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Privacy: In the analog world of our parents, as an ordinary citizen and not under surveillance because of being a suspect of a crime, it was taken for granted that you could walk around a city without authorities tracking you at the footstep level. Our children don’t have this right anymore in their digital world.

Not even the dystopias of the 1950s — Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Colossus, and so on, managed to dream up the horrors of this element: the fact that every citizen is now carrying a governmental tracking device. They’re not just carrying one, they even bought it themselves. Not even Brave New World could have imagined this horror.

It started out innocently, of course. It always does. With the new “portable phones” — which, at this point, meant something like “not chained to the floor” — authorities discovered that people would still call the Emergency Services number (112, 911, et cetera) from their mobile phones, but not always be capable of giving their location themselves, something that the phone network was now capable of doing. So authorities mandated that the phone networks be technically capable of always giving a subscriber’s location, just in case they would call Emergency Services. In the United States, this was known as the E911 regulation (“Enhanced 9-1-1”).

This was in 2005. Things went bad very quickly from there. Imagine that just 12 years ago, we still had the right to roam around freely without authorities being capable of tracking our every footstep – this was no more than just over a decade ago!

Before this point, governments supplied you with services so that you would be able to know your location, as had been the tradition since the naval lighthouse, but not so that they would be able to know your location. There’s a crucial difference here. And as always, the first breach was one of providing citizen services — in this case, emergency medical services — that only the most prescient dystopians would oppose.

What’s happened since?

Entire cities are using wi-fi passive tracking to track people at the individual, realtime, and sub-footstep level in the entire city center.

Train stations and airports, which used to be safe havens of anonymity in the analog world of our parents, have signs saying they employ realtime passive wi-fi and bluetooth tracking of everybody even coming close, and are connecting their tracking to personal identifying data. Correction: they have signs about it in the best case but do it regardless.

People’s location are tracked in at least three different… not ways, but categories of ways:

Active: You carry a sensor of your location (GPS sensor, Glonass receiver, cell tower triangulator, or even visual identifier through the camera). You use the sensors to find your location, at one point in time or continuously. The government takes itself the right to read the contents of your active sensors.

Passive: You take no action, but are still transmitting your location to the government continuously through a third party. In this category, we find cell tower triangulation as well as passive wi-fi and bluetooth tracking that require no action on behalf of a user’s phone other than being on.

Hybrid: The government finds your location in occasional pings through active dragnets and ongoing technical fishing expeditions. This would not only include cellphone-related techniques, but also face recognition connected to urban CCTV networks.

Privacy of location is one of the Seven Privacies, and we can calmly say that without active countermeasures, it’s been completely lost in the transition from analog to digital. Our parents had privacy of location, especially in busy places like airports and train stations. Our children don’t have privacy of location, not in general, and particularly not in places like airports and train stations that were the safest havens of our analog parents.

How do we reinstate Privacy of Location today? It was taken for granted just 12 years ago.

Privacy: In the analog world of our parents, leaks to the press were heavily protected in both ends – both for the leaker and for the reporter receiving the leak. In the digital world of our children, this has been unceremoniously thrown out the window while discussing something unrelated entirely. Why aren’t our digital children afforded the same checks and balances?

Another area where privacy rights have not been carried over from the analog to the digital concerns journalism, an umbrella of different activities we consider to be an important set of checks-and-balances on power in society. When somebody handed over physical documents to a reporter, that was an analog action that was protected by federal and state laws, and sometimes even by constitutions. When somebody is handing over digital access to the same information to the same type of reporter, reflecting the way we work today and the way our children will work in the future, that is instead prosecutable at both ends.

Let us illustrate this with an example from the real world.

In the 2006 election in Sweden, there was an outcry of disastrous information hygiene on behalf of the ruling party at the time (yes, the same ruling party that later administered the worst governmental leak ever). A username and password circulated that gave full access to the innermost file servers of the Social Democratic party administration from anywhere. The username belonged to a Stig-Olof Friberg, who was using his nickname “sigge” as username, and the same “sigge” as password, and who accessed the innermost files over the Social Democratic office’s unencrypted, open, wireless network.

Calling this “bad opsec” doesn’t begin to describe it. Make a careful note to remember that these were, and still are, the institutions and people we rely on to make policy for good safeguarding of sensitive citizen data.

However, in the shadow of this, there was also the more important detail that some political reporters were well aware of the login credentials, such as one of Sweden’s most (in)famous political reporters Niklas Svensson, who had been using the credentials as a journalistic tool to gain insight into the ruling party’s workings.

This is where it gets interesting, because in the analog world, that reporter would have received leaks in the form of copied documents, physically handed over to him, and leaking to the press in this analog manner was (and still is) an extremely protected activity under law and indeed some constitutions — in Sweden, as this concerns, you can even go to prison for casually speculating over coffee at work who might have been behind a leak to the press. It is taken extremely seriously.

However, in this case, the reporter wasn’t leaked the documents, but was leaked a key for access to the digital documents — the ridiculously insecure credentials “sigge/sigge” — and was convicted in criminal court for electronic trespassing as a result, despite doing journalistic work with a clear analog protected equivalent.

It’s interesting to look at history to see how much critically important events would never have been uncovered, if this prosecution of digital journalism had been applied to analog journalism.

For one example, let’s take the COINTELPRO leak, when activists copied files from an FBI office to uncover a covert and highly illegal operation by law enforcement to discredit political organizations based solely on their political opinion. (This is not what law enforcement should be doing, speaking in general terms.) This leak happened when activists put up a note on the FBI office door on March 8, 1971 saying “Please do not lock this door tonight”, came back in the middle of the night when nobody was there, found the door unlocked as requested, and took (stole) about 1,000 classified files that revealed the illegal practices.

These were then mailed to various press outlets. The theft resulted in the exposure of some of the FBI’s most self-incriminating documents, including several documents detailing the FBI’s use of postal workers, switchboard operators, etc., in order to spy on black college students and various non-violent black activist groups, according to Wikipedia. And here’s the kicker in the context: while the people stealing the documents could and would have been indicted for doing so, it was unthinkable to charge the reporters receiving them with anything.

This is no longer the case.

Our digital children have lost the right to leak information to reporters in the way the world works today, an activity that was taken for granted — indeed, seen as crucially important to the balance of power — in the world of our digital parents. Our digital children who work as reporters can no longer safely receive leaks showing abuse of power. It is entirely reasonable that our digital children should have at least the same set of civil liberties in their digital world, as our parents had in their analog world.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: The anonymous cash of our analog parents is fast disappearing, and in its wake comes trackable and permissioned debit cards to our children. While convenient, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In the last article, we looked at how our analog parents could anonymously buy a newspaper on the street corner with some coins, and read their news of choice without anybody knowing about it. This observation extends to far more than just newspapers, of course.

This ability of our parents – the ability to conduct decentralized, secure transactions anonymously – has been all but lost in a landscape that keeps pushing card payments for convenience. The convenience of not paying upfront, with credit cards; the convenience of always paying an exact amount, with debit cards; the convenience of not needing to carry and find exact amounts with every purchase. Some could even argue that having every transaction listed on a bank statement is a convenience of accounting.

But with accounting comes tracking. With tracking comes predictability and unwanted accountability.

It’s been said that a VISA executive can predict a divorce one year ahead of the parties involved, based on changes in purchase patterns. Infamously, a Target store was targeting a high school-aged woman with maternity advertising, which at first made her father furious: but as things turned out, the young woman was indeed pregnant. Target knew, and her own father didn’t.

This is because when we’re no longer using anonymous cash, every single purchase is tracked and recorded with the express intent on using it against us — whether for influencing us to make a choice to deplete our resources (“buy more”) or for punishing us for buying something we shouldn’t have, in a wide variety of conceivable ways.

China is taking the concept one step further, as has been written here before, and in what must have been the inspiration for a Black Mirror episode, is weighting its citizens’ Obedience Scores based on whether they buy useful or lavish items — useful in the views of the regime, of course.

It’s not just the fact that transactions of our digital children are logged for later use against them, in ways our analog parents could never conceive of.

It’s also that the transactions of our digital children are permissioned. When our digital children buy a bottle of water with a debit card, a transaction clears somewhere in the background. But that also means that somebody can decide to have the transaction not clear; somebody has the right to arbitrarily decide what people get to buy and not buy, if this trend continues for our digital children. That is a horrifying thought.

Our parents were using decentralized, censorship resistant, anonymous transactions in using plain cash. There is no reason our digital children should have anything less. It’s a matter of liberty and self-determination.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: In the last article, we focused on how people are tracked today when using credit cards instead of cash. But few pay attention to the fact that we’re tracked when using cash today, too.

Few people pay attention to the little sign on the revolving door on Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It says that wi-fi and bluetooth tracking of every single individual is taking place in the airport.

What sets Schiphol Airport apart isn’t that they track individual people’s movements to the sub-footstep level in a commercial area. (It’s for commercial purposes, not security purposes.) No, what sets Schiphol apart is that they bother to tell people about it. (The Netherlands tend to take privacy seriously, as does Germany, and for the same reason.)

Locator beacons are practically a standard in bigger commercial areas now. They ping your phone using wi-fi and bluetooth, and using signal strength triangulation, a grid of locator beacons is able to show how every single individual is moving in realtime at the sub-footstep level. This is used to “optimize marketing” — in other words, find ways to trick people’s brains to spend resources they otherwise wouldn’t have. Our own loss of privacy is being turned against us, as it always is.

Where do people stop for a while, what catches their attention, what doesn’t catch their attention, what’s a roadblock for more sales?

These are legitimate questions. However, taking away people’s privacy in order to answer those questions is not a legitimate method to answer them.

This kind of mass individual tracking has even been deployed at city levels, which happened in complete silence until the Privacy Oversight Board of a remote government sounded the alarms. The city of Västerås got the green light to continue tracking once some formal criteria were met.

Yes, this kind of people tracking is documented to have been already rolled out citywide in at least one small city in a remote part of the world (Västerås, Sweden). With the government’s Privacy Oversight Board having shrugged and said “fine, whatever”, don’t expect this to stay in the small town of Västerås. Correction, wrong tense: don’t expect it to have stayed in just Västerås, where it was greenlit three years ago.

Our analog parents had the ability to walk around untracked in the city and street of their choice, without it being used or held against them. It’s not unreasonable that our digital children should have the same ability.

There’s one other way to buy things with cash which avoids this kind of tracking, and that’s paying cash-on-delivery when ordering something online or over the phone to your door — in which case your purchase is also logged and recorded, just in another type of system.

This isn’t only used against the ordinary citizen for marketing purposes, of course. It’s used against the ordinary citizen for every conceivable purpose. But we’ll be returning to that in a later article in the series.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: We’ve seen how our digital children’s privacy is violated in everything they buy with cash or credit, in a way our analog parents would have balked at. But even worse: our digital children’s privacy is also violated by tracking what they don’t buy — either actively decline or just plain walk away from.

Amazon just opened its first “Amazon Go” store, where you just pick things into a bag and leave, without ever going through a checkout process. As part of the introduction of this concept, Amazon points out that you can pick something off the shelves, at which point it’ll register in your purchase — and change your mind and put it back, at which point you’ll be registered and logged as having not purchased the item.

Sure, you’re not paying for something you changed your mind about, which is the point of the video presentation. But it’s not just about the deduction from your total amount to pay: Amazon also knows you considered buying it and eventually didn’t, and will be using that data.

Our digital children are tracked this way on a daily basis, if not an hourly basis. Our analog parents never were.

When we’re shopping for anything online, there are even simple plugins for the most common merchant solutions with the business terms “funnel analysis” — where in the so-called “purchase funnel” our digital children choose to leave the process of purchasing something — or “cart abandonment analysis”.

We can’t even simply walk away from something anymore without it being recorded, logged, and cataloged for later use against us.

But so-called “cart abandonment” is only one part of the bigger issue of tracking what we’re interested in in the age of our digital children, but didn’t buy. There is no shortage of people today who would swear they were just discussing a very specific type of product with their phone present (say, “black leather skirts”) and all of a sudden, advertising for that very specific type of product would pop up all over Facebook and/or Amazon ads. Is this really due to some company listening for keywords through the phone? Maybe, maybe not. All we know since Snowden is that if it’s technically possible to invade privacy, it is already happening.

(We have to assume here these people still need to learn how to install a simple adblocker. But still.)

At the worst ad-dense places, like (but not limited to) airports, there are eyeball trackers to find out which ads you look at. They don’t yet change to match your interests, as per Minority Report, but that’s already present on your phone and on your desktop, and so wouldn’t be foreign to see in public soon, either.

In the world of our analog parents, we weren’t registered and tracked when we bought something.

In the world of our digital children, we’re registered and tracked even when we don’t buy something.

Privacy: Our analog parents’ dating preferences were considered a most private of matters. For our digital children, their dating preferences is a wholesale harvesting opportunity for marketing purposes. How did this terrifying shift come to be?

I believe the first big harvester of dating preferences was the innocent-looking site hotornot.com 18 years ago, a site that more seemed like the after-hours side work of a frustrated highschooler than a clever marketing ploy. It simply allowed people to rate their subjective perceived attractiveness of a photograph, and to upload photographs for such rating. (The two founders of this alleged highschool side project netted $10 million each for it when the site was sold.)

Then the scene exploded, with both user-funded and advertising-funded dating sites, all of which cataloged people’s dating preferences to the smallest detail.

Large-scale pornography sites, like PornHub, also started cataloging people’s porn preferences, and contiously make interesting infographics about geographical differences in preferences. (The link is safe for work, it’s data and maps in the form of a news story on Inverse, not on Pornhub directly.) It’s particularly interesting, as Pornhub is able to break down preferences quite specifically by age, location, gender, income brackets, and so on.

Do you know anyone who told Pornhub any of that data? No, I don’t either. And still, they are able to pinpoint who likes what with quite some precision, precision that comes from somewhere.

And then, of course, we have the social networks (which may or may not be responsible for that tracking, by the way).

It’s been reported that Facebook can tell if you’re gay or not with as little as three likes. Three. And they don’t have to be related to dating preferences or lifestyle preferences — they can be any random selections that just map up well with bigger patterns.

This is bad enough in itself, on the basis that it’s private data. At a very minimum, our digital childrens’ preferences should be their own, just like their favorite ice cream.

But a dating preferences are not just a preference like choosing your flavor of ice cream, is it? It should be, but it isn’t at this moment in time. It could also be something you’re born with. Something that people even get killed for if they’re born with the wrong preference.

It is still illegal to be born homosexual in 73 out of 192 countries, and out of these 73, eleven prescribe the death penalty for being born this way. A mere 23 out of 192 countries have full marriage equality.

Further, although the policy direction is quite one-way toward more tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion at this point in time, that doesn’t mean the policy trend can’t reverse for a number of reasons, most of them very bad. People who felt comfortable in expressing themselves can again become persecuted.

Genocide is almost always based on public data collected with benevolent intent.

This is why privacy is the last line of defense, not the first. And this last line of defense, which held fast for our analog parents, has been breached for our digital children. That matter isn’t taken nearly seriously enough.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: At worst, our analog parents could be prevented from meeting each other. Our digital children are prevented from talking about particular subjects, once the conversation is already happening. This is a horrifying development.

When our digital children are posting a link to The Pirate Bay somewhere on Facebook, a small window sometimes pops up saying “you have posted a link with potentially harmful content. Please refrain from posting such links.”

Yes, even in private conversations. Especially in private conversations.

This may seem like a small thing, but it is downright egregious. Our digital children are not prevented from having a conversation, per se, but are monitored for bad topics that the regime doesn’t like being discussed, and are prevented from discussing those topics. This is far worse than preventing certain people from just meeting.

The analog equivalent would be if our parents were holding an analog phone conversation, and a menacing third voice popped into the conversation with a slow voice speaking just softly enough to be perceived as threatening: “You have mentioned a prohibited subject. Please refrain from discussing prohibited subjects in the future.”

Our parents would have been horrified if this happened — and rightly so!

But in the digital world of our children, the same phenomenon is instead cheered on by the same people who would abhor it if it happened in their world, to themselves.

In this case, of course, it is any and all links to The Pirate Bay that are considered forbidden topics, under the assumption — assumption! — that they lead to manufacturing of copies that would be found in breach of the copyright monopoly in a court of law.

When I first saw the Facebook window above telling me to not discuss forbidden subjects, I was trying to distribute political material I had created myself, and used The Pirate Bay to distribute. It happens to be a very efficient way to distribute large files, which is exactly why it is being used by a lot of people for that purpose (gee, who would have thought?), including people like myself who wanted to distribute large collections of political material.

There are private communications channels, but far too few use them, and the politicians at large (yes, this includes our analog parents) are still cheering on this development, because “terrorism” and other bogeymen.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: In the analog world of our parents, it was absolutely unthinkable that the government would demand to know every footstep you took, every phonecall you made, and every message you wrote, just as a routine matter. For our digital children, government officials keep insisting on this as though it were perfectly reasonable, because terrorism, and also, our digital children may be listening to music together or watching TV together, which is illegal in the way they like to do it, because of mail-order legislation from Hollywood. To make things even worse, the surveillance is retroactive — it is logged, recorded, and kept until somebody wants all of it.

About ten years ago, a colleague of mine moved from Europe to China. He noted that among many differences, the postal service was much more tightly controlled — as in, every letter sent was written by hand onto a line in a log book, kept by the postmaster at each post office. Letter from, to whom, and the date.

At the time, three things struck me: one, how natural this was to the Chinese population, not really knowing anything else; two, how horrified and denouncing our analog parents would have been at this concept; three, and despite that, that this is exactly what our lawmaker analog parents are doing to all our digital children right now.

Or trying to do, anyway; the courts are fighting back hard.

Yes, I’m talking about Telecommunications Data Retention.

There is a saying, which mirrors the Chinese feeling of normality about this quite well: “The bullshit this generation puts up with as a temporary nuisance from deranged politicians will seem perfectly ordinary to the next generation.”

Every piece of surveillance so far in this series is amplified by several orders of magnitude by the notion that it you’re not only being watched, but that everything you do is recorded for later use against you.

This is a concept so bad, not even Nineteen-Eighty Four got it: If Winston’s telescreen missed him doing something that the regime didn’t want him to do, Winston would have been safe, because there was no recording happening; only surveillance in the moment.

If Winston Smith had had today’s surveillance regime, with recording and data retention, the regime could and would have gone back and re-examined every earlier piece of action for what they might have missed.

This horror is reality now, and it applies to every piece in this series. Our digital children aren’t just without privacy in the moment, they’re retroactively without privacy in the past, too.

(Well, this horror is a reality that comes and goes, as legislators and courts are in a tug of war. In the European Union, Data Retention was mandated in 2005 by the European Parliament, was un-mandated in 2014 by the European Court of Justice, and prohibited in 2016 by the same Court. Other jurisdictions are playing out similar games; a UK court just dealt a blow to the Data Retention there, for example.)

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: Our parents, at least in the Western world, had a right to hold private conversations face-to-face, whether out in public or in the sanctity of their home. This is all but gone for our digital children.

Not long ago, it was the thing of horror books and movies that there would actually be widespread surveillance of what you said inside your own home. Our analog parents literally had this as scary stories worthy of Halloween, mixing the horror with the utter disbelief.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being surveilled at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual device was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they listened to everybody all the time. But at any rate they could listen to you whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.” — from Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the West, we prided ourselves on not being the East — the Communist East, specifically — who regarded their own citizens as suspects: suspects who needed to be cleansed of bad thoughts and bad conversations, to the degree that ordinary homes were wiretapped for ordinary conversations.

There were microphones under every café table and in every residence. And even if there weren’t in the literal sense, just there and then, they could still be anywhere, so you had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.

“Please speak loudly and clearly into the flower pot.” — a common not-joke about the Communist societies during the Cold War

Disregard phonecalls and other remote conversations for now, since we already know them to be wiretapped across most common platforms. Let’s look at conversations in a private home.

We now have Google Echo and Amazon Alexa. And while they might have intended to keep your conversations to themselves, out of the reach of authorities, Amazon has already handed over living room recordings to authorities. In this case, permission became a moot point because the suspect gave permission. In the next case, permission might not be there, and it might happen anyway.

Mobile phones are already listening, all the time. We know because when we say “Ok Google” to an Android phone, it wakes up and listens more intensely. This, at a very minimum, means it’s always listening for the words “Ok Google”. IPhones have a similar mechanism listening for “Hey Siri”. While nominally possible to turn off, it’s one of those things you can never be sure of. And we carry these governmental surveillance microphones with us everywhere we go.

If the Snowden documents showed us anything in the general sense, it was that if a certain form of surveillance is technically possible, it is already happening.

And even if Google and Apple aren’t already listening, the German police got the green light to break into phones and plant Bundestrojaner, the flower-pot equivalent of hidden microphones, anyway. You would think that Germany of all countries has in recent memory what a bad idea this is. It could — maybe even should — be assumed that the police forces of other countries have and are already using similar tools.

For our analog parents, the concept of a private conversations was as self-evident as oxygen in the air. Our digital children may never know what one feels like.

And so we live today — from what started as a habit that has already become instinct — in the assumption that every sound we make is overheard by authorities.

Privacy: The dystopic stories of the 1950s said the government would install cameras in our homes, with the government listening in and watching us at all times. Those stories were all wrong, for we installed the cameras ourselves.

In the analog world of our parents, it was taken for completely granted that the government would not be watching us in our own homes. It’s so important an idea, it’s written into the very constitutions of states pretty much all around the world.

And yet, for our digital children, this rule, this bedrock, this principle is simply… ignored. Just because they their technology is digital, and not the analog technology of our parents.

There are many examples of how this has taken place, despite being utterly verboten. Perhaps the most high-profile one is the OPTIC NERVE program of the British surveillance agency GCHQ, which wiretapped video chats without the people concerned knowing about it.

Yes, this means the government was indeed looking into people’s living rooms remotely. Yes, this means they sometimes saw people in the nude. Quite a lot of “sometimes”, even.

According to summaries in The Guardian, over ten percent of the viewed conversations may have been sexually explicit, and 7.1% contained undesirable nudity.

Taste that term. Speak it out loud, to hear for yourself just how oppressive it really is. “Undesirable nudity”. The way you are described by the government, in a file about you, when looking into your private home without your permission.

When the government writes you down as having “undesirable nudity” in your own home.

There are many other examples, such as the state schools that activate school-issued webcams, or even the US government outright admitting it’ll all your home devices against you.

It’s too hard not to think of the 1984 quote here:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. — From Nineteen Eighty-Four

And of course, this has already happened. The so-called “Smart TVs” from LG, Vizio, Samsung, Sony, and surely others have been found to do just this — spy on its owners. It’s arguable that the data collected only was collected by the TV manufacturer. It’s equally arguable by the police officers knocking on that manufacturer’s door that they don’t have the right to keep such data to themselves, but that the government wants in on the action, too.

There’s absolutely no reason our digital children shouldn’t enjoy the Analog Equivalent Rights of having their own home to their very selves, a right our analog parents took for granted.

Europe: Slack has updated its Terms of Service to let your manager read your private conversations in private channels. Our analog parents would have been shocked and horrified at the very idea that their bosses would open packages and read personal messages that were addressed to them. For our digital children, it’s another shrugworthy part of everyday life.

The analog plain old telephone system, sometimes abbreviated POTS, is a good template for how things should be even in the digital world. This is something that lawmakers got mostly right in the old analog world.

When somebody is on a phonecall — an old-fashioned, analog phonecall — we know that the conversation is private by default. It doesn’t matter who owns the phone. It is the person using the phone, right this very minute, that has all the rights to its communication capabilities, right this very minute.

The user has all the usage rights. The owner has no right to intercept or interfere with the communications usage, just based on the property right alone.

Put another way: just because you own a piece of communications equipment, that doesn’t give you any kind of automatic right to listen to private conversations that happen to come across this equipment.

Regrettably, this only applies to the telephone network. Moreover, only the analog part of the telephone network. If anything is even remotely digital, the owner can basically intercept anything they like, for any reason they like.

This particularly extends to the workplace. It can be argued that you have no expectation of privacy for what you do on your employer’s equipment; this is precisely forgetting that such privacy was paramount for the POTS, less than two decades ago, regardless of who owned the equipment.

Some employers even install wildcard digital certificates on their workplace computers with the specific purpose of negating any end-to-end security between the employee’s computer and the outside world, effectively performing a so-called “man-in-the-middle attack”. In a whitewashed term, this practice is called HTTPS Interception instead of “man-in-the-middle attack” when it’s performed by your employer instead of another adversary.

Since we’re looking at difference between analog and digital, and how privacy rights have vanished in the transition to digital, it’s worth looking at the code of law for the oldest of analog correspondences: the analog letter, and whether your boss could open and read it just because it was addressed to you at your workplace.

Analog law differs somewhat between different countries on this issue, but in general, even if your manager or workplace were allowed to open your mail (which is the case in the United States but not in Britain), they are typically never allowed to read it (even in the United States).

In contrast, with electronic mail, your managers don’t just read your entire e-mail, but typically has hired an entire department to read it for them. In Europe, this went as far as the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that it’s totally fine for an employer to read the most private of correspondence, as long as the employer informs of this fact (thereby negating the default expectation of privacy).

Of course, this principle about somewhat-old-fashioned e-mail applies to any and all electronic communications now, such as Slack.

So for our digital children, the concept of “mail is private and yours, no matter if you receive it at the workplace” appears to have been irrevocably lost. This was a concept our analog parents took so for granted, they didn’t see any need to fight for it.

Today, privacy remains your own responsibility.

Pirate Parties: This past weekend, elections were held in Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. The Pirate Party of Luxembourg tripled their support and entered the Luxembourg Parliament with two MPs, and in the Czech Republic, the Pirate Party increased their support further – now receiving a full 17% in Prague.

With 6.45% of the votes of the final tally, the Luxembourg Pirate Party is entering its national Parliament, being the fifth Pirate Party to enter a national or supranational legislature (after Sweden, Germany, Iceland, and the Czech Republic). This may not seem like much, but it is a very big deal, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later. A big congratulations to Sven Clement and Marc Goergen, new Members of Parliament for Luxembourg!

Further, the Czech Republic has had municipal elections, and the Czech Pirate Party showed a full 17.1% support in Prague, the Czech capital, making the Pirates the second biggest party with a very narrow gap to the first place (at 17.9%). This may or may not translate to votes for the Czech national legislature, but is nevertheless the highest score recorded so far for a Pirate Party election day. I understand the Czech Pirates have as many as 275 (two hundred and seventy-five!) newly-elected members of city councils, up from 21 (twenty-one). Well done, well done indeed!

For people in a winner-takes-all system, like the UK or United States, this may sound like a mediocre result. In those countries, there are usually only two parties, and the loser with 49% of the vote gets nothing. However, most of Europe have so-called proportional systems, where 5% of the nationwide votes gives you 5% of the national legislation seats. In these systems, the parties elected to Parliament negotiate between themselves to find a ruling majority coalition of 51%+ of the seats, trying to negotiate common positions between parties that are reasonably close to each other in policy. This usually requires a few weeks of intense negotiations between the elections and the presentation of a successfully negotiated majority coalition.

Further, it could reasonable be asked what kind of difference the Czech Republic or Luxembourg could possibly make on their own in the global information repression. The answer is, a whole lot. The key here is realizing that one country is sufficient to break the global repression of information; the repression is completely dependent on every single country keeping watertight doors. If one single country decides to allow the free movement of culture and knowledge, then all such distribution will immediately be based there. The copyright industry lobby in other countries will protest, quite loudly, but there’s not really anything they can do about it.

And since the problem from a policymaking standpoint has been that the industry-age era politicians consider the Internet-related policy areas completely peripheral in the first place, conceding those policy areas will be seen as very cheap price to bind those votes to a majority coalition.

“One country is sufficient to break the global repression of information.”

A relevant comparison is how Canada has now legalized cannabis at the country level, following many state-level initiatives here and there in the world, and at once, the floodgates are open. Not just for the illegal distribution networks, but more importantly, for legalization everywhere else. As a German politician dryly said today, “what’s possible in Canada is also possible in Germany”, proposing that cannabis should be legalized outright in Germany. I would imagine the tone is similar in most places — or, importantly, many enough places.

The Luxembourg and Prague coalition talks have just started, with an outcome typically expected in a few weeks.

If you order a BMX bike then you will get it prebuilt in a box. To get ready for the first ride with your new BMX bike you have to do some easy steps:

1. put on the bar

2. put on the seat

3. put on the pedals

4. put on the frontwheel

 

At the how to BMX Bike Video you can see how it will look like !

Enjoy to ride your BMX Bike.

Many people asked us already how to change grips at the BMX bike. If you don't know the specialtricks then it will be very difficult. So enjoy to watch the video : how to change your grips !!

For now is in german but english and some other languages will follow soon. Just check out the kunstform?! BMX Shop Youtube account at http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/kunstformbmxshop

 

Sometimes you will get some flat tire. If you want to get some tricks how to change your tube of your BMX bike then you should watch the video.

Actually it's very easy to change the chain of a BMX bike. As well it's not a big thing to make the chain shorter. But without some little tricks it can be a long way to solve this work. That's why you should watch the kunstform?! BMX Shop - How To put a chain video!

Not a lot of BMX rider use a front brake. But actually many tricks like nosetap-no-footed are just possibil with a front brake and so it's just a question of time and a opinionleader will put a frontbreak and will come up with new variations and new tricks. If you want to be this leader then u should watch the kunstform?! BMX Shop How To put a front brake !

 

At the moment it is just in german available but will be with english subtitles soon !

 

 

If you decide for a new crank and you don't know how this to install, then you look at this video. It differs they in reference of structure. There are one piece, two piece and three piece cranks then again have various lengths and various axles. The axle are different from the material, the size and numbers of notchs (splines).

It will happen in the course of time, that's your bottom bracket broke down. If you do not know exactly how you should install a new bearing, then you look at this video! Basically, the bottom bracket differ in "loose ball" and "sealed bearing". The loose ball bottom bracket are installed in many cheap beginners bikes. The bearings in turn differ in different sizes. Starting with the largest outer diameter are US-BB, MID-BB, SPAN-BB and EURO-BB. The EURO-BB you recognize the screw thread and are rarely built on a BMX frame. This is important, first you have to check if you have a 19mm or a 22mm axle crank!

WETHEPEOPLE X kunstform BMX Shop - Get in the Van Tour 2015

The WETHEPEOPLE crew which consisted of Ed Zunda, Dillon Llody, Pete Sawyer, Moritz Nussbaumer and Dima Pyrkhodko did a huge roadtrip trough Germany and visited every day a BMX Shop. At 9th of July the team stopped at kunstform BMX Shop in Stuttgart. First we did a little session in our warehouse. After that we all went to BOOST Skatehalle and spend some great ridin till deep in the night! It was a very awesome time to hang up with Pros of WETHEPEOPLE and we're very happy about that good session. Our friend Sebi Nitsche did a little videoclip just to share some impression. Thanks for WETHEPEOPLE, SPORT IMPORT to make this stop in our BMX Shop possibil and of course a very special thanks to all local riders and customers!

Cheers Daniel !!

In Hard am Bodensee, almost directly on the German-Austrian border, one of the largest and best bowls of Europe is located. This is the location of the Ride Further Tour 2017 from the 2nd - 3rd September with a big stint in the fifth round.

From England have already announced Kriss Kyle, Bas Keep, Matt Priest, Chaz Mailey and Lima Eltham, but that's not all. A total of 16 international pros will go to Hard in the start and then there would be the winners of the four wildcards. Chris Halbritter and Mätti Hilber have already qualified at the BMX Männle Turnier in Tuttlingen, two other wildcards can be won on the 2nd September at the Pre-Quali directly on site. But be careful: the number of participants is limited, so register quickly (register@wayfurther.com)

For more information on the Ride Further Tour 2017 in Hard, visit Facebook.

Robin Kachfi vs. Florian Faust - Game of Bike 2017

Bro Robin Kachfi was with his homies at europe's biggest indoor bike park in Straßbourg, where the guys filmed a new webisode for youtube. Enjoy the video, your kunstform BMX shop team!

Video: Robin Kachfi

Subscribe our youtube channel: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/kunstformbmxshop

The Vans BMX Pro Cup Series, the world’s leading platform for elite BMX park terrain competition, announces the official 2018 World Tour dates and locations for the upcoming season. The celebrated BMX competition series will take place in Australia, California, Mexico and Spain, welcoming a top-ranking competitive field of invited pro BMX riders and Wildcards for their chance to compete on the world stage for a piece of the grand $155,000USD prize.



The Vans BMX Pro Cup Series is also proud to expand the 2018 World Tour with the addition of two new Regional Qualifier events in the United States and Chile, encouraging more talented BMX riders from around the world to earn their way to the Vans BMX Pro Cup World Championships. The five confirmed Regional Qualifier events are open to registration by all professional men and women BMX riders beginning in Santiago, Chile on March 23. The top three podium winners from each Regional Qualifier will advance to the Vans BMX Pro Cup Pro Tour, and secure their invite to the Vans BMX Pro Cup World Championships.



2018 VANS BMX PRO CUP SERIES WORLD TOUR ZEITPLAN



Regional Qualifiers

Santiago, Chile
March 23 & 25

Sydney, Australia
April 27

Woodward East, Pennsylvania
June 28

Guadalajara, Mexico
August 24

Málaga, Spain
September 21



*registration information is available on vansbmxprocup.com



Pro Tour

Sydney, Australia
April 29

Huntington Beach, CA
August 3 & 5

Guadalajara, Mexico
August 25 - 26



World Championship

Málaga, Spain
September 22 - 23



@vansbmxprocup on Instagram
#vansbmxprocup



All the best

Your kunstform BMX Shop Team

The first stop of the Ride Hard Session Tour 2018 will taking place at the 5th of May, at the Trendsport hall in Basel. For the first stop they will host a chilled BMX jam with vouchers and goodies for tricks. If the weather will be nice, you can ride the Half-pipe, flatrails and curbs outside. Sounds good right?

All the best, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

What:
Ride Hard Session Tour #1 Basel

When:
05 May 2018

Where:
Trendsport Basel
Uferstrasse 80
4057 Basel


More infos on Facebook.

Felix Prangenberg, Robin Kachfi and Marcel Gans were for a day in Luxembourg, where the boys met Jack Seymour who showed them around. As you can see in the video, the weather wasn't that nice, but it turned out tough to a great video!

Enjoy the Video, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!



Video: Robin Kachfi



Subscribe our youtube channel: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/kunstformbmxshop

On the 25.07.2018, the Kink Bikes Pro Team will visit our Shop in Stuttgart, Germany. Come over and hang up with the Kink pros, like Nathan Williams, Travis Hughes, Dan Coller and more. Supported by Kink Bikes and Traffic Distribution.

All the best, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

What:
Kink New Wave Germany Tour 2018

When:
25th July

Where:
kunstform BMX Shop
Rothebühlstr.63
70178 Stuttgart


More infos on Facebook.

On the 25.07.2018, the Kink Bikes Pro Team visited our Shop in Stuttgart, Germany. Travis Hughes, Dan Coller and Ben Basford killed it at our stockroom and on the streets of Stuttgart! Check out the whole video now!

Enjoy the video, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!



Video: Robin Kachfi



Subscribe our youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/kunstformbmxshop

Xmas and New year is getting closer and some people ask us for our opening times during the holidays. Usually we close our BMX Shop in Stuttgart on 24th and 31th.

Opening Times 21.12.2018 - 31.12.2018

21.12.2018 - 12pm - 6pm (last shopping before xmas)
22.12.2018 - 10am - 3pm
24.12.2018 - closed
25.12.2018 - closed
26.12.2018 - closed
27.12.2018 - 12pm - 6pm
28.12.2018 - 12pm - 6pm
29.12.2018 - 12pm - 6pm
31.12.2018 - closed


Notes for shipping orders:

German Shipping

All orders with all products "in stock" which we will get till 21.12.2018 12pm will right in time for xmas.

International Shipping

For sending parcels to a recipient outside Germany, the following deadlines apply:

In neighboring countries: 17.12.2018
To other European countries: 13.12.2018
In non-European countries: 07.12.2018

We wish you merry xmas and a happy new year.

Your kunstform BMX Shop Team

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