Эдвард Сноуден шпион Цру CIA Призма Призм Prism слежка шпионаж США

Dr Katherine Albrecht

http://m.ruvr.ru/2013/08/14/15/katherine-strawberry-festival-1_1.jpg

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Fighting PRISM: Privacy is a Human Right

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Download audio file August 12, 2013 20:11

Эдвард Сноуден шпион Цру CIA Призма Призм Prism слежка шпионаж США

Shock waves have travelled across the globe with the recent revelations about NSA and U.S. spying on private law-abiding citizens the world over. As a result people are beginning to shy away from the internet giants and looking for more secure ways to go about their business on-line and avoid US prying, some US companies have even closed down completely to avoid a knock on their doors by “Big Brother” with a FISA order. We spoke to privacy rights advocate and the co-founder of a much needed internet privacy provider, Dr. Katherine Albrecht, about the current paradigm.

Hello. This is John Robles. I am speaking with Dr. Katherine Albrecht, she’s one of the co-founders of the Startpage.com web resource andshe’s a long-time privacy-rights champion and advocate.

Robles: Hello, Katherine. How are you this afternoon or evening?

Albrecht: Hi, John, I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on the show.

Robles: It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what your project is offering Internet users, especially in light of the recent alarming NSA revelations?

Albrecht: Absolutely! Startpage.com, we refer to it as the world’s most private search engine and we actually run two search engines: Startpage.com and Ixquick.com.

Startpage returns Google results in complete privacy and Ixquick returns private results from other search engines.

So, if I can focus on Startpage here, when you want to do a Google search, if you go on to Google.com and you search we know now that the NSA has the ability to access the information that you search for, the websites that you receive in response in which one you click on. Google also, of course, makes a record of that. And I don’t mean to single out Google, because Microsoft’s Bing search engine does the same thing, the Yahoo search engine also does the same thing.

So, basically all of the big search engines, they keep a record of everything you search for and they use that information to create a quite detailed personal dossier of information about individuals all over the globe.

So, what we did in developing Ixquick and Startpage is we said: people need the ability to access that information without having their personal information captured. So when you go to Startpage.com and you enter in a search term, we submit it to Google servers for you through our server, so Google never sees you they only see us, they only make contact with us, and then we take the information that we get from Google and then we serve it to you completely anonymously and privately.

Google never sees you. There are no tracking cookies, there’s no opportunity for them to detect your IP address or in any way know who you are. And then we delete all records of your visit, so we don’t store your IP address. We do not make a record of your searches and we don’t use tracking cookies.

We really have no idea who uses our website because we don’t want to keep track of that. We believe their privacy is a fundamental human right and that everyone should have the ability to access information freely, because that’s really the whole purpose of the Internet.

Robles: Can I ask you a question, now it sounds great. A lot of people are extremely skeptical now. How can they be sure that you are not secretly, also, working with the NSA or something?

Albrecht: That’s actually an extraordinarily good question, given the recent developments.

There are actually a couple of reasons why we are a trustworthy company. One of them is the fact that we are third-party certified, so we actually... We’ve been certified actually for several years through an extensive auditing procedure through an organization called the EuroPriSe, which is based over in Europe, they’re the European privacy certifying authority.

They have extensively used all of the European privacy laws and regulations about protecting consumer privacy and gone through all of our data-handling practices and given us their highest possible grade every time they’ve reviewed us.

We’ve also been certified by an organization called Certified Secure out of the Netherlands. And all those certifications are online. People can actually view those. That’s one assurance. It the third-party independent assurance. And then the other reason, I think in light of what has been happening with the NSA scandals and the concerns about the United States Government accessing the web traffic of people through large companies, like Google, and Yahoo, and Microsoft, etc, through the PRISM program, because our company is based in the Netherlands we are actually not under U.S. jurisdiction, and what that means is that FISA Court requests, or Patriot Act requests, or FBI requests, or data collection programs like PRISM do not directly apply to us.

We have never been approached by any governmental agency and requested to turn over any information; we’ve never been asked to be part of a PRISM program. Those kinds of requests have been of course, issued to American companies, but as a Dutch company we have not received those sorts of requests. And if we did, at that point our immediate response would be ‘we are not under US jurisdiction’ and there are certainly legal protections there for us and also the people who use our service.

Robles: You yourself, you are an American citizen. Could you be pressured personally somehow to cooperate with them?

Albrecht: Well, I actually don’t work directly for the company, which is kind of an interesting arrangement. They are 100% held by a Dutch family. It’s not a publically traded company, it’s a privately held company. I am actually a contractor with the company so I am not actually in...

I suppose if somebody came up to me and said; “Hey, Katherine, we really want to put pressure on you as an American to provide information.”

If that were to happen, even if I wanted to provide information, I could not, because I don’t have access to our servers. All of the data that flows to our servers is all encrypted and it’s part of the certification to guarantee the privacy that we have under all of our certifications. I don’t have access to anything.

So, at the end of the day, if someone were to lean, even in the Dutch Government on the Dutch arm of our company, there would literally be no records to provide. And that’s kind of an interesting case, because when you land on a particular website that website gets your IP address automatically, any website, even if it’s the local animal hospital, they get your IP address…

Robles: Sure. And a lot more than that, actually. They get a lot more information than that.

Albrecht: Yeah. Any tracking cookies, they can put cookies on your browser, if they are malicious they can put malicious code on your browser. There are a lot of things that a website can do to you. We have actually engineered an architected Startpage and Ixquick, so that when your computer may contact with our server we don’t even temporarily store your IP address so we never get it.

In fact, the place in the architecture that would normally put your IP address, we overwrite it instantly with zeros. So even if someone were to come with a warrant or, God forbid, a hacker, I mean, it happened to Google. if someone were able to get into those records, there would literally be no records to get into.

Robles: Great! You mentioned Ixquick. Can you describe what that is for our listeners?

Albrecht: I can. Ixquick.com is the same privacy protections, the same third-party certification. The only difference is that when you go to Ixquick.com and you put in a search, we take your search and we submit it to multiple search engines, including some very small ones and some far-flung ones all over the world.

And, on the fly – our founder has actually developed a proprietary algorithm that takes your search, submits it to all kind of different places and then gets the best results from all of them and then serves them to you instantly.

It’s kind of like a Google Search, but it’s not Google, it’s a metasearch engine, meaning that we go out to other search engines. We found that in Europe a lot of people like the Ixquick search engine because you get the actual Google results.

Robles: Two questions: one does this slow down any traffic on the user side, and two, what about browsing?

Albrecht: Because we are a search engine, what we do is we simply provide you with links to external websites. So, if you search something, you know I am a cancer survivor, so when I had to look up cancer treatment, I certainly didn’t want that information going out to Google and being in their hands.

So, when you search for something sensitive along those lines, you have the reassurance of knowing that your search did not get catalogued by the big search engine companies, which are really marketing research companies.

But when you click on an actual link and you leave the protection of Start page, let’s say, you go to the national institutes of health or wherever you go, then you are leaving our protection and you make direct contact with their servers and now you are just out in the wild west on the internet.

We have developed the first and only proxy associated with a search engine, which is available both through Start Page and Ixquick, so if you are doing a particularly sensitive search, and the website that you find from your search is a website that you want to visit but you don’t necessarily want that website to see you, then there is a link that you can click on to your search result that says “view by Ixquick proxy”, it is on both websites Start Page and Ixquick, and if you click that, what we do is we go to the, national institutes of health website, for example, load the contents of their page onto our servers and then we serve it to you. So you see it through our servers.

There is a little frame around it that says “proxy” so that you know your viewing it through us not through them. That means they can’t see you, they can’t put any Malware on your browser, for example that is one of the reasons people use it.

It is a little bit slower to use the proxy because we have to double-load it. So, we download it and then you load it to view, so there is kind of a dual step. And the other difference on our proxy, we do not use java script or flash for security reasons because those actually have big security holes in them and we do not transmit that.

Robles: Can you give our listeners your website addresses one more time?

Albrecht: Absolutely The websites are Startpage.com , and Ixquick.com . If you would like to sign up for an early access to Startmail, our upcoming e-mail program, go to Startmail.com. My personal website is kmashow.com , I am a radio host.

Robles: Thank you Doctor Albrecht I really appreciate it.

Albrecht: Thank you so much John it’s been a pleasure.

Facebook: largest database of bio-metric facial coordinates – Katherine Albrecht

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Hello. This is John Robles. I am speaking with Dr. Katherine Albrecht, one of the co-founders of the Startpage.com web resource and a long-time privacy-rights champion and advocate. This is part 2 of an interview in progress.

Albrecht: Once you are in the proxy you can click additional links and surf the Internet using the proxy, and no one ever sees you. The only thing I could add is that when you connect to us – whether it is your search connection or your proxied web-surfing – it is protected by SSL encryption. And not just generic SSL encryption: we just finished installing the latest form, which is called Perfect Forward Secrecy, a type of layer security, the latest, absolute state-of-the-art version of SSL encryption. And what that means is that even if someone were to intercept your communication with us, all they would be able to see would be gobbledygook, they would not be able to actually make sense of it because it is in encrypted in streams.

Even your ISP, which may be watching your traffic, like Verizon and AT&T has been caught doing, even if you are under Verizon or AT&T and they capture your traffic with us, all they will see is an encrypted stream that they can’t make sense of.

Robles: Regarding the Onion Browser program, how effective is that? Can you tell us about Oinion? The Tor project. I’m sure you are familiar with it.

Albrecht: We are actually big fans of Tor. I’ve been doing privacy work since 1999, since long before I helped create the Startpage, so certainly I have been following a lot of these privacy services.

I think the real key is that, as much as we would like to have the perfect, secure solution, it really is a back-and-forth kind of an “arms race” with the privacy people working to deploy the latest technologies and malicious governments and oppressive regimes and others who want to invade people’s privacy, finding ways around it and vice versa. So, it’s a kind of spy versus spy world we are living in right now.

Robles: Right. Some of our listeners, Some of the normal Internet users are saying “So what if the NSA knows I shop at Safeway every Friday, or that I drive such and such a route to work, that I sent a birthday card to my sister?” They say “so what?” But how can that information be used maliciously or why should people be afraid that such information is being collected?

Albrecht: I think here in the U.S. we had an example of that with the IRS scandal that has been unfolding at the same time with this NSA scandal, in which we found that people, who had particular political views, were being denied the same legal privileges as other people.

How do they know what political views you hold? Well, where would you go to find that information? The biggest dossier of personal information ever collected in the history of humanity is now in the hands of the NSA, and much of that has been collected by the services offered by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other big companies, and they do it through your willing contract with them, I should point out, the information they have collected on people they’ve collected through your voluntary participation in their service.

They say it very plainly. In fact, Yahoo, when they switched over users to their new Yahoo account in June, they specifically said: “By agreeing to accept this new Yahoo, you agree to let us scan and review the appropriateness of all of your e-mail messages.”

People agree to do it, they consent.

Robles: But they don’t say they will go ahead and send it off to the US government, do they?

Albrecht: Right, so there’s where the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution comes into play, because the Constitution says that you can’t go prying around in people’s private information.

So, I think it gets into an interesting grey area of the law they use in the letterwork on this. If they allow the private sector to collect all of the data and then simply go to the private sector, then the argument that they make is that they are not directly accessing your information – you’ve already shared that information elsewhere – and I think probably the next ten years of legal decisions will be heavily looking into that.

What I’d like to suggest to people is that, if they are concerned about it, there are alternatives to virtually all of those privacy-invading services, and you don’t really have to sign the “I agree box” on the Yahoo e-mail and agree to let them read all of your messages.

There are alternatives, and in fact we are developing what we call the world’s most private e-mail, StartMail, which people can sign up for at StartMail.com. That will be coming out at the end of this year and then a paid version of it next year. But that’s fully encrypted. We are using all of the absolute, state-of-the-art technology in light of what we know about NSA tactics to lock it down.

So, that can be coming out next year, and you know, those sorts of things – StartMail is not free, but it’s not going to be terribly expensive, but it’s not free – and people say “hang on a second, my Yahoo e-mail is free.”

And I say if I gave you a hotel room and told you, hey, the hotel room is free, why are you paying $200 a night for a hotel room, but yet I had eqipped the hotel room with cameras, and microphones, and bugged the phones, and had a camera in the shower because I wanted to watch what you did while you used the free hotel room, then you might say “Gee, I’d rather pay for it.” So, that’s how we really view e-mail.

Robles: That’s a wonderful way to put it.

Albrecht: Yeah, the free e-mail services, that’s really what they are doing. They are giving you a space to reveal your personal information about yourself so that they can capture it. And that’s not free as far as we are concerned.

Robles: I always thought the same thing about Facebook. I mean they must have massive infrastructure for Facebook worldwide, which must be extremely expensive, and they just provide this for free.

Albrecht: Immensely! And the thing about Facebook, if you think about what Facebook has really done – even its name gives it away – Facebook has the largest collection of photographs of people’s faces, of any organization or government or agency anywhere on Earth.

And they have that not because they’ve surreptitiously gone around snapping secret photos of people, but because people voluntarily submitted those photos. So, now that immense treasure trove of biometric facial coordinates of people’s faces are certainly being put to use, and we contributed it all ourselves without even thinking it’s through.

Robles: Is that the main treasure of Facebook?

Albrecht: It is a big part of it. I think it goes far beyond that. And I think one of the reasons Facebook went public and they made so much money not because people were so excited about the ability to share information with their friends, but because the recognized the value of being able to identify individuals specifically and know all of their interests.

So, you know, the people who want to abuse this information are typically criminals, marketers and governments. Those are really the groups you are looking at. And criminal hackers, of course.

I live in the city where we had a Facebook bandit. What he was doing, he was going online and see when people talked about their vacations on Facebook. They’d say “oh, yeah, I’m leaving Friday! SO excited! I’m going to Hawaii!” And then he would break into their homes and rob them blind while they were out of town – and he did that all on the basis of their Facebook information. So, I say whatever you wouldn’t put on a billboard, don’t put it on Facebook.

And then you’ve got the marketers, that’s where the money is being made right now. If I can figure out every one who is interested in my competitor’s products and I can lead them all over to my products.

And then, of course, the governments, which some would argue in the US have gone way overboard and suspecting that all Americans as being potential terrorists, even those of us who are completely law-abiding. It’s really those three groups.

If you have something like Facebook that you can fund with marketing money, all the better, at least as far as the government is concerned, because then they can just come in and scuff it up.

The websites are Startpage.com, and Ixquick.com. If you would like to sign up for an early access to Startmail, our upcoming e-mail program, go to Startmail.com. My personal website is kmashow.com.

 

Last Update: 08/06/2023 03:24 +0300

 

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