Feb 25
2017

Ping GPS Tracker

Posted on February 25, 2017 by Cloak Meister

Ping Cut No Sound v2 from Joshua Lippiner on Vimeo.

Inside Ping is a GPS module, Bluetooth, and 3G cellular module. Bluetooth is used for short distance, while the 3G cellular lets owners find things that are miles away. Users pay $36 per year for the service, with an additional $3 per month per device.[More at ReadWrite]

The battery lasts a long time – months.

It looks cute, but I presume the casing can be removed, and then the device could be disguised for covert tracking. Imagine if a Ping was hidden in the heel of your shoe by someone – you’d never know.

I think it is fair to say that from now on, if anyone has a desire to tracks your movements, they can.

The small size has been a rapid improvement. An article written less than 2 years ago said “A concealed GPS is usually Battery Powered, so whomever has placed a tracker on your vehicle, needs to have access to remove and recharge. Some units are smaller than smartphones…”

What can you do to protect yourself? You can buy a GPS detector from just $99.

Posted in Spy Equipment | Leave a comment
Feb 19
2017

Office Monitoring Has Begun

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Cloak Meister

office-lights-nightBecause legally an employer can track anything you do at work (except for bathroom breaks), it is clear what the end result will be – total tracking. The only question is how long it will take to become commonplace.

The beginning is here already, workplaces that can tell whether you are at you desk or not. The primarily function is to save electricity by not having heating/cooling/lighting running unnecessarily. And in the same report, something that should be safe because the data is anonymised:

The Boston Consulting Group has outfitted about 100 volunteer employees in its new Manhattan office with badges that embed a microphone and a location sensor. Made by Humanyze in Boston, the badges track physical and verbal interactions. BCG says it intends to use the data to see how office design affects employee communication. [Bloomberg]

The obvious next step is for the data to not be anonymised.

So expect a future where everything you do at work is recorded (except bathroom breaks, but they can deduced of course). And then AI will decide who is or isn’t a good employee without needing to quantify their decisions.

And then, collectives of private premises will share their data. Your workplace will know how often you go to the gym, and what you ate at a restaurant. The only safe places will be in public (depending on your local government) and your home (depending on you).

 

 

 

Posted in Corporate Surveillance | Leave a comment
Dec 03
2016

Is Big Brother Coming to China?

Posted on December 3, 2016 by Cloak Meister

As with just about everything else reported on here, it will likely come to be because, good honest people have nothing to fear.

It would be far nicer if the focus was only the positive, getting plus points for community involvement, never committing a violent crime, being employed in recent years…

How long before having too few friends on Facebook singles you out as a credit risk?

More than three dozen local governments across China are beginning to compile digital records of social and financial behavior to rate creditworthiness. A person can incur black marks for infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules. The effort echoes the dang’an, a system of dossiers the Communist party keeps on urban workers’ behavior.

In time, Beijing expects to draw on bigger, combined data pools, including a person’s internet activity, according to interviews with some architects of the system and a review of government documents. Algorithms would use a range of data to calculate a citizen’s rating, which would then be used to determine all manner of activities, such as who gets loans, or faster treatment at government offices or access to luxury hotels.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Posted in Government Surveillance | Leave a comment
May 18
2016

Passport Acquires Verizon

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Cloak Meister

Company from the future Passport has announced that they will be buying Verizon in a cash and stock deal. This means that a company that has made its name monitoring and tracking drones and other vehicles, will now be in control of a telecommunications business.

Expect that soon enough they will launch a product that has privacy advocates up in arms.

Could this be a corporate Big Brother in the making?

Posted in Corporate Surveillance | Leave a comment
May 11
2016

Sweden: First Cashless Society?

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Cloak Meister

swish

When a former member of ABBA says a cashless society will have less crime, people listen. Already Sweden has laws restricting cash deposits in banks, as well as 80% of transactions being non-cash (USA is 50%). Read the full story at Wired.

Yes, less banks and bus drivers will be robbed, that is for sure. Muggings will keep occurring, it will just be for Apple Watches instead of cash. Criminals are unlikely to change their profession, but rather just adapt.

I foresee two major problems with losing cash:

Privacy – the very reason why cashless means less monetary crime is that anonymous transactions disappear. This also means that no transactions will be private. Proponents will use the If You Have Nothing to Hide mantra, which will convince most people. And rightly so, for the only people who could really lose out are those on the margins of society, those who have activities in grey areas, that aren’t illegal but still attract unwarranted and undesired attention.

Replacing cash for criminals will be alternate digital systems, like Bitcoin. Money laundering will still happen, it will just be digital.

Redundancy – as someone who has worked it the fields of tech and survivalism, the clear problem with a cashless society is that lack of a backup system. Where’s Plan B? What if electricity is cut? What if hackers destroy the computerised system and the computerised back-up system?

Cashless is going to happen anyway. The important thing is those who need non-criminal transaction privacy are protected, and that a backup system remains in place for a very long time, until cash is completely forgotten.

 

Posted in Government Surveillance | Leave a comment
Dec 07
2015

DarkMarket / OpenBazaar

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Cloak Meister

Open Bazaar (previously known as DarkMarket) has a major advantage over the now closed Silk Road – it is peer to peer. That means no central website that the authorities can take down.

DarkMarket works in a fundamentally different way to Silk Road or any other online marketplace. Instead of being hosted off a server like a normal website, it runs in a decentralized manner: Users download a piece of software onto their device, which allows them to access the DarkMarket site. The really clever part is how the system incorporates data with the blockchain, the part of Bitcoin that everybody can see. Rather than just carrying the currency from buyer to seller, data such as usernames are added to the blockchain by including them in very small transactions, meaning it’s impossible to impersonate someone else because their pseudonymous identity is preserved in the ledger.
Vice.com

Posted in Dark Web | Leave a comment
Sep 06
2015

How Legal is Stingray?

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Cloak Meister

Judge Kendra Ausby ruled last week that the police should not have used a stingray to track Andrews without a search warrant, and she said prosecutors could not use any of the evidence found at the time of his arrest.

Baltimore police used a stingray to locate Kerron Andrews after he was charged with attempted murder in 2014. Prosecutors did not reveal that surveillance until a year later, and a judge ruled that using the phone tracker was an unconstitutional search. Some states require officers to get a search warrant, in part because the technology is so invasive. The Justice Department is considering whether to impose a similar rule on its agents.

While no clear decision has been made on Stingray technology, the USA Today article makes it clear that police are careful not to disclose the are using it. In other words, they want to get away with it for as long as they can.

Posted in Government Surveillance | Leave a comment
Sep 02
2015

Laser Drone Destroyer

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Cloak Meister

Given the potential for unaccountable, untraceable attacks with drones, it isn’t surprising that science is developing ways of blowing them out of the sky.

The HEL MD’s laser weapon is accurate enough to target specific sections of an unmanned aerial vehicle, disabling or destroying it depending on where it fires its beam. Because the beam travels at the speed of light, it effectively reaches its target instantaneously—there’s no outmaneuvering it.

Despite such precision, the weapon is compact enough to be carried in four suitcases by two soldiers. [Source: Daily Dot]

So it sounds like it doesn’t blow up the drone (that would take substantially more energy) but rather targets a critical part. Like shooting the gas tank of a car, I guess. The video at Boeing’s site gives slightly more info.

Won’t the response from drone makers be to hide/disguise/shield the critical parts? Or just put them on the one side of the drone? That would give them a 50/50 chance of survival.

Posted in Weapons | Leave a comment
Aug 29
2015

Legal in the USA: Drones That Can Attack You

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Cloak Meister

police-drones

Either this will get reversed in due course, or it is a sign of a future we need to get used to. In North Dakota it is now legal for the authorities to fly unmanned vehicles that can use non-lethal weaponry.

The bill’s stated intent was to require police to obtain a search warrant from a judge in order to use a drone to search for criminal evidence. In fact, the original draft of Representative Rick Becker’s bill would have banned all weapons on police drones.

Then Bruce Burkett of the North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association was allowed by the state house committee to amend HB 1328 and limit the prohibition only to lethal weapons. “Less than lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons, and Tasers are therefore permitted on police drones. [The Daily Beast].

And as we know, even with supposedly expert human users, Tasers are regularly lethal. Imagine how bad it could be when a drone Tasers someone…

Shoot them down people.

Posted in Government Surveillance, Spy Equipment, Weapons | Leave a comment
Jun 24
2015

Google Listening – Without Permission

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Cloak Meister

Google’s Chronium is supposedly open source and open to scrutiny. However Google added some code without telling anybody:

About Voice Search
Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room. Source

So it isn’t surprising that they didn’t tell anyone! Google needs this functionality so it can listen out for the few people who want to say “OK Google”.

In the near future expect computers / tablets / smartphones to have a physical off-switch for microphones and cameras. Because while it is easy to put some sticky tape over a camera lens, microphones aren’t as easy to block.

 

 

 

Posted in Avoiding Detection, Corporate Surveillance, Internet | Leave a comment