Today's announcement from Apple that the new iPod Nanos will have cameras in them reminded me of two posts I made a while ago.

First, camera ubiquity as evidence of absence. If Bigfoot, UFOs, or Nessie really existed we ought to see more better photos as more people carry more better cameras. Instead it's just more of the same: fuzzy, ambiguous ( Read more... )

This weekend I got to meet Ian Goldberg, author of the OTR protocol that I use at home and work in Gaim/Pidgin/Adium. Ian is a pleasant and wicked smart guy, and our conversation revealed a few interesting things ( Read more... )

In the United States employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If you're using company networks or computers for personal communication it's reasonable to expect that some of this data will be discovered by the company, at very least unintentionally. Maybe you're out sick one day and someone needs to check your $HOME or email account ( Read more... )

The 9th Circuit just approved searching laptops at airports. The TSA is no longer happy making sure that your laptop isn't a bomb, now they want to make sure that the *information* on your laptop isn't dangerous. Presumably they're concerned about laptop-facilitated hijackings. "I've got 200GB of child pornography! I'll start viewing it unless ( Read more... )

doohickey wants to send mail to sploof, and wants to make sure the Sudanese government won't be able to read it. I told her I'd post instructions for how to send encrypted email with GPG so that she can send secure email herself.

1. Download and install MacGPG for OSX or GPG for Windows.
   
   
2. Download and install GPGMail for Apple Mail or the GPG plugin for your ( Read more... )

As Jon Stewart pointed out on the Daily Show earlier this week, the NSA's phone call database invades privacy because you can determine an awful lot about private citizens' lawful private communication without needing to examine the content of that communication. "They know you called the Gay Teen Bondage Chatline for 15 minutes last Tuesday, but ( Read more... )

This article presents an interesting solution to the wiretapping problem that existed in the late 1990s, code named "ThinThread". The system "identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy." Presumably this means that every phone number's MD5 checksum would be stored in the database. They ( Read more... )

Reading this article and thinking how to answer his question helped me clarify what exactly the problem is with wiretapping criminals and terrorists without a court order:

The enemies of our government and the enemies of the persons in our government are not the same enemies.Our government should have the ability to surveil criminals and ( Read more... )

In honor of the recent wiretapping scandal I've stopped using my old 2048 bit GPG key.

pub 1024D/7DDC9B55 2004-03-22
Key fingerprint = 078A 32BA 18AD 27EA 9DF5 CB3B C3F1 3AEF 7DDC 9B55
( the revocation key )