Quotulatiousness

March 29, 2010

Americans to lose privacy in offshore banking

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Of course, the headline assumes that they had any such privilege in the past . . .

Samuel Taliaferro is disturbed by provisions in a new law which will extend US government intervention into foreign bank business:

The name of the bill is the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (H.R. 2487) commonly known as the HIRE Act. This is the jobs incentive bill that was signed by the President on March 18th amid little fanfare.

Relatively small by Washington standards (“just” an $18 billion stimulus package) the bill was drafted to provide incentives to employers to hire more people but contains some very disturbing language concerning the ownership and transference of money to any overseas account. The truly galling part of the bill is that it attempts to require “foreign financial and non-financial institutions to withhold 30% of payments made to such institutions by U.S. individuals unless such institutions agree to disclose the identity of such individuals and report on the bank transactions”. Think about this — the U.S. government is attempting to strong arm foreign financial and non-financial institutions (think banks and law firms) to either withhold 30% of the transactions in a U.S. individual’s account (and presumably remit this to the U.S. Treasury) or disclose the account details to the U.S.. The language of the bill addresses both bank accounts and any foreign trusts (ie- Private Interest Foundations).

In other words, the US government is afraid more Americans are going to be worried about the security of their money and will look to offshore institutions to preserve their savings. The government is moving pre-emptively to deter that flow of money away from their direct control. You’d almost think they didn’t trust their own citizenry.

March 11, 2010

News bulletin: school still sucks

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Things aren’t improving in schools, as this report from James Stephenson makes clear:

I remember the day they installed the cameras in my high school. Everyone was surprised when we walked and saw them hanging ominously from the ceiling.

Everyone except me: I moved to rural Virginia from the wealthier and more heavily populated region of northern Virginia. Cameras have watched me since middle school. So I wasn’t surprised, just disappointed. “What have we done?” asked one of my friends. It felt like the faculty was punishing us for something. A common justification for cameras is that they make students safer, and make them feel more secure. I can tell you from first hand experience that that argument is bullshit. Columbine had cameras, but they didn’t make the 15 people who died there any safer. Cameras don’t make you feel more secure; they make you feel twitchy and paranoid. Some people say that the only people who don’t like school cameras are the people that have something to hide. But having the cameras is a constant reminder that the school does not trust you and that the school is worried your fellow classmates might go on some sort of killing rampage.

Cameras aren’t the worst of the privacy violations. Staff perform random searches of cars and lockers. Most of the kids know about locker searches because they see the administration going though their stuff in the hall. But not everyone knows about the car searches, all the way out in the parking lot where administrators aren’t likely to be observed. (People don’t often bother to lock their cars, either).

In a world where everyone seems to be desperately worried about dangers to kids, the one thing that’s overlooked is the almost complete loss of human rights: being a student in the public school system means you don’t have many rights at all. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that prisoners in jail have more rights — and better-protected rights — than children and teenagers in school.

Petty acts of rebellion–and innocent little covert activities–kept our spirits up. The school’s computer network may have been censored, but the sneakernet is alive and well. Just like in times past, high school students don’t have much money to buy music, movies or games, but all are avidly traded at every American high school. It used to be tapes; now it’s thumbdrives and flash disks. My friends and I once started an underground leaflet campaign that was a lot of fun. I even read about a girl who ran a library of banned books out of her locker. These trivial things are more important than they seem because they make students feel like they have some measure of control over their lives. Schools today are not training students to be good citizens: they are training students to be obedient.

Of course, obedience must be enforced.

December 15, 2009

Nanny state now to come with pop-up warnings

Filed under: Britain, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

Just in case you British internet users weren’t already aware, the government may start including pop-ups whenever you access an out-of-country social networking site. Nice of them to at least warn you that your internet usage will be monitored for quality and customer satisfaction (the customer in question is the government, BTW):

The ACPO document, obtained by The Register, suggests the government may “minimise or discourage or give ‘pop-up’ warnings as regards to communications services within the online environment where there is evidence, presented to a Circuit Judge or Secretary of State, that allowing the public access or use of specific communications services could make them vulnerable to fraud, the theft of personal information or other attack”.

ACPO does not explain the technical details of its plan, but points out that “measures already exist to minimise the availability of potentially illegal content”. However, it cites the Internet Watch Foundation’s blacklist of international URLs carrying indecent and abusive images of children, suggesting a parallel list of social networks, forums and real time messaging sites judged to be risky could be created.

The proposal was drawn up by ACPO’s Data Communications Group. The group is chaired by Jim Gamble, the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which is responsible for policing paedophiles on the internet.

November 25, 2009

I thought Obama was going to be better than Bush on privacy issues

Filed under: Government, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

Perhaps I was misinformed:

The Obama administration is seeking to reverse a federal appeals court decision that dramatically narrows the government’s search-and-seizure powers in the digital age.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Justice Department officials are asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its August ruling that federal prosecutors went too far when seizing 104 professional baseball players’ drug results when they had a warrant for just 10.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ 9-2 decision offered Miranda-style guidelines to prosecutors and judges on how to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights while conducting computer searches.

Kagan, appointed solicitor general by President Barack Obama, joined several U.S. attorneys in telling the San Francisco-based court Monday that the guidelines are complicating federal prosecutions in the West. The circuit, the nation’s largest, covers nine states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

November 24, 2009

Friendly reminder to UK readers: you do not have a right to remain silent

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:28

A fascinating story about a case in Britain where the government’s shiny new powers under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) have been used to jail a schizophrenic man for refusing to divulge the passwords to access his files:

The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.

His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.

The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.

In June the man, JFL, who spoke on condition we do not publish his full name, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The powers came into force at the beginning of October 2007.

[. . .]

Throughout several hours of questioning, JFL maintained silence. With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence — a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.

October 21, 2009

QotD: England of bye-gone days

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:11

[I]t is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official — the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.

George Orwell, “England, Your England”, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941-02-19.

October 12, 2009

Protip: a police station parking lot is not a “private place”

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

BBC News reports that a couple of Edinburgh pub-goers chose a particularly unsuitable place to go have sex after meeting in the pub:

An amorous couple have been fined for having sex in broad daylight — in a police station car park.

Leanne Richardson, 26, and Ross Welsh, 30, had to be physically stopped mid sex act by officers from Portobello police station in Edinburgh.

They both pleaded guilty to committing a breach of the peace in the car park on 21 April and were fined £200.

September 23, 2009

Information is data, but data is not information

Filed under: Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

Wired obtained several hundred pages of information through a Freedom of Information Act query relating to internal surveillance of Americans by the FBI — including information from hotels, car rental agencies, and at least one department store chain:

A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.

Headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside Washington, the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) maintains a hodgepodge of data sets packed with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners, the documents show, bringing the government closer than ever to implementing the “Total Information Awareness” system first dreamed up by the Pentagon in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Such a system, if successful, would correlate data from scores of different sources to automatically identify terrorists and other threats before they could strike. The FBI is seeking to quadruple the known staff of the program.

The last paragraph needs a bit of analysis . . . because just adding more data won’t “automatically” do any good for domestic security or individual privacy. There was no lack of data on the 9/11 terrorists: if anything, there was too much data. Data is useless until it is corelated with other data to form actual information, a pattern of data that shows something of interest. The various intelligence-gathering arms of the US government already gather lots and lots of data, but they haven’t always been able to turn that collection of raw data into useful information . . . at least, not in a timely fashion.

Opsahl cites a October 2008 National Research Council paper that concluded that data mining is a dangerous and ineffective way to identify potential terrorists, which will inevitably generate false positives that subject innocent citizens to invasive scrutiny by their government.

At the same time, Opsahl admits the NSAC is not at the moment the Orwellian system that TIA would have been.

Those false positives may be enough to disrupt the private lives of many Americans and non-citizen residents, because everyone still has things about them they don’t particularly want to be broadcast to the world. Many employers reconsider their employees who are deemed to be “of interest” to the government, leading to potential loss of employment, diminished opportunities for promotion, or other less obvious but still negative consequences. Having “nothing to hide” is no defence . . . in fact, it may make things tougher — if they don’t find anything obvious, they may decide to dig deeper, creating more disruption.

Of course, things could always be worse: the EU is busy working towards their own Precrime database. (Obscure reference explanation.)

September 6, 2009

QotD: Politics in the 21st century will not be about . . .

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

. . . privacy and intellectual property. Or rather, it’s going to be about privacy and intellectual property the way that the 20th century was about steam locomotives and iron foundries. These were vital 19th century technologies that provided a platform for 20th century industries to evolve on top of, but triple-condensing steam engines tell us nothing about semiconductor fab lines: they lie too far down the stack of incremental technologies. By the time we reach 2050, the microprocessor and software industries will be about as innovative and interesting as steam locomotives were in 1950; and the big questions about privacy and IP will have been answered (hint: ubiquitous polycentric surveillance, some sort of abstraction layer to encapsulate and insulate the public against the crisis of copyright, and a generation for whom the concept of “blackmail” makes less sense than bleeding with leeches as a cure for a surfeit of billious humours).

Thirdly, it’s not going to be about biotechnology any more than the 20th century was about powered heavier-than-air flight. Yes, flight was and is important, but not in the way the Italian modernists of the first three decades imagined, with their manifestos about “air-mindedness” and Douhet’s insane, apocalyptic visions of air power — that led to such atrocities as the British Empire’s policing with bombers (dropping poison gas!) in the 1920s, and strategic bombing raids against civilian populations during subsequent wars. For the most part, military aviation falls into two categories (better artillery, and better logistics); it doesn’t really change warfare, it just makes the whole barbaric affair more efficient (which is to say, more destructive). Biotechnology is going to be an efficiency enabler for a whole lot of things, and have immense second-order effects (just like cheap air travel), but it’s not going to fundamentally change us (unless some lunatic repeats the mousepox/interleukin-4 experiment with weaponized smallpox, in which case we are probably all dead).

Charles Stross, “Chrome Plated Jackboots”, Charlie’s Diary, 2009-09-04

August 11, 2009

So much for the right to not self-incriminate

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

The headline really does tell the story: Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data: Up to five years in jail after landmark prosecutions. You will provide the key, citizen . . . or you’ll do hard time:

Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years.

The government said today it does not know their fate.

The power to force people to unscramble their data was granted to authorities in October 2007. Between 1 April, 2008 and 31 March this year the first two convictions were obtained.

The disclosure was made by Sir Christopher Rose, the government’s Chief Surveillance Commissioner, in his recent annual report.

The former High Court judge did not provide details of the crimes being investigated in the case of the individuals &mash; who were not necessarily suspects — nor of the sentences they received.

Deleting your cookies doesn’t protect your privacy

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:44

According to a report in Wired, there are lots of sites out there (including whitehouse.gov) who are actively circumventing the common practice and zombifying the cookies you thought you’d deleted:

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.

What’s even sneakier?

Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being “killed,” the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the “backup.”

This would be a good opportunity for Adobe (who control the Flash cookie capability) and the browser developers to get together and provide end users with enhanced capability to turn off these zombies. Probably a tiny percentage of current users ever bother to delete cookies, so it’s not like this would seriously undermine legitimate uses of cookies, but it would put a bit more control of how personal information is used back in the hands of the individual.

Of course, back here in the real world, I don’t honestly expect any such thing, but regulation is almost always the wrong answer to a given problem on the internet. But that’s what we’re likely to get . . .

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