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      "title": "The Illusion of Online Privacy",
      "body": "As the Ashley Madison hack demonstrated, Web companies can't guarantee privacy.\n\n\nThere was a time when people had secrets. Men could discreetly dispose of receipts for flowers, drinks or jewelry, and a last check for lipstick on the collar before turning the key to the front door could hide a multitude of sins.\n\nBut times have changed, even if behaviors haven’t. Shopping, chatting and traveling in the digital age means that habits and relationships are all recorded somewhere – whether people know it or not.\n\nAnd computers are terrible at keeping secrets.\n\nThe 30 million users of AshleyMadison.com thought they had some privacy – until hackers last week exposed their names, addresses and credit card payments. Two suicides have reportedly been linked to the disclosures, which – unlike the almost routine reports about electronic thefts of financial data – have led to consequences far more serious than can be addressed by a credit-monitoring agency.\n\n\nAlong with recent high-profile breaches that have affected retailers like Target and government agencies like the IRS and Office of Personnel Management, the Ashley Madison hack shows online information is never truly safe, despite people’s increasing willingness to hand it over. Consider, for example, how easily people disclose their eating habits on sites like Yelp or Zomato, their traveling destinations on TripAdvisor or Expedia, and their pastimes and politics on sites like Pinterest and Facebook.\n\nPeople also leave clues through credit card purchases, website visits and phone calls, while mobile phones and vehicle transponders can track their every move.\n\n“That data, while innocuous in each small piece, becomes extremely valuable to online marketing companies trying to maximize their reach,” says Rainey Reitman, director of the activism team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Many apps and services don’t need this data to function, but they are collecting it anyway.”\n\nIndeed, Google is a daily resource for billions of people worldwide in part because it offers its users an individualized experience based on their location and past preferences.\n\nThat data, though, is constantly at risk.\n\n\nSo far this year, 505 data breaches have targeted businesses, government agencies and other institutions, exposing more than 139 million records, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. The sheer number of hacks is evidence of how companies underestimate the threat of a data breach and how the government needs to procure software faster to keep up with the latest cybersecurity technology, says Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.\n\nThe bigger problem reflected by the breaches, however, is that all this user data is being stored in the first place.\n\nMany people realize Web services like Facebook or Google are monitoring their activities, but companies also collect information in less obvious ways. Large websites and smaller businesses running smartphone apps do everything they can to collect information to tailor advertising or sell it to third parties interested in doing the same. Those third parties, sometimes known as “data brokers,” are in the business of buying information from nearly every digital service to paint a picture of a person’s daily life, Schneier says.\n\n“Everything that touches a computer produces data – and your data moves around a lot,” Schneier says. “There is not much you can do to protect it because you are not holding your data. We are relying on other people who hold that data.”\n\nGovernment agencies are also collecting that data from companies whether or not they have search warrants, according to confidential documents leaked to the press by Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency.\nTom Risen\nPhoto by Dylan Roberts on Unsplash![dylan-roberts-155770.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmcrbywNgUtvKJZVMTu535x44Q83MXnTnvCybz1j6QqfQx/dylan-roberts-155770.jpg)",
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      "permlink": "a-dollar-for-your-data",
      "title": "A Dollar For Your Data",
      "body": "Information about you is free for the taking on the Web. A new crop of entrepreneurs wants you to collect.\nnless your name is Oprah Winfrey or Warren Buffett, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone to pay $1,000 to hear about your purchasing habits. Anyone who wants this information can glean much of it from your behavior on the Internet anyway. Companies tracking and aggregating our clicks, taps, and swipes are the ones making fortunes. Individuals are not.\n\nBut a startup called Personal thinks it can change this. Its starting point is an idea that may seem strange to the Facebook generation: an online network where users control what information advertisers can access.\n\nPersonal, based in Washington, D.C., is among a number of startups that want to help people “collect, curate, and derive value” from their own online data, according to the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, a group formed in 2010 to encourage such efforts; it lists 30 businesses as members.\nPersonal cofounder Shane Green believes that many Internet surfers are primed to share more detailed and revealing information than they commonly do today—so long as they stay in control, and possibly earn money from it.\n\nUsers of the network, launched last November, are encouraged to upload information of all sorts, trivial (pizza orders) or sensitive (student loan records, medical prescriptions). They place the data in a “vault” and can grant other people or Web programs access to relevant portions. You could enter your home alarm code and share it only with houseguests, or grant a financial advisor access to details about your retirement accounts.\n\nThis year, the company plans to add a marketplace where people will be able to sell access to their personal information—for instance, an intention to buy an SUV in the next four weeks. Local car dealers, Green believes, would want to pay for the chance to advertise or offer incentives to such users because the strategy offers higher odds of a payoff than, say, targeting ads through Google. Green says an individual could earn $1,000 a year in this manner; Personal would take a percentage of advertiser fees.\n\nGreen started Personal in 2009 and has raised $11 million from investors. He previously founded an online company that helped owners of stadiums and other facilities create maps of buildings or private events like the Super Bowl. His customers wouldn’t have allowed him to resell the data, yet that is exactly what individuals do when they simply give away their location and much more. It is a phenomenon Green considers a “fundamental instability” in the marketplace.\n\nEconomists, however, have found major problems with the idea of personal-data marketplaces. Individuals struggle to put a value on their data. And within today’s market structure, the value can vary dramatically depending on how it’s measured, but often information is exchanged for mere pennies, says Alessandro Acquisti, co-director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Behavioral Decision Research.\n\n“I would like these services to succeed,” Acquisti says. “At least they provide some more transparency. But I fear they may not.” It’s unclear so far how many users Personal has; the company declined to say. As of now, Green’s startup idea appears to have won more attention from analysts and privacy watchdogs than from consumers.\n\nIn the end, people will have to see enough benefit from such services to invest time in maintaining an account, which can involve manually entering information such as the numbers associated with bank accounts or warranties. But Green believes there are big productivity benefits to storing one’s valuable information in a single location. Users will have access to a personal data search box, and a feature to be introduced soon will let them safely complete online forms with a single click.\n\nGreen says the ultimate challenge for private data networks like his will be maintaining security. As with a bank, if you lock a lot of value in a vault, robbers will try to get in.\nJessica Leber \nPhoto by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash!![joshua-sortino-215039.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmX3LhjXk4wTousqo3rHX6oh3p9wJuKbsHB5yUTAhc6ufA/joshua-sortino-215039.jpg)",
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      "body": "You can follow me and do upvode back please😁",
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      "title": "The law behind surveillance",
      "body": "NSA operations\n    The law behind surveillance\n    Foreign intelligence\n\nSign up for our newsletter:\nDonate Now!\nHome › Surveillance programs\nSurveillance programs\nBackground: the US Intelligence Community\n\nSeventeen agencies make up the US Intelligence Community, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the National Security Agency (NSA). The total budget for fiscal year 2013 for the Intelligence Community was US$52.6 billion. Although the bulk of the documents released by Edward Snowden are related to NSA operations, different Intelligence Community agencies often work together, request data together and share their intelligence with each other.\nNSA operations\n\nThe NSA seems to classify its programs under three units, though these are not necessarily mutually exclusive: Special Source Operations (SSO), Global Access Operations (GAO) and Tailored Access Operations (TAO). GAO programs involve open access collection using satellites (FORNSAT), microwave intercept sites, or other forms of open collection in cooperative countries. SSO programs require privileged access for the data they collect, and TAO programs that collect data involve remote exploitation of computers or networks. In addition to these units, there is a joint NSA-CIA group called Special Collection Services (SCS), which inserts equipment in areas that are difficult to access, particularly diplomatic premises.\nThe Special Source Operations logo: an eagle grasping fibre-optic cables that encircle the globe.\n\nThe Special Source Operations logo: an eagle grasping fibre-optic cables that encircle the globe.\n\nMany of the documents initially released by Edward Snowden and reported on in mainstream media contained details on the SSO unit. In particular, under the PRISM program, service providers – including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, PalTalk, AOL and Yahoo – allowed the NSA to collect communications data for analysis. Also part of SSO are the programs which tap fibre-optic cables around the world – at least some of the access to these fibre-optic cables is achieved through industry cooperation. Other operations are undertaken without the knowledge of the companies involved.\n\nAnother category of documents reveals NSA operations that compromise smartphones and calling patterns. Location data enables the agency to discern previously unknown relationships between individuals using its CO-TRAVELER system. Cookies and data from mobile apps are targeted by a number of NSA tools.  Text messages are also routinely collected.\n\nOther documents show screenshots of a program called Boundless Informant, which maps and graphs data from every Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) record in the SIGINT system and offers a full view of GAO’s collection capabilities. High data volumes were observed, notably in US-allied countries such as Germany and Brazil, as well as the most heavily surveilled places, such as Iran and Afghanistan. The NSA’s XKeyscore database allows for analysis of data from the combination of data from PRISM, SCS sites (also called F6 sites) and FORNSAT sites.\n\nProject BULLRUN, an NSA program aiming to defeat the encryption used to secure network communication technologies, works with the TAO unit. Documents on BULLRUN describe capabilities against SSL/TLS, SSH, encrypted chat, HTTPS, VPN and encrypted Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP).\n\nThe Snowden documents include indications of the extent and scale of the targeted TAO attacks carried out by the NSA and its international partners together with some details about individual targets. Documents also describe how TAO’s hardware and software attacks are implemented, including the interdiction and compromise of hardware produced by US companies that is intended for use overseas.\n\nDocuments in the Snowden archive also describe operations that are primarily carried out by the NSA’s Five Eyes partners in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There are close staffing and funding relationships between these agencies. The NSA also has particularly close relationships that include jointly staffed projects, sharing of NSA tools and raw data about US citizens with signals intelligence agencies in Germany, Sweden and Israel.\nThe law behind surveillance\n\nA number of important releases also reveal the justification that the NSA uses to enable the extent of collection and analysis mentioned above, as well as the US legislation that enables these programs. A 2009 draft report from the NSA Inspector General summarises NSA activities post-9/11 and, in particular, the transition from authorisation of warrantless surveillance by President Bush to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) authorisation.\n\nTwo key parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) enable NSA surveillance: Section 215 of Title II in the Patriot Act of 2001 amending FISA, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008, also amending FISA. Section 215, entitled ‘Access to certain business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations’, allows the FBI to request metadata from US service providers, as they did in a court order issued to Verizon for all call records for a three-month period in 2013. Other NSA operations, including PRISM, seem to be authorised by FAA Section 702, which does not explicitly allow for targeting of US-person data. However, certain documents show that programs enabled by Section 702 inevitably contain US-person data in their databases, and those databases can be used to search for US persons or analyse their metadata under appropriate procedures.\n\nExecutive Order 12333, signed by President Reagan 4 December 1981, is also an important – some would say the primary – source for NSA authorities, allowing US intelligence agencies to operate beyond the bounds of judicial and legislative oversight for foreign intelligence purposes, with the approval of the US attorney general. The NSA’s interpretation of Executive Order 12333 is not public, but the order is said to place few restrictions on the gathering of US persons’ communications content and metadata where it is collected “incidentally” and allow the broad collection of non US persons’ data. Edward Snowden has suggested that “indefensible collection activities”, such as the upstream collection of US internet companies’ data travelling between their data centres, takes place under Executive Order 12333 authorities.\nForeign intelligence\n\nUS foreign intelligence involves extensive spying on diplomatic allies and trade partners. UN and EU embassies in New York and Washington have been bugged by the NSA, and SCS sites are intercepting communications of US diplomatic partners overseas. Documents released in Brazilian media outlets show that the US gathers foreign intelligence by spying on participants of the Summit of the Americas and the Organization of American States and by analysing data on topics such as oil and energy. One document details a ‘success’ in pushing for Iran sanctions after significant support from NSA espionage reports on the UN Security Council.\n\nThe NSA has had extensive collaboration with the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), even paying the UK intelligence agency for access to certain operations. The GCHQ Tempora operation provided both agencies with data from a number of tapped fibre-optic cables. Intelligence and collected data is also shared between the NSA and the intelligence agencies in Germany, Israel and Sweden.",
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      "permlink": "re-m4r4nz4-the-eternal-value-of-privacy-20170824t200439136z",
      "title": "",
      "body": "@@ -430,8 +430,14 @@\n ote YOUR\n+ work.\n",
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      "body": "This is very true. However please keep in mind that you should use quotation and post a link to the original source whenever you use someone else's content.\n\nTo quote stuff in markdown, simply put a '>' in front of the text. Then it looks like this:\n\n> Quoted text can be very very long, even go over multiple lines.\n\nYou might also want to add some of your own words and thoughts to the post to give readers a real reason to upvote YOUR",
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      "author": "ppita",
      "permlink": "re-m4r4nz4-the-mission-to-decentralize-the-internet-20170824t175652848z",
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      "body": "I recommend that you enter https://wcex.co/?ref=urq1g3D you will get 50 free WCX Tokens and 15% if you want to invest, this currency is now in the PRE-ICO stage and is the best time to invest!",
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      "author": "cheetah",
      "permlink": "cheetah-re-m4r4nz4the-mission-to-decentralize-the-internet",
      "title": "",
      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttp://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-mission-to-decentralize-the-internet",
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      "title": "The Mission to Decentralize the Internet",
      "body": "In the nineteen-seventies, the Internet was a small, decentralized collective of computers. The personal-computer revolution that followed built upon that foundation, stoking optimism encapsulated by John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow described a chaotic digital utopia, where “netizens” self-govern and the institutions of old hold no sway. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone,” he writes. “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”\n\nThis is not the Internet we know today. Nearly two decades later, a staggering percentage of communications flow through a small set of corporations—and thus, under the profound influence of those companies and other institutions. Google, for instance, now comprises twenty-five per cent of all North American Internet traffic; an outage last August caused worldwide traffic to plummet by around forty per cent.\n\nBy Janus Kopfstein\nPhoto by Randall Bruder on Unsplash![randall-bruder-136626.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmbYab9UZU1eBFKwzJuYRurUY8yZZEa5bxU79vimYjGzCz/randall-bruder-136626.jpg)\n\nEngineers anticipated this convergence. As early as 1967, one of the key architects of the system for exchanging small packets of data that gave birth to the Internet, Paul Baran, predicted the rise of a centralized “computer utility” that would offer computing much the same way that power companies provide electricity. Today, that model is largely embodied by the information empires of Amazon, Google, and other cloud-computing companies. Like Baran anticipated, they offer us convenience at the expense of privacy.\n\nInternet users now regularly submit to terms-of-service agreements that give companies license to share their personal data with other institutions, from advertisers to governments. In the U.S., the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a law that predates the Web, allows law enforcement to obtain without a warrant private data that citizens entrust to third parties—including location data passively gathered from cell phones and the contents of e-mails that have either been opened or left unattended for a hundred and eighty days. As Edward Snowden’s leaks have shown, these vast troves of information allow intelligence agencies to focus on just a few key targets in order to monitor large portions of the world’s population.\n\nOne of those leaks, reported by the Washington Post in late October, revealed that the National Security Agency secretly wiretapped the connections between data centers owned by Google and Yahoo, allowing the agency to collect users’ data as it flowed across the companies’ networks. Google engineers bristled at the news, and responded by encrypting those connections to prevent future intrusions; Yahoo has said it plans to do so by next year. More recently, Microsoft announced it would do the same, as well as open “transparency centers” that will allow some of its software’s source code to be inspected for hidden back doors. (However, that privilege appears to only extend to “government customers.”) On Monday, eight major tech firms, many of them competitors, united to demand an overhaul of government transparency and surveillance laws.\n\nStill, an air of distrust surrounds the U.S. cloud industry. The N.S.A. collects data through formal arrangements with tech companies; ingests Web traffic as it enters and leaves the U.S.; and deliberately weakens cryptographic standards. A recently revealed (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/11/23/us/politics/23nsa-sigint-strategy-document.html) detailing the agency’s strategy specifically notes its mission to “influence the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships” with companies developing and deploying security products.\n\nOne solution, espoused by some programmers, is to make the Internet more like it used to be—less centralized and more distributed. Jacob Cook, a twenty-three-year-old student, is the brains behind ArkOS, a lightweight version of the free Linux operating system. It runs on the credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi, a thirty-five dollar microcomputer adored by teachers and tinkerers. It’s designed so that average users can create personal clouds to store data that they can access anywhere, without relying on a distant data center owned by Dropbox or Amazon. It’s sort of like buying and maintaining your own car to get around, rather than relying on privately owned taxis. Cook’s mission is to “make hosting a server as easy as using a desktop P.C. or a smartphone,” he said.\n\nLike other privacy advocates, Cook’s goal isn’t to end surveillance, but to make it harder to do en masse. “When you couple a secure, self-hosted platform with properly implemented cryptography, you can make N.S.A.-style spying and network intrusion extremely difficult and expensive,” he told me in an e-mail.\n\nPersuading consumers to ditch the convenience of the cloud has never been an easy sell, however. In 2010, a team of young programmers announced Diaspora, a privacy-centric social network, to challenge Facebook’s centralized dominance. A year later, Eben Moglen, a law professor and champion of the Free Software movement, proposed a similar solution called the Freedom Box. The device he envisioned was to be a small computer that plugs into your home network, hosting files, enabling secure communication, and connecting to other boxes when needed. It was considered a call to arms—you alone would control your data.\n\nBut, while both projects met their fund-raising goals and drummed up a good deal of hype, neither came to fruition. Diaspora’s team fell into disarray after a disappointing beta launch, personal drama, and the appearance of new competitors such as Google+; apart from some privacy software released last year, Moglen’s Freedom Box has yet to materialize at all.\n\n“There is a bigger problem with why so many of these efforts have failed” to achieve mass adoption, said Brennan Novak, a user-interface designer who works on privacy tools. The challenge, Novak said, is to make decentralized alternatives that are as secure, convenient, and seductive as a Google account. “It’s a tricky thing to pin down,” he told me in an encrypted online chat. “But I believe the problem exists somewhere between the barrier to entry (user-interface design, technical difficulty to set up, and over-all user experience) versus the perceived value of the tool, as seen by Joe Public and Joe Amateur Techie.”\n\nOne of Novak’s projects, Mailpile, is a crowd-funded e-mail application with built-in security tools that are normally too onerous for average people to set up and use—namely, Phil Zimmermann’s revolutionary but never widely adopted Pretty Good Privacy. “It’s a hard thing to explain…. A lot of peoples’ eyes glaze over,” he said. Instead, Mailpile is being designed in a way that gives users a sense of their level of privacy, without knowing about encryption keys or other complicated technology. Just as important, the app will allow users to self-host their e-mail accounts on a machine they control, so it can run on platforms like ArkOS.\n\n“There already exist deep and geeky communities in cryptology or self-hosting or free software, but the message is rarely aimed at non-technical people,” said Irina Bolychevsky, an organizer for Redecentralize.org, an advocacy group that provides support for projects that aim to make the Web less centralized.\n\nSeveral of those projects have been inspired by Bitcoin, the math-based e-money created by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. While the peer-to-peer technology that Bitcoin employs isn’t novel, many engineers consider its implementation an enormous technical achievement. The network’s “nodes”—users running the Bitcoin software on their computers—collectively check the integrity of other nodes to ensure that no one spends the same coins twice. All transactions are published on a shared public ledger, called the “block chain,” and verified by “miners,” users whose powerful computers solve difficult math problems in exchange for freshly minted bitcoins. The system’s elegance has led some to wonder: if money can be decentralized and, to some extent, anonymized, can’t the same model be applied to other things, like e-mail?\n\nBitmessage is an e-mail replacement proposed last year that has been called the “the Bitcoin of online communication.” Instead of talking to a central mail server, Bitmessage distributes messages across a network of peers running the Bitmessage software. Unlike both Bitcoin and e-mail, Bitmessage “addresses” are cryptographically derived sequences that help encrypt a message’s contents automatically. That means that many parties help store and deliver the message, but only the intended recipient can read it. Another option obscures the sender’s identity; an alternate address sends the message on her behalf, similar to the anonymous “re-mailers” that arose from the cypherpunk movement of the nineteen-nineties.\n\nAnother ambitious project, Namecoin, is a P2P system almost identical to Bitcoin. But instead of currency, it functions as a decentralized replacement for the Internet’s Domain Name System. The D.N.S. is the essential “phone book” that translates a Web site’s typed address (www.newyorker.com) to the corresponding computer’s numerical I.P. address (192.168.1.1). The directory is decentralized by design, but it still has central points of authority: domain registrars, which buy and lease Web addresses to site owners, and the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or I.C.A.N.N., which controls the distribution of domains.\n\nThe infrastructure does allow for large-scale takedowns, like in 2010, when the Department of Justice tried to seize ten domains it believed to be hosting child pornography, but accidentally took down eighty-four thousand innocent Web sites in the process. Instead of centralized registrars, Namecoin uses cryptographic tokens similar to bitcoins to authenticate ownership of “.bit” domains. In theory, these domain names can’t be hijacked by criminals or blocked by governments; no one except the owner can surrender them.\n\nSolutions like these follow a path different from Mailpile and ArkOS. Their peer-to-peer architecture holds the potential for greatly improved privacy and security on the Internet. But existing apart from commonly used protocols and standards can also preclude any possibility of widespread adoption. Still, Novak said, the transition to an Internet that relies more extensively on decentralized, P2P technology is “an absolutely essential development,” since it would make many attacks by malicious actors—criminals and intelligence agencies alike—impractical.\n\nThough Snowden has raised the profile of privacy technology, it will be up to engineers and their allies to make that technology viable for the masses. “Decentralization must become a viable alternative,” said Cook, the ArkOS developer, “not just to give options to users that can self-host, but also to put pressure on the political and corporate institutions.”\n\n“Discussions about innovation, resilience, open protocols, data ownership and the numerous surrounding issues,” said Redecentralize’s Bolychevsky, “need to become mainstream if we want the Internet to stay free, democratic, and engaging.”",
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      "permlink": "cheetah-re-m4r4nz4this-simple-iphone-case-can-be-used-to-steal-atm-pins",
      "title": "",
      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttps://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/iphone-case-atm-pins/",
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      "parent_permlink": "security",
      "author": "m4r4nz4",
      "permlink": "this-simple-iphone-case-can-be-used-to-steal-atm-pins",
      "title": "This Simple iPhone Case can be Used to Steal ATM PINs",
      "body": "![rami-al-zayat-170349.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmUrCvchxgoesvuwTrQ2T2mP9U1c8xxaAYHBhEqNvLeuv6/rami-al-zayat-170349.jpg)\n\nATM\nIt’s a common wisecrack around the criminal community. This whole stealing ATM PINs thing would be a lot simple if a gadget would just do all the work.\n\nSounds like a crazy dream, right?\n\nAfter all, what thief wouldn't love to steal ATM PINs via a handheld device?\n\nThis dream, frighteningly for us, may just come true with what appears to be an ordinary iPhone case.\n\nIt’s called the ‘FLIR One – Infrared Accessory’ and it fits the Apple iPhone 5 and 5s. The concept behind it is that the infrared camera on the case can pick up thermal heat signatures and translate them into dynamic color images.\n\nWhile it’s initially created for security, home repairs and outdoor activities, thieves can use it to pick up the thermal heat signatures left behind after an individual punches in a PIN at the ATM or a bank code at the supermarket.\n\nSo an amateur ATM-code thief can now buy an iPhone case with infrared-scanning capabilities. Thermal imaging technology—normally reserved for military operations and for hunting—can be bought from online stores and retailers for just a few hundred dollars.\n\nWith infrared technology, thieves can scan a keypad that you have punched your PIN into. They don’t have to use their hands – just the infrared accessory on their phones.\n\nThe thermal imaging camera does all the work – capturing an image of the heat that is left by your fingertips when they touch the buttons to enter the PIN. Using the dynamic color image of the thermal signature, crooks can easily tell the order of the PIN numbers.\n\nAnd if you’re wondering if criminals could cause any damage with access to just the PIN and not the physical card, they can! They only require a radio frequency identification scanner that can capture your details from your card, even from three feet away.\nThermal imaging and ATM PIN theft\n\nThis isn’t the first time thermal imaging has grabbed headlines when it comes to stealing ATM PINs. Research presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in 2011 showcased how thermal imaging has the ability to detect residual heat from keypresses unlike traditional video cameras.\n\nThermal image from research paper\n\nResearchers who gave the presentation gathered volunteers to select random PIN numbers on a brushed metal PIN pad and a plastic PIN pad. The researchers found that the plastic PIN pad made it possible to determine the heat signatures of the numbers pressed as well as the number order.\n\nThe research also suggested that the thieves could adopt the use of thermal camera techniques in the future. It is easy for account robbers to hide such gadgets about their person, and they are inexpensive. The FLIR One case for example costs $350, which is a small investment for someone keen to access your account, steal your credit card data and find out your security codes.\nHow to protect yourself\n\nFortunately, there are some things you can do.\n\nThe design and science guru Mark Rober had made a video, showing how you can easily prevent thieves from using this new strategy to steal your PIN and information.\n\nAfter you swipe an ATM card, rest a couple of fingers on other buttons while typing in your code.\n\nThis would leave a signature that even the savviest criminal with the best infrared camera/accessory won’t be able to detect. It’s all about the buttons you press on the machine.\n\n\nPosted on September 15th, 2014 by Graham Cluley\nPhoto by Rami Al-zayat on Unsplash",
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      "title": "",
      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttps://advocacy.mozilla.org/en-US/net-neutrality",
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      "permlink": "the-fcc-has-a-plan-to-destroy-net-neutrality-it-s-up-to-us-to-stop-it",
      "title": "The FCC has a plan to destroy net neutrality. It’s up to us to stop it.",
      "body": "The Federal Communications Commission's new Chairman Ajit Pai just announced a proposal to gut net neutrality.\n\nNet neutrality is the freedom to say, watch and make what we want online without interference from internet service providers. Two years ago, after hearing from nearly 4 million people urging it protect the open internet, the FCC passed rules protecting net neutrality.\nWhy should we protect net neutrality?\n\nThere are a million reasons why we must protect net neutrality. Here are a few of them:\n\n    Net neutrality is fundamental to free speech. Without net neutrality, big companies could censor your voice and make it harder to speak up online. Net neutrality has been called the \"First Amendment of the Internet.\"\n    Net neutrality is fundamental to competition. Without net neutrality, big Internet service providers can choose which services and content load quickly, and which move at a glacial pace. That means the big guys can afford to buy their way in, while the little guys don't stand a chance.\n    Net neutrality is fundamental to innovation. Without net neutrality, creators and entrepreneurs could struggle to reach new users. Investment in new ideas would dry up, and the internet would start to look more and more like cable TV: a zillion channels and nothing on.\n    Net neutrality is fundamental to user choice. Without net neutrality, ISPs could decide you watched too many cat videos in one day and throttle your Internet speeds leaving you behind on the latest Maru memes.\n\nCALL TO ACTION \n\nhttps://advocacy.mozilla.org/it/net-neutrality/?utm_source=www.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ih-content-hub",
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      "author": "windrockswater",
      "permlink": "re-m4r4nz4-the-eternal-value-of-privacy-20170823t170220276z",
      "title": "",
      "body": "Very well said.  I know there are a lot of us to keep track of, but all the more reason to feel a need for control and  personal freedom of whatever gifts have been given to us. Peace to you.",
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      "title": "",
      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttps://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/05/the_eternal_value_of.html",
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{
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      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "privacy",
      "author": "m4r4nz4",
      "permlink": "the-eternal-value-of-privacy",
      "title": "The Eternal Value of Privacy",
      "body": "![mathyas-kurmann-102968.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmXE4f5fgqkawWwTPBFQEtjXsnPLU4tMNU7jQPgamG5GMG/mathyas-kurmann-102968.jpg)\nThe most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: \"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?\"\n\nSome clever answers: \"If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.\" \"Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition.\" \"Because you might do something wrong with my information.\" My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.\n\nTwo proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (\"Who watches the watchers?\") and \"Absolute power corrupts absolutely.\"\n\nCardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, \"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.\" Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.\n\nPrivacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.\n\nWe do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.\n\nA future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty.\n\nFor if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.\n\nHow many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered.\n\nThis is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.\n\nToo many wrongly characterize the debate as \"security versus privacy.\" The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.\n\nfrom  Schneier on Security",
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      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttps://www.lawfareblog.com/who-publishing-nsa-and-cia-secrets-and-why",
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      "permlink": "who-is-publishing-nsa-and-cia-secrets-and-why",
      "title": "Who Is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?",
      "body": "![brandon-wong-263951.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmNVNgYGkCadxuH2EPyoUbcBX3Yrdr4KTX59R5bUpq2bfa/brandon-wong-263951.jpg)There's something going on inside the intelligence communities in at least two countries, and we have no idea what it is.\n\nConsider these three data points. One: someone, probably a country's intelligence organization, is dumping massive amounts of cyberattack tools belonging to the NSA onto the Internet. Two: someone else, or maybe the same someone, is doing the same thing to the CIA.\n\nThree: in March, NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett described how the NSA penetrated the computer networks of a Russian intelligence agency and was able to monitor them as they attacked the U.S. State Department in 2014. Even more explicitly, a U.S. ally—my guess is the U.K.—was not only hacking the Russian intelligence agency's computers, but also the surveillance cameras inside their building. \"They [the U.S. ally] monitored the [Russian] hackers as they maneuvered inside the U.S. systems and as they walked in and out of the workspace, and were able to see faces, the officials said.\"\n\nCountries don't often reveal intelligence capabilities: \"sources and methods.\" Because it gives their adversaries important information about what to fix, it's a deliberate decision done with good reason. And it's not just the target country who learns from a reveal. When the U.S. announces that it can see through the cameras inside the buildings of Russia's cyber warriors, other countries immediately check the security of their own cameras.\n\nWith all this in mind, let's talk about the recent leaks at NSA and the CIA.\n\nLast year, a previously unknown group called the Shadow Brokers started releasing NSA hacking tools and documents from about three years ago. They continued to do so this year—five sets of files in all—and have implied that more classified documents are to come. We don't know how they got the files. When the Shadow Brokers first emerged, the general consensus was that someone had found and hacked an external NSA staging server. These are third-party computers that the NSA's TAO hackers use to launch attacks from. Those servers are necessarily stocked with TAO attack tools. This matched the leaks, which included a \"script\" directory and working attack notes. We're not sure if someone inside the NSA made a mistake that left these files exposed, or if the hackers that found the cache got lucky.\n\nThat explanation stopped making sense after the latest Shadow Brokers release, which included attack tools against Windows, PowerPoint presentations, and operational notes—documents that are definitely not going to be on an external NSA staging server. A credible theory, which I first heard from Nicholas Weaver, is that the Shadow Brokers are publishing NSA data from multiple sources. The first leaks were from an external staging server, but the more recent leaks are from inside the NSA itself.\n\nSo what happened? Did someone inside the NSA accidentally mount the wrong server on some external network? That's possible, but seems very unlikely. Did someone hack the NSA itself? Could there be a mole inside the NSA, as Kevin Poulsen speculated?\n\nIf it is a mole, my guess is that he's already been arrested. There are enough individualities in the files to pinpoint exactly where and when they came from. Surely the NSA knows who could have taken the files. No country would burn a mole working for it by publishing what he delivered. Intelligence agencies know that if they betray a source this severely, they'll never get another one.\n\nThat points to two options. The first is that the files came from Hal Martin. He's the NSA contractor who was arrested in August for hoarding agency secrets in his house for two years. He can't be the publisher, because the Shadow Brokers are in business even though he is in prison. But maybe the leaker got the documents from his stash: either because Martin gave the documents to them or because he himself was hacked. The dates line up, so it's theoretically possible, but the contents of the documents speak to someone with a different sort of access. There's also nothing in the public indictment against Martin that speaks to his selling secrets to a foreign power, and I think it's exactly the sort of thing that the NSA would leak. But maybe I'm wrong about all of this; Occam's Razor suggests that it's him.\n\nThe other option is a mysterious second NSA leak of cyberattack tools. The only thing I have ever heard about this is from a Washington Post story about Martin: \"But there was a second, previously undisclosed breach of cybertools, discovered in the summer of 2015, which was also carried out by a TAO employee, one official said. That individual also has been arrested, but his case has not been made public. The individual is not thought to have shared the material with another country, the official said.\" But \"not thought to have\" is not the same as not having done so.\n\nOn the other hand, it's possible that someone penetrated the internal NSA network. We've already seen NSA tools that can do that kind of thing to other networks. That would be huge, and explain why there were calls to fire NSA Director Mike Rogers last year.\n\nThe CIA leak is both similar and different. It consists of a series of attack tools from about a year ago. The most educated guess amongst people who know stuff is that the data is from an almost-certainly air-gapped internal development wiki—a Confluence server—and either someone on the inside was somehow coerced into giving up a copy of it, or someone on the outside hacked into the CIA and got themselves a copy. They turned the documents over to WikiLeaks, which continues to publish it.\n\nThis is also a really big deal, and hugely damaging for the CIA. Those tools were new, and they're impressive. I have been told that the CIA is desperately trying to hire coders to replace what was lost.\n\nFor both of these leaks, one big question is attribution: who did this? A whistleblower wouldn't sit on attack tools for years before publishing. A whistleblower would act more like Snowden or Manning, publishing immediately—and publishing documents that discuss what the U.S. is doing to whom, not simply a bunch of attack tools. It just doesn't make sense. Neither does random hackers. Or cybercriminals. I think it's being done by a country or countries.\n\nMy guess was, and is still, Russia in both cases. Here's my reasoning. Whoever got this information years before and is leaking it now has to 1) be capable of hacking the NSA and/or the CIA, and 2) willing to publish it all. Countries like Israel and France are certainly capable, but wouldn't ever publish. Countries like North Korea or Iran probably aren't capable. The list of countries who fit both criteria is small: Russia, China, and ... and ... and I'm out of ideas. And China is currently trying to make nice with the US.\n\nLast August, Edward Snowden guessed Russia, too.\n\nSo Russia—or someone else—steals these secrets, and presumably uses them to both defend its own networks and hack other countries while deflecting blame for a couple of years. For it to publish now means that the intelligence value of the information is now lower than the embarrassment value to the NSA and CIA. This could be because the US figured out that its tools were hacked, and maybe even by whom; which would make the tools less valuable against U.S. government targets, although still valuable against third parties.\n\nThe message that comes with publishing seems clear to me: \"We are so deep into your business that we don't care if we burn these few-years-old capabilities, as well as the fact that we have them. There's just nothing you can do about it.\" It's bragging.\n\nWhich is exactly the same thing Ledgett is doing to the Russians. Maybe the capabilities he talked about are long gone, so there's nothing lost in exposing sources and methods. Or maybe he too is bragging: saying to the Russians that he doesn't care if they know. He's certainly bragging to every other country that is paying attention to his remarks. (He may be bluffing, of course, hoping to convince others that the U.S. has intelligence capabilities it doesn't.)\n\nWhat happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don't tell the rest of us? I think there's something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate.\nthanks to Bruce Schneier",
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      "parent_permlink": "security",
      "author": "m4r4nz4",
      "permlink": "social-engineering-methods",
      "title": "social engineering methods",
      "body": "![maxime-rossignol-266384.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQma95VA2ceLn9Cbehz8xGkss4tP7C6gwTZyUVX8HXrWev8/maxime-rossignol-266384.jpg)\nSocial engineering is the practice of learning and obtaining valuable information by exploiting human vulnerabilities. It is an art of deception that is considered to be vital for a penetration tester when there is a lack of information about the target that can be exploited.\n\nSocial engineering is the practice of learning and obtaining valuable information by exploiting human vulnerabilities. It is an art of deception that is considered to be vital for a penetration tester when there is a lack of information about the target that can be exploited. As people are the weakest link in the security defense of any organization, this is the most vulnerable layer in the security infrastructure.\nThe six social engineering methods given here could be beneficial for understanding, recognizing, socializing, and preparing the target for your final operation. These methods have been categorized and described according to their unique representation in the social engineering field. We have also included some examples to present a real-world scenario under which you can apply each of the selected methods. Remember that psychological factors form the basis of these attack methods, and to make these methods more efficient, they should be regularly drilled and exercised by social engineers.\nImpersonation\n\nAttackers will pretend to be someone else in order to gain trust. For instance, to acquire the target's bank information, phishing would be the perfect solution unless the target has no e-mail account. Hence, the attacker first collects or harvests e-mail addresses from the target, and then prepares a scam page that looks and functions exactly like the original bank web interface.\nAfter completing all the necessary tasks, the attacker then prepares and sends a formal e-mail (for example, the accounts' update issue), which appears to be from the original bank's website, asking the target to visit a link in order to provide the attacker with up-to-date bank information. By holding qualitative skills on web technologies and using an advanced set of tools (for example, SSLstrip), a social engineer can easily automate this task in an effective manner. With regards to human-assisted scamming, we could accomplish this by physically appearing and impersonating the target's banker.\nReciprocation\n\nThe act of exchanging a favor in terms of gaining mutual advantage is known as reciprocation. This type of social engineering engagement may involve a casual and long-term business relationship. By exploiting the trust between business entities, someone could easily map their target to acquire any necessary information. For example, Jane is a professional hacker and wants to know about the physical security policy of the ABC company at its office building. After careful examination, she decides to develop a website, drawing keen interest of two of their employees by selling antique pieces at cheap rates. We assume that Jane already knows their personal information including the e-mail addresses through social networks, Internet forums, and so on. Out of the two employees, Alice comes out to purchase her stuff regularly and becomes the main target for Jane.\n\nJane is now in a position where she could offer a special antique piece in exchange for the information he needs. Taking advantage of human psychological factors, she writes an e-mail to Alice, and asks her to get the ABC company's physical security policy details, for which she would be given a unique antique piece. Without noticing the business liability, she reveals this information to Bob. This proves that creating a fake situation, while strengthening the relationship by trading values, can be advantageous for a social engineering engagement.\n\nInfluential authority\n\nAn attack method by which one manipulates the target's business responsibilities is known as an influential authority attack. This kind of social engineering attack is sometimes part of an impersonation method. Humans, by nature, act in an automated fashion to accept instructions from their authority or senior management, even if their instincts suggest that certain instructions should not be followed. This nature makes us vulnerable to certain threats. For example, if someone wanted to target the XYZ company's network administrator to acquire their authentication details, they would have observed and noted the phone numbers of the administrator and the CEO of the company through a reciprocation method. Now, using a call-spoofing service (for example, www.spoofcard.com) to call the network administrator, they would notice that the call is coming from the CEO and should be prioritized. This method influences the target to reveal information to an impersonated authority; the target has to comply with instructions from the company's senior management.\nScarcity\n\nTaking the best opportunity, especially if it seems scarce, is one of the greediest habits of human beings. This method describes a way of giving an opportunity to people for their personal gain. The famous Nigerian 419 Scam (www.419eater.com) is a typical example of human avarice. Let's take an example where Bob wants to collect personal information from XYZ university students. We assume that he already has the e-mail addresses of all the students. Afterwards, he professionally develops an e-mail message that offers vouchers with drastic discounts on iPods to all XYZ university students, who might then reply with their personal information (name, address, phone, e-mail, date of birth, passport number, and so on). As the opportunity was carefully calibrated to target students, by making them think about getting the latest iPod for free, many of them might fall for this scam. In the corporate world, this attack method can be extended to maximize commercial gain and achieve business objectives.\nSocial relationship\n\nWe require some form of social relationship to share our thoughts, feelings, and ideas. The most vulnerable part of any social connection is sexuality. In many cases, opposite sexes attract and appeal to each other. Owing to this intense feeling and false sense of trust, we may end up revealing information to the opponent. There are several online social portals where people can meet and chat to socialize. These include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Orkut, and many more. For instance, Bob is hired by the XYZ company to get the financial and marketing strategy of the ABC company in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. He first looks through a number of employees and finds a girl called Alice who is responsible for all business operations. Pretending to be a normal business graduate, he tries to find his way into a relationship with her (for example, through Facebook). Bob intentionally creates situations where he could meet Alice, such as social gatherings, anniversaries, dance clubs, and music festivals. Once he acquires a certain trust level, business talks flow easily in regular meetings. This practice allows him to extract useful insights into the financial and marketing perspectives of the ABC company. Remember, the more effective and trustful relationships you create, the more you can socially engineer your target. There are tools that will make this task easier for you; for instance, SET, which we will describe in the next section.\nCuriosity\n\nThere is an old saying: curiosity killed the cat. It is an admonishment to humans that sometimes our own curiosity gets the better of us. At work, there is a great deal of curiosity at play. We want to know how much the CEO gets paid, who is going to get promoted, or who is going to be let go. As a result, social engineers take this natural curiosity and use it against us. We may be enticed to click on a link in an email that gives us a teaser about some celebrity gossip. We may also be enticed to open a document that is in fact malware that, in turn, compromises our system. Penetration testers can leverage this curiosity through a number of different attacks.",
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      "parent_permlink": "surveillance",
      "author": "m4r4nz4",
      "permlink": "the-world-of-surveillance",
      "title": "the world of surveillance",
      "body": "\"Surveillance Is the Business Model of the Internet\"\nUnder surveillance capitalism, we’ve lost control of our devices and our data – but there is a way back. Interview with Bruce Schneier by Agne Pix.\n\n    Agne Pix\n    OpenDemocracy\n    July 18, 2017\n\nAgne Pix (AP): Does technology protect our privacy on the internet or is it a threat?\n\nBruce Schneier (BS): There are a lot of technologies that help preserve privacy and keep us and our data secure, like for example encryption. Technology can also remove privacy: you may think of cameras or listening devices and insecure internet connections. We are living in a world where we often interact with computers. They produce data about these interactions, which is data about ourselves and that is collected by corporations. Surveillance is the business model of the internet. So right now a lot of the technology that we use is harmful to our security and privacy.\n\nAP: Isn't it ironic that the internet, which was supposed to make the world more open and connected (just like in the mission statement of Facebook), is being exploited by governments for mass surveillance and by corporations to make mass profits?\n\nBS: The internet does make the world more open and interconnected. It connects billions of people to new information and new ideas; it's incredibly empowering. But those same technologies that allow us to communicate allow other people to listen in. When the internet was built, free and open, it meant that advertising was the only obvious way to make money and that turned into surveillance.\n\nFor sure we can build the internet to be more secure and private but then you have to figure out how companies are going to make money there. You can build the internet to be more protective of individual liberties, and then the countries that want to invade people's liberties have to figure out how to get around it. Such tensions will always exist in these technologies. We as the builders of the internet need to recognise what is important and prioritise it.\n\nAP: Why is encryption so important as means to protect our privacy? Ordinary people don't really understand what it is—it sounds too technical and complicated.\n\nBS: Encryption is too technical and complicated; no one has to understand it! How does your door lock work, the intricacies of the mechanism? You don't understand it and you don't care. But you know that you need a door lock to protect your house. Encryption is just a tool. People don't need encryption, they need privacy, they need security, things that matter to them and their society. It's important for your freedom, your liberty, for your autonomy as a person to be both secure and private in your thoughts and communications. That's a fundamental human right. Encryption is a mathematical technology that in some cases makes that right possible on the internet.\n\nAP: In Europe, and in the US as well, after each terrorist attempt or attack, sooner or later politicians would point to encryption as means of protecting terrorists.\n\nBS: After terrorist attacks people who like police states always point to technologies and laws that make their lives less convenient. And whether it is encryption or search and seizure laws or procedural laws or investigative powers, police will always try to get more power by exploiting horrific events. We have to understand that our freedom and liberties are more important. It is true that, in every technological age, the price of liberty is the possibility of crime. We need to recognise that we pay that price willingly. We can give police all sorts of powers, over encryption, over due process, over prosecution and arrest... and live in a police state. There might be less terrorism but we're not going to be safer. All of these police demands is that they are power grips that exploit fear and we have to respond to them as such.\n\nAP: When you think about privacy on the internet, what is wrong with social networks, Facebook in particular? If you were Mark Zuckerberg for a day, what would you change?\n\nBS: There's nothing wrong with public social media and social networks and how we communicate through them. But we start having problems when something as powerful as Facebook is run by a for-profit corporation. It's not operating in the interest of its users, but in the interest of their customers—the advertisers. It's not Facebook's fault, they are a company trying to make money. But they're making money in a regulatory world where they are allowed to exploit all of their users, spy on them, run social experiments and manipulate them for profit. Now, if I was in charge of Facebook, I would do just that, because if I didn't, I'd be fired. But if I was the government looking at what Facebook is doing, I would stop and ask: is this the society and the business model we want? Do we want companies to make money by exploiting their users or do we want them to operate in the best interest of their users? We've been letting the markets run rampant and do whatever they want and it has come up with this surveillance capitalism. Now we have to decide do we like it.\n\nAP: The internet was a product of the children of the Generation '68, an idealistic project connecting the world where everybody could exchange information freely. But it has lost its innocence and is not as free as it used to be. Can you pinpoint the moment when it became the money generating machine?\n\nBS: There wasn't the moment when it turned from this free idealistic project to this enormous engine of capitalism; it happened slowly. The internet turned from non-commercial to commercial, as companies did not see any way of making money other than advertising and then used personal advertising, the invention of cookies and browsers, as a way to better make money. It happened because of the laws that existed at the time made that the best business model. There's nothing sacred about the way the legal structures enabling the internet are, we can change these laws and maybe we should think about it.\n\nAP: What does privacy mean to you?\n\nBS: Privacy is fundamentally about autonomy. Privacy gives me the ability to decide who I share different aspects and information of myself with. And that means I am an autonomous human being in the society. When someone comes to me and says \"I know this about you\" they are violating my privacy, but they are really violating me. What they're saying is: \"you don't have control over what I know about you.\" That is a fraud, an assault. If we are in charge of our own privacy, we're in charge of ourselves. That's why it is so important today.\n\nAP: Many people don't realise this because they accept \"free\" services without asking themselves questions. They don't even bother about their privacy and it's not important to them, because they claim that they \"have nothing to hide,\" \"everything is public anyway\" and they are OK with giving away everything to Google.\n\nBS: They are wrong. They are protecting the privacy of their bodies, they're not telling you their salary, they don't broadcast their sexual fantasies. These people do use privacy but they don't realise it because privacy is something you tend not to notice until you've had lost it. Also, privacy is not just a benefit to them. They might not have anything to hide, but they might know people who are marginalised in the society, who are dissidents, reporters, activists. Privacy collectively helps us all, and it's not about my privacy, his privacy or hers, it's about OUR privacy. It's about society being a place where we can have ideas and conversations away from public view. And that means that we're going to be able to think new thoughts and advance.\n\nAP: When have we lost control of our devices? We don't decide on our hardware of software anymore, we are just given prefabricated configuration and mobiles equipped with all sorts of spying applications. How can we regain control and choice?\n\nBS: In some ways we've lost control of devices at the very beginning, when you had to be some kind of expert to understand how to use privacy and how to make security work. But that really changed with invention of the iPhone. Before the iPhone you could decide what was on your device. With the iPhone you can only put things on that device that Apple approves of. And when you get to the 'Internet of Things,' you have zero control on what's going on them. So we've lost control of our devices and our data because it has moved to the cloud. I have no control over the data on Google, Facebook, Flickr, no control over the security or privacy settings.!",
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