Kerr: Say Goodbye to Privacy

"Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information."

The article doesn't indicate that this was a direct quote, just the latest dissappointment from the current administration.

"Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines."

Now they want immunity for the companies who complied with the government's request. Goodbye privacy and hello fascism.

He's absolutely right though. It's trivial to massively violate someone's privacy nowadays.

The only thing you CAN do is hope that people are nice about keeping your data private

There is an interesting movement afoot in the UK started by a wonderful man who has always been at the forefront of the effort to apply technology for benefit.
Graham Sadd has a blog Graham's Blog and he recently included the speech from Gordon Brown regarding the UK government's responsibility to keep information private.
Graham's commercial effort is a company called Paoga, which provides a service where individuals can manage the process and permissions for revealing identity and personal information. This is not a commercial plug, as we have no investment in Graham's venture, but an interesting insight into what companies are trying to do to help you manage your personal information - including charging advertisers or marketers who might want your contact details.

Privacy dies at the hands of technological advances and time saving devices.

Take OnStar for example, now available on all newer GM cars. You're capable of making phone calls, getting your car door unlocked, having diagnostics performed on your vehicle, a reminder to change your oil, and you can hit the button to alert them that you're vehicle has broken down.

The downside to that is, they can track your vehicle wherever your at. They can use the onstar diagnostics to determine what your vehicle was doing prior to an accident. How fast you were going, and if you actually hit the brakes or not.

That PDA you carry, or I-phone you're carrying, it connects to the internet? It's got an IP address, that can be hidden, but ultimately with the right person at the controls they can figure out where you are at, it more than likely has a GPS device in it.

Technology is great, but how much control do we give up in order to save time?

Certainly online. Offline, it's harder to monitor - and much, much more expensive.

+1

Aiding and abetting a crime is a crime.

It would seem like that, but it's much easier than you think:
http://www.bluetoothtracking.org/

Also, there are a couple DARPA projects that attempt to use either floor sensors or video cameras to do gait recognition.

Not to mention the UK having somewhere in the range of 6 million surveillance cameras, because apparently most Britons (as well as most people worldwide, to be fair) believe that trading privacy (and rights) for a false sense of security is a good trade

If you've got a live Internet/phone connection, you're not offline. And tracking is not monitoring.

No doubt DARPA are going to be using foreign cameras exclusively, since there are so many of them.

I feel a bit reassured, knowing that any government seems to do most things badly. I think they do about 10 things well.

I just get nervous seeing someone prominent come right out and say it. If the US Government will say this openly, then what will they do secretly?

If they modify FISA to allow companies immunity, then successive administrations will use it as precedent to seek ever more power.

perhaps its time for a revolution

Do they work even if i walk without rhythm?

Fixed.

No, you misunderstand our culture. We Britons are a nation of voyeurs and closet exhibitionists and we get turned on by the feeling that someone is watching our every move.

From what I understand, yes. They look at distance of each step, and can easily infer height and speed from that. And with the embedded sensors, they can tell how you step in terms of weight distribution, and a whole host of other things. According to the researchers, they can basically recreate your skeleton, which is a roundabout way of identifying you.

Maybe. There are sixty million people in the UK, give or take. "Roundabout" seems to slightly underestimate the difficulty of that calculation.

One camera, then, for every ten people.