Big Uncle: privacy and surveillance

Editor's Notes

• #2: © Two Hills Ltd 2014 Created and published by Two Hills [email protected] www.twohills.co.nz PO Box 57-150, Mana Porirua 5247 New Zealand This work by Two Hills Ltd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Content must be attributed to "Two Hills Ltd www.twohills.co.nz by The IT Skeptic".
• #3: Some nervousness: outside my area of expertise and many of you may not agree with my views. Flying at my limit I wrote this Big Uncle paper ten years ago. It still holds true. The research I did for this version has probably got me on an NSA list though. immense amounts of data are assembled about us, gradually eroding privacy. The application of advanced technologies gives us hope of finding the evil terrorist needle in that haystack. Modern concepts of privacy are just that: modern. In most places and times, people live with far less privacy than the Western world has become accustomed to. Now things are returning to normal: get over it. We can be quite apathetic about much of this change, but the community will speak up whenever it goes too far – defining the limits through outcry.
• #4: More security systems that intrude into our privacy are inevitable given the rise of terrorism. Society will get used to conceding privacy over time. But the initial reaction of many to these more integrated security systems will be that they represent “Big Brother”. Originally Big Brother was the supreme ruler in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful… Nobody has ever seen Big Brother... BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU… 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… You had to live … in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and … every movement scrutinised” In contemporary usage Big Brother is a mythical entity who is all knowing, all powerful, secretive and despotic. The image is often invoked in privacy discussions, always pejoratively
• #5: If we accept that increased security is essential in response to modern threats, we must all ensure that the resulting erosion of privacy does not result in an erosion of freedom and democracy. It especially falls on IT workers to ensure technology is put to work benevolently. The result of increased security does not have to be Big Brother. It can be “Big Uncle”: a powerful force working in the interests of the community to preserve and protect. Smokey the Bear with wiretaps.
• #6: the organisations around us watch us: governments, employers and corporations. This is generally done for security, to detect fraud, or for marketing. Their sources of data are proliferating: • mailing lists, subscriptions, memberships • tax, customs, permits, licenses • offences and fines • EFTPOS, ATM • web traffic, cookies , social networks, e-commerce • emails, SMS, VOIP, traditional phone • mobile phone location • public transport, tolls • physical building and car-park access • CCTV : license plates, face recognition • Smart tags (RFID), smart cash • Internet of Things
• #7: A top United Nations human rights official released a report Wednesday that blasts the United States' mass surveillance programs for potentially violating human rights on a worldwide scale. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay also praised whistleblower Edward Snowden and condemned U.S. efforts to prosecute him. "Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected," she said. "We need them."In particular, the surveillance programs violate Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I know some in this audience won’t agree with me but Transparency is a foundation of democracy Snowden (and Bradley – now Chelsea - Manning) is revealing the actions of agencies who overstepped the bounds of their mandate We may snicker at Manning, and Snowden is gay. Perhaps you need to already be an outsider in order to destroy your own life for the sake of the many. All agencies should stand accountable (we will come back to this)
• #8: On the other hand, I’m not an anarchist The state has a duty to protect us These agencies are acting to do what they think is right (within their community’s own cognitive capture) So I’m not talking here about the power of surveillance, I’m talking about the power of killing Technology has put the power of mass death into the hands of a few lunatics Guy Fawkes worked for weeks carting gunpowder into the cellars of the Houses of Parliament. Now the same destructive power is carried in a suitcase or backed up in a van full of fertiliser. Some famous battles in history killed less people than 9/11
• #9: • Statistical analysis: deviance reporting (“take the ratio of funds transferred to declared income and investigate the top 2%”) • Pattern analysis: exception reporting (“no-one has signed on from there before” or “this individual has never come in at night before” or “there are an unusual number of deductions happening from this country”) • Profiling: (“this individual will probably react this way”) the application of advanced technologies gives us hope of finding the evil needle in the haystack. And the stakes are too high not to try. As our security capabilities become more advanced, the world is changing to make it all the more urgent that we deploy these capabilities. As we face escalating terrorism, hacking and identity theft, it is clear society must respond to protect itself. But to do so raises challenges. How do we protect without destroying what we seek to protect: freedom and democracy? How can we use the collected data for the benefit of its subjects? How will we respect the right to privacy?
• #10: What is “normal” privacy anyway? The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy may or may not have said that consumer privacy issues are a "red herring… You have zero privacy anyway… Get over it".
• #11: Expectations of total privacy are a Twentieth Century phenomenon, that emerged as we moved away from communal housing and village living. There is no reason why they can not be rolled back again. The issue is that it takes time to change something so conservative and personal. In a 1968 talk on privacy in the electronic age, sociologist Marshall McLuhan argued that it was the coming of a new technology – books – and the "closed-off architecture" needed to read and study that had forged the sense of the private self.
• #13: Teens are learning how to obfuscate their identity Whitewalling Multiple personas Snapchat "I agree that the online persona has become a kind of double," Josh Cohen says. "But where in Dostoevsky or Poe the protagonist experiences his double as a terrifying embodiment of his own otherness, we barely notice the difference between ourselves and our online double. I think most users of social media would simply see themselves as creating a partial, perhaps preferred version of themselves.“http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/internet-death-privacy-google-facebook-alex-preston academic and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen. Cohen's book, The Private Life (2013),  But none of this hides Big Data from the state and corporations
• #14: I have no use for an anonymous network. I live in a free country and I work for myself. My tastes in pornography are within the law. I answer to no man and I stand by anything I say ... or I retract it :) I understand the need for some people to have anonymity: homosexuals in Muslim countries, intellectuals in Australia, the clinically paranoid everywhere... but I do feel the demand for anonymity is overstated. I can present valid use cases where theft is a reasonable action, or even killing. Presenting a few emotive situations doesn't make a rational argument. I believe there are many more undesirable use cases for anonymity, such as stalking, trolling, vandalism, terrorism, extortion, character assassination, organised crime, and paedophilia. I distrust anyone who feels the need to be anonymous. Personally I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. For 99% of human history those around you knew far more about you than Google ever will. We lived in small communities. We were born and died in the same place. Your neighbours knew when you whacked your kids, they knew the state of your bowels. if something was stolen they had a pretty good idea who did it. If you shouted "down with the government" they knew exactly who you were, so you better damn mean it, and not be some teenager intoxicated by rebellion and half-baked idealism (and anonymity).
• #15: For an extreme position on rolling back privacy, see the views of David Brin: “What you can show throughout history is that openness and light has increased the freedom of people. In other words, privacy doesn't bring you freedom, it comes from freedom. But accountability is the one thing without which freedom utterly dies.” Downloaded from hotwired.lycos.com, now gone. High levels of privacy are mostly a phenomenon of large wealthy cities. In poorer urban communities and small towns and villages, people draw together and expose their lives to family and neighbours in return for the security and protection it brings.
• #16: This whole idea of anonymity and privacy is a passing modern phenomenon - and incidentally it is the root of many modern ills. It was fun while it lasted but the internet is evaporating it again. Humans have adapted to living in a state of close intimacy for most of the last 100,000 years and now we have to again. I'm not saying that is a desirable or undesirable thing. I'm making a rational observation of fact. To desire to stop that incoming tide is the irrational response, not mine. So my case is that we shouldn't leap to the assumption that anonymity is some fundamental human right. It hasn't been for most of our history; privacy only was possible in the situation where sheer numbers overwhelmed our ability to remain connected as a community; and that connectedness has been inevitably restored by technology whether you like it or not. It is not just the internet. Mobile communications, cameras in every phone and building, RFID, smart dust... Connectivity and intimacy are being restored - fast. Get over it. Welcome to the global village If you want to take a fundamentalist position beyond rational argument, I predict much unhappiness for you because privacy will go no matter how much you shout against the tide. Anonymity empowers the evil more than the good. Technology puts forces in the hands of evil that are unprecedented, e.g. nukes. I predict society will return to a more connected state including a reduction in privacy in order to moderate the behaviour of the community. We have to. A few more 9/11s will make that clear.
• #17: Public expectations of privacy will change as we get used to exposing so much of our lives electronically. Has your attitude to using your credit card online changed over the past ten years? Do you allow cookies on your PC? Did you always? Do you even think about the EFTPOS trail you leave? Even in modern times we concede privacy to others who watch over us. Doormen are allowed to watch our coming and going in return for their protection. Neighbours are given permission to spy on our homes through friendships or within the framework of Neighbourhood Watch. Local police patrol our streets, allowed to pry with more freedom than other citizens. We agree as a condition of employment to clock in and out of the job, to pass through access control systems, to let our employer watch and police our web surfing and email at work, to be answerable for our whereabouts and activities during work hours.
• #18: Flybuys have dumped their toolbar: more than a year to collect the 2000 points required to get a $10 gift card, according to the Lifehacker website. http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/8826046/Qantas-wants-to-monitor-your-web-activity
• #19: According to The Economist “A society capable of constant and pervasive surveillance is being rapidly built around us, sometimes with our co-operation, more often without our knowledge … Occasionally there is a burst of publicity about some particularly intrusive new method of data collection. But once the fuss is over, the public acquiesces in the surrender of more information—until the next revelation… Each benefit—more security against terrorists or criminals, better government services, higher productivity at work, better medical care, a wider selection of products, more convenience, more entertainment—will seem worth the surrender of a bit more personal information, or a marginal increase in monitoring. Yet the cumulative effect of these bargains, each seemingly attractive on its own, will be the relentless destruction of privacy.” This ambivalence will work itself out over time. Naturally there will always be a dissenting view, but the trend is for an increasing proportion of the community to accept greater intrusions into privacy in return for greater security (among other benefits). And you know what? Most people don't care. They sell their life story for a few loyalty points. They happily fill in shopper profiles. I quite like the idea of only having to put up with advertising that is actually relevant to me. And that if I fall down a hole somebody will come looking for me.
• #20: We will allow access control systems to know more about us (e.g. biometrics) so that they can recognise when our identity has been stolen. Any human gatekeeper knows that a wealthy senior woman is unlikely to look like a 14-year-old school-boy, but currently anybody on the Web can pass themselves off as someone else with a minimum of credentials. If two things are known about us already, it should be OK to put them together in order to spot the unexpected, just as a human might do. We will allow authorities to find us via our mobile phone when we have crashed the car or had a heart attack or wandered with dementia, but trust them not to tell our spouse we are philandering or to map our political activities. We will delegate trust to peers (family, colleagues, and friends) to allow them to access our email when we are sick, to vouch for us when we forget our passwords, to ask the building access system where we are. Most of all, we will recognize that rights to privacy that we conceded and the trust we delegated in the physical domain can logically have an equivalent in the electronic world, so long as it is on the same terms.
• #21: In the most dystopian view, Dave Eggers's 2013 novel The Circle paints a portrait of an America without privacy, where a vast, internet-based, multimedia empire surveys and controls the lives of its people, relying on strict adherence to its motto: "Secrets are lies, sharing is caring, and privacy is theft."
• #22: But they’ll only ever get so much:  "When we seek to intrude on the other's privacy, whether with a telephoto lens, a hacking device or our own two eyes, we're gripped by the fantasy of seeing their most concealed, invisible self. But the frustration and disappointment is that we only ever get a photograph of the other, an image of their visible self – a mere shadow of the true substance we really wanted to see. The most private self is like the photographic negative that's erased when exposed to the light.“http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/internet-death-privacy-google-facebook-alex-preston
• #23: in 2012 when Target basically “knew” a 16-year-old girl was pregnant before her own father did. The store’s predictive analytics identified her as pregnant based on certain buying patterns and started sending her ads for baby products. Facebook “emotion contagion.” Facebook tested 689,003 unknowing users to see if changing what was posted in their news feed could alter the emotional outlook reflected in their own posts Drip (Data Retention and Investigatory Powers) bill in the UK What do these have in common? There was a backlash! The very fact you heard about them means there was protest Society does fight back – it moderates excess Sometimes we over-react, e.g European privacy laws, but that’s OK, it will level out the Clipper chip, attempts to restrain encryption, Australia’s attempt at a compulsory identification card And of course Snowden, and now The Intercept leaking more NSA secrets. two founders of The Intercept, writer Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras I’m not saying this spells the end of privacy: even in the most communal societies there are constraints in place to preserve some level of privacy. Except in the most despotic societies, this level is set by the community through their assent, or more often through dissent when the line is crossed. The response to excesses such as, and of course the Snowden revelations shows this. As another example, railfans quickly pushed back on the heavy-handed post-9/11 security on railroads. Or look at the pressure TSA come under when they get carried away (quite rightly!).
• #24: Society does fight back – it moderates excess Sometimes we over-react, e.g European privacy laws, but that’s OK, it will level out the Clipper chip, attempts to restrain encryption, Australia’s attempt at a compulsory identification card And of course Snowden, and now The Intercept leaking more NSA secrets. two founders of The Intercept, writer Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras Except in the most despotic societies, this level is set by the community through their assent, or more often through dissent when the line is crossed. The response to excesses shows this. the NSA is losing its hacker support "We've gone backwards about 10 years in the relations between the good guys and the US government," said Alex Stamos, a veteran security researcher http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/9003494/NSA-revelations-hurt-hacker-collaboration As another example, railfans quickly pushed back on the heavy-handed post-9/11 security on railroads. Or look at the pressure TSA come under when they get carried away (quite rightly!).
• #25: If we accept that increased security is essential in response to modern threats, we must all ensure that the resulting erosion of privacy does not result in an erosion of freedom and democracy. It especially falls on IT workers to ensure technology is put to work benevolently. As business and government work together to put in place standards and controls, more trust will be conferred on security systems, ceding privacy to them so that they may protect us. Security systems of increasing sophistication will, with our permission, manage complex data from multiple sources to detect and respond to threats to our community and our businesses. They will provide benevolent security, we hope.
• #26: No technology is inherently good or evil. It is up to the community to apply it as we see fit. The loss of privacy in general, and the rise of surveillance in particular, can be good or bad.
• #27: Communities get the government they deserve. Despotism arises with the tacit consent of the majority, and is overthrown through rejection by the majority (or a powerful minority). IT professionals are at the centre of the implementation of all modern security measures. We owe it to ourselves, our professionalism and our community to ensure that these measures are imposed with benevolent intent: and to blow whistles when they are not. The world has changed for the worse. Security will increase and privacy decrease. Advanced technologies will deploy to make it so. The IT industry has a central role in ensuring that technology delivers the benevolent security of Big Uncle, not the despotism of Big Brother. I'm optimistic. We've run democracy pretty well and it is spreading globally (unless militant Islam has its way). We can Big Uncle