'We need a new Geneva Convention to protect all citizens from snoops' In 1949, the world’s nations came together to sign the Geneva Conventions, according respect in times of war to civilians, soldiers incapable of fighting, and prisoners of war. Now we need to go back and do the same for civilians caught up in online conflict, according to Microsoft. In a keynote at this year's RSA USA …
You need only look as far as Caspar Bowden and how he was treated by Microsoft to know how they really feel about privacy. It would be interesting to hear what - if anything - Brad Smith has to say about it.
They only started caring when they were given no other choice but to do so.
In 2002, Caspar left FIPR and joined Microsoft, where he became chief privacy adviser for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Microsoft was originally keen on privacy, and Caspar got the company to sponsor privacy research in various ways. But the company’s direction changed as cloud services became important and as the Bush surveillance laws gave the agencies access to cloud data. In 2011 Caspar left. As he told the story, he was responsible for briefing Microsoft’s government sales managers in 40 countries about privacy, and told them that if they sold Microsoft cloud services to non-US governments, the US Fisa court (the Foreign Intelligence Surveilliance court) would give the FBI, NSA and CIA unfettered access to everything. For this, he was fired.
The fastest way to find out if Microsoft are targetting you on behalf of....
Try resetting your password with one of the Linux password managers if you are running windows 7 or earlier.
If you can reset your password and log in, you are not being targetted.
If you can reset your password and not log in, then you are being targetted.
Stuxnet doesnt work on Windows 10, but you cant switch off the "Cortana"-is-supervising-you data stream back to Microsoft. Its impossible, if you think you have, its just cached until the next update.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X0Teo5AxQM
The sad fact is that things like the Geneva Convention are once in a lifetime events. It takes nearly complete destruction of two successive generations to motivate the government to do the right thing.
...and still widely ignored - both by people like ISIS and people like the US military. Not forgetting Israel.
Sadly human history shows that the despots win much more often than the nice guys. The late 20th century western European viewpoint is very much an minority position.
"The sad fact is that things like the Geneva Convention are once in a lifetime events. It takes nearly complete destruction of two successive generations to motivate the government to do the right thing."
One thing I noticed in this was the market pushing back against a bad idea. MS isnt suggesting this from the goodness of their heart but because trust = more money while governments have no motivation beyond control. It would be good if such a push back of the largest corporations occurred to restrain the gov from overstepping and abusing their position.
* Is that privacy is frowned upon like virginity by most America citizens, corporations and government officials. Its there to be thrown away / discarded. As long as that's the case, and as long as the big privacy rapers are all American, nothing new can happen.
* Meanwhile where are all the FOSS options? Where are the European competitors to compete against US corps to focus minds...??? As long as there's no real competition to Facebook / Google / Uber / Microsoft / Snap / Linkedin, then nothing will ever change, ever.
* Laws are to be laughed by the lawless. Its the Wild Wild West in Surveillance Capitalism country...
Part of the problem is the antics of companies like Slurp and Chocolate Factory. The amount of information they either have or are trying to get makes them a rather obvious target for governments. They are constantly under the thumb of the local FISA court.
There is an old rule in security: what you never knew you can never tell. They need to learn this and minimize the information they are collecting and retaining.
Snoops nowadays can do a lot more damage than snooping. For instance, non-lethal (or lethal) Directed Energy Weapons that are remote or software controlled can be installed anywhere. They can be programmed to fire only at a specific person based on LIDAR scanned profiles or something similar. Battery technology and wireless power are both improving at rapid rates. Spooks are not far away from having the capability to harass a specific person from every traffic light if they choose to. I have experienced versions of this, so I'm not speaking only theoretically. These comments from Microsoft are welcomed and very timely.
As much as I dislike snooping by governments, snooping and data mining by businesses and commercial industries is just as dangerous and invasive. If this was seriously being considered, I'd support taking it further and applying privacy restrictions to ALL snooping focused at private citizens, whether done for/with business or government applications.
In-human rapacious multi-national corporations who's only concern is its survival, or a government elected by you and can be removed by you?
Imagined conversion - Google exec " Mr President we note from your android phone tracking, that your movements between these dates are identical to someone you don't want the electorate to know you know.... Now about that tax legislation..."
I would loved to have watched this spiel live!
How the feck could he spout that with a straight face, it may be admirable, but has less than ZERO chance of ever actually happening..
I mean if a given government were to agree a £Bn-worth-it amount every year for access to all clients info (and of course make it perfectly legal), would [insert USA corp. name] really say: 'no thanks, we're earning quite enough now thank you very much...'
Of course, even if they did, us plebs are pretty unlikely to ever know about it.
/sighs
"In 1956, US and UK intelligence agencies recorded a speech given in private by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev which decried the excesses of Stalin’s regime."
Only they didn't...
While not officially released until 1989 under Mikhail Gorbachev, Nikita Khrushchev's famous "secret speech", delivered to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party on February 25, 1956 wasn't really that secret (or private).
There was an official transcript which in March 1956 was sent to all the heads of state in the Eastern bloc, where it circulated amongst the higher echelon. Viktor Grajewski, a journalist working for a news magazine of the Polish government, was friends with one of the secretaries of Edward Ochab, at the time the First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party.
Grajewski accidentally (?) saw a copy of Khrushchev's speech, borrowed it - and took it to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw. The embassy made a copy and forwarded it to the Shin Bet, which in turn forwarded it to the CIA. From there the speech made its way to Pesident Eisenhower and, eventually, to the NYT which wrote about it on June 4, 1956.
The Washington Post did an anniversary piece in 2006 about it.
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