Utterly unacceptable violation of personal liberties

This Guardian article highlights the utterly unacceptable violation of personal liberties taking place under the banner of ‘fighting terrorism’. If one puts aside the pathetic grounds on which police suspected David Mery of being a terrorist, what really makes me mad as hell is the fact the fact that even without any evidence of terrorist involvement, the Police will keep details of the arrest on their computers for ever more & happily share this information which countries around the world.

the police are not only entitled to keep my fingerprints and DNA samples, but according to my solicitor, they are also entitled to hold on to what they gather during their investigation: notepads of arresting officers, photographs, interviewing tapes and any other documents they entered in the police national computer (PNC). So even though the police consider me innocent there will remain some mention (what exactly?) in the PNC and, if they fully share their information with Interpol, in other police databases around the world as well. Isn’t a state that keeps files on innocent persons a police state?

What guarentees of use & data protection would apply if the records were to make their way to, say, the US. With the way US immigration policy is going, it is not at all far fetched that the police records could lead of all manner of complications visiting the US. All this the consquences of so called “terrorist” behaviour

• They found my behaviour suspicious from direct observation and then from watching me on the CCTV system
• I went into the station without looking at the police officers at the entrance or by the gates
• Two other men entered the station at about the same time as me
• I am wearing a jacket “too warm for the season”
• I am carrying a bulky rucksack, and kept my rucksack with me at all times
• I looked at people coming on the platform
• I played with my phone and then took a paper from inside my jacket

Pretty much every commuter in London would match these criteria several times a week. It is an absolutely unacceptable violation of personal liberties for such criteria to lead to a permanent record of an innocent person being a potential “terrorist” suspect. I’ve been considering it for a while, but this just highlights that its way past time for one to join Liberty. Right now.

Recovering encryption keys via acoustic analysis

Have just been reading this article about how, given a 15 minute recording of a user typing, it is possible to ‘recover’ details of every word & even letter typed. Each key has a subtly different sound, so given a mapping of sound <-> key it is possible analyse a recording to recover the letters / words typed. By assuming that the text being typed was, say English, it is possible to apply statistical to the 15 minute recording to generate the sound <-> key mappings. Combine the two techniques with a suitably planted microphone and you have a pretty damn good channel for covertly monitoring what someone types. Another good reason to stop using regular passwords & move wholesale to one time keys / secure id generators – as if existing spyware weren’t enough of a reason already.

Even more intriguing though, is the last paragraph where they link to another study suggesting that, since CPUs make different sounds (high frequency, inaudible to humans) depending on what they are computing, that it might be possible to analyse a recording of a decryption operation to recover the encryption keys. Damn, encryption & security breaks down in the most obscure & unimaginable/unexpected ways.