India to Monitor Google and Skype – WSJ.com.

As an extension of their policy of pushing for access to encrypted communications on RIM BlackBerry devices, they are now demanding access to data from both Google and Skype. India is demanding that Skype and Google install servers within India so the government can access the information on Indian users.

Obviously bad guys can trivially bypass this through the use of VPNs and by taking care to use servers located outside of India. The real impact will be to open all legitimate Internet users to universal surveillance.

RIM sidesteps BlackBerry ban in India | Signal Strength – CNET News.

According to the CNET article, the Indian government is going to put off shutting down BlackBerrys in their country while they study a RIM proposal to allow government monitoring of the communications.

Thanks to David Brin for linking to this article in reason.com about the debate over arresting people for recording active duty police officers. In general the specific law being broken is about making audio recordings without the concent of all parties.

As a privacy advocate, I find this situation puts me in an uncomfortable situation. On the one hand there is concern about the privacy interests of the police officers. On the other hand, this is one of the only ways of demonstrating police abuse or other bad actions. It also acts to balance the playing field where the police are already routinely recording most interactions through the use of dashboard cameras.

The origin of the term surveilance is the latin from sur- “over” + veiller “to watch,”. It implies that surveillance is about being watched by those in power (above).

Sousveillance is a term that has been coined recently to describe participant recording, or recording from “below”. That feels like a very different thing that should be fine as long as it is not hidden. Especially in circumstances where there is not a clear expectation of privacy.

I guess my solution to the conundrum would be to state that there should be no expectation of privacy on the part of authorities from recording when they are exercising those authorities. The citizens being interacted with would have a possible privacy expectation with respect to recording third parties however.

I am very interested in feedback and other thoughts on this one.

There has been a lot of media coverage of the threats of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to shut down BlackBerry connectivity in their countries unless RIM (the maker of BlackBerry) introduces a back door so they can monitor communications.

I have been following this story closely, but wanted to wait until I had all the facts before blogging about it. At this point I don’t think I am going to get the whole story. The statements I am seeing are absolutely contradictory and the whole thing is getting really fishy.

UAE/SA say that they need to be able to access BlackBerry communications, but they can’t.

RIM says that their technology makes interception impossible because the communications are encrypted end to end between the BES server (located at the users place of business) and the handset. RIM claims not to have access to the decryption keys.

Third parties claim that RIM has arrangements with other countries (including the US and Russia) which allows such access.

RIM responds that this is false and that they don’t have this ability.

It looks like RIM and UAE/SA will come to an agreement while both continue to claim that they have not compromised their positions.

The moral of this story is that you should not trust security you can not fully analyze yourself. Anonymizer Universal uses strongly encrypted L2TP VPN technology to secure your information so even if your telecommunications provider is cooperating with surveillance they still can’t read the contents of your messages.

Unfortunately Anonymizer Universal does not support BlackBerry yet, but iPhone, Windows, and Mac users are protected.

Privacy Digest reports on a new White House proposal to extend the powers of FBI “national security letters” to include gathering of “electronic communication transactional records”. While this may appear to be a small change, the potential impact is huge.

These records include all the header information from emails: To:, From:, Time, and often Subject:.

It may also include a list of the full URLs that you visit.

While it does not include the contents of the messages, this level of detail is often more than enough to discover social networks, relationships, intentions, plans, political affiliations, and more.

The real problem is that there are no checks and balances on national security letters. They are issued by FBI offices on their own authority without review by a judge. Historically, self restraint in the face of this kind of power has never worked well. While judges approve the vast majority of subpoenas and search warrants in a timely manor, they can reject egregious cases and the mere fact of their review causes law enforcement to be more restrained in their use.

From the Privacy Digest article:

The use of the national security letters to obtain personal data on Americans has prompted concern. The Justice Department issued 192,500 national security letters from 2003 to 2006, according to a 2008 inspector general report, which did not indicate how many were demands for Internet records. A 2007 IG report found numerous possible violations of FBI regulations, including the issuance of NSLs without having an approved investigation to justify the request. In two cases, the report found, agents used NSLs to request content information “not permitted by the [surveillance] statute.”