How China Turned a City Into a Prison. ORD Acquisition of Surveillance Technology. Safe and Sorry – Terrorism & Mass Surveillance. 'It's like Christmas for repressive regimes': China is selling surveillance technology all over the world. Venezuela's Carnet de la Patria ("Fatherland" ID card) looks like any other state ID, except it tracks everything from citizens' use of state benefits to what they're saying online to their party affiliations.
A recent Reuters investigation found that Venezuela hired Chinese tech giant ZTE to create the cards and generate a large database on citizens' behaviour. Venezuela is just one of many countries importing Chinese-designed state surveillance technology according to Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. A recent Reuters investigation found Venezuela hired Chinese tech company ZTE to create an ID card attached to a large database that tracks citizens' behaviour.
(Marco Bello/Reuters) "[It] wouldn't be the first country in the world to go out and seek Chinese products with a view toward surveilling and potentially repressing its own population," Richardson told Day 6 host Brent Bambury. The cost of online spying: Your privacy and your wallet. U.N. summit votes to support Internet eavesdropping.
A United Nations summit has adopted confidential recommendations proposed by China that will help network providers target BitTorrent uploaders, detect trading of copyrighted MP3 files, and, critics say, accelerate Internet censorship in repressive nations.
Approval by the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union came despite objections from Germany, which warned the organization must "not standardize any technical means that would increase the exercise of control over telecommunications content, could be used to empower any censorship of content, or could impede the free flow of information and ideas. " The ITU adopted the confidential Y.2770 standard for deep packet inspection -- only members, not the public, currently have access to the document -- last month during a meeting in Dubai. A related ITU meeting in Dubai, which has drawn sharp criticism from the U.S. government and many Internet companies, began this week. Because Y.2770 is confidential, many details remain opaque. Mikko Hypponen: How the NSA betrayed the world's trust. Hasan Elahi: FBI, here I am!
John McAfee, Anti-Virus Software Mogul: Canada Not Safe From Government Spying. MONTRÉAL - American software mogul John McAfee appears relaxed at a downtown restaurant as he digs into a bowl of poutine, but says even the safe haven of Canada isn't immune from government spying.
"Your Canadian government has all of the facilities that the American government has, no more, no less," he says, in light of recent leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden. "If you think that the Canadian government is somehow morally or ethically or in any other way superior, you're wrong. " Ten months ago McAfee, 67, was a fugitive from the Belize government, wanted for questioning in the mysterious death of his neighbour Gregory Viant Faull, 52. After a failed political-asylum claim, two faked heart attacks and a criminal charge for illegally entering Guatemala by speed boat, he was deported to the U.S., ending what became a network television spectacle. Story continues below slideshow. Surveillance questions snowball: 5 stories you may have missed. As former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden settles into a new, albeit temporary, home in Russia, he's left a storm of questions about mass surveillance in his wake.
Part of the famous fugitive's deal with Moscow is that he's not allowed to release information harmful to the United States during his one-year reprieve in the country, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. But before Snowden left the transit zone in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport for a more hospitable location in Russia, he released a torrent of documents about the United States' use of mass surveillance — further stirring up a surveillance controversy he ignited in early June.
In the past week, media outlets published shocking new details based on the documents from Snowden, while U.S. officials continued to struggle with the fallout by publishing documents of their own. Here's a look at the top five mass surveillance stories from the past few days. U.S. doles out money to U.K. spy agency. Canada Has NSA-Style Surveillance System, Documents Show. Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data.
The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message. The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013.
Iran was the country where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered, with more than 14bn reports in that period, followed by 13.5bn from Pakistan.