#Surveillance
How surveillance, trolls, and fear of arrest affect Egypt’s journalists
As Egypt’s crackdown on the press extends to social media and other communication platforms, many journalists say phishing attempts, trolling, software to monitor social media posts, and a draft law that would require registration for social media users are making them think twice before covering sensitive issues.
The issue of targeting journalists online was brought into focus by the NilePhishscam that has targeted more than 110 journalists and activists since 2016–many of them implicated in a large-scale legal case Egypt brought against non-governmental organizations–according to a joint report published by the Toronto-based Citizen Lab and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a local human rights groups also targeted in the scam.
Through “reverse engineering,” which uses information about the victim to predict their behavior, NilePhish attackers used fake Dropbox and Google Documents invitations to trick victims into entering their account information so hackers could access their communications, according to the report.
accessnow:
“Your passport, Facebook, and Twitter please.”
We already told you about the U.S. government’s proposal to add an “optional” field asking you to list your social media accounts every time you cross the border. And thousands of you have already told the U.S. government you think that’s a bad idea. Unfortunately, their proposal just got even worse.
We’ve seen the revised form (PDF download) Customs and Border Protection is proposing, and the “Social Media Identifier” field isn’t even marked as optional — making it mandatory for travelers entering the United States to divulge their social media accounts.
This kind of broad-strokes data collection violates fundamental privacy rights and hinders freedom of expression — and there’s no proof it would do anything to improve security. Instead, it sets a terrible example for countries around the world to start monitoring everyone’s social media at the border.
Take action now to stop the U.S. government’s expansion of social media surveillance.
Twitter has made a name for itself as a champion of free speech around the world. Following the recent coup attempt in Turkey, however, something has changed in the way it approaches censorship, and the company refuses to talk about it.
Twitter’s policy toward Turkey—limited “censoring to avoid a ban”—puts the company between a rock and a hard place: If Twitter does not comply with Turkey’s ever-increasing censorship requests to silence dissidents, it may face a nationwide ban that silences everyone. But this bullying has just gained more ground against press freedoms in Turkey with Twitter censoring journalists’ accounts that Turkish government wants banned.
Read more from the Daily Dot.
I frequently encounter Eritreans living safely in the West, with political asylum, who feel they can’t even “like” social-media posts that are critical of the regime back home. Instead they prefer privately writing or calling the individual whose post they wanted to react to. They fear the regime is tapping everyone’s social media account.
Read more from Global Voices.
News of the alleged Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computers has riveted the world. But for many, this kind of behavior is a daily reality.
Read more.
Except for blacklisted nations like Syria and North Korea, there is little to stop governments that routinely violate basic rights from obtaining the same so-called “lawful intercept” tools that have been sold to Western police and spy agencies. People tracked by the technology have been beaten, jailed and tortured, according to human rights groups.
Read more from the AP
An investigative journalist returns from an undercover mission in North Korea—only to face her critics.
I lived in a locked compound under complete surveillance: Every room was bugged, every class recorded. I scribbled down conversations as they happened and buried my notes in a lesson plan. I wrote at night, erasing the copy from my laptop each time I signed off, saving it to USB sticks that I carried on my body at all times. I backed up my research on an SD card, which I hid in the room in different spots, always with the light off, in case there were cameras. After six months, I returned home with 400 pages of notes and began writing.
Read more from the New Republic.
Bakırköy 3rd Penal Court of Peace has issued a gag order soon after the attack, suspected to be organized by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) militants, on demand of the Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım. The gag order included not only printed and mass media but also online news portals and social media.
The gag order is expected to last until the investigation launched into the attack was completed.
Soon after the gag order, social media users said Twitter and Facebook was too slow. Some users said they cannot access Twitter or Facebook without using a VPN program.
Read more.
It has been three years since the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) launched the open-source whistleblower submission system SecureDrop, and already its ranks of users include The New Yorker, ProPublica, The Guardian, Gawker Media, the Washington Post, and The Intercept. And just last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists became the latest organization to jump aboard.
It all begs the question: Will secure encryption systems like SecureDrop become a fixture of modern journalism? And should your news team be scrambling to catch up?
Read more.
Stickers and slides serve to ease concerns that spooks could be watching our every move, as even the FBI director says he puts tape on his camera
For the past half decade, the technology industry has been racing to build better cameras into the hardware we use every day.
Yet the surveillance age has inspired an odd cottage industry battling against this trend: a glut of cheap stickers and branded plastic slides designed to cover up the front-facing cameras on phones, laptops and even televisions.
For years, security researchers have shown that hackers can hijack the cameras to spy on whomever is on the other end. To put that in perspective, think of all the things your devices have seen you do.
Read more from the Guardian.
