Sunday, February 28, 2016

Only the beginning


BRT discussed the Apple/FBI issue in depth in The Answer is No, a piece articulating, in part, how the FBI screwed the pooch in terms of changing passwords twice in disregarding Apple's advice in terms of working with the iPhone vis a vis iCloud, the service that can force the iPhone to dump its data if the password is NOT changed. With this in mind, Monday Note weighs in with a cautionary tale as to why a slippery slope looms if the FBI gets its way.







When taken in conjunction with what the NSA/CIA/FBI, and significant others, do in capturing ALL OF OUR DATA 24/7, one readily sees Apple's encrypted smartphone data to be the last bastion of privacy we have on planet earth. (Google's jumping in on this as well.) 

Extending this notion further regarding our civil rights, yours truly just saw Citizenfour, the engrossing documentary on Edwin Snowden, the NSA whistleblower. In it was the astounding revelation that not only can the NSA track and capture ALL digital & analog traffic in the US but that said data is immediately retrievable by simply accessing an e-mail address, a CC number or a person's telephone number due to the environment's unique ability to link all the skeins of content relating to the specific search item in question and packaging it in such a way that any intelligent person versed in information technology can easily understand. Even more disquieting, according to Snowden, is the use of predictive analytics to ascertain what the targeted party may do in any given situation, whether it's in the present day or in the future, thanks to the singular leveraging of metadata in ways only techs at the NSA can understand. 




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