Recent developments

Surveillance case studies

From case studies of surveillance scandals in Macedonia and Morocco, you’ll learn about how these two categories of technology are deployed and the effect misuse has on populations and individuals.
 

Tactical surveillance:

Technologies that do not require physical installation onto a network. These technologies can be easily transported to different locations for deployment.
 

Network surveillance:

Technologies that require physical installation onto a network to perform communications surveillance.

We're going to focus on two main categories of surveillance:

• Network surveillance
• Tactical surveillance

Following that, we will  look at the communications surveillance technologies available to some actors, which facilitate their interference with our privacy

It only takes four location points to uniquely identify you in a dataset of 1,500,000 people

In the first part of this chapter, we’re going to explore the actors who threaten the right to privacy:

1. Governments
2. The private sector
3. Individuals

Key concepts: Threats to the right to privacy

All of a sudden the content of the call or what you write in an email doesn’t seem to matter much in getting revealing information, does it? 

When it comes to internet communications, the situation is just as concerning

A tool released in 2013 by MIT, called "Immersion" helps to illustrate how analysing “just” metadata of an email can reveal whole networks and groups of contacts.

How is data communicated?

Take a mobile network:

Your phone gives away its location constantly by sending out signals to different base stations as you move around the city.

The amount of metadata generated in the course of a communication is staggering

IMSI - International Mobile Subscriber Identity is a unique identifier stored on your SIM card to associate with the relevant provider of your service

Then when your phone connects to a base station it reveals metadata to identify itself to the network and to associate it with the correct provider

All it is doing is trying to give you the best service possible

All of this information may be necessary…and totally revealing

Didn't know these existed?

Open up the keypad on your phone like you’re going to dial a number and dial the code *#06# into your phone.You’ll get your own unique IMEI identifier displayed to you. Both the IMSI and the IMEI are completely unique to your phone and are transmitted almost instantaneously.

IMEI - International Mobile Equipment Identifier is a unique identifier that identifies your handset to the network