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ICanStalkU twitterbot nags Twitter users about disclosing their location
ICanStalkU is a twitterbot Twitter-analyzing service that seeks out Twitter users who transmit their location in the photos they tweet and generates responses like "ICanStalkU was able to stalk...
View ArticleMassive public domain catalog dump from Harvard
David Weinberger writes, "Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliographic information about virtually all the 12M works in its 73 libraries. This is (I believe) the...
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In which Santa helps remind us all of the importance of metadata
Metadata is one of those things that is so important, it becomes easy to forget about. We often collect metadata without thinking about it. When we don't collect it — or if we collect it in a sloppy...
View ArticleIn which Ye Olde Metadata Network tracks that traitor Paul Revere
Sociologist Kieran Healy does a nice job of explaining how even a data system that doesn't contain the actual content of conversations can be part of a very powerful surveillance state. Part parody and...
View ArticleTown council snoops on phones to find litterbugs & unlicensed pet owners
Juha sez, "Wyndham council in the Australian state of Victoria has been spying on residents for three years to find not terrorists, but people who litter and keep unregistered pets, and advertise...
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Podcast of "Metadata – a wartime drama"
In the current installment of my podcast, I read aloud (MP3) a recent Guardian column, "Metadata – a wartime drama, which imagines a dialog between Alan Turing and Winston Churchill that might have...
View ArticleUnderstanding NSA boss James Clapper's France-spying "denial"
NSA boss James Clapper has officially responded to the allegations that the agency intercepted 70,000,000 French phone calls with a narrowly worded, misleading denial. Tim Cushing at Techdirt does us...
View ArticleEFF shows how "metadata" collection is bad for freedom of association
The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed 22 declarations in First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA. The briefs are from a wide variety of groups -- environmentalists, gun-rights activists,...
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US drones could be killing the wrong people because of metadata errors
The Intercept, the "fearless, adversarial journalism" venture launched by Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media, launched with a big boom today. Lead story on the site right now, which is https by default...
View ArticleEU's highest court strikes down mass surveillance under the Data Retention...
The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU, has invalidated the European Parliament's Data Retention Directive, which required phone companies and ISPs to store your clicks, email...
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Five dumb things that NSA apologists should really stop saying
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has rounded up the five most discredited arguments advanced by apologists for NSA spying, including "The NSA has Stopped 54 Terrorist Attacks with Mass Spying"; Just...
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Weaseling about surveillance, Australian Attorney General attains bullshit...
Michael writes, "Watching Australia's Attorney-General try to explain why tracking Australians' web histories is not such a big deal resembles listening to a dirty joke told by a ten-year-old, i.e. it...
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How your smartphone betrays you all day long
Ton Siedsma, a lawyer for the Dutch civil liberties group Bits of Freedom, volunteered to have a week's worth of his phone's metadata collected and analyzed by researchers from Ghent University and by...
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How metadata compromises you
"It's only metadata," is the catch-all excuse for mass surveillance -- after all, if spies aren't capturing what your message says why should you care if they're getting who sent it, what its subject...
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Ransomware gets a lot faster by encrypting the master file table instead of...
In just a few short years, ransomware -- malware that encrypts all the files on the computer and then charges you for a key to restore them -- has gone from a clever literary device for...
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Study shows detailed, compromising inferences can be readily made with metadata
In Evaluating the privacy properties of telephone metadata, a paper by researchers from Stanford's departments of Law and Computer Science published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,...
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Former Attorney General says Edward Snowden performed a public service
Though he "harmed American interests," says Eric Holder, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's leaks "were also a public service." (more…)
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Leading DNS experts say they've found a secret dedicated link between Trump...
After the DNC hack, security experts began playing close attention to the security of servers associated with the Trump campaign, on the assumption that if the Democrats had been targeted, the...
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NSA report discloses that the agency tripled its surveillance of Americans in...
One effect of the Snowden leaks is that the NSA now makes an annual disclosure of the extent of its domestic surveillance operations; that's how we know that the NSA collected 534 million phone call...
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