Julian Assange, our go-to-source for feeling concerned about privacy, was at a panel with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism yesterday. He informed the audience that iPhone, Blackberry and Gmail users are all “screwed” – that “the reality is that intelligence operations are selling right now mass surveillance systems for all those products.”
So, yes, I guess this renders yesterday’s thing about secret software tracking everything but iPhones moot, because it turns out there’s a bunch of spy software for every platform.
The panel discussed some of the revelations made in the 287 documents about the international surveillance industry just published by Wikileaks, which cover a total of 160 companies in 25 countries.
Steven Murdoch of Cambridge Security group, who was permitted to speak in the presence of Assange, noted that intelligence gathering-software for these platforms was growing increasingly pervasive, and that further,
We’re seeing increasingly wholesale monitoring of entire populations with no suspicion of wrongdoing – the data is being monitored and stored in the hope that it might one day be useful.
…
Without controls on this industry, the threat that surveillance poses to freedom on expression and human rights in general is only going to increase.
So! New “Spy-File” Wikileaks, and you probably don’t have any privacy anymore. But hey, did you see that funny new cat video?
Nothing said about Assange’s whole getting-extradited-for-rape-charges thing, incidentally.
[Source: Register]
