Privacy

Source: TimesOnline

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.

Source: Princeton University

Abstract Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. We show that this phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. We use cold reboots to mount attacks on popular disk encryption systems — BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt, and TrueCrypt — using no special devices or materials. We experimentally characterize the extent and predictability of memory remanence and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple techniques. We offer new algorithms for finding cryptographic keys in memory images and for correcting errors caused by bit decay. Though we discuss several strategies for partially mitigating these risks, we know of no simple remedy that would eliminate them.

Source: The International PGP

It's personal. It's private. And it's no one's business but yours. You may be planning a political campaign, discussing your taxes, or something even more sensitive. Or you may be doing something that you feel shouldn't be illegal, but is. Whatever it is, you don't want your private electronic mail (E-mail) or confidential documents read by anyone else. There's nothing wrong with asserting your privacy. Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution.

Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their E-mail?

What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.

Today, if the Government wants to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, it has to expend a certain amount of expense and labor to intercept and steam open and read paper mail, and listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversation. This kind of labor-intensive monitoring is not practical on a large scale. This is only done in important cases when it seems worthwhile.

More and more of our private communications are being routed through electronic channels. Electronic mail is gradually replacing conventional paper mail. E-mail messages are just too easy to intercept and scan for interesting keywords. This can be done easily, routinely, automatically, and undetectably on a grand scale. International cablegrams are already scanned this way on a large scale by the NSA.

Source: Flex Your Rights

In any given police visit to your home, with a few notable exceptions, the below rules will help protect your civil rights and improve your chances of leaving safely—so you don't have to be a legal expert to do the right thing.

1) Keep Your Private Items Out of View
This is common sense: Always keep any private items that you don't want others to see out of sight. Legally speaking, police do not need a search warrant in order to confiscate any illegal items that are in plain view. Bear in mind that, without a search warrant, police cannot enter you home under any circumstances. Still, if they see something suspicious in the proximity of your house, they could arrive with a warrant quickly and unexpectedly.

2) Do Not Let Them Enter
Exit the house and close the door behind you before greeting the officer. Regardless of what the officer says, there is no reason they need to be allowed into your home. Permitting an officer to enter your home is the equivalent of waiving your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Without a warrant, police officers absolutely cannot enter your home without your permission or an emergency circumstance that could justify their entry.

3) Be Courteous & Non-Confrontational
If a police officer contacts you at your home, remain calm. Ask the Officer "How can I help you?" While you may not be pleased to have the police at your door, it is best to treat them as you would any other unexpected visitor. You have nothing to gain -- and everything to lose – by allowing hostilities to emerge.

Even if the officers are being belligerent it's always in your best interest to remain calm, courteous and non-confrontational.

Source: Wired

Federal agents at the border do not need any reason to search through travelers' laptops, cell phones or digital cameras for evidence of crimes, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, extending the government's power to look through belongings like suitcases at the border to electronics.

The unanimous three-judge decision reverses a lower court finding that digital devices were "an extension of our own memory" and thus too personal to allow the government to search them without cause. Instead, the earlier ruling said, Customs agents would need some reasonable and articulable suspicion a crime had occurred in order to search a traveler's laptop.

On appeal, the government argued that was too high a standard, infringing upon its right to keep the country safe and enforce laws. Civil rights groups, joined by business traveler groups, weighed in, defending the lower court ruling.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government, finding that the so-called border exception to the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches applied not just to suitcases and papers, but also to electronics.

Source: Yahoo Tech

A series of events at international airport security checkpoints -- and not just the all-gadgets-out-of-bags issue that Ben reported last week -- are troubling privacy and civil liberties advocates.

In the last few months, travelers have found their cell phones and laptops seized by officials, at least temporarily. In at least one case, an engineer was asked to turn on the PC, enter his password, and allow agents to copy a record of all the web sites he had visited on the machine. The laptop was then taken away from him altogether.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus filed a lawsuit last week to demand that the government disclose border search policies regarding electronic devices. At least two dozen incidents have now been logged, 15 of which involved officers searching records of cell phone calls, files on laptops, and even the contents of MP3 players. Almost all involve "travelers of Muslim, Middle Eastern or South Asian background, many of whom... are concerned they were singled out because of racial or religious profiling."

Source: BoingBoing

The easiest way to kill an RFID, and be sure that it is dead, is to throw it in the microwave for 5 seconds. Doing this will literally melt the chip and antenna making it impossible for the chip to ever be read again. Unfortunately this method has a certain fire risk associated with it. Killing an RFID chip this way will also leave visible evidence that it has been tampered with, making it an unsuitable method for killing the RFID tag in passports. Doing this to a credit card will probably also screw with the magnetic strip on the back making it un-swipeable.

The second, slightly more convert and less damaging, way to kill an RFID tag is by piercing the chip with a knife or other sharp object. This can only be done if you know exactly where the chip is located within the tag. This method also leaves visible evidence of intentional damage done to the chip, so it is unsuitable for passports.

The third method is cutting the antenna very close to the chip. By doing this the chip will have no way of receiving electricity, or transmitting its signal back to the reader. This technique also leaves minimal signs of damage, so it would probably not be a good idea to use this on a passport.

The last (and most covert) method for destroying a RFID tag is to hit it with a hammer. Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks. This will destroy the chip, and leave no evidence that the tag has been tampered with. This method is suitable for destroying the tags in passports, because there will be no proof that you intentionally destroyed the chip.

Source: BBC

Biometric technology uses computerised methods to identify a person by their unique physical or behavioural characteristics.

Developments and uses have increased with demand to match concerns over international, business and personal security.

Biometrics is more personal than a passport photo or Pin, using traits such as fingerprints, face or eye "maps" as key identifying features.

Uses range from building access and laptop security to identity cards and passports.

However, there are concerns about the storing of biometric data and its possible misuse.

Continued

Source: BBC

Tens of thousands of children are being fingerprinted in school - often without the consent of their parents, a human rights group has complained.

Prints are taken for a library lending system which the makers say makes lending more efficient and less vulnerable to abuse.

But the pressure group Privacy International says the practice is illegal and breaches the human right to privacy.

 

Regarding the 7/7/2005 terrorist attacks in London, let us look at the facts, and what we were told, and compare them. Then, using Ockham’s Razor and common-sense, let us see what conclusions are to be drawn, so we can all understand what most likely really did happen that day.