The Link
Welcome to the new normal.
"Can't even urinate in his own yard anymore." LOL!
"At watering holes or events where developers and entrepreneurs hang out, the conversation often bounces across the app economy and the “cloud” it relies on, that notion of amorphous servers that handle your storage and processing needs off site. Yet, the cloud is not amorphous. It is composed of companies with real people, servers, and computers, and some of the people are hanging out at bars, and soon they tell you how they access data their users have uploaded."
"Cloud-based services brag about SSL encryption and make you sign in with complex passwords to make you feel secure, but like banks, their employees and data-mining algorithms can access your data stored on their servers to be monetized in some way. That’s the nature of the cloud on the commercial side."
"But the government, which has largely been left behind in this quest for personal data, jumped into the fray with different and most likely less efficient methods. Examples abound. The latest—and most worrisome for international travelers—is Glenn Greenwald’s story about the travails that journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras experiences every time she returns to the US. Among her documentaries were “My Country, My Country” which was filmed in Iraq and was nominated in 2007 for an Academy Award, and “Oath” which focused on two brothers in Yemen. “Poitras’ intent all along with these two documentaries was to produce a trilogy of War on Terror films,” Greenwald writes. And that got her on a list of Americans who receive special attentions from the Department of Homeland Security."
"Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her.... Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke."
"They also confiscated her electronic devices, including her camera, presumably searched and copied whatever was on them, before returning them often days later. And she wasn’t the only one. During an 18-month period from 2008-2010, more than 6,600 passengers—almost half of them US citizens—had had their electronic devices searched without search warrant, according to the ACLU."
"How far will the government go in trying to extract the last bit of information from its people? At this point, it appears to be lagging behind the commercial sector where big corporations and even startups that come and go obtain information because people hand it to them—eagerly or very unwittingly. And so an insidious and at once funny privacy issue erupted in France, or more precisely in a tiny village in Maine-et-Loire, with worldwide resonance. Read.... Can’t Even Urinate in his own Yard Anymore."
Welcome to the new normal.
"Can't even urinate in his own yard anymore." LOL!
"At watering holes or events where developers and entrepreneurs hang out, the conversation often bounces across the app economy and the “cloud” it relies on, that notion of amorphous servers that handle your storage and processing needs off site. Yet, the cloud is not amorphous. It is composed of companies with real people, servers, and computers, and some of the people are hanging out at bars, and soon they tell you how they access data their users have uploaded."
"Cloud-based services brag about SSL encryption and make you sign in with complex passwords to make you feel secure, but like banks, their employees and data-mining algorithms can access your data stored on their servers to be monetized in some way. That’s the nature of the cloud on the commercial side."
"But the government, which has largely been left behind in this quest for personal data, jumped into the fray with different and most likely less efficient methods. Examples abound. The latest—and most worrisome for international travelers—is Glenn Greenwald’s story about the travails that journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras experiences every time she returns to the US. Among her documentaries were “My Country, My Country” which was filmed in Iraq and was nominated in 2007 for an Academy Award, and “Oath” which focused on two brothers in Yemen. “Poitras’ intent all along with these two documentaries was to produce a trilogy of War on Terror films,” Greenwald writes. And that got her on a list of Americans who receive special attentions from the Department of Homeland Security."
"Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her.... Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke."
"They also confiscated her electronic devices, including her camera, presumably searched and copied whatever was on them, before returning them often days later. And she wasn’t the only one. During an 18-month period from 2008-2010, more than 6,600 passengers—almost half of them US citizens—had had their electronic devices searched without search warrant, according to the ACLU."
"How far will the government go in trying to extract the last bit of information from its people? At this point, it appears to be lagging behind the commercial sector where big corporations and even startups that come and go obtain information because people hand it to them—eagerly or very unwittingly. And so an insidious and at once funny privacy issue erupted in France, or more precisely in a tiny village in Maine-et-Loire, with worldwide resonance. Read.... Can’t Even Urinate in his own Yard Anymore."
