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Anti-Terrorism Hypothetical: Bulk Scanning of Hosted Files? (justsecurity.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The tech community has spoken: we don't want the NSA or any other government agency running bulk surveillance on us, and we don't want tech companies to help them. But Bruce Schneier points out an interesting hypothetical raised by Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain: "Suppose a laptop were found at the apartment of one of the perpetrators of last year's Paris attacks. It's searched by the authorities pursuant to a warrant, and they find a file on the laptop that's a set of instructions for carrying out the attacks. ... The private document was likely shared among other conspirators, some of whom are still on the run or unknown entirely. Surely Google has the ability to run a search of all Gmail inboxes, outboxes, and message drafts folders, plus Google Drive cloud storage, to see if any of its 900 million users are currently in possession of that exact document.
If Google could be persuaded or ordered to run the search, it could generate a list of only those Google accounts possessing the precise file — and all other Google users would remain undisturbed, except for the briefest of computerized 'touches' on their accounts to see if the file reposed there." Zittrain asks: would you run the search? He then walks us through some of the possible complications to the situation, and the pros and cons of granting permission. His personal conclusion is this: "At least in theory, and with some real trepidation, I'd run the search in that instance, and along with it publicly establish a policy for exactly how clear cut the circumstances have to be (answer: very) for future cases to justify pressing the enter key on a similar search." What would you do?
If Google could be persuaded or ordered to run the search, it could generate a list of only those Google accounts possessing the precise file — and all other Google users would remain undisturbed, except for the briefest of computerized 'touches' on their accounts to see if the file reposed there." Zittrain asks: would you run the search? He then walks us through some of the possible complications to the situation, and the pros and cons of granting permission. His personal conclusion is this: "At least in theory, and with some real trepidation, I'd run the search in that instance, and along with it publicly establish a policy for exactly how clear cut the circumstances have to be (answer: very) for future cases to justify pressing the enter key on a similar search." What would you do?
Send or receive a known kiddie porn image through GMail and they will tip the authorities. That hash check can be used for anything the government wants to find people in possession of, just hand them a hash and a NSL.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, just imagine an alternate relaity in which Donald Trump becomes president, enforces his "Scare the Muslims away" policy by requiring them to wear clearly visible marks on their clothing and the document being a call for civil disobedience telling among other things how to produce markers which look OK but will not be visible for automatic surveillance cameras.
Obviously everyone forwarding such a document is not a law-abiding citizen but a prospective terrorist and needs to be found and detained.
Some services already do that to try to uphold their terms of service: http://venturebeat.com/2012/08...
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
This is done in the US with all printers, copiers, and just about anything else that can produce digital output. They are all watermarked with the printer info, time and date, plus likely other stuff encoded in (usually) yellow dots all over the page. The EFF had a decryption project for it, not sure how it ended up but the landing page is here:
https://www.eff.org/issues/pri...