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Flashmag July 2019 www.flashmag.net
These internet users were targeted because of their posts, that showed their pro-democrats, ideology. A reminder that according to many analysts had changed the face of an election that was tight in some states between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
Technology is transforming the practice of policing and intelligence. In addition to the proliferation of declared surveillance technologies, such as body cameras and license plate readers, police forces use social media to monitor their targets and create profiles of peoples connected in social networks. Which implies that when you have an interesting profile you have a second secret profile in the software that is used to monitor your cybernetic activity, by the police which track your every act and gesture. Police forces are even able to trigger the camera of your tablet computers and phones, without your knowledge. Social medias are fertile ground for information gathering, and analysis. Facebook has more than two billion active users a month. its affiliate Instagram has 800 million monthly users; and Twitter has 330 million active users a month,
While social media analytics cover a range of increasingly sophisticated technologies, and companies are developing more creative ways to harness data embedded in social communications, social media monitoring by Police states, that are now the prerogative of all democracies and autocratic regimes can be divided into three broad categories.
First an individual, a group of individuals or affiliation (for example, an online hashtag); are tracked by the traces left by their cybernetic activity.
The second point combines computer surveillance, with human surveillance, using an informant, or a friend of the target who unknowingly serves as a back door to the intimacy of its link on social networks. Public accounts not covered by customized security settings limiting access, also provide information .
The third, more conventional method uses analytical software, to generate data on
individuals, groups, associations, or locations. Apart from these shadowy methods, the police can access social media platforms management directly to request information from companies like Facebook or google. These information concern basic subscriber information about metadata, including the content of messages on individuals or group of affiliated persons. However, each platform has various mechanisms to deal with these direct requests, and levels of legal procedure are required. The more the data are private, the stronger the legal protections. In general, it happens that these requests are done in the secret between companies like Facebook or Google and governments which are potential customers. In spite of everything very little is known, about what is woven in the high spheres of the society. Political leaders and leaders of big data companies both rubbing themselves in muffled saloon.
The more pernicious intelligence agencies like the CIA are using other coward methods to spy on citizens directly by trapping TVs, iPhones, WhatsApp, Android, and many other electronic products. All these devices and services are likely, according to documents posted by WikiLeaks, to be spied by the US intelligence agency. Since April 2016, and WhatsApp's decision to encrypt all conversations, its competitors have followed and the majority of email applications are considered tamper-proof. WhatsApp uses, like some of its competitors, the Signal protocol, which allows for absolute encryption of messages - the company itself does not have access to it. WikiLeaks, by unveiling the CIA's "Vault 7" document set, showed that the agency had access to all messages on all phones it bugged. Meanwhile, even the FBI, the US federal police had criticized, early 2016, the encryption of WhatsApp. How did the CIA succeed? By taking full control of the device, remotely. "It's not a defeat of encryption. If you compromise a phone, you do not care about encryption anymore, "said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, quoted by the Wired website. By hacking devices upstream, the CIA was able to thwart all application protection processes. "