News You Need to Know – Page 6

Job Opportunities

A lot of people complain that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from hardworking Americans. I expect many of them will soon be heading down to Texas to claim the jobs recently freed up by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE):

ICE rounded up more than 150 employees — nearly a quarter of Hiebert’s workforce — loaded them into buses and booked them for working in the country unlawfully. A criminal investigation of the company continues.

OK, I don’t expect any of the people complaining about illegal immigrants taking jobs to head down to Texas to fill those jobs. Why? Because welding trailers all day is generally seen as shit work. The hours are long, the work is repetitive, and the environment isn’t as comfortable as most office jobs. In other words it’s work that most Americans have no interest in doing, which is why a lot of these industries are dependent on illegal immigrants. While a lot of these jobs qualify as shit work for the average American, they qualify as a huge step up from the opportunities otherwise available to many illegal immigrants.

ICE isn’t freeing up these jobs so hardworking Americans can claim them, they’re removing the only labor pool that these manufacturers realistically have available to them. If ICE keeps up its current efforts, it could put a lot of manufacturers out of business.

NYPD Suspends Use of Body Cameras

What were sold as a tool for law enforcer accountability turned into a tool for evidence gathering. Body cameras have failed to reign in bad police behavior but they still provided us little people with some amusement as law enforcers tried to explain how really egregious looking footage was actually a misunderstanding. It appears as though the New York Police Department (NYPD) has tired of explaining the embarrassing footage because it has completely suspended their use:

The NYPD’s plan to outfit every officer with body cameras has run into trouble. The department has pulled about 2,990 Vievu LE-5 cameras across the city after one officer’s camera caught fire near a Staten Island precinct. There’s a “possible product defect” with the LE-5, the NYPD said in a statement, and it was removing existing models out of an “abundance of caution.” Most of the force’s 15,500 cameras (including LE-4 models) aren’t affected.

As one of my friends said, I wonder how long the officer had to hold a lighter to their body camera before it stayed lit.

Unleash the Zuckerberg Inquisition

Yesterday Zuckerberg unleashed his inquisitors and they found a lot of heretics:

Facebook said it was removing the publishers and accounts not because of the type of content they posted, but because of the behaviors they engaged in, including spamming Facebook groups with identical pieces of content and using fake profiles.

“Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the company said in a blog post. “People will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.”

So what kind of pages were removed? As of this writing, Cop Block’s main Facebook page has been unpublished along with a number of its state affiliate pages. Gun Laws Don’t Work, V for Voluntary, Punk Rock Libertarians, and many other anti-state pages were also found guilty of heresy.

This is where most libertarians flip their shit about Facebook’s censorship… on Facebook. I won’t debase myself in such a manner. Instead I will point out that it was foolish for so many anti-statists to centralized their content on a site owned and operated by a statist. While I recognize how easy Facebook makes it to reach a large audience, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. In exchange for accessing Facebook’s audience you have to submit to Facebook’s policies and those policies are (probably purposefully) vague and in a constant state of flux. One minute Facebook takes a hands off approach to content, the next it erases dissenting voices like the black plague erasing Europeans.

Of course this entire mess could have been avoided by simply doing the pre-Facebook status quo. Had all of these organizations kept their audience focused on their own websites and forums, there would have been nothing for Zuckerberg’s inquisitors to censor. Instead they opted for the ease of relying on Facebook. They pushed their audience to Facebook and thus put themselves under the rule of Zuckerberg. Now they’re paying the price. Some of these organizations are fortunate enough to still have their own websites and forums so they haven’t been completely erased but most weren’t so smart.

Once again I find myself beating this bloated corpse of a horse that is advocating for individuals and organizations to stop relying on centralized technologies and instead rely on their own infrastructure. Sadly, I know that the innards of this corpse are going to burst forth and spill all over the place before anybody follows my advice.

The Fake Facebook Profiles of Law Enforcement

Do you remember that really hot chick who tried to friend you on Facebook? The one who claimed to be single and horny? There’s a good chance that “she” was a cop:

Police officers around the country, in departments large and small, working for federal, state and local agencies, use undercover Facebook accounts to watch protesters, track gang members, lure child predators and snare thieves, according to court records, police trainers and officers themselves. Some maintain several of these accounts at a time. The tactic violates Facebook’s terms of use, and the company says it disables fake accounts whenever it discovers them. But that is about all it can do: Fake accounts are not against the law, and the information gleaned by the police can be used as evidence in criminal and civil cases.

Investigators know this, which is why the accounts continue to flourish.

This should come as a surprise to approximately nobody. Law enforcers have been busy turning this country into a surveillance state. Meanwhile, Facebook has been busy collecting every shred of personal information about as many people as it can. They’re a match made in Heaven, or more aptly Hell.

The best defense against this, other than not using Facebook, is to only add people whose identity you have personally verified. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a person you know in real life isn’t an undercover cop, but verifying identities will at least cut down on the low level efforts to surveil you.

A Lot of Websites Don’t Fix Security Issues

Last year Google announced that it would be removing the Symantec root certificate from Chrome’s list of trusted certificates (this is because Symantec signed a lot of invalid certificates). This notification was meant to give web administrators time to acquire new certificates to replace their Symantec signed ones. The time of removal is fast approaching and many web administrators still haven’t updated their certificates:

Chrome 70 is expected to be released on or around October 16, when the browser will start blocking sites that run older Symantec certificates issued before June 2016, including legacy branded Thawte, VeriSign, Equifax, GeoTrust and RapidSSL certificates.

Yet despite more than a year to prepare, many popular sites are not ready.

Security researcher Scott Helme found 1,139 sites in the top one million sites ranked by Alexa, including Citrus, SSRN, the Federal Bank of India, Pantone, the Tel-Aviv city government, Squatty Potty and Penn State Federal to name just a few.

The headline of this article is, “With Chrome 70, hundreds of popular websites are about to break.” A more accurate headline would have been, “Administrators of hundreds of websites failed to fix major security issue.” Chrome isn’t the culprit in this story. Google is doing the right thing by removing the root certificate of an authority that failed to take proper precautions when issuing certificates. The administrators of these sites on the other hand have failed to do their job of providing a secure connection for their users.

Live Streaming Summary Executions

The Company Formerly Known as Taser (Axon) has announced a new line of body cameras that allow law enforcers to live stream their antics:

Police officers wearing new cameras by Axon, the U.S.’s largest body camera supplier, will soon be able to send live video from their cameras back to base and elsewhere, potentially enhancing officers’ situational awareness and expanding police surveillance.

[…]

Axon plans to test the device, the Axon Body 3, with a group of agencies early next year and ship to U.S. customers in the summer. (The initial price of $699 doesn’t include other costs, like a subscription to Axon’s Evidence.com data management system.) A built-in antenna transmits HD video over dedicated 4G LTE cellular networks, while another feature triggers the camera to start recording and alerts command staff once an officer has fired their weapon, a possible corrective to the problem of officers forgetting to switch them on.

Now the whole department can tune in for the summary execution of the unarmed black man!

Less you mistakenly believe that this live streaming capability might give oversight committees the ability to oversee law enforcers by randomly activating the live streaming capability, never fear, the live streaming capability can only be activated when the officer wearing the camera enables it:

Giving supervisors the ability to live-stream from officers’ chests has raised privacy concerns among police too. Axon’s system does not allow supervisors to remotely begin live-streaming from an officer’s camera unless it is in recording mode–that is, once an officer presses a large button in the center of the camera or is activated automatically by the sound of a gunshot, for instance. The video streams will also be limited to those with permission through the Evidence.com software.

That’s a relief! I was almost worried that there was a chance that an overseer might randomly activate an officer’s body camera can catch them doing something unlawful!

Of course the live video is streamed to Evidence.com, which is a service geared towards preventing the use of collected evidence from being used to defend an accused party or from bring charges against a law enforcer who has been caught doing something illegal.

Axon has covered all of its bases. There’s no possibility that these new features will be used to hold law enforcers accountable, which will make them popular with law enforcement departments.

Living in a Surveillance State

People often argue about whether Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four more accurately predicted our current predicament. I tend to believe that both books predicted different aspects of the present. Governments have certainly invested heavily in dumbing down and distracting the population in order to make them more docile and therefore easier to rule. But they have also invested heavily in ensuring that they can watch everything you do wherever you go:

The next time you drive past one of those road signs with a digital readout showing how fast you’re going, don’t simply assume it’s there to remind you not to speed. It may actually be capturing your license plate data.

According to recently released US federal contracting data, the Drug Enforcement Administration will be expanding the footprint of its nationwide surveillance network with the purchase of “multiple” trailer-mounted speed displays “to be retrofitted as mobile LPR [License Plate Reader] platforms.” The DEA is buying them from RU2 Systems Inc., a private Mesa, Arizona company. How much it’s spending on the signs has been redacted.

This is why I laugh at people who leave their cellphone at home when they “don’t want to be tracked.” If you drive your vehicle somewhere, there’s an ever increasing chance that the license plate will be recorded by a government scanner. If you take public transit, there’s an almost guaranteed chance that your face will be caught on a surveillance cameras inside of the vehicle (and an ever increasing chance that facial recognition software will automatically identify you). If you walk, you’ll likely be recorded on any number of private and public surveillance cameras (which, again, are more and more being tied to facial recognition software to automatically identify you).

Everything has pros and cons. One of the cons of technology becoming more powerful and cheaper is that surveillance technology has become more powerful and cheaper. Tracking an individual, especially in metropolitan areas, is trivial. Fortunately, surveillance is a cat and mouse game. One of the pros of technology becoming more powerful and cheaper is that countersurveillance technology is becoming more powerful and cheaper.

The Difficulty of Classifying People

It must be difficult being a collectivist. Their philosophy requires that 7 billion unique individuals fit neatly into a handful of boxes. Is an individual male or female? Is an individual a proletariat or a bourgeois? Is an individual black or white? These questions often seem straight forward but then you run into intersex individuals, workers who also own a stake in means of production, and individuals with white skin who have black ancestry:

In 2010, Taylor took an AncestryByDNA test, he said, “just to confirm what we’d already known.” The results said that he was 90 percent European and 6 percent indigenous American, as well as 4 percent sub-Saharan African.

[…]

Still, the results were enough for Taylor to update his birth certificate last November: It now says that he is black, Native American and Caucasian.

Taylor acknowledges that he looks white. But despite being “visually Caucasian,” as he puts it, he considers himself to be multiracial.

“I’m a certified black man,” he told The Post. “I’m certified black in all 50 states. But the federal government doesn’t recognize me.”

What qualifies an individual as being black? This is a question collectivists have to wrestle with. Is it based on ancestry? Is it based solely on skin color? Is there a minimum DNA threshold? Is so, what is that threshold and what is the justification for setting it there?

Every historical attempt to categorize individuals into a handful of tidy boxes has failed. It turns out that a species with 7 billion individuals is rather complex and contains a lot of variety.

All Data Is for Sale

What happens when a website that sells your personal information asks you to input your phone number to enable two-factor authentication? Your phone number is sold to advertisers:

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.” I managed to place an ad in front of Alan Mislove by targeting his shadow profile. This means that the junk email address that you hand over for discounts or for shady online shopping is likely associated with your account and being used to target you with ads.

There really is no reason for a website to require a phone number to enable two-factor authentication. Short Message Service (SMS) is not a secure protocol so utilizing it for two-factor authentication, which many websites sadly do, is not a good idea. Moreover, as this study has demonstrated, handing over your phone number just gives the service provider another piece of information about you to sell.

Instead of SMS-based two-factor authentication websites should at a minimum offer two-factor authentication that utilizes apps that use Time-based One-time Password Algorithm (TOTP) or HMAC-based One-time Password Algorithm (HOTP) like Authy and Google Authenticator. Better yet websites should offer two-factor authentication that utilizes hardware tokens like YubiKeys.

Want to Avoid Being Swatted? Sign Up for Our Anti-Swatting Service Today!

You know police procedures are inadequate when convincing SWAT teams to storm random addresses happens so often that there’s a term for it. The Seattle Police Department (SPD) was recently caught up in a rather embarrassing swatting incident. Instead of taking responsibility for its inadequate procedures it has decided to put the burden on the citizenry:

On its official “swatting” resource site, the Seattle Police Department acknowledges how swatting works, along with the fact that citizens have requested a way to submit their own concerns or worries about being a potential victim. (Full disclosure: after having my own personally identifiable data distributed in a malicious manner, I asked SPD for this very thing… in 2015.)

“To our knowledge, no solution to this problem existed, so we engineered one,” SPD’s site reads. The site claims that swatting victims are “typically associated with the tech industry, video game industry, and/or the online broadcasting community.”

SPD’s process asks citizens to create a profile on a third-party data-management service called Rave Facility (run by the company Smart911). Though this service is advertised for public locations and businesses, it supports private residences as well, and SPD offers steps to input data and add a “swatting concerns” tab to your profile.

Want to avoid being swatted? Sign up for our anti-swatting service today! If you don’t sign up, then the department cannot be held responsible for murdering you when some random jackass on the Internet calls in a fake hostage situation.

What gets me is not just that swatting happens so often that there’s a term for it but that it happens so often that the SPD website has a page dedicated to it. If swatting happens so often that your department has to dedicate a page to it, then your procedures for responding to random hostage situation calls need some serious overhauling.