Over the weekend the news broke that a hacker had obtained the nude images of over 100 female celebrities, and had released many onto the internet with the promise of much more to come. Current speculation is that the hack was made possible by a flaw in the Apple ICloud
After the massive photo leak that exposed nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and dozens more, Apple is looking into a vulnerability in its iCloud service that could have allowed hackers to obtain the images.
The Telegraph in London reported that hackers gained access to the photos by breaking into the women's iCloud accounts. Apple has apparently already fixed a bug in its "Find My iPhone" app that may have caused vulnerability.
The iCloud service allows users to store their information in a virtual database. Information that can be saved in the iCloud includes contacts, personal messages and photos
.
One of the obvious problems of systems like iCloud is that if all information is stored in one place, it can then all be equally accessed. Which brings to mind a certain NSA storage facility being built in the Utah desert, to review/retain most of the internet traffic in the world. I quote from former State Department Section Chief and current NSA Whistleblower John Napier Tye:
However, if the contents of a U.S. person’s communications are “incidentally” collected (an NSA term of art) in the course of a lawful overseas foreign intelligence investigation, then Section 2.3(c) of the executive order explicitly authorizes their retention. It does not require that the affected U.S. persons be suspected of wrongdoing and places no limits on the volume of communications by U.S. persons that may be collected and retained.
“Incidental” collection may sound insignificant, but it is a legal loophole that can be stretched very wide. Remember that the NSA is building a data center in Utah five times the size of the U.S. Capitol building, with its own power plant that will reportedly burn $40 million a year in electricity.
“Incidental collection” might need its own power plant.
Anyones private information, photographs, writings, contacts, etc should not be accessible via a
Google-Like processor that can filter through 850 Billion Records on world citizens. As we
have learned the government can brand you a terrorist based off of sheer suspicion, or a lone facebook post, then any number of private citizens are having their personal information viewed by any number of dubious NSA, 5 eyes/Private Contractors/22 other nations allowed access to the databases. Many could choose to make away with these images by the thousands if instead of being honorable like Snowden. Snowden himself has said
some of them do:
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden said NSA workers regularly passed around explicit photos they came across as part of their covert surveillance efforts.
Snowden, stuck in Russia for more than a year after he exposed secret U.S. online security tactics, said in an interview with The Guardian that young NSA employees particularly enjoyed the photos as perks of their job and had little respect for the privacy of people. Their conduct, he added, was not reported and continued with regularity.
"In the course of their daily work, they stumble upon something that is completely unrelated to their work, for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they're extremely attractive," he told The Guardian. "So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker says: 'Oh, hey. That's great. Send that to Bill down the way.'"
This should become all the more of a serious debate considering
this information I had previously
diaried>:
Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.
In some leaked documents the NSA/5-Eyes have talked of being 'greatly interested' in expanding these capabilities to the cameras of gaming systems like the Playstation 4 and XBOX 360, which for me at least, brings about the question of what kind of terrorist prevention is involved in watching my child play Lego Marvel Heroes?
So while the media is focused on ICLOUDS, hacking, personal privacy and the likes....can we please expand the discussion.