Mass surveillance

Public and security authorities made a total of 440,000 requests to monitor people s phone and internet use in 2005-2006. In the period 11 April to 31 December 2006 the UK gov issued 253,557 requests for communication data, which as defined by the RIPA includes who you phoned, when they phoned you, how long they phoned you for, subscriber information and associated addresses. Customers in shopping centres are being tracked by private companies. In the novel an omnipresent Big Brother character was monitoring citizens through their main source for information - telescreens . New features like geolocation give an even increased admission of monitoring capabilities to large service providers like Google, where they also are enable to track your physical movements while users are using mobile devices, especially those which are syncing without any user interaction.

These tracks, record and store the details of all journeys undertaken on major roads and through city centres and the information is stored for five years. In the longer term mandatory onboard vehicle telematics systems are also suggested, to facilitate road charging (see vehicle excise duty). The British Police hold records of 5.5 million fingerprints and over 3.4 million DNA samples on the National DNA Database.

The geographical location of a mobile phone (and thus the person carrying it) can be determined easily (whether it is being used or not), using a technique known multilateration to calculate the differences in time for a signal to travel from the cell phone to each of several cell towers near the owner of the phone. . Google China has a history of cooperating with the wishes of the authorities.

The system works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation. Across the country efforts are increasingly under way to track closely all road vehicle movements, initially using a nationwide network of roadside cameras connected to automatic number plate recognition systems. Utilising mobile phone signals, a system can tell when people enter the centre, how long they stay in a particular shop, and what route each customer takes.

government in monitoring the communications of millions of American citizens. This report came on the heels of allegations that the U.S.

It has managed thusfar to keep the proceedings open. Such a state may also be referred to as an Electronic Police State. Privacy International s 2007 survey, covering 47 countries, indicated that there had been an increase in surveillance and a decline in the performance of privacy safeguards, compared to the previous year.

This data is valuable for authorities, advertisers and others interested in profiling users, trends and web site marketing performance. 1076 and S.436 would require providers of electronic communication or remote computing services to retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user. In early 2006, USA Today reported that several major telephone companies were cooperating illegally with the National Security Agency to monitor the phone records of U.S.

Concerns have been raised over the unregulated use of biometrics in schools, affecting children as young as three. In February 2009 it emerged that the government is planning a database to track and store records of all international travel into and out of the UK. By the time the state collapsed in 1989, the Stasi had built up an estimated civilian network of 300,000 informants (approximately one in fifty of the population), who monitored even minute hints of political dissent among other citizens.

Since a significant proportion of purchases are carried out by credit or debit cards, which can also be easily tracked, it is questionable whether loyalty cards provide any significant additional privacy threat. Through programs like Google s AdSense, OpenSocial and their increasing pool of so called web gadgets , social gadgets and other Google-hosted services many web sites on the Internet are effectively feeding user information about sites visited by the users, and now also their social connections, to Google. citizens, and storing them in a large database known as the NSA call database.

The best ranking was given to Greece, which was judged to have adequate safeguards against abuse . Many countries throughout the world have already been adding thousands of surveillance cameras to their urban, suburban and even rural areas. The United Kingdom is seen as a pioneer of mass surveillance. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are constantly informing users on the importance of privacy, and considerations about technologies like geolocation. .

Google, Facebook and others are increasingly becoming more guarded about this data as their reach increases and the data becomes more all inclusive, making it more valuable. Many West Germans visiting friends and family in East Germany were also subject to Stasi spying, as well as many high-ranking West German politicians and persons in the public eye. Most East German citizens were well aware that their government was spying on them, which led to a culture of mistrust: touchy political issues were only discussed in the comfort of their own four walls and only with the closest of friends and family members, while widely maintaining a façade of unquestioning followership in public. Iran s crackdown on dissidents and protesters in the aftermath of the June 2009 election has been said to have been facilitated by surveillance technologies including some provided by Western European companies.

Many people are willing to join supermarket and grocery loyalty card programs, trading their personal information and surveillance of their shopping habits in exchange for a discount on their groceries, although base prices might be increased to encourage participation in the program. At the end of 2006 it was described by the Surveillance Studies Network as being the most surveilled country among the industrialized Western states. On 6 February 2009 a report by the House of Lords Constitution Committee, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, A YouGov poll published on December 4, 2006, indicated that 79% of those interviewed agreed that Britain has become a surveillance society’ (51% were unhappy with this).

The program was later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness , after a negative public reaction. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an ongoing lawsuit (Hepting v. AT&T) against the telecom giant AT&T for its assistance of the U.S.

federal agents regularly use mobile phones to collect location data. The Total Information Awareness program, of the Information Awareness Office, designed numerous technologies to be used to perform mass surveillance.

In 1999 two models of mandatory data retention were suggested for the US: What IP address was assigned to a customer at a specific time. Facebook also keep this information, although limited to their closed server environment and not spread out openly like Google.

Examples include advanced speech-to-text programs (so that phone conversations can be monitored en-masse by a computer, instead of requiring human operators to listen to them), social network analysis software to monitor groups of people and their interactions with each other, and Human identification at a distance software which allows computers to identify people on surveillance cameras by their facial features and gait (the way they walk). Recently the documents, exposed by a whistleblower who previously worked for AT&T, showing schematics of the massive data mining system were made public. The FBI developed the computer programs Magic Lantern and CIPAV, which they can remotely install on a computer system, in order to monitor a person s computer activity.

There is increasing use of roadside fingerprinting - using new police powers to check identity. In the second model, which is closer to what Europe adopted , telephone numbers dialed, contents of Web pages visited, and recipients of e-mail messages must be retained by the ISP for an unspecified amount of time. The Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today s Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2009 also known as H.R.

Like in George Orwell s novel 1984 - the telescreens or rather the various web pages - are now watching the users watching and navigating the web. Traffic cameras, which were meant to help enforce traffic laws at intersections, have also sparked some controversy, due to their use by law enforcement agencies for purposes unrelated to traffic violations. The Department of Homeland Security is funding networks of surveillance cameras in cities and towns as part of its efforts to combat terrorism. The NSA has been gathering information on financial records, internet surfing habits, and monitoring e-mails.

government had been conducting electronic surveillance of domestic telephone calls without warrants. Law enforcement and intelligence services in the United States possess technology to remotely activate the microphones in cell phones in order to listen to conversations that take place nearby the person who holds the phone. U.S. The information they gather is then stored on the crimint database. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires that all U.S.

Google s Gmail service is increasingly employing features to work as a stand-alone application which also might activate while a web browser is not even active for synchronizing; a feature mentioned on the Google I/O 2009 developer conference while showing the upcoming HTML5 features which Google and others are actively defining and promoting. They have also performed extensive surveillance on social networks such as Myspace. The FBI collected nearly all hotel, airline, rental car, gift shop, and casino records in Las Vegas during the last two weeks of 2003.

Chip Pitts at www.CSRLaw.org has conducted a good analysis of the issues involved, noting the parallels to surveillance happening in the United States and in Western countries. As a result of the digital revolution, many aspects of life are now captured and stored in digital form. Of these eight, China, Malaysia and Russia scored lowest, followed jointly by Singapore and the United Kingdom, then jointly by Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.

The database will retain record of names, addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and credit card details, which will be kept for no more than 10 years . Forward Intelligence Teams conduct mass surveillance of political and environmental protestors and of journalists . It requires telecommunication operators to implement mass surveillance of the general public through retention of metadata on telecommunications and to keep the collected data at the disposal of various governmental bodies for substantially long times.

telecommunications companies modify their equipment to allow easy wiretapping of telephone, VoIP, and broadband internet traffic. Billions of dollars per year are spent, by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, and the FBI, to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems such as Carnivore, ECHELON, and NarusInsight to intercept and analyze the immense amount of data thats traverse the Internet and telephone system every day. The Senior VP of The Mirage went on record with PBS Frontline describing the first time they were requested to help in the mass collection of personal information. The NYPD infiltrated and compiled dossiers on protest groups (most of whom were doing nothing illegal) before the 2004 Republican National Convention, leading to over 1,800 arrests and subsequent fingerprinting. The legislative body of the European Union passed the Data Retention Directive on 2005-12-15.

Other databases causing him concern were the National Child Database (ContactPoint), the Office for National Statistics Citizen Information Project, and the NHS National Programme for IT. In 2002 In London, the Oyster card payment system can track the movement of individual people through the public transport system, although an anonymous option is available, while the London congestion charge uses computer imaging to track car number plates. In 2008 plans were being made to collect data on all phone calls, emails, chatroom discussions and web-browsing habits as part of the Government s Interception Modernisation Programme, thought likely to require the insertion of thousands of black box probes into the country’s computer and telephone networks. Since October 2007 telecommunication companies have been required to keep records of phone calls and text messages for twelve months under the Data Retention Directive This enables the Government and other selected authorities within the UK such as Police and Councils amongst others to monitor all phone calls made from a UK landline or Mobile upon request. In 2002 the UK government announced plans to extend the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act(RIPA), so that at least 28 government departments would be given powers to browse citizens web, email, telephone and fax records, without a warrant and without a subject s knowledge. The FBI requested all electronic data of hundreds of thousands of people based on a very general lead for the Las Vegas New Year s celebration.

Concern has been expressed that governments may use this information to conduct mass surveillance on their populations. One of the most common forms of mass surveillance is carried out by commercial organizations. Mass surveillance is the pervasive surveillance of an entire population, or a substantial fraction thereof. Modern governments today commonly perform mass surveillance of their citizens, explaining that they believe that it is necessary to protect them from dangerous groups such as terrorists, criminals, or political subversives and to maintain social control. Mass surveillance has been widely criticized on several grounds such as violations of privacy rights, illegality, and for preventing political and social freedoms, which some fear will ultimately lead to a totalitarian state where political dissent is crushed by COINTELPRO-like programs.

Balancing these factors, eight countries were rated as being endemic surveillance societies . Access to this information is not required to be limited to investigation of serious crimes, nor is a warrant required for access. Undertaken under the Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development (FP7 - Science in Society The INDECT Project The main expected results of the INDECT project are: The consortium HIDE ( Homeland Security, Biometric Identification & Personal Detection Ethics ), devoted to monitoring the ethical and privacy implications of biometrics and personal detection technologies and promoted by the European Commission develops ADABTS ( Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces ), a low-cost pro-active surveillance system to detect potential abnormal behaviour in crowded spaces. The SORM (and SORM-2) laws enable complete monitoring of any communication, electronic or traditional, by eight state agencies, without warrant. In 2002 German citizens were tipped off about wire-tapping, when a software error led to a phone number allocated to the German Secret Service being listed on mobile telephone bills. Before the Digital Revolution, one of the world s biggest mass surveillance operations was carried out by the Stasi, the secret police of the former East Germany.