Tech companies selling the technology to track us
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in surveillance, Iran, surveillance state, hacking, malware on
In April I wrote a news story based on a talk by data encryption company PGP Inc founder Phil Zimmermann at Infosecurity, which revealed his feelings about Britain heading towards becoming a surveillance state.
But compared to countries like Iran and China, I guess we’re lucky. Both have been known to monitor citizens for years. Shockingly though, tech countries in Europe don’t look like they have any qualms in providing this surveillance technology to countries that are willing to use it in this way.
The Wall Street Journal and the BBC both reported on how the Nokia Siemens Networks (which has just bought some wireless tech from poor old Nortel) provided sophisticated technology for Iran to examine the content of online communications.
It’s not just for blocking traffic - the technology is supposed to see what information is passed back and forth. A Nokia Siemens spokesman is quoted as saying: ” Western governments, including the UK, don’t allow you to build networks without this functionality.”
It’s kind of scary. But would you expect anything less? Tech companies sell to the public as well as private sector - and very often governments around the world want to keep track of their citizens.
However, at least there are still ways to be anonymous and organise demonstrations without being tracked - as the events in Iran and the use of Twitter shows.
Even Google has to bow down to government power. Google has very quickly complied to a direct command by China to remove pornography from all its sites, even though all it is doing is linking to the content rather than having anything involved in distributing it.
But China is a big market, and there’s a lot of profit to be made. This need to make money can also be seen with the fact that the Chinese government can get away with shipping surveillance software with all of its PCs.
It’s the price we have to pay for better technology. The networking tech that makes communication on devices like mobiles so easy and useful can also be used in ways which we don’t necessarily want. Companies are there to make money - they are not our moral guardians.
As a citizen I guess the only power we have is that of the vote - and is why the Iranians are so furious that the elections over there weren’t as fair as they should be. But in the UK we still have that vote - and hopefully we can use it properly.
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Twitter being used as a ‘political weapon’ in Iran
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in Iran, hacking, politics on
At the ENISA / Reuters event I attended this morning, there was a very interesting talk with BT chief security technology officer Bruce Schneier and International Security Forum (ISF) president Howard Schmidt that surprisingly switched from business security and into the presidential events in Iran that have been taking place.
Schneier said that the events were very interesting when it came to IT and IT security because it was the “coming of age” for citizen journalists.
The real journalists were under house arrest and not able to report, and the information that was coming out was from people - mostly through Twitter, as the Iran government forgot about it when trying to block things for the election.
Schneier said: “We’re seeing stories and images coming out that are unable to be blocked by the government, and the only thing they can do at this point is to ‘take down’ the internet. It’s possible and governments have done that.”
“Hackers around the world are helping,” he added. “If you have a Twitter account we’re all being asked to change our location to Iran and change our timezone, because that makes it harder for the police to find the real twitterers.”
Schneier also said that people around the world were setting up proxy servers to allow Iranian information to come out, and that there was even a proposal to use the Opera browser and turn it into a massive anonymous network to help the Iranian citizen journalists.
He continued: “The anonymity tools that many Western governments are trying to get rid of are saving lives in Iran. It is the first time that people in other countries don’t just protest in their own capitals - they actually do something.”
Schneier said it was very interesting to see computer security, networks and hacking used in this way.
Howard Schmidt argued the point further by highlighting the fact that mobile devices were being used to get the word out. He said that this anonymity allowed people to use the internet as a real vehicle to create change.
Schneier highlighted the Cyberwar Guide for Iran Elections guide for beginners as a useful starting point, if you wanted to get involved, and mentioned the fact that people were getting involved in denial of service attacks against the Iranian government.
Schneier said: “This is interesting. A lot of what people think as cyber war is kids playing politics - you see this in Pakistan, the Arab states, China. They are not just fooling around - this is serious stuff. We can actually have international politics being affected by these actions.
“I think this is a first. I think this shows the power of social media in a way nothing ever has before,” he adds.
Author Timothy Garton Ash also makes similar points in an article written for the Guardian.
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