Government Use of Surveillance Devices must be Restricted: Privacy Experts

"Canada must acknowledge, and then constrain, the government’s use of portable surveillance devices that can indiscriminately dredge data from people’s smartphones without them knowing, privacy experts say.

Everything that is known or suspected about the government’s use of these machines – called 'IMSI catchers,' 'cell-site simulators' or 'Stingrays' – is chronicled in a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind, 130-page report written by privacy experts and released to The Globe and Mail.

Federal police have used these devices for more than a decade, but the practice was confirmed only this year in a series of stories in The Globe. Now, researchers Christopher Parsons and Tamir Israel say it’s time for civil society to debate the pros and cons of IMSI catchers, even if many government agencies still won’t discuss them."

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Communication Security Establishment's Cyberwarfare Toolbox Revealed
"Top-secret documents obtained by the CBC show Canada's electronic spy agency has developed a vast arsenal of cyberwarfare tools alongside its U.S. and British counterparts to hack into computers and phones in many parts of the world, including in friendly trade countries like Mexico and hotspots like the Middle East.

The little known Communications Security Establishment wanted to become more aggressive by 2015, the documents also said.

Revelations about the agency's prowess should serve as a 'major wakeup call for all Canadians,' particularly in the context of the current parliamentary debate over whether to give intelligence officials the power to disrupt national security threats, says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, the respected internet research group at University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs."

Google's Rapidly Expanding Political Activity and Information Collection Systems Present Cause for Concern
"Google is so rapidly expanding both its information-collecting capabilities and its political clout that it could become too powerful to be held accountable, a new Public Citizen report finds.

'Mission Creep-y: Google Is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collection Empire' looks at the ways Google is accruing power both in terms of the information it collects about the public and the sway it has over federal and state governments, as well as civil society.

Privacy experts say only the National Security Agency (NSA) rivals Google in terms of information gathering, and a recent survey showed that Americans are more concerned about companies like Google than the NSA. But Public Citizen documents that Google has not always warned the public before collecting or combining users’ information in new ways – and some of its collection practices have pushed the boundaries of the law. This is cause for concern as Google expands into new technological developments and acquisitions that collect information beyond what people do on the Internet."

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Related Report:  Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era

Privacy & Surveillance

How the U.S. and its Spy Allies Scan the World for Hackable Servers
"The spy agencies behind the Five Eyes snooping alliance are actively scanning networks across the connected world for vulnerabilities. Their tool is called Hacienda and its task is to find any unprotected "holes" left in server firewalls, such that spies can penetrate those servers and, potentially, take control. This was revealed in a paper published yesterday in Heise Online by researchers and journalists based in Germany."

Beantown's Big Brother: How Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Technology to Spy on Thousands of Music Festival Attendees
"...One of the reasons for a less physically imposing police presence may have been that the city was in the process of testing a pilot program for a massive facial recognition surveillance system on everyone at the concerts in both May and September. Using software provided by IBM that utilized existing security cameras throughout the area, the city tracked the thousands of attendees at the concert and in the vicinity, and filtered their appearance into data points which could then be cross-checked against certain identifying characteristics. And then... Well, what happens next is what makes this sort of thing so potentially troubling."