Ron Paul has a few things to say about the expansion of Presidential powers.
The Last Nail – Floor Speech May 25 2011
May 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment
What Does Your Phone Know About You? More Than You Think
May 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Figuring that I’ve got nothing to hide or steal, I’d always privileged convenience over any privacy and security protocols. Not anymore.
I plugged my phone into my computer and opened an application called Lantern, a forensics program for investigating iPhones and iPads. Ten minutes later, I’m staring at everything my iPhone knows about me. About 14,000 text messages, 1,350 words in my personal dictionary, 1,450 Facebook contacts, tens of thousands of locations pings, every website I’ve ever visited, what locations I’ve mapped, my emails going back a month, my photos with geolocation data attached and how many times I checked my email on March 24 or any day for that matter. Want to reconstruct a night? Lantern has a time line that combines all my communications and photos in one neat interface. While most of it is invisible during normal operations, there is a record of every single thing I’ve done with this phone, which also happens to form a pretty good record of my life.
Figuring that I’ve got nothing to hide or steal, I’d always privileged convenience over any privacy and security protocols. Not anymore. Immediately after trying out Lantern, I enabled the iPhone’s passcode and set it to erase all data on the phone after 10 failed attempts. This thing remembers more about where I’ve been and what I’ve said than I do, and I’m damn sure I don’t want it falling into anyone’s hands.
by contributors@theatlantic.com (Alexis Madrigal), On Monday April 25, 2011, 10:33 am EDT
You want a drink? Give us your fingerprints.
May 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment
THOUSANDS of clubbers and pub patrons are being forced to submit to fingerprint and photographic scans to enter popular venues, seemingly unaware of the ramifications of handing over their identity.
Biometric scanners, once the domain of James Bond movies, are flooding the pub market as the fix-all solution to violence and antisocial behaviour. The pubs are exerting more power than the police or airport security by demanding photos, fingerprints and ID. Police can only do it if they suspect someone of committing a crime and they must destroy the data if the person is not charged or found not guilty.
Yet one company boasts that the sensitive information collected about patrons can be kept for years and shared with other venues in the country – in what appears to be a breach of privacy laws.
by Natalie O’Brien and Eamonn Duff January 30, 2011
