BIG BROTHER in the age of INTERNET # (Ongoing - Links, Articles & Videos)

Creating a Surveillance and DNA Database for Every American - From the Cradle to the Grave
Brandon Turbeville
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Activist Post

Coming in combination with such recent announcements as the open desire of agencies like DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to create an internet server that will house all verbal communications, it can scarcely be debated that the U.S. Government, military, and intelligence apparatus in concert with its Corporate wing, are attempting to develop an all-encompassing database on each and every American citizen.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

File-Sharing Service isoHunt Illegally Fosters Piracy, Appeals Court Says
By David Kravets
03.21.13

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the popular BitTorrent file-sharing service isoHunt and its related websites violate U.S. copyright law and are on the hook for hefty monetary damages.

The decision (.pdf) by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, hailed by the Motion Picture Association of America, marks the first time a federal appeals court has ruled against a BitTorrent search engine. IsoHunt, TorrenTBox and Podtropolis unlawfully pointed the way to free movies, music, videogames and software that were copyrighted and not authorized for the sites’ operator — Gary Fung — to help distribute, the court said.

CONTINUE: [link to www.wired.com]

Skype Leaks Your Location
Mar. 22, 2013

The events of the past week reminded me of a privacy topic I’ve been meaning to revisit: That voice-over-IP telephony service Skype constantly exposes your Internet address to the entire world, and that there are now numerous free and commercial tools that can be used to link Skype user account names to numeric Internet addresses.

The fact that Skype betrays its users’ online location information is hardly news. For example, The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets warned last year about research showing that it was possible to coax Skype into revealing the IP addresses of individual Skype users. But I believe most Skype users still have no clue about this basic privacy weakness.

What’s changed is that over the past year, a number of services have emerged to help snoops and ne’er-do-wells exploit this vulnerability to track and harass others online. For example, an online search for “skype resolver” returns dozens of results that point to services (of variable reliability) that allow users to look up the Internet address of any Skype user, just by supplying the target’s Skype account name.

CONTINUE: [link to krebsonsecurity.com]

NB: Read the comments!!!

Location Data Can Uniquely Identify Cellphone Users
By Francie Diep
03.27.2013

A new study demonstrates how easy it is to identify people from the location-tracking data on their cellphones.

Just a few data points from a location-tracking cellphone are enough to identify most people, a new study found. It doesn't matter if those data are "anonymized" so they aren't linked to any identifiers such as address or phone number. Just four random points are enough to put names to 95 percent of the anonymized users in a cellphone database.

The study fits in with growing evidence that fairly publicly available data—cellphone location data is open to many location-tracking apps, for example—is not as anonymous as you might think.

The research team, including technology researchers from the U.S., Belgium and Chile, looked at 15 months' worth of location data from 1.5 million cellphone users in a "small European country." The data weren't particularly detailed. They simply tagged people by their closest cellphone tower once an hour. Many apps get similar data from Apple and Android.

CONTINUE: [link to www.popsci.com]

When a Secretive Stingray Cell Phone Tracking "Warrant" Isn't a Warrant
Hanni Fakhoury
Thursday, March 28, 2013
EFF

An Arizona federal court this afternoon will be the battleground over the government's use of a "Stingray" surveillance device in a closely watched criminal case, United States v. Rigmaiden. And in an important development, new documents revealed after an ACLU of Northern California Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request should leave the government with some explaining to do.

"Stingray" is the brand name of an International Mobile Subscriber Identity locator, or “IMSI catcher.” A Stingray acts as a fake cell-phone tower, small enough to fit in a van, allowing the government to route all network traffic to the fake tower. We've warned that Stingrays are dangerous because they have the capability to obtain the contents of electronic and wire communications while necessarily sucking down data on scores of innocent people along the way.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Digital Grab: Corporate Power Has Seized the Internet
By Norman Solomon
March 28, 2013

If your daily routine took you from one homegrown organic garden to another, bypassing vast fields choked with pesticides, you might feel pretty good about the current state of agriculture.

If your daily routine takes you from one noncommercial progressive website to another, you might feel pretty good about the current state of the Internet.

But while mass media have supplied endless raptures about a digital revolution, corporate power has seized the Internet — and the anti-democratic grip is tightening every day.

“Most assessments of the Internet fail to ground it in political economy; they fail to understand the importance of capitalism in shaping and, for lack of a better term, domesticating the Internet,” says Robert W. McChesney in his illuminating new book, Digital Disconnect.

Plenty of commentators loudly celebrate the Internet. Some are vocal skeptics. “Both camps, with a few exceptions, have a single, deep, and often fatal flaw that severely compromises the value of their work,” McChesney writes. “That flaw, simply put, is ignorance about really existing capitalism and an under-appreciation of how capitalism dominates social life. Both camps miss the way capitalism defines our times and sets the terms for understanding not only the Internet, but most everything else of a social nature, including politics, in our society.”

And he adds: “The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising — all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism — are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop.”

CONTINUE: [link to www.globalresearch.ca]

U.S. House of Rep. Shamefully Passes CISPA; Internet Freedom Advocates Prepare for a Battle in the Senate
Dave Maass and Mark M. Jaycox
Thursday, April 18, 2013
EFF

Today, Internet freedom advocates everywhere turned their eyes to the U.S. House of Representatives as that legislative body considered the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.

For the second year in a row, the House voted to approve CISPA, a bill that would allow companies to bypass all existing privacy laws to spy on communications and pass sensitive user data to the government.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation condemns the vote in the House and vows to continue the fight in the Senate.

"CISPA is a poorly drafted bill that would provide a gaping exception to bedrock privacy law,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl said. “While we all agree that our nation needs to address pressing Internet security issues, this bill sacrifices online privacy while failing to take common-sense steps to improve security."

The legislation passed 288-127, despite a veto threat from Pres. Barack Obama, who expressed serious concerns about the danger CISPA poses to civil liberties.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]