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News & Issues > Your Spying Eyes
 

Your Spying Eyes

I mention news I read to a friend who's from the US but living elsewhere, and often I'll see something before him even though he is a voracious reader and reads 10X faster than I do. He's been shocked by the latest in revelations about ways in which we're being spied upon which are only being told now --

-- Tracking Your Car: The federal, state and local governments all track our cars and where they go, on a regular basis. The ACLU just filed a suit about this. CNN.com There are license plate readers installed on police cars, surveillance cameras on streets, and other places, which record and store indefinitely the information of your car's whereabouts.

This is how local authorities find stolen cars rather easily, if the car is being driven, because the collected information on the street interfaces with a database of stolen cars and other cars the police have tagged in order to find. Private companies are getting these devices, too.

-- Tracking your Mail: I think someone already posted lately that the federal government scans and stores an image of the outside of EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF U.S. MAIL. This program has been in force for a while now, and it's called MICT, or Mail Isolation and Control. It also records the order of the mail's processing, or what mail was processed at that post office right before and after the envelope you put in the box there.

This program is how they caught that red-headed actress who sent poison ricin letters to the president and Michael Bloomberg. They apparently matched up the order of the mail with other things having to do with her.

And the post office does more, too: NYTimes-watching-political-groups-mail

-- Your Documents are Reporting on You: And historically we shouldn't forget that our computers are being used against us even when we aren't doing online stuff. A few years back it came to public knowledge that Microsoft Word contained embedded code in it that allowed the federal government to trace a file document back to the very computer where the author had created it.

It came out during a case of a man who bombed abortion clinics who used Kinkos stores to write letters warning or threatening his targets. He'd printed them out there and mailed them, snail-mail. But the FBI found the computer he'd used to write on.

The extra code in Microsoft Word also reports back to Microsoft, checks your usage of the product, and helps them market to you. And it makes documents which are often 3-4 times bigger to store than the same document written by OpenOffice, the free open-source word processing software. This makes a huge difference to businesses, who pay for that storage one way or another.

Microsoft had to let the government into its software; they were facing massive lawsuits about trademark infringement, antitrust legal action, and overseas problems. Most of this suddenly went away, like magic.


posted on July 18, 2013 10:50 AM ()

Comments:

There is a fine line between protection and intrusion. I, too, lead a boring
and honest life and chuckle to think how mind numbing my information would be. I detest the marketing aspect of the whole thing and get more
junk mail than anyone should.
comment by elderjane on July 20, 2013 5:35 AM ()
In Ohio some cities have shut down traffic cameras, but non-traffic CCTV is showing up everywhere. In London UK they have over 30,000 CCTV cameras on the streets and buildings (outside) and probably more by now.
comment by jondude on July 19, 2013 9:49 AM ()
It seems hypocritical for people to share all kinds of intimate details via Facebook and other online applications, and then get all mad about the government gathering information. I can see there is a fine line between okay and abusive, though, and I don't know how to define it. I suppose it will take some cases argued in the Supreme Court to carve it out.
comment by troutbend on July 18, 2013 9:28 PM ()
Tealstar says it for me
comment by kevinshere on July 18, 2013 8:12 PM ()
If intense high-tech surveillance is catching the bad guys, I am not worried about it. If someone is looking at my stuff, let them look. I lead an intensely honest and boring life. Furthermore, it is true that high tech has escalated the surveillance, made it more pervasive, but clandestine government intrusion has being going on since the 40s and 50s. And, look, we're still here, and the people getting caught in this web are not the likes of you and me.
comment by tealstar on July 18, 2013 12:46 PM ()

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