Nearly two dozen child advocacy groups have formed a coalition and filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that YouTube is illegally tracking the online activity of small children in direct violation of COPPA.
The post 23 Child Advocacy Groups Find YouTube ILLEGALLY Spying On and Tracking Kids as Young as 6 appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
In one of the most invasive moves by the state in recent history, the UK government will now require internet users to verify their identity before being able to access online porn.
In an Orwellian move — ostensibly made to ‘protect the children’ — the UK government is set to announce that by April 2018, people in the UK will have to prove they are 18 before being allowed access to porn websites. What could possibly go wrong?
As the BBC reported on Monday, websites will be legally required to install age verification controls by April 2018 as part of a move to make the internet safer for children.
If a porn site refuses to go along with this Orwellian move, they will be essentially banned from the internet by rules set out in the Digital Economy Act.
According to the BBC:
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Under the plans, firms supplying payment and other services to the pornography websites could be notified about any breach.
A regulatory body will be asked to oversee and enforce the new rules.
It is thought this could be the British Board of Film Classification which already sets age limits for films and computer games.
‘Most robust protection’
Digital minister Matt Hancock will formally begin the process, which was the subject of a 2016 consultation during David Cameron’s government, in a written statement to the Commons later.
Mr Hancock said: “All this means that while we can enjoy the freedom of the web, the UK will have the most robust internet child protection measures of any country in the world.”
“Steps like this to help restrict access, alongside the provision of free parental controls and education, are key,” Will Gardner, from internet safety charity Childnet said.
READ MORE: Former Head of DHS Warns Americans About the Horrors of Govt-Mandated Crypto “Backdoors”
Of course, on the surface, this may seem like it’s for the children. However, it is nothing short of total online surveillance.
It is estimated that 28,258 users — every single second — access porn on the internet. Those numbers are staggering and allowing government access to all those identities would be a death blow to online privacy.
Allowing the government to play the role of parent online is not only a massive concession to the nanny state but it opens the gate to total online surveillance.
There are already dozens of highly effective, third party programs — many of which are completely free — that block children from accessing adult content online. Parents should be the ones stopping their kids from seeking out porn online, not the state.
But what about child porn?
Child porn is a very real problem and it victimizes countless innocent children globally. However, this act does nothing to stop it.
Child porn is not accessed through legitimate porn websites. Pedophiles seek out their depraved fantasies on the dark web where users browse these horrific images and videos anonymously.
If the UK government was genuinely concerned about the well-being of British children, then they would stop ignoring the rampant child rape taking place across the country.
However, that is simply not the case.
As RT reported earlier this year, Children reporting violent sexual crimes are not being taken seriously by the police, Britain’s victims’ commissioner, Baroness Newlove, has warned.
Newlove said the authorities are failing young people that come forward with stories of abuse, making them feel like criminals themselves.
READ MORE: Edward Snowden Develops Phone Case to Alert Users if Their Data is Being Compromised
In some cases, children said they were simply not believed or told that they were wasting the police’s time.
“They didn’t care because we were three teenage girls,” a young woman said in describing how the police reacted to her call about an assault.
“It’s like we were wasting their time. They couldn’t be bothered with us.”
Instead of stopping pedophilia, the government is going to track its citizens’ porn habits. Stellar idea.
Fret not child victims, now everyone will be kept safe as internet users are forced to identify themselves before fapping.
Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich recently published a searing critique of the federal government’s spying powers in light of Wikileaks data releases that allege various vulnerabilities inside the CIA, as well as the agency’s capabilities to pursue surveillance of Americans with impunity. For a great number of years, Kucinich has stressed the importance of privacy and the consequences of federal overreach and was one of relatively few in Congress to stand up against legislation including the Patriot Act that has led to widespread spying with scarce oversight.
“If Tuesday’s WikiLeaks document dump is authentic, as it appears to be, then the agency left open electronic gateways that make all Americans vulnerable to spying, eavesdropping and technological manipulation that could bring genuine harm,” Kucinich wrote.
“It is bad enough that the government spies on its own people. It is equally bad that the CIA, through its incompetence, has opened the cyberdoor to anyone with the technological skills and connections to spy on anyone else,” he said.
“The constant erosion of privacy at the hands of the government and corporations has annihilated the concept of a “right to privacy,” which is embedded in the rationale of the First, Third, Fourth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Kucinich went on to warn that “We have crossed the threshold of a cowardly new world, and it’s time we tell the government and the corporations who have intruded to stop it.”
Unfortunately, voices of dissent such as Kucinich are much harder to find than reports that gloss over or dismiss the revelations shared by Wikileaks. In the wake of last week’s Wikileaks bombshell unveiling of “Vault 7” – the leak of an expansive and unsettling collection of documents that detail just how intrusive the CIA has become – the mainstream media’s collective reaction has been nearly as telling as the documents themselves. Rather than providing an objective look at the data within the leak itself, a number major news outlets have predictably opted to echo one another and focus instead almost entirely on their distaste for Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange.
READ MORE: BREAKING: Assange Releases SMS Records Showing He Was Framed by Police in Rape Cases
A plethora of popular news articles over the last few days show passive yet unified rejection of the information’s legitimacy. The Washington Post wasted little time in attempting to minimize Wikileaks’ credibility, as well as questioning whether the Vault 7 leak has Russian ties. The Post claimed the release of documents “shifts the narrative away from the hacking of the DNC and Russia’s relationship with Trump” and suggesting that people should “consider where the information came from and the lack of credibility WikiLeaks has as a news source.” NBC’s Today similarly indicated a potential connection between Russia and the documents, although posed as a question.
However, as we’ve pointed out in the past, WikiLeaks has never released anything that was not entirely genuine and verifiable.
Fortune summarized the leak as a collection of “misinformation” and accused Wikileaks of serving as “a well-oiled machine of information warfare, sowing panic, fear, and paranoia among the populace.”A Forbes article, titled “WikiLeaks Vault 7 CIA Dump Offers Nothing But Old News,” seeks to reassure the reader that “the overwhelming majority of us aren’t likely to be targeted by the CIA.”
A Foreign Policy post, titled “Wikileaks Has Joined the Trump Administration,” described Wikileaks as an “anti-American group” that “has become the preferred intelligence service for a conspiracy-addled White House.” This article centered around a possible Trump-Wikileaks kinship, noting that the president may be keeping quiet about the Vault 7 leaks because he could “benefit from” them.
However, beneath the surface of Vault 7 reports that seek to obfuscate the data, summaries, and analyses that expose the CIA’s troubling hacking capabilities are able to be found and are vital to bringing these disconcerting but crucial topics to light.
READ MORE: Newly Declassified Govt Docs Reveal Operation Mockingbird is Alive and Well
The Independent published a straightforward explanation of the Vault 7 leak as well as steps that can be taken to protect some personal data. The article also points out how Apple’s response to the leaks serve as an admission of sorts regarding vulnerabilities exploited by the CIA: “While our initial analysis indicates that many of the issues leaked today were already patched in the latest iOS, we will continue work to rapidly address any identified vulnerabilities.”
In addition, Edward Snowden publicly recognized the authenticity and implications of the information released through Vault 7. “Evidence mounts showing CIA & FBI knew about catastrophic weaknesses in the most-used smartphones in America, but kept them open — to spy,” he noted in one tweet. In another, he declared that the leaks are “first public evidence USG secretly paying to keep US software unsafe.”
It’s important to note that Wikileaks dumped a massive amount of data at once in its Vault 7 release, and proper, thorough analysis of this information is critical. When troves of documents are unleashed so quickly, it is possible for some parts of information to be initially overstated or misunderstood. But for the media to uniformly proclaim that all is settled- that the leaks are nothing but old news, insignificant bits of data not worthy of concern, or a nefarious disinformation campaign- is a disservice to the public.
Thanks to what’s known as the Internet of things — the growing number of ‘smart’ devices and appliances connected to the web and each other — will be used by police to solve violent crimes.
Your fridge, law enforcement says, might help solve a murder.
However beneficial that sounds, it indicates a number of circumstances to send chills down the spines of privacy rights advocates — or anyone who doesn’t find the idea of, say, a washing machine spying on their every move.
“Wireless cameras within a device, such as fridge, may record the movement of owners and suspects,” Metropolitan Police head of the digital, cyber and communications forensics unit, Mark Stokes told The Times.
“Doorbells that connect directly to apps on a user’s phone can show who has rung the door and the owner or others may then remotely, if they choose, to give controlled access to the premises while away from the property.
“All these leave a log and a trace of activity. The crime scene of tomorrow is going to be the internet of things.”
Stokes explained detectives are already being trained to hunt for such devices at crime scenes in order to map both victims’ and suspects’ digital footprints. So many appliances and personal devices are now linked to the Internet under the premise of convenience, Stokes assessment isn’t an exaggeration.
Indeed, many privacy advocates and domestic surveillance critics — like whistleblower Edward Snowden — have long warned the consumer culture’s lust for convenience and saving time would usurp more rational goal of keeping the government’s prying eyes out of our homes.
Instead, as the Telegraph explains, in just one example,
“The new Samsung Family Hub Fridge has cameras that carry a live feed of its contents, so shoppers can tell what they need when they are out at the shop. The dates and times that people logon to the fridge, therefore could provide alibis or prove people were not were they said they were.”
Further, authorities have been working to create a portable “digital forensics toolkit” — for analyzing microchips and downloading information on the spot — so police would not be forced to remove large appliances from a crime scene for testing.
As Stokes noted, however, private corporations — the manufacturers of these devices — could create obstacles to this potential gold mine of information. Concern for customers’ privacy has, indeed, been a barrier for investigators in Bentonville, Arkansas, who have filed search warrants to obtain the information from murder suspect James A. Bates’ Amazon Echo.
Law enforcement have filed search warrants with Amazon for recordings from the device in hopes it had been voice activated and captured clues to explain how Victor Collins was strangled to death in Bates’ hot tub in 2015 — but, thus far, the company has not complied.
“It is believed that these records are retained by Amazon.com and that they are evidence related to the case under investigation,” the search warrant reads.
Police have already obtained information from the electric water meter on Bates’ house, and feel the Echo — a voice-activated device which plays music, can answer questions, turns on home appliances, and uses artificial intelligence to improve service over time — might have recorded information vital to parsing out the murder.
When it comes to the Internet of things and the accommodating features such devices provide, costs to personal privacy far outweigh the benefits of saved time. Indeed, considering law enforcement and government authorities are far from infallible, the thought your connected devices have an astonishing amount of information about your otherwise private life should be of sharp concern.
While it might be noble to solve violent crime using any means necessary, the potential for abuse — police trumping up charges after accidentally ‘discovering,’ for example, non-violent, victimless crimes a person committed — is unparalleled.
For owners of the Amazon Echo worried about privacy, instructions for deleting audio recordings can be found here.
In a country continuing to shirk the ordinary, Iceland’s Pirate Party — an amalgamation of anarchists, libertarians, and hackers, who want to ban digital surveillance — is predicted to win the country’s national elections this Saturday.
This collection of free-thinkers have upturned the traditional Western political paradigm and hopes to use online public polls to shape governmental policy and end all Internet spying.
Although the Pirate Party formed just four years ago, its popularity has skyrocketed — most likely for unconventional tactics aligning loosely with libertarianism — the promotion of privacy rights and personal freedoms, and simultaneous shrinking of Big Government.
Edward Snowden has been offered the safe haven of Icelandic citizenship should the Pirates likely victory come to fruition — which makes sense, given the party’s anti-establishment roots.
In fact, the Pirates have experienced astonishing success in a short time — taking the nation’s longstanding political traditionalists off-guard in the process — even the group’s founder, a programmer and former Wikileaks activist, is stunned.
Asked whether she expected the explosion of enthusiasm for the nascent Pirate Party — which now leads in public polls with 22.6 percent — founder Birgitta Jónsdóttir decisively told the Washington Post, “No way.”
But considering growing frustration with ever-increasing Western governments — and all of the surveillance programs, police state tactics, and chill on personal liberties — the rise of the Pirates, who describe themselves as neither right nor left but a radical mix of both, hardly seems too shocking.
“People want real changes and they understand that we have to change the systems,” Jónsdóttir asserted, “we have to modernize how we make laws.”
According to the Pirates’ website, “The Icelandic Pirate Party was founded on November 24th, 2012 based on the political ideology of the Swedish Pirate Party, which Richard Falkvinge founded in January 2006, to bring about internet copyright reform.”
Obviously, the message is resonating — one in five Icelanders now favor the Pirate Party, according to the Iceland Monitor.
Indeed, Iceland’s tendency toward the radical first became apparent in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. Instead of bailing out the Big Banks who’d sent untold numbers into economic ruin as the United States and European governments decided, Iceland jailed its crooked financiers. And although the move — which created additional hardship for years — wasn’t unanimously favored, the bold act opened the door for what happened next.
In April, the release of the notorious Panama Papers revealed Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson and his wife held stakes in an offshore secret investment company allowing them to profit enormously from the downfall of those Big Banks.
Though he denied all the allegations against him, dismissing the profiteering to, in essence, a years-old clerical error, Icelanders took to the streets en massed to protest the glaring conflict of interest. In fact, 6.6 percent of the country flooded streets around government buildings — a number equivalent in the U.S. to 21 million people, reports the Post — demanding Gunnlaugsson’s ouster.
“What would be the most natural and the right thing to do is that he resign as prime minister,” Jónsdóttir told the Guardian at the time. “There is great demand for that in society; he has totally lost all his trust and believability.”
Not long afterward, the embattled prime minister resigned. New elections were announced. But the people of Iceland had grown suspicious of political insiders and elites ruling the land, and worried electing candidates from traditional parties might yield the same corruption.
Enter the Pirate Party’s nontraditional platform.
“The distrust that had long been germinating has now exploded. The Pirates are riding on that wave,” University of Iceland political history professor, Ragnheithur Kristjánsdóttir, told the Post. “We’ve had new parties before, and then they’ve faded. What’s surprising is that they’re maintaining their momentum.”
Iceland has been the first of nations with Pirate Party presence to elect members to government positions — two Pirates serve as Members of Parliament. Ásta Guthrún Helgadóttir, one of the two and just 26-years-old, succinctly described what might be the key to the Pirate Party’s astounding success:
“We are not here to gain power. We are here to distribute power.”
