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Content type: News & Analysis
17 June 2013
Below is an excerpt of an article that recently appeared in Melbourne, Australia's The Age, written by Carly Nyst, Head of International Advocacy at Privacy International:
"Mass surveillance of a country's citizens by its government can no longer be said to be the preserve of authoritarian and dictatorial states.
The publication last week by The Guardian of classified National Security Agency documents has exposed the extent of surveillance by the US government, throwing…
Content type: Press release
17 November 2015
A new Privacy International investigation reveals Microsoft's complicity in a serious case of Government persecution in Thailand. It is a shocking example of how Western companies not only work with governments that fall considerably short of international human rights standards, but can actually facilitate abuses of human rights.
In early 2014, a Thai stockbroker, Katha Pachachirayapong, was accused by the Government of spreading rumours on the ill-health of King…
Content type: News & Analysis
There are three good reasons why security is so hard for NGOs. First, we are afraid to speak about meaningful security. Second, we focus on the wrong areas of security and in turn spend money and prioritise the wrong things. Third, we struggle to separate the world we want from the worlds we build within our own organisations. At PI we have failed and struggled with each of these for over 20 years. Out of exhaustion, we decided to do something about it: we are building an open framework, a…
Content type: News & Analysis
Ask people around you if they live in a smart city, and more likely than not they will answer that they don’t. I can tell you that because I have tried.
When giving talks about this very topic in cities like Berlin, The Hague and Stockholm, I always ask this question at the start. The rough ratio I tend to get is that: 15 per cent hesitantly raise their hand to say they do, 60 per cent don’t, 20 per cent just look confused and 5 per cent are not listening.
And yet most people who live in cities…
Content type: Explainer
What is integrated policing?
Integrated policing is the collection and centralisation of data used for policing purposes. In the era of ‘big data’, companies – often the same companies offering infrastructures for smart cities – are offering interfaces that allow police easier access to datasets. Smart cities are cities where projects are deployed to use the collection and analysis of data to attempt to provide better targeted services to inhabitants.
With the proliferation of surveillance…
Content type: Case Study
Police and security services are increasingly outsourcing intelligence collection to third-party companies which are assigning threat scores and making predictions about who we are.
The rapid expansion of social media, connected devices, street cameras, autonomous cars, and other new technologies has resulted in a parallel boom of tools and software which aim to make sense of the vast amount of data generated from our increased connection. Police and security services see this data as an…
Content type: News & Analysis
Technologists hoped the “Crypto Wars” of the 1990s – which ended with cryptographers gaining the right to legally develop strong encryption that governments could not break – was behind them once and for all. Encryption is a fundamental part of our modern life, heavily relied on by everything from online banking and online shopping services to the security our energy infrastructure.
However, from comments by the French and German governments about creating a European initiative to circumvent…
Content type: News & Analysis
In our latest report “Who’s that knocking at my door? Understanding surveillance in Thailand”, we highlighted various methods of surveillance that the Thai Government employs. Included in these methods was the finding that Microsoft was the only technology company which by default trusts the Thai Government’s root certificate. Root certificates ensure the validity of a website, and protect users from being tricked into visiting a fake, insecure website. Most technology companies including Apple…