The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark

December 25, 2011 7:45 AM

The EFF's Year End Review   The ACLU's This Year in Civil Liberties   Amnesty International's Anual Report (video)

The ACLU has various blog entries dedicated to providing more details on issues like capital punishment, but I haven't notice the big "everything we did this year" report they used to generate, maybe they release such information more incrementally now.   Amnesty International has another report entitled Year of Rebellion planned for 9 January 2012.

Recent vaguely related stories :

Amnesty volunteer Asma Hedi Nairi has discovered the Tunisian government's spyware project, Ammar 404, modifying her email exchanges. (recently, related)

The EFF's Jered Wierzbicki reverse engineered Carrier IQ's file format to build IQIQ, a tool for analyzing its activities on your device (previously).

Twitter has open sourced the encrypted SMS messaging application TextSecure created by Whisper Systems, who they recently acquired. Btw, Tahrir is an interesting distributed anonymous "workalike" for Twitter.

Daniel Ellsberg was hustled out of a military hearing after he tried to speak to PFC Bradley Manning, and debated neocon activist Cliff May on Al Jazeera. Via Greenwald's The intellectual cowardice of Bradley Manning’s critics

posted by jeffburdges (11 comments total)

A useful work of thumb regarding making a decision requiring knowledge that is being kept from you: assume that the person hiding the information has something to gain from the uncertainty, and so decide as much against his favor as possible.
posted by JHarris at 7:58 AM on December 25, 2011 [4 favorites]

A useful RULE of thumb, dammit.
posted by JHarris at 7:58 AM on December 25, 2011

JHarris: A good rule of thumb on keeping a secret - is don't tell anyone you are keeping a secret. Yes, your point is a valid one, but the person hiding information is also probably hiding the fact that they are hiding information from you.

Also, the most pertinent secrets are not personal ones, but corporate and governmental ones.

(also, great news on open sourcing Textsecure; somehow I had missed that news).
posted by el io at 9:49 AM on December 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

CIA: No Big Deal That We Trained NYPD to Conduct Domestic Spying
posted by homunculus at 10:50 AM on December 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

I posted this without checking the EFF's Deeplinks blog which has many "seasonal" posts like their 2011 Holiday Wish List and 2011 Reading List, as well as several more Year in Review posts, including :

Watershed Moments in the Fight for Free Speech, Privacy, and Fair Use

Fighting the Internet Blacklist Bills

I should've included this EFF one too once I decided to mention Tunisia :
Next Step: Identifying Customers of Surveillance Technology Companies and Turning Up the Heat

Anyone who followed DHS' harassment of Jacob Appelbaum this year might find this interesting :
Protect Yourself from Intrusive Laptop and Phone Searches at the U.S. Border
posted by jeffburdges at 12:27 PM on December 25, 2011

"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." -- Commissioner Pravin Lal, from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 12:31 PM on December 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

Don't forget the secret interpretations of the Patriot Act!

Yay, 2011! Can't wait to see what 2012 will hold!
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:48 PM on December 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

This ACLU page seems valuable. They made Freedom of Information Act requests for a handful of documents already in the public eye (from the State Dept. Cables). That the official government releases nonetheless included redactions gives us a direct view of how the redaction process operates. Mouse-rollover reveals the redacted text. Unsurprisingly, classification is used to cover up mild embarrassments.
posted by nobody at 4:06 PM on December 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

TextSecure is now listed on the Guardian Project, btw.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:27 AM on December 26, 2011

China’s Parallel Online Universe
posted by jeffburdges at 10:39 PM on December 26, 2011

China jails dissident Chen Xi for 10 years: Veteran dissident is the second to be convicted of inciting subversion through online essays within four days
posted by homunculus at 12:33 AM on December 27, 2011 [1 favorite]