What’s Privacy Good For, Anyway?
"I've got nothing to hide, so I've got nothing to worry about." If you talk about privacy to your circle of friends, how many of them are going to respond…
General Privacy News
Is It 1984 Yet?
People in general are still dismissive of the dangers of mass surveillance: as you mention the words Big Brother and 1984, most argue that such a dystopia cannot happen where…
The Quest For Power Has Always Been A Quest For Information Advantage
One recurring theme in conflicts through history is that the struggle for power has always been the struggle for the information advantage. The group that had more and better information…
What Happens When Your Phone, Your Desk, And Your Walls Are The Informants?
In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. In 1990, Germany was re-unified. In 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. The net effect of this is that nobody younger than…
Without Anonymity, Free Speech Does Not Exist
Politicians and bureaucrats who clamp down on anonymity sometimes claim that an absence of anonymity has no adverse effect on freedom of speech. This is an outright lie; without anonymity,…
Does It Take A Disaster For The Public To Wake Up To The Mass Surveillance?
It seems there needs to be a major wiretapping disaster for the public to wake up to the fact that freedom of speech and privacy are essentially gone. Seeing how…
Why I Won’t Invest In Biometrics: Privacy Disaster Waiting To Happen
There has been a rather high financial interest in biometric security solutions for the past few years. I'm very sceptical of biometric authentication solutions - they're a privacy disaster waiting…
When Very Important Principles Collide
There is a couple of very important principles that build what we consider a modern democracy: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, privacy of citizens, transparency and accountability of…
Why Today’s Wiretapping Is Entirely Unlike Yesterday’s
Wiretapping has expanded grotesquely without lawmakers being aware of it, just by law enforcement demanding the apparent ability to wiretap online conversations. What nobody talks about is that if you're…
NSA And Associates Have Already Killed Freedom Of The Press
The NSA and its accomplices have killed whistleblower protection by tracking every communication that takes place. In doing so, they have killed the free press. There is no longer any…