Articles with the Tag Civil liberties

Hey You, Get Off Of My Cloud

Civil liberties, Culture, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism
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Why I don’t do Facebook, reason No. umpty-three…

When it comes to personal data security I’ve always been paranoid, and with good reason. From Techcrunch:

You’ve got to hand it to Facebook. They certainly know how to do security — not.

Today I was tipped off that there is a major security flaw in the social networking site that, with just a few mouse clicks, enables any user to view the live chats of their ‘friends’. Using what sounds like a simple trick, a user can also access their friends’ latest pending friend-requests and which friends they share in common. That’s a lot of potentially sensitive information.

Unbelievable I thought, until I just tested the exploit for myself.

And guess what? It works.

The irony is that the exploit is enabled by they way that Facebook lets you preview your own privacy settings. In other words, a privacy feature contains a flaw that lets others view private information if they are aware of the exploit.

I know Facebook wants us to share more information and open up, but I’m not sure that this is quite what they had in mind.

Video…

Oooh, I dunno, I wouldn’t put it past them, especially with the current requirements placed ISP’s and social networking companies to provide information to security organisations – how better to datamine friends and associates of someone under suspicion, no warrant required?

, “…in future finding out other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules”.
Sir David Omand, former Whitehall intelligence and security co-ordinator February 2009

I was having this very conversation with my son yesterday, apropos of Charlie Stross’ article on cloud computing and Steve Jobs’ long term strategy for the development of Apple as a data handler.

My son and his iPhone-toting friends may consider me an old fart for being firmly in the open-source using, roll your own cloud tendency, but being what might be considered a political dissident in a vicious neoliberal society I’ve got good reason to be paranoid. And this from someone who read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson as a teenager and loved it. Now he’s happy just to hand over his data to any old Tomasina, Dick or Harret. Feh, where did I go wrong as a parent?

This latest piece of Facebookery just goes to prove me right and him wrong. Let some corporation have control over my personal details? Not a hope in hell.

Linky Linky

Food, Linky Linky, Merkins..., Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, UK elections, UK politics
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How was such a terrible environmental disaster allowed to happen? Deep Sea News has at least some answers in The Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill: A Timeline. And guess what – the whole affair has Halliburton’s mucky fingerprints all over it.

Dill and Honey flavour potato chips anyone? Satay and Ginger? Frikadelle? Avocado & Lobster?

Maak de Smaak, the Cloggie version of Do Us a Flavour

If you thought Walkers crisps fans came up with some weird flavours in their “Do Us A Flavour” competition (last year’s winner, Builder’s Breakfast, allegedly tasted of bacon, eggs, sausage and baked beans) then you should see some of the suggestions in the Dutch version, Maak de Smaak. 95% of the entries can be dismissed as mere variations on that classic cloggie theme, kaas, kaas en kaas, garnalen met en beetje kaas, but there are some interesting entries, like the aforesaid Avocado & Lobster – mind you, whether the suggestions will translate into actual recognisable flavours remains to be tasted. Walker’s is still way ahead of Lay’s in the PR stakes though: their latest marketing effort is to tie new flavours to the world cup. Anyone for a bratwurst crisp?

Who says Merkins don’t get UK politics? A masterly summation of the election so far, by Stanley at Unfogged:

Let’s see. Labor and Tories are both lame-os. Brown, because, basically he’s boring, and there’s a recession about, and something about the banks, plus Britons are still smarting from the Blair decision to play wardude alongside Bush in Iraq, which was totes expensive and morally squicky at best. Cameron, because, despite being young and charismatic (not to mention riding a bike to work—did I get that part right? I remember something about a bicycle), he’s a privileged wanker.

There’s also the fact that that Cameron has (it’s not original but I can’t remember which commenter wrote it) a waxy-melty face like a Victorian doll. No really, just look:

Victorian wax boy doll

But do go on:

But! This year, they had very, very special US-style, televised debates, which, gasp!, propelled Liberal Dem Clegg into the national spotlight, and it’s possible that now, mayhaps, the Liberal Dems could win a plurality, but, no matter what, it seems no single party’s going to outright take it, so some sort of coalition of governing parties is inevitable, not to mention likely to be unstable. After all, the last time there was a comparable power-sharing agreement (in the 1970s? writing this from memory is easy, because I can seemingly make stuff up), the whole thing went in the can within six months or so.

So, lots of crazy uncertainty abounds, and no one’s really happy about the whole mess. But the queen’s position is definitely safe (for now)

Yup, that’s pretty much it.

Believe, indeed. We didn’t think the Labour Party would do such an illiberal and opressive thing as to force biometric ID cards on an unwilling populace either. But they did, because they were shit scared of being accused of being soft on immigration, just like Obama and the Dems. Now look where they are in the polls. Goodbye Gordon, Goodbye, Obama…

OMFG. This latest from Oklahoma is utterly inhumane. I’d even call it torture. From the Rude Pundit:

The Oklahoma Legislature Will Look Inside Your Daughter’s Vagina (Part of the “Your State Sucks, Too” Series):
The brutal assault on women’s rights continues in states where you’d expect there to be a brutal assault on women’s rights. This week’s yahoos are the members of the Oklahoma legislature who voted by a veto-proof majority to require pregnant women who want an abortion to get a vaginal-probe ultrasound in order to show them the fetus. There is no exception for victims of rape or incest.

In other words, if you are a woman who wants a perfectly legal medical procedure in Oklahoma, you must submit to the forced insertion of an implement into you, even though that act carries medical risks (you know, perforation, infection, that kind of stuff) and serves no actual medical purpose. It’s just to be total dicks about abortion.

In otherer words, the Oklahoma legislature wants to sodomize pregnant women.

Like I said, OMFG.

I Sentence You To Be Taken From Here and DNA Tested Till You’re Dead. Or Until We Get Our Sample. Whichever’s The Soonest.

Policing, Torture, Totalitarianism
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America may have a Democrat president charming the rest of the world but at home Cheney’s heirs are still in charge. And they’re still gaily torturing away willy-nilly, with judicial approval.

After police lost or contaminated an already willingly given DNA sample, Niagara County Court Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza issued an order requiring the suspect to provide another. Not so unusual, you might think except the order was issued ex-parte – which meant defence counsel had no chance to object.

Odd. Why ex-parte? Why would the defence object to a DNA test? It’s a quick and painless operation. Well actually no, it’s not. Not the way Niagara County does it. William N Grigg describes what happned to Ryan S. Smith of Niagara Falls, New York, a 21-year-old charged with burglary:

Smith was brought in handcuffs to the police station and informed that the investigators had been authorized to use physical force. Although nobody intended to harm him, Smith was told, the sample was going to be surrendered; it was just a question of how much he wanted to endure before it was. Smith still refused to comply.

Confronted with an intransigent suspect who refused to provide critical evidence, the investigators reluctantly strapped the handcuffed Smith to a downward sloping table, covered his face with a towel, and waterboarded him. He broke within seconds, and meekly permitted the DNA sample to be taken.

On the basis of the DNA evidence, Smith was hit with a 24-count criminal indictment. He was also charged with “criminal contempt of court” for forcing his interrogators to torture him.

When Smith’s defense counsel filed a motion to suppress the evidence based on Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections, the same Judge who issued the ex parte orders produced a ruling validating the use of waterboarding as means of forcing compliance, as long as it’s not done “maliciously” or to “excess.”

This account is true and accurate in every detail, save one – the specific torture protocol that was used to compel Smith to surrender a sample of his DNA.

He wasn’t subjected to water torture; instead, he was given a brief taste of electroshock torture by way of a Taser that was used to inflict a “drive stun.” This involves placing the prongs of the device directly on the body of the victim for a brief, painful, paralyzing charge.

Oh, so that’s why it was ex-parte. I think should think the defence would have been sure to object if they’d known their client was to be tortured into compliance with a taser.

It may have been only a tasering (!) and not an actual waterboarding but that’s hardly the point. It was no abberation; those were no bad apples or rogue cops acting on their own warped initiative. The official torturers were acting on the direct orders of both a DA and a judge.

As Detective Lt. William Thomson would later testify, Assistant Niagara County D.A. Doreen M. Hoffmann, who is presiding over the prosecution of Ryan Smith, instructed the police that “we could use the minimum force that was necessary” to force the suspect to submit to a DNA test.

Now, think carefully about that formulation: In principle, it authorizes the use of any amount of force needed to extract the sample, since the critical term is “necessary.” As long as the police were reasonably careful in calibrating the duress the applied, they could continue escalating the level of force until it broke the suspect; wherever they end up would obviously be the “minimum” necessary to accomplish their objectives.

Exactly. It doesn’t matter what method of torture the official torturers use; it’s almost irrelevant, though there’s something particularly distasteful and reminiscent of Pinochet’s Chile about Tasers. Torture is torture is torture. You’re using pain to make someone do something. Once that’s been judicially ordered the dam is breached and torture is official policy. In no time at all physical coercion becomes the norm – never the last option, but always the first. It’s practical everyday fascism; it may be red in tooth and claw but it’s always covered by the paperwork.

This week we’ve seen waterboarding reportedly used in London against drug suspects by the Met. Bad apples, say the police. That time it wasn’t, thankfully, court-ordered and was entirely unofficial – but given that British police methods slavishly follow the US as night follows day, it can’t be long before it is.

A Good Day To Bury A DNA Database

Uncategorized
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The expenses scandal rolls on and on, and while it may be a disaster for the public’s faith in constitutional government, for New Labour it’s business as usual and every new day of scandal is just another good day for burying bad news.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in particular must be chuffed to bits that the politerati’s bogged down in the mire of the expenses scandal; it all not only takes the heat off her personal travails, it lets her get on with dismantling democracy by the back door in decent peace and quiet:

Opposition parties and civil liberty groups united to condemn plans that are being steered through parliament while MPs are distracted by the expenses row.

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats claim the government is seeking to make controversial changes to the national DNA database via a “statutory instrument” because it fears losing a vote that would be required if they were introduced by the more conventional method of primary legislation.

A statutory instrument has to be discussed only by a specialist committee which meets for 90 minutes and is usually made up of 16 MPs and a chairman. Critics say the Labour MPs who will dominate the committee will be handpicked by government whips and therefore back the Home Office proposals

How to do things with rules, in a nutshell.

Wounded and weak though he is, Gordon Brown is still PM and intends to stay PM for the foreseeable future; he still wants to get his way and as we already know, bullying is one of his favoured methods of doing so. I’ll bet those MPs will be handpicked – handpicked to be lying awake nights fretting they’ll be found out about something.

I can only hope that because of the unauthorised publication of the unredacted reciepts (with more yet to come) that the whips have lost most of their coercive power over MPs. I can only hope too that enough MPs are roused by this blatant use misuse of procedure to ensure the DNA database isn’t bulldozed through via statutory instrument while there’s no Speaker and Parliament’s in turmoil.

Those are very faint hopes, though. What they’re fretting about nights may not even be expenses at all: milking allowances may be the least of some MPs’ sins. While the latest revelations are certainly juicy and indicative of the unscrupulousness greed of some MPs, not least the whips themselves, not all scandals are financial and the whips probably have plenty of even juicier stuff left to make members sweat with nervousness and suddenly decide to retire ‘because of health problems’.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that publication of the reciepts has enabled whips to join the dots on some very questionable personal behaviour by some MPs. I think MPs will do what they’re told.

“They who are in the highest places, and have the most power, have the least liberty, because they are the most observed”

Activism, Life under Capitalism, Police Murder, Policing
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This is the sort of story being pushed into the background by the media free for all that’s the MPs expenses scandal; normally it’d cause public outrage. Yet another way in which Parliament’s let down the voters, but at least it shows some people are still watching.

It’s been alleged by lots of those present (or watching live, like me)that the violence at the G20 London protests was incited by police provocateurs to discredit protestors, following the established European pattern.

The police, as is their wont, continue to deny it strenuously, despite damning video evidence. But also as is their wont they made the mistake of assuming the crowd was composed entirely of hippies with dogs on strings.

Wrong!

G20 police ‘used undercover men to incite crowds’

“…Liberal Democrat [MP] Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.

Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.

Brake, a member of the influential home affairs select committee, will raise the allegations when he gives evidence before parliament’s joint committee on human rights on Tuesday.

“When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, ‘There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,'” Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification.

Brake has produced a draft report of his experiences for the human rights committee, having received written statements from people in the crowd. These include Tony Amos, a photographer who was standing with protesters in the Royal Exchange between 5pm and 6pm. “He [one of the alleged officers] was egging protesters on. It was very noticeable,” Amos said. “Then suddenly a protester seemed to identify him as a policeman and turned on him. He legged it towards the police line, flashed some ID and they just let him through, no questions asked.”

Amos added: “He was pretty much inciting the crowd. He could not be called an observer. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories but this really struck me. Hopefully, a review of video evidence will clear this up.”

Clearly German federal police didn’t get the memo. They (accidentally or otherwise) arrested one of their police provocateurs:

Police Officer Arrested for Joining Berlin’s May Day Riot

During the May Day protests last week, Berlin police clashed with nearly every kind of demonstrator imaginable — including one of their own. An off-duty police officer from Frankfurt has been arrested for stone-throwing during riots which left over 450 of his colleagues injured.

[…]

The 24-year-old, usually stationed at Frankfurt International Airport, is suspected of taking part in the May Day riots in Berlin and — in at least two instances — throwing cobblestones and striking police officers. He was off-duty and staying in Kreuzberg, the multi-ethnic and alternative neighborhood at the center of the annual demonstrations, during his visit to the capital, where he completed his training in August last year.

The policeman has been suspended and will remain off-duty until the criminal proceedings are over…

Yeah sure. More like a pressured plod didn’t recognise the code word. Now they have to follow through with the arrest and charge.

If this arrest of a fellow-officer follows the UK pattern, give it a couple of months and most likely any charges will be quietly forgotten and the officer concerned will be compensated with a comfy well-paid admin post in a regional station somewhere.