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Privacy

MAC Catching

As we walk around with mobile phones in our pockets, there are multiple radios each with identifiers that can be captured and recorded just through their normal operation. Bluetooth and Wifi devices have MAC addresses and can advertise their presence to other devices merely by sending traffic, or by probing for devices to connect to if they’re not connected.

I found a simple tool, probemon that allows for anyone with a wifi card to track who is at which location at any given time. You could deploy a few of these with Raspberry Pis or even go even cheaper with a number of ESP8266.

Powers to Investigate

The Communication Data Bill was draft legislation introduced first in May 2012. It sought to compel ISPs to store details of communications usage so that it can later be used for law enforcement purposes. In 2013 the passage of this bill into law had been blocked and the bill was dead.

In 2014 we saw the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 appear. This seemed to be in response to the Data Retention Directive being successfully challenged at the European Court of Justice by Digital Rights Ireland on human rights grounds, with a judgment given in 2014. It essentially reimplemented the Data Retention Directive along with a whole load of other nasty things.

Decentralise (in a kind of centralised way)

Once a month I am involved in running an informal session, loosely affiliated with Open Rights Group and FSFE, called Cryptonoise. Cryptonoise explores methods for protecting your digital rights, with a leaning towards focusing on privacy, and provides a venue for like minded people to meet up and discuss the state of the digital landscape and those that may try to infringe on the rights of digital citizens.

We’ve all made it easy for large enterprises and governments to collect masses of data about our online activities because we perform most of those activities in the same place. Facebook, Google and Twitter spring to mind as examples of companies that have grown to dangerous sizes with little competition. This is not paranoia. This is real. We make it a lot more difficult when we spread out.

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