In the last ten days, I’ve been thinking about how to pick this up and simply iterate on the initial posts that I had created, sharing interesting information about a part of the world that we know little about. This is especially interesting since the graduate course that I’m currently working on is titled “Topics in Intelligence”, requiring a weekly “intelligence report” or an aggregate of data about a nation of our choosing. Having equal parts dumb luck and quick response, no one had taken China yet, a country that has continued to impress me with the insanity of its nature but the depth of its history. As a result, I’ve gotten to intertwine some personal curiosity with the education that I’m pursuing. What good luck! Perhaps I can share some of the findings with the blog just to gauge response and feedback. We’ll have to see!
Over the last week, we’ve gotten to see some shocking stuff. Since I’m not needing to share much of my China research in this particular post, I’m going to share a bit of the other stuff that I’m reading…
News
The broken record of breaking encryption skips again in Florida shooter case
Sean Gallagher for ArsTechnica Link
The debate of encryption is back again. After a Saudi Air Force officer shot three members of the US Navy, two iPhones were left behind. Drumming up the same line of political pressure that occurred after the San Bernadino shooting, there’s another round of calls from Attorney General Barr to combat the problem that the intelligence community loves to call “going dark” and what they frame as Apple’s resistance the accommodating law enforcement. On its face, it seems noble. We want to see what the bad guys are doing.
The trouble is that this is a bit of a disingenuous ask. Apple has already come out in a rebuke of the Justice Department’s claims, stating that they shared gigabytes of data over seven legal requests that likely include iCloud backup, iMessage contents, and much more. Combining this with the fact that calls are tracked by the service provider, making them easily accessed via a subpoena, it becomes increasingly hard to look at this as a good faith argument for this case. Instead, it seems that this is political opportunism that is seeking to take the notion of combating terrorism in order to pressure Apple to make phones with a drive that can be unencrypted.
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
Kashmir Hill for the New York Times Link
An unknown, small startup driven by a curious Australian technologist is pushing some serious boundaries by creating an artificial intelligence meant to integrate open intelligence sources such as Facebook and Twitter to perform facial recognition on camera feeds. The pairing of this OSINT feed in order to create an end product for use with facial recognition creates a clear problem. With their stated goals, they sounds fairly noble, stopping child exploitation and fighting violent crime, there’s a slippery slope that attempting to sell this product can lead to include cyberstalking, an already prevalent occurrence all too well known by many females on the internet, among other questions of civil liberties in selling to governments and police departments.
Fortunately, Facebook is currently mulling over whether this is a violation of their terms of service that explicitly prevent scraping for cases such as these and Twitter has already issued a cease-and-desist, requesting the immediate deletion of all images that Clearview AI has collected. Surprisingly, even Clearview AI’s story of helping the NYPD catch a suspected terrorist appears to be fabricated with the department issuing a denial. To make the whole thing even more bizarre, it’s surfaced that funding for the company comes from Peter Thiel, a controversial figure in tech that aligns closely with Trump, and Hoan Ton That, Clearview’s founder, has also been spotted with alt-right figures like Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theory peddler, and Chuck Johnson, active Holocaust denier and avowed white nationalist. To say that this is getting to be strange is an immense understatement.
Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data
Joseph Cox for Vice Link
Avast, the makers of the ever popular free antivirus solution of the same name, has been accused of selling user data gathered from unsuspecting users of the free service. While the common expression has always been “if you’re not paying, you are the product”, this goes well beyond that. The adage would be more accurate to say that “if you’re not paying, you’re being harvested constantly in ever more invasive ways” although that doesn’t seem to roll off the tongue. While there isn’t much surprise in companies selling user data, the nature of the data sold is what is most problematic. The data they referred to as the “All Clicks Feed” includes practically every single thing that a user clicks on in their browser with some rough anonymization done.
The trouble is that anonymous data just isn’t. There’s no way to reasonably prevent data from being revealed. A partner article from PCMag even goes into detail, showing exactly how data from this set could be quickly reversed in simple terms. In short, Google or Amazon can buy this data set and see exactly when someone submitted a complex search term or bought a product and use that “device ID” to understand the entirety of a user’s behavior. It’s worth noting that Google was an active client of Jumpshot, Avast’s subsidiary that sold the data. As of now, Avast is claiming to have 435 million active users and Jumpshot claims to have 100 million devices.
Books
Outside of internet news, I’ve been trying to put down some more regular books. The things you used to have to read in during the summer before going back to school. I’ll post to the Goodreads page for each and just give some quick thoughts!
IT
By Stephen King Link
This one’s a re-read although I really forgot how horrifying this book was. Not just length, clocking in at 1116 pages, yet the creepiness that Pennywise oozes throughout. The changes made when shifting mediums to the movies was probably for the best since a teenager who kills animals and an uncomfortable sex scene in the sewers really isn’t a great thing for anyone on the silver screen. Great book, no matter what. This reminds why Stephen King is a master of horror.
The Memory Police
By Yoko Ogawa Link
A short read that merges the mundane with the surreal, you’re taken to an island on which a police force exists solely to enforce the forgetting of things in waves. Originally written in 1984 in Japanese, it was translated just last year and immediately caught many eyes since it seems very appropriate for 2020, the time of “fake news” and technology pushing our limits. Eventually, we may lose bits of ourselves similar to the small losses of the island.