RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: Listen up, anarcho-capitalists: 'They know when you're sleeping, they know when you're awake'  Fri May 27, 2016 3:24 am | |
| No matter who you are, no matter what you're doing, no matter how innocent your life may be; you're being watched. No matter where you go online, no matter what website you connect to, whether it's a news outlet or Amazon.com or YouTube, the government will now make a record of that, because of the metadata retention bill.
I used to teach cybercounter intelligence for the Defence Intelligence Agency. Let's talk practicalities. Your phone is constantly singing out into the universe, saying, 'I'm here, I'm here' to the nearest mobile tower, and that tower makes a permanent record of that activity. That phone tower makes a permanent record of that activity, one that's held for a very long time under these metadata retention laws. The police can look up these records. They know everywhere you've been, they know everyone you've been in contact with: on the basis of this they know all of your associations.
They know who you talk to the most. They know when you talk to them. They know when you're awake. They know when you're sleeping. They know when you're working. They know how you get to work. They know where you go shopping. All of these things are what, as an intelligence analyst, we call your pattern of life.
Suzi Jamil and Desh Amila - together known as Think Inc - have organised a 'virtual tour' of capital cities by US ...
Suzi Jamil and Desh Amila - together known as Think Inc - have organised a 'virtual tour' of capital cities by US whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Photo: Peter Rae
To simplify, metadata just means private records. They are the same things that a private eye would create if they were following you around. They don't know everything that you've said to somebody because they're not sitting that close to you in the cafe, but they see who you met with. They saw when you met with them. They saw the number plate of the car you drove there, they saw when you went, when you left. That's all metadata.
We don't care what you're saying on the phone. We only care where that phone is. When government officials say, 'we're not listening to what you're actually saying on the phone', don't be persuaded by that. Because to an intelligence analyst, metadata is more important than content.
If I have to listen to your phone calls, I'm having a bad day because it takes a really long time. People don't use names a lot of times because they recognise each other's voices. They just say, 'hey, do you remember that thing at that place that we did with the guy', and you're like, 'oh yeah, yeah I remember that'. That's not a lot of fun for me to listen to. I don't want to do that. But if I have your metadata, I can avoid that conversation entirely. In fact, computers can do this automatically: they can create these kinds of connections.
There are cases where they do have to use warrants for pulling the content of the websites you're visiting. For example, if they want to read the words on the page. But for technologists, there are very easy workarounds.
What we have is your IP address, which is basically like your house number for the Internet. They see that your street address was in contact with this other Internet street address. Now they may not be allowed to actually go look at the page that you pulled over the Internet.
But if I know the size of the file that was transmitted across the Internet, which is also metadata I can uniquely fingerprint every single story on that news site.
And I can then correlate this news story to your address without ever going to the content in a legal sense.
Understand the way that interplay works. Start encrypting your communications. Download apps for your phone. Use something like WhatsApp, which isn't perfect but it does encrypt your communications end to end so it's much more difficult for people to use. Start thinking of where you're exposed. But ultimately we don't want to be in the position where everyone is trying to build castles to defend themselves. That's not what free societies are for.
If we're having to fight for inches every time we pick up the phone and think, 'what is this going to look like in a government database' we're already on that slide to a closed society.
I'm not against national security. But we need to make sure that mass surveillance, indiscriminate surveillance, mandatory retention policies, are not being carried out. Because by definition, if you're collecting the communications of everyone, the majority of those impacted are going to be innocents, not the guilty.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/they-know-when-youre-sleeping-they-know-when-youre-awake-20160526-gp4cei.html |
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