Find the Villain

Interesting tech story caught my eye this morning:

A hacker was able to shout abuse at a two-year-old child by exploiting a vulnerability in a camera advertised as an ideal "baby monitor".

ABC News revealed how a couple in Houston, Texas, heard a voice saying lewd comments coming from the camera, made by manufacturer Foscam.

Vulnerabilities in Foscam products were exposed in April, and the company issued an emergency fix.

Foscam said it was unable to provide a statement at this time.

However, a UK-based reseller told the BBC it would contact its entire customer database to remind them "the importance in setting a password to their cameras".

The spokesman added that it would be urging Foscam's head office - based in Shenzhen, China - to send out a memo to all its resellers suggesting they too contact their customers.

ABC reported that Marc Gilbert and wife Lauren were left shaken when they heard a "British or European accent" coming from the camera.

Mr Gilbert said the voice directed offensive, sexualised words at their daughter Allyson, who was asleep in bed.

The family believed the hacker was able to call the child by her name because it was spelt out on the bedroom's wall.

The two-year-old is deaf, something the couple described as "something of a blessing" in the circumstances.

This is as bad a privacy breach as I can imagine - people all over the world having access to watch your child AND BULLY HER without your consent. And the people who are terrified because the government has access to your secrets aren't going to angrily protest Foscam, or demand that the head of Foscam be impeached. They won't even boycott Foscam.

The crowd that's enraged about the NSA surveillance program don't seem concerned that the information they're mining all comes from private corporations, who could just as easily be targeting you for elimination or social turmoil. In fact, the only reason Edward Snowden is in Russia right now is because the government farmed out all this data to ANOTHER private company, which didn't have the good sense to keep it away from him.

It increasingly looks to me like Government and Corporations both know too much about us. But at least the Government isn't a bunch of amateurs about it. The government has never let my credit card information fall into the hands of thieves, the way Exxon/Mobil did once. The government just wants to keep tabs and lock my information down. Google and Facebook... God only knows. If there's money in it, they'll sell me to Al Quaeda.

Tap Into America!

Let's go for a swim in murky ethical waters, shall we? Rep Jane Harman, Democratic Congresswoman, is accused of, well, I'll let CQPolitics explain it.

Rep. Jane Harman , the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.

Harman was recorded saying she would "waddle into" the AIPAC case "if you think it'll make a difference," according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

In exchange for Harman's help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, "This conversation doesn't exist."

I'm all for sweeping out the influence peddlers, and I'm not attached to Jane Harman or Isreal. The question is though, what was the NSA tapping her phone for?

You'll recall that this warrentless wiretapping thing was repeatedly dismissed as not a problem because first, no Americans were being monitored. Then it was only Americans speaking to suspected terrorists. As it turns out, "terrorists" was defined as "Democrats" after all, just like Rush Limbaugh always says. And everybody says he isn't running the party!

Harman, for her part, is demanding that the complete transcripts be released. A good strategy in a post-Blagojevich world.

I want to see if this one catches on with the Right-Wing blogosphere - I came across it on ThinkProgress. On one hand it has the tremendously appealing "all Democrats are corrupt" angle, and even the "we need warrentless wiretaps" angle. Unfortunately, it also wrecks their valuable "but Bush never used them against his political enemies" meme. Tantalyzing!

h/t Think Progress

You Created A Monster

SFGATE:

The Obama administration is again invoking government secrecy in defending the Bush administration's wiretapping program, this time against a lawsuit by AT&T customers who claim federal agents illegally intercepted their phone calls and gained access to their records.

Disclosure of the information sought by the customers, "which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security," Justice Department lawyers said in papers filed Friday in San Francisco.

Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lawyer for the customers, said Monday the filing was disappointing in light of the Obama presidential campaign's "unceasing criticism of Bush-era secrecy and promise for more transparency."

I've already read a couple of right-wing remarks saying "see? Even Obama knows Bush was right!" This feeling of satisfaction will last a couple of days until someone, probably Glenn Beck, realizes that Obama can tap Glenn Beck's phone because of policies that Bush put into place. Then all of the sudden, the policy will be fascism.

I'm going to say it now, the policy IS fascism. Warrentless wiretapping is easily abused and completely unnecessary, and the fact that we didn't do it was one of the reasons why we maintained moral superiority during the cold war. An unwillingness to torture people was one of the others.

Is Obama going to use these tainted tools himself or is he just trying to avoid dragging the Bush administration though a costly investigation? Who knows? How can they? I'm less worried that MY phone will be tapped than I was a year ago at this time, but since I'm posting this opinion, maybe I better stick to coded messages from here on in.