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Good news for wiking on the go...

"Given the government's obsession with passing cybersecurity legislation, you would think they'd be happy that Apple and Google are making it harder for foreign governments and criminals to break into people's phones or company servers to steal your data. But you'd be forgetting that the head of the FBI and his fellow fear-mongerers are still much more concerned with making sure they retain control over your privacy, rather than protecting everyone's cybersecurity."

"OpenRemote is an open-source Internet of Things platform that could help spur smarter homes and cities. "

"In case you're wondering what could be wrong with entrusting secret keys to the government for use "in exceptional circumstances", just ponder this: a few months ago, hackers (suspected to be Chinese) stole the personnel records of 21.5 million US federal employees, including the records of every person given a government background check for the last 15 years."

"On the surface of it, the incident is entirely trivial: in a thoughtless moment, a police officer on a surveillance helicopter decides to tweet a photo of a celebrity he's spotted (in this case Michael McIntyre), briefly adding the Metropolitan police to the ranks of London paparazzi. The Met's snap had a few features a standard press photo lacks, though, including an exact timestamp, location data, and a vantage point from an expensive and taxpayer-funded aerial spot. Online reaction to the photograph was predictably bad - why are police invading the privacy of someone who's doing nothing wrong? - and was followed by questioning whether the photo breached the Data Protection Act, which it may well have done."

"One of the biggest arguments against mandating backdoors in encryption is the fact that, even if you trust the United States government never to abuse that power (and who does?), other criminal hackers and foreign governments will be able to exploit the backdoor to use it themselves. A backdoor is an inherent vulnerability that other actors will attempt to find and try to use it for their own nefarious purposes as soon as they know it exists, putting all of our cybersecurity at risk. "

"If you're doing nothing wrong, and have nothing to hide from your government, then mass surveillance holds no fears for you. This argument might be the oldest straw man in the privacy debate, but it's also a decent reflection of the state of the argument. In the UK's first major election since the Snowden revelations, privacy is a nonissue. This is a shame, because when it comes down to it, many of us who are doing nothing wrong have plenty we would prefer to hide."

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