With a long, sweeping bow to Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, I changed the title of this entry from "Private Parts" based on her column of June 16. She mentions "that polls indicate that the overwhelming American attitude is 'Spy on me.'" Please.
As I was saying, “law
enforcement” can be divided into at least two parts: Criminal Investigation and
Crime Prevention.
One is
after the act; one is
before the act.
Big difference.
Anyone
who has watched any of the cops and robbers TV shows knows that all kinds of
information is “out there.” “Out there” may mean on servers scattered around
the world. Or “right there” on your
smartphone. It remains for detectives to
connect the dots and find the perp. A
crime is committed. A suspect is ferreted out.
A cellular phone is found. After
obtaining a warrant the calls are “dumped,” as they say. All of the data about the suspect’s movements
are merged. And the person is cleared or
becomes a suspect.
How
about crime prevention? That is the
question. How much of our lives are we willing to have “examinable” in order to
stop the bad-guys in their tracks? Is
there really a need to wade through all of
that data for every person in order to find a kernel of significance?
No. It would be a waste of time. What we do need to see is what we used to
call “exception reports” when I worked in the long-distance phone business. At one company that I worked for we offered
customers the opportunity to see things that were exceptional: Calls longer
than n minutes; calls during specific
times; calls to certain states, cities or area codes. Combine them and management can spot
problems. Does an employee have a family
problem that needs attention? Is someone
looking for another job?
What
if intelligence analysts could do the same with much of the data that is “out
there”? Enter the somewhat futuristic TV
show “Person of Interest,” the premise of which is that a computer has been
built that analyzes every possible piece of data and comes up with the names of
two people, one of whom is going to do harm to the other. (It’s an interesting trick that they play on
us when the tables are turned.)
The
point is well taken: It is really hard to stay “off the grid.” There’s little doubt that clues exist before the fact that a bad thing is
going to happen and who is going to do it:
Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols left plenty of clues that
were used to convict them after the
1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. Could
those clues have been used to catch the plot before it was hatched? There were
dots to be connected.
The 19 people who carried out the 9/11 attacks lived among
us for months, leaving trails a mile wide that were pieced together after the destruction. People in positions to know, with their
hair on fire, wrote memos starting in January, 2001, that warned of the attacks. There were, after all, dots to be connected.
The brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were known to
authorities well before they burst on the scene as the Boston Marathon
Bombers. There’s probably plenty of
evidence to convict the lone surviving brother.
But could connecting the dots have prevented
this massacre?
As
quoted in The New York Times recently, Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote
that it isn’t that the Internet has been penetrated by the surveillance state;
it’s that the Internet, in effect, is a
surveillance state. It’s a surveillance
state in the hands of corporations.
One
question is does that mean that one gives up all sense of privacy be being “on
the grid”?
Another
is whether that corporate and public data should be accessible to the
government?
To
the first question, in a sense, Yes. In
a sense. Even if you’re talking
strictly about the electric grid,
one’s usage could be
significant.
Example:
If your electric bill is “substantially” higher –whatever that means—than you neighbors’ perhaps there’s something going on.
And
what if your water bill is “substantially” higher –again, whatever that means – than your neighbors’
perhaps there’s something going on.
Are
we a police state if some agency looks at those dots, checks your bank and ATM
usage, and goes before a judge to obtain a search warrant to see if you’ve got
a meth lab in your garage?
Eric Schmidt of Google said in 2009 “If you
have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing
it in the first place.” I DISAGREE IN
PRINCIPLE. There could be lots that I do
that I don’t want anyone to know about.
It’s when what I’m doing is illegal
that the authorities need to know
about it.
Some say that you can have privacy or you can
have the Internet, but you can’t have both.
It
is at least possible to participate
in online culture while limiting horizontal, peer-to-peer exposure. But it is practically
impossible to protect your privacy vertically –from the service providers
and social media networks and now security agencies that have access to your
every click and text and email.
In
the olden days, when faxes were just becoming widespread, there was talk of
making it impossible to re-fax a fax or of notifying the sender of an initial
fax that it has been copied or re-faxed.
That never went anywhere. But how
about emails with these features:
1.
Sender notification when an email is received,
and opened.
2.
Making something that you send un-forwardable.
3.
Having emails deleted from the server and the
recipient’s computers in some time.
The
Internet has changed everything. I
could stop right there. You know me
better than that. There is, however a
divide between information about ourselves that we readily divulge and information about
us that we have no idea is out there.
People
are posting running commentaries on where they are, what they are drinking and
with whom. It’s amazing. But it’s all
voluntary. Even bragging.
Let’s
take a look at the other stuff, and then try to figure out what, if anything,
to do about it.
To
begin with, most people have no idea how much information is contained in their
computer hardware.
Some
examples:
Computers
all over the world know the house that I live in, and the car that was parked
in my driveway when Google’s camera-car drove by.
Computers
know when I make a cellular phone call, to whom, for how long and what towers
it was relayed through. Ditto
emails and text.
Computers
know what products and services that I search for online. On the bottom of my screen I’m even told that
“people who bought that also bought this.” Should I be surprised that when I am
on FaceBook there are ads on the right side of my page that show the results of
my recent searches.
How
do they know that?
Each
computer has two identifying numbers: One is an Internet Protocol (IP) address;
one is a Media Access Control (MAC) address.
Some
specifics:
A
few years ago I was dumb and fell for one of those scams that resulted in my
Hotmail account being hijacked. It took
a while but I was able to demonstrate to Hotmail that I was who I said that I
was even though I didn’t match the recently-changed identifiers of mother’s
maiden name, etc. How? For years I’d been accessing my emails from
one laptop, now it was being accessed from another. And I was sitting at the older one while the
hijacker was sitting at a newer one. I regained control of my email account.
I
was in Europe recently. I did some
online searches for where to eat, places to visit and travel directions. All in Munich, with answers in German. I even read The NY Times in Munich –albeit in
English.
Back
in the US of A my new searches stopped having German-oriented results and being
written in German.
Have
you ever accessed a discount-air-travel website to check out pricing, surfed
away, and then returned –only to find out that the price had gone up? Their server
recognized your computer. That’s their way of teaching you to “buy now” next
time.
Here’s
an experiment. You and a friend check
pricing from two different computers –one a Windows device and one a Mac. Many items that you shop for will show different
prices. Typically, Mac users will be
shown higher prices. Go figure.
Since
you are reading this blog let me tell you a few things about people who come to
this site. Anytime I want to I can check
my account and find out the following:
- How many
people visited the blog today?
- What
countries did they log in from?
- What
were the operating systems of their computers (Windows, Mac, other)?
- What
browsers did they use (Explorer, Safari, FireFox, other)?
- Last
but not least, what site were they on before coming to this blog?
And
that’s for free. Imagine what information someone could buy?
You
may have heard the term “megadata,” referring to the bare bones of computer
data. In digital cameras megadata
includes the make and model of the camera, the date and time the pix was taken,
and the location. Privacy? Forget-about-it.
I
recently uploaded pix on FaceBook that I had taken at an event, using my
iPhone. Later I uploaded pix that I had
taken with my Panasonic and uploaded to my iMac
and then sent to FaceBook. There
they are, in two separate albums, identified as being taken using IOS (the
iPhone) and Aperture (an improved iPhoto on my iMac). Privacy?
There
are so many facts about us that are collected on a daily basis: Credit card
payments for fuel and food; MetroCards on subways and highway toll-booths;
online and in-store purchases; bank deposits and withdrawals; online searches
on Google, Bing and others.
When
you stop to think about it, there’s an absolutely amazing amount of data out there about each of us. It used to be a segmented, incomplete paper
trail.
Now
it’s an all-encompassing trove of precise, track-able data.
The question is, should we allow our government to know that
much about us?
To further complicate matters, I just returned from seeing "War On Whistleblowers" at a showing by MoveOn.org at the Burton Barr Library in Phoenix. It's an interesting and informative movie --a "must see." Some viewers tried to tie it to Edward Snowden, formerly of NSA. I'm not sure that he's a whistleblower, because, a) he was complicit in what is going on, and, b) what was going on is exactly as Congress established and the President signed. I'm not sure that he's a spy, either, although that's what he's being charged with. To coin a phrase, "It's complicated."
What's your take on this subject?
My #3 Son, Mark, sent this along to me. It's from the Aspen (CO) Daily News. It's fascinating in the distinction that it displays between voting laws in these two states: Exclusionary vs. Inclusive. Suppression vs. Encouragement. Amazing.
