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"Apple has warned the UK government that proposals in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to demand technology firms weaken encryption would make the data of millions of law-abiding citizens less secure and make it easier for hackers to "cause chaos"."

"Interest in so-called dazzle camouflage appears to have grown substantially since the Metropolitan police announced last week that officers will be using live facial recognition cameras on London's streets - a move described by privacy campaigners and political activists as "dangerous", "oppressive" and "a huge threat to human rights"."

"As more governments turn to contact tracing apps to aid in their efforts to contain the coronavirus outbreak, cybersecurity experts are warning this may spark renewed interest in Bluetooth attacks. They urge developers to ensure such apps are regularly tested for vulnerabilities and release patches swiftly to plug potential holes, while governments should provide assurance that their databases are secure and the data collected will not be used for purposes other than as originally intended. "

"The app, which scraped billions of photos from the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other online platforms, drew the world's attention last weekend following a detailed report in the New York Times. The app's supposed capability to identify practically anyone from even low-quality photos frightened privacy advocates and officials. And today, one of the latter - New Jersey's attorney general Gurbir Grewal - actually did something about it."

"We are talking about vast fields of aggregate data, the scale of which is difficult to comprehend; this data can be parsed by the artificial intelligence recommendation algorithms that Google has pioneered, and that now steer everything from employment application processes to dating apps."

"That was apparently the result of the US government's probing of visa applicants' social media profiles. After the search, an officer questioned the 17-year-old, who got a scholarship to study in the US, about his friends' social media activity and told him she'd found some "posting political points of view that oppose the US," the student paper noted. Despite Ajjawi's protests, the officer denied the student's entry and let him call his parents."

"After discussing the general absurdity and creepiness of not being allowed to freely criticize the government for the order they brought to his company, he concludes by saying that he's stopped using email altogether, and "If you knew what I know about email, you might not use it either." "

"There are clear indications that the UK government is now actively considering use of the technology as a way of easing the lockdown. If this signals an outbreak in Whitehall of tech "solutionism" - the belief that for every problem there is a technological answer - then we should be concerned. Tech solutions often do as much harm as good, for example, by increasing social exclusion, lacking accountability and failing to make real inroads into the problem they are supposedly addressing."

"There aren't many exit nodes out there. Many people fear that running an exit node will put them in police crosshairs if it gets used in the commission of a crime. For the record, Boing Boing runs a very high-capacity exit node, and though we've received multiple contacts from US law enforcement, we've just explained that this is a Tor node that runs with logging switched off, and thus we have no information that'll be relevant to any investigations, and the officers involved have thanked us and gone away without further trouble. "

"The secure email service used by US whistleblower Edward Snowden has shut down rather than comply with orders from US security services - and is also legally barred from speaking out. The owner and operator of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, took the service down yesterday "for maintenance" before revealing today that the real reason was demands from US intelligence."

"At a time when science fiction and reality feel as if they are collapsing in on each other, we must resist the temptations of Big Brother; we would just be trading one kind of lockdown for another."

"Silent Circle, a secure communications company founded by PGP creator Phil Zimmerman, has pre-emptively shut down its secure, encrypted email service and destroyed the servers so that it cannot be forced to reveal its customers' secrets to NSA spooks. "

""The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It's the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques," she said."

"The FBI can issue national security letters to conduct online surveillance in the US without court approval, but requests often come with a gagging order, which prevents websites from publicly disclosing them. To get around this, many websites state that they have not received any classified requests."

"The company, Unacast, went live with its Social Distancing Scoreboard Tuesday. The dashboard, billed as a public health utility, includes a county-by-county breakdown of people's movement patterns. It assigns each county a grade, which Unacast based (at least in part) on how much people are traveling. "