Tag Archives: surveillance

James Bond as a Commentary on Targeted Killing

With the semi-recent release of the 24th James Bond film, Spectre, there have been renewed calls to kill off Bond. Some think that Spectre ought to be the last Bond film while others think his work his obsolete going so far as to say “[e]xcept for the occasional Seal Team Six operation, we send drones after those [enemies that didn’t learn how to code] kind of terrorists; not a lone-wolf alcoholic”.

Ignoring the critiques of racism/sexism that are leveled at Bond, I want to examine a few issues brought up in Cracked’s short video, “Why the World No Longer Needs James Bond”. Among the main points, apart from the quotation above, are that cyber war is the future and classic spy techniques such as those employed by Bond are obsolete in the face of hackers and drones, Bond fights old villains and ignores the geopolitics of today, and is a “bad role model”.

I argue in this short piece, however, that as the world changes, Bond changes as well ignoring the entertainment value of blowing things up, Spectre serves as a critique of the way in which national security is going. It should go without saying that this post may contain spoilers and thus I suggest you don’t read ahead until you’ve seen the film. Until then, here’s Cracked’s video:


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Data Privacy Day 2016

It’s that time of year again! Data Privacy Day! What follows after the jump is an aggregation of posts I’ve written about data security as well as a commentary on web-browsers and a how-to guide for using TOR safely.

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Data Privacy Day 2015 – Security Tips

As is the case every year, Data Privacy Day rolls around and I come dangerously close to forgetting about it. This year, I was saved by Mauricio Prinzlau over at Cloudwards who reminded me to write something and gave me a useful article he wrote entitled “Data Privacy Day 2015: Top Experts Comment on Privacy Issues (+Infographic)” which I will use in this post and strongly recommend you read. To recap, however, last year I wrote a post about staying secure online and my personal security setup and published a PDF version. This year I intend to write a more general post about current security trends, some new tips to stay safe, and some nice infographics. As usual, I’ll see you after the jump!

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TrueCrypt is Still Safe

I want to preface this with a note from me: “Hey all, I apologize for not publishing anything recently; I’ve had writer’s block and now I’m doing research for my next big post (get ready for it!) amidst dealing with crashed hard drives and OS transfers.

But, inspired by a the comment “dude, truecrypt is dead” that I saw on IRC, I want to write a short statement about TrueCrypt. Now it’s no secret I’m a TrueCrypt fanboy so this will be a tad biased, but please hang with me.”

Since 2004, TrueCrypt has been the go to OTF encryption tool and has served probably millions of users (myself included). TrueCrypt had been in active development getting to version 7.1a when, on May 28, 2014, truecrypt.org displayed a very odd message warning of the insecurity of the software.

Although no one knows for sure why the develops suddenly stopped (although there are a few conspiracy theories), we do know that TrueCrypt is still safe.

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