Author: Christopher Burg

Rule Are for Thee, Not for Me

Senator Ron Wyden has had enough of consumers’ privacy being violated and has decided to do something:

The Senator’s proposal would dramatically beef up Federal Trade Commission authority and funding to crack down on privacy violations, let consumers opt out of having their sensitive personal data collected and sold, and impose harsh new penalties on a massive data monetization industry that has for years claimed that self-regulation is all that’s necessary to protect consumer privacy.

Wyden’s bill proposes that companies whose revenue exceeds $1 billion per year—or warehouse data on more than 50 million consumers or consumer devices—submit “annual data protection reports” to the government detailing all steps taken to protect the security and privacy of consumers’ personal information.

The proposed legislation would also levy penalties up to 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines for executives who knowingly mislead the FTC in these reports. The FTC’s authority over such matters is currently limited—one of the reasons telecom giants have been eager to move oversight of their industry from the Federal Communications Commission to the FTC.

I read through his proposal [PDF]. Strangely enough the proposal doesn’t mention any punishments or penalties for politicians or other government agents who violate people’s privacy.

Rules are for thee, not for me, ya fuckin’ plebs.

When it comes to surveillance my primary concern is government surveillance. The main reason I’m concerned about private surveillance is because it can turn into government surveillance (either by payment or by a subpoena). If that weren’t the case, I’d be far less concerned because, unlike government surveillance, I can opt out of private surveillance. Moreover, if private surveillance couldn’t turn into government surveillance, a company seeing me do something it didn’t like wouldn’t result in men with guns busting down my door at oh dark thirty to either kidnap or murder me. So any legislation that doesn’t curtail government surveillance is, in my opinion, worthless.

Making Surveillance Easy

We’re only a few days away from yet another “most important election in our lifetime.” Since the Republicans are in power, the Democrats and their sympathizers are pissed and when they’re pissed it’s not uncommon for them to protest (Remember the last time they were out of power? They actually protested the wars that the party in power started! Those were the days!). Nobody likes it when people protest again them so the party in power wants to keep tabs on the people who might take action against them. Fortunately for them, most protesters make this easy:

The United States government is accelerating efforts to monitor social media to preempt major anti-government protests in the US, according to scientific research, official government documents, and patent filings reviewed by Motherboard. The social media posts of American citizens who don’t like President Donald Trump are the focus of the latest US military-funded research. The research, funded by the US Army and co-authored by a researcher based at the West Point Military Academy, is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to consolidate the US military’s role and influence on domestic intelligence.

The vast scale of this effort is reflected in a number of government social media surveillance patents granted this year, which relate to a spy program that the Trump administration outsourced to a private company last year. Experts interviewed by Motherboard say that the Pentagon’s new technology research may have played a role in amendments this April to the Joint Chiefs of Staff homeland defense doctrine, which widen the Pentagon’s role in providing intelligence for domestic “emergencies,” including an “insurrection.”

A couple of years ago a few friends and I had the opportunity to advise some protesters on avoiding government surveillance. They were using Facebook to organize and plan their protests. We had to explain to them that using Facebook for that purpose meant that every local law enforcement agency was likely receiving real-time updates on their plans. We made several recommendations, most of which involved moving planning from social media to more secure forms of communications (Signal, RetroShare, etc.). In the end they thanked us for our advice, decided that using anything but Facebook was too difficult (which made me suspect that there were undercover law enforcers amongst them), and kept handing law enforcement real-time information.

The moral of the story is that government agencies pour resources into social media surveillance because it works because most protesters are more concerned about convenience than operational security.

Security for Me, Not for Thee

Google has announced several security changes. However, it’s evident that those changes are for its security, not the security of its users:

According to Google’s Jonathan Skelker, the first of these protections that Google has rolled out today comes into effect even before users start typing their username and password.

In the coming future, Skelker says that Google won’t allow users to sign into accounts if they disabled JavaScript in their browser.

The reason is that Google uses JavaScript to run risk assessment checks on the users accessing the login page, and if JavaScript is disabled, this allows crooks to pass through those checks undetected.

Conveniently JavaScript is also used to run a great deal of Google’s tracking software.

Disabling JavaScript is a great way to improve your browser’s security. Most browser-based malware and a lot of surveillance capabilities rely on JavaScript. With that said, disabling JavaScript entirely also makes much of the web unusable because web developers love to use JavaScript for everything, even loading text. But many sites will provide at least a hobbled experience if you choose to disable JavaScript.

Mind you, I understand why Google would want to improve its security and why it would require JavaScript if it believed that doing so would improve its overall security. But it’s important to note what is meant by improving security here and what potential consequences it has for users.

Drop the Word Internet

It turns out Internet freedom is declining:

Digital authoritarianism is on the rise, according to a new report from a group that monitors internet freedoms. Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, said today that governments are seeking more control over users’ data while also using laws nominally intended to address “fake news” to suppress dissent. It marked the eighth consecutive year that Freedom House found a decline in online freedoms around the world.

“The clear emergent theme in this report is the growing recognition that the internet, once seen as a liberating technology, is increasingly being used to disrupt democracies as opposed to destabilizing dictatorships,” said Mike Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, in a call with reporters. “Propaganda and disinformation are increasingly poisoning the digital sphere, and authoritarians and populists are using the fight against fake news as a pretext to jail prominent journalists and social media critics, often through laws that criminalize the spread of false information.”

There’s a great deal of irony in a pro-democracy, i.e. a pro-mob rule, organization discussing a decline of freedom but I digress.

Internet freedom isn’t the only freedom that’s in decline. Pretty much every government that has the ability it tightening its grip on its slaves. That is the purpose of government after all.

Deafening the Bug

I know a lot of people who put a piece of tape over their computer’s webcam. While this is a sane countermeasure, I’m honestly less worried about my webcam than the microphone built into my laptop. Most laptops, unfortunately, lack a hardware disconnect for the microphone and placing a piece of tap over the microphone input often isn’t enough to prevent it from picking up sound in whatever room it’s located. Fortunately, Apple has been stepping up its security game and now offers a solution to the microphone problem:

Little was known about the chip until today. According to its newest published security guide, the chip comes with a hardware microphone disconnect feature that physically cuts the device’s microphone from the rest of the hardware whenever the lid is closed.

“This disconnect is implemented in hardware alone, and therefore prevents any software, even with root or kernel privileges in macOS, and even the software on the T2 chip, from engaging the microphone when the lid is closed,” said the support guide.

The camera isn’t disconnected, however, because its “field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed.”

While I have misgivings with Apple’s recent design and business decisions, I still give the company credit for pushing hardware security forward.

Implementing a hardware cutoff for the microphone doesn’t require something like Apple’s T2 chip. Any vendor could put a hardware disconnect switch on their computer that would accomplish the same thing. Almost none of them do though, even if they include hardware cutoffs for other peripherals (my ThinkPad, for example, has a build in cover for the webcam, which is quite nice). I hope Apple’s example encourages more vendors to implement some kind of microphone cutoff switch because being able to listen to conversations generally allows gathering more incriminating evidence that merely being able to look at whatever is in front of a laptop.

What Part of Free Didn’t You Understand?

Did you know that a majority of apps targeted at children contain ads:

(Reuters Health) – Those cute little apps your child plays with are most likely flooded with ads – some of which are totally age-inappropriate, researchers have found.

A stunning 95 percent of commonly downloaded apps that are marketed to or played by children age five and under contain at least one type of advertising, according to a new report in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics. And that goes for the apps labeled as educational, too, researchers say.

That’s just terrible… oh:

The researchers scrutinized 135 of the most downloaded free and paid apps in the “age five and under” category in the Google Play app store. Among them were free apps with 5 to 10 million downloads and paid apps with 50,000 to 100,000 downloads.

Emphasis mine.

To once again quote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). If you can download an app without paying upfront, the developer is making money in some other way. Advertisements are the quick and easy go to. In app purchases are the more sophisticated method although more difficult to execute because you need to incentivize users to buy your in app purchases. When your target audience is children, in app purchases are even more difficult because parental controls often prevent children from making purchases directly.

Instead of performing a study with an obvious result such as determining how many free apps display ads (almost all of them), a better study would be to learn why people are so foolish as to believe that they can get something for free.

No Jury Will Convict Him

There are certain crimes that are justified by the circumstances under which they were perpetrated. This is one of them:

A scientist accused of attempted murder in Antarctica stabbed his colleague because “he was fed up with the man telling him the endings of books,” it has been claimed.

Scientific engineer Sergey Savitsky, 55, became enraged and stabbed welder Oleg Beloguzov, 52, with a kitchen knife.

It is believed to be the first time a man has been charged with attempted murder in Antarctica.

I doubt that there’s a jury on the planet that will convict him.

The “Impartial” Jury

I’ll be the first to admit that a trial by jury is a better system than trial by a tribune of government bureaucrats but that doesn’t mean that I’m foolish enough to believe that a trial by jury can’t be rigged. There are numerous ways that government officials manipulate juries into declaring a desired verdict. However, government manipulation isn’t the only fault with jury trials. Another fault with jury trials is the jurors themselves:

The more severe a crime, the more evidence you should have to prove someone did it. But a new Duke study, appearing Oct. 29 in Nature Human Behavior, has shown that the type of alleged crime can increase jurors’ confidence in guilt.

“If the crime is more serious or more heinous, [mock jurors] are more likely to be convinced by the same amount of evidence,” said lead study author John Pearson, an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Duke School of Medicine.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Most people know that there are certain crimes where being accused is pretty much an automatic guilty sentence. Terrorism and sexual crimes against a child are two examples.

This bias could be a useful tool for a government prosecutor. If, for example, a prosecutor wanted to make sure a suspect went down, they could add a charge that the suspect raped a child. Even if the prosecutor had no evidence to work off of, the jury’s bias again severe crimes might be enough for him to get a guilty verdict even if he can’t get the original charges to stick.

Despite best efforts there is no such thing as a truly impartial jury.

The Most Sensible Proposal

Drug prices here in the United States are absurd, which shouldn’t surprise anybody since drug manufacturers hold government granted monopolies on their products. However, the plebeians are screeching and after a while that sound can get annoying to our overlords. In the hopes of reestablishing a serene environment, our overlords have been considering strategies to bring drug prices down. To accomplish this they could simply remove the monopolies they granted to the drug companies and let competition bring drug prices down or they could pay government employees to fly down to Mexico and buy the drugs for less. Guess which strategy is being fielded first:

Amid a flurry of national proposals to bring exorbitant U.S. drug prices in line with other countries’ charges, one Utah insurer has a different option for patients:

Pay them to go to Mexico.

PEHP, which covers 160,000 public employees and family members, is offering plane tickets to San Diego, transportation to Tijuana, and a $500 cash payout to patients who need certain expensive drugs for multiple sclerosis, cancer and autoimmune disorders.

It makes sense to try this strategy first. The pharmaceutical companies paid good money for their monopolies and revoking them would show bad faith on behalf of the government and that could dissuade other companies from paying to purchase monopolies.

The Arbitrary Decrees Called Law

The United States is often advertised as a land where “the law reigns supreme.” The upside about this is that if you don’t like what is currently reigning supreme, you just need to wait 15 minutes for it to change:

U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born on U.S. soil, according to excerpts of an interview released Tuesday.

Arbitrary laws changing arbitrarily.

This executive order is more interesting than most because it is attempting to nullify the Fourteenth Amendment:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Fortunately for Trump, there is a great deal of precedence for politicians nullifying the clauses of the Constitution. Every single gun restriction law is a demonstration of the fact that the Constitution is toothless and therefore irrelevant. Perhaps some members of Congress or the judiciary will find their spine and declare Trump’s executive order irrelevant but I wouldn’t hold my breath. After all, if Congress or the judiciary had a spine, executive orders wouldn’t be a thing.