Search
Content type: Explainer
21st February 2018
Video surveillance technologies are deployed in public and private areas for monitoring purposes. Closed-circuit television (CCTV)– a connected network of stationary and mobile video cameras– is increasingly used in public areas, private businesses and public institutions such as schools and hospitals. Systems incorporating video surveillance technologies have far greater powers than simply what the camera sees. Biometric technologies use the transmitted video to profile, sort and identify…
Content type: Explainer
16th February 2018
What is the Global Surveillance Industry?
Today, a global industry consisting of hundreds of companies develops and sells surveillance technology to government agencies around the world. Together, these companies sell a wide range of systems used to identify, track, and monitor individuals and their communications for spying and policing purposes. The advanced powers available to the best equipped spy agencies in the world are being traded around the world. It is a lucrative business, but is…
Content type: Examples
16th July 2018
In 2013, Edward Snowden, working under contract to the US National Security Agency for the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton, copied and leaked thousands of classified documents that revealed the inner workings of dozens of previously unknown surveillance programs. One of these was PRISM, launched in 2007, which let NSA use direct access to the systems of numerous giant US technology companies to carry out targeted surveillance of the companies' non-US users and Americans with foreign contacts by…
Content type: Explainer
22nd February 2018
Phone networks are divided between two networks: the physical and the mobile. The physical runs on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) that serves your home phone. Mobile networks are dominant in the age of communication and are used to relay mobile communications to the PSTN. The most prominent mobile networks are GSM networks (Global System for Mobile communications) and are what we use everyday to communicate with one another. Another system is known as CDMA (Code Division Multiple…
Content type: Examples
2nd May 2018
A new examination of documents detailing the US National Security Agency's SKYNET programme shows that SKYNET carries out mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network and then uses a machine learning algorithm to score each of its 55 million users to rate their likelihood of being a terrorist. The documents were released as part of the Edward Snowden cache. The data scientist Patrick Ball, director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which produces scientifically…
Content type: Case Study
1st December 2017
Invisible and insecure infrastructure is facilitating data exploitation
Many technologies, including those that are critical to our day-to-day lives do not protect our privacy or security. One reason for this is that the standards which govern our modern internet infrastructure do not prioritise security which is imperative to protect privacy.
What happened?
An example of this is Wi-Fi, which is now on its sixth major revision (802.11ad). Wi-Fi was always designed to be a verbose in the…
Content type: Explainer
31st March 2020
In a scramble to track, and thereby stem the flow of, new cases of Covid-19, Governments around the world are rushing to track the locations of their populace. One way to do this is to write a smartphone app which uses Bluetooth technology, and encourage (or mandate) that individuals download and use the app. We have seen such examples in Singapore and emerging plans in the UK.
Apps that use Bluetooth are just one way to track location. There are several different technologies in a smartphone…