Electronic Surveillance is defined in federal law as the non-consensual acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire or electronic communication, under circumstances in which a party to the communication has a reasonable expectation of privacy. The “contents” of a communication consists of any information concerning the identity of the parties, or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of the communication.
Examples of electronic surveillance include: wiretapping, bugging, videotaping; geolocation tracking such as via RFID, GPS, or cell-site data; data mining, social media mapping, and the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. Such surveillance tracks communications that falls into two general categories: wire and electronic communications. “Wire communications” involve the transfer of the contents from one point to another via a wire, cable, or similar device. “Electronic communications” refer to the transfer of information, data, sounds, or other contents via electronic means, such as email, VoIP, or uploading to the cloud.
—Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute, “Electronic Surveillance“
Superheroes worry about having their identities revealed, while the rest of us in the real world worry about surveillance technologies and how they can be easily abused.
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With vast amounts of data becoming available to intelligence analysts, new tools will help them sift and interpret it all—but they will introduce new risks, too.
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ForcedEntry is “one of the most technically sophisticated exploits” Project Zero security researchers have ever seen.
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The world’s most notorious surveillance company says it wants to clean up its act. Go on, we’re listening.
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eBook surveillance is potentially part of a larger trend in which data collection that would be illegal if performed by a state actor has become a common business practice of a private actor.
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Current learning analytics practices may be inconsistent with higher education institutions’ fiduciary responsibilities. Institutional interests and student interests are not identical, and we should not assume they align.
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Edward Snowden touched off a global debate in 2013 when he gave Barton Gellman, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald each a vast and explosive archive of highly classified files revealing the extent of the American government’s access to our every communication. They shared the Pulitzer Prize that year for public service. For Gellman, who never stopped reporting, that was only the beginning.
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In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
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The boundaries of privacy are in dispute, and its future is in doubt. Citizens, politicians and business leaders are asking if societies are making the wisest tradeoffs. The Times is embarking on this monthslong project to explore the technology and where it’s taking us, and to convene debate about how it can best help realize human potential.
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I am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people. I’ve been writing about security issues on my blog since 2004, and in my monthly newsletter since 1998. I’m a Special Advisor to IBM Security, a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a board member of EFF. This personal website expresses the opinions of none of those organizations.
Schneier on Security – “Crypto-Gram” Newsletter Read More
Permanent Record
By Edward Snowden
Published by Metropolitan Books, September 17, 2019
“Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.”
Permanent Record Read More
You are under surveillance right now.
Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who’s with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you’re unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you’re thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it.
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World Read More