Loss of Privacy

There are new questions swirling in the case of an IMPD officer accused in a deadly drunk driving accident. At issue: what were the cities two top cops doing the day IMPD officer David Bisard plowed into three motorcyclists, killing one of them.

The investigation continues.

The controversy over the full body scanners at airports hasn’t even died down yet and they are starting to be used in vans roving around US streets. According to Forbes, “American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents.”

The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.

“It’s no surprise that goverments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

It’s no surprise that law enforcement are so happy about these vans. They can infringe on your privacy without you even knowing about it. AS&E claims that there isn’t a need to worry about these vans because they don’t see as well as the airport scanners. They are attempting to deflect privacy advocates from the fact that these vans still violate a person’s privacy and their fourth amendment rights. Unlike the airports and the TSA, AS&E freely admit that these scanners can save the pictures that it takes.

Today I stumbled upon a story about the Facebook soldier, Eden Abergil, who had her picture taken with bound and blindfolded Palestinians. In the article, she boasted that she hated Arabs and wished they were all dead.

The article itself was cut and pasted onto another website, in its entirety, yet the original article is now gone. A quick google search reveals that several other blogs and websites read the story earlier as well and have portions of the original article on their sites.

There is no explanation as to why the story was pulled. Censorship of any kind is wrong, especially when you are reporting a legitimate news story.  If the story needs to be edited, then do so and inform your readers that you did so.  Deleting it with no explanation is wrong and leads to a distrust of media. Fortunately, the story is also being covered by Haaretz. It is unlikely that their story will magically disappear.

From the Denver Post.

Denver officials are deeply divided over the proper level of punishment for a police officer who was seen on video tackling and beating a 23-year-old man who was doing nothing but talking on a telephone outside a LoDo nightclub.

The video of Officer Devin Sparks repeatedly hitting Michael DeHerrera of Denver with a department-issued piece of metal wrapped in leather, picking him up roughly and slamming a car door on his ankle has prompted Independent Monitor Richard Rosenthal to push for the firing of Sparks and Corporal Randy Murr.

Rosenthal, who monitors police internal investigations, maintains Sparks and Murr are unfit for the force because they didn’t tell the truth about the April 4, 2009 incident. Rosenthal also believes the use of force by Sparks was excessive. The Denver City Council earlier this year agreed to pay $17,500 to settle a federal lawsuit brought by DeHerrera alleging excessive force.

A new program allows users in countries that practice censorship and other types of crackdowns on dissidents, to download stories from blocked sites and read them. Using digital steganography, Collage can hide up to fifteen articles in seven medium sized photos.

Once the material is embedded in a Flickr image, anyone with Collage can download it and extract the stories. A censor attempting to monitor traffic from a prohibited site would only see the reader visiting Flickr, which is not generally blocked by web censors.

Collage can also be easily extended so that stories are embedded in other photo-sharing sites. The idea is to spread material across numerous sites that host user-generated content so that the activity of someone running Collage appears much like that of any internet user and the censors cannot just block access to Flickr. Collage does, however, rely on the goodwill of Flickr users, who will have to provide access to the images where the articles are to be hidden.

The software is made up of two distinct parts, according to a copy of the paper the research team plans to present at Usenix: there is a “message vector layer” that embeds the content in the Twitter message or photo — what the group calls a “cover traffic” — and a “rendezvous mechanism” that allows various parties to publish and retrieve the embedded messages once they are downloaded from Twitter or Flickr or some other social network. The researchers say their method won’t allow the sending of large files, but will allow the transmission of short text files or other communications.

Countries that censor the internet will probably label Collage as an illegal program, however, it will still be difficult to near impossible for a country to control all usage of such programs. While a country can ban access to Flickr, it won’t be able to ban every single site that takes photos from Flickr and posts them elsewhere.