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Legal Network Podcast on Patriot Act Renewal
The Steady Creep of Statist Control
EULA-based Deep Root Spying On Blizzard Entertainment Customers
Acoustical Spying Recovers Passwords With 90-percent Accuracy
Does Your Doctor's Computer Have Spyware?
The Steady Creep of Statist Control
EULA-based Deep Root Spying On Blizzard Entertainment Customers
Acoustical Spying Recovers Passwords With 90-percent Accuracy
Does Your Doctor's Computer Have Spyware?
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Friday, November 18, 2005
Legal Network Podcast on Patriot Act Renewal
Coast-to-Coast is a series of general interest legal podcasts produced by the LegalTalkNetwork and hosted by Robert Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams. These two bill themselves as the "top legal bloggers" and I find that bit of hubris a little offputting, but they do have some good shows.Today's 'cast on The Patriot Act presents two views - a former FBI agent turned Congressional candidate and an ACLU representative. It's an interesting discussion and well worth listening. Both sides make valid points, and both sides are really worried about excesses already occurring.
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 5:18 PM
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Categories: Homeland Security, Policy & Regulation, Privacy
Terry Frazier at 5:18 PM
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The Steady Creep of Statist Control
The insidious creep of anti-terrorism laws to include all criminal activity - and the complementary definition creep which links every potential criminal activity to the support, promotion, or funding of terrorism - continues unabated amid abusive government behavior and growing use of secret National Security Letters that prevent recipients, under penalty of jail, from ever disclosing that they've been served. From a Washington Post investigative report:Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect -- a single telephone call, for example -- may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.The PATRIOT ACT Renewal bill - our first chance to undo many of the wrongs pushed through by the Bush Administration's John Ashcroft - is being gutted. It appears that rather than striking the most onerous parts of the PATRIOT Act, the bill is actually making them worse. EFF has all the requisite information.
Historically, what countries have embraced such laws - subjecting millions of citizens to secret surveillance, making it a crime to disclose the surveillance, and hiding the reality of the laws from the public? If you answer this question honestly you'll be hard-pressed to find a democracy on your list.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 2:36 PM
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Categories: Homeland Security, Privacy
Terry Frazier at 2:36 PM
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Friday, October 14, 2005
EULA-based Deep Root Spying On Blizzard Entertainment Customers
If you play Warcraft, World of Warcraft, or any other Blizzard Entertainment game you need to read this. You probably have no idea how much personal info the cretins at Blizzard are collecting from you. [via Copyfight]I Spy With My Little EULA (Donna Wentworth)
You may recall that Blizzard is the videogame company that sued three software programmers for creating BnetD, a free, open source program that allowed gamers to play games they purchased with others on the platform of their choice. Blizzard claimed that the programmers violated several parts of the company's End User Licensing Agreement (EULA), including a provision on reverse-engineering. But it turns out that's not all that Blizzard's lawyers have inserted in the fine print. As Bruce Schneier reports, the company is also using its Terms of Use agreements to justify spying on gamers' computers.
Writes Greg Hoglund, co-author of Exploiting Software, How to Break Code:
I watched the [software] warden sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar. These strings can easily contain social security numbers or credit card numbers, for example, if I have Microsoft Excel or Quickbooks open w/ my personal finances at the time. ...[The scanning] certainly will result in warden reporting you as a cheater. I really believe that reading these window titles violates privacy, considering window titles contain alot of personal data. But, we already know Blizzard Entertainment is fierce from a legal perspective. Look at what they have done to people who tried to make BNetD, freecraft, or third party WoW servers.
As Schneier says, this is truly scary stuff. Yet even a few of the security-savvy readers at Schneier's weblog are downplaying its significance. Why? Annalee Newitz has a theory that rings true to me: people think of routine spying as normal. […]
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 11:11 PM
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Categories: Privacy, Security, Technology
Terry Frazier at 11:11 PM
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Sunday, October 2, 2005
Acoustical Spying Recovers Passwords With 90-percent Accuracy
Computer scientists at UC Berkeley have been experimenting with recordings of keystrokes. Using 10-minute sound recordings of users typing at a keyboards, researchers were able to feed the data into a computer and recover up to 96 percent of the typed characters. By running the audio repeatedly through a feedback loop that trains the computer, they were able to recover passwords, passphrases, and complete paragraphs. [via FutureEdition from Arlington Institute]Once the system is trained, recovering the text became more straightforward, even if the text was a password and not an English word. After just 20 attempts, the researchers were able to retrieve 90 percent of five-character passwords, 77 percent of eight-character passwords and 69 percent of 10-character passwords.
[...]
What was particularly striking about this study, the researchers said, was the ease with which the text could be recovered using off-the-shelf equipment. "We didn't need high-quality audio to accomplish this," said Feng Zhou, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in computer science and co-author of the study. "We just used a $10 microphone that can be easily purchased in almost any computer supply store."
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 9:51 PM
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Categories: Privacy, Technology
Terry Frazier at 9:51 PM
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Does Your Doctor's Computer Have Spyware?
What is your doctor's computer security policy? Every time I have a blood test or visit a doctor I sign a new HIPAA form, but it's clear there's no understanding of digital privacy within the office. For a high-tech industry, doctors and their staff are woefully ill-equipped to deal with computers. What do you do when all the providers of a necessary service have little or no idea how to protect your information? [via Spyware Warrior] [More...]
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
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