Every single IT guy, every single manager …

by Daniel on September 23, 2014

I’m sure that this point has been made somewhere or other in the general debate on email spying and the NSA/Snowden revelations, but in my opinion not often enough or forcefully enough. People who want to dismiss the whole thing as “no big deal” are, in my view, totally underestimating the scale of the blind trust that’s required of them. In other words, even opponents of ubiquitous surveillance (like Kieran in this worked example) tend to assume that the institution which has access to your information is the institution which collected it. But that’s not necessarily the case at all.

The Leveson Inquiry in the UK demonstrated that the Police National Computer could be accessed by more or less any tabloid journalist with a phone and an account with a crooked detective agency (which served as the conduit to crooked insiders). The Manning and Snowden revelations, whatever else they’ve shown us about the world, have made it clear that mid-level employees can get access to huge amounts of top secret data as long as they’ve got the wit to smuggle it out on a thumb drive.

So the question is not so much “do you trust the CIA/NSA/MI6/etc?”. It’s “Do you trust every single sysadmin working for these organisations? Every single analyst? Every single middle manager?”. The CIA might not be interested at all in my dull mobile phone conversation metadata, but someone else might – the Leveson inquiry was told how the UK’s PNC was used by one copper to check out his daughter’s new boyfriend. In terms of our personal data, the kind of uses which the agencies want to be allowed to make, while worrying enough in themselves, are the tip of the iceberg. And all the policies which might prevent it from being accessed by blackmailers, tabloid journalists, nosey neighbours and basically anyone else, are themselves top secret and not subject to any sort of legal oversight.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, as you can see; it’s based on the fact that big and complicated systems are set up to malfunction, particularly if they are able to declare themselves above any regulation at all. And the way in which this particular system is set up to malfunction is easily predictable and potentially very damaging to innocent people. I am personally not at the stage where I trust every single person who might be hired for a low level IT job in a security agency, and I’m not sure that I trust an entirely opaque set of safeguards with no accountability either.

{ 80 comments }

1

Doctor Memory 09.23.14 at 12:33 pm

Speaking as a professional sysadmin, you should totally trust me and my peers, and we have absolutely never been known to do just as stupid things with far less sensitive data purely out of boredom or alcohol-fueled poor judgment. If you can’t trust a cohort comprised almost entirely out of young single men notorious for social adjustment problems, who indeed can you trust?

2

Lynne 09.23.14 at 12:44 pm

If no one —no government, no internet company—was permitted to collect this data we wouldn’t have to decide who we trusted with it. I trust no one. That it’s collected at all is scandalous and dangerous.

3

Rich Puchalsky 09.23.14 at 12:45 pm

Just because there was a known scandal in which bored U.S. techs were listening to phone sex calls from U.S. military officers in Iraq home to their spouses doesn’t mean that people have anything to be concerned about.

4

Vladimir 09.23.14 at 12:58 pm

Recall that Snowden was an employee of Booz Allen not the NSA. A belief in the importance of intelligence sharing combined with an expansion of the number of people with security clearances – especially those working at private sector contractors – makes privacy vulnerable. While IT audits and restrictions to access can help keep data safe at agencies like the IRS (though every year a couple of employs at Canada Revenue face discipline for unauthorized access to individual tax payer information) the persistent bureaucratic pressure to share access to their databases is clear vulnerability. I have greater trust in those who are inculcated in the culture of security agencies than those who might just be passing through a temp position at a contractor via short term contracts.

5

Ronan(rf) 09.23.14 at 1:08 pm

The access exists at every level to some degree, though. Back in the day when I used to work in call centres (for a mobile phone provider) we had access to peoples phone logs, and some other semi ‘important’ info, which caused consistent ‘low scale’ problems (ie people giving phone records to jealous boyfriend/girlfriends etc)Worsened, I might add, that this specific companys main customer base was teenagers.
At that level we didnt have access to texts, incoming calls or voice recordings however (which were handled at a higher level, with the procedure being – afaict – you could only access such info through a high enough ranking police officer. I had the impression this was easily enough circumvented though.)
I remember a friend back then who used to work at an insurance company at at entry level, working on the phones, text me to say he’d been looking through my health insurance policy and could get me a better deal (basically, a few pounds off at most)I had to tell him to mind his f*****g business and get out of my account. At that stage I registered everything I could in a made up name (which has come back to be a bit of a pain in the ass now as Ive forgotten most of them)
Point being, I dont know how you counteract this low level snooping.(which is more common and likely to annoy people than the Daily Mail getting hold of your texts)

6

MPAVictoria 09.23.14 at 1:15 pm

This is an issue I truly care about but I seem to be in the minority. Even my partner (who is wonderful in every way) doesn’t understand why I care about privacy. So I am a little worried that this might be a losing battle.

7

bunbury 09.23.14 at 1:18 pm

It’s not even a mere good question. From Geoffrey Prime via passport office corruption (nearly universal according to Google but I had one case where more than 10,000 illegitimate UK passports were sold in mind) through News Group paying policemen on there are continual reports of actual abuse. Even the Manning and Snowden cases illustrate this point. Both were relatively junior and fortunately at somewhat public spirited. Had they been more commercially minded there would have been other opportunities and it’s unclear whether the administrators would even know that security had been breached.

The range of sympathies, incentives and vulnerabilities to blackmail or duress that could lead to abuse is huge. Cult members, stalky exes, religious or political zealots, the greedy, the bad with money, the embarrassed, the scared all potential leaks.

8

Pete 09.23.14 at 1:19 pm

Just to drive this home, there’s also the recent “celebrity nudes hacked from iCloud” scandal, and a bunch of anonymous 4chan hackers have decided they don’t like a speech made by Emma Watson so they’re targeting her for privacy invasion. And the whole ugly #gamersgate mess. There are a lot of angry young male hackers willing to target prominent feminists.

(I keep trying to write a thing on how ‘radicalisation’ of the 4chan crowd parallels the process of turning other young men into Islamic terrorists. Misogyny, violence and access to private “truth” are the common factors)

9

Lynne 09.23.14 at 1:35 pm

The 2005 dystopian novel The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks was prescient about surveillance. The premise was that it didn’t matter how much data was collected, how many cameras were installed on streets, as long as there was no way to look at it all—humans physically couldn’t do all that surveillance. Then technology evolved that could “look” at all of it and people could be spotted almost anywhere in the world from their e-trail. I got my whole family to read this novel but I was the only one blown away. I’m very concerned about loss of privacy. MPAV, like you I worry we may lose this one.

10

Jesús Couto Fandiño 09.23.14 at 1:39 pm

Another angle – the weakening of security protocols and standards by US agencies and their use of 0-day exploits that they will want to remain unpatched means you are not safe from anybody else that realize those “doors” were left open.

11

bunbury 09.23.14 at 1:42 pm

There is also the problem that most of this data is much more effective against McLibel types who don’t really feel they have much to hide than they are against anyone serious about staying below the radar. The result will be like the drunk looking for his keys underneath the streetlight not because he thinks that’s where they are but because that’s where he can see.

12

Tom Slee 09.23.14 at 1:42 pm

Private industry continues to pay even less attention to the “Every single IT guy” problem than some governments.

When the NSA was developing their data collection infrastructure they did not use any of the existing “Big Data” NoSQL databases (Cassandra, HBase) because they had nothing in the way of security controls — anyone with access to the database could access all the database. So they developed Accumulo, now hosted by the Apache Foundation to provide a reasonable security model. (The Apache Foundation continues to help the NSA in its efforts by hosting Accumulo).

From what I can see, decent security controls are low on the list of priorities for most commercial users (see, for example, the feature comparison at http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis and search for “security”).

13

Mario 09.23.14 at 1:49 pm

So the question is not so much “do you trust the CIA/NSA/MI6/etc?”. It’s “Do you trust every single sysadmin working for these organisations?

Indeed. And it’s also a problem for the security agencies themselves, because the piles of data collected in this way are incredibly juicy targets. If you can infiltrate NSA, you can spy on the US in a very cost-effective manner. Snowden was a wake-up call for them too.

Incidentally, the same phenomenon has caused trouble to the tax evasion havens in Europe (Switzerland and Liechtenstein), as any grumpy bank clerk can carry in a thumb drive documents that would have filled a few trucks in the not-so-distant past.

14

William Timberman 09.23.14 at 2:02 pm

The usual temptations apply — to prurience, vigilantism, self-righteousness, envy, etc. It’s also worth mentioning that the grunts are often given much higher-level access than their job descriptions indicate simply because a) there’s too much work that needs doing, b) the access-levels are poorly designed, and don’t match up well with the task assignments, and/or c) their bosses are either lazy or overburdened.

Whether we like it or not, quis custodiet ipsos custodes applies to any system of surveillance. The savants no doubt know this as well or better than we do, but don’t seem to have made much progress in avoiding it. In fact, the more carefully a security system is designed and implemented, the more likely it is to alienate the people tasked with operating it. Cast the seed of general human failing onto this fertile ground, and you won’t necessarily get Das Leben der Anderen, but you’d have to be very lucky not to get Red Road.

15

rea 09.23.14 at 2:10 pm

We have two dogs, and a local grocery store recently mailed us a free dog food sample. The cat-owning neighbor got a free cat food sample. The neighbor without pets got nothing. So data-mining seems fairly ubiquitous–it’s being used to sell pet food!

I don’t really see a solution to all this other than (a) smash all the computers, or (b) learn to live with it. We could make it illegal, but one point made in the original post is that being illegal doesn’t stop it.

16

soru 09.23.14 at 2:21 pm

Not sure I follow some of the details of the logic here. If you are a crooked detective agency, or whatever, surely you would get your data direct from the telecoms company, not from the subset of that data held by the spooks?

The latter is presumably going to be rather-better guarded; subverting even a privatised spy is going to be outside the expense budget of most newspapers. And you would run a realistic risk of being counted as a foreign agent and ending up with a 30 year sentence.

Of course, if you want police data, say ‘which celebrity has just been arrested’, you get it from the police. But for anything else, it seems about as practical as bribing a policeman to find out who you can buy drugs from. They probably know, and it might even conceivably work, but there are rather a lot of cheaper and safer ways of doing the same thing.

I suspect the arguments _for_ privacy and _against_ state surveilance don’t actually have all that much overlap. There are exceptions, like the NSA weakening cryptography standards, but on the whole you could pick any level of the either without much affecting the other.

17

Clay Shirky 09.23.14 at 2:38 pm

There is a related problem, at the level of the machines. Computers don’t “send” data to one another — they can’t in fact do that, given the way digital data and networks work. Instead, they copy data to other machines.

Machine 1{Copy+Delete} -> Machine 2{Copy+Store} looks like the data got sent, but it’s only a simulacrum of me giving you a piece of paper. What tends to happen is M1{Copy+Store in logfile}->M2{Copy+Store}.

And that’s before you factor in the idea of a chain of such machines, and the creation of incremental backups, et al.

Jeff Jonas wrote an interesting thing about this a while ago, “How Many Copies of Your Data?”, discussing how many copies of data get copied and cached. His conclusion is that for data that moves from one organization to another, a thousand copies being created as an orderly side-effect of logging and backups is a perfectly plausible case, and numbers well in excess are not uncommon.
http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2007/08/how-many-copies.html

So it’s not just that there are many people who have access to your data; there are also many copies of your data for those people to have access to.

18

Neel Krishnaswami 09.23.14 at 2:47 pm

It’s also worth mentioning that the grunts are often given much higher-level access than their job descriptions indicate simply because a) there’s too much work that needs doing, b) the access-levels are poorly designed, and don’t match up well with the task assignments, and/or c) their bosses are either lazy or overburdened.

There’s a second issue here — it is only possible to do fine-grained access control if the jobs in questions have been thoroughly Taylorized. In other words, precisely to the extent that sysadmin jobs are not McJobs, this is not possible.

Strangely, this actually makes me more optimistic about the possibility of achieving significant privacy rights — our social will to micromanagement and managerialism is incredibly strong, and if privacy rights align with its logic rather than resist it, matters are perhaps not quite as hopeless as I assumed (given that Moore’s law makes surveillance exponentially cheaper over time).

19

novakant 09.23.14 at 2:57 pm

Nevermind the NSA, the trouble is that you can’t even trust the taxman or the NHS – and not because they’re evil, but because of bog standard stupidity and clumsiness.

HMRC loses two CDs with data of 25 million child benefit claimants on a train

NHS lost track of 1.8m patient records in a year with sensitive information found in public bin and for sale on the internet

20

novakant 09.23.14 at 3:00 pm

21

Brendan Taylor 09.23.14 at 3:03 pm

There’s another critical piece of that question that often goes ignored. It’s not just “do you trust them today?”, it’s “do you trust whoever is in control of that data for as long as it exists – 5, 20, 50 years from now?”.

22

Nick Brooke 09.23.14 at 3:26 pm

See also LOVEINT.

23

Shelley 09.23.14 at 3:41 pm

To my college students “the government” is a far-away and not very threatening entity–asking them if they want their neighbors to have access to their information might be a way of getting them to feel more concern for privacy.

I hate for the government to be portrayed as the enemy, though, when it’s the only weapon we have against the corporations.

24

Phil Koop 09.23.14 at 3:41 pm

The problem is bigger than just unauthorized access by individual members of authorized organizations. Once a security weakness is implemented by design, there is no way to control who uses it. As Bruce Schneier puts it in connection with fake cell phone towers, “We have one infrastructure. We can’t choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don’t. We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy. We can be secure from everyone, or vulnerable to anyone. And I’m tired of us choosing surveillance over security.”

25

Rich Puchalsky 09.23.14 at 3:50 pm

Perhaps concerns like this will eventually lead to non-Anglo countries building a secure infrastructure. Within the U.S., nothing is going to happen. As evidenced by the comment box here on CT, people enjoy the pleasures of censoriousness more than they are afraid of being exposed themselves. Our system is insecure because, at base, the general public wants to be able to scold their neighbors.

26

TM 09.23.14 at 3:53 pm

16: “If you are a crooked detective agency, or whatever, surely you would get your data direct from the telecoms company”

The known solution to this problem is a privacy law that requires the telecoms to delete any connections data after say six months. But now the telecoms are required to keep the data for the surveillance needs of the state!

The German Constitutional Court and the European Court have both in recent years ruled for stronger privacy protection. German telecoms were ordered to delete huge amounts of data. Of course in the US we don’t have any of that legal protection.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung

27

William Timberman 09.23.14 at 3:56 pm

Another thing: despite all the fancy algorithms, these systems are still better at targeting people than they are at separating the wheat from the chaff. This means, among other things, that even though the Tsarnaev brothers were identified and neutralized quickly enough after the Boston Marathon bombings, they apparently couldn’t be identified as potential bombers beforehand, at least not with the current state of the NSA’s dark arts.

It also means that if all you have is a targeting system, you’re most likely to pick targets according to your prejudices or your political ambitions. In Germany, for example, the internal security services spent a fortune monitoring fringe leftist groups, while neo-Nazi cells went about murdering people and infiltrating the security services themselves without anybody seeming to notice. In this country, we spend millions dogging halal markets and anti-G-20 protestors, but throw hissy fits when someone suggests that right-wing militia groups might pose a threat to the public order. Madness, Colonel Nicholson said, as he fell on the detonator. Unfortunately for us, General Alexander had a much broader purview.

28

Lynne 09.23.14 at 3:59 pm

If someone broke into my house and forcibly withdrew a pint of my blood, I would not be worried about who received the blood or who decided who received the blood. I’d be concerned that someone took the blood in the first place.

This preoccupation with how widespread is the access to data seems wrong-headed to me, to put it mildly.

29

Anarcissie 09.23.14 at 4:02 pm

Why is the government the only weapon you have against the corporations? I can think of lots of other weapons. The government (in a capitalist polity) creates the corporations at the behest of, and in the interests of, its ruling class. It doesn’t seem like a very good weapon, even supposing you could wrest it away from the people you want to use it against.

30

TM 09.23.14 at 4:02 pm

“We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy.”

Yep.

31

dsquared 09.23.14 at 4:11 pm

Incidentally, the same phenomenon has caused trouble to the tax evasion havens in Europe (Switzerland and Liechtenstein), as any grumpy bank clerk can carry in a thumb drive documents that would have filled a few trucks in the not-so-distant past.

ACH, I knew there was a segment of this rant of mine (familiar to many wine bars of London over the last few years) which I’d forgotten to put in the post. Thanks Mario.

17: yes this copying feature means that (according to a friend of mine who has made a career out of searching through very big email archives on behalf of large corporations carrying out internal inquiries into illegality) it is basically impossible for a company with more than a couple of thousand employees to delete an email. He has a standing bottle-of-champers bet with his clients that he can send them an email, they can delete it, and then if he can’t subsequently find it somewhere on their system on a misconfigured sever, he’ll buy the bubbly.

32

J Thomas 09.23.14 at 4:13 pm

“We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy.”

For myself, I tend to prefer a world where everybody can spy.

Try to make a world where nobody can spy and the bad guys will put in loopholes that let them secretly spy anyway. And then it becomes something of an open secret but you still can’t do anything about it.

Make it so those same bad guys have to go to a whole lot of expensive effort if they don’t want everybody in the world to spy on them, and I figure I come out ahead. It’s maybe an annoyance if my wife gets to spy on me, but I don’t have any big secrets. It would be worse for me if I thought I could keep secrets, and I tried to, and then I annoyed somebody important and my wife got told everything plus some believable lies.

33

TM 09.23.14 at 4:47 pm

“Make it so those same bad guys have to go to a whole lot of expensive effort if they don’t want everybody in the world to spy on them, and I figure I come out ahead.”

Can you give an be more specific, maybe give an example how that works that you come out ahead?

34

Ralph Hitchens 09.23.14 at 4:51 pm

Not sure the problem is too many sysadmins having access to sensitive data, but rather too few. “Trusted insiders” who go rogue will always be with us, but if you take the long view they really don’t constitute much of a presence. In the classified intelligence world where I spent a good bit of my life, the insider threat alarmists kept pointing to the same handful of people — Pollard, the Walkers, Ames, Hanssen, and lately Manning and Snowden. In too many cases we have only ourselves to blame. Pollard was recognized by most of his colleagues as a nutjob but the Navy kept renewing his TS clearance. Ames got away with it in large part because CIA Counterintelligence and FBI Counterintelligence didn’t communicate. Manning, a very troubled person who clearly should have been relegated by the Army to a less-sensitive position, was instead given access to a network — SIPRNet — that had a sophisticated McAfee security suite with download monitoring and workstation i/o lockdown tools but the sysadmins didn’t implement them. The NSA network surely had fine-grained folder and file access control tools but doesn’t seem to have used them, and for some reason the Agency also seems to have allowed fairly broad internal distribution of sensitive policy documents.

Sysadmin resources, in my experience, are always spread pretty thin and their priorities are, naturally enough, maintaining network “uptime.” Down in the unclassified world people have, in a manner of speaking, “voted with their feet.” Private and public sector business processes began a wholesale migration to the web two decades ago, and the alarming disclosures of network penetration and information compromise don’t get much beyond the 24-hour news cycle. We just don’t seem to worry about it all that much. I think we need to face the fact that in both the classified and unclassified worlds, “trusted insiders” and social-engineering hackers are a cost of doing business.

35

Sumana Harihareswara 09.23.14 at 5:06 pm

Pete @#8: “(I keep trying to write a thing on how ‘radicalisation’ of the 4chan crowd parallels the process of turning other young men into Islamic terrorists. Misogyny, violence and access to private “truth” are the common factors)”

I myself have a similar spiel around a similar analogy and am curious to hear more about yours, especially “access to private ‘truth'” (and may try to tie in some old dsquared insights about escapism, empathy, and caffeine).

36

Bruce Wilder 09.23.14 at 5:11 pm

It’s not that the system is set up to “malfunction” — it is that these systems function in the way that they do, creating vast trails of data. And — this is the critically important “and”, as far as privacy is concerned — it is a fairly simple matter to “connect the dots” as they say across systems, to deduce meaningful information about a person.

Your credit card / debit card data is being recorded and communicated across many systems in the normal functioning of the system for charging a hotel room, a restaurant meal, or a purchase in a store. It doesn’t have to be stolen by hackers, to become known to retailers and banks. Your supermarket “club card” data is being recorded. That last half dozen things you registered for on the web with your Facebook account . . . The police videotaped your face entering a stadium or walking down a London street, and ran it through a face recognition program. Heck, the NSA may have intercepted your last Skype videocall and run your face through their face recognition software. Google has run your Facebook photo through their face recognition system. The police photographed your license plate on the freeway six times in the last day. Your cellphone has tracked your location and served that information to a dozen different apps three times in the last hour. And, it isn’t that hard to link your cellphone data to your debit card to your Netflix account — hey, you just got that iPhone 6 and linked your debit card to the Apple Pay function on the phone and you pay your Netflix account with the same debit card, or you pay through PayPal which you replenish with from the bank account associated with the debit card, and the Internal Revenue folks required PayPal to get your social security number, not to mention the 1577 cookies in your browser and 37 LSO cookies on your computer and umpteen websites that have noted your IP address.

“Privacy” is a pretty flimsy and abstract conceptualization against all of this. It is not going to be solved by a “privacy policy”. The recording of data and the communication (copying and copying and copying, as Clay Shirky reminds us) of data is built into the architecture of the system, to accomplish the functions of the system. It is not a fit of absent-mindedness in the design. Your phone number, your street address, your debit card number, your car license, your tax id, . . . . these identifiers have to be copied, and associated with stuff you do, things you buy, places you go, calls you make, people you contact, . . . . to make this digital world function.

I doubt that university administrators are going to forget to check Twitter accounts before extending the offer to hire in the future. Does any one go un-Googled? Does someone check to see which candidates you contributed to in the last election before doing business with you? Can the tax authorities model your income and outgo better than Quicken? Does your insurance company have access to your medical records? Does your employer check your credit score?

It is the strategic uses of this data, which lag behind the actual compilations of it. I do not think it serves us well to imagine that we are vulnerable only to the “malfunctioning” of the system, the instance where “hackers” “steal” whatever, or the cable guy stumbles on to our porn habits, while admonishing us about uTorrent and copyright infringement.

37

bunbury 09.23.14 at 5:12 pm

I think J Thomas’ view (32 at time of writing) is not unreasonable but it would seem to mean giving up some bits of self image, like being against ID cards in the UK or quoting Ben Franklin’s
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
I also think that making the leap from the wholly true claim that leaving information doors open to the government leaves them open to other people as well to the hard dichotomy between being spied on by everyone or no-one is wrong and unhelpful. I’m pretty sure that we don’t have the option of being spied upon by no-one and most private individuals will not be able to put up their own fake base stations but it is as a counsel of despair that it is really dangerous.
Imposing tight regulation on corporate data holdings and existence threatening penalties for breaches would end careless and gratuitous data grabbing and limit what is available to security services or others on fishing expeditions for example. Establishing access rights and records can help too. The ability to eliminate every email is not the goal or even necessary to make things better.

38

Peter K. 09.23.14 at 5:15 pm

@4

” I have greater trust in those who are inculcated in the culture of security agencies than those who might just be passing through a temp position at a contractor via short term contracts.”

I don’t really trust the former either. Neither does the conservative Supreme Court surprisingly enough as they recently ruled that police need warrants to search smart phones.

@23

Yes according to polling millennials are less averse to government. My guess is that they have had worse experiences with large corporations; they have no idea who Richard Milhouse Nixon was and the Vietnam War is just something they studied about for a history exam. Plus all of the anti-government Teabaggers are gay-hating, woman-hating, classist, racist aholes. Get off their lawn!

@29
“Why is the government the only weapon you have against the corporations?”

Government is democratically accountable more or less (or less) and regulates and governs corporations which are pretty difficult to deal with on a one-on-one basis.

One of my favorite American TV shows, Person of Interest, starts back up tonight. It deals with these issues in a dramatic fashion and is said to have predicted Edward Snowden:

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/person-of-interest-the-tv-show-that-predicted-edward-snowden

It also explores the idea artificial intelligence. See the Butlerian Jihad’s motto:

“”Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.””

39

Seeds 09.23.14 at 5:21 pm

Not sure I follow some of the details of the logic here. If you are a crooked detective agency, or whatever, surely you would get your data direct from the telecoms company, not from the subset of that data held by the spooks?

I think what you’re missing here (and in the rest of your comment) is how private detectives make their contacts. Presumably in most cases they rely on acquaintances and friends-of-friends from previous jobs in the police and security services, rather than random approaches to telecomms employees in the hope that they might be bent. So this is more of a ‘you go to war with the army you’ve got’ situation.

40

Ze Kraggash 09.23.14 at 5:21 pm

“Every single IT guy”

The profession is so specialized nowadays that to a typical IT guy the application in question is a blackbox. They don’t know the structure, nor can they write a decent query. You’d need a developer to do it; for that matter probably a lead developer. But developers don’t have access to production.

41

Peter K. 09.23.14 at 5:24 pm

@29

For instance, Obamcare which was enacted partly in response to democratic action, requires insurance corporations to provide health insurance individuals with pre-existing conditions.

42

Rich Puchalsky 09.23.14 at 5:30 pm

““Privacy” is a pretty flimsy and abstract conceptualization against all of this. It is not going to be solved by a “privacy policy”.”

Assuming that we live under this system for a while, the only real relief is going to come from changing social attitudes. Look at this thread for bits like “a professor is a professor that represents his institution all day around, seven days a week.” There is going to have to be greater shame attached to paying attention to someone’s personal details than the shame directed at people for getting caught being human beings instead of perfect avatars.

43

William Timberman 09.23.14 at 5:33 pm

Bruce Wilder @ 36

I wonder if in the long run, perhaps in the very long run, which might well be too long a run for who knows how many of us poor unfortunates, the effect of knowing everything incriminating or embarrassing about everyone won’t lead out of necessity to the breakdown of dysfunctional taboos, and to the rise of a new tolerance. If no one gives a rat’s behind about the fact that you’re gay, for example, you can’t be blackmailed simply because you were observed frequenting a certain bar.

A fanciful projection, perhaps, but the general stress of being googled by anyone who’s taken a dislike to you has to have consequences, no? At a minimum, it might reduce 13 year-old suicides, leave the security forces critically short of provably loyal and reliable apparatchiks, and cause employers to ask themselves who they’re gonna call when no one suits their requirements.

44

bianca steele 09.23.14 at 5:34 pm

I’m unclear about the focus on IT personnel. The people most likely to have inappropriate access are people who have access for work purposes: for instance, the secretaries, who believe they deserve it (they’re incredibly close to the people they work for, after all, closer than anybody else), and who are generally less well trained in security issues than IT. Similarly, though “middle managers” are mentioned in the OP, they’ve gone unnoticed. Who’s going to take away a middle manager’s access, once they have it? Who’s going to tell them, deciding to help a cop find information about his daughter’s friend, is not a decision they’re empowered to make? Though in most cases, they don’t need direct access to the databases themselves, because the underlings do it. But it’s humiliating to some of them, unfortunately, not to have information their subordinates have. Such a dilemma!

45

William Berry 09.23.14 at 5:42 pm

We are not going to lose this fight. It has already been lost.

The average American is a coward to the core.

To paraphrase BF, he/ she has already traded a great deal of freedom for security. The reault: less freedom and even less security.

46

William Berry 09.23.14 at 5:58 pm

Sorry. Missed bunbury @27

47

William Berry 09.23.14 at 6:03 pm

Quoting BF, I mean. Xe appears to be using the quote in rather a different context from mine.

48

J Thomas 09.23.14 at 7:19 pm

#33 TM

“Make it so those same bad guys have to go to a whole lot of expensive effort if they don’t want everybody in the world to spy on them, and I figure I come out ahead.”

Can you give an be more specific, maybe give an example how that works that you come out ahead?

I don’t want to do that, but instead let me say I think I’d come out less behind.

Many new technologies turn into big wins for some early users who exploit them well, until the rest catch up. Sometimes the others can’t catch up.

So bronze weapons were a big advantage compared to flint, and then it turned out they were inherently expensive so it was mostly a warrior caste that could have them.

Cheap iron weapons got the Hittites all the way to Egypt before they spread.

This is a new technology that we can’t suppress without giving up the internet. If we try to stop people from spying, it will be mostly people who’re already powerful who do it at first. They’ll pass on secrets to little people when they have a reason to. Then eventually it will start to filter down. Like, maybe your boss can pay to find out things about you supposing he cares. Some years later you can also pay to find out things about him. But he gets a discount, and also it’s a deductible business expense.

Better if anybody can spy on anybody else. That reduces the advantage of the people who already do it. It means you don’t get to keep secrets, but you can’t reliably do that anyway. Things get out at random times or when they’ll do the most damage. Better if you start out knowing you can’t reliably keep secrets, and deal with that.

It’s a different society we’ll have to learn to live in, but we can’t go back. Already, if you want to do something involving money and keep it secret, it has to be cash or bitcoin. And if you get caught with significant amounts of cash the government assumes you’re dealing drugs and they take it away from you. You can have it back if you implicate somebody more important….

So swim or drown, there ain’t no inbetween.

49

William Berry 09.23.14 at 9:08 pm

Just want to add, in opposition to J. Thomas and company, that the solution for the problem of the surveillance pan-opticon is not the universalized, globalized pan-opticon.

When the notion of personal privacy is under attack from both the “left” and from the right, what chance has it?

Old-fashioned USW, liberal [d]emocrat guy, here.

Feelin’ lonely.

50

J Thomas 09.23.14 at 9:35 pm

Just want to add, in opposition to J. Thomas and company, that the solution for the problem of the surveillance pan-opticon is not the universalized, globalized pan-opticon.

I’m open to suggestions.

I’ve heard that the crossbow was banned in europe for a good long time, preserving the old ways. But then they decided they needed them to fight arabs, and afterward they brought them home.

I read that firearms were successfully banned in Japan for a good long time, but then they had to deal with foreigners with firearms and they took them up themselves.

I think if you want to ban surveillance you probably need to redesign the internet to prevent it. Also it would help a lot of the US government was not allowed to do it secretly. But we need to stop other governments from doing it too, or we’re back to gun-control Japan and foreigners.

I would be fine with a society where everybody gets to keep their secrets. I just don’t see any way to get there from here. So I want to survive with the technology we have instead of the technology we wish we had.

But if there’s a way to do it, let’s get started creating that.

51

Cian 09.23.14 at 9:51 pm

@40
But developers don’t have access to production.

Says who? It’s hard to debug production problems if you can’t access production data. And anyway, the dev database is invariably a clone of production.

Most of the UNIX support people I’ve known over the years could put an SQL query together. It might not be elegant, or fast, but it would get the job done.

52

TM 09.23.14 at 10:02 pm

“Better if anybody can spy on anybody else. That reduces the advantage of the people who already do it.”

That doesn’t make sense – those with power and resources always have the advantage – there is no “level playing field” in spying (*). I’m not prepared to give up on old-fashioned legal regulation. Of course, that playing field isn’t level either but there is a world of a difference between having legally enshrined privacy protections (Europe, see 26) and having nothing (US).

(*) I also should qualify my agreement (30) with the original statement, that “anybody can spy on anybody”. Closer to the truth is to say that anybody, even the powerful, are vulnerable to being spied at. But that does not at all imply something like a level playing field!

53

Jerry Vinokurov 09.23.14 at 10:19 pm

This means, among other things, that even though the Tsarnaev brothers were identified and neutralized quickly enough after the Boston Marathon bombings, they apparently couldn’t be identified as potential bombers beforehand, at least not with the current state of the NSA’s dark arts.

Not only that, but they apparently couldn’t be identified even after the Russians pointed at them and said “HAY YOU MIGHT WANT TO PAY SOME ATTENTION TO THESE GUYS.”

But yeah, human factors is the number 1, number 2, and so on down to probably about number 1000 or so biggest problem in security. Surprise! every time your information passes through yet another set of e-hands, it is potentially exposed for exploitation by nefarious entities (to say nothing about the nefarious entities generating or controlling the information in the first place). Actually, it’s a minor miracle that this kind of data isn’t compromised way more often than it currently is.

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J Thomas 09.23.14 at 10:21 pm

I’m not prepared to give up on old-fashioned legal regulation. Of course, that playing field isn’t level either but there is a world of a difference between having legally enshrined privacy protections (Europe, see 26) and having nothing (US).

I sympathize with that. I don’t think it will work, but it would be a good thing if it did work.

Part of the problem is that the bad guys have special legal protections. They can spy secretly and sometimes they can make it illegal for you to find out they are spying. What good is the law against that? Of course if you can get the law changed to prevent them from secretly spying, that would be good. If it was enforced.

(*) I also should qualify my agreement (30) with the original statement, that “anybody can spy on anybody”. Closer to the truth is to say that anybody, even the powerful, are vulnerable to being spied at. But that does not at all imply something like a level playing field!

I do want a level playing field. Like, increase the NSA’s output to the point that any citizen can run a few hours/day of spying on whoever they want, already paid for by our taxes. Corporations could do that for a stiff fee.

Make it illegal for people whose income is more than $200,000/year to hide their data, and enforce it. Also corporations and government itself.

If you want to know who’s spying on you, ask the system who’s been looking at your records.

I see no way to keep my data secret, beyond things I keep on permanently-offline machines. With the system we have now, it isn’t a matter of telling people not to spy, it’s more a matter of telling people to do their jobs with their eyes closed. You can’t help but spread around lots of data that smart people can infer a whole lot from.

We either dismantle the internet and learn to live without it — but people get to build their own networks unless we forbid digital data transfer — or else we learn to live with it.

We could do much better epidemiology with uncensored data. There are lots of advantages to free information. We can learn to handle the disadvantages because we have to.

55

Collin Street 09.23.14 at 10:47 pm

In Germany, for example, the internal security services spent a fortune monitoring fringe leftist groups, while neo-Nazi cells went about murdering people and infiltrating the security services themselves without anybody seeming to notice.

Both your politics and the sorts of jobs you can succeed at are shaped by your personality and the way you approach problem-solving, which is also going to shape how you approach whatever job it is you actually do.

People who think that national-security work is good and productive are on that account going to have certain personality features in common, and these personality features are going to shape not only the targets they think desirable to track but also their politics more generally.

And given that real-world national-security work is in large part bullshit or even actively counterproductive, the personality features are pretty likely to include “has little real idea of how the world actually works or how people actually think” or even “manipulative timeserver”, and this is going to have some pretty significant impact on the politics they’ll support.

[bluntly… yes, the same thing I always say. Has anyone here read Spycatcher?]

56

Ken_L 09.23.14 at 11:18 pm

” big and complicated systems are set up to malfunction …”

Not in the sense that the malfunction is deliberate, but that it’s inevitable. Or perhaps to put it more accurately, unanticipated consequences are inevitable. Complexity (“chaos”) theory, pungently summarised in Murphy’s Law. We KNOW that complex adaptive systems behave this way but bureaucrats continue to convince politicians that all will be well as long as there are sufficient “safeguards” and properly qualified technicians are in charge. MBAs rule the world.

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J Thomas 09.23.14 at 11:33 pm

Has anyone here read Spycatcher?

Oh, that brought back memories. You’re talking about the one written by Wright.

When I was in maybe 7th grade I found a book in my school library with that name. What I remember about it is mostly from WWII, when the author was trying to catch german spies. AT one point they had him look over some spies they were about to send to Germany. They all spoke excellent German and had fake passports etc. He turned over their neckties and they were not wearing German clothes, and he told them they were all dead.

He had no thought for the sensibilities of spies who were about to be sent into Nazi Germany, getting told that the people who had trained them were utterly incompetent and had made a simple obvious mistake that would get them caught immediately.

58

duaneg 09.24.14 at 12:33 am

But developers don’t have access to production.

Bullshit. This has been untrue at every place I’ve ever worked, including a large financial data provider relied on by, basically, everyone in the financial industry; and the customs dept of a certain small nation, where I worked on the PAX border control server-side systems, as a contractor, in my very first job out of university (with no security check done, AFAIK).

In the first, I could have manipulated, say, the order flow data that was sent to, basically, every bond trader in the world. It would have been hard to do it for long or without being caught, though.

In the second I could look up the list of people targeted for interdiction at the border, for example. Or change it.

Mind you, in both cases such things weren’t meant to be possible, and I’m pretty sure the senior managers and compliance people would have sworn it wasn’t. They may even have believed that.

I’d also note that in addition to the middle managers and other non-IT staff discussed above, any of the (poorly treated, minimum wage, out-sourced, constantly changing) cleaning staff could have done the same.

59

Greg vp 09.24.14 at 1:11 am

I am personally not at the stage where I trust every single person who might be hired for a low level IT job in a security agency…

Neither is the current Director of the NSA. He’s trying to get rid of nearly all of them.

This doesn’t solve the problem of abuse, but it reduces the “attack surface” quite a lot. Put the computers completely in charge, I say.

60

Thornton Hall 09.24.14 at 1:15 am

Or, in other words, good old American small town values!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter

61

Ze Kraggash 09.24.14 at 7:12 am

“And anyway, the dev database is invariably a clone of production.”

The UAT is, dev – not so much, it depends. Besides, I’ve seen scrambling of the sensitive/personal data for the purpose of troubleshooting. It all depends.

“Most of the UNIX support people I’ve known over the years could put an SQL query together”

I know, but in my experience Indian innovation in IT training will make this a thing of the past soon. It’s possible (and, in a sense, efficient) to train someone to do oil-change without knowing anything about cylinders and pistons. So, not every IT guy; fewer and fewer of them.

62

Steve Sailer 09.24.14 at 8:54 am

Well said.

It’s not hard to imagine a marketplace in embarrassing details about your private life emerging. At present, NSA sysadmins are probably skipping over with boredom your private affairs, but the Internet Age is good at generating exchanges that get products to those who are willing to pay for them. For example, in the future your father-in-law might pay a fair sum for your private emails.

63

The Raven 09.24.14 at 9:10 am

Like Cory Doctorow says, if you think your parents snooping your browser history is bad news, consider what happens if it’s every police agency on the planet. Or every mafioso.

One of the best bulwarks against this type of problem is routine encryption of personal data, starting with e-mail, but the NSA has worked very hard to prevent this from being implemented.

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J Thomas 09.24.14 at 9:34 am

At present, NSA sysadmins are probably skipping over with boredom your private affairs, but the Internet Age is good at generating exchanges that get products to those who are willing to pay for them. For example, in the future your father-in-law might pay a fair sum for your private emails.

Boring. Yes. People are whatever it is they are, and it’s mostly boring little details that vary a lot. Right now people get really embarrassed if it gets proven that they are the way that other people haven’t been proven to be. I think we’d mostly get over that pretty quick if we had to.

Don’t say things in email that would show your father-in-law that you are a despicable person. Unless you are despicable person. For the rest, you are what you are and if for his own quirky reasons your father-in-law disapproves then too bad.

Hey, if your father-in-law would pay a fair sum to see your emails, maybe he’d pay *you* a fair sum for that. There ought to be a way you could give him permission and have it be real, and then you could be the lowest bidder. Why shouldn’t that money stay in the family?

One of the best bulwarks against this type of problem is routine encryption of personal data, starting with e-mail, but the NSA has worked very hard to prevent this from being implemented.

That sounds like it would be a good thing. But to stop the important stuff we’d need a way to keep the banks and stores and police and IRS etc from cooperating, from sharing data. I think that’s swimming against the current, but I wouldn’t mind being wrong.

65

Guano 09.24.14 at 10:23 am

If you read carefully some of the apologists for the Murdoch press and its hacking of telephones you will see that they are suggesting that the Murdoch press was part of police and secret service investigations. Glenn Mulcaire appears to suggest this in his book with James Hanning (“The News Machine: Hacking, the Untold Story”). David Elstein’s argument that it is others who have abused Milly Dowler, and not Murdoch’s journalists, depends on his claim that the journalists were helping to find Milly Dowler while the police were being incompetent.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-elstein/schoolgirl-was-murdered

There appears to have been very little push-back from the police or their political masters about this confusion of roles. There is a risk that a private corporation accesses private information, without the safeguards supposedly in place when it is used by public servants, and then is used for private purposes.

66

root_e 09.24.14 at 3:19 pm

1. Verizon collects data
2. NSA copies some of it
3. OMG government!

Odd.

67

Randy 09.24.14 at 4:51 pm

Two related points:
1. All computer systems are vulnerable. All. It is only a matter of time before a bad actor hacker (or hacker in the employ of a bad actor) cracks these system and begins extracting this data.
2. Any system that can read data off of your system can also write data onto your system.

Given these two points, it will eventually happen that the ubiquitous surveillance machine will become the greatest extortion system of all time. One day you will receive a phone call telling you that you will be turned in to the FBI for child pornography if you do not pay up–pornography that they put on your phone or computer.

68

TM 09.24.14 at 5:01 pm

“But to stop the important stuff we’d need a way to keep the banks and stores and police and IRS etc from cooperating, from sharing data.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with having laws about these things. Yes, laws can be broken, but that applies to all laws, not just laws about the handling of data in the internet age. I am tired of the defeatist attitude that we have reached a point where privacy is a thing of the past and we just have to live with it. There are both technical and regulatory barriers that can be erected to protect privacy. None of these are going to be 100% effective but neither are any of the barriers against bad behavior that we try to erect in any other area of life. The question really is, how much do we care.

69

Plume 09.24.14 at 5:16 pm

It’s not just government. It’s private industry. One of the biggest problems with the Snowdens and the Julian Assanges is they concentrate(d) pretty much only on government. They ignore private industry, more or less. But we need to worry about both/and. And with government becoming more and more privatized, the old boundaries, such as they were, are disappearing. Where does government end and the private sector begin, or vice versa?

Is a Google or a Facebook really less of a future threat to our privacy than the NSA? Especially when companies like that tend to belong to even larger organizations like ALEC, which connects them back to our political life in yet another way . . . .

I did IT work for a long time, and while there are some amazingly complicated ways of hacking into systems (which are well beyond my expertise), the surprising thing is how easy it is to get most of what the hackers want with a flash drive. The bad guys don’t really need to be black quants, etc.

In short, by connecting everything, we’ve created Frankenstein’s monster, and we’re going to need as much effort put into the technology of encryption/personal privacy as we put into online marketing and sales. They should have done the security part first, of course, but they were blinded by the dollar signs.

70

J Thomas 09.24.14 at 5:45 pm

“But to stop the important stuff we’d need a way to keep the banks and stores and police and IRS etc from cooperating, from sharing data.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with having laws about these things. Yes, laws can be broken, but that applies to all laws, not just laws about the handling of data in the internet age.

It’s evanescent stuff. They look at your data. They use it. You want to prove that they knew what they know by looking at your data, and they say you have no proof.

Currently they say that they have the right to look at your stuff because terrorists. And you have no right to know what they have looked at because terrorists. But they are secretly obeying the laws, before they secretly look at your data they secretly get a judge to say it’s OK so that takes care of any legal questions.

As long as the government has he de facto ability to keep their spying secret from you, you don’t gain much by the legal right to sue them over it. But laws could still be useful. The government could sue anybody it’s annoyed at who’s been doing private spying etc.

For myself, I think Big Data has lots of possibilities we haven’t begun to exploit and it will be so valuable we won’t be able to keep it illegal. We had better learn to live with it, and the first societies that do will get competitive benefits until the others catch up. If we really can’t fight it then I’d rather not try.

But I could be wrong. Maybe we really can fight it and win. I’d like that if it works.

71

TM 09.24.14 at 6:09 pm

Current laws, especially in the US, are terrible. We can agree on that. One question is, should we give up or try to pressure for better laws? Another question is, are there any laws that are even hypothetically up to the task? Some say no, there isn’t really anything that can effectively be done because internet. I don’t think that is true. In any case, we need to distinguish these two questions.

68 and others, of course privacy laws must regulate both private and public actors. That is definitely how they are understood in Europe. In the US, we are so far behind that most Americans can’t even imagine the kind of protections that Europeans take for granted.

72

Plume 09.24.14 at 6:35 pm

There are so many conflicts right now, and most go unacknowledged. First, the government doesn’t want us to use encryption. And even if we do, it always wants back door access — secretly, primarily. Privacy starts with true encryption. Unbreakable. To anyone. Decrypted only by the user and their choice of persons on the other end.

There is also the conflict between security and convenience. The private sector pushes the latter. We see ads, for example, regarding banking via your smartphone, etc. But lose that phone, and you don’t have to be a hacker to raid that bank account — or any of the other online portals you’ve set up. The convenience of user names and passwords also conflicts with security. Saved, or otherwise. They’re too easy to break. At the very least, it should be the law that no online portal of any kind can make your user name public. Not via chat rooms or commercial sites. The actual user name should never be the same as the publicly viewable ID. Security through obscurity. At least one half of the process is made more difficult to uncover. Long passwords (more than 16 characters) helps the other half. It’s far from foolproof. But it helps. And 16-17 should be the minimum allowed.

Eventually — though it should have been done to start with — we’re going to have to get rid of the user name and password system entirely, and go with advanced forms of biometrics . . . . not only to get into your personal devices, but into portals as well. And encrypted communication will need that on both ends.

We’re going to have to limit the conflicts and pretty much end the idea that we can be safe and have our conveniences, too, online. With rare exceptions, we really can’t have both.

73

John Doe 09.25.14 at 9:14 pm

The U.S. is not entirely without privacy laws. No one has mentioned The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970, the Consumer Credit Reporting Reform Act of 1996, the Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act of 1999 (GLBA), or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Most of these provide civil penalties for misuse of the type of information they cover.

Yes, they are an incomplete patchwork. Yes, the rouge sysadmin, programmer, or middle manager can do significant damage to individuals. But the places I’ve recently worked as a programmer (TBTF bank where I loaded 10M credit card records daily or my current assignment where the info is subject to DPPA and GLBA and where I’m writing code to determine who has access to that data) do take their responsibilities seriously.

I’m much more concerned about the datasets that are not subject to any federal or state privacy laws than I am about most health or financial data:

Repo Man License Plate Databases

74

Nathanael 09.26.14 at 12:52 am

The solution to these problems is simpler than it appears. The solution is privacy. The old-school version of privacy from the late Middle Ages: people may know all your business, but *it’s none of their business*. They can tell tales, and people will just say “Well, that’s his business as a private citizen.” Where “terrorism prosecutions” based on illegal spying result in an apology to the (possible) terrorists and the imprisonment of the prosecutors for privacy violations. When discovering “child pornography” on someone’s computer results in an apology to that person. (Child pornography is evidence of the crime of child sexual abuse, but it shouldn’t be illegal to possess evidence of a crime; right now the “child pornography” laws basically protect child abusers by making it hard to collect evidence of their crimes. The abusers love this.)

We need a society where nobody can be blackmailed because people are more offended by the invasion of privacy than by whatever was threatened to be revealed.

People, particularly government officials, act as if they have a right to do whatever they want with any information they get. Well, um, no. Usually it’s none of their business.

In short, I’m advocating for privacy to be enforced by formal social rules, not by technology. It was before; it can be again.

Secrecy is another matter. As for secrecy, the government cannot be allowed to have any secrets, except for troop movement plans. Period. Secrecy by the government is used for one and only one purpose: concealing criminal activity.

Private citizens can be allowed to have secrets. If they really want.

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JohnD 09.26.14 at 12:47 pm

Daniel’s basic point makes a lot of sense to me – the point is that many practical, real day-to-day privacy risks are increased by concentrating vast amounts of data in a place where single individuals can access in an official capacity, or otherwise can use or abuse it.

As to why it would be preferable for a tabloid journalist to know a NSA/GCHQ sysadmin compared to a phone company data person that seems pretty obvious – convenience. A journalist (or criminal) can only have so many sources. To reliably get at any given persons phone records, for example, you would have to maintain sources at every big phone company, and those sources would not be able to help you with other useful stuff like family connections, criminal records etc. Furthermore, corporations are set up for making money, not generalised conspiracy (no, really!), and their enthusiasm for micromanagement means that they do keep data in different places, with different access rights. So for example, I would expect that while many Comcast employees can pull customer phone records, and a smaller number could pull customer browsing records, much smaller numbers could do both, and asking for a complete data dump on a specific customer would raise all sorts of flags. As a result the thing to worry about from corporations is typically the continuos low-grade erosion of mass privacy inherent in stuff like data-mining based marketing, rather than individual complete privacy breaches (i.e. an actual person monitoring you in particular)

Security agencies are absolutely set up to spy on people though, and tend to be able to collect and display lots of interesting and private information (including from corporations) on named individuals very rapidly, with such individual requests being a normal activity. As a result, one crooked source in an environment like that is much more valuable to third parties who want to aggressively get through someone else’s privacy. The fact that the new security apparatus puts such power in the hands of thousands of individuals and trusts them all is, as Daniel says, in many ways as big deal as what it allows government agencies to do officially.

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Anarcissie 09.26.14 at 2:22 pm

But how are you going to bring these changes about, if only a few people want them?

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william c wesley 09.26.14 at 7:52 pm

What ever can be abused will be abused. Information is power, it is more important than military hardware or physical strength. If a Mafia type organization had access to this treasure trove of personal information would they know how to monetize the catch? You bet they would, they’d use the information to empower themselves until the balance of power was so skewed someone would have to be declared leader for life. why did this not happen before? Well it did, it was called the inquisition, its primary means was torture confessions but it also had secret eyes and ears everywhere, the latest installment was named the Holocaust. We saw similar regimes with Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China. A careful study of the great tyrants of history always uncovers a vigorous secret police charged with ensuring that the leadership has all the information on citizens and that citizens have no real information on leadership, a misbalance of political power that ALWAYS ends in disaster eventually. Today we seek “terrorists” instead of “witches”, we fear “drugs” instead of “potions”, we seek “Muslims” instead of “Pagans”, we dread “bombs” instead of “black magic” but its exactly the same impulse and it will end with America utterly destroyed as was Spain during its inquisition (Spain will NEVER be a world power again), as was Germany, the former Soviet Union and the China of the cultural revolution (60 million dead exited a whole generation). Warfare is the most lucrative of all human activities to they who know how to exploit it, two trillion spent on Iraq is two trillion made by businesses, inquisitions are fantastically lucrative operations, our secret police aided by digital technology are poised to carry out a world spanning for profit inquisition that may destroy all of civilization, the people who say, “why its perfectly calm” don’t realize they are in the eye of the largest storm ever to have emerged

78

ajay 09.29.14 at 9:30 am

As to why it would be preferable for a tabloid journalist to know a NSA/GCHQ sysadmin compared to a phone company data person that seems pretty obvious – convenience. A journalist (or criminal) can only have so many sources. To reliably get at any given persons phone records, for example, you would have to maintain sources at every big phone company

JohnD makes the point I was about to – yes, starting from scratch on the task “find out this specific bit of phone data”, I would look at the phone company first. But tabloid hacks, private detectives etc aren’t starting from scratch and the police are pretty much your one-stop shop for all kinds of useful stuff. Not just phone data, but VRN lookups, tips on the progress of investigations and so on.
Plus you start on familiar ground with this kind of thing. Every crime desk journalist, honest or not, is going to know a lot of policemen just because it’s her job to write about them – so she’s got a foot in the door already. She’s not going to know anyone who works in the billing department at Vodafone, except by chance.

Another couple of points: Schneier I think also noted that, from an access-control point of view, complying with a court order is identical to breaching someone’s privacy for criminal ends. You can’t make it impossible to do one and still be able to do the other.

And the point that we can be pretty sure that Edward Snowden was not the first person to leak massive amounts of NSA information. He was just the first person to leak it to _us_. Remember the acronym for why people become intelligence agents: MICE. Money, Ideology, Conscience, Ego. Snowden was C – but it is a tremendous leap of faith that NSA has had no one before or since who, instead of being C and leaking to everyone, was M, I or E and leaked only to a grateful and rewarding customer in another country.

79

TM 09.29.14 at 3:50 pm

“FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized Apple and Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.”

“Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile,” said John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department. “The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I’ve got to get an Apple phone.”

“Comey added that FBI officials already have made initial contact with the two companies, which announced their new smartphone encryption initiatives last week. He said he could not understand why companies would “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”

Wow.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/26/1332567/-FBI-criticizes-Apple-and-Google-for-giving-people-what-they-want-privacy

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sanbikinoraion 09.30.14 at 8:45 am

My ten years of experience as a computer programmer have shown me that, at least in private industry, the sysadmins care a hell of a lot more about implementing and maintaining privacy and security protocols than most managers do, who view those activities (rightly) as not returning any value to the business for the effort.

If you really want privacy, you need a branch of government whose job it is to audit private companies’ data set-ups, and fine companies found lacking. In the UK we have data protection laws already perfectly adequate to the task of protecting peoples’ privacy but absolutely zero enforcement capability.

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