Spying online

[Menydh]

When companies spy us

Printers that tell the ink we spend, TV recorders that control what we watch, computers which inform of the web sites we visit... we are under surveilance but companies say that there is nothing to fear.

They changed the ways to watch TV of an entire country, but the managers and executives of Tivo, the highly popular TV digital recorder in the US, opened their big mouths. Right after the incident with the nipple of Janet Jackson, the people in charge of Tivo said that the popular incident was the most seen moment by their users in their reproductors. Users didn't take long in wondering... how could they know?

As it appears, Tivo knows how to call back home. It does so every night sending a resport on the habits of the user. The company says that they don't have personal data from the users and that the information is compiled only with statistical purposes but... how can this be checked?

Tivo is not the only company which does this. The users of the Usenet newsgroup comp.periphs.printers found out in November that at least one model of Lexmark printers automatically inform on the number of ink cartridges used.

Google is another company accused of spying on the users. The beta version of their e-mail service, G-Mail analyzes the content of of the e-mail messages and offers publicity related to the content. The analysis is carried out by a program that doesn't store personal information, but many users don't trust this.

Not even the very infrastructure of the Internet is clean of spywaring. Companies like Cisco or Netgear have openly admitted that their products have backdoors which allow the authorities to pry into our communications if needed to.

El Mundo, 19th December, 2004

[Menydh]

Under surveillance and unaware of it

Spyware programs are present in 9 out of 10 computers connected to the Internet, and these are not the only ones who control us without us realizing. security government agencies also want to know what we do on the Internet.

In the mid 2004 a study by the Internet access provider Earthlink concluded that 7 out of 10 computers connected to the Internet were infected with spyware. In only six months that figure has increased to reach 9 out of 10. This is not machines with some self-installed isolated program. Every computer infected with spyware programs has a mean of 25 different processes running and compiling information, or forcing the user to navigate through determined web pages.

In the best of cases, these programs bomb the users with commecial publicity or slow down the working performance of their PCs. In the worst of cases, they make phone calls to expensive services or harvest information of the credit cards that have been used to buy over the Internet. What can be worse than being spied by our own computer? Being spied upon by a government.

US SPIES. In December 2002 the US announced the release of an ambicious security program destined to investigate the contents of digital communications --e-mail among others-- in search for potential threats to national security. Known as T.I.A. --Total Information Awareness--, the project raised the wraths of the citizens most concerned with privacy and freedom of expression, and it had to be cancelled two years after it was proposes and after numerous prostests. The US, however, has not abandoned completely its aspirations. During last November a New York university admitted to have received funds from the CIA to research on a system for tracking IRC conversations. This system will function in an autonomous way in all chats around the world, and will allow "the firm" to detect conversation which can pose a threat to security.

The announcement has been made simultaneously with the publication by a British magazine of the hardware that makes function the spying system known as Echelon, created by the US and Britain to analyze the communications of the entire planet.

The US is not the only country that tracks communications online. The more powerful countries are increasingly more interested in controlling digital communications. The Russian FSB, old KGB, has a network of surveillance of the Internet traffic known as SORM. China also has various projects of cybersurveillance, and France has created a network of spionage similar to Echelon, called with irony Frenchelon.

El Mundo, 19th of December, 2004