[governance] The Big Brother is everywhere now - Assange

[Riaz K Tayob]

[The only difference now being we cannot really pretend these 
"omissions" on liberty are not there... from Apple's oops we did not 
know it was turned on, Google's drive-by piracy of WiFi data compiling 
Streetview or the US War on Terror grab of ALL SWIFT international 
financial transaction data... the net must be free, and there is so much 
of fiddling of deckchairs on the titanic... and meanwhile the arguments 
faced while these kinds of things were happening was "if it aint broke, 
don't fix it" (i.e. governance of critical internet resources and more!) 
and perhaps this will simply take a new guise....or perhaps not... if as 
Lessig said, technological choices (+stds) are effectively regulation 
then the scope of struggle is much larger... time to revisit my 
Parminder, Geist and Mueller on this especially as the reintier class 
seeks to reinvigorate controls in the name of preventing piracy while 
the weapons of mass distraction are deployed to ensure Big Brother makes 
some people more equal than others... of course this may just be 
conspiracy theory junk, right?]

The Big Brother is everywhere now
Hasan Suroor
Share · Comment · print · T+
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during a news conference in central 
London, on Thursday.
AP WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during a news conference in central 
London, on Thursday.

“How many of you here have an iPhone, a Blackberry or any other mobile 
device?'' WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asked surveying a hall full 
of people at the City University here on Thursday. As hand after hand 
went up, he told them that everyone of them, irrespective of what kind 
of mobile device they carried, was a potential target of spying.

This was how stark the threat from a booming multi-billion dollar global 
mass surveillance industry was, Mr. Assange said as he released a cache 
of 287 files providing a rare glimpse into how the industry was 
operating without any checks.

The Spy Files, spanning 25 countries, are first of a series of sensitive 
data that WikiLeaks plans to publish in coming months.

“Working with Bugged Planet and Privacy International, as well as media 
organisations from six countries – ARD in Germany, The Bureau of 
Investigative Journalism in the UK, The Hindu in India, L'Espresso in 
Italy, OWNI in France and the Washington Post in the U.S. Wikileaks is 
shining a light on this secret industry that has boomed since September 
11, 2001 and is worth billions of dollars per year. WikiLeaks has 
released 287 documents today [Thursday], but the Spy Files project is 
ongoing and further information will be released this week and into next 
year,'' Mr. Assange said at a crowded press conference.

N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, speaking through a video-link, 
expressed concern over a fast growing and completely unregulated 
surveillance industry in India. At least two Indian companies were 
selling surveillance technology without any regulation.

“We are very concerned about our privacy violations,'' he said.

Mr. Ram said that working with WikiLeaks had been a “very valuable 
experience.” The issue highlighted by WikiLeaks was of “great 
international significance'' and of “significance to India.”

Mr. Assange said that it might sound like something out of Hollywood but 
mass interception systems built by Western “intelligence contractors'' 
were a reality. Over the past decade, the surveillance industry had 
grown from a covert operation which primarily supplied equipment to 
government intelligence agencies such as the NSA in America and 
Britain's GCHQ, into a huge transnational business.

Dramatically illustrating the threat, Mr. Assange said that potentially 
everyone who carried any mobile device was a sitting duck for anyone 
wanting to spy on them. The threat to investigative journalism from 
these new and covert surveillance techniques was particularly dire.

“The only way we are going to win this war is by developing 
counter-surveillance systems,'' he said.

WikiLeaks, which itself has been a victim of surveillance by 
intelligence agencies and their proxies and has had its site hacked, is 
in the process of developing a more secure system to submit information 
to the site.

Mr. Assange said that international surveillance companies were based in 
the more technologically sophisticated countries, and sold their 
technology to every country of the world. Intelligence agencies, 
military forces and police authorities were able to silently and 
secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or 
knowledge of the telecommunication providers.

Experts who worked on the files called for new laws to regulate export 
of surveillance technology.

“Western governments cannot stand idly by while this technology is still 
being sold,” said Eric King of the Privacy International campaign group.

Jacob Appelbaum, a computer expert at the University of Washington, said 
the systems revealed in the files were as deadly as murder weapons.

“These systems have been sold by Western companies to places for example 
like Syria, and Libya and Tunisia and Egypt. These systems are used to 
hunt people down and to murder,” he said, while Pratap Chatterjee of the 
Bureau of Investigative Journalism said a French firm offered to sell 
such systems to the erstwhile Qadhafi regime to spy on dissidents living 
in Britain.

Mr. Assange warned that with entire populations being subjected to 
surveillance nobody anywhere in the world was safe anymore.

“In traditional spy stories, intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the 
phone of one or two people of interest. In the last 10 years systems for 
indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm. Intelligence 
companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record 
the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the location of every 
mobile phone in a city, down to 50 metres. Systems to infect every 
Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on 
the intelligence market,'' said a statement on official WikiLeaks Spy 
Files site.

Keywords: The Hindu, WikiLeaks, SpyFiles, espionage technologies, spying 
on citizens, CCISat, Indian spy satellite

http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article2678603.ece

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t