London police launched on 25th of February a new advertising campaign. Posters and TV ads are urging Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras.

"Thousands of people take photos every day.

What if one of them seems odd ?

Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras.If you see someone doing that, we need to know.

Let experienced officers decide what action to take." 

Other posters target households:

"you see hundreds of houses every day. What if one has unusual activities and seems suspicious"

as well as mobile phone users :

"Thousands of people have mobiles. What if someone with several seems suspicious?"

What's going on in London ? Is the Metropolitan police not busy enough ? did they become completely paranoiac ? or do they need some budget increase ?

Where is this so famous British phlegm ?

As a response, many people have already redesigned the posters to point out the absurdity of them. Some samples are available on BoingBoing.

Tags: 2008, advertising, ATT, attack, blog, camera, civil liberties, counterterrorism, CTU, design, february, fon, ia, ict, im, King, lan, launch, location, london, mobile, mobile phone, nomadcom.net, officer, paranoia, PDF, phone, photo, photographers, Photography, picture, police, post, posters, public, security, snitch, suspect, terror, terrorism, uk, USA, user, wp, www, XP

I found the article below on "The Register" site and asked myself the following question: 

If connecting to Internet using an open and unsecured wifi access point is considered as a crime, why authorities do not apply the same principle to other services (mainly electricity and water) we often use without any formal agreement of the owner ?

 " More than half of computer users have illegally stolen Wi-Fi connections, according to The Times – but only 11 alleged offenders have been arrested in the UK, as the police seem to think those deploying Wi-Fi should be more careful about securing their connections.

The data was collected from a "Have Your Say" survey on the website of security-specialist Sophos: apparently 54 per cent of the 560 people who responded admitted nicking bandwidth from insecure Wi-Fi routers.

This might say more about Sophos customers than the general population, and extrapolating the results to every computer user in the country is probably a crime against statistics: so that's exactly what The Times has done.

…

Anyone caught stealing a Wi-Fi connection can be fined up to a grand, even if it's left unsecured, so make sure you ask nicely next time you're looking to log on, and if the person next to you has never stolen a Wi-Fi connection then we have to assume that you have. "

What is your opinion about accessing open wifi ? Do you think it is a crime ?

Source: The Register

Tags: 2007, access, agreement, art, blog, ces, computer, connection, connections, crime, customer, electricity, enforcement, free, ia, im, internet, internet access, King, lan, law, list, MIT, nomadcom.net, police, population, security, services, statistics, survey, the register, thief, thieves, uk, user, water, web, website, what is, wifi, wireless, wp, www

Cory Doctorow wrote this Creative Commons-licensed fiction story for Radar Online magazine.

  Une version française est disponible ici

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” –Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.” –Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck. Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.

Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him.

“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration–Powered by Google.

“I thought that didn’t start until next month?” The man was alternately wearing and holding a large sombrero.

Googling at the border. Christ. Greg had vested out of Google six months before, cashing in his options and “taking some me time"–which turned out to be less rewarding than he’d expected. What he mostly did over the five months that followed was fix his friends’ PCs, watch daytime TV, and gain 10 pounds, which he blamed on being at home instead of in the Googleplex, with its well-appointed 24-hour gym.

He should have seen it coming, of course. The U.S. government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

The DHS officer had bags under his eyes and squinted at his screen, prodding at his keyboard with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the god damned airport.

Read the rest of this entry »

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