Category: surveillance state
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Age verification: a moral panic
Senator Frame, Representatives Berry and Reed, I’m writing to oppose the imposition of age verification requirements for online services in the State of Washington. The laws before the legislature on this topic and similar laws in other states are not privacy-preserving, but enable surveillance, risk identity theft, and suppress free expression on the internet, which…
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A Fig Leaf
There is a major separation of powers issue with the current surveillance arrangement: The standard for permitting a query of the database of internal US phone calls is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of terrorist activity, Inglis says. Only 20 analysts within the NSA are empowered to approve targeting US-based phone conversations, he says. One of…
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Decentralizing the Web… Again
…cloud computing represents centralization of information and computing resources, which can be easily controlled by corporations and governments. [Jaeger, et al. Link] In the wake of Prismgate or the Snowden Affair or whatever we’re going to call this kerfuffle, I’ve been struck by how the current centralized nature of the World Wide Web has facilitated…