Discover- Google’s eyes are watching you

In the latest issue of Discover magazine, there’s an article on the topic of comercial satellite images, Google Street View and such things. The article is called No Place to Hide, by Sharon Weinberger (starts on p.32). When I find a more readable link that what I’ve given above, I’ll add that in.

A bit of interesting info-

GeoEye-1 (planned launch next month) will have a ground resolution of 41 centimeters.

“From 423 miles in space, we’ll be able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond”

For nongovernmental customers- we get the degraded 1/2 meter resolution.

Chickens coming home to roost for Google/YouTube in Viacom lawsuit

Last week a US court ruled that “Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube”.

Google must divulge YouTube log
Remember those IP addresses which Google was arguing should not be considered personally identifiable information earlier this year?

Leading privacy expert Simon Davies told BBC News that the privacy of millions of YouTube users was threatened.

He said: “The chickens have come home to roost for Google.

“Their arrogance and refusal to listen to friendly advice has resulted in the privacy of tens of millions being placed under threat.”

Mr Davies said privacy campaigners had warned Google for years that IP addresses were personally identifiable information.

Google pledged last year to anonymise IP addresses for search information but it has said nothing about YouTube data.

Mr Davies said: “Governments and organisations are realising that companies like Google have a warehouse full of data. And while that data is stored it is under threat of being used and putting privacy in danger.”

The EFF said: “The Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube.

Proskauer Rose attorney Louis Solomon said the parties are now debating how to share the YouTube data with individual IP addresses masked, but while still ensuring that different users can be distinguished.

source Why worry about masking them if they aren’t “personally identifiable information”?

Don’t give Google a free pass on data collection, privacy advocates say after YouTube ruling

“Google has a business practice of retaining all the search queries of YouTube viewers,” Rotenberg said. “It is this practice that puts consumer data at risk.”

The end result, he added, “is exactly what were warning about” during a court dispute between Google and the U.S. Department of Justice over Internet search data two years ago.

In that case, the DOJ subpoenaed Google to turn over records on millions of search queries that the government said it needed as part of an effort to defend the Child Online Protection Act from legal challenges. EPIC supported Google’s ultimately successful effort to oppose the subpoena, Rotenberg said. But, he added, the privacy group cautioned even then that as part of the discovery proceedings in criminal or civil cases, Google could at any time be asked to turn over users’ personal data.

Google’s continuing habit of storing highly detailed search data so the information can be analyzed for targeted marketing purposes poses a “real concern” for U.S. residents, Rotenberg said. As the decision in the Viacom case demonstrates, “companies can’t always control who has access to this sort of data,” he noted.

Furthermore, Google’s argument that the IP addresses stored in the YouTube logging database represent personally identifiable information is at odds with the company’s previously stated views on that issue, according to Rotenberg. In cases such as its dispute with the DOJ, Google argued that IP addresses and the other search-related data was practically useless in helping anyone to identify an individual, Rotenberg said. Stanton made the same point in his July 2 ruling in favor of Viacom.

“There is a clear contradiction in Google’s position, that they will assert privacy interests when it is in their favor to do so,” Rotenberg said.

US and EU close to sharing their datamines, Wall Street wants to continue oil speculation

I wanted to make a new post in honor of my stat counter being about to rolling over the 50K mark. Basically, it’s just the same old story, though. Greed and an increasingly Big Brotherlike world. I wish I had something more heartening to post at the moment. I’ll keep looking.

U.S. and EU near deal on sharing data

The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement that would allow law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information - including credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits - about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

and Sweden, a member nation of the EU has just passed its new law allowing

all cross-border internet and telephone traffic to be monitored

.

Wall Street

Lobbies to Protect Speculative Oil Trades
(E)xecutives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two of Wall Street’s largest investment banks, made the case that their multibillion-dollar investments in energy contracts have not led to higher oil prices.

I made up a little NNDB map of some of the top oil, securities and banking board interlocks. It’s nowhere near as big as some of the other board interlock maps I’ve worked on in the past since it is focused on a few narrow segments rather than the bigger picture.

Separately, lobbyists for the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and other financial entities such as hedge funds roamed through congressional office buildings this month and, in the Senate, left behind short policy statements that defended the current state of regulation. “Blaming speculation for the increase in energy prices is to confuse causation and correlation,” one of the documents said.

A second document, or “talker,” asserted: “Congress and regulators have acted to strengthen oversight of the energy markets. Give the new authorities time to work.”

But time is running short. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates oil trading, has drawn the increasing ire of lawmakers for exempting financial firms from rules that limit speculative buying, a prerogative usually reserved for airlines and trucking companies that need to lock in future fuel costs. The CFTC has also waived regulations on U.S. investors who trade commodities on some overseas markets, allowing them to accumulate large quantities of the future oil supply by making purchases on lightly regulated foreign exchanges.

ETA:
So, I went looking for posts about solutions to add a bit on to this post; here’s what I’ve got…
The World’s Worst Problems Can Be Solved
The Orion Project: Energy. Humanity. Hope.
Private surfing
Lawns To Gardens Episode 5: Worm Poop

Big Brother comes to Sweden? Bill to “monitor all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country”

World+dog ignores Sweden’s Draconian wiretap bill by Dan Goodin, published in the UK’s Register. Think it doesn’t matter what happens in Sweden, since you live in “the land of the free and the home of the brave? Better think again, because it’s the world wide web…
Sweden. One of the co-developers (Niklas Zennström) of Skype, Kazaa and Joost is Swedish. The Pirate Bay (and their new blogging service Baywords), Swedish. The Pirate Bay’s ISP, PRQ, (based in Sweden) also hosts Wikileaks.

I’d set up a fake email address through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hated Internet surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret from everyone, even the cops.

(from Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, p.40 in .pdf of the ebook)

H/T to ThinkingShift for pointing out the story.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s excellent young adult novel, Little Brother, a book I mentioned a week or two ago. Neil Gaiman put it very well when he wrote about Little Brother

I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.

I don’t do book reviews, but I’ll paste here a few snips from the book which as I read them seemed worth a cut and paste to a blog entry. Oh, and I just have mention in passing that I enjoyed the way Cory tossed “caltrops” and the Scoville scale into the story. Also, food for thought for me was the idea that arfids (RFID chips) in library books might be used to track people around… being over 25, a lot of the tech stuff I’ll probably have to remain pretty clueless about. But, I do recommend that you consider donating a copy for a teacher or librarian. No doubt some arfids will get nuked, so the list may continually need replacements copies, but that’s a small price to pay for an important message.

I still take my freedom for granted and let other
people take it away from me. You’re the first generation to grow
up in Gulag America, and you know what your freedom is worth
to the last goddamned cent!

Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front
pages of newspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and
Japan, and broadcasters around the world have aired the clip on
primetime news. The issue came to a head last night, when the
British Broadcasting Corporation’s National News Evening
program ran a special report on the fact that no American
broadcaster or news agency has covered this story.

The quote above didn’t remind me of Sibel Edmonds. No, no, not at all…

Not really Cory’s words, but ones we could all use to see more frequently:

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

if it’s the DHS’s job to keep us safe, they’re failing. All the crap they’ve done, none of it would stop the bridge from being blown up again. Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom? Making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other? Calling dissenters traitors? The point of terrorism is to terrify us. The DHS terrifies me.

Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: it turns us into prisoners of our own device.

(from the Afterword by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, Xbox Hacker )