Loss of Privacy

If you’re entering the United States from Canada, you begin to be inspected roughly 45 feet before you stop and begin talking to the border guard.  Your license plate is photographed and, as you pass by those pretty yellow posts, they are scanning your car for any RFID equipped ID cards inside your car.  If you have an enhanced driver’s license, your information is being scanned without you giving permission for it.

The Customs and Border Protection computer connects with your province’s database and in less than a second – .56 to be exact – your personal information is uploaded to a screen in the booth. A second camera snaps the driver’s face.

Welcome to America, Canadians.  I hope you like it.  I suspect that, when the new laws go into effect July 1st and all Canadians need a passport to come to America, we’re going to see less of our northern friends visiting the once-friendly United States.

A post-mounted scanner screens your vehicle for radioactive material that could be used to build a “dirty bomb” – a probe so sensitive it will detect if you’ve recently had a medical test that used isotopes.

As you pull up to the booth, a computer monitor may be filling with information about you, even before the guard asks, “Where are you coming from? What’s your citizenship? Where are you headed? Why?”

If a border lookout, arrest warrant or criminal record pops up on the guard’s screen, or if something doesn’t quite add up – maybe you’re sweating bullets on a cold day – expect to get hauled over for a secondary inspection.

The port of entry at the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit – the busiest commercial land crossing in North America, through which a quarter of all Canada-U.S. trade passes – has strict controls, as does the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.

And this is just the beginning of your border check.

Border agents, packing pepper spray, collapsible batons and 9-mm automatic pistols, are the first point of contact for people and cargo alike. Sometimes their supervisors order vehicle sweeps at random. Then for 30 minutes, agents will pop every trunk, just for a look-see.

Down below the 80-year-old bridge, dozens of long-haul transport trailers are queued up to go through the same checks, and possibly pass through a giant gamma-ray screening facility that peers inside suspicious 18-wheelers.

If you happen to cross the border at North Dakota, you’ll be happy to know that unmanned drones are scanning the area for up to 15 miles.  Though the drone is not permitted in Canada, it can still see well into the country.  There will be another drone stationed near Detroit next year.

My advice to my friendly neighbors up north: stay home.  While most of us Americans are friendly, it’s not worth the hassle to be spied upon just so you can visit a foreign land.

A sixth-grader was told that she could not give a report on the slain gay activist Harvey Milk unless her classmates’ parents gave permission for their children to hear the report.  Now, the ACLU is threatening to sue the school district.

District officials told Natalie Jones and her parents that a report on Milk fell under the school board’s life and sex education policy, which requires parental consent before any instruction on the topics of reproduction and human sexuality.

Natalie, 12, is a student at Mount Woodson Elementary School and did the report last month as part of an independent research project class at the school. Students in the class are required to do PowerPoint projects on a subject of their choosing.

The ACLU says that the school district is violating her free speech rights.

Blair-Loy, in his letter to the school district, said the girl was told the subject was “sensitive.” School officials later told the girl’s mother, Bonnie Jones, that the presentation only could be shown to students whose parents had signed a permission slip in advance.

Superintendent Robert Graeff and Grace cited the board policy dealing with sex-education matters. The policy states that parents will be notified in writing about any teaching on the subjects of sex or “family life, human sexuality, AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases.”

Natalie gave the presentation to about half the class, Blair-Loy said. The ACLU wants the district to apologize to Natalie, send letters “reflecting such apology” to parents who received the school district permission request, let Natalie give the presentation to the whole class and clarify that the board policy applies only to course content for sex-education instruction. The group also wants the district to say situations like this won’t happen again.

“We think the school district singled out and discriminated against Natalie’s speech because of its content,” Blair-Loy said. “This is not sex education. This is a presentation about Harvey Milk, a historical figure who happened to be gay.”

While discussing sexuality can be a sensitive issue, there is no reason to put the assignment in the category of sex education.  Yes, Harvey Milk was gay.  Only extremely naieve 12-year olds wouldn’t know what that meant.  Would permission slips be needed for others, such as Bill Clinton, Gavin Newsom, Alan Turing, President Buchanan, Tennessee Williams, or Oscar Wilde?  Their biographies would be sexual in nature as well, at least according to this school district’s policies.

Britain is working hard to maintain its place as a leading surveillance society. Building on the massive “success” of its widespread use of CCTV cameras, police are now installing a system that will use the cameras to track and log car journeys. CCTV cameras across the UK are being added to the system, which automatically recognizes and stores license plate numbers, then adds them, and the location in which they were spotted, to a central database. Police, of course, say the system’s great at reducing and solving crime, and one police bigwig says that arrests are up 40% in his area since cops started using the system. But just because arrests have increased, it doesn’t necessarily mean crime has been reduced. He further defends the system by saying “innocent people have nothing to fear from the way we use it” — which all too often is used as an attempt to justify pretty nasty governmental intrusions on privacy and liberty. This system sounds like another part of Britain’s attempt to record the lives of its subjects in databases, alongside its database of info on every child in the country, and details of all the internet and phone traffic there. Will people there get up in arms over all this government surveillance, or are they saving their ire only for the likes of Google Street View?

Read more about it at the BBC.

If you live in Colorado, your DNA will now be collected upon arrest.  It will then be stored in a database until it’s proved you are innocent.  The problem is, there are no repercussions to agencies that don’t expunge the data properly.

This is Colorado’s version of Katie’s Law, in which law enforcement officials can take your DNA from you when you’ve been suspected of a felony.  State lawmakers claim it’s going to save people’s lives.

The law is named for Katie Sepich, a 22-year-old New Mexico woman raped and murdered in 2003. Authorities collected her killer’s DNA from her body, but had no match. At the time, they did not know that Gabriel Avilla later arrested for burglary, had also killed Sepich. Avilla skipped bail after his burglary arrest. Only after he was caught and convicted three years later was a DNA sample taken and matched to the Sepich slaying.

So, the system worked.  It just took a little while longer.  If he had had the DNA sample taken upon arrest, it still wouldn’t have brought Katie back.

The state will begin developing the systems necessary to collect the DNA in July. Agencies will begin collecting DNA from felony arrestees in September of 2010. Funding comes from an initial $75,000 appropriation for start-up costs and a $2.50 surcharge for felony and misdemeanor convictions, as well as traffic tickets.

Coloradans will be footing the bill for this one.  If you get any type of conviction or a traffic ticket, there will now be an extra fee so you can “help” the state in its quest for justice.

“This is just an identifier. It’s going to exonerate people who are innocent and it’s a tool that will allow us to convict the guilty as well,” Tipton said.

And it will never be used against anyone.  Honest.  They’d never “accidentally” keep the information when it should have been destroyed.

The bill once required the state to pay $25,000 if records weren’t properly expunged when required, but that provision was eliminated amid concerns about unfairly burdening smaller agencies.

That’s nice for the smaller agencies, but what about regular citizens?  What happens when a smaller agency doesn’t expunge the record and their records are tied to larger agencies?  Your DNA will still be in the system.  All a smaller agency has to say is, “Oops, sorry about that,” and they’re off the hook.  No fine for them.

“I really don’t see it as an invasion of privacy, in that if you’re not guilty, the data is destroyed,” State Sen. Jim Isgar, D-Hesperus said. Isgar also supported the bill.

This law is a gross invasion of privacy and removes civil liberties that were presumed untouchable.  It’s an invasion of privacy because the Supreme Court said it is.  You are presumed innocent until proven guilty.  As a state, you don’t get to pick and choose which laws you want to follow.  Being presumed innocent does not mean innocent but let me take your DNA.

For the truly paranoid, this evidence could be planted at the scene of a crime.  It’s been done before with items not so damning as DNA.  You may or may not be vindicated, but, in the meantime, your life, career, and reputation will be lost.

The new Safari 4 beta has been released and it boasts many new features, including what is now being called a security nightmare for the browser.  The data trail within the browser reveals hidden files of a user’s history and XML files that can, quite literally, add up to gigabytes of personal information left on the computer.  Much of this information is kept in obscure locations, making it difficult for the average user to find and clean out.

Let’s start with the easy stuff. In ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari reside two folders: Bookmarks and History. Inside the history folder is a file for every webpage you’ve visited, regardless of when you’ve set Safari to delete history items in your preferences. I suspect Safari does some cleanup here as the files become slightly more sparse as one travels farther back in time (the past week – the time I’ve set Safari to delete history items after – usually comprise about half of the items, and I’m pretty sure my browsing habits aren’t increasing logarithmically), but I cannot figure out what gets kept and what doesn’t. Each item can be anywhere from 4-200k, but those add up when you get thousands of them. Deleting everything past a week old saved me over 100Mb.

This particular dump has been around at least since a version of Safari 3, but Safari 4 is even more egregiously unhygenic. You know the fancy new Top Sites feature, and how it tells you with a little blue star peeled away from the page preview if it’s been updated since you last checked? Safari makes a little file for every site, every time it checks on them, which if RefreshInterval is in seconds as I suspect it is, means it creates a nice XML file for every one of your top sites every 30 minutes (1800 seconds). These are located in ~/Library/PubSub/Feeds/ and given arcane hexadecimal names, and contain whatever turned out to be new on the webpage. As the Wikipedia homepage is one of mine and changes just about constantly, the vast majority of my XMLs were filled with Wikipedia content. I had over 24000, and deleting everything more than a week old (again, about half of the items) saved me about 93Mb.

But even this isn’t the worst of it. The most outrageous thing I found, and it took drinking from Spotlight’s firehose of filesystem changes with FSEventer to find it, was that Safari does not delete the webpage previews it generates for Quicklook. Ever. 2.03 GB of webpage previews (2 per website – a full resolution and a thumbnail), all generated since downloading the Safari 4 beta, residing – not in the user library, not even in the root library – in /private/var/folders/et/etuAKaR1GTeV9DVeRGfst++++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews/, a hidden folder far away from the mouseclicks of all but the most relentless tinkerers.

This is a huge problem considering how fast the folder grew in such a short amount of time.  It is also a problem for the myriad users that don’t know these files even exist.  The privacy nightmare emerges when one realizes just how much information is being kept and that most of it needs to be removed manually.

There are some tips you can follow that may help you with the new beta at Mac OS X Tips.  Remember, this is still in beta, so if you are using it, you are presumably wanting to help fix problems such as these.  Private browsing will also eliminate these worries, but you have to know about it first in order to actually use it.