We love the EFF, and they can practically do no wrong. The SSD Project is just another stand-up example of their public service. Keep up the great work!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.
Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?
After an introductory discussion of how you should think about making security decisions – it’s all about risk management – we’ll be answering those two questions for three types of data:
First, we’re going to talk about the threat to the data stored on your computer posed by searches and seizures by law enforcement, as well as subpoenas demanding your records.
Second, we’re going to talk about the threat to your data on the wire – that is, your data as it’s being transmitted – posed by wiretapping and other real-time surveillance of your telephone and Internet communications by law enforcement.
Third, we’re going to describe the information about you that is stored by third parties like your phone company and your Internet service provider, and how law enforcement officials can get it.
Here on RTFA, we’ve been following the “printer yellow dots” story for some time… and it seems like other people have been, as well. I was tipped off to a really great project that has been trying for MONTHS to get Lexmark to confirm their yellow dots, and the punchline is that they DID confirm it, they’re not stopping the yellow dots program, and they’ll give you a refund if you complain enough.
Brahm’s blog has turned out a lot of new findings, and it’s a wealth of information. Great work! …and definitely check it out. I’ve linked to the final post in the series, but I recommend reading through all of them.
I am happy, however, that I jumped through all of these hoops and produced some consumer-centred documentation on how to pursue manufacturers (or at very least, Lexmark) if you are dissatisfied with the forensic dot technology.
It’s my hope that people can find these pages useful, and that during my five-month consumer rights crusade I contributed something useful to this particular issue.
Here’s a short summary of my most useful learnings:
1. ALL Lexmark colour laser printers have this tracking dot technology. It’s probably accurate to say that any modern colour laser printer you buy will have it as well.
2. You CANNOT disable this technology, at least not by any practical means. It’s deeply embedded in the hardware of the printer, don’t bother trying!
3. Entry-level tech support does NOT know that this technology exists. Don’t even try to get help from them, though you may end up with free photoconductor.
4. Lexmark Canada and Lexmark International (based in the USA) both have Privacy Offices:
USA:
privacy@lexmark.com
Privacy Mailbox
740 West New Circle Road
Lexington, Kentucky 40550
U.S.A
Canada:
canadaprivacy@lexmark.com
Attention: Privacy Officer Inc.
50 Leek Crescent
Richmond Hill, ON
L4B 4J3
5. 1-800-663-7662 is a verified and often-not-published phone number for Canadian Support, according to Google it is a link to their Service Dispatch team.
6. Suzanne Deland in the Canadian office may be able to help you, if you call 1-905-763-5544. This number doesn’t show up on Google or Yahoo.
7. If you are persistant, a refund of your printer is definitely possible. You just have to keep poking around until you get in touch with the right people – while I had terrible luck contacting Lexmark by phone, I had excellent luck contacting them by snail mail.
So, that’s it! Good luck with your own consumer battles, and thanks for reading! If you leave me a comment, I can and will respond to it, but I expect this to be my last post on this issue.
Following up on the RFID meme, here’s a video demonstration of how RFID was used at HOPE to provide total surveillance of the conference atendeees. From the press release:
This weekend, the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project will a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests. Conference goers will be given unprecedented ability to connect with new people, find the talks they’re most interested in attending, see what’s happening and where in real time, and experience and talk about the way RFID technology is changing the world.
Attendees receive RFID badges that uniquely identify and track them across the conference space. Location information is incredibly accurate—visitors’ exact locations and movements are monitored in real time, and used to drive revolutionary social networking features which completely change the conference experience.
At The Last HOPE hacker conference, the AMD project (http://amd.hope.net/) provided 1400 attendees with active 2.4GHz RFID badges. These badges tracked attendees around the conference. The AMD web site allowed participants to enter information about their interests and connect with similar users and find conference presentations they might enjoy. The project also provided several interesting visualizations, including the graphs and 2D maps shown in this video.
The (non-personally identifying) data collected during the project will be released under a creative commons non-commercial license. The software will also be released under and open-source license. Sign up for the mailing list on the web site to be notified when these releases are made.
Google announced a promising toolkit for tracking Internet Service Providers, and the quality of service they provide. Certain ISPs have been caught red-handed performing content-based filtering, such as the Comcast bittorrent situation. The previous link explains how to circumvent Comcast’s filtering, but Google seeks a broader solution. The Measurement Lab can be used to identify new instances of filtering, or perhaps new ways that ISPs might dream up for interfering with your communications.
When an Internet application doesn’t work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP, the application, your PC, or something else? It can be difficult for experts, let alone average Internet users, to address this sort of question today.
Last year we asked a small group of academics about ways to advance network research and provide users with tools to test their broadband connections. Today Google, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers are taking the wraps off of Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that researchers can use to deploy Internet measurement tools.
Researchers are already developing tools that allow users to, among other things, measure the speed of their connection, run diagnostics, and attempt to discern if their ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications. These tools generate and send some data back-and-forth between the user’s computer and a server elsewhere on the Internet. Unfortunately, researchers lack widely-distributed servers with ample connectivity. This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another.
M-Lab aims to address these problems. Over the course of early 2009, Google will provide researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All data collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on. M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish.
In case you’ve heard about Obama backing the Bush total-surveillance program, there is a lot to learn. In short, Obama has always backed this program, which is disappointing but unsurprising. More importantly, though, is that these actions are taking place under the initiative of Bush’s old DOJ, which hasn’t been swapped out because Obama’s Attorney General hasn’t been confirmed yet.
…And guess what? That confirmation is being stalled in order to allow the statute of limitations to lapse on certain periods of time during which Bush’s surveillance was flat-out illegal. They have mostly covered their asses, but for the next few weeks, we could potentially hold the last administration accountable.
A number of you have emailed to ask about this report–that Obama has supported Bush’s request for a stay pending appeal in the al-Haramain case.
The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
…continuing…
On its face, this looks like really horrible news–a spineless attempt on Obama’s part to play along with Bush’s efforts to run out the clock on Bush’s alleged crimes in wiretapping al-Haramain and other Americans. And frankly, this should not be surprising news; Eric Holder said in his confirmation hearing that–unless he finds anything unexpected–he would continue the Bush Administration’s support for retroactive immunity, a case that is also before Judge Vaughn Walker. So it would be unsurprising that the Obama Administration would be cautious in this case as well.
That said, there is some confusion about the whole decision.
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