cloakers.org

Author: admin

  • NYC – Car Movements Tracked

    Given that New York City is still terrified, I don’t blame them. Manhattan is the obvious target still, and so the authorities are doing their very best to keep track of who comes and goes. Huffington Post reports:

    … install license plate reader cameras “in every lane of traffic on all of the bridges and tunnels that serve as entrances and exits to Manhattan.”

    Soon, no one will be able to drive onto or off of the island without potentially being recorded.

    Currently, Kelly said, the NYPD has “complete” coverage on the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges and the Battery and Holland Tunnels. License plate readers will be commissioned for additional bridges by this summer. The devices can quickly scan license plate numbers and submit the time and place they were captured to a database.

    If they leave it at that, I guess the trade-off is a fair one. The Powers-That-Be will know when anyone enters or exits Manhattan, meaning your or I as well as potential terrorists. Criminals will need to keep this in mind when concocting alibis!

    The concern is that this sort of monitoring will continue to expand, until ultimately your whereabouts is always known unless you use some form of cloaking.

  • Can You Trust VPN Services?

    Virtual Private Networks (VPN) are a wonderful tool for protecting your privacy online. When you use one (and they are often very reasonably priced) the websites you visit will only see the IP address of the VPN service, and not yours at home or work.

    Common uses include:

    • general privacy when researching gray area topics
    • posting comments and forum involvement
    • using the VPN’s country as a mask for your own – to perhaps open a USA iTunes account, or bypass Chinese government firewalls

    Now, VPNs are only beneficial if you can trust them. Governments can easily connect your activities to a VPN service you are using – but can they get to you via the VPN company?

    Ultimately you can’t trust anyone else. Ultimately the only way would be to run your own VPN. If that is beyond your capabilities, try this:

    • have a netbook that is only used for VPN activity, ever, from new. And buy it with cash
    • use free Gmail or Outlook accounts that are only ever accessed via VPN
    • only ever use your netbook/VPN combo at internet cafes or public access points like McDonalds
    • make sure there are other people accessing the web at the same time, from that same location

    That’s pretty extreme. If you just wish to protect yourself at a 99% level, there are numerous VPN companies that are almost certainly trustworthy. A list of some VPN services, along with their responses to questions regarding your anonymity is over at Torrent Freak.

    IMO, if the government were to acquire or start up their own VPN service, so that they could catch out those who seem to be avoiding scrutiny, there are two ways they would most likely achieve that:

    1. Have a high-profile service with a lot of clients. The sort that Australian consumers would use to get access to iTunes in the USA or whatever

    2. Have a service that is known and trusted by people who frequent discussion boards that focus on anonymity and black hat online practices. Hackers, basically.

    So using a little known VPN that doesn’t promote themselves to hackers would be the way to go.

  • Future Laws Against Cloaking

    Firstly, here’s a list of cloaking techniques that will most likely never be illegal:

    • normal hats
    • spectacles
    • facial hair
    • any hairstyle you choose
    • breathing masks (where the air is filthy)
    • sunglasses (when outdoors, until clear sunglasses are invented…)
    • makeup
    • scarfs
    • motorcycle and bike helmets (while you are riding)
    But these can and will be against the law:
    • full face coverings (like a burqa)
    • fake facial hair
    • fake facial tattoos
    • fake noses
    • hats that obscure the eyes or side of your face
    • sunglasses indoors
    • scarves above your chin

    And for transportation, you should always be able to walk, although it wouldn’t surprise me if running without a valid reason becomes illegal. Joggers might be restricted to special zones. Anything with a motor or wheels will most likely need to be registered, and have a built-in location chip. Expect that you will need to register these within the next 20 years:

    • bicycles
    • skateboards
    • scooters

    With public transportation, before long everyone will have re-loadable travel cards that will require registration. Eventually face recognition systems will be used in combination with travel cards, so that there will be no way of fooling the system.

    If cloaking becomes too much of a problem, expect curfews to emerge, as well as “reason to be there” zones.

  • Rural and City Cloakers

    I expect that when everyone knows what a cloaker is, there will be two distinct types, and one that simply doesn’t exist.

    City / Downtown Cloaker: This is the most obvious cloaker. A high population density, combined with the presence of major corporations and businesses, as well as large gathering points means that inner cities will be where the most surveillance cameras will be located. The high density also means that getting quickly from A to B (by foot, scooter or bicycle) is quite easy to achieve.

    Rural Cloaker: It is hard to cloak if you live in an area of low population. If you live at the end of a country road, and head into town with the licence plates of your pickup truck obscured, your neighbors will still know that it is you. And if you scoot around a small town with a mask on, you will attract attention. So if you live somewhere rural, cloaking will be more concerned with relationships with like-minded locals.

    Suburban Cloaker: The worst of both worlds. Too far to get from A to B under your own steam, and too hard to network if locals. If you really want to have a life the authorities cannot connect with you, choose the city or country instead.

  • UK To Spy On Personal Web Activities

    UK officials plan to monitor Britons’ online activities by placing surveillance devices on the country’s telecom networks, a Parliamentary report says. The program would keep tabs on which websites were visited as well as who contacted whom. [Source: RT.com]

    That will include anyone who communicates with the UK internationally… While they will mostly just note who contacted who and when (as already happens, legally, in the USA), they might also store the content as well – although there might be storage limit issues unless they are building massive facilities.

    It looks like this will soon apply to all countries. Those with oppressive regimes already do it, the USA is ramping up their abilities, and now the UK as well. From here on in, expect that any online activity that can be directly linked to yourself to be monitored, analyzed and shared.

    • Your IP address (if it is fixed)
    • Your email address
    • Your phone number / SIM card
    • Your name

    To avoid such prying, you need to send encrypted information via a VPN (virtual private network). Because the smartest criminals and terrorists will also be doing this, the governments will be wanting to shut this down as well. They could achieve this by:

    • Identifying VPN services and flagging any activity via their servers as potentially suspicious
    • Setting up commercial VPN services or colluding with existing VPN services

    So you really need to trust the VPN you are using.

    Keep in mind that government bodies do not have the time or inclination to spy on lawful activities and communications – they truly just want to catch the bad guys. But if you partake in “grey area” activities and conversations, that might include you.

  • FaceFirst Knows You Instantly

    Police units in the USA are starting to use software developed by FaceFirst. The ability of the software has been predicted by futurists and depicted in movies and TV for quite some time – but now it is reality.

    In a single second, law enforcement agents can match a suspect against millions upon millions of profiles in vast detailed databases stored on the cloud. It’s all done using facial recognition, and in Southern California it’s already occurring.

    “Up to 4 million comparisons per second, per clustered server” — that’s how many matches a single computer wired to the FaceFirst system can consider in a single breath as images captured by cameras, cell phones and surveillance devices from as far as 100 feet away are fed into algorithms designed to pick out terrorists and persons of interest.

    The technology is not restricted to fixed surveillance cameras – an agent can take a photo with their cell phone and receive an instant result.

    The future for us revolves around two new paradigms:

    1) What rights do individuals have to not have their likeness stored in a database? Presumably the same rules regarding DNA and fingerprint storage would apply…

    2) To protect yourself, how can you mask your face so that you remain undetected? The law might have great difficulty with this, given the myriad ways one can mess with their facial imagery.

    • Could Elton John be arrested for wearing elaborate glasses?
    • How long can a fringe be?
    • In a polluted city is wearing a dust mask acceptable?
    • Should motorcycle riders wear helmets?
    • Can someone with 3rd degree burns wear bandages on their face?

    The law could outlaw “deliberate disguising of your facial identity for the purposes of avoiding detection”, but could luck proving intent.

    I predict that there will always be a legal means of defeating this. Once again, I predict a divided culture – those who are masked, and those who are not. I suggest that cloakers chose to ride both worlds, adopting one or the other where they see fit.

  • Public Transport Smart Cards – Tracking Customers

    I’m sure there are other examples around the world, but this post is regarding my home town of Melbourne that has replaced a healthy, functional ticketing system with a $1 billion system that uses smart card technology. It is called “Myki”

    • 2.2 million public transport users (all must use a Myki card)
    • 1.1 million Myki users have registered their cards

    Registration is a smart move because you will get a SMS or email when your balance it running low. It also makes it easier to reload your card with cash online.  But buried away in the small print it says that authorities might be given access to your movements. And concession card holders have no choice, they must register.

    There have been 71 police requests for customer movements in Melbourne this year. Most people acquired their Myki part way through the year, so a more accurate number going forward would be perhaps 200 requests annually.

    Combined with CCTV footage, police will be able to prove your whereabouts down to the minute for all the time you spend on public transport. CCTV imagery will show that it is you using the card, and train/tram/bus logs will show where they took you and when.

    It remains to be seen which criminal activities will be affected, and which civil liberties will be compromised. Of more concern, perhaps, are countries with looser privacy controls. In the USA, could 3rd parties (like private detectives) be sold this information? In Eastern Europe could citizens be spied on because of grey area activities?

  • Epidermal Electronic Systems – Human/Computer Interface

    One day most people will gave these, with the exception of cloakers perhaps. Hopefully no democratic government will make them compulsory.

    They will certainly have a nickname, and I can’t see EES taking off. How about e-tatt? Or e-sticker? Or e-patch? I like ePatch.

    Called an “epidermal electronic system” (EES), it’s basically an electronic circuit mounted on your skin, designed to stretch, flex, and twist — and to take input from the movements of your body.

    … functionality in a wide array of electronic components, including biometric sensors, LEDs, transistors, radio frequency capacitors, wireless antennas, and even conductive coils and solar cells for power. [Source: IO9]

    As you can see in the video, it is pretty much a temporary tattoo, with electronics inside that can cope with being bent and twisted. But that’s not to say a more permanent version won’t be designed – one that can be used to identify you.

    The most obvious uses are biometric, in which the ePatch monitors your body, and sends to information to your smartphone, or perhaps hospital equipment:

    • heart monitoring
    • brain activity
    • sleep patterns
    • neo-natal observations

    The key advantage is being able to fit snugly and discreetly to the skin. Attach it to your throat and it could read what you are saying, even if you are only mouthing the words.

     

  • See Through Walls – Undetected

    There are other surveillance technologies out there that can “see through walls”, but they all rely on transmitting something. This new idea is purely a receiver, so the subject has no way of telling you are watching them.

    All it takes is for the subject to have WiFi in their home – presumably the subject needs to be within range of the WiFi. The article says that 25% of homes worldwide have WiFi, but of course in the western world it would be substantially higher.

    Wi-Fi radio signals… When a radio wave reflects off a moving object, its frequency changes-a phenomenon called the Doppler effect. Their radar prototype identifies frequency changes to detect moving objects. It’s about the size of a suitcase and contains a radio receiver composed of two antennas ­and a signal-processing unit. In tests, they have used it to determine a person’s location, speed and direction-even through a 30cm thick brick wall. Because the device itself doesn’t emit any radio waves, it can’t be detected.