Street with a View is an art project in Google Street View, with a variety of scenes enacted for the camera, either to be discovered in Street View, or discovered via the project web site.
USA Today informs us that:
Despite surveillance cameras and heavy security, vandals in a small Swedish town have burned down a giant Yuletide straw goat for the 24th time since 1966, the Associated Press reports.
Here at Emergent Chaos, we’re deeply concerned that the goat ended up with neither privacy nor even temporary safety.
Photo: AP Photo/Pernilla Wahlman
Chris Soghoian, who we’ve mentioned here extensively in the past, has posted some new research around just how much electronic surveillance is really going on here in the US.
Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.
And that’s just Sprint. (Who btw also keeps logs of all IP access for 24 months, including in many cases full URLs).
You really need to read the full article because he has so much data, as usual, Chris sums things up nicely:
As the information presented in this article has demonstrated, the publicly available law enforcement surveillance statistics are, at best misleading, and at worst, deceptive. It is simply impossible to have a reasonable debate amongst academics, public policy makers, and members of the public interest community when the very scale of these surveillance programs is secret.
and
As for the millions of government requests for geo-location data, it is simply disgraceful that these are not currently being reported…but they should be.
Per Chris’s request the full data dump has been mirrored here as well.
One of the best ways to upset someone who cares about privacy is to trot out the “nothing to hide, nothing to worry about” line. It upsets me on two levels. First because it’s so very wrong, and second, because it’s hard to refute in a short quip.
I think what I like most about “We Live In Public” is how it shows how well that nothing to hide idea screws with people’s lives. The movie is the story of Josh Harris and some bizzare experiments he ran, including putting 100 people under constant surveillance and interrogation in “Quiet,” a bunker under New York City with free flowing drugs. After that screwed a lot of people up, Josh and his girlfriend decided to “live in public” on the web. Roughly quoting “after a fight, we’d both run to see who the people watching thought had won it.” In many ways, it was unpleasant to watch, in the way any view of dystopia is.
The movie was one of my favorite parts of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, and not just because it was the end and I got to kick back with a beer while we watched. It was my favorite because we talk a lot about privacy in very technical ways: what it means, how to protect it. We talk less about the why or the communication of it. The movie was pretty impactful for a lot of us. One of the best, and perhaps most post-modern was having a Skype conversation with the director, Ondi Timoner, after the screening. (Another member of the household stopped by, said hi, and covered the camera. And sorry about the butt-in-camera, Ondi, we had the beer near the laptop running Skype.)
In the future, we’re inspired to have more art at the conference, and I’d encourage all of you to see We Live in Public. It’s currently in limited engagements [Updated with links]:
8/28 – IFC Center, NYC
9/4 – Brattle, Cambridge
9/25 – NuArt, Los Angles
10/2 – Roxie – San Fransisco, CA
10/9 – Alamo Draft House – Austin, TX
10/16 – Music Box – Chicago
11/13 – Landmark Varsity – Seattle
You can also follow @onditimoner on Twitter, read the blog about the movie, or get in touch with her by Skype..no, just kidding. I think she deserves some privacy.
We were surprised last week to see that the GAO has issued a report certifying that, “As of April 2009, TSA had generally achieved 9 of the 10 statutory conditions related to the development of the Secure Flight program and had conditionally achieved 1 condition (TSA had defined plans, but had not completed all activities for this condition).”
Surprised, that is, until we we saw how the GAO had defined (re-defined?) those statutory conditions in ways very different from what we thought they meant, or what we think Congress thought they meant.
Read the details at “GAO moves the goalposts to “approve” Secure Flight”
Congressman Jason Chaffetz has introduced legislation seeking a ban on Whole-Body Imaging machines installed by the Transportation Security Administration in various airports across America. Describing the method as unnecessary to securing an airplane, Congressman Chaffetz stated that the new law was to “balance the dual virtues of safety and privacy.” The TSA recently announced plans to make the scanners, which capture a detailed picture of travelers stripped naked, the default screening device at all airport security checkpoints. Whole Body imaging (Backscatter X-Ray) technology was introduced as a tool for screening some air travelers.
Read “Congressman Seeks End of Whole Body Imaging at Airports” for the links.
These scanners won’t make us more secure. Our wallets and our dignity can’t afford these scanners. Kudos to Congressman Chaffetz.
As an aside, searching for this image (which we’ve used before) required turning off Google’s “SafeSearch.” If Google won’t show that image, why should you be forced to pose for it?
Previously: “TSA to Look Through Your Clothes” and “TSA Violates Your Privacy, Ties themselves in Little Knot of Lies”
