Mine now, sucka!

(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

Any computer with at least one file "coming from 'dubious origins,' e.g. downloaded from P2P". I don't know about you, but everyone I know has downloaded something at one point or another. As I've said before, there are many situations where downloading even copyrighted material is completely ethical(even if it may not be clearly legal or illegal).

Info on the bill brought to you via Slashdot.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

By putting tons of cameras at different angles on an airplane and carefully inspecting everyone's faces and movements, the EU hopes to identify terrorists before they strike.

There's only a few problems to work out:

1. There's no way to know what a terrorist looks like
2. Removing privacy with no gain is a vast waste of money and resources
3. Mass surveillance hurts everyone and doesn't actually work.

China has history, but the recent part isn't so good.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

We're in very real danger of what they have over there being implemented here. And it's already begun.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

As part of a social experiment, attendees at a hacker conference in July will be issued badges with electronic tracking devices. Large displays will show in real-time where people go, with whom they associate, for how long and how often.

Hopefully after seeing how easy it is to tag and track someone with RFID, people will become more aware of what a dangerous technology this could be if we don't pass strong privacy regulations to prevent their misuse.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

While this is barely legal (if it IS legal), I don't particularly have a problem with cell phone companies opening their data to police to help find a person reported as missing. That is, of course, assuming that they don't abuse the power and that missing persons are defined correctly.

As with most government powers, as long as there is independent oversight and proper consequences for abuse, who cares what powers they actually have?

Don't tempt pointless attention

(Image is in the Public Domain)

The EFF has an excellent article about how to avoid being searched at the border. Specifically, how to protect your laptop data that courts recently ruled could be searched without warrant.

GPS

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

Here's a guide on how to make a very low cost GPS tracking device useful for monitoring your own car, your loved ones, or anyone else for that mater so long as you can slip this device into their bag or car.

What you got in there?

(Image is in the Public Domain)

You can be forced to turn it on and let border agents browse around for stuff to charge you with. Isn't that nice?

(Image is in the Public Domain)

First the FBI was going to put the DNA of innocent people on permenant file, but now they're going to drag in the DNA of any relatives to the offenders as well.

He was a church-going father of two, and for more than 30 years Dennis Rader eluded police in the Wichita area, killing 10 people and signing taunting letters with a self-styled monogram: BTK, for Bind Torture Kill. In the end, it was a DNA sample that tied BTK to his crimes. Not his own DNA. But his daughter's.

Investigators obtained a court order without the daughter's knowledge for a Pap smear specimen she had given five years earlier at a university medical clinic in Kansas. A DNA profile of the specimen almost perfectly matched the DNA evidence taken from several BTK crime scenes, leading detectives to conclude she was the child of the killer. That allowed police to secure an arrest warrant in February 2005 and end BTK's murderous career.

The sad thing here is that the practice could be used to do great good, but we can't let the FBI ever have the power to do this because they can't be trusted to use it properly.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

It was just yesterday that I was explaining why closed circuit tv systems (the the ones they have prominently installed all over London) don't work. Here's an article about a London Graffiti artist who carefully painted a giant message to the authorities that spans three full stories on a building right next to a security camera.

The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera. Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on 'Big Brother' society.