According to EPIC’s press release, the center of the issue is a plan by DHS to create fake accounts on social networking sites and use those accounts to monitor the networks for certain key words – such as “drill,” “infection,” “strain,” “virus,” “trojan,” and others. The complaint was filed in the District of Columbia, and asks the court to compel DHS to process EPIC’s FOIA request, as well as to order DHS to produce the records EPIC has requested, to acknowledge EPIC as news media, and to pay EPIC’s legal bills for the suit.

The impetus for EPIC’s request was an announcement by DHS that it planned to implement a Social Media Monitoring and Situation Awareness Initiative, whereby it would monitor social media sites in order to gain realtime information on events. The DHS announcement states that the goal of the initiative is not to collect personally identifiable information except in extreme cases – e.g., a person trapped in rubble with their mobile phone who is posting their status (as happened during the Japanese tsunami).

Though at first glance – and thanks in no small part to EPIC’s description of it – the DHS program sounds awfully “Big Brother.” Upon closer reading of DHS’s actual statement, though, it seems that the goal of the program is to monitor developing situations in realtime, rather than to monitor individuals for subversive behavior.

But if your reason was mainly security, wouldn’t you want to create a 4-digit PIN that wasn’t unbearably easy to guess? Apparently not, according to data posted on app developer Daniel Amitay’s blog today.

One of Amitay’s iOS apps is called “Big Brother Camera Security” Basically, the application will snap a picture of whoever is trying to use your phone without your consent. If they get the code wrong, snap! You have a picture of who was trying to access your device. You can also set it to sound an alarm.

Based on the passcodes of the over 200,000 subscribers to the app, we get some information on the most common passcodes. And unsurprisingly, people fail to secure their phones with any code that would actually secure their phones.

For an app whose sole purpose is security, the top password is 1234. The second most common passcode was 0000. And the bronze goes to 2580, which as you probably know is simply a straight line down the middle of the keypad.

Here’s a graph of the top 10 most common passcodes. It looks as though 1,425 people thought that 5683, which spells “Love,” was a good choice.

Apparently, people also love to use years as their passcodes. Whether they coincide with dates of birth, graduations, or anniversaries, 1990-2000 were in the top 50 most used passcodes and 1980-1989 were all in the top 100. One is the most common digit for the first spot in the code, while zero is the most common in the last spot.

So, guys, you’ve gotta step up your password game. I know you don’t want to make them so complicated that you forget them yourselves, but there is a happy medium between digits with no significance and 1111. And with these statistics in hand it is very likely that I could break into your phone with minimal effort.

Formulaic passwords are never a good idea, yet 15% of all passcode sets were represented by only 10 different passcodes (out of a possible 10,000). The implication? A thief (or just a prankster) could safely try 10 different passcodes on your iPhone without initiating the data wipe. With a 15% success rate, about 1 in 7 iPhones would easily unlock–even more if the intruder knows the users’ years of birth, relationship status, etc.

So next time you want to check out your boyfriend/girlfriend’s texts from last night, try a couple of these simple combinations. There’s a really good chance that one of them will work.

In the remake of Casino Royale, James Bond connects himself from Montenegro to MI6 in London so they can figure out the poison Le Chiffre’s associate added to his drink. Remote medical monitoring in the real world might become a matter of business, based on something Microsoft has been developing.

The Times Online described a patent sought by Microsoft. This technology would monitor aspects of the physical state of a computer user connected to the system.

Someone who is feeling a little stressed out by their employer would end up sending a signal to human resources. Management could provide help to the employee as they see fit.

Take a moment to indulge in a little outrage yourself. If developed and implemented in the business world, this could be the most reprehensible invasion of privacy ever proposed.

Now we’ll tie it into the Fast purchase. The Norwegians have some fascinating products in their solutions mix.

In the category of Surveillance and Enforcement, Fast offers products that assist with threat detection and criminal investigation. These relate to data, of course.

But Microsoft’s patent would turn physiological responses into data. The company has been working on ways to assess data, based on the patent. We can’t see any reason why the Fast Surveillance and Enforcement tools couldn’t be part of the assessment chain.

Frustration in the workplace may end up being interpreted as more than pressure from an upcoming deadline. Imagine a world where physical responses to stress cause someone to be accused of thought crimes.

Stay tuned. Big Brother will be watching.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-the-fast-buy-and-big-brother-2008-01/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/big-brother-wants-your-email-access-2008-01 http://www.webpronews.com/big-brother-wants-your-email-access-2008-01#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:02:59 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=43344 A disturbing report via National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell says Big Brother (that's the US government and its NSA if you haven't been keeping up) wants access to any email, file transfer and Web search. Their main ally so far in the security game: AT&T.

AT&T’s sudden interest in packet-sniffing comes as "the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood." This new alliance is due to AT&T’s new television service U-Verse.

Gigi B. Soh, president of Public Knowledge isn’t happy about it:

"AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry," she said. "The good news for AT&T is that there’s so little competition that where else are the customers going to go?"

Indeed. As Nate Anderson at ArsTechnica notes, after making a nice point about a technological "arms race," it’s rather difficult to get anywhere on the Internet without crossing over AT&T toll roads:

In addition to running a massive network of its own, AT&T runs a good chunk of the backbone infrastructure in the US. It’s a rare bit of traffic that can make it to its destination without passing on to an AT&T-owned network. If the company deploys its anti-piracy technology to all data passing through its networks, AT&T’s "solution" could affect most US Internet users.

AT&T denies that user privacy in jeopardy. And their close-knit relationship with the National Security Agency, we know, is proof of their commitment.