Tag Archives: privacy

Dispatches from the Decade of the Leak: The Antisec retaliation for Anonymous arrests

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“I do not believe in leaks. I would execute leakers. They’re betraying our country.”

-Ralph Peters, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel

A loosely-knit — or completely unknitted — network of hackers, called Anonymous, has pledged a protracted campaign attacking enemies of democracy. Shortly after their announcement, over a dozen hackers, said to be associated with Anonymous, were arrested for attacks on PayPal. They launched these attacks on PayPal because the website cut off the account for donations to WikiLeaks. After their arrest, the hacker group Antisec attacked over 70 servers for law enforcement departments. Part of the information they acquired includes 10GB of private law enforcement data containing mail spools of police officers from dozens of different departments; usernames, passwords, social security numbers, home addresses and phone numbers to over 7000 officers; alist of hundreds of snitches who made “anonymous” crime tips to the police; and hundreds of internal police academy training files.

The insecurity of government information, in this case the release of personal details about informants who believed to be protected by the veil of anonymity offered by police agencies, is threatening fundamental control mechanisms the state relies upon. This digital monkey-wrenching brings us one step closer to democracy.

Who’s in Big Brother’s Database?

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In this review of  The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid, published by The New York Review of Books, we learn about one of the largest developments in cyber-surveillance and the assault on our privacy by an increasingly tyrannical government.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015.”[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven’t yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

Read the full article at:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231