Friday, September 5, 2014

Oh Crap! Big Brother is watching, and He has your address

We might consider age as adding a reluctance to embrace new fads, which much of new technology amounts to.  A smartphone amounts to a small computer that you can make phone calls with and which allows the guv'mint (sic) and private companies to find and track your physical location.

We curmudgeons do not live as Luddites; we just wait 10 years to let the gadget gurus decide what they will market to us next.

This carries the advantage of not having naked pictures of ourselves hacked from the "cloud,." or failing to realize privacy settings on an iPhone don't affect the automatic backup feature which sends everything up to damnable cloud even if unbidden by the user.

Technology curmudgeons also don't get busted for posting pictures of their pot on Instagram.

[“Marijuana” is one of about 400 “hot” keywords that are monitored by government agencies on social media. Social media monitoring is not new, but apparently some people either do not know about open-source intelligence (OSINT), or choose to disregard the list of terms in the Department of Homeland Security National Operations Center Media Monitoring Capability Desktop Reference Binder. So what might happen if you post a picture of big fat bud of pot on Instagram? Busted!

A teenage girl in Louisiana was allegedly “part of a group taking photographs of marijuana and posting them on the social media site Instagram.” The details are fairly sketchy at this point, presumably because it involves a 17-year-old minor. St. Mary Parish Sheriff's Office told WAFB that “a detective with the narcotics division saw a picture of people with marijuana on a social media site and began an investigation.” At any rate, detectives showed up at the teenager’s home and “found her to be in possession of the illegal drug. She was released on a summons to appear in court on December 11, 2013.”

KATC added that during the investigation, the detective learned the residence where the pot was located. It does not say how that was determined; perhaps the teenager did not strip the geo-tagged locational metadata from the photo? Back in 2010, the creators of I Can Stalk U tried to raise awareness about hidden metadata added to smartphone photos. If you don’t disable geotagging and post your photo online, a person is “allowing their movements to be recorded and analyzed by anyone: from a government to a nosy neighbor.”

The St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Office is one of several that are part of the Gulf Coast High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area; as a side note, the parent agency is the DEA and you might recall the DEA’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program being mentioned during revelations about the Hemisphere Project.

After Andrew Hicks obtained a Hemisphere Project presentation, we learned it “covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch - not just those made by AT&T customers - and includes calls dating back 26 years.” The New York Times reported, “Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the NSA data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.”] emphasis added because WTF!

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