Hacking into mobile phones is a walk in the park, say experts. All it takes is a single SMS sent from the hacker’s phone, to break into a phone and gain total control over it, including listening to recordings of phone conversations, reading text messages and even accessing passwords. Experts say that mobile is the new playground for hackers as these devices are easier to break into than PCs, and consumers pay less attention and are tardy when securing their phone.
Videos
Bram Bonné: Your Smartphone is Leaking Your Information
Bram Bonné is a PhD student in computer science at the Expertise Centre for Digital Media at Hasselt University, where he specializes in computer security and privacy. During his PhD, he developed an interest in privacy-sensitive information leaking from smartphones and laptops. Bonné summarizes the basic Wi-Fi technology hackers exploit for “man-in-the-middle” attacks. He explains how your personal information is available to anyone tracking Wi-Fi traffic and some steps you can take to make these type of attacks more difficult.
Matthew Green: Why the NSA is Breaking Our Encryption
Encryption dates back to the Founding Fathers and the Bill of Rights. Now, the United States National Security Agency is breaking and undermining core encryption technologies that power the Internet, saying it’s being done for our own protection from terrorists. But are we sacrificing our freedoms for fear? Matthew Green discusses the campaign waged by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to weaken commercial encryption standards to make our communications more accessible.
Matthew Green is an Assistant Research Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on computer security and cryptography, and particularly the way that cryptography can be used to promote individual privacy. His work includes techniques to securely access medical databases, enhance the anonymity of Bitcoin, and to analyze deployed security systems. Prior to joining the Johns Hopkins faculty he served as a Senior Technical Staff Member at AT&T Laboratories.
The Tor Project: Protecting Online Anonimity
Jacob Appelbaum introduces the Tor Project and the Tor Network – an anonymity network used to protect individual’s identities online. Tor is free software for enabling anonymous online communication. The name TOR is an acronym derived from the original software project name The Onion Router. Tor is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication, by keeping their Internet activities from being monitored. The core principle of of the Tor Project, called “onion routing”, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than six thousand relays to conceal a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult for Internet activity to be traced back to the user: this includes visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms. It is legally used by millions worldwide to circumvent censorship and to stay safe from online snooping.
NSA Surveillance Placing A “Chilling Effect” on the Press
Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union have released a joint report, entitled “With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy,” based on extensive interviews with dozens of journalists, lawyers, and senior US government officials. The 120-page report documents how national security journalists and lawyers are adopting elaborate steps or otherwise modifying their practices to keep communications, sources, and other confidential information secure in light of revelations of unprecedented US government surveillance of electronic communications and transactions. The report finds that government surveillance and secrecy are undermining press freedom, the public’s right to information, and the right to counsel, all human rights essential to a healthy democracy.
Police Surveillance and Predictive Policing
Privacy today faces growing threats from a growing surveillance apparatus that is often justified in the name of crime prevention. This video short brought to you by AJ+ summarizes some of the highly intrusive technology which allows law enforcement to conduct targeted surveillance against individuals who are not suspected of engaging in any criminal activity. Numerous law enforcement agencies—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, private security contractors and state and local police departments—intrude upon the private communications of innocent citizens, amass vast databases of who we call and when, and catalog “suspicious activities” based on the vaguest of standards. The government’s collection of this sensitive information is itself an invasion of privacy. But its use of this data is also rife with abuse as innocuous data is fed into bloated watchlists, with severe consequences upon individuals who do not even realize why they have been targeted. History has repeatedly shown that powerful, state surveillance tools are most often abused for political ends which disproportionately target political dissidents and disfavored minorities.
Greenwald Meets Bernstein: From Watergate to Snowden
Glenn Greenwald and Carl Bernstein discuss how NSA surveillance has affected contemporary investigative journalism with journalist, Fredrik Laurin, of Swedish Radio. Greenwald and Bernstien discuss the U.S. Government’s history of placing journalists, activists and whistleblowers under surveillance. Greenwald discusses how the Snowden revelations have affected the precautions investigative journalists must take to protect their sources (and themselves), as well as the current practice of prosecuting whistleblowers under the Obama administration. Bernstein explores how institutional secrecy has increased since Watergate and suggests that there is much less oversight of intelligence abuses than in the past.
PBS Frontline: Spying on the Home Front (2007)
Synopsis: Spying on the Home Front looks at the massive FBI data sweep of U.S. citizen’s records and the electronic surveillance of their communications. FRONTLINE investigates National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping and how the FBI and other intelligence agencies”data mine” – sift through Internet communications – of millions of Americans, and that the FBI and are mining social media and commercial-sector data banks to an unprecedented degree.
Experienced national security officials and government attorneys see a troubling and potentially dangerous collision between the strategy of pre-emption at home and the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Peter Swire, a law professor and former White House privacy adviser to President Clinton, tells FRONTLINE that since 9/11 the government has been moving away from the traditional legal standard of investigations based on individual suspicion to generalized suspicion. The new standard, Swire says, is: “Check everybody. Everybody is a suspect.” Former CIA Assistant General Counsel, Suzanne Spaulding, warns “So many people in America think this does not affect them. They’ve been convinced that these programs are only targeted at suspected terrorists. … I think that’s wrong. … Our programs are not perfect, and it is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs.”
Fair Use Notice
This video contains copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes only in an effort to advance the understanding of human rights and social justice issues and is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law.
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPVzWAcCyl8
This video short from Test Tube News provides a general overview of the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. The video summarizes the “evolving standards of decency” test used by the court, providing relevant examples and court rulings.
Discrimination Against “Discrete and Insular Minorities”
This episode of Crash Course in Government and Politics provides a general overview of the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “discrete and insular minorities.” Discussed is the historical instances of discrimination against Asian, European, and Latino immigrants, Native Americans, non-English speakers, people with disabilities, and LGBT people. Also discussed are federal and state responses to this discrimination and some brief historical context for the legal protection of vulnerable groups.
Camden Civil Rights Project 