Could we be constantly tracked through our clothes, shoes or even our cash in the future?
In order to carry out tracking on the scale that Declan suggests - of a every citizen, on a nationwide scale, - you would need to deploy a vast array of sensor networks.
DARPA has put a high priority on developing such networks in their drive to digitize the battlespace under the "Persistence over the battlefield" philosophy that dominates current military thinking.
Cebrowski sums this doctrine up:
We are seeing the emergence of sensor-based warfare. The reality is, the world knows if we can sense it, we can kill it.
- Retired Navy Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, [Office of Force Transformation, February 5, 2002]
. . The SensIT program will create the binding between the physical world and cyberspace. Today's information systems focus on human input or computer generated data for fodder, but the future will build on continuous streams of real-world physical data. The SensIT program is founded on the concept of a networked system of cheap, pervasive platforms that combine multiple sensor types, embedded processors, positioning ability and wireless communication. Specifically the mission of SensIT is to develop all necessary software for networked microsensors.
Incidentally, seems to me, one corollary of the Cebrowski doctrine might be, if you can't sense it . . .
Sure, there are script kiddies out there who are Internet sociopaths and who will attack anything that that moves. Most of those folks are so uninventive that they'd attack address 127.0.0.1 if somebody told 'em to do so.
I've had this idea:
A CDROM that contains all the pieces that one needs to build an emergency DNS service for one's home, company, school, or whatever..
apparentlyicannwatchnew year resolution was to migrate from nuke to slash.
DeCoding the Deals: The use of the term arms trade has the effect of making many people think that it is only tanks and guns and weapons of mass destruction that are the problem. . . By focusing solely on weapons and torture equipment, we can ignore the fact that in some cases it is state of the art technology and communications equipment that allows repressive governments to moniter and arrest human rights defenders and pro-democracy campaigners.
Electro-shock equipment and leg irons may be the visible implements of torture but it is the use of global positioning devices and call interception equipment that enables a government to track the movements of its opponents. Sophisticated computers which track satellites and moniter the movemnets of troops on the battlefield are increasingly part of the modern arsenal.
Such sophisticated systems have been described as the "central nervous system of the repressive regieme that connects the brain to the boot." Amnesty Ireland
the ability to see what people are thinking about and interested in is pretty cool.
Which is why the Internet Police in China have set-up a proxy server running an adaptive filtering matrix between the mainland Googler and the oracle in Mountainview.
Shanghai grows on you. I've been home for a day now, and my lungs still burn. But, I yearn to return. As a perennial globetrotter, I can think of few more compelling places to be right now. Never has our world known such heedless, vast, brash, accelerated-to-warp-speed development. One thing's for certain -- it will affect us, sure as the sky is...blue.
Declan McCullagh via: A new licence agreement says that anyone using code released under it must respect privacy, free expression, due process and other human rights: Move over, free software. Step aside, today's open-source licences.
Software distributed under an "enhanced source" licence released this week will be legally prohibited from censoring or spying on users.
Crafted by Hacktivismo, a hacking group organised by the Cult of the Dead Cow, the Hacktivismo enhanced-source software licence agreement (HESSLA) says that anyone using code released under it must respect privacy, free expression, due process and other human rights.
MONTREAL, 18 OCTOBER, 2001 -- A new report released today by Rights & Democracy reveals that the Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel Networks may be contributing to human rights violations in the People's Republic of China. The report points specifically to Nortel's OPTera technology to be launched in China this week at the APEC Leaders Meeting in Shanghai.
China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China describes how technology developed for commercial purposes by transnational corporations, including Nortel, is being used by Chinese police and security forces to refine the targetting and repression of political dissidents. It also provides an overview of Nortel's long-standing involvement in the development of surveillance technology both at home and abroad.
Journalists covering the APEC meeting of 21 leaders, including US President George Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, will file their stories using Shanghai's new state-of-the-art citywide broadband network, purchased from Nortel.
"Although the network will provide western journalists with an efficient communication system, it will also provide Chinese authorities with an unprecedented ability to conduct surveillance and monitor the activities of human rights and democracy advocates," Warren Allmand, President of Rights & Democracy, today told a news conference in Montreal.
"Nortel is fundamentally changing the way content will be delivered across tomorrow's broadband Internet. Its Personal Internet strategy is all based on developing an intimate knowledge of an individual user's identity: their physical location and their content interests - not merely IP addressing," said the author of the report Greg Walton. "We are seeing the focus shift to censorship and surveillance of homes and offices; in effect, redistributing China's "Great Firewall" from the international gateways to millions of PCs. "
China still equates political dissent with criminal activity. On September 28, four Chinese citizens were tried for subversion for participating in an on-line pro-democracy forum. The four are but the most recent of several arrests in recent years for Internet-related crimes. APEC leaders are expected to announce an "anti-terrorism" pact at the APEC summit which many human rights advocates fear could be used to excuse increased crackdowns on Internet privacy, freedom of opinion, freedom of expression and the right of association, particulary in authoritarian states such as China.
"Civil liberties form the cornerstone of democracy and underpin the promotion and protection of other human rights", Mr. Allmand said. "They are protected by a number of agreements and treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which both Canada and China have ratified."
He urged the Government of Canada to incorporate human rights safeguards within its domestic trade and investment promotion activities in relation to the Peoples Republic of China. Pointing to the myriad of processes and resources devoted towards the promotion of trade with China, Mr. Allmand said, "Chinese activists are risking lengthy imprisonment or worse for simply advocating political reform in their country. They need our support, not our complicity in the violation of their rights."
China's Golden Shield is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing the report in English, French and Chinese. The CD-ROM is a user-friendly package which includes additional information on China's Internet and domestic legislations, related Web links and several different privacy software programmes. The software on the CD-ROM can be downloaded from the Internet without problem if you live in Canada, the US, Europe or mot other other countries but access to it is blocked from China.
China's Golden Shield is a also a living document. Readers can contribute comments and suggestions to the online version by visiting go.openflows.org The go.openflows Web site also features news stories and commentary on technology, privacy and human rights in China.
For information:
Patricia Poirier or Mary Durran : (514) 283-6073
Greg Walton: jamyang@openflows.org
To order copies of the report or the CD-ROM: publications@ichrdd.ca
Rights & Democracy is a Canadian institution with an international mandate. It works with civil society and governments in Canada and abroad to promote human rights and democratic development through dialogue, advocacy, capacity building and public education. It focuses on four themes: democratic development, women's rights, rights of indigenous peoples, and globalization and human rights and has two special operations: International Human Rights Advocacy and Urgent Action and Important Opportunities.
Nortel: holding Nortel responsible would be like blaming Boeing for al-Qaeda flying its planes into the World Trade Centre and that Nortel was not concerned about how products were used after they were bought.
That may change if Rights and Democracy's allegations of Nortel's involvement in surveillance technology in China are true. There is a growing trend towards holding multinational corporations accountable for any degree of complicity with repressive governments in human-rights abuses.
Carol Samdup, co-ordinator of Rights and Democracy's globalisation programme, said there has been increased discussion in recent years about the creation of international legislation and an international court to handle such cases.
The United Nations, meanwhile, is exploring ways to bring corporations under the same umbrella of human-rights laws that apply to states. And in a major development last month, a US federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld US legislation that enables victims of alleged human-rights abuse to sue US-based corporations in US courts.
The ruling came after Myanmar residents sued California-based energy conglomerate Unocal, charging the company in connection with alleged slavery, murder and rape carried out by the Myanmar military during the construction ofan oil pipeline there.
Ralph Steinhardt, a professor at the George Washington University Law School in Washington and an expert on multinational corporations and human-rights laws, says the ruling should have a significant impact on ''boardroom consciousness''.
''Multinationals would need to make sure they are not giving assistance to governments violating human rights,'' he said.
Even if the technology companies' actions in China do not legally amount to rights violations, their role in choking the free flow of information is less than admirable, said Mickey Spiegel, senior Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch.
''You don't want information blocked,'' she said. ''You certainly don't want any group of people not to have access to information. You want citizens who are knowledgeable. That's the issue - that people should have information, that information should cross borders and be available.''
EarthQuake is a slick little app that contacts the USGS and gathers the latest quake data, and then plots it onto a spinning globe on your desktop. You can customize the style display, set alarms to trigger when a new quake occurs anywhere in the world, and sort data by Richter scale quake magnitude.
what was a search engine doing conducting international diplomacy in the first place?
And how, exactly, did a Californian firm founded by a couple of Stanford university dropouts, using old doors for office furniture, wind up striking panic into the core of an authoritarian world power?
"The authorities were already in the habit of using surveillance, censorship or the outright elimination of overly critical websites," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Menard in a letter to the Chinese authorities. "But the blocking of a search engine sets a surprising and very worrying precedent."
Cisco Systems, said on Thursday it will supply routers and switches to help the Shanghai unit of China's largest telecom operator upgrade its network. Cisco did not disclose details of the contract. ..(reuters/ZDnet)
Meanwhile, China Mobile Picks Nortel: Leveraging the Optical Ethernet capabilities of Nortel Networks metropolitan optical portfolio, the Shanghai network will support real-time, mission-critical data applications, including Shanghai Mobile's evolving Business Operation Support System (BOSS), billing and network management. . .
His Excellency Jiang Zemin
President, People's Republic of China
C/o Embassy of the People's Republic of China
2300 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20008
Via facsimile: (202) 588-0032
Your Excellency:
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is very concerned by the Chinese
government's apparent blocking of domestic access to the Google Internet
search engine. Such censorship directly affects China-based journalists'
ability to conduct research and impedes citizens' access to news that is
unavailable in China's tightly controlled domestic media.
On August 31, both the English and Chinese-language search engines operated
by Google became inaccessible to Internet users in China. In a public
statement, a spokesperson for Google confirmed that the site was blocked
inside China and said that the government offered no explanation. ..facsimile
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is very concerned by the Chinese government's apparent blocking of domestic access to the Google Internet search engine. Such censorship directly affects China-based journalists' ability to conduct research and impedes citizens' access to news that is unavailable in China's tightly controlled domestic media. ..facsimile
Slashdot Mirror
Could we be constantly tracked through our clothes, shoes or even our cash in the future?
In order to carry out tracking on the scale that Declan suggests - of a every citizen, on a nationwide scale, - you would need to deploy a vast array of sensor networks.
DARPA has put a high priority on developing such networks in their drive to digitize the battlespace under the "Persistence over the battlefield" philosophy that dominates current military thinking.
Cebrowski sums this doctrine up:
- Retired Navy Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski,
[Office of Force Transformation, February 5, 2002]
First take: Check out DARPAs IXO - The Information Exploitation Office:
http://dtsn.darpa.mil/ixo/
in particular, Dr. Sri Kumar's Sensor Information Technology (SensIT) Program:
http://dtsn.darpa.mil/ixo/sensit.asp
Incidentally, seems to me, one corollary of the Cebrowski doctrine might be, if you can't sense it . . .
http://go.openflows.org/admin.pl?op=edit&sid=03/01 /14/1033209
Ubiquitous Sensor Networks, Next 10 years:
2000: 100 million image sensors sold worldwide (Cahners In-Stat Group)
2006: 1 billion 'mobile' sensors on 21 million telematic-enabled cars in US (Telematics Research Group)
2006: 2.5 billion devices on the Internet (Dr. Vinton Cerf)
2010: 60 trillion wireless sensors deployed worldwide (Ernst & Young)
RF Micro Devices Opens Sales And Customer Support Office in China
One Billion Smart Cards
apparentlyicannwatchnew year resolution was to migrate from nuke to slash.
Thoughtcrime
Electro-shock equipment and leg irons may be the visible implements of torture but it is the use of global positioning devices and call interception equipment that enables a government to track the movements of its opponents. Sophisticated computers which track satellites and moniter the movemnets of troops on the battlefield are increasingly part of the modern arsenal.
Such sophisticated systems have been described as the "central nervous system of the repressive regieme that connects the brain to the boot." Amnesty Ireland
Slashdot: Take Action
Yeah, right
Which is why the Internet Police in China have set-up a proxy server running an adaptive filtering matrix between the mainland Googler and the oracle in Mountainview.
http://go.openflows.org
Thought Crime: Internet users at risk of arbitrary detention, torture and even execution
Related Shareholder Resolutions
http://www.amnestyusa.org/abolish/innocence.html
Software distributed under an "enhanced source" licence released this week will be legally prohibited from censoring or spying on users. Crafted by Hacktivismo, a hacking group organised by the Cult of the Dead Cow, the Hacktivismo enhanced-source software licence agreement (HESSLA) says that anyone using code released under it must respect privacy, free expression, due process and other human rights.
thank you.
Appeal Cases
© International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2001.
go.openflows.org
Nortel Technology Threatens Human Rights in China
MONTREAL, 18 OCTOBER, 2001 -- A new report released today by Rights & Democracy reveals that the Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel Networks may be contributing to human rights violations in the People's Republic of China. The report points specifically to Nortel's OPTera technology to be launched in China this week at the APEC Leaders Meeting in Shanghai.
China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China describes how technology developed for commercial purposes by transnational corporations, including Nortel, is being used by Chinese police and security forces to refine the targetting and repression of political dissidents. It also provides an overview of Nortel's long-standing involvement in the development of surveillance technology both at home and abroad.
Journalists covering the APEC meeting of 21 leaders, including US President George Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, will file their stories using Shanghai's new state-of-the-art citywide broadband network, purchased from Nortel.
"Although the network will provide western journalists with an efficient communication system, it will also provide Chinese authorities with an unprecedented ability to conduct surveillance and monitor the activities of human rights and democracy advocates," Warren Allmand, President of Rights & Democracy, today told a news conference in Montreal.
"Nortel is fundamentally changing the way content will be delivered across tomorrow's broadband Internet. Its Personal Internet strategy is all based on developing an intimate knowledge of an individual user's identity: their physical location and their content interests - not merely IP addressing," said the author of the report Greg Walton. "We are seeing the focus shift to censorship and surveillance of homes and offices; in effect, redistributing China's "Great Firewall" from the international gateways to millions of PCs. "
China still equates political dissent with criminal activity. On September 28, four Chinese citizens were tried for subversion for participating in an on-line pro-democracy forum. The four are but the most recent of several arrests in recent years for Internet-related crimes. APEC leaders are expected to announce an "anti-terrorism" pact at the APEC summit which many human rights advocates fear could be used to excuse increased crackdowns on Internet privacy, freedom of opinion, freedom of expression and the right of association, particulary in authoritarian states such as China.
"Civil liberties form the cornerstone of democracy and underpin the promotion and protection of other human rights", Mr. Allmand said. "They are protected by a number of agreements and treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which both Canada and China have ratified."
He urged the Government of Canada to incorporate human rights safeguards within its domestic trade and investment promotion activities in relation to the Peoples Republic of China. Pointing to the myriad of processes and resources devoted towards the promotion of trade with China, Mr. Allmand said, "Chinese activists are risking lengthy imprisonment or worse for simply advocating political reform in their country. They need our support, not our complicity in the violation of their rights."
China's Golden Shield is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing the report in English, French and Chinese. The CD-ROM is a user-friendly package which includes additional information on China's Internet and domestic legislations, related Web links and several different privacy software programmes. The software on the CD-ROM can be downloaded from the Internet without problem if you live in Canada, the US, Europe or mot other other countries but access to it is blocked from China.
China's Golden Shield is a also a living document. Readers can contribute comments and suggestions to the online version by visiting go.openflows.org The go.openflows Web site also features news stories and commentary on technology, privacy and human rights in China.
For information:
Patricia Poirier or Mary Durran : (514) 283-6073
Greg Walton: jamyang@openflows.org
To order copies of the report or the CD-ROM: publications@ichrdd.ca
Rights & Democracy is a Canadian institution with an international mandate. It works with civil society and governments in Canada and abroad to promote human rights and democratic development through dialogue, advocacy, capacity building and public education. It focuses on four themes: democratic development, women's rights, rights of indigenous peoples, and globalization and human rights and has two special operations: International Human Rights Advocacy and Urgent Action and Important Opportunities.
That may change if Rights and Democracy's allegations of Nortel's involvement in surveillance technology in China are true. There is a growing trend towards holding multinational corporations accountable for any degree of complicity with repressive governments in human-rights abuses.
Carol Samdup, co-ordinator of Rights and Democracy's globalisation programme, said there has been increased discussion in recent years about the creation of international legislation and an international court to handle such cases.
The United Nations, meanwhile, is exploring ways to bring corporations under the same umbrella of human-rights laws that apply to states. And in a major development last month, a US federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld US legislation that enables victims of alleged human-rights abuse to sue US-based corporations in US courts.
The ruling came after Myanmar residents sued California-based energy conglomerate Unocal, charging the company in connection with alleged slavery, murder and rape carried out by the Myanmar military during the construction ofan oil pipeline there.
Ralph Steinhardt, a professor at the George Washington University Law School in Washington and an expert on multinational corporations and human-rights laws, says the ruling should have a significant impact on ''boardroom consciousness''.
''Multinationals would need to make sure they are not giving assistance to governments violating human rights,'' he said.
Even if the technology companies' actions in China do not legally amount to rights violations, their role in choking the free flow of information is less than admirable, said Mickey Spiegel, senior Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch.
''You don't want information blocked,'' she said. ''You certainly don't want any group of people not to have access to information. You want citizens who are knowledgeable. That's the issue - that people should have information, that information should cross borders and be available.''
Source: David Lee is a China-based writer.
Bootnote®®
250k ZIP file download
Only available for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
Navagent also offer a powerful search and data visualization tool that i've found useful for tracking the China Googlebomb: Surf3D
Shanghai: Cisco sells routers, switches to China Telecom - while China Mobile Picks Nortel
what was a search engine doing conducting international diplomacy in the first place?
And how, exactly, did a Californian firm founded by a couple of Stanford university dropouts, using old doors for office furniture, wind up striking panic into the core of an authoritarian world power?
Engine trouble ;-)
"The authorities were already in the habit of using surveillance, censorship or the outright elimination of overly critical websites," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Menard in a letter to the Chinese authorities. "But the blocking of a search engine sets a surprising and very worrying precedent."
Cisco Systems, said on Thursday it will supply routers and switches to help the Shanghai unit of China's largest telecom operator upgrade its network. Cisco did not disclose details of the contract. . .(reuters/ZDnet)
Meanwhile, China Mobile Picks Nortel: Leveraging the Optical Ethernet capabilities of Nortel Networks metropolitan optical portfolio, the Shanghai network will support real-time, mission-critical data applications, including Shanghai Mobile's evolving Business Operation Support System (BOSS), billing and network management. . .
Committee to Protect Journalists
330 Seventh Avenue, 12th floor
New York, NY 10001
His Excellency Jiang Zemin
President, People's Republic of China
C/o Embassy of the People's Republic of China
2300 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20008
Via facsimile: (202) 588-0032
Your Excellency:
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is very concerned by the Chinese government's apparent blocking of domestic access to the Google Internet search engine. Such censorship directly affects China-based journalists' ability to conduct research and impedes citizens' access to news that is unavailable in China's tightly controlled domestic media.
On August 31, both the English and Chinese-language search engines operated by Google became inaccessible to Internet users in China. In a public statement, a spokesperson for Google confirmed that the site was blocked inside China and said that the government offered no explanation. . .facsimile
Harvard: Where's Wan Yahihai?
Your Excellency:
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is very concerned by the Chinese government's apparent blocking of domestic access to the Google Internet search engine. Such censorship directly affects China-based journalists' ability to conduct research and impedes citizens' access to news that is unavailable in China's tightly controlled domestic media. . .facsimile
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----N
Version: PGPfreeware 7.0.3 for non-commercial use
iQA/AwUAPXQLctA2woXcpyGSEQKBfgCg42njJxBK7j1lxMlOW
rvTVqpveEAoOBu q3qWmzI5pomj9p81ccR68zNR
=RyNf
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----