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Rise of drones in UK airspace prompts civil liberties warning - 8 octobre 2012
A European commission report predicts hundreds of civil uses for unmanned aircraft in the next decade
Drones will be commonplace in the skies above the UK within a decade, according to a European commission document suggesting that hundreds of firms will develop new uses for them.
But the claims have prompted (...)
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UK : Transparent Citizens and Opaque Government. - 12 septembre 2012
A year ago this week, the UK Government published a report entitled "Transparent Government, Not Transparent Citizens" , by Dr Kieron O’Hara. It made 14 recommendations, the most important of which seem to have not been implemented. Meanwhile the Government continues to release data on citizens, and is (...)
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Colères d’Arabie : le logiciel espion - 6 septembre 2012
Cruel paradoxe de ce printemps arabe : les défenseurs des droits de l’homme barheïnis utilisent les réseaux sociaux occidentaux pour manifester ; leurs tortionnaires, des systèmes de surveillance occidentaux pour les espionner.
Le Barheïn vient de condamner le principal défenseur des droits de l’homme barheïni à la (...)
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How Your Phone Can Spy on You - 2 septembre 2012
A glimpse at the future of mobile security came to light recently in London, at the Vodafone Annual General Meeting (AGM) "“ though most people do not yet understood the significance of what transpired. This meeting may have lacked the overt drama of the Olympics, but it revealed nonetheless the attitude towards (...)
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Rwandan government expands stranglehold on privacy and free expression - 24 août 2012
Last week the Rwandan government tightened its grip on citizens when the national parliament adopted legislation that sanctions the widespread monitoring of email and telephone communications.1
The law, an amendement to the 2008 Law Relating to the Interception of Communications,2 empowers the police, army and (...)
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This is not surveillance as we know it : the anatomy of Facebook messages - 23 août 2012
Modern communications surveillance policy is about gaining access to modern communications. The problem is that the discourse around communications policy today is almost the same as it was when it was simply a question of gaining access to telephone communications. "Police need access to social network activity (...)
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The ’Cookie Law’ - 13 août 2012
Our vision is a world in which privacy is protected by governments, respected by corporations and cherished by individuals. We believe that technological developments should strengthen, rather than undermine, the right to a private life, and that everyone’s personal information and communications must be carefully (...)
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Police drones in the UK ? Watch this airspace"¦ - 8 août 2012
Drones are back in the headlines, with the news that the Ministry of Defence plans to develop unmanned underwater vehicles for use in submarine warfare. Human rights groups have already raised concerns over the UK’s use of airborne military drones, which have played a key role in UK operations in Afghanistan since (...)
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Has Hacking Team’s government trojan been used against journalists ? - 7 août 2012
Hacking Team is a supplier of "lawful intercept" technology based in Milan. A regular attendee of surveillance industry conferences around the world, last year one of the company’s founding partners told the Guardian that Hacking Team had sold surveillance software to 30 countries across five continents.
Hacking (...)
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Surveillance companies : real responsibility goes beyond the letter of the law - 6 août 2012
Earlier this year, Privacy International began research into the corporate social responsibility policies of companies that sell communications surveillance technology. Given that this technology is known to facilitate human rights abuses in repressive regimes around the world, surveillance tech companies that (...)
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Mass surveillance and classified patents - 4 août 2012
As part of Privacy International’s investigation into the mass surveillance industry we have examined hundreds of legal documents, brochures and, most recently, patents. Patents are a form of intellectual property ; patent-holders publicly disclose their inventions in exchange for the exclusive rights to use and (...)
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Access to private communications is a privilege, not a right - 2 août 2012
Governments have no automatic right of access to our communications. This will sound highly controversial to some, even downright radical. But the demands of national security and crime prevention do not, in fact, immediately trump every other right and responsibility in the complex relationship between citizen (...)
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Foreign companies complicit in Bahrain’s human rights violations - 30 juillet 2012
Last week’s revelation that Bahraini human rights activists have been targeted by advanced surveillance technology made by British company Gamma is yet another nail in the coffin of privacy and freedom of expression in Bahrain.
Over the past ten years, Bahraini citizens, among the most internet-connected in the (...)
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Who gets to see the confidential UK surveillance annex ? - 28 juillet 2012
Every year the Interception of Communications Commissioner in the UK reviews the interception warrants in the UK (of which there are around 1500 warrants per year), and a small subset of the requests for communications data (of which there are around half a million requests per year). Each report has statements (...)
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Privacy in constitutions : The data - 26 juillet 2012
Privacy International has compiled data on the privacy provisions in national constitutions around the world, including which countries have constitutional protections, whether they come from international agreements, what aspects of privacy are actually protected and when those protections were enacted. We are (...)
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Cyber Attacks on Activists Traced to FinFisher Spyware of Gamma - 25 juillet 2012
It’s one of the world’s best-known and elusive cyber weapons : FinFisher, a spyware sold by U.K.- based Gamma Group, which can secretly take remote control of a computer, copying files, intercepting Skype calls and logging every keystroke.
For the past year, human rights advocates and virus hunters have scrutinized (...)
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Legal action to stop sale of spy technology to brutal regimes - 25 juillet 2012
Human rights group Privacy International is preparing to take legal action against the British government for failing to control exports of sophisticated spy technology to brutal regimes.
Legislation allows the British government to restrict or stop exports if they are capable of aiding repression or breaches of (...)
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Energy smart meters are a threat to privacy, says watchdog - 15 juillet 2012
European Data Protection Supervisor warns ’massive collection of personal data’ could be accessed without safeguards
Hi-tech monitors that track households’ energy consumption threaten to become a major privacy issue, according to the European watchdog in charge of protecting personal data.
The European Data (...)
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Warning over smart meters privacy risk - 12 juin 2012
An EU data watchdog has warned of the "considerable risks" to privacy posed by new energy smart meters.
The European Data Protection Supervisor said safeguards were needed over how firms used the "massive collection" of consumers’ data uploaded by meters.
The technology is able to track when consumers are home, (...)
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Why Twitter has taken the wrong fork in the road - 2 mars 2012
Earlier this week it was announced that UK-based Datasift would start offering their customers the ability to mine Twitter’s past two years of tweets for market research purposes. The licensing fees will add another revenue stream to Twitter’s portfolio - but at what cost to the company’s reputation ? Twitter, once (...)
