UK ISP TalkTalk Monitoring its Customers Online Activity Without Consent − ISPreview UK:

Here we go again with an ISP monitoring users without consent and collecting information about their activities.

In this case the ISP claims to be doing so as part of a project to improve some future security and parental control services. They say that they are not capturing any data about which users visit what sites, but obviously the capability is there. The ISP did not announce this to their customers and only admitted it after it had been discovered and exposed.

Whether the ISP later decided to start capturing that information, the government makes them start capturing it, or a hacker get in to trick the system in to capturing, there is a real likelihood that users of the TalkTalk broadband service in the UK will have their activities captured.

Once again, this shows that you can’t trust your Internet providers. Their business is not privacy and their interests do not run parallel to your privacy interests. Only tools which encrypt your Internet activity, like Anonymizer Universal, can protect you against this kind of surveillance by your ISP.

The European Parliament appears to be trying to create a regulation to require search engine companies to retain total information about their user’s searches for a period of years. If you are in the EU area, I strongly encourage you to reach out to fight this.

Declaration29: “A group of members of European Parliament is collecting signatures for a Written Declaration that reads: ‘The European Parliament [...] Asks the Council and the Commission to implement Directive 2006/24/EC and extend it to search engines in order to tackle online child pornography and sex offending rapidly and effectively’.

The Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC requires that details on every telephone call, text message, e-mail and Internet connection be recorded for months, for the entire population, in the absence of any suspicion. As to what is wrong with data retention please refer to DRletter. The Written Declaration even wants to extend data retention to search engines, meaning that your search terms could be tracked for months back.

The proposed declaration has been signed by 371 MEPs (list of names here) - and thus reached the 368 members needed to pass it. Many MEPs signed because of the title of the document (’setting up a European early warning system (EWS) for paedophiles and sex offenders’), not knowing that they are endorsing blanket data retention as well. More than 30 MEPs decided to withdraw their signature, one even on the day of adoption.”

Cnet (among others) reports on Google’s interception of personal information from open WiFi nodes, including passwords and e-mail.

Clearly it was poor practice for Google to be capturing and recording such information as they drove around, but the real news should be that the information was there to be captured. The intent of the monitoring of WiFi seems to be collecting the locations of WiFi base stations to improve enhanced GPS location services. This works by having your device upload a list of all the WiFi base stations it can see (along with signal strength) which the service then looks up in a database to determine your location. This requires the service to have a database of the physical location of an enormous number of WiFi base stations.

To do this, all Google would have needed to capture was the hardware address of each device. Instead they captured some of the actual data being sent back and forth as well.

It turns out that this is incredibly easy. With many of the WiFi chipsets built in to personal computers, laptops and USB adapters, one can easily download free software that will start intercepting open WiFi traffic with a single click.

The shocking news should not be that Google accidentally got this information but that anyone with bad intent could do it to you. Anonymizer will soon be releasing a video we did a few weeks back showing how someone could take control of your Facebook account using an open WiFi and almost no technical expertise at all.

If the connection between you and a website, email server, or other service is un-encrypted, then anyone near you can intercept it if you are using an open WiFi.

To be clear, open WiFi means that the underlying connection is un-encrypted. Many public WiFi sites have a login page. This is to manage usage, and provides no security to you at all.

If you get a connection before you type in a password, especially if you see a web page before you type a password, then you should assume you are on an insecure connection and therefor vulnerable.

Google Runs Into Chinas Great Firewall - WSJ.com

This article reports on an outage experienced by Google users in China. At first Google thought it was due to a technical issue, but now think that it was an intentional outage caused by the Great Firewall of China. It seems likely that this was a retaliation to punish Google for its statements and actions.

From the Official Google Blog (follow link for the whole post):

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

I would expect to see China censor Google.cn very quickly (which would prevent the re-direct to Google.hk). It will be interesting to see if China will then take the next step of censoring Google.hk and possibly other Google properties around the world. It would be easy for Google to set up any or all of them to return results in chinese if the browser is detected to be configured in that language.

Google and India Test the Limits of Liberty - WSJ.com

In this case, it is not the search engine, but their social networking site “Orkut” which is the issue. Google’s troubles stem less from their actions than the fact that they are the dominant social networking site in India, and so most of those issues happen on that site.

Google has been forced to take down a lot of content, and hand over the identities of many posters. If the examples in the article are to be believed, the threshold for censorship is not high.

At the risk of repeating myself, if you live in India and you want to say something that might push or cross the line, do it with robust anonymity technology. You might still have your post taken down, but they can’t come after you.

A long time customer recently sent in the following question. Since it should be of broad interest, I asked his permission to anonymous post and answer it here.

How do you know that subscribing to an anonymizer does not simply mark you for observation?

We all know the NSA is capable of intercepting any electronic communication, and with gajillions of electronic communications happening every second, how would the NSA (or the FBI or the CIA or whoever it is who watches us) know which of those communications to watch?

Seems like the people wanting anonymity would be the first on the list.

Surely they COULD, couldn’t they? That is, get the subscriber lists, which would enable them to intercept communications this side of the proxy - i.e., intercept on the way out, on the way TO the proxy, BEFORE it gets securely tunneled? And no, that would not be possible with the web, but it would with email. Supposedly.

This is what has been proposed to me. What do you think? Does it have any validity?

It is certainly the case that the government could, in principle, monitor your access to privacy services. As long as that access is over a strongly encrypted connection, the contents of your communication, what sites you are visiting or who you are communicating with would be protected. The strength of your anonymity is then largely determined by the number of other users of the same service with which your traffic is being mixed.

In the United States, the use of privacy tools is not restricted. Strict separation of intelligence from law enforcement functions should prevent drift net monitoring of your use of Anonymizer from leading to any kind of legal investigation. The huge number of Anonymizer subscribers would also make this difficult and highly visible.

Outside of the US it is another story. Many countries exercise much greater control over the Internet. Even if it were not blocked by the Iranian government, accessing the Anonymizer website from within Iran would be a risky activity. Once again, the key here is safety in numbers. We have run anti-censorship tools in Iran that supported over 100,000 users. With those numbers, it is awkward for the government to go after people simply for using the service. This is not to say that if you are already under observation for some other reason that it would not give them added ammunition. Privacy tools are generally very effective at keeping you below the radar, but can be much less effective once you are on the radar for whatever reason.

The reality is that there is no evidence of widespread Internet surveillance being used in the US to track users of privacy services. As long as the connection to the service is well encrypted, you should be fine.

YouTube Korea squelches uploads, comments | Digital Media - CNET News

I am very pleased that Google is taking a stand against Korean anti-privacy laws. The law in question requires large Internet services (like YouTube) to collect real name information about any user posting content or comments. In response, Google has completely cut off any posting or commenting through the Korean version of the site. The solution Google proposes is that users should simply log in to a non-Korean version of the site and post away. This way Google never  needs to capture identifying information.

It will be interesting to see if Korea responds by trying to block access to all non-Korean versions of YouTube. Obviously anonymity tools provide an excellent end run around this kind of restriction.

I find myself of two minds on how to feel about this action. On the one hand, it respects Korea’s right to set its own laws within its borders, without allowing any one country to dictate how the rest of the world will use such tools. On the other hand, I find such anti-privacy policies so repugnant, I would like to see companies simply refuse to comply and pull hardware out of that country while continuing to provide the service.

Argentine judge: Google, Yahoo must censor searches | Latest News in Politics and Law - CNET News

There is a disturbing trend towards increasing regulation of the Internet. In this case, Argintine judges have ordered Google and Yahoo to remove certain search results related to various individuals. This appears to be a back door way of removing the content without actually having to go after all the sites hosting the objectionable content. The concept is that information that can’t be found is almost the same as information that does not exist at all.

Because a few search engines dominate the market, they become an easy leverage point for achieving broad objectives. Countries like China and Iran have long understood the power of censoring the search engines to block access to information they don’t have easy reach to censor directly.

Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China - NYTimes.com

Activists at Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, have discovered a massive program of surveillance against Skype in China. Specifically the Chinese are monitoring instant message traffic on Tom-Skype, a joint venture between eBay (the owner of Skype) and a Chinese wireless operator.

It looks like all of the text messages passing through the service are scanned for key words of interest to the Chinese government. This program captures both messages within the Tom-Skype network and between that network and the rest of the Skype network.

This is yet another compelling argument for using strong encryption to prevent interception of message content. People in China can avoid this surveillance by using the non-chinese version of Skype, and using a VPN to get the communications safely out past the Chinese scanners.