this information to harm the Council.



Now, tell me again that we're not living in a fascist state.

You're Toast. Raytheon's RIOT Has Your Number

Leading U.S. defence contractor, Raytheon, has developed RIOT, the  Rapid Overlay Information Technology software programme that can gather, sort, digest and analyze all your social media telltales.  It can even predict where you'll be and what you'll be doing in the future.

The Guardian recently got their hands on a copy of this Raytheon video describing RIOT



Notice what the reviewer talked about?  RIOT let him know this fellow would be working out in the gym every morning from 6 till 7.   And with that he quipped what better time to get the fellow's laptop or at least access it.  Raytheon's own guy can't talk about RIOT for more than 3-minutes without contemplating how it could be used for a criminal purpose.

The most disturbing aspect to RIOT is how few people are likely to find it disturbing.  If the majority acquiesce to the wholesale surrender of their privacy without a fight, and events of the past decade give no reason to conclude otherwise, then those who wish to protect their privacy will have to fight for it and become ever more vigilant in its defence.

Imagine if a company or a political party or a rival of any sort finds you troublesome, they can track you, analyze you, find out where you go, when and where you're likely to be, identify those whom you contact, their numbers and names and what makes you vulnerable even if you don't know it.

Because I probably haven't said it clearly or eloquently enough, James Ball adds his two shillings worth.

It's easy to believe those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear – and most of us are essentially decent people, with frankly boring social network profiles. But, of course, to (say) a petty official with a grudge, almost anything is enough: a skive from work, using the wrong bins, anything. Everyone's got something someone could use against them, even if only for a series of annoyances.

It's also tempting to believe that with good privacy settings and tech savvy, we can protect ourselves. Other people might be caught, but we're far too self-aware for that. But stop and think. Do you trust every friend you have to lock their privacy settings down? Your mum? Your grandad? Do they know to strip location data from photos? Not to tag you in public posts? Our privacy relies on the weakest point of each of our networks – and that won't hold.

Surveillance is getting cheaper and easier by the day, which in turn proves almost irresistible – for those with good and bad intentions – to make more use of it.

The only way to prevent such a shift is to group together, raise funds, and lobby hard for real legal safeguards, fast, before the culture shift is irreversible. Anything less is acquiescence.

Maybe It's Time to Get Out of Dodge

This was bound to happen.  Inevitable.

American cellular giant Verizon has filed a patent application for a device to watch you watching TV.   Who is interested in watching you watch TV?  Probably more people than you can imagine but TV advertisers would be near the top of the list.   That's certainly Verizon's target group.

[Verizon] has filed a patent, published last week, for a system designed to be used in the home to target advertisements at people. Using a combination of image and audio sensors, it would detect actions in your living room while you were watching TV. These sensors, deploying facial and profile recognition, would pick up “physical attributes” like skin color, facial features, and even hair length, and also detect “voice attributes” to help determine the tone of your voice, your accent, and the language you speak. Inanimate objects aren’t off-limits—the technology could also spot beer cans and wall art.
 

Combined, this would mean that your TV or set-top box would effectively be watching and listening to you while you snuggle up on the couch with your partner to watch the latest episode of Homeland. If the cuddling went a bit further, the chances are the technology would pick up the noises and start playing ads for "a commercial for a contraceptive” or “a commercial for flowers,” as outlined in the patent.

The patent also says if the device picks up that the user is “stressed” then it “may select an advertisement associated with the detected mood (e.g., a commercial for a stress-relief product such as aromatherapy candles, a vacation resort, etc.).” It adds that “If a couple is arguing/fighting with each other” the system “may select an advertisement associated marriage/relationship counseling.” And if the sensors detect that a user is a kid, the system will trigger “more advertisements targeted to and/or appropriate for young children.”

As Steve Donohue at FieceCable has noted, Verizon’s technology would operate in the same way Google targets Gmail users based on the content of their emails—only transposing that principle into the home by “scanning conversations of viewers that are within a ‘detection zone’ near their TV, including telephone conversations.”

Maybe it's time to start thinking seriously about building that cabin up the coast and getting off the grid entirely. 

Is Your Cell Phone Giving Away All Your Secrets?

Privacy?  That's a thing of the past.   The Surveillance State is the new reality and, barring massive government intervention, it's here to stay.

How are you liking that fancy Android cell phone?   Don't bother answering that, we already know.

Taxpayer-funded programs have created malware for Android smartphones that can remotely take over your phone's camera and use it to spy on you, according to reports in the Washington Times and PCWorld.

 ...Researchers from the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center developed the software along with researchers from the school of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University in Bloomington, thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation. (You can read their full paper here [PDF].)

The study was designed to see what kind of information hackers might be able to steal using malware disguised as an app on a smartphone; other forms of malware already include programs that can listen in on calls and steal credit card numbers or PIN numbers that users might say while calling their bank, or use the phone to “feel” keystrokes typed on a computer keyboard near the phone.

...Perhaps the concern should be, not that individual “bad guys” might hack your phone to steal your credit card number, but that the government itself might be collecting your information. As Kade Ellis of Privacy SOS and the ACLU reported, a security expert says that everyone who was at Occupy Wall Street had their cell phone surveyed by the NYPD. “[T]he identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID'd, whether an informant pointed them out, it's known they were there anyway. This is routine,” private investigator Steven Rambam says in a video talk.

He continued, "[C]ell phones are now the little snitch in your pocket. Cell phones tell me where you are, what you do, who you talk to, everybody you associate with." 


And if the NYPD or other government agencies spying on you through your cell phone doesn't make you nervous, perhaps Rambam's last comment will: he says that the government is “amateur” compared to big business.

“Your privacy today isn't being invaded by big brother -- it's being invaded by big marketer."

There is no privacy any more.   The little we haven't foolishly surrendered through social networking, the internet and countless other activities has been taken from us without our knowledge or consent.   Your home may still be your castle but, henceforth, what goes on behind your portcullis may be less secure than you imagined.

Want The Job? First, Let's See Your Social Networks Accounts

It was bound to happen.   Prospective employers asking demanding to inspect job applicants' social network accounts.

Employers and colleges find the treasure-trove of personal information hiding behind password-protected accounts and privacy walls just too tempting, and some are demanding full access from job applicants and student athletes.

In Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall.

While the MSNBC article details the American experience, I wonder if one would have to look too hard to find the same thing here in Canada, particularly with employers.

Meanwhile a cautionary tale from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about privacy perils from online dating sites.


In "Six Heartbreaking Truths About Online Dating Privacy," EFF identifies serious security holes and counter-intuitive privacy settings that could expose daters' private information. For example, your dating profile – including your photo – can hang around long after you think you've taken yourself off the market. Some sites are also sucking up the vast quantity of data their users share and selling it to online marketers. If you aren't careful, your profile can also be indexed by Google, perhaps popping up in search results if you have an unusual nickname or other unique ways of describing yourself.

"Whether you signed up on a lark or maintained an active profile for years, you may be exposing more information about yourself than you know," said EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman. 

"There are a number of ways your online dating profile can be connected to your real identity, exposing things like religious and political beliefs, drug and alcohol use, and sexual preferences. That's why we created this list of the biggest risks, and included some simple tips for online daters who want to protect themselves."

Ditch All Your Illusions About Privacy, All of Them, The Lot.

Imagine yourself among the thousands and thousands of people gathered for the final game of the Canucks/Bruins Stanley Cup.  It's easy to assume you're virtually invisible in the sea of faces.  It's not.   Click on this link http://www.gigapixel.com/image/gigapan-canucks-g7.html and begin zeroing in on the crowd.  Be sure to click the "turn on GigaTag" link on the screen, click on the crowd with your mouse and use your mouse wheel to zoom in.

To get some idea of what this can mean to ordinary people in a residential setting, click on this link -   http://www.gigapixel.com//360/coquitlam360.html Zoom in on any of the highrise apartment buildings, right into the apartments themselves.

Now, imagine the gigapixel technology suitably advanced and automated then slaved to modern face recognition software.

Welcome to the latest advance in our Surveillance Society.

Surveillance Society - Remote Cameras That Sense Anger

A British firm is hawking software that will allow surveillance cameras to listen in, analyze the pitch, tone and intonation of noises and determine whether they reveal some type of threat.   The idea is that the monitors will be able to tell if you're being aggressive or attacked and then alert authorities.

Not only is Big Brother going to be constantly watching you, now he'll be listening to boot.  Who knows just how far this fledgling listening technology can and will evolve?  From BBC News:

 "A lot of incidents just can't be picked up by video only systems," said Chris Mitchell, Audio Analytic's boss, on BBC World Service's Digital Planet.

"For example in a hospital where somebody, or a nurse, is being threatened early hours in the morning - that's a very difficult thing for CCTV guards who monitor hundreds of channels worth of video signals on 20 screens or so to pick up."

The software goes beyond simply placing microphones onto cameras and listening in. By feeding hundreds of sample sounds into the system, the software can distinguish different threats from various sounds - and not just based on volume.

As always it's not the technology that's really the problem but rather the manner in which it can be abused, the improper ends to which it can be turned.  I'm sure it would be great, say at hospital parking lots where nurses coming off shift in the middle of the night can be at increased risk.  But, as always, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, who watches the watchers?
 

Surveillance Has Become a Two-Way Street

The erosion of public privacy by the spread of closed-circuit surveillance cameras has been a vexing problem in recent decades. Many years ago it was estimated that a downtown worker in Vancouver was recorded on tape an average 13-times every day. Police and security agencies have become fond of the electronic eye but not so much any more. Now that the citizenry is armed with cell phone video cams, it's the police who are often falling prey to video surveillance. Think Robert Dziekanski. There's even a term for it - "sousveillance." From The Guardian:

Who watches the watchmen? Or, to translate Juvenal another way: who polices the police? The answer this week was a New York fund manager, of all unlikely superheroes, who provided the Guardian with key footage of the minutes leading up to the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests in London. The man came forward because "it was clear the family were not getting any answers".

If there is anything to feel optimistic about today, perhaps it is the hope that we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of sousveillance, the term coined by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, and it emphasises "watchful vigilance from underneath", by citizens, of those who survey and control them.

Not that turning our cameras on those who train theirs on us is without risk. Indeed, one might judge it fairly miraculous that the man was not forcibly disarmed of his camera phone, given that it is now illegal to photograph police who may be engaged in activity connected to counterterrorism. And as we know, everything from escorting Beyoncé to parking on a double yellow while you nip in to Greggs for an iced bun can now be justified with that blight of a modern excuse - "security reasons".

Yet it will by now have dawned on even the most dimwitted Met officer that it is increasingly impossible for them to control the flow of information about their activities - to kettle it, if you will - no matter how big their army of press officers putting out misleading information in the immediate aftermath of any event may be.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/11/police-surveillance-marina-hyde

In Defence of Privacy, Our Fundamental Right

I believe in rights. I believe there isn't a single right we have today that hasn't been bought and paid for - in blood - often several times over. I believe there isn't a right that can't and won't be taken from us unless we defend it. But in order to defend rights, they have to be understood and valued.

One right that's rapidly being lost is our right to privacy. Our privacy is being invaded, even trampled upon at every turn. Use your credit card and you're yielding a bit of your privacy. Use the phone, same thing. Hell the grocery store now records your favourite brand of frozen pizza and your preference in feminine hygiene products. Now in British Columbia, the government has our health records processed in the United States which means, thanks to the Patriot Act, our assurance of health care privacy is shattered.

Britain, home of Magna Carta itself, has become astonishingly indifferent to the right of privacy. Britain has become a surveillance society with its precious architecture defaced by batteries of CCT security cameras. In some communities the police operate aerial reconnaissance drones over their own streets. These are things designed to aid the war against al-Qaeda, not to surveil ordinary Britons.

There was a story over the weekend about a proposed new British transit identity card. Leaving aside the right of privacy, it's pretty cool technology. It functions as a cash card and a security/surveillance device. Want to hop a train, get on a bus or ride the Tube? Swipe your card or else submit to inconvenient human scrutiny. I mean, after all, if you're not using your card you must be up to something, eh?

In no time they've got a detailed history of Charlie Banks of 54 Melbourne Grove, SE 22. They know where he goes, when and for how long - every day, every month, every year of his life. Computers can immediately spot something out of the ordinary and, very quickly, "out of the ordinary" becomes something suspicious, something to be watched. You call extra surveillance upon yourself by choosing to try something new and, Heaven help you if that something new just happens to be in or near a place that's already being watched.

"If you have nothing to hide, there's no reason to worry." That's the vile excuse they always use when stripping away another layer of your privacy. That's right, only wrongdoers need to be worried, right? Wrong, dead wrong. It's a set up whereby defending your fundamental right to privacy becomes analogous with trying to hide something in your dirty, devious and undoubtedly criminal or subversive life.

Surely the onus ought to be on those seeking to narrow your rights, not on those defending their rights. You want to take away my rights then first show that it's truly necessary. Show the purpose is valid. Show there are no other ways to achieve the same purpose, not just no other ways that are as inexpensive. Show just how much intrusion is actually required and for just how long. No blank cheques. No indefinite powers. The focus has to be on restoring that right as fully and quickly as possible. Figure out who will watch the watchers, who will represent the public interest in monitoring their intrusion of the public's rights and give those watchers genuine powers to intervene when they detect abuse.

Sadly, this isn't what happens. After all, it's so much easier to cast suspicion on objectors when the rest of the public is complacent and all too willing to be herded into the surveillance corral.

If you've ever served your country or had a family member who went off to war and maybe didn't come back, these are rights you have fought for, rights that must belong to your entire society. If you don't defend them you cheapen that service, that sacrifice. Freedom, after all, is more than just hoisting another pint in The Legion.

Addendum:

I forgot to explain why I consider privacy our "fundamental right." That's because the strength of our right of privacy impinges on so many of our other essential rights including free speech, association, assembly, equality; thought, conscience and religion; arrest and detention and due process. Undermining privacy can also powerfully undermine those other rights.

Another concern that arises out of the erosion of our privacy rights is the almost Newtonian rise in secrecy that results from it. It's an action/reaction process. As our privacy is stripped from us, government secrecy inevitably increases. We don't know who is watching us, when we're being watched and what is being recorded and catalogued much less how it will be used on or against us or others, often without our awareness even of that. It sets up government against the individual in an adversarial relationship.

It's vastly more troubling when it's done at the same time we are "dumbing down" society, weakening us against the shelling out of our rights. That's what I meant by my reference to the masses being complacently herded into the surveillance corral.

Your Privacy Up In Smoke

It's called the International Information Consortium and Canada's part of it. It's planning the free flow of biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information across network linking the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The US designed programme is called "Server In The Sky." There's not much information to be found about IIC but it's already creating concerns about the wholesale loss of privacy. From The Guardian:

The plan will make groups anxious to safeguard personal privacy question how much access to UK databases is granted to foreign law enforcement agencies. There will also be concern over security, particularly after embarrassing data losses within the UK, and accuracy: in one case, an arrest for a terror offence by US investigators used what turned out to be misidentified fingerprint matches.

The FBI told the Guardian: "Server in the Sky is an FBI initiative designed to foster the advanced search and exchange of biometric information on a global scale. While it is currently in the concept and design stages, once complete it will provide a technical forum for member nations to submit biometric search requests to other nations. It will maintain a core holding of the world's 'worst of the worst' individuals. Any identifications of these people will be sent as a priority message to the requesting nation."

In theory, Sky Server makes a lot of sense. What's missing, as you might expect, is any discussion of how information sharing will be regulated to preserve the privacy of ordinary citizens against the whim of those operating the system. With rapid advances in biometrics technology, the day isn't far off where we may all be recognizable and we won't be needing bar codes tattooed on our foreheads either.