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Mobile surveillance security objections of tech industry led by giants

| December 12, 2013

Google and Facebook are leading the group from the tech industry that is seeking changes to government spying.

A group of the largest and most powerful tech companies in the world have come together in an effort to improve mobile surveillance security for their users, who now know that they are being watched by certain government agencies, particularly in the United States.

These industry leaders are seeking to encourage wide scale changes to the American government’s Big Brother activities.

The companies have called themselves the Reform Government Surveillance group. They are seeking to make massive mobile surveillance security changes to the way that the American government has been watching people in the country and around the world. Much of this action is the result of the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who revealed – among other things – that the NSA has been watching millions upon millions of people every day, around the globe, gathering information such as location data from their mobile devices.

The group has said that it should be possible for individuals and businesses to have greater mobile surveillance security.

Mobile Surveillance SecurityThe Reform Government Surveillance group is made up of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Twitter, AOL, and LinkedIn. This alliance was created in order to move ahead their communal belief that “it is time for the world’s governments to address the practices and laws regulating government surveillance of individuals and access to their information.”

The organization has placed its backing behind widespread new reforms that federal politicians have proposed. The group’s website has suggested five different core elements that require changes. They are:

• Accountability and oversight
• A limit to the authority of the government for user data collection
• Government demand transparency
• Avoidance of government related conflicts
• Respecting a more free flow of information

An open letter from the group to the American government has urged them to “take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight.” The goal is to boost mobile surveillance security and privacy for users of the standard and mobile web.

Geolocation technology used by NSA to record 5 billion device locations worldwide

| December 11, 2013

Recent revelations are shocking smartphone owners who are finding that their locations are being collected.

It has now been revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is using geolocation technology to track the location of billions of mobile phones around the world every day, even though it looks as though a very small fraction of one percent of the data is ever actually used.

It is estimated that this tech is collecting location data for around 5 billion different devices each day.

The massive NSA database currently includes “at least hundreds of millions of devices” according to reports that have been made by The Washington Post. This data is used to allow authorities to be able to use geolocation technology to locate “cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them.”

The use of the geolocation technology for data collection by the NSA is labeled as “incidental”.

NSA geolocation technologyIncidental data collection is a legal term that describes a result that is “foreseeable but not deliberate” by the company that is obtaining the information. That said, the activities of the NSA have been heavily criticized by privacy groups. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union released a statement that said “It is staggering that a location-tracking program on this scale could be implemented without any public debate.”

They also added to their statement that the “dragnet surveillance” that is going on to collect data regarding hundreds of millions of mobile devices “flouts our international obligation” for respecting the privacy rights of everyone from Americans to those from other countries.

These most recent discoveries have occurred at nearly the same time that Microsoft had revealed that it intends to implement greater methods of encryption. At the same time, they have been labeling the snooping from the government as being an “advanced persistent threat” when compared to cyber attacks and malware.

From among the information that is collected by the NSA through geolocation technology, they insist that only “a tiny fraction of 1 percent” is actually ever used, as the agency uses a powerful analytical program (known as Co-Traveler) in order to determine which targets to actually observe.