Loss of Privacy

The TrackingPoint rifle is now available for purchase. A novice shooter can hit a target at 500 yards away. Surely, nothing will ever go wrong with this weapon.

Networked Tracking Scope

Heads Up Display

“Think of it like a smart rifle. You have a smart car; you got a smartphone; well, now we have a smart rifle,” says company President Jason Schauble. He says the TrackingPoint system was built for hunters and target shooters, especially a younger generation that embraces social media.

Except no one is using their smart car or smart car to kill people intentionally. The rifle is a weapon that kills people. That’s it’s purpose. We shouldn’t be making killing people easier.

Schauble says because the company sells directly — instead of going through gun dealers — it knows who its customers are and will vet them. And he says there’s a key feature that prevents anyone other than the registered owner from utilizing the gun’s capabilities.

Many people can pass being “vetted” and still use the weapon against other people. Just because a person passes your tests today doesn’t mean they will pass them a year from now.

“It has a password protection on the scope. When a user stores it, he can password protect the scope that takes the advanced functionality out. So the gun will still operate as a firearm itself, but you cannot do the tag/track/exact, the long range, the technology-driven precision-guided firearm piece without entering that pass code,” he says.

While that’s a nice feature, if a person purchases the rifle with the intention to kill other people, password protections are a moot point.

Josef Weidenholzer discusses data protection friendly search engine Ixquick with privacy advocate Alexander Hanff and Alex van Eesteren from Ixquick.

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Many new credit and debit cards come with chips that allow customers to tap the card to make a purchase. These chips, used in many retail outlets from Tim Hortons to high-end computer shops, are read by payment machines and are supposed to be a safe and convenient way to pay for goods.

Using a Samsung Galaxy SIII — one of the most popular smartphones available in Canada — and a free app downloaded from the Google Play store, CBC was able to read information such as a card number, expiry date and cardholder name simply by holding the smartphone over a debit or credit card.

And it could be done through wallets, pockets and purses.

The app used the near field communication (NFC) antenna built into the Galaxy SIII phone, a feature available on many phones running Google’s Android operating system. The antenna is normally used to allow two phones to talk to each other.

While the apps can’t read CVV information, this isn’t always necessary in order to make a purchase. Many stores have a $25 or $50 limit before you even need to sign for your purchases. Most stores don’t ask for your CVV when you are there in person. Stores such as Staples, type in the last four digits of your credit card number when they ask for the card. The most common place for CVV information is when purchasing something online. Given the fact that the vast majority of retailers don’t ever ask to look at the card, cloning a card for several small purchases can be done without it even needing to look legitimate.

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The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. The agency will neither confirm nor deny specifics. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. (Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5′s– that stretches past the moon.

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Under last month’s White House executive order on cybersecurity, the scans will be driven by classified information provided by U.S. intelligence agencies — including data from the National Security Agency (NSA) — on new or especially serious espionage threats and other hacking attempts. U.S. spy chiefs said on March 12 that cyber attacks have supplanted terrorism as the top threat to the country.

The Department of Homeland Security will gather the secret data and pass it to a small group of telecommunication companies and cyber security providers that have employees holding security clearances, government and industry officials said. Those companies will then offer to process email and other Internet transmissions for critical infrastructure customers that choose to participate in the program.

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