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Mar 29 15 11:00 PM
The Australian Financial Review's political editor Laura Tingle on Wednesday explained to news sources, in a light-hearted fashion, how they could continue to leak to her despite the new data retention laws. For those in the know out there who had lots to say in response on Twitter, here are my thoughts on some of the more technical points. I'm not a lawyer, but I have a reasonable understanding of information security and how it operates within, and across, organisations, and I have five issues with some of the tips her informant gave. My first point is that trying to delineate between metadata and data is to debate about angels on a pinhead. If I made metadata about your metadata, then your metadata is now data that my metadata describes – where is your god now? Let's agree that it's all data, because it is. The new data retention laws highlight the fact that it is all but impossible to cover your tracks online. Greg Newington Secondly, this idea that driving people to use overseas services such as Wickr, Gmail, Skype, Snapchat, etc in order to avoid the data retention regime is eye-poppingly misleading. If a public servant wanted to leak something to you that was ultra sensitive, and you've pointed them to use any of these overseas providers, the security and confidentiality of that information is now entirely dependent on the security capabilities of that third party provider. Personally, I'd prefer that if someone thinks that information is important enough to blow the whistle on, it isn't fired off into the cloud where accountability is easy to claim and hard to verify. Edward Snowden's leaks showed that the US National Security Agency is quite committed to drilling into these vendors in any way it can, and Snowden's leaks also proved that the NSA cannot control its own information.
The Australian Financial Review's political editor Laura Tingle on Wednesday explained to news sources, in a light-hearted fashion, how they could continue to leak to her despite the new data retention laws.
For those in the know out there who had lots to say in response on Twitter, here are my thoughts on some of the more technical points.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have a reasonable understanding of information security and how it operates within, and across, organisations, and I have five issues with some of the tips her informant gave.
My first point is that trying to delineate between metadata and data is to debate about angels on a pinhead. If I made metadata about your metadata, then your metadata is now data that my metadata describes – where is your god now? Let's agree that it's all data, because it is.
The new data retention laws highlight the fact that it is all but impossible to cover your tracks online. Greg Newington
Secondly, this idea that driving people to use overseas services such as Wickr, Gmail, Skype, Snapchat, etc in order to avoid the data retention regime is eye-poppingly misleading.
If a public servant wanted to leak something to you that was ultra sensitive, and you've pointed them to use any of these overseas providers, the security and confidentiality of that information is now entirely dependent on the security capabilities of that third party provider.
Personally, I'd prefer that if someone thinks that information is important enough to blow the whistle on, it isn't fired off into the cloud where accountability is easy to claim and hard to verify.
Edward Snowden's leaks showed that the US National Security Agency is quite committed to drilling into these vendors in any way it can, and Snowden's leaks also proved that the NSA cannot control its own information.
Read more @ http://www.afr.com/technology/not-so-simple-to-protect-secret-sources-under-data-retention-laws-20150326-1m80im
There is an old expression that an Englishman's home is his castle — and even for those of us who are not male or English, we still imagine the home to be a refuge against the bustle of the street and the prying eyes of nosey neighbours. When we go home we make a retreat from the chaos of the world, hunkering down into our own private kingdoms, places of safety and security. How architects think about the domestic reflects a popular desire to control how much of our home life we reveal. The Viennese modernist Adolf Loos believed that the outside of the home should be unremarkable, without ornament, plain and anonymous like a face lost in a city crowd. By contrast, the interior should be materially rich, eclectic and highly personal. How we design our homes, he argued, sends strong messages to society about who we think we are, and who we want to be. For Loos, sending messages was giving the game away — if we really want to be ourselves at home we have to conceal our lives from public scrutiny. That concealment is becoming harder and harder to manage. As you read this, the United States' National Security Agency (as well as a myriad of other corporations and governments) are almost definitely monitoring your home internet traffic and scanning your emails. Although the main building itself is not a secret, nothing is known about what goes on inside Under a programme called "Prism" they are keeping records of your phone's geolocation, harvesting your metadata and tracking your browser history. They are filing and documenting your most intimate details, and as we know from whistleblower Edward Snowden, NSA workers routinely share your nude photos with their colleagues (in an office culture apparently closer to fraternity "bros" than intelligence specialists). Your data is siphoned directly from the biggest servers in the world through so-called "backdoor" surveillance tools — including those of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — and stored in the NSA's Massive Data Repository in Utah. Alongside your own personal information, more generalised data scooping and snooping is banked, logged and then synthesised, analysed and cross-compared.
There is an old expression that an Englishman's home is his castle — and even for those of us who are not male or English, we still imagine the home to be a refuge against the bustle of the street and the prying eyes of nosey neighbours. When we go home we make a retreat from the chaos of the world, hunkering down into our own private kingdoms, places of safety and security.
How architects think about the domestic reflects a popular desire to control how much of our home life we reveal. The Viennese modernist Adolf Loos believed that the outside of the home should be unremarkable, without ornament, plain and anonymous like a face lost in a city crowd. By contrast, the interior should be materially rich, eclectic and highly personal.
How we design our homes, he argued, sends strong messages to society about who we think we are, and who we want to be. For Loos, sending messages was giving the game away — if we really want to be ourselves at home we have to conceal our lives from public scrutiny.
That concealment is becoming harder and harder to manage. As you read this, the United States' National Security Agency (as well as a myriad of other corporations and governments) are almost definitely monitoring your home internet traffic and scanning your emails.
Although the main building itself is not a secret, nothing is known about what goes on inside
Under a programme called "Prism" they are keeping records of your phone's geolocation, harvesting your metadata and tracking your browser history. They are filing and documenting your most intimate details, and as we know from whistleblower Edward Snowden, NSA workers routinely share your nude photos with their colleagues (in an office culture apparently closer to fraternity "bros" than intelligence specialists).
Your data is siphoned directly from the biggest servers in the world through so-called "backdoor" surveillance tools — including those of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — and stored in the NSA's Massive Data Repository in Utah. Alongside your own personal information, more generalised data scooping and snooping is banked, logged and then synthesised, analysed and cross-compared.
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
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