Video: Hacker war drives San Francisco cloning RFID passports - Engadget

The law of unintended consequences strikes again. In an attempt to improve national security, the U.S. Government has been pushing hard for the widespread adoption of RFID tags in passports around the world. They are already in U.S. passports. The problem is that they are easily scanned from a distance (as shown in the video), and can be cloned. If the RFID chip in the passport is trusted by the authorities, then the security situation is actually worse, not better. Getting real passport information from someone used to be hard. It generally involved actually stealing the passport. With the scanner, one could produce large numbers of clones while simply standing around the airport with the antenna in ones roller luggage (staying out side of security).

The long range readable RFID tags also make possible all kinds of other tracking and identification. The video talks about correlating personal information from RFID enabled credit cards with the passport number to produce even better fakes.

Distribution of such devices around a city would provide much better and more accurate and automated tracking of a population than cameras with their resolution, and facial recognition issues.

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.

Chinese Bloggers Scale The Great Firewall In Riots Aftermath - WSJ.com In a triumph of low tech, Chinese bloggers are evading the Chinese national censorship system by simply converting their posts to read right to left rather than left to right.Clearly this is only a short term solution, and the government will adapt quickly, but it shows again how brittle these censorship systems are. 

Charter’s Web monitoring draws intervention from Capitol Hill | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.comIt looks like Charter may not start monitoring its user’s web activity after all. We shall see… 

It appears that a company is now selling a tool that will allow high resolution tracking of the motion of customers through stores and malls by triangulating on their cell phones. The technique involves tracking the phone through its globally unique IMEI number. The company claims that this is anonymous because only the phone company knows the correspondence between the IMEI and the customer’s real name.I have very little faith in that protection. There are simply too many ways one might extract that kind of information, which could then become widely available. One could even connect the location information and IMEI data to checkout records. After a couple of trips, it would be fairly unambiguous. This is certainly clever, but disturbing. There is no opt-in or opt-out, and the tracking takes place passively with no ability for the user to detect that it is going on.Shops track customers via mobile phone - Times Online

Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt - washingtonpost.com  For a short time Facebook became the center of a fledgling activist movement in Egypt. Over 74,000 people registered on a Facebook page devoted to this issue. It became the primary communications path for this group, and enabled its explosive growth. It also contained the seeds of its rapid unwinding and the arrest and beating of the creator of that page.To me this is yet another example of the “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog” syndrome. People feel so comfortable in front of their computers, they will say and do things they would fear to do in public or face to face. Facebook is in no way anonymous, nor does it claim to be. While there are many tools that could have enabled these people to operate and organize anonymously, there is no evidence that they used any of them.The Internet is very powerful, but it is also very public. People wishing to use it in repressive countries need to take special care to protect themselves and their visitors. 

I encourage everyone to read this article by Declan McCullagh: Q&A with Charter VP: Your Web activity, logged and loadedThe gist is that Charter Communications, the third largest cable operator in the US, is testing a system to capture the URLs you visit when you browse the web, then provide that information to advertising networks through a third party company, NebuAd. They claim this information is “anonymized”, but I can’t really see how that is possible. If a company wants to target car ads at people who visit many car websites, then the advertiser must know that you have done so when you are shown the ad. Since they have your IP address, they know who you are (or at least have personally identifiable information).While the advertiser may not get the actual web logs, this is a huge amount of information, and I am sure more could be gathered by a clever and systematic set of advertising targets. For each narrow target, capture information on which users match the target criteria when there is an opportunity to show them an ad.The obvious solution is to prevent the ISP from gathering this information in the first place. Any kind of encrypted tunnel, like those provided by the various Anonymizer solutions, will prevent this kind of commercial espionage on their users.

This article discusses the risk from “deep packet inspection” by ISPs. The article states that at least 100,000 people in the US are being tracked with this technology right now. If true, the impact of this could be huge. Whereas a website can only track you when you are actually visiting that site, your ISP can see all of your activity on any website or other service you use. The idea is that the information collected could be sold to advertisers to better target marketing messages to you. If you had been looking at car sites, you might see more car ads next time you visit an advertising supported website like CNN.com.This is certainly not the realm of science fiction. The Chinese government is already using this technology on a massive scale as part of their national censorship infrastructure. They use it to detect forbidden words and phrases, “Tibet” being at the top of that list right now.Most of us assume that the bad guys are “out there” on the net, and assume that our ISPs are basically just passing our traffic along without looking at it. If they start this kind of inspection, it opens all kinds of additional risks. Once the equipment is there, a rogue sysadmin could tune it to watch for passwords, personal information, bank information, etc. It opens a whole new set of vulnerabilities.Anonymizer’s Total Net Shield, and Private Surfing (with full time SSL enabled) provide significant protection against this threat. Both allow you to tunnel your traffic to Anonymizer without the ISP being able to inspect it, other than to see that it is going to Anonymizer.It is shocking to me that this kind of thing should be possible without explicit user consent. Maybe we need a “truth in labeling” law for Internet service providers.  A bottle of Napa Merlot can not be so labeled unless it is from Napa and made from merlot grapes. Similarly, it should not be called an “Internet Connection” if you can’t go everywhere (some ISPs are restricting certain perfectly legal protocols). If the ISP is going to spy on you, it should be in big red letters. Maybe I am OK with that, but I certainly have a right to know in advance.

Security guide to customs-proofing your laptop | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.comDeclan writes a witty and informative piece on securing a laptop against legals searches without cause at border crossings. 

Yahoo and MSN helping to root out Tibetan rioters | The ObserversYahoo China posted pictures of “most wanted” Tibetan protestors on Yahoo! China’s home page. Cooperation with lawful process in a repressive country is bad enough, here they are actively collaborating. Yahoo!’s claim that this was done by Yahoo! China, not by the Yahoo! mother-ship, seems disingenuous at best.Active support of censorship and oppression is clearly unethical. If this is not clearly on the wrong side of the line, then what in the world is?