Nobody is Safe Anymore. No One, Nowhere.

It's the latest, greatest thing in the Pentagon's toybox - MAVs.  Micro Air Vehicles like those shown in the following video already exist and they could take your last shreds of privacy.  They could even take your life.



And here's the civilian version of the Dragonfly MAV developed for the U.S. Air Force.   You can buy your own, limited performance, civilian version starting at a hundred bucks.  The Dragonfly makers will even sell you your own "swarm."



What the military is doing is to develop better power, communications and control systems for their MAVs.   The civilian stuff relies on batteries that last just several minutes.   The military technology can operate for several days.

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.

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.