I gave my talk about privacy by design last Saturday at eth0 2014 winter edition, a small hacker get-together which was organised in Lievelde, The Netherlands this year. eth0 organizes conferences that aim at bringing people with different computer-related interests together. They organise two events per year, one during winter. I’ve previously given a very similar talk at the OHM2013 hacker conference which was held in August 2013.
Video
Here’s the footage of my talk:
Quick Synopsis
I talked about privacy by design, and what I did with relation to Annie Machon‘s site and recently, the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence site. The talk consists of 2 parts, in the first part I explained what we’re up against, and in the second part I explained the 2 sites in a more specific case study.
I talked about the revelations about the NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence agencies, about the revelations in December, which were explained eloquently by Jacob Applebaum at 30C3 in Hamburg in December. Then I moved on to the threats to website visitors, how profiles are being built up and sold, browser fingerprinting. The second part consists of the case studies of both Annie Machon’s website, and the Sam Adams Associates’ website.
I’ve mentioned the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, for whom I had the honour to make their website so they could have a more public space where they could share things relating to the Sam Adams Award with the world, and also to provide a nice overview of previous laureates and what their stories are.
One of the things both sites have in common is the hosting on a Swiss domain, which provides for a safer haven where content may be hosted safely without fear of being taken down by the U.S. authorities. The U.S. claims jurisdiction on the average .com, .net, .org domains etc. and there have been cases where these have been brought down because it hosted content the U.S. government did not agree with. Case in point: Richard O’Dwyer, a U.K. citizen, was threatened with extradition to the United States for being the man behind TVShacks, which was a website that provided links to copyrighted content. MegaUpload, the file locker company started by Kim Dotcom, was given the same treatment, where if you would visit their domain, you were served an image from the FBI telling you the domain had been seized.