The right to be forgotten.

The great dream of John Perry Barlow and other Internet pioneers back in the 1990s was that it would become a force for human freedom—that government and corporations would become transparent, and that individuals, through the power of cryptography, would be empowered to act freely and anonymously.

Instead individuals are becoming more and more transparent not only to police and spy agencies, but to employers, lenders, credit rating agencies and advertisers.   The fact that the information is not necessarily accurate or complete makes the situation worse.

It is corporations and government agencies that have the power to alter records and send embarrassing facts down the memory hole, as Winston Smith did in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  

This is not a question of technology, or at least not exclusively a question of technology.  It is a question of whether we the people have the power and the will to set legal limits to power and enforce those limits.

We should start by insisting on transparency of government.  We can’t protect our privacy until we have the means of knowing what is done to invade or privacy.   And we can’t rely on government to protect us from corporate exploitation if its operations are hidden from us.

LINKS

Yes, Jimmy Wales, There Is a Right to Be Forgotten by Ted Rall for PandoDaily.

The Internet With a Human Face by Maciej Ceglowski at the Beyond Tellerand 2014 Conference in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Surveillance, corporate and governmental

Click on Ted Rall’s Rallblog for more from this cartoonist.

We need transparency more than privacy

When I start to rant about the NSA and its threat to the right of privacy, some of my friends point out that I already gave up much of my right to privacy years ago.

In return for a supermarket discount card, I let the supermarket monitor my purchase and (no doubt) sell the information to advertising agencies.  The same with my credit card company.  The same with Google.   There’s lots of information about me available on-line, and anybody with access to all of it can put it together to draw a picture of me—which may or may not be accurate.

Most of this doesn’t bother me partly because it doesn’t touch on the things I really want to keep private, but more importantly, it is largely harmless.  Amazon’s computer algorithm guesses what books I might like, sometimes correctly and sometimes not, but this is something that doesn’t affect my life.

On the other hand, when a credit rating agency compiles information about me behind my back, this can do me great harm, even if the information is incorrect.  I can image the NSA using algorithms similar to Amazon’s to guess what kind of political activity I might like.  All this affects my life, but in the case of the credit rating, it is very difficult to correct wrong information and, in the case of the NSA, I don’t even know what it is.

All this put me in mind of a book some friends told me about when it first came out in 1997—David Brin’s The Transparent Society.  I never read it, but I’m familiar with Brin’s argument.  He said that improvements in recording and information processing technology, plus the Internet, make it possible to discover more about what people are doing than ever before.

The question for Brin is not whether government and corporations know what we the people do as whether we the people know what they do.  Rather than engage in a futile effort to prevent the use of universally available technology, we the people should use it to level the playing field.

He gave the example of the surveillance cameras that are ubiquitous in Britain and more and more common in the USA.  Rather than get rid of them, he said, make the recordings universally available.

Brin coined the word sousveillance as an alternative to surveillance—scrutiny from below rather than scrutiny from above.   Imagine being able to access what the surveillance camera sees, in real time or on your smart phone.  Wouldn’t this contribute just as much to public safety as having somebody at a police station trying to monitor all the cameras?

As for myself, I think it is a good thing, not a bad thing, that there is a public record of what goes on in public places.  If I get into an altercation with someone, especially a police officer, and there is a dispute as to what happened, I am glad there is a public record so that the judge doesn’t have to decide whose word to take.

Barack Obama back in the days when he was an Illinois state senator got the legislature to pass a bill for videotaping of police interrogations to be made available to juries.  That’s a positive example of transparency.  Another is the citizens videotaping police when they make arrests.  It is a reasonable tradeoff that the police make their own videotapes, provided they are available to the public and especially to courts.

This is a deep and complicated subject.   Biven a choice, I would rather know what government and corporate officials are doing that affects me than to be able to hide from them.   I want to take down the one-way mirror through which they watch me, and replace it with a pane of glass through which we both can see each other.  What do you think?

The secret state and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Ladar Levison, who closed down his Lavabit e-mail service rather than comply with a secret government order, is in the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma situation.

He and other business owners would be better off if they stuck together and resisted the government’s secret demands in the courts.  But because of the government’s gag orders, none of them has any way of knowing whether others are fighting the same battle or they are all alone.

Levison is forbidden to say just what the government ordered him to do and what his objection was.  His secret appeal against a secret order will be tried in secret.  This is crazy.   This is bizarre.  It is like some unpublished short story by Franz Kafka.

We have a huge national security apparatus which operates in secret.  The President of the United States issues secret orders for assassinations of people deemed national enemies, based on a secret legal ruling.  These operations are subject to review by a secret court.  We the people are supposed to be reassured by congressional committees which receive secret testimony they are not allowed to tell us about.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, writing about the Nazi and Soviet regimes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, said that the aim of totalitarian governments was to destroy all institutions that stood between the individual and absolute power, so that any person who dared dissent felt helpless and alone.

We’re not in that situation in the United States—not yet.   But we do have a growing totalitarian mentality.  Washington is full of politicians and commentators who labels as a “narcissist”  anyone who defies authority in the name of conscience.

If the United States exists 30 years from now with liberty under law, it will be because of brave individuals such as Ladar Levison, who was willing to sacrifice a business he spent 10 years building up rather than sacrifice the liberties of his fellow citizens.

Thoughts and links on NSA spying 6/21/13

I don’t think the National Security Administration’s spy program is the U.S. government’s worst abuse of power.

Death warrants based on the President’s sole judgment, signature strike killings based on patterns of behavior, imprisonment of people at Guantanamo Bay who are not accused of any crime, acts of war based on the President’s sole judgment, prosecution of whistle-blowers for exposing wrongdoing—all these are far worse abuses, although of course made easier by all-pervading government secrecy.

It is a fact that we, the people, do not know the whole story about the NSA.  Maybe if we knew the whole story we would think differently, but I doubt it.  To think that people can be trusted to exercise power in secret and without accountability goes against both human nature and the historical record.

The NSA is part of an international intelligence-gathering system, set up in 1947, which continues British-American wartime intelligence cooperation, and links the NSA predecessor organization (the NSA was officially created in 1952) with Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CES) and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

This makes laws against spying on American citizens essentially meaningless.  There is no law against the GCHQ spying on American citizens, nor against sharing the information with the U.S. government.   During the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher reportedly wanted to tap the conversations of cabinet ministers she suspected of being disloyal.  Canada’s CES did the job for her.

Click on ECHELON: America’s Secret Global Surveillance Network for a 1998 article by Patrick S. Poole giving the historical background, including the Thatcher anecdote.

Click on The Brits Are Spying On Us — They’ve Got ‘More Access’ Than the NSA for a current report by John Reed for Foreign Policy magazine.

Click on GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for access to the world’s communications for a current report by The Guardian.  [Added 6/22/13]

Click on What do we know about Canada’s eavesdropping policy? for a current report by CBC News.

A congressman told CNET last week that he was told by the NSA that it in fact does have the power to listen to individual phone calls.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant in the briefing said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday [June 13]  that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

A Nadler spokesman later said that Nadler accepts NSA’s assurance that it doesn’t eavesdrop on individual phone calls.  My guess is that the NSA technology simply sweeps up everything that is electronically available and stores it, but only looks at individual messages when somebody in the NSA decides there is some reason to do so.

Click on NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls for the full report from Declan McCullagh of CNET.

The Washington Post reported that the NSA has four surveillance programs—MAINWAY and MARINA, for collecting “metadata” on who calls whom, when and where; PRISM for Internet communications; and NUCLEON, which collects intercepted telephone calls.

Click on U.S. surveillance data includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadata for the Washington Post report by Barton Gellman.

The Obama administration says that NSA spying is legal and transparent because it is under the supervision of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court and because it gives limited information to certain Senators and Representatives who are not allowed to tell what they know.

Click on Fisa court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process  and The top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant for Glenn Greenwald’s reports to The Guardian on why these assurances mean little or nothing.

In terrorist attacks ranging from the 9/11 attacks to the Boston marathon bombings, enough information was available to the authorities to stop the attacks.   The problem was noticing the vital information hidden among all the meaningless information.  If your problem is finding needles in haystacks, it doesn’t help to pile up ever-bigger haystacks.

Click on The Dirty Little Secret About Mass Surveillance: It Doesn’t Keep Us Safe for more about this on Washington’s Blog, which, by the way, has excellent continuing coverage and links on the whole NSA scandal.

Another problem is that the more data is piled up, the more frequently mistakes will be made.  Everybody who has suffered from an error on their credit record knows how hard it is to correct that record.  Imagine how much worse it would be for an agency that operates in secret and that does not admit mistakes.

Click on Why Should We Even Care If the Government Is Collecting Our Data? for more about this by Rebecca J. Rosen of The Atlantic Monthly.

Click on NSA Scandal: What It Would Take to Stop the Spying for final thoughts by Jesse Walker in Reason magazine.

It’s the Democrats who back NSA spying

Click to view.

Click to view

Back during the Bush administration, many Democrats, including Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden, opposed warrant-less wiretapping.   But now that the Democrats are in power, there has been a change of mind.

It is a great example of how much politics is a matter of group loyalty rather than loyalty to principle.  Obamaphiles are in favor of whatever President Obama favors, and Obamaphobes are opposed, no matter what.

Presidents Ronald Reagan was noted for “dog whistles”—phraseology that the general public didn’t notice, but that reassured conservative Christians that he really was on their side.  President Obama has a genius for liberal dog whistles.  Liberals believe he is on our side at heart in spite of all the things he actually does.

Click on Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-Terror Tactic for the complete results of the Pew Research poll.

Click on Americans Disapprove of Government Surveillance Programs for the complete result of the Gallup poll.

Both Pew and Gallup found that the NSA surveillance program gets more support from Democrats than Republicans.

What do Americans think about NSA spying?

Source: Huffington Post

Different public opinion polls show widely different results on what Americans think about National Security Administration surveillance.   I think the difference is explained partly on how the questions were worded, and partly on when the questions were asked.

If you asked me whether I think the NSA should spy on suspected terrorists, I would answer, yes, of course, if they have good reason to think somebody might be a terrorist, they should put the person under surveillance.  That is a different thing from having the NSA gather up phone records of all Americans, or on having Homeland Security agencies spy on Americans who are exercising their constitutional right peaceably to assemble or to petition the government for redress of grievances.

My reaction to Edward Snowden’s report on the NSA PRISM program was immediate and negative because of my pre-existing belief that the Obama administration is not acting in good faith.  If I had not been following the question, I would have been much slower to make up my mind.

I’m glad there still are many Americans who value the right of privacy, and who have not been stampeded into giving up this basic right.

Click on Majority Views Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-Terror Tactic for Pew Research’s summary of its polling.

Click on Americans Disapprove of Government Surveillance Programs for Gallup’s summary of its polling.

Click on Actually, Americans aren’t shrugging off NSA surveillance for a report from the Christian Science Monitor.

Biden 2006 vs Obama 2013 on NSA surveillance

Click on U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms for a report from Bloomberg Business News on the extent of data gathering.

President Obama says that the National Security Agency does not use its surveillance capability to listen to individual phone calls.  It only monitors patterns of calls.  But patterns can tell you a lot.   Click on Using Metadata to find Paul Revere for a theoretical example.

Do you think you have nothing to fear because you have done nothing wrong?  Click on You commit three felonies a day.

What we know and don’t know about the NSA

We know that the National Security Agency has the capability of eavesdropping on our phone calls, reading our e-mail and accessing our confidential financial and medical records.   Spokesmen say the NSA doesn’t actually do any of these things.  They say the NSA may check who someone calls or e-mails, but not the content of the communication.

Maybe this is true.   There’s no way, except by way of future leaked information, to verify whether it is true or not.   It comes down to a question of trust.   President Obama draws up secret assassination lists, orders military interventions on his own authority and relentlessly prosecutes anybody who reveals what he is doing in the name of the American people.   Can we trust someone like that with this additional power?  Can we trust anybody with this power?  I wouldn’t even trust myself with the power that Obama claims.

The Pew Foundation’s public opinion poll, shown below, indicates that I’m not alone in distrusting the government.   Public distrust in government is long-standing and well-founded, going back to the Founders.   Government is a useful and sometimes useful means of doing certain things, just as corporations are.  What we distrust is government officials, or for that matter corporate executives, who exercise great power without accountability.

A hidden world, still growing beyond control

Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William R. Arkin wrote a fine series three years ago about the out-of-control growth of secret national security and intelligence agencies.   The recent PRISM disclosures make it more relevant than ever.  Here’s their lede, following by some of my miscellaneous thoughts:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

via washingtonpost.com.

The fact that an enormous amount of money is being spent, and nobody knows quite how to account for it, has a corollary:  Some people are making a lot of money, and have a vested interest in keeping their income stream.

The PRISM program is not a new concept, although its scope is unprecedented.  As early at 1997, before the 9/11 attacks, the FBI was using a software program called Carnivore to monitor and process electronic and e-mail communication.

The Total Information Awareness program supposedly was abolished in 2003.  Click to view.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency created what it called the Total Information Awareness program, which gathered and correlated information on everyone in the United States, including phone calls, social networks, credit card records, phone calls and medical records.   When it became known, there was a great public outcry, and Congress de-funded the program in 2003.  But evidently the essential part of the program continued to exist.

I remember J. Edgar Hoover and the enormous power he wielded because of the Federal Bureau of Investigations files.  If you were a politician or public official and you displeased J. Edgar Hoover, chances are that the FBI had a file on you, and that any sexual, political or financial indiscretion would be leaked to favored members of the press.   He gathered and leaked information on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he regarded as a Communist.  No President dared interfere with him.

Now maybe there isn’t anybody in the National Security Agency who is exactly like J. Edgar Hoover.   Maybe the NSA is completely focused on its mission to learn about potential threats to the United States, and never abuses its power.  Behind the NSA cloak of secrecy, there’s no way to tell.  Knowledge is power.  When a secret government agency potentially can know everything there is to know about citizens, but citizens have no right to know anything about the secret agency, that is a power imbalance that is not compatible with American freedom and democracy as I was brought up to believe in them.

I remember that the government did have all the information it needed to stop the 9/11 attacks, including reports of suspicious characters taking pilot lessons, but not bothering to learn how to land the planes.  The problem was not a lack of information, but lack of ability to sort out the wheat from the chaff.   I don’t think that indiscriminately collecting more chaff necessarily makes the country safer.

Another aspect of the PRISM program is what it does to the ability of companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple to compete overseas.  No foreign company will want to buy a product that contains a trapdoor for the National Security Agency.   As somebody remarked, it would be as if every Japanese car contained a tracking device so that Japanese intelligence could know your location at all times.   You probably would not be reassured if the Japanese government said that they only tracked foreigners and not Japanese citizens.

Big Brother really can be watching you

The National Security Agency, the top-secret U.S. electronic eavesdropping agency, has access to your e-mails, Internet searches and data files if you use Google, Apple, Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook or any of the other major e-mail, search, video or communications services.

The program, called Prism, was revealed by The Guardian newspaper in London.  The Guardian also broke news of a secret court order to Verizon to turn over call records to the NSA.  Presumably this is the tip of the iceberg.   The call records will give the NSA clues on who to check, the Prism program will give the capability of surveillance.   I wonder if the Associated Press or James Rosen of Fox News use Verizon or some other service.

Julian Assange of Wikileaks, reviewing a book entitled The New Digital Age in last Sunday’s New York Times, wrote that Google’s technology epitomizes the death of privacy and the advance of authoritarianism.  He may have written more truly than he realized (or maybe not).

This same weak the court-martial of Bradley Manning began at Fort Meade, Md., home of the NSA.   The principle on which Manning was court-martialed is that the U.S. government has a right to keep its activities secret from the people.   The principle on which the NSA operates is that the people have no right to privacy from the government.   Neither principle is compatible with American freedom as I was brought up to believe in it.

Cypherpunks uncut

I think the Internet is potentially one of the greatest tools to promote human freedom and access to ideas and knowledge.  I think it also is potentially one of the greatest tools of Big Brother for surveillance and censorship.  For this reason I was particularly interested in the two-part series on the Cypherpunks on Julian Assange’s The World Tomorrow program.  The RT network recently released an uncut version of Assange’s Cypherpunk interviews, which I also viewed with great interest.

The first part is more than an hour long and the second part is two hours long, and my guess is that most people who view this post won’t have the time or the interest to watch them in their entirety.  But I am posting them anyhow, for whoever might be interested, and also am linking to them in my Documentaries menu on the right.

The Cypherpunks are a loose movement whose goal is to promote individual privacy by providing encryption that would allow people to prevent unauthorized people, including government agents, from reading their private communication.  Assange interviewed three notable Cypherpunks—Andy Muller-Maguhn of Germany, a member of the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker organization; Jeremie Zimmerman of France, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net, which advocates for free circulation of knowledge on the Internet; and Jacob Appelbaum of the USA, an independent computer security researcher and a participant in the Tor project to create on-line anonymity systems.

They drew a frightening, but (I think) true, picture of the ability of governments to collect and record every electronic transaction by every individual—e-mails, credit card purchases, Google searches, bank deposits and withdrawals, telephone calls—while themselves operating behind a veil of secrecy.

Applebaum gave an example of a man indicted for posting information on the Internet in violation of a secret law whose text he was not allowed to see.  The judge was allowed to see the law, and the man was acquitted, but presumably the loophole in the law was tightened up.  I have to write “presumably” because there is no way to know.

Muller-Maguhn said that just as the invention of the printing press made everyone a potential reader, the creation of the Internet has made everyone a potential writer.  Anyone, not just professional writers who are able to please professional editors, has the means of writing out what they think and know, and communicating it to the world.  This is valuable and important, and it doesn’t matter that only a little of the writing is of high quality.

These three, and Assange himself, are more libertarian than socialist.  Assange said the three basic freedoms, from which all other freedoms flow, are (1) freedom to communicate, (2) freedom of movement and (3) freedom to engage in economic transactions, and the third may be the most fundamental.  He may have been playing devil’s advocate when he said the latter, but I don’t think so.

I came across these videos on This Day in Wikileaks, a daily blog with daily news and commentary about Wikileaks, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.  I have put a link to it on my Links menu on the right.

I have put a link to Assange ‘The World Tomorrow’ —Cypherpunks uncut version, the Digital Journal version of the interviews, on my Documentaries menu on the right.

Click on Digital Journal: Cypherpunks Part 1 and Part 2 for the original 25-minute broadcasts.

Julian Assange’s The World Tomorrow was broadcast by the RT (Russia Today) network.  It was started by the Russian government for its own purposes, and for that reason should be regarded with skepticism, but it also provides information and ideas not available through the established U.S. TV networks.  In the same way, the Voice of America is an agent of the U.S. government, but provides information to Russians they might not get from their domestic broadcasters.  When I was younger, I never thought I would ever make this comparison, but times have changed.

Julian Assange and the cypherpunks (2)

We live in a world in which information about the private lives of individual citizens is becoming increasingly available to powerful organizations and to governments, and in which the activities of powerful organizations and citizens are increasingly hidden from individual citizens.  Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, sought to penetrate the secrecy of powerful organizations and governments.  The cypherpunk movement sought to protect the privacy of individuals through creation and distribution of cryptography.

Assange, on his The World Tomorrow program, interviewed three leading lights of the cypherpunk movement, Andy Muller-Maguhn, a member of the Chaos Computer Club, a German hacker association; Jacob Applebaum, an independent security researcher involved in the Tor project to create an online anonymity system; and Jérémie Zimmerman, co-founder of the French La Quadrature du Net, which advocates free communication on the Internet.

Assange is under house arrest in Britain, facing deportation to Sweden to face charges of sexual misconduct, from which he fears deportation to the United States to faces charges of espionage.  Yet he manages to attract a wide array of fascinating characters to his weekly TV program, people I don’t think I’d get to see otherwise, and he seems to be having a good time doing it.

Click on Digital Journal for summaries, transcripts and commercial-free videos of the latest and previous World Tomorrow broadcasts.

Click on Julian Assange: the Cypherpunk Revolutionary for a long but interesting and sometimes unflattering article by an Australian about Julian Assange’s background