By Carl Weiss
Have you noticed that
everywhere you look CCTV cameras are popping up? You see them at intersections, on buildings,
at intersections and even dangling beneath helicopters and UAVs. Casinos
are chock full of them, as are banks, department stores and the corner 7-11. Not only is it getting to the point where you
can no longer venture outdoors without being watched, but the technology now
exists where clothing, car doors and the walls become transparent. If you
want to know who could be watching you and how you can fight back, read on and
learn the truth about our surveillance society.
Even the President Thinks Big Brother is a Good
Thing
At least one world-renown author has written
about a society beset by them and the current President of the United States
recently spoke about them when he said, "In the abstract, you can complain
about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you
actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right
balance."
The
author I mentioned is George Orwell, who penned a novel about the very thing
that President Obama was talking about. "1984," was the novel that depicted a police
state bent on tracking the movements and thoughts of its citizens. The novel’s
rallying cry was one of, "Big Brother Is Watching You." This is the very same Big Brother that the
President called by name in one instance only to shrug it off at the next.
Move Over George, Here
Comes "More Well"
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| Category:George Orwell Category:Nineteen Eighty Four (Original text : George Orwell, 1984. This self-made image is based on a picture that appears in an old acreditation for the BNUJ.) Picture of George Orwell taken from File:GeoreOrwell.jpg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
While
the Commander-in-Chief was talking specifically about the exploits of the NSA, what
most people do not understand is that the spy agency is only the tip of a vast
surveillance iceberg that operates with impunity on a worldwide basis. Sometimes it’s big government watching us,
whether it be various federal, state or local government agencies. Sometimes the surveillance is perpetrated by
big business, (see our article, Is
Google Watching You). At other times,
it can be under the control of everyone from snooping ex-spouses, to nosy
neighbors, prying teenagers or a criminal element that intends on doing you
harm. What we have today is not George Orwell’s
1984, we “More Well 2014," where everybody and their brother
is watching somebody!
Prepare for the Coming
Hackathon
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English: OpenBSD hackers at c2k++ at MIT.
Photo by Dug Song. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The
fact of the matter is that it’s almost too easy to spy on the public these
days. Not only are surveillance products cheap to own and operate, but they are now
built into every laptop, tablet and Smartphone on the market. Many automobiles come from the factory with
them already installed. There are even
industries built around installing them in and around homes and offices. Since most of these devices are
Internet-enabled, this means that off-the-shelf software is all it takes to
hack into and take control of these cameras.
Watch Out for the RAT
Hack Attack!
Think
that sounds more than a little paranoid?
Tell that to Miss Teen USA, Cassidy Wolf, who was blackmailed by a hacker
who used her laptop’s webcam to take nude photos of her without her
knowledge. The hacker used what’s known
in the industry as a remote administration tool (RAT) that is able to not only
remotely operate a victim’s webcam, but is also capable of disabling the little
light that lets someone know that their webcam is on. (And to think that not
too long ago, celebrities had only to worry about pushy paparazzi trying to
catch them in compromising situations.)
In September, the FBI arrested a 19-year-old man named Jared
Abrahams from Temecula, California, on charges that he hacked into the social
media accounts of several women, including Wolf, and took nude photographs of
them by remotely controlling their webcams. He then allegedly contacted the
victims and threatened to post the pictures on their social media profiles
unless they sent him more nude photos and videos or did what he demanded for
five minutes in Skype video chats. http://www.macworld.com/article/2081940/researchers-older-mac-webcams-can-spy-without-activating-warning-light.html
Ancient Greeks Had a Trojan Horse, We Have to
Contend with Trojan Emails
While
ratting has gotten much of the notoriety when it comes to using a target’s own
camera to spy on them, it is not the only way to break and enter
digitally. One of the easiest ways to
break into a computer is via email. Just
before Christmas 2013, staffers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(Dedicated to Defending Your Rights in the Digital World) received an email
purportedly inviting them to a conference in Asia hosted by Oxfam
International. The email directed EFF’s
staff to click on a pair of links that purportedly contained information
regarding the conference. When they
realized that the links were not hosted on Oxfam’s domain, but resided instead
on Google drive, they smartly did not click on the link which in all likelihood
contained malware.
Countries Spying
Everywhere Without Remorse
EFF has written
extensively about
the worsening situation for bloggers in Vietnam, supporting campaigns to free
high-profile bloggers such as Le Quoc Quan and Dieu Cay, and criticizing the Vietnam’s Internet censorship bill. Vietnam’s
Internet spying campaign dates back to at least March 2010, when engineers at
Google discovered malware
broadly targeting Vietnamese computer users. The infected machines were used to
spy on their owners as well as participating in DDoS attacks against dissident
websites.
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| Spy vs. Spy (2005 video game) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Last
year the Chinese made headlines for about two months with all there escapades.
See our article Chinese
Hack Attack for more details. In addition, Richard Snowden's security leaks
shed a lot of light on just how much our government was spying on everyone,
including US citizens.
Of
course, the majority of the public are not on the blacklist of unfriendly
governments. So why should the average family
worry about their privacy being invaded by hackers? Because some hackers make a tidy living from
this kind of activity, that’s why. And
I’m not talking about sextortion here.
If Only We Had a
Digital Neighborhood Watch
As long as there have been homes and
businesses there have been burglars. In
the past, thieves had to risk being detected while they cased a home or a
neighborhood in search of targets of opportunity. (This is why the neighborhood watch program was
invented.) The problem in the digital
age is that thieves no longer have to prowl the neighborhood to determine a
victim’s patterns. That’s because your
home or business may become their unwitting accomplice.
The
latest things to hit the market are smart appliances. Everything from smart lighting and
entertainment centers, to wireless security devices and the networks upon which
they operate are subject to being hacked.
As a rule, if you can use your smartphone to set your home’s thermostat,
open your garage door, or let you view your home when you are away, then so can
a hacker bent on stealing your goods.
While “Smart Homes” are all the rage, a number of people in the know
consider them to be a major chink in your home’s security armor.
Forget the Attack of The
Clones, Watch Out For The Household Appliances
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| Samsung to Join International Smart Home•Building Show 2013 (Photo credit: samsungtomorrow) |
Could hackers
gather information from smart lighting, entertainment, or security devices – or
the networks on which they communicate – to determine patterns of when you are
home, when you are likely to have company over, and when your house is empty?
"Internet enabled appliances, which run operating systems like Windows or Android, can be co-opted by hackers’ malicious code in the same way your computer or phone can be hijacked. Once taken over by the hacker software, the appliance is used to send spam (containing virus links, for example) or to mount denial-of-service attacks. A hacker who had co-opted multiple Internet-equipped refrigerators and garage door openers could use their combined power to inundate an Internet target with email or other malicious activity." Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/is-your-fridge-sending-malicious-emails/#1fRkHMH7DX8YpXIC.99
Now Your Car is Spying
on You
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| English: 2008 Triple Black smart car 451 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
So
does the prospect of your fridge spying on you freak give you the chills? Then just wait until you hear what the
government has in store for your car.
Called Vehicle-to-Vehicle Technology, or V2V, it is being touted as a
way of making driving safer by enabling vehicles to communicate with one
another in real time. This means the
addition of such things as motion detectors, radio beacons and, you guessed it,
cameras that are designed to help drivers avoid collisions by warning them
audibly or by forcibly taking control of the vehicle to avoid a crash. (Didn’t we all see "Minority Report" to know
what else this technology could be used to do?)
This is on top of
all the automated surveillance being used in shopping malls and big box stores.
Not only do shopping centers' eyes-in-the-sky watch for shoplifters and observe
employees, but they can also be equipped with face recognition software, or be
programmed to observe and track shoppers as they window shop and make
purchases. Coming to a mall near you is
a new technology that will allow store owners to tailor ads displayed in
strategically placed kiosks that match a shopper's demographics.
Shoppers
at the new International Finance Center Mall in Seoul can find their way around
the four-story complex by approaching one of 26 information kiosks. When they
do, they also are being watched. Just above each kiosk's LCD touch screen sit
two cameras and a motion detector. As a visitor is recorded, facial identity
software estimates the person's gender and age.
The system's makers, two companies from South Korea's SK Holdings Co. conglomerate, plan
to allow advertisers to tailor interactive ads on the kiosk by those
attributes. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444897304578044322254166986
So
to sum it up, when it comes to who’s watching you in the digital age, know that
it's “More Well” (everybody), not just Orwell. You can’t take a walk, you can’t go shopping,
you can’t take a drive or stay home. You can’t even spit outside of the tracking area of the surveillance
society. Or, to put it bluntly, when it
comes to "Eye spy, with my little eye," I see George Orwell was an optimist.
In
this article I covered a multitude of ways, (even levels) that the surveillance
society employs to track our lives. I have covered aspects of how everyone is spying on someone,
in some way or another, including: individuals spying on each other, businesses spying on
employees and or customers, governments spying on other governments (and their own
citizens), and last but not least, the criminal element spying to get our money
and goods. If you found this article to be useful or entertaining -- or disturbing -- pass it along
to your friends and co-workers. If you have a comment relating to this article, leave
it in the section below. Thanks for sharing
this journey with me. Until next time, watch out for the "Watcher of the Skies."
If you like this article, you can find more by typing “Internet Security” in the search box at the top left of this
blog.
If you found this article useful, share it with your friends, families and co-works. If you have a comment related to this article, leave it in the comment sections below. I hope you have found these questions and answers useful. Thanks for sharing your time with me.
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