U.S.-China Surveillance

A recent blog post by Hal Roberts at the The Berkman Center for Internet & Society raises concerns about popular anonymizing and censorship circumvention services DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix selling their individual user data to third parties. In the post, Roberts infers from a curiously-worded FAQ entry at Edoors.com that these three partner services [...]

Studying how the U.S. government maintains records on its residents is not a simple matter of identifying “the dossier system” and following its history. According to the GAO, as of 2004, there were more than 122 data mining systems in over 50 government agencies and departments containing personally identifiable information on U.S. citizens. The names [...]

An interesting post in the Financial Times today talks about a new online surveillance trend in China, led by the Beijing-based company TRS Information Technology, that shifts from searching for politically sensitive keywords to “advanced text mining solutions enabling censors to monitor and forecast public opinion.” The article appears to takes a negative view [...]

The San Franciscos Chronicles’ “TheTech Chronicles,” along with a number of other media outlets, is reporting that Google has will “halve the time it stores logs of user web searches” from 18 to 9 months. Charitably, one could call this a misleading statement, but it really is just plain wrong. Google keeps its search logs [...]

From today’s Seattle Times:
Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime
By Benjamin J. Romano
Seattle Times technology reporter
Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.
The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB [...]

The Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be [...]

Good opinion piece be Leslie Harris on the Real ID program….
Most disappointing, the hard decisions on how to implement Real ID — including how to protect privacy — have been left to the states. Simply put, there are no privacy rules. States are simply encouraged to follow a set of “best practices” for protecting privacy. [...]

From today’s New York Times, China Finds Eager Allies for Olympic Security:
In preparation for the Beijing Olympics and a series of other international events, some American companies are helping the Chinese government design and install one of the most comprehensive high-tech public surveillance systems in the world.
When told of the companies’ transactions, critics of China’s [...]

When China launches the Summer 2008 Olympics, IBM will be there providing real-time surveillance services for public spaces, using its new Smart Surveillance System (S3). S3 can provide real-time alerts via a standard web browser when particular patterns appear in the stream of visual data. Vice President for security and privacy services at IBM, Julie [...]

I’ve added a new feature to this blog, a real-time feed of surveillance-related news items and other documents as I find them. There is a link to it on the navigation bar to the left. Comments welcome.