Professor Cole, I have been a fan of your work, and especially your blog, ever since I took one of your classes at Michigan - "America and Middle Eastern Wars." I've always appreciated your analysis and insight into a part of the world that is so complex, and ultimately so alien to much of the United States.
Hearing that you were targeted in this way by the Bush Administration left me both shocked and outraged on a personal level. This is a frightening abuse of power. I would have liked to believe that these kinds of abuses were left behind in the days of the Vietnam War and Martin Luther King, but with everything that has been revealed recently that appears to have been a naive notion.
I feel motivated to do something to fight this new "shadow government", as you called it - but the problem seems so intractably large that I have no idea where to begin. What would you recommend - writing to congressmen, donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or some other lobbying group? I'm sure that many of your readers would love to hear how they can help.
Actually it depends on the camera and its design. On some, the light can be disabled using a modified driver; certain Logitech cameras you can disable the light through a Windows registry key.
In all cases they would need to hack into a machine to apply the exploit - but there's nothing necessarily saying that the exploit has to be through hardware in all cases. (It may just be that they don't have a way of doing it for cameras that would require hardware hacks - there's nothing in the text saying they can do it for every make and model.)
Professor Cole, I have been a fan of your work, and especially your blog, ever since I took one of your classes at Michigan - "America and Middle Eastern Wars." I've always appreciated your analysis and insight into a part of the world that is so complex, and ultimately so alien to much of the United States.
Hearing that you were targeted in this way by the Bush Administration left me both shocked and outraged on a personal level. This is a frightening abuse of power. I would have liked to believe that these kinds of abuses were left behind in the days of the Vietnam War and Martin Luther King, but with everything that has been revealed recently that appears to have been a naive notion.
I feel motivated to do something to fight this new "shadow government", as you called it - but the problem seems so intractably large that I have no idea where to begin. What would you recommend - writing to congressmen, donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or some other lobbying group? I'm sure that many of your readers would love to hear how they can help.
Actually it depends on the camera and its design. On some, the light can be disabled using a modified driver; certain Logitech cameras you can disable the light through a Windows registry key.
In all cases they would need to hack into a machine to apply the exploit - but there's nothing necessarily saying that the exploit has to be through hardware in all cases. (It may just be that they don't have a way of doing it for cameras that would require hardware hacks - there's nothing in the text saying they can do it for every make and model.)