Against the Law: Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance – Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang & Edward Snowden

Front-line journalists are high-value targets, and their enemies will spare no expense to silence them. Unfortunately, journalists can be betrayed by their own tools. Their smartphones are also the perfect tracking device. Because of the precedent set by the US’s “third-party doctrine,” which holds that metadata on such signals enjoys no meaningful legal protection, governments and powerful political institutions are gaining access to comprehensive records of phone emissions unwittingly broadcast by device owners. This leaves journalists, activists, and rights workers in a position of vulnerability. This work aims to give journalists the tools to know when their smart phones are tracking or disclosing their location when the devices are supposed to be in airplane mode. We propose to accomplish this via direct introspection of signals controlling the phone’s radio hardware. The introspection engine will be an open source, user-inspectable and field-verifiable module attached to an existing smart phone that makes no assumptions about the trustability of the phone’s operating system.

Read more & PDF. Maybe it will be a CrowdSupply hardware accessory/case.

Huh, a dream here. Bunnie and Snowden, could it get better than this?

YES.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE! “EFF Lawsuit Takes on DMCA Section 1201: Research and Technology Restrictions Violate the First Amendment” and Bunnie’s post “Why I’m Suing the US Government”.

Today I filed a lawsuit against the US government, challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 means that you can be sued or prosecuted for accessing, speaking about, and tinkering with digital media and technologies that you have paid for. This violates our First Amendment rights, and I am asking the court to order the federal government to stop enforcing Section 1201.

Busy summer Bunnie!

On a maker business note, getting rid of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would remove an artificial barrier to innovation.