the future

new developments

Posted by Julia Scher

New Internet Monitor report: “Measuring Internet Activity”
Internet Monitor is delighted to announce the publication of “Measuring Internet Activity: A (Selective) Review of Methods and Metrics,” the second in a series of special reports that focus on key events and new developments in Internet freedom, incorporating technical, legal, social, and political analyses.

“Measuring Internet Activity,” authored by Robert Faris and Rebekah Heacock, explores current efforts to measure digital activity within three areas: infrastructure and access, control, and content and communities.
From Internet Monitor, “New Internet Monitor report: ‘Measuring Internet Activity: A (Selective) Review of Methods and Metrics'”
About Internet Monitor | @thenetmonitor

Jake Applebaum at Schauspiel Köln & Update

Posted by Christian

Unmissable events at Schauspiel Köln: A play about Wikileaks and the NSA, a panel discussion with, among other figures central to current affairs, Jake Applebaum, and on Sunday, the beginning of a discussion series called Surviving under Surveillance.

Saturday 23 Nov 2013: Assassinate Assange – Reloaded
von Angela Richter
Regie: Angela Richter
ANSCHLIESSEND PANEL (IN ENGL. SPRACHE) MIT JACOB APPELBAUM (JOURNALIST), RENATA AVILA (MENSCHENRECHTSANWÄLTIN), JOSEPH FARRELL (WIKILEAKS), ANGELA RICHTER, JENNIFER ROBINSON (RECHTSBERATUNG WIKILEAKS). DAS GESPRÄCH FÜHRT JOHN GOETZ (JOURNALIST).

Sunday 24 Nov: Assassinate Assange – Reloaded
von Angela Richter
Regie: Angela Richter
Anschliessend Diskussionsreihe
Überleben unter Überwachung
Jacob Appelbaum lädt ein
MODERATION ANGELA RICHTER

http://www.schauspielkoeln.de/spielplan/

We’ll make the Sunday events an excursion, keep your ticket and receipt, and we’ll reimburse you.

Some selected material on Applebaum: His keynote talk at last year’s Chaos Communication Congress:




And an interview in N+1 mag. Note, both of these are from before the NSA revelations, and in retrospect look quite lucent. Quote:

But the thing is, taking precautions with your communications is like safe sex in that you have a responsibility to other people to be safe—your transgressions can fuck other people over. The reality is that when you find out it will be too late. It’s not about doing a perfect job, it’s about recognizing you have a responsibility to do that job at all, and doing the best job you can manage, without it breaking down your ability to communicate, without it ruining your day, and understanding that sometimes it’s not safe to undertake an action, even if other times you would.

201113_assassinate

Postscript:

I have some comments and notes that I would like to share with you, but please post yours here below first (anonymously if you like).

Also:
A good and a bad review: http://www.ksta.de/kultur/mrs-heart,15189520,25127138.html

The bad one is more interesting: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buehne-und-konzert/mister-heart-12679064.html

If I may translate the last paragraph, about the power of art:

“All the theater would need to do, in order to do justice to the issues at heart, is ‘just’ to develop the self-confidence and go back to its roots and trust its artistic powers and possibilities. Then it would be, by pulling the audience into a process of understanding that is, by being subjective, ambiguous, playful and exceeding the simple transmission of information, the last public space that the NSA can not spy on. A medium that would be as suspicious as it would be indispensable.”

Im Original:

“Dabei müsste das Theater, um dem Thema gerecht zu werden, „nur“ das Selbstbewusstsein entwickeln, sich auf die eigenen Wurzeln zu besinnen und seinen künstlerischen Möglichkeiten zu vertrauen. Dann wäre es, wie es den Zuschauer in einen subjektiven, vieldeutigen, spielerischen, über die bloße Mitteilungsebene weit hinausgehenden Verstehensprozess zieht, der letzte öffentliche Ort, in den die NSA nicht hineinspionieren kann. Und als Medium so verdächtig wie unverzichtbar.”

physical and virtual

Posted by Christian

In the words of Eric Schmidt, executive chairman at Google (paraphrased, I can’t find the original quote):

“Identity will change from something that originates in the physical world and is being projected into the virtual world, to Identity that is created in the virtual and experienced in the physical world.”

Coincidentally, there is this news story about how US officials set up tents in hotel rooms where they fear surveillance. Shielding from video cameras, defeating audio bugs with a white noise generator, and even protecting against electromagnetic snooping. It took some work to find out what they look like from the outside. They appear very physical indeed. A psychoanalytic’s dream.

tenda-gonfiabile-010

tent-ready

http://www.solianiemc.com/

F.tenda-TIS-rm

F.tenda-ingresso-CIMA-apertura

Can we get one please?

what paranoid networking physically looks like (and sounds like)

Posted by Christian

From a discussion about protecting yourself against most ‘black bag’ and ‘evil maid’ attacks.

put distinctive scratches into all your peripherals, take a photo, and regularly check that the scratches are identical to the photo. This is how weapons inspectors ensure the seals protecting weapons caches have not been tampered with. The seals are scratched in a distinctive way that can’t be forged, then check periodically. Use tamper evident tape on your devices to slow down a burglar that wants to plant a keylogger in your keyboard.

The computer in question is an ‘air gapped’ machine, which means it is not connected to any network. You’d use it for extreme operational security (i.e. working with leaked NSA documents).

If you have a desktop [computer], put super glue in all the USB interfaces so they aren’t functional. Do the same to any interface on the mother boards that could attach removable media. Try to make the case impossible to open (bonus points for encasing it in cement except for the fan, CD tray, cables for keyboard/mouse, power cable and power button).

Turns out that really isolating a computer that you work on is a very hard thing to do. The latest threat seems to be some kind of super-malware that can bridge air gaps by communicating via a computer’s built-in speaker and mic. Allegedly it ‘talks’ at around 18kHz which is a frequency most people cannot hear.

a restaurant’s walk-in freezer is the poor man’s faraday cage

postscript to the Biometrics presentation yesterday

Posted by Christian

Just a thought, regarding the representative function of portraits. The change is especially visible in ruler’s portraits. Take e.g. the Doge of Venice by Bellini, 1501:

Giovanni_Bellini,_portrait_of_Doge_Leonardo_Loredan

Presumably as with other portraits of this kind, copies were put up in official buildings all around the country. So that the Doge would always be present. This way, one person can be in many places at once. And exercise authority.

Nowadays this, too, has been democraticized. With the automatic synchronization of biometric face databases, we’re all everywhere, anytime. Except that the power relations have changed, too. It’s pictures of those that need to be controlled and disciplined, that are being exchanged.

Those pictures are normally not put up on a wall (except maybe when you’re on the most wanted list). So what is it that happens exactly, when no human is looking at those portraits, but algorithms. What is being done to the representation of you?

Emotion Detection

Posted by Christian

emotion detection emotient
A still from the video below. The amazing bit about this is not that it’s there, and apparently working, but how incredibly crude it looks. The analysis meta-data drawing (if that’s what you can call the lines drawn onto the faces) look like a child’s drawing of a face, unable to display any empathy, individuality, attitude. It works very well with the actors trying to do a blank Buster Keaton face. I wonder why, and what this tells me.