Henry Porter did a nice documentary on More4 yesterday evening giving a broad ranging introduction to surveillance technologies like CCTV, ID cards, RFIDs, no fly lists, biometrics and mobile phones, and the blanket secret wiretapping in the US.
He even got Al Gore to quote Bruce Schneier's line about mass data collection being like trying to find a needle in a haystack by throwing more hay on the stack. Despite having written about the issues for a long time, he seemed somewhat amazed towards the end, when Adam Laurie demonstrated just how easily all the data being gathered can be accessed by a third party. Laurie showed the results of hacking into a CCTV system filming Porter on the streets of London, secretly recording Porter's conversation with another journalist by taking remote control of a mobile phone and breaking the security on the biometric chip on the new UK passports.
The programme is being repeated tomorrow evening at 10pm.
Update: Spyblog has kindly pointed out that I got the timing of the repeat wrong. It is due to be repeated Wednesday, 29th November at 10pm. Unfortunately his comment here got blocked by Haloscan filters. Grrr. I'm getting really fed up again with stupid software filters and will be asking Haloscan for an explanation as well as encouraging them to put the situation right.
No comments:
Post a Comment