Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Conor Friedersdorf

Mass Surveillance Is Coming to a City Near You

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 17:00:00 -0400

Tech entrepreneur Ross McNutt wants to spend three years recording human outdoor movements in a major U.S. city, KMOX news radio reports.

If that sounds too dystopian to be real, you’re behind the times. McNutt, who runs Persistent Surveillance Systems, was inspired by his stint in the Air Force tracking Iraqi insurgents. He tested mass surveillance technology over Compton, California, in 2012. In 2016, the company flew over Baltimore, feeding information to police for months (without telling city leaders or residents) while demonstrating how the technology works to the FBI and Secret Service.

The goal is noble: to reduce violent crime.

There’s really no telling if surveillance of this sort has already been conducted over your community as private and government entities experiment with it. If I could afford the hardware, I could legally surveil all of Los Angeles just for kicks.

And now a billionaire donor wants to help Persistent Surveillance Systems to monitor the residents of an entire high-crime municipality for an extended period of time––McNutt told KMOX that it may be Baltimore, St. Louis, or Chicago.

McNutt’s technology is straightforward: a fixed-wing plane outfitted with high resolution video cameras circles for hours on end, recording everything in large swaths of a city. One can later “rewind” the footage, zoom in anywhere, and see exactly where a person came from before or went after perpetrating a robbery or drive-by shooting … or visiting an AA meeting, a psychiatrist’s office, a gun store, an abortion provider, a battered women’s shelter, or an HIV clinic. On the day of a protest, participants could be tracked back to their homes.

In the timely new book Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All, author Arthur Holland Michel talks to people working on this category of technology and concludes, “someday, most major developed cities in the world will live under the unblinking gaze of some form of wide-area surveillance.”

At first, he says, the sheer amount of data will make it impossible for humans in any city to examine everything that is captured on video. But efforts are underway to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to “understand” more. “If a camera that watches a whole city is smart enough to track and understand every target simultaneously,” he writes, “it really can be said to be all-seeing.”

The trajectory of this technology in the U.S. is still unwritten. It may depend on everything from public opinion to Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to restrictions that policy makers impose before wide-area surveillance is entrenched.

According to KMOX, McNutt plans to consult with city leaders before starting his planned three-year project somewhere. Does his company retain video of the Baltimore officials who could approve or thwart its return? I’d wonder if I were them.

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Should We Give Kids an Internet of Their Own?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 11:29:29 -0400

It might be better to ban kids from the internet.

Across the West, governments are pushing for more power to regulate cyberspace even as authoritarian political parties are gaining more official power, portending a future in which what people can say online is subject to the whims of ill-meaning bureaucrats.

Often, calls for regulation and even censorship are justified by the highly defensible and probably correct anxiety that the status quo ill-serves the internet’s youngest users.

In the United Kingdom, the government in a white paper recently proposed a crackdown on any website that “allows users to share or discover user-generated content, or interact with each other online.” Its proponents cited that “the impact of harmful content and activity can be particularly damaging for children and young people, and there are growing concerns about the potential impact on their mental health and wellbeing.” And The Guardian noted “growing pressure on the government to act in the wake of the death of teenager Molly Russell,” a 14-year-old whose father believes that “exposure to images of self-harm on social media was a factor in her taking her own life.”

In the United States, cyberbullying and internet safety rank among the top concerns of parents. Their anxiety is not irrational, as Jean M. Twenge argued in a September 2017 cover story in The Atlantic on technology’s role in mental-health problems among teens.

The Washington Post has reported on ISIS’s efforts to recruit children in Western countries. “A 12-year-old German Iraqi boy—guided by an Islamic State contact in the Middle East who warmly addressed him as ‘brother’ and groomed the boy via the encrypted messaging app Telegram—built and tried to detonate a bomb near a shopping center in the western German city of Ludwigshafen,” the newspaper noted. “A 15-year-old girl—the daughter of a German convert to Islam and a Moroccan mother—was sentenced to six years in prison for an attack last February on a German police officer in Hanover. She gouged him in the neck with a kitchen knife, causing life-threatening injuries after being befriended and cajoled by an Islamic State instructor via a text messaging service.”

With each viral story about terrifying harms, political pressure for new rules that protect kids is likely to grow. Perhaps the best way forward is to try to come up with a regulatory regime that strikes the right balance between free speech for all (adults) and the well-being of children. But I’m not hopeful that society will succeed in that endeavor.

One alternative is to ban kids from the open internet, a place where the violence is more graphic than any R-rated movie, the sex is more salacious than any strip club, and the bullies get 24-hour access to kids’ bedrooms.

Of course, there are reasons society hasn’t taken that course. Kids badly want internet-connected devices. And the internet offers many benefits to young people. As the above-mentioned U.K. white paper puts it:

Most children have a positive experience online, using the internet for social networking and connecting with peers, as well as to access educational resources, information, and entertainment. The internet opens up new opportunities for learning, performance, creativity and expression … Research by UNICEF (2017) shows that use of technology is beneficial for children’s social relationships, enabling them to enhance existing relationships and build positive friendships online. A report by The Royal Society for Public Health in 2017 found that young people reading blogs or watching vlogs on personal health issues helped improve their knowledge and understanding, prompted individuals to access health services, and enabled them to better explain their own health issues or make better choices

Research by Ofcom showed that nine in ten social media users aged 12–15 state that this use has made them feel happy or helped them feel closer to their friends. Two thirds of 12–15 year olds who use social media or messaging sites say they send support messages, comments or posts to friends if they are having a difficult time. One in eight support causes or organisations by sharing or commenting on posts. In the 2019 UK Safer Internet Centre survey, 70% of young people surveyed said that being online helps them understand what’s happening in the world … 43% said they have been inspired to take action because of something they saw online, with 48% stating being online makes them feel that their voice or actions matter.

Moreover, there is a sense that, for better or worse, there’s no fighting technology––that today’s young people can be kept from the internet no more than yesterday’s young people from the printing press or television. And imagine the injustice of punishing, say, a science-loving 11-year-old, or her parents, for a session at TheAtlantic.com reading about hagfish slime.

But perhaps there’s a regulatory middle ground. Here’s an idea:

Silicon Valley builds a new network specifically for young people— up to, say, age 15. The youth-net is huge and varied, like the internet. But its content must be similar to that of a PG movie. It emerges as the new starter internet. Allowing young kids on the actual internet comes to be seen as anomalous.
On the youth-net, decisions about content moderation are made with children in mind. Freedom of speech is not paramount.
Young people would access the youth-net via a new generation of smartphones and tablets. These new devices would block access to the actual internet. Via a password-protected companion device, parents could impose age-optimized limits on total daily screen time, total time on social-media apps, and total time on gaming apps, as well as a nightly shutoff time.
Social-media apps wouldn’t be available to users until they reach high-school age. Only companies that do not own social-media sites for adults would be allowed to develop child-specific equivalents, reducing the incentive to addict children to their products.
Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and other “adult” sites would be for ages 16 and up, with access to the adult internet and its mainstream apps replacing the coming-of-age thrill of a first car in the coming era of automated driving.

The youth-net would protect children from adult material and predatory adults while minimizing the need to police speech on the internet. The youth-net might also lead to a flowering of content for younger audiences.

As with any new development, the youth-net would have unintended consequences and imperfections. Silicon Valley, the government, and parents would still need to guard against abusers and scammers. Still, maybe a two-tiered internet—one for adults, one for the young— would be better than the existing internet, or a future, severely restricted internet. Kids with especially dumb or clueless parents might be best served.

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The Dangers of a Mandatory DNA Database

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 08:00:00 -0500

In Arizona this week, a state legislator named David Livingston stirred a controversy about DNA that may be a portent of privacy nightmares to come. A law he proposed would have forced many residents to give samples of their DNA to a state database, to be stored with their name and Social Security number.

If passed, “many people—from parent school volunteers and teachers to real estate agents and foster parents—will have no choice but to give up their DNA,” The Arizona Republic reported. “Any DNA in the database could be accessed and used by law enforcement in a criminal investigation. It could also be shared with other government agencies across the country for licensing, death registration, to identify a missing person or to determine someone’s real name.”

A public outcry followed. In response, the bill was amended to require DNA “only from professionals who care for patients with intellectual disabilities in an intermediate care facility.” That focus is most likely due to a recent, widely reported crime: Weeks ago in Phoenix, police collected DNA from employees at a medical facility where a woman in a coma unexpectedly gave birth, identifying her alleged rapist.

All 50 states maintain the DNA of at least some convicted criminals. And members of the military must give DNA samples to ease identification in battlefield deaths.

Some go so far as to advocate forcing everyone to submit DNA samples to the government for storage. In 2002, for example, Nature published a commentary arguing that “the most logical and fair practice—and also the most controversial—would be to DNA-test all individuals at birth. This would not only act as a deterrent from crime for all members of the community, but would make the task of catching criminals easier for police. If the correct safeguards are in place to protect civil liberties, why should a proposal to test everyone at birth be a frightening one? On the other hand, if the correct safeguards are not in place and the fears are justified, why are we daring to test anyone at all?”

There are two primary dangers of a universal DNA database. First, as Christine Rosen once wrote, DNA “provides an inescapable means of identification, categorization, and profiling” that is uniquely revelatory:

DNA is a person’s “future diary.” It provides genetic information unique to each person; it has the potential to reveal to third parties a person’s predisposition to illnesses or behaviors without the person’s knowledge; and it is permanent information, deeply personal, with predictive powers. Taken together, the coming age of DNA technology will change the character of human life, both for better and for worse, in ways that we are only beginning to imagine—both because of what it will tell us for certain and what it will make us believe. To know one’s own future diary—or to know someone else’s—is to call into question the very meaning and possibility of human liberty.

Second, imagine a permanent database of information that powerful. How long do you anticipate that trove would exist before being breached by nefarious actors? My assumption is that all permanent databases of sufficient size and value will be hacked eventually—and sooner rather than later, when the security infrastructure is designed and maintained by IT bureaucrats in state governments.

What if adequate safeguards are in place? I do not grant the possibility—not that the risks have stopped millions of consumers from voluntarily submitting their DNA to databases maintained by private technology corporations, as is their right.

Arizona should reject even the watered-down proposal. A person shouldn’t be compelled to give a DNA sample in order to work in an intermediate-care facility. And passing that requirement into law would raise valid slippery-slope concerns.

More intriguing is a provision in the original proposal, since amended, that would have authorized “the medical examiner’s office in each county to take DNA from any bodies that come into their possession.” The Arizona Republic wrote that “collecting DNA from the dead could solve some longstanding cold cases.” That’s a public good—one that could conceivably spring wrongfully convicted people from prison. And DNA from the dead could presumably have research value, too.

On the other side of the matter are the privacy rights of the dead. Do the dead have any privacy rights? Do their extended family members? Perhaps the best path is putting people in DNA databases at death rather than at birth. For now, however, public policy in the United States is gradually heading in the other direction.

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Barack Obama Reflects on Leaving the Presidency

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 12:00:00 -0500

What was President Obama thinking in the moments just before he handed off power to Donald Trump? It’s a question that millions must have wondered about last January.

Now they have an answer.

In Obama’s first major interview as a private citizen, he told Prince Harry of Wales, the British royal, that he felt thankful for his spouse and unexpected serenity as his term ended; that presidents aren’t afforded the luxury of long reflection on thorny challenges; that he feels as though he is now like a coach on the sidelines rather than a player on the court; that life after leaving the White House unfolds in slow motion; and that free speech remains vital in spite of hate speech.

The BBC released the podcast-style interview in full.

Last January, as many Democrats watched the inauguration of Donald Trump with anger, uncertainty and foreboding, Obama was reflecting on his partner and their journey:

Prince Harry: Can I take you back to the 20th of January 2017? You sat in Marine One, the presidential helicopter, flying over Washington. You sat through the inauguration with your game face on. You weren't giving much emotion away, as we saw. What's going through your mind?

President Obama: The first thing that went through my mind was, sitting across from Michelle, how thankful I was that she had been my partner through that whole process ... She is not someone who was naturally inclined to politics, so despite the fact that she was as good of a First Lady as there has ever been, she did this largely in support of my decision to run. And for us to be able to come out of that intact—our marriage is strong, we're still each other's best friends, our daughters turning into amazing young women—the sense that there was a completion and that we had done the work in a way that preserved our integrity and left us whole and that we hadn't fundamentally changed was a satisfying feeling. Now, that was mixed with all of the work that was still undone and the concerns about how the country moves forward. But overall there was a serenity there more than I would have expected.

One of the metaphors that was used for the presidency is that you are a relay runner. There is a sense sometimes in any position of leadership that you by yourself do certain things and then it's over, but I always viewed it as taking the baton from a whole range of people who had come before me, some of whom had been heroic, some of whom had screwed up.

But wherever you were in the race, if you ran hard and you did your best, and then you were able to pass that baton off successfully, with the country or the world a little bit better off than when you got there, then you could take some pride in that, and I think that we were able to do that.

Asked about the transition from seeking a series of elective offices to post-presidential retirement, Obama expressed thanks that he only became famous in his 40s:

So despite this whirlwind you described, by the time I was elected to the Senate and I was a national figure, I was a grown man. I was settled. I was a parent. I had changed diapers. I had struggled with figuring out how we were going to pay the bills. We had made sacrifices. Michelle and I had the arguments that married couples have. And so I think that although the process was in some ways surreal because it happened so quickly, we were pretty steady in knowing who we were and what we believed in … And when I got off the treadmill so to speak it didn't feel like my identity was wrapped up in having this position. My relationship with my family and my friends, the values that I cared about, felt pretty consistent. So the break did not feel as abrupt.

I think American politics is unique in that there is a perpetual campaigning taking place. So the idea that I don't have to go raise money for television ads, that felt really good. The idea that there were certain elements of the job that were largely ceremonial and that I always tried to do as best I could, but that weren't things I necessarily would do on my own, the fact that I was freed up from some of that, from the pomp and circumstance of the presidency, that actually felt good.

Leaving the White House “gives you the ability to reflect and study in a way that sometimes as president you couldn't do the way you wanted because you had to move very, very quickly,” Obama said. “My life had been so accelerated. Everything felt and still feels to some degree as if it is moving in slow motion—not necessarily in a bad way. I was talking to my lawyer and he was saying we have to meet with somebody right away because they really want to get something done. I said, okay, how about tomorrow? He said, ‘Well no, it's going to take at least two weeks.’ And I had to explain, ‘Where I'm from, right away means if we don't do something in half an hour somebody dies.’ So there's just a lower intensity level. Sometimes it means you don't have the same adrenaline rush. But it also means you can be more reflective and deliberate about the kinds of things you want to get done.”

What’s occupying Obama’s time and attention now?

“I'm really obsessed now with training the next generation of leaders to be able to make their mark on the world,” he said. “One way I've described it is that I think when you're in politics directly, then you're a player on the field, and there's some element of that you'll never be able to duplicate—the excitement and the thrill and sometimes the agony that goes along with being on the field. And now I'm making that transition to some degree as a coach. And that has its own demands and its own responsibilities and its own impact. Being a great coach is often times as satisfying as being a great player but it's a different role. That's how I'm transitioning.”

The second half of the interview focused largely on online culture, social media and the opportunities and challenges that digitally connected lives place before young people.

Harry: You managed to get people to use technology to take real action when you were elected. Part of me wants to ask how you managed that. At the same time, the social media landscape has changed dramatically since then: issues of trolling, extremism, fake news, bullying ... Is there more that you could've done as president to get ahead of some of these issues?

Obama: Well, most of this is happening outside of government. In the United States in particular, we have a very strong First Amendment. As a former constitutional lawyer, I am pretty firm about the merits of free speech and the question, I think, really has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices and a diversity of views but doesn't lead to a balkanization of our society, but rather promotes ways of finding common ground. I'm not sure government can legislate that. But what I do believe is that all of us in leadership have to find ways in which we can recreate a common space on the internet.

One danger of the internet, Obama continued, “is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases.

“One of the things I discovered even back in 2007 and 2008 is that a good way of fighting against that is making sure that online communities don't just stay online––that they move offline,” he continued. “I think that social media is a really powerful tool for people of common interests to convene and get to know each other, but then it's important for them to get off line, meet in a pub, meet at a place of worship, meet in a neighborhood. On the Internet everything is simplified. And when you meet people face to face it turns out that they are complicated. There may be someone who you think is diametrically opposed to you because of their political views, but you root for the same sports team. Or you notice that they're really good parents.”(An illustration of that insight was just published in Mother Jones.)

“It's also harder to be as obnoxious and cruel in person as people can be anonymously on the Internet,” Obama said. “One of the things we want to do when we're working with young people to build up platforms for social change is to make sure they don't think just sending out a hashtag, in and of itself, is bringing about change… You have to get on the ground and you actually have to do something.”

Obama then reiterated his support for freedom of speech:

Harry: On social media, educate or regulate?

Obama: I'm big on education, because the notion that we are going to be able to corral, that we are going to be able to contain, what's said and what's not on the Internet seems unachievable—and contrary to the values of an open society that the United States and Great Britain and most of the advanced world adheres to. I don't want to live in a world in which the state is making a decision about who says what.

In the last question he answered at length, Obama reassured Harry that there are reasons to maintain optimism about the future despite today’s problems:

Harry: Can you give people a reason to feel optimistic about the year ahead? Please?

Obama: Well, I don't think in terms of one year, but I can tell people what I genuinely believe: if we take responsibility for being involved in our own fate, if we participate, if we engage, if we speak out, if we work in our communities, if we volunteer, if we see the joy that comes from service to others, then all the problems that we face are solvable despite all the terrible news that we see, despite all the genuine cruelty, pain and hardship that people are experiencing around the world at any given moment. If you had to choose a moment in human history in which you wanted to be born and you didn't know at the time whether you were going to be Prince Harry or Barack Obama or a small child in rural Africa or India, you'd choose today, because the fact is the world is healthier, wealthier, better educated, more tolerant, more sophisticated, and less violent than just about any other time in human history.

You think about the history of the United States. It was only a few generations ago when someone who looked like me was in bondage, or if not in bondage, then in servitude … It was just a few generations ago that women couldn't aspire to anything beyond caring for their children—the most noble thing you can do, but I want my daughters to be able to do other things, and they can do other things, while still raising a family.

It was just a few generations ago, at a time when your grandmother, Her Majesty, was already an adult when half the world was aflame and 60 million people were killed in a great global war. And when you think about the strides we've made just in my lifetime—I have some gray hair, but in the scale of human history, I'm a blink of an eye—you think about how much things have changed and gotten better, that has to make you optimistic, as long as you don't think that any of us can sit back passively and assume progress continues. History doesn't just run forwards, it runs backways and sideways, and it requires us to continually push.

Love or hate him, Obama has always made an effort to be constructive in his public statements. I appreciate that quality more now than I did before he left office.

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Parents Share How They Protect Their Kids Online

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 16:00:00 -0400

Earlier this week, I asked parents to share their approach to protecting the privacy of their children as they begin to use devices with Internet access and social networks. The inquiry was inspired by an Aspen Ideas Festival talk where Julia Angwin and Manoush Zomorodi revealed how their reporting on privacy changed their parenting.

The parents who’ve replied so far are in agreement that the task is difficult.

Our first correspondent is a married woman in her mid-40's with a 12-year-old child. She lives in Irvine, California. She recently created a technology contract with her child. She writes:

My 12-year-old doesn't yet have a Facebook account, and doesn't remember how to use her Instagram account. I've showed her Snapchat, but her friends don't use it, and she hasn't pushed for it. (She was understanding when I told her I'd deleted it because the filters were so racist.) I expect her upcoming 7th-grade year to involve a lot of change in what has up to now been very limited use of social media. She just this year got a smartphone, several years after many in her upper-middle-class-neighborhood public school did. She has a cheap tablet that she uses to watch Cartoon Network and Youtube. She watches hours of Youtube with little supervision, mostly young adults who are passionate about animation or crafting, and she texts with friends. So my level of awareness about what she does in digital spaces is fairly low - I have no idea who most of the you-tubers are who she watches. We do talk about them, and she knows we can access her browserhistory, for now.

We did have a conversation this year after one of my husband's periodic browser-history checks turned up some moderately adult content (YouTube animations illustrating funny-in-retrospect sexual experiences, like getting caught by a parent), but I'm okay with her using the internet to look around a bit. We have talked for a while now about how the internet can get intimacy wrong, and these conversations are an important part of the general ongoing conversations about intimacy, sex, contraception, and consent.

My job as a librarian does involve a slightly higher than average level of involvement with online privacy issues, but that hasn't translated to at-home chats about higher-level information security. We're still more focused on issues around communication, and how the online setting can make it even harder to make mature, empathetic decisions that it is normally, especially for teens whose brains are still developing. So her concept of personal information is evolving, and I think it's going to be challenging to navigate that at the very same time she's navigating the complicated personal-growth time of the early teen years.

I would characterize my attitude towards dealing with the online world in parenting as resentful but resigned. I'm not scared of the internet, like I don't worry about rando sex offenders. Instead, I feel like the companies and governments that are collecting dossiers of information about individuals can't be trusted to get things right, and I feel like I need to teach my kid to deal with that, and that's a drag. We're trading so much for cute cat videos and easy access to coffee filters and hand cream.

She really likes those cute cat videos, though.

James has worked for more than 20 years in the IT industry and has nine children ranging in age from eighteen to three years old. “I'm probably in the minority in that I'm definitely not ‘out-teched’ by our kids, despite years of trying to get them interested in what goes on under the hood,” he writes. “My wife and I are one of the last cohorts to remember, fully, the time prior to the Internet and so it's much easier for us to end-run the whole thing by simply not participating. Suggesting the same to our kids or their peers is akin to asking them to give up one eye and both feet.”

Their advice distills down to a few first principles:

1. If you are not paying for the app, website, or service, you are not the customer. You are the product, and the way that they're making all their money.

2. There is no privacy online. Doesn't matter how clever you think you are with a nickname or how careful you are with your pictures and comments. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and you will be unmasked, publicly, for the world to gawk at.

3. Don't say anything online you wouldn't own in person, or want read back to you by us over dinner.

As to our awareness - one rule we have for the few that have taken some steps into social media (Facebook and Instagram for the most part) - is that they stay connected with us so we can see what's going on. We're aware of at least one finsta; the child (who is 16) is also aware that we're aware.

Using tools borne from the professional experience I mentioned above, internet traffic is monitored regularly (and filtered). I pull up the dashboard, explain how it all works, show what I'm able to see - and not see. So far, these lessons seem to have take hold, especially as the kids get older and see the consequences in the news, whether it's doxing, texting scandals, or cautionary tales of students (or professionals) getting called out for their online activities and losing scholarships (or jobs) as a result of them.

Our next correspondent is a mother of two boys, eight and ten, and the Data Privacy Consultant for the California Department of Education. In her work, she has seen “both the power of data to tell compelling stories and power of data to wreak havoc.”

She explains:

When used for good, data can ensure personalized instruction / interventions for kids who are struggling, food for kids who are hungry, and more. When used for ill, data can be inconvenient (e.g., useless to answer important questions), annoying (e.g., telemarketers), and terrifying (e.g., identity theft). In constantly-connected, perpetually-hacked digital spaces, collection of any data comes with risks. As such, one must constantly be asking: (1) Is collecting/sharing these data legal and necessary to answer important questions? (2) Do the expected benefits outweigh the inherent risks? and (3) Is every conceivable, plausible measure being taken to minimize data collection, protect data assets, manage/utilize data to maximize benefit?

But awareness of those perils does not cause her to keep her kids offline:

My approach to screen time mirrors my approach to life in general. I don’t believe in living in a bubble, avoiding uncomfortable truths, pretending that I can control things that I cannot. But I do believe in being reasonable and thoughtful, staying informed and sharing information with others, striving each day to learn and do better. I believe in being cautious without being alarmist…in managing and minimizing risks without suffocating benefits. When it comes to my kids and any topic—including but certainly not limited to screen time—I hope I can imbue them with both the confidence to explore and the knowledge/skills to ask questions/seek help when they find they’ve wandered too far. In both the physical and the digital world, parenting is a perpetual lesson in letting go, a daily affirmation that control is an illusion.

I recently heard an analogy that I think makes a lot of sense. The analogy is this: We don’t teach our kids to be water safe by showing them a video, pretending water doesn’t exist, or refusing to let them get in the pool. We teach them to be water safe by suiting up, jumping in the pool with them, and helping them learn the skills that will minimize their risk of drowning. Carrying this analogy into the online space, my personal stance is that—whether we like it—our kids are in the pool. Technology is everywhere. As such, it’s up to us to get in there with them and guide them through mistakes and dangers so that someday…even when we’re not around to pull them out of the water…they can save themselves with smart decisions and well-honed skills. I’m a big fan of Web sites like Common Sense Media, FERPA Sherpa, On Guard Online, US Department of Education’s Protecting Student Privacy, and Soul Behind That Screen.

Here are the rules in her house:

(1) No screen time is permitted before my hubs and I wake up in the morning. If the boys rise before us, they need to find other activities (e.g., reading, Legos) to fill their time.

(2) My hubs and I are the holders of the passwords. If the boys want online access, we’re the gatekeepers. The boys understand that at any moment, Mom and Dad can and will check their history to see what they’ve been up to.

(3) Any abuse of screen time privileges will result in immediate revocation of said privileges. We have a very small house and Mama’s got very good ears. If a Minecraft or basketball YouTube video veers into inappropriate language or content, the boys are responsible to shut it down…IMMEDIATELY. If Mom or Dad have to come in to shut it down, the screen is going OFF for a good, long time.

(4) When playing games with potential to connect with others, they are required to:

a.       Never connect with anyone they don’t know

b. Never share personal information

c.       Only use online IDs that are nonsensical and won’t reveal anything about who they are, how old they are, where they live, etc.

d. Only connect with friends whose identities have been verified by me or their dad (e.g., through a text to other parents verifying that the user name my kiddos want to connect with is affiliated with the kiddo we think it is)

e.       Tell my hubs or I immediately if anyone is pressuring them to share information

(5) Screen time ends at least 30 minutes before bed.

(6) We watch together. Especially when watching shows that aren’t necessarily targeted to their demographic, either my hubs and I watch ahead of time to make sure everything is copacetic before giving approval and/or we watch together so that we can shut things down or answer questions as appropriate. One example is Gilmore Girls. This is one of my favorite shows and I’ve been binge watching it with the boys. It’s sparked a lot of important conversations about coming of age. It has been a great tool for us to bond and talk about important topics. If they ask to watch or play something that I don’t think they’re ready for, I’ll give them the respect of watching at least a portion/researching so that I can cite specific reasons (language, sex, violence, etc.) that I think they should wait or avoid consuming the content altogether. Especially as they grow older, I won’t be around all the time to hover. I want them to be analytic, critical thinkers who make thoughtful decisions. As such, I try to let them experience what it’s like to ask, debate, research, consider the input of others, and draw conclusions. I try to avoid too many “No! Because I said so’s.”

(7) Family time, exercise, and chores are greater than screen time. Those who live in the house connect in the house, help in the house, behave in healthy ways in the house. The second the screen gets in the way of responsibilities to one another and ourselves, it’s time to go cold turkey for a bit and remember that we are NOT addicts fiending for a drug but humans who have the capacity to enjoy things in moderation.

Veronica is the parent of a 3-year-old, and while she has thought deeply about the ways she will try to protect her digital privacy she feels that regulatory changes are what’s ultimately needed:

The production and collection of my child's digital traces is really beyond my control. For instance, although I asked her pre-school not to share photos of her on Facebook, other parents do, and this leads to the fact that the Facebook's DeepFace technology has already stored her facial recognition data. Sometimes I ask parents to remove the pictures, but social media content is deeply interconnected with highly emotional and personal relationships, with the need to share experiences and give meaning to them, and sometimes - as a parent - it is simply not possible to 'opt out'.

Yet social media are just one dimension of the datafication of children, and the impossibility to opt out. Most of my daugthers' data is collected and stored by a plurality of agents, from her preschool digital records to her health records (both stored on outsourced platforms), from social media to cloud systems. I have little control of how her data is collected, stored, shared and exploited.

As a parent I will of course talk to her about digital privacy, and what should and should not be posted on social media. I will probably use the technique used by one parent in London: everytime the daugther wanted to download an app on her phone she would need to study the terms and conditions… However, I believe that the issue is far more complex than simply developing ways to teach our children how to protect their privacy. As parents, we should not only be talking about digital privacy and how we can instruct our children to protect it, but rather about 'data justice'. What we need is to campaign for more regulation and transparency.

Alex writes:

This was a topic my wife and I discussed at length during her pregnancy. Our daughter is now 8months old. From the second she was born she was old enough for us to be concerned about her presence on the internet. We haven't decides on rules for when she is older, but from the start we agreed and had a strict policy required for us, family, and friends: her face would NOT be used in any social media posts. Our concerns ranged from privacy policies on instagram and facebook, to who controls the rights to those photos once posted. We impose pretty harsh penalties for not abiding by our rules, mostly a length of time where you do not get access to our child or their photos as distributed by us.

Being 31 and growing up in the ancient times (Before Social Media), I know that had my parents plastered my image on the internet for all to see, I would have held it against them well into my adulthood. This is a simple matter of respect and trust for your child. I want her to make the decisions about her online footprint and understand the consequences of what happens if you are not thoughtful about your internet presence in our current world.

I won’t make that choice for her.

If you’ve taken a different approach than these correspondents write conor@theatlantic.com to share your approach.

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Why Would Anyone Fear a Self-Driving Car?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 10:00:00 -0400

To understand what the world will be like in ten years, it isn’t enough to look back at how different things were a decade ago and presume the differences will be comparable. The pace of technological change is speeding up so quickly, says Astro Teller, who leads the arm of Google that aims at “moonshots,” that one must look back 30 years to experience the same amount of discontinuity we’ll feel ten years hence.

A decade out, he continued, half of all cars on the road will be self-driving (and there would be more but for the fact that today’s cars are too expensive an asset to junk immediately).

The remarks took place Sunday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which the Aspen Institute co-hosts with The Atlantic. And it prompted a question from moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Trying to imagine a rapid shift toward self-driving cars, Sorkin wondered if the public would be ready as quickly as the technology. “Today there are 35,000 fatalities on the road using cars that we all drive just in the United States,” he said. “What number does that have to go down to that it becomes politically palatable, to the public, that they get in the car, and there may very well be a fatality as the result of a computer?”

In Teller’s view, we’re nearly there already.

“Almost every single person in this room already made that choice, because you got on a plane,” he told the Aspen crowd. “Planes fly roughly 99 percent of the miles that they fly by computer. It's now to the place that it is not safe for humans to fly in a lot of conditions. It's mandated that the computer fly because the computer can do it better.”

He posed this question to skeptics:

If you could have a robotic surgeon that makes one mistake in 10,000, or a human that made one mistake in 1,000, are you really going to go under the knife with the human? Really? We are already at that stage. I think self-driving cars are not in some weird other bucket. We make this decision all the time.

I suspect he is right, if only because more than half of young people already say in surveys that they look forward to self-driving cars, and the ubiquity of ride-sharing services with human drivers is already conditioning car passengers to give over more control. As a counterpoint, however, there are lots of Americans who choose to drive rather than fly, fearing the latter more despite knowing that it is statistically much safer.

With that in mind, I pose the question to readers who shudder at the thought of getting in a self-driving car, even after they are well tested and statistically safer than a car piloted by a human. Are you able to articulate what it is about the self-driving car that scares you? I fear sharks, despite the long odds against one biting me, because they are prehistoric sea monsters who rise up to unexpectedly bite people with razor sharp teeth. Dying by a combination of being eaten alive and drowning seems unusually scary. Why is getting in a self-driving car scarier than getting in a taxi?

The entire opening session of the Aspen Ideas Festival is here, with the Astro Teller interview starting at the 36-minute mark.

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The Future of Privacy Is Plausible Deniability

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Sun, 30 Oct 2016 15:00:00 -0400

The successful breach of John Podesta’s email account is the latest high-profile hack to expose thousands upon thousands of private missives to the public. With the Sony Pictures debacle in the recent past and no prospect of perfect digital security, more breaches seem inevitable. So why do email providers, organizations and individuals only seem interested in one approach to thwarting thefts?

A difficult-to-guess password, two-factor authentication, attentiveness to phishing schemes, and security features at companies like Google and Apple are all variations on a theme: All are attempts to secure an email account so unauthorized folks can’t break in. Once a breach happens, the game is lost. But what if that were just the beginning?

* * *

Say you’re 70 and you unexpectedly learn you require a surgery that will keep you in the hospital for a week. You adamantly don’t want any of your grandkids to find the will in your house that reveals who among them gets what. You suspect they’ll be snooping against your wishes. And you have 12 hours at home to prepare. You could pick a hiding spot they probably wouldn’t guess but might find. You could put the will in a padlocked trunk and take the key with you.

But what if they still find some way into the trunk?

In fact, your grandson does find a way to remove the wooden bottom, look through its contents, replace them and reseal the trunk without you even knowing.

Luckily, you anticipated this possibility. When he breached the trunk, he was able to lay hands on your will in its envelop marked “Last Will and Testament.” But the trunk included 30 different envelopes that all said “Last Will and Testament.” Each held a list with very different bequeathals. Your grandson had no way of knowing which was the real will, though he held it in his hands. Only your lawyer knew which one was real.

Hiding something is one way to keep it secure. Overwhelming would-be snoops with plausible decoys is another way. Yet, virtually no one’s email inbox is deliberately seeded with fake messages so prying eyes cannot entirely know what is real.

Imagine a startup called Plausible Deniability LLC.

When I first conceived it years ago, I thought the firm would be given access to the Google accounts of its customers, for the purpose of obscuring search histories. Over time, at random moments, it would perform searches generally regarded as embarrassing. “Donald Trump sex tape.” “Signs you have an Oedipus complex.” “Herbal cures for chlamydia, gluten free.” “What is Aleppo?” “Why is my credit score so low?” “Does huffing cat litter cause erectile dysfunction?”

The company would not store any data on the searches it performed, only that a given person was a customer and therefore not necessarily responsible for a search.

I used to think Plausible Deniability could start off marketing itself to Stanford strivers who didn’t want to be blackmailed by a hacker during their 2032 Senate run. “My fellow Californians, I never searched for ‘molly delivery.’ Like some of you, I’m a customer of Plausible Deniability to protect my privacy from snoops.” But I didn’t want would-be politicians helped so much as the person who hesitates before conducting a search like “suicide helpline” or “free anonymous HIV testing.”

Success would’ve depended in part on whether Plausible Deniability became common knowledge. After all, some would be put off by the danger of signing up for a service that generates fake searches. What if everyone later believed a fake was real? The concept would only work if lots of people came to know about the tactic, and it was used by lots of people, not just outliers trying to hide a terrible secret.

In fact, that hurdle, along with the fact that profitability would spawn instant competitors, meant the only likely path to a new norm of plausible deniability would’ve been a company like Google or Yahoo offering such a service free to its users.

Had the idea expanded to email, John Podesta’s account would’ve included “sent emails” he never actually sent, alongside the actual emails that make him and some of his correspondents look bad. (Would fake messages appear only in sent mail, or would contacts occasionally get messages they’re texted to disregard or that bypass their inbox but live in their archives?)

If the fakes had ranged from the wildly implausible, like a note about how Hillary Clinton was the true killer of JFK, all the way to the fake but totally plausible, like a note to George Soros complaining about Stephen Bannon, Podesta would’ve gained plausible deniability.

To be clear, I would dislike that outcome in his case. I agree with Glenn Greenwald that knowing the contents of some Podesta emails is in the public interest. There would be lots of instances in which Plausible Deniability would be bad for journalists. It should certainly be illegal to use for official government business.

But I wouldn’t mind if Plausibility Deniability gave Podesta cover for the purely private emails in his archives—“Dear Larry, Just FYI, that was, indeed, one of the algorithmically generated decoy emails!”—and especially if it gave cover to private citizens when their communications are hacked and posted online. A price of the privacy most people want is always that a few bad actors aren’t fully exposed.

To me, the benefits privacy confers on a free society are worth it.

Stepping back, the big idea is combining pessimism about our ability to really protect anything from being seen in today’s digital world with the insight that, in some cases, having verifiably created a fake personal-data trail, or contracting with a third party who provides that service, could offer plausible deniability that enhances privacy.

I’ve also wondered if, say, a feminist, gaming journalist who keeps getting doxxed would find it easier to keep her current phone number or address from the internet hordes if she flooded the web with fake phone numbers and addresses, in addition to trying to keep her actual phone number and address closely held. And if the Office of Personnel Management had kept 10 fake background files alongside every real one, maybe the OPM hack would’ve proved less costly.

It’s easy to imagine other iterations of this idea. No approach is without drawbacks and none offers perfect privacy, either. (In fact, it’s probably a good thing there will always be ways to verify the realness of some information with enough effort.)

Still, this largely unexploited approach seems to promise more personal privacy in a world where that good is rapidly disappearing in many unfortunate ways. We operate under the delusion the traditional approach to information security is adequate. How many major hacks will it take to persuade us, at the very least, to send this article to a shortlist of contacts with a note that says, “For future reference, I’ve already started doing this for plausible deniability”?

That email might come in handy one day.

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Should the Careless Be Punished for Getting Hacked?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 14:00:00 -0400

Nearly everyone with internet access is harmed, at least indirectly, by digital criminals.

Josephine Wolff, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, believes cybersecurity policy would benefit from a debate about if and when it might be appropriate to punish careless computer users for their role in enabling those criminals.

She writes:

The question in my field (cybersecurity) that I think would most benefit from more vigorous, widespread debate is what degree of responsibility and liability individual Internet users should have for participating, unknowingly, in the perpetration of cybercrimes and data breaches. The (generally well-meaning) people whose computers are infected and become part of the large bots that spew phishing emails and ransomware, or who click on the links and attachments in those phishing emails and carelessly surrender their login credentials or the contents of their hard drives play an enormous and devastating role in many (perhaps most) of the major cybersecurity incidents that occur today.

And yet, for the most part, discussion of these careless mistakes and oversights on the part of people with poor computer hygiene centers on the need for better education and awareness-raising. Very rarely do we grapple with the question of whether, perhaps, the only way to get individuals to take this seriously and actually change their behavior––to be more attentive to issues of security––is if there are concrete penalties and consequences associated with participating in bots, falling for phishing attacks, failing to install security updates, and other basics of computer hygiene.

This possibility raises difficult and important questions, especially around how we distinguish people who make stupid mistakes, for which there should be consequences, from those targeted by truly sophisticated adversaries, who should not be penalized for falling victim to a scheme that no one could reasonably have been expected to defend against. It also raises the crucial issue of how much technical support, signaling, and warnings are required for such a system to be viable and fair, as well as significant challenges of enforcement and attribution.

All of these are questions worthy of greater discussion and debate––as unpalatable as it may seem, at first glance, to contemplate the possibility of individual liability for unintentional complicity in computer crimes.

On Friday, Wolff will speak on the subject “Who Should Safeguard Our Data” during a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

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All the Federal Agencies that Fly Drones over US Soil

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 12:29:51 -0500

A little more than a decade ago, the border patrol started using surveillance drones. The technology and the mission were a perfect match, and few did any worrying—almost no one objects to closely monitoring America’s southern border.

The belief that the federal government was using drones to conduct domestic surveillance inside the United States, though, could get a person labeled a paranoid lunatic as recently as 2012. Yet, by then, the border patrol had lent its drones to other agencies 700 times. And the Department of Homeland Security was actively developing a domestic drone fleet, egged on by at least 60 members of Congress.

“This bipartisan caucus, together with its allies in the drone industry, has been promoting UAV use at home and abroad through drone fairs on Capitol Hill, new legislation and drone-favored budgets,” the Center for International Policy reported.

In 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a staunch defender of NSA surveillance, declared that drones are “the biggest threat to privacy in society today.” Under her questioning, the FBI admitted to using surveillance drones in “a very minimal way.”

What did Feinstein know that the FBI wasn’t telling us? Perhaps that the federal government gave local police departments $1.2 million to spend on drones that year.

In 2015, NBC News reported that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms spent $600,000 on six drones, “then never flew them because of technical problems with flight time, maneuverability and more.” Has ATF figured them out yet?

AP reported that the DEA was using drones domestically, too.

That brings us to 2016.

On Wednesday, USA Today reported that the Pentagon “has deployed drones to spy over U.S. territory for nonmilitary missions over the past decade,” citing a report by a Pentagon inspector general who declared that the flights are “rare and lawful.”

That’s the narrative that officials speaking on behalf of the federal government keep conveying––that the instances of aerial surveillance over U.S. soil are safe, legal and rare.

But it isn’t so.

There are too many federal, state, and local agencies with too many surveillance aircraft to pretend any longer that aerial spying is rare. There is too little oversight to presume all these government entities are acting legally.

As for safety, Americans know neither what sort of aerial-surveillance data has been archived nor how secure it is. And security researcher Nils Rodday learned that he could successfully hack into professional drones and take over their operations on a $40 budget.

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation are trying to draw attention to these issues; the Justice Department has issued its own guidelines on domestic drone use. But there’s still not much public discussion, debate, or oversight of domestic drone surveillance.

My sense of public opinion is that Americans don’t particularly want to be spied on from above. By keeping various aerial-surveillance programs hidden or very quiet, the government will continue to achieve a rapid fait accompli unless it is stopped.

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What the FBI vs. Apple Encryption Fight Is Really About

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:07:07 -0500

When software engineers at Apple designed the iPhone’s security features, they labored knowing that millions were relying on them to safeguard their privacy. Insofar as their efforts succeeded, they would stymie spying by jealous exes; stop hackers from emptying bank accounts; prevent blackmailers from stealing nude photos; and thwart authoritarian governments from identifying dissidents.

San Bernardino County issued secure iPhones to employees including Syed Rizwan Farook, the health department inspector who, along with his wife, murdered 14 people.

The FBI understandably wants to snoop through his device.

But it ran up against Apple’s security features. Older iPhones require a four-digit passcode. And entering the wrong code 10 times automatically wipes them clean.

On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered Apple to write malware to load onto the dead terrorist’s phone, so that the FBI can keep guessing new codes electronically, forcing entry without causing the device to delete all the data that it contains.

Apple intends to appeal the order and issued a statement denouncing it .

Newer iPhones are more secure, and Apple doesn’t want the weakest part of the old model’s security to be breached. After all, millions of innocents still use that old model. And the precedent would affect all Apple customer—and everyone else who uses electronic devices.

“We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them,” the company declared. “But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create… Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software—which does not exist today—would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.”

Apple calls what the FBI is asking for “a backdoor.”

In part for that reason, media coverage has focused on a preexisting debate about the costs and benefits of unbreakable encryption. Should technology companies build products so secure that not even government agents with lawful warrants can peek inside?

Like many technologists, I believe that the answer is yes : Just as a safe with a weak backdoor is as vulnerable to robbers as to cops with a search warrant, an iPhone with a backdoor is vulnerable to hackers, GCHQ, Chinese and Russian analogs to the NSA, and mischievous 13-year-old computer prodigies. Either a device is secure or it isn’t, and the world’s most powerful country is best served by products that facilitate secure communications for its CEOs, its Senate aides, its citizens, and the dissidents seeking to reform its authoritarian adversaries.

Breaking into this iPhone would certainly require creating software—and setting precedents—that harm America. Weigh against that the uncertain chance that it would yield information about a dead man who already attacked the United States, or about his associates, months after the attack was completed.

That strikes me as a shortsighted tradeoff.

But the FBI’s effort to force Apple’s hand isn’t just about whether the costs of unbreakable encryption outweigh the benefits. (Technically, it isn’t even about “backdoors.”) The most important question raised by this case concerns coercion. The federal government is empowered to compel individuals and corporations to hand over data in their possession upon the presentation of a valid search warrant. Is the FBI also empowered to compel Americans to write and execute malware?

Does it have a claim on the brainpower and creativity of citizens and corporations?

Apple CEO Tim Cook aptly summed up the situation: “The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe,” he declared.

A federal judge is effectively ordering these unnamed people to write code that would indisputably harm their company and that would, in their view, harm America. They are being conscripted to take actions that they believe to be immoral, that would breach the trust of millions, and that could harm countless innocents. They have been ordered to do intellectual labor that violates their consciences.

That may be commonplace in authoritarian countries, but liberal democracies ought to avoid doing the same out of an aversion to transgressing against core freedoms.

The order could set a sweeping precedent if it stands.

“If you allow people to be conscripted in this way, as investigative arms of the government,” Julian Sanchez observes, “not just to turn over data, but to help extract data, where the only connection to a case is that they wrote some software the suspect used or made a device the suspect used, you're effectively saying that companies are going to have to start a sideline in helping the government with surveillance.”

He adds: “Do we want to accept that courts may compel any software developer, any technology manufacturer, to become a forensic investigator for the government, whether or not the investigation is intrinsically legitimate?"

I do not want to accept that.

Almost every American wants to defeat the menace of terrorism. Apple is certainly invested in that effort and consistently assists the United States government.

Had Syed Rizwan Farook whispered his passcode to me, I’d be the first to alert the FBI. But precisely because support for counterterrorism is so overwhelming, there is a lot to gain and very little to lose from a citizenry that retains the discretion to refuse to cooperate with the government when its requests are overzealous. That is a prudent check to conserve, especially knowing that the counterterrorism mission can corrupt so deeply as to cause U.S. officials to countenance torture, extrajudicial killings of U.S. citizens, and forced rectal feedings of prisoners.

Even if you don’t buy that argument, what the FBI is doing with this order should trouble you. It’s opportunistically using the most unpopular possible target, a dead terrorist, to create other precedents that Nicholas Weaver correctly dubs catastrophic.

As he writes at Lawfare :

The same logic behind what the FBI seeks could just as easily apply to a mandate forcing Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others to push malicious code to a device through automatic updates when the device isn't yet in law enforcement's hand. So the precedent the FBI seeks doesn't represent just "create and install malcode for this device in Law Enforcement possession" but rather "create and install malcode for this device".

Let us assume that the FBI wins in court and gains this precedent. This does indeed solve the "going dark" problem as now the FBI can go to Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, or Google with a warrant and say "push out an update to this target". Once the target's device starts running the FBI's update then encryption no longer matters, even the much stronger security present in the latest Apple devices. So as long as the FBI identifies the target's devices before arrest there is no problem with any encryption.

But at what cost?

Currently, hacking a target has a substantial cost : it takes effort and resources. This is one reason why I don't worry ( much ) about the FBI's Network Investigative Technique (NIT) malcode, they can only use it on suitably high value targets. But what happens in a world where "hacking" by law enforcement is as simple as filling out some paperwork?

Almost immediately, the NSA is going to secretly request the same authority through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court using a combination of 702 to justify targeting and the All Writs Act to mandate the necessary assistance. How many honestly believe the FISC wouldn't rule in the NSA's favor after the FBI succeeds in getting the authority?

The NSA's admittedly restrictive definition of "foreign intelligence" target is not actually all that restrictive due to the "diplomatic" catch-all, a now unfortunately public cataloging of targets, and a close association with the GCHQ. So already foreign universities, energy companies, financial firms, computer system vendors, governments, and even high net worth individuals could not trust US technology products as they would be suceptible to malicious updates demanded by the NSA.

And the problems don’t end there. In The Washington Post , security technologist Bruce Schneier argues :

Either everyone gets access or no one does.

The current case is about a single iPhone 5c, but the precedent it sets will apply to all smartphones, computers, cars and everything the Internet of Things promises. The danger is that the court’s demands will pave the way to the FBI forcing Apple and others to reduce the security levels of their smart phones and computers, as well as the security of cars, medical devices, homes, and everything else... The FBI may be targeting the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, but its actions imperil us all.

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An Unprecedented Threat to Privacy

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:08:54 -0500

Throughout the United States—outside private houses, apartment complexes, shopping centers and businesses with large employee parking lots—a private corporation, Vigilant Solutions, is taking photos of cars and trucks with its vast network of unobtrusive cameras. It retains location data on each of those pictures, and sells it.

It’s happening right now in nearly every major American city.

The company has taken roughly 2.2 billion license-plate photos to date. Each month, it captures and permanently stores about 80 million additional geotagged images. They may well have photographed your license plate. As a result, your whereabouts at given moments in the past are permanently stored. Vigilant Solutions profits by selling access to this data (and tries to safeguard it against hackers). Your diminished privacy is their product. And the police are their customers.

The company counts 3,000 law-enforcement agencies among its clients. Thirty thousand police officers have access to its database. Do your local cops participate?

If you’re not sure, that’s typical.

To install a GPS tracking device on your car, your local police department must present a judge with a rationale that meets a Fourth Amendment test and obtain a warrant. But if it wants to query a database to see years of data on where your car was photographed at specific times, it doesn’t need a warrant––just a willingness to send some of your tax dollars to Vigilant Solutions, which insists that license plate readers are “unlike GPS devices, RFID, or other technologies that may be used to track.” Its website states that “LPR is not ubiquitous, and only captures point in time information. And the point in time information is on a vehicle, not an individual.”

But thanks to Vigilant, its competitors, and license plate readers used by police departments themselves, the technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous over time. And Supreme Court jurisprudence on GPS tracking suggests that repeatedly collecting data “at a moment in time” until you’ve built a police database of 2.2 billion such moments is akin to building a mosaic of information so complete and intrusive that it may violate the Constitutional rights of those subject to it.

The company dismisses the notion that advancing technology changes the privacy calculus in kind, not just degree. An executive told The Washington Post that its approach “basically replaces an old analog function—your eyeballs,” adding, “It’s the same thing as a guy holding his head out the window, looking down the block, and writing license-plate numbers down and comparing them against a list. The technology just makes things better and more productive.”

By this logic, Big Brother’s network of cameras and listening devices in 1984 was merely replacing the old analog technologies of eyes and ears in a more efficient manner, and was really no different from sending around a team of alert humans.

The vast scale of Vigilant’s operations is detailed in documents obtained through public-records laws by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“Last year, we learned that the NYPD was hoping to enter into a multi-year contract that would give it access to the nationwide database of license plate reader data,” the civil liberties group announced Monday in a blog post linking to the document. “Now, through a Freedom of Information Law request, the NYCLU has obtained the final version of the $442,500 contract and the scope-of-work proposal that gives a peek into the ever-widening world of surveillance made possible by Vigilant.”

The NYPD has its own license plate tracking program. It nevertheless wanted access to the Vigilant Solutions database as well, “which means,” the NYCLU notes, “the NYPD can now monitor your car whether you live in New York or Miami or Chicago or Los Angeles.” The NYPD has a long history of spying on Muslim Americans far outside its jurisdiction. And both license-plate readers and the information derived from them have already been misused in other jurisdictions.

More abuses seem inevitable as additional communities adopt the technology (some with an attitude expressed with admirable frankness by an official in a small Florida city: “We want to make it impossible for you to enter Riviera Beach without being detected.”)

Washington is accelerating the spread of the technology.

“During the past five years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has distributed more than $50 million in federal grants to law-enforcement agencies—ranging from sprawling Los Angeles to little Crisp County, Ga., pop. 23,000—for automated license-plate recognition systems,” the Wall Street Journal reports. As one critic, California state Senator Joe Simitian, asked: “Should a cop who thinks you're cute have access to your daily movements for the past 10 years without your knowledge or consent? I think the answer to that question should be 'no.'"

The technology forms part of a larger policing trend toward infringing on the privacy of ordinary citizens.

“The rise of license-plate tracking is a case study in how storing and studying people's everyday activities, even the seemingly mundane, has become the default rather than the exception,” the Wall Street Journal explains. “Cellphone-location data, online searches, credit-card purchases, social-network comments and more are gathered, mixed-and-matched, and stored. Data about a typical American is collected in more than 20 different ways during everyday activities, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Fifteen years ago, more than half of these surveillance tools were unavailable or not in widespread use.”

Nor are police the only ones buying this data.

Vigilant Solutions is a subsidiary of a company called Digital Recognition Network.

Its website declares:

All roads lead to revenue with DRN’s license plate recognition technology. Fortune 1000 financial institutions rely on DRN solutions to drive decisions about loan origination, servicing, and collections. Insurance providers turn DRN’s solutions and data into insights to mitigate risk and investigate fraud. And, our vehicle location data transforms automotive recovery processes, substantially increasing portfolio returns.

And its general counsel insists that “everyone has a First Amendment right to take these photographs and disseminate this information.” But as the ACLU points out:

A 2011 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Policenoted that individuals may become “more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation” due to license plate readers. It continues: “Recording driving habits could implicate First Amendment concerns. Specifically, LPR systems have the ability to record vehicles’ attendance at locations or events that, although lawful and public, may be considered private. For example, mobile LPR units could read and collect the license plate numbers of vehicles parked at addiction counseling meetings, doctors’ offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for political protests.”

Many powerful interests are aligned in wanting to know where the cars of individuals are parked. Unable to legally install tracking devices themselves, they pay for the next best alternative—and it’s gradually becoming a functional equivalent. More laws might be passed to stymie this trend if more Americans knew that private corporations and police agencies conspire to keep records of their whereabouts.

Spread the word.

(Image via Leonard Zhukovsky/Shutterstock.com)

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How Police Departments Can Evaluate Threats by Using an Algorithm

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 18:07:05 -0500

When Tamir Rice was killed by police officers in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2014, some observers assigned a portion of the blame to a 911 dispatcher. She relayed a citizen’s concern that a black male was sitting on a park swing, pulling a gun from his waist band and pointing it at people. But she failed to convey the caller’s observation that the male was “probably a juvenile” and that the gun was “probably fake.” Perhaps that information would have changed the behavior of the cop who shot to kill even as he stepped from his squad car.

As it turned out, the gun was indeed a harmless toy, and Rice, the black male holding it, was just 12 years old.

Every year, incidents like that one underscore how crucial it is for 911 dispatchers to piece together and pass along relevant information to first responders. Cops, firefighters and EMTs react in ways shaped by whatever they’re told.

Of course, even the best dispatchers can only piece together so much context in a matter of seconds. Often all they have to go on is a single, frantic 911 caller of unknown reliability. And that’s where the technology company Intrado sees a market opportunity.

With its product, Beware, a city that gets a 911 call about a known individual or address can plug that information into a proprietary search function and get a “threat assessment” based on publicly available data that a dispatcher wouldn’t have time to find or weigh. The technology would not have helped to save Tamir Rice. But according to an article in The Washington Post ,police officers in Fresno, California, believe that it helps them better respond to many emergency calls in that city.

“While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report. The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social-media postings,” the story begins. “It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning. The man had a firearm conviction and gang associations, so out of caution police called a negotiator. The suspect surrendered, and police said the intelligence helped them make the right call—it turned out he had a gun.”

That sounds like a good outcome in that particular case. And Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer is a fan of the product as one part of a larger municipal-surveillance network that’s now at his disposal.

“Our officers are expected to know the unknown and see the unseen,” he told The Post. “They are making split-second decisions based on limited facts. The more you can provide in terms of intelligence and video, the more safely you can respond to calls.”

But as is often the case when police departments adopt new technology on their own initiative, rather than engaging in a sustained period of public comment and civic debate, Dyer appears to underestimate the pitfalls the technology could bring, and has adopted it without key safeguards, making problems all but certain.

One was raised at a City Council meeting:

Councilman Clinton J. Olivier, a libertarian-leaning Republican, said Beware was like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel and asked Dyer a simple question: “Could you run my threat level now?”

Dyer agreed.

The scan returned Olivier as a green, but his home came back as a yellow, possibly because of someone who previously lived at his address, a police official said. “Even though it’s not me that’s the yellow guy, your officers are going to treat whoever comes out of that house in his boxer shorts as the yellow guy,” Olivier said. “That may not be fair to me.”

In fact, depending on how heavily Beware weighs social-media posts, it seems like it would be relatively easy for a hostile person to create a few fake accounts and elevate someone else’s personal threat assessment and their home address to red status.

How resistant is this proprietary-search capability against being gamed? Fresno’s police department can’t possibly know, not only because the product is relatively knew, but because it won’t be told how the technology actually works.

Intrado considers the specifics a trade secret.

Opacity of that sort will make it much more difficult to evaluate the efficacy of the company’s tool. And it could easily obscure egregious civil-liberties violations. For example:

The algorithm could assign an elevated threat level to individuals who have social-media accounts registered under names typically given to black or Hispanic people.
It could assign an elevated threat level based on tweets or Facebook posts that offer constitutionally protected speech that criticizes police officers or police unions.
It could disadvantage low-income people by assigning an elevated threat level to their addresses based on the behavior of past tenants in their high-turnover apartments, while richer folks in single-family homes are less often miscast.

If Beware were open source software, an unjust or flawed criteria or piece of code could be discovered. But the secrecy around Intrado’s approach makes real oversight impossible.

In that way, the company’s product is part of an alarming trend. More and more secret code is being incorporated into the criminal-justice system, making it more opaque and vulnerable to mistakes.

“Proprietary software interferes with trust in a growing number of investigative and forensic devices, from DNA testing to facial recognition software to algorithms that tell police where to look for future crimes,” Rebecca Wexler explained last year in Slate. “Inspecting the software isn’t just good for defendants, though—disclosing code to defense experts helped the New Jersey Supreme Court confirm the scientific reliability of a breathalyzer.”

Dyer downplays the concerns of Beware's critics, assuring The Washington Post that its scores don’t trigger a particular response––in Fresno, he explained, 911 operators “use them as guides to delve more deeply into someone’s background, looking for information that might be relevant to an officer on scene.” But that just means that any faulty information would come to the police officers second hand. Dyer added that street officers never see the scores, although in Fresno, they were told about a “red” address and then called in a negotiator.

Police departments that use Beware would seem to have troublingly perverse incentives, insofar as cops who use deadly force are judged based on what a reasonable officer would’ve done in the same situation with the same information. Lawsuits against municipal governments turn on that question. Will the fact that police were responding to a call relating to a house or individual with a red threat level now be used to argue that subsequent force was relatively more reasonable?

I can imagine a “smart” emergency-response system that incorporates publicly available data in a way that enhances public safety without infringing on civil liberties. If I had a schizophrenic son, I would love a way to register that fact with the emergency-response system so that dispatchers would know to send folks trained to deal with the mentally ill. In the event of a fire, I’d love for my local fire department to know automatically that my wife and I have a friendly dog in the house.

But the number and gravity of the unanswered questions surrounding the technology that Fresno and others are using more than justifies the skepticism of critics like the ACLU of Northern California’s Matt Cagle, who summed up his objections to me:

Fresno police rushed forward with new surveillance technology without meaningful public input about whether this software is appropriate or what safeguards should be in place. This is yet another surveillance tool being used without transparency or accountability, and it risks targeting communities that are already vulnerable to police misconduct.

If Intrado opened up every aspect of Beware to scrutiny by the public, and the Fresno police force committed to specific protocols, its benefits might prove greater than its drawbacks. But so long as residents aren’t allowed to know what causes their local police force to stigmatize a person or an address as “dangerous,” they’re effectively denied the ability to decide whether the software tool is just or prudent. My threat assessment: Beware of this product and proceed only with great caution.

(Image via Schmidt_Alex/Shutterstock.com)

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Do Encrypted Phones Threaten National Security?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 06:00:00 -0400

In Washington, D.C., where a growing chorus is demonizing end-to-end encryption that permits people to have conversations that the government can never see, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has aired a particularly extreme anti-privacy position: The Rhode Island Democrat suggested last week that selling well-encrypted smartphones to Americans should be treated like dumping toxic waste in streams. Ben Wittes of The Brookings Institution transcribed the remarks.

They began with a hypothetical kidnapping. “A girl goes missing,” Senator Whitehouse told Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. “A neighbor reports that they saw her being taken into a van out in front of the house. The police are called. They come to the home. The parents are frantic. The girl's phone is still at home.”

Naturally, everyone wants to search the phone for clues. But it is encrypted. Of course, the phone doesn’t necessarily hold any clues, and the victim is no worse off than every child kidnapped in the thousands of years before smartphones existed. Nevertheless, Senator Whitehouse feels that the phone maker bears some culpability for the girl’s fate, and should perhaps be made to pay up in a civil lawsuit:

It strikes me that one of the balances that we have in these circumstances where a company may wish to privatize value by saying, "Gosh, we're secure now. We got a really good product. You're going to love it." That's to their benefit. But for the family of the girl that disappeared in the van, that's a pretty big cost. And when we see corporations privatizing value and socializing cost so that other people have to bear the cost, one of the ways that we get back to that and try to put some balance into it, is through the civil courts, through a liability system.

If you're a polluter and you're dumping poisonous waste into the water rather than treating it properly, somebody downstream can bring an action and can get damages for the harm that they sustain, can get an order telling you to knock it off. I'd be interested in whether or not the Department of Justice has done any analysis as to what role the civil-liability system might be playing now to support these companies in drawing the correct balance, or if they've immunized themselves from the cost entirely and are enjoying the benefits. I think in terms of our determination as to what, if anything, we should do, knowing where the Department of Justice believes the civil liability system leaves us might be a helpful piece of information. So I don't know if you've undertaken that, but if you have, I'd appreciate it if you'd share that with us, and if you'd consider doing it, I think that might be helpful to us.

Senator Whitehouse is taking a very strange position. In the hypothetical, even looking past the objections noted above, the girl (or the guardian who bought her the phone) deliberately purchased a secure device and could have chosen a less secure model had they decided that the potential risks of strong encryption outweigh the benefits. When individuals bear the predictable cost of a consumer choice that they made without coercion it is inaccurate to say that the seller socialized the cost.

Of course, there may be hypotheticals better-suited to advancing Whitehouse’s agenda.

Say that some radicalized proponents of Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” tax plan plot to blow up 27 water towers in a misguided bid for their hero’s affection. After they’ve planted explosives, but before any detonations, they’re apprehended thanks to a tip from one of their co-workers at Godfather’s Pizza, who looked over their shoulders as they were texting back and forth about the plot. If authorities could access those messages they could save the water towers. But everything is encrypted, and hours later, all the water towers go boom.

The mustachioed terrorists succeed!

But even granting that there are scenarios in which strong encryption could result in costs that the public wouldn’t have had to bear in an alternative world with less privacy, a civil-liability framework would have to account for the opposite sort of case, in which costs were imposed on consumers or society by insufficiently strong encryption.

Say a foreign government, a terrorist organization, or black-hat hackers compromise the smartphone exchanges of David Petraeus or Hillary Clinton or the head of security at a nuclear power plant or a systems administrator at the New York Stock Exchange. What costs will the public bear that wouldn’t exist in an alternative world with end-to-end encryption? And what of the costs born by average citizens when their privacy is compromised? I strongly suspect the costs of insecurity are much higher than the costs that would be born in a world of end-to-end encryption, though of course there’s no way to prove that judgment definitively.

Either way, shaping encryption policy by way of dueling lawsuits and jury awards strikes me as one of the least efficient, least accurate methods imaginable to quantify the costs and benefits of different approaches to encryption and data security. And in a nation in which telecommunications companies were able to wrangle retroactive immunity for knowingly and illegally helping the government to spy on Americans, the notion that civil liability would be consistently applied to powerful corporations, even in the aftermath of black-swan events, is strikingly naive.

(Image via wk1003mike/ Shutterstock.com)

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Should Google Ever Lie to Us?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 11:29:32 -0400

What is Google’s responsibility to its searchers? In a Thursday panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Ashkan Soltani, the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist, offered a hypothetical that captured why that question is so difficult to answer.

Before getting to that hypothetical, let’s assume that Google commits––whether formally or informally––to the notion that it has some responsibility to look out for its users.

For example, if someone searches for the best way to drive from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, it will direct them to the fastest or safest route, not the route that takes them past an out-of-the-way fast food chain that paid off the search engine.

That’s an easy case: The best interests of the searcher is clear.

In contrast, Soltani’s hypothetical raised larger questions about what it means to act in a searcher’s best interests.

“Suppose Google is a fiduciary to us, they and Bing decide that they're going to look out for us. And I happen to believe that vaccines are probably bad,” he began. “And I Google ‘should I vaccinate my child?’”

“If Google is ‘looking out for me,’” he continued, “should they interpret that in the best way as, you've got to shake this person by the lapels, the way that I presume a doctor would?”

Or should a benevolent Google’s approach be, “We're looking out for you, we know what kinds of articles you're looking for, let us speed you to your destination?”

Generally, he said, he has no ready answer.

“But I think the reason we turn to experts, why they have power over us and why we want them to be fiduciaries, is to get the benefits of that expertise,” he added. “In that instance, we’d probably want to be told that the best state of medicine now is that you probably want to have that vaccine.”

So when should a search engine act like an expert? When should it direct searchers as neutrally as possible to the Web pages that they’re seeking? And to what degree should it consider the interests of people other than the person searching?

Here are some other hypothetical search terms:

Are humans causing climate change?
Is it okay to cheat on my spouse?
How to make a bomb with pressure cooker and nails;
Most painful way to spank child;
Is Google evil?
Leaked sex tape of [insert unwilling celebrity]
Most painless suicide method
What do I tell my incoming freshman daughter about campus rape?

As yet, I can’t think of a single method I’d want a search engine to apply to all of those search terms.

Can you?

(Image via Twinsterphoto/ Shutterstock.com)

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Why the Government Should Destroy -- Not Store -- Employees' Sensitive Information

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 12:07:56 -0400

Imagine a piece of information that would be useful to store digitally if it could be kept secure, but that would do more harm than good if it ever fell into the wrong hands. With Friday’s news that “hackers have breached a database containing a wealth of sensitive information from federal employees’ security background checks,” just that sort of fraught information has arguably been exposed to hackers.

One of the documents that they got, the Questionnaire for National Security Positions, asked federal workers and contractors seeking security clearances “to disclose everything from mental illnesses, financial interests, and bankruptcy issues to any brush with the law, major and minor drug and alcohol use as well as a robust listing of an applicant’s family members, associates, or former roommates,” my colleague Adam Chandler explains. “At the bottom of each page, a potential employee must submit his or her social security number. Given the length, that means if you’re filling out this document, you will write your SSN over 115 times.”

That trove of information was useful to the national security bureaucracy in its efforts to stop espionage, monitor potential blackmail, and otherwise police its employees.

Yet it now seems like the U.S. would have been better off reviewing information about cleared employees on intake and then destroying it, rather than retaining the records.

“These forms contain decades of personal information about people with clearances,” Joel Brenner, a former high-ranking intelligence official told the Washington Post, “which makes them easier to recruit for espionage on behalf of a foreign country.”

In hindsight, retaining the documents betrayed a degree of hubris: National security officials had excessive confidence in their ability to keep these secrets from falling into the hands of malicious actors, so they risked storing them indefinitely.

What else falls in this “better to destroy than to have stolen” category?

After Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and numerous successful hacks of various federal databases, perhaps the government should perform an audit and a purge on the theory that it won’t ever be competent enough to reliably safeguard information.

Isn’t there good reason to surmise that is true?

Perhaps the privacy activists who want to pass data retention laws forcing private corporations to purge the data that they hold at periodic intervals also have a point. Would it be a national security threat if the Google search histories and iPhone location data of all members of Congress, U.S. military personnel, and American CEOs fell into the hands of Vladimir Putin or China’s government? If so, perhaps it makes more sense to prohibit retaining such information for longer than two years, even though the precision of Internet ads might suffer as a result.

National security officials and Google leaders have institutional and psychological incentives to assert and believe that if they’re just careful enough going forward, they can safeguard the information that they hold. And we have an incentive to believe them. Wouldn’t it be great if our government and corporations that make cool products for us could exploit the benefits of unlimited data retention without any costs?

But I no longer believe that they can. If you disagree, what sort of leak or hack or data breach would it take to persuade you otherwise? I expect you’ll see it sooner, rather than later.

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Three Reasons Apple’s New Encryption Technology is a Good Idea (Even if the FBI Hates It)

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 16:05:21 -0400

The head of the FBI is upset. In James B. Comey's ideal world, FBI agents would be able to access everything on a person's smartphone as long as a judge had issued a lawful warrant. But technology companies are now selling devices that encrypt the user's data. There is no "backdoor" access. Only the user can decode its contents.

Hence the speech Comey is scheduled to give Thursday. "Mr. Comey will say that encryption technologies used on these devices, like the new iPhone, have become so sophisticated that crimes will go unsolved because law enforcement officers will not be able to get information from them," The New York Times reports. "The speech was prompted, in part, by the new encryption technology on the iPhone 6, which was released last month. The phone is the first one that thwarts intelligence and law enforcement agencies, like the National Security Agency, from gaining access to it, even if the authorities have court approval." (The iPhone 6 is not the first smartphone to offer default encryption.)

Comey's speech is part of a sustained effort to sway the debate over encryption, or what the FBI calls devices "going dark," thwarting efforts to solve robberies, kidnapping, and other crimes. Comey has pressed this point on network television:

In the interview that aired on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Mr. Comey said that “the notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law troubles me a lot.” He said that it was the equivalent of selling cars with trunks that could never be opened, even with a court order.

“The notion that people have devices, again, that with court orders, based on a showing of probable cause in a case involving kidnapping or child exploitation or terrorism, we could never open that phone?” he said. “My sense is that we've gone too far when we've gone there.”

These concerns strike many people as reasonable. The notion that Apple in particular is behaving badly briefly found purchase with the brilliant legal scholar Orin Kerr. But Comey's arguments are ultimately misleading and wrongheaded, as Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute explains in a definitive essay. The full text is worth your while. It begins with a brief sketch of some relevant history:

When the digital world was young, a motley group of technologists and privacy advocates fought what are now, somewhat melodramatically, known as the Crypto Wars. There were many distinct battlefields, but the overarching question ... was this: Would ordinary citizens be free to protect their communications and private files using strong, truly secure cryptography, or would governments seek to force programmers and computer makers to build in backdoors that would enable any scheme of encryption to be broken by the authorities? Happily for both global privacy and the burgeoning digital economy—which depends critically on strong encryption—the American government, at least, ultimately saw the folly of seeking to control this new technology. Today, you are free to lock up your e-mails, chats, or hard drives without providing the government with a spare key.

I'd add that you've long been free to buy a safe that opens only with your thumbprint, bury a treasure chest in a location known only to you, or write a diary in code. Jumping to the present, Sanchez debunks the notion that Apple or anyone else is setting an alarming new precedent with its encryption:

It is Apple’s backdoor access that was the aberration, even for Apple. If you encrypt your MacBook’s hard drive with Apple’s FileVault, or your Windows computer with Microsoft’s BitLocker, then unless the user chooses to send either company a backup copy of her encryption key, they can no more unlock those encrypted files than a bookbinder can decipher the private code you employ in your personal diary. Strong encryption is not even new to smartphones: Google’s Android operating system—the world’s most popular mobile platform, running on twice as many devices as iOS—has featured full-device encryption since 2011, and Google has never had backdoor access to those encrypted files. And, of course, there have always been a wide array of third-party apps and services offering users the ability to encrypt their sensitive files and messages, with the promise that nobody else would hold the keys.

Acknowledging that encryption may nevertheless be growing easier and more prevalent, in a way that will sometimes thwart law enforcement from solving crimes, Sanchez shows that the case against backdoors for law enforcement is nevertheless strong.

This is so for three reasons:

"A backdoor for law enforcement is a deliberately introduced security vulnerability, a form of architected breach: It requires a system to be designed to permit access to a user’s data against the user’s wishes, and such a system is necessarily less secure than one designed without such a feature .... Activist Eva Galperin puts the point pithily: 'Once you build a back door, you rarely get to decide who walks through it.' Even if your noble intention is only to make criminals more vulnerable to police, the unavoidable cost of doing so in practice is making the overwhelming majority of law-abiding users more vulnerable to criminals."
"Authoritarian governments, of course, will do their best to prevent truly secure digital technologies from entering their countries, but they’ll be hard pressed to do so when secure devices are being mass-produced for western markets. An iPhone that Apple can’t unlock when American cops come knocking for good reasons is also an iPhone they can’t unlock when the Chinese government comes knocking for bad ones. A backdoor mandate, by contrast, makes life easy for oppressive regimes by guaranteeing that consumer devices are exploitable by default ..."
While Apple may tightly integrate its hardware and software, most device manufacturers don't. By creating a legal obligation to help police to access devices, "you necessarily encourage them to centralize control over the software running on that device ... there’s not much point in requiring Google to release an insecure version of Android if any user can just install a patch that removes the vulnerability .... In the long run, the options are an ineffective mandate that punishes companies that choose centralized models, or a somewhat more effective mandate that will still be circumvented by sophisticated criminals … but only at the cost of destroying or marginalizing the open computing architectures that have given us decades of spectacular innovation."

Sanchez concludes by observing that while default encryption may cause the FBI to lose some access it previously enjoyed to criminal communications, it is misleading to view that loss outside a larger context in which everyone, including criminals, create a once-unimaginable trail of their activities.

With regard to Apple alone, "The company’s ecosystem considered as a whole provides a vast treasure trove of data for police even if that trove does not include backdoor access to physical devices. The ordinary, unsophisticated criminal may be more able to protect locally stored files than he was a decade ago, but in a thousand other ways, he can expect to be far more minutely tracked in both his online and offline activities. An encrypted text messaging system may be worse from the perspective of police than an unencrypted one, but is it really any worse than a system of pay phones that allow criminals to communicate without leaving any record for police...? Meanwhile activities that would once have left no permanent trace by default—from looking up information to moving around in the physical world to making a purchase—now leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs that would have sounded like a utopian fantasy to an FBI agent in the 1960s."

I'd only add that, even ignoring all these benefits of backdoor-free encryption, the practice is necessary as a response to a federal government that routinely intrudes into the private communications of Americans suspected of no crime, rather than respecting privacy except in cases where an individualized warrant is obtained. Perhaps if the Bush administration hadn't embarked on an illegal program of warrantless wiretapping, if the telecoms wouldn't have been given retroactive immunity for their unlawful behavior, and if Edward Snowden hadn't shown that U.S. officials lied under oath about a program of mass surveillance, Americans would feel less need to build safes that not even the state can unlock.

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Commentary: Who Can Respect a System That Helps the CIA to Behave This Way?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 13:00:00 -0400

If a Senate or CIA employee decides to leak an unredacted copy of the 6,000-page report on the brutal torture of numerous human beings under President George W. Bush, there will be dismay among many national-security officials, D.C. think-tank employees, and establishment pundits. They'll be unable to understand what radicalized the leaker enough to break his word or risk her freedom.

But I will understand. It isn't that I want the unredacted report published in full. If charged with wielding the black pen myself, I'm sure there are passages I'd strike: clauses that could credibly endanger lives, for example, yet add nothing important to the civic debate about torture or the historical record. Even so, if I worked on the Senate Intelligence Committee or at the CIA right now, I'd look at the news and feel reaffirmed in my belief that a Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage, Glenn Greenwald, or Barton Gellman would be far more likely to publisheverything in the public interest and no more than the U.S. government.

It isn't just that reporters have a better historical track record than bureaucrats when deciding what ought to be suppressed and what should be public. It's that the recent behavior of the White House, the Senate, and especially the CIA is appalling.

We're witnessing egregious dysfunction.

To review, the CIA tortured prisoners, violating a longstanding moral taboo as well as international law and U.S. law. In doing so, they lied to their overseers about the particular techniques they were using, as well as the efficacy of those techniques. And all of this has been acknowledged by the president of the United States.

Years later, the Senate committee that oversees the CIA spent millions of taxpayer dollars and years of scarce staff time to compile a comprehensive report on this torture.

Then all of the following occurred:

The report was kept secret long after being completed.
President Obama assigned Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who recently lied under oath in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to head up the executive branch's painfully slow declassification review.
The CIA was given a lead role in the process, giving the black redaction pen to the very—perhaps the same people—whose illegal acts are under review.
Meanwhile, it emerged that the CIA spied on its Senate overseers as they were compiling the report, lied about doing so, erroneously accused Senate staffers of having committed a felony, and got caught in all these misdeeds.
Obama reacted to this malfeasance under Director John Brennan, himself a CIA staffer during the illegal torture, by complimenting his performance as head of the agency.
It is unclear if anyone at the CIA will be fired over this.
And when the executive branch concluded the torture-report redaction process, the results were predictable: Even Senator Dianne Feinstein, normally an extreme defender of the national-security state and a staunch advocate of state secrets, believes that too much of her committee's work has been redacted. Nearly two years after the committee approved the report, its release is again postponed indefinitely.

Why would anyone maintain faith in official channels when this is how they work? Even Feinstein, who is on the right side of this particular issue, is abdicating her responsibility to the public. She knows that more of the torture report should be released than the executive branch wants to release. She believes making this report public will make the U.S. less likely to torture again. At this point, she is under no illusion about the CIA's willingness to use dirty tactics in its suppression attempts. Just as Senator Mike Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the record, making use of the Constitution's Speech or Debate clause, Feinstein is perfectly capable of getting a version of the torture report, with whatever redactions her committee feels is appropriate, to Congress and the people.

If I were a Senate or CIA staffer, I'd be agonizing about whether I ought to leak this report to more responsible parties as the lesser of two evils. While I believe the rule of law has great value, it's hard to argue that it is enhanced if classification statutes are followed strictly, with the result that America's intelligence bureaucracy is better able to hide its torture and tell lies about its efficacy (in part because the CIA's lawbreakers still fear being prosecuted for torture).

As Andrew Sullivan put it, "Either the rule of law applies to the CIA or it doesn’t. And it’s now absolutely clear that it doesn’t. The agency can lie to the public; it can spy on the Senate; it can destroy the evidence of its war crimes; it can lie to its superiors about its torture techniques; it can lie about the results of those techniques. No one will ever be held to account. It is inconceivable that the United States would take this permissive position on torture with any other country or regime."

If following classification rules abets that result, civil disobedience becomes more likely and more justified. Those who lament leaks would do well to understand who is creating the conditions for them: Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and an out-of-control CIA. Efforts to suppress the truth from Americans creates an understandable determination in some patriots to make sure that the truth outs, one way or another, because a system of classified secrets is never so illegitimate as when it is being used to suppress illegal and immoral government misdeeds.

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Senator: The White House Should Launch a Criminal Probe of the CIA

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 10:48:05 -0400

Senator Mark Udall, a member of the committee that conducts oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency, declared Thursday that the agency should be investigated by an independent counsel for violations of the Constitution, federal criminal statutes, and an executive order pertaining to surveillance.

"From the unprecedented hacking of congressional staff computers and continued leaks undermining the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation program to his abject failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the agency, I have lost confidence in [Director] John Brennan," he said.

Earlier in the day, Brennan admitted the CIA spied on Senate staffers as they conducted an inquiry into torture of prisoners perpetrated by the spy agency—an act that makes a mockery of the separation of powers and is just the latest illustration of the spy agency's longstanding contempt for democratic strictures.

Weeks ago, when Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the CIA of exactly that behavior, Brennan said, “I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s—that’s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.” He was either lying or woefully ignorant of what was going on at the agency he heads.

The Department of Justice, which has a dismal record of keeping the CIA accountable, declined to investigate the matter for criminal wrongdoing. The CIA's own findings were made public only after DOJ abdicated its responsibilities. The New York Times details what the CIA has now admitted:

An internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency has found that its officers improperly penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to prepare its damning report on the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program.

The report by the agency’s inspector general found that C.I.A. officers created a fake online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by members of the committee staff, and tried to cover their movements as they rooted around the system, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation’s findings.

McClatchy Newspapers explains what will probably happen next, instead of a criminal probe or accountability meted out to CIA agents who spied on the duly elected members of America's upper legislature: "Brennan has decided to submit the findings for review to an accountability board chaired by retired Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana."

The head of the CIA can't decide for himself that this is widely inappropriate conduct that deserves the strongest possible sanction?

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Does John Brennan Know Too Much for Obama to Fire Him?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 10:21:43 -0400

When John Brennan assured the country that the CIA hadn't improperly monitored the Senate team that compiled a report on Bush-era torture, he fed us false information. That much is clear from Thursday's news that "the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities." Either the CIA director was lying or he was unaware of grave missteps at the agency he leads. There are already calls for his resignation or firing from Senator Mark Udall, Trevor Timm, Dan Froomkin, and Andrew Sullivan, plus a New York Times editorial airing his ouster as a possibility.

President Obama could surprise the country by axing his former counterterrorism adviser, explaining that under Brennan's management, employees broke laws and undermined the separation of powers core to our democracy. Obama may well make a good-faith effort to act in the national interest. But it's impossible to believe that he won't be aware of the following: No U.S. official knows more than Brennan about Obama's many drone killings. Some of the killings were solidly grounded in international law. And others may have violated the Fifth Amendment, international law, or the laws of war.

In the past, Brennan has been willing to lie about those drone strikes to hide ugly realities. For example, he stated in the summer of 2011 that there had been zero collateral deaths from covert U.S. drone strikes in the previous year, an absurd claim that has been decisively debunked. What if he grew more forthright, either in public statements or by anonymously leaking information?

Recall how intimately Obama involved himself in many killings:

President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces .... Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.

And the central a role Brennan played:

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama...

Finally, recall the chilling logic these two settled on:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Even if Brennan told everything he knew, I'd still guess that the odds would be heavily against Obama ever finding himself on trial for civil-rights violations or war crimes (though if I were Obama, I'd take proactive steps to lessen the odds further.)

But I can imagine details that could cause Obama's image to suffer, now and in the eyes of history. He might be subject to travel bans or indictments in absentia in certain countries, for example. We don't now know what sort of legal authority Obama had the first time he ordered Anwar al-Awlaki to be killed, or why his 16-year-old son, an innocent American teenager searching abroad for his absentee father, ended up dead. There's still much classified information about innocent people killed in drone strikes.

I am not suggesting that Brennan is blackmailing Obama, or even that he would necessarily retaliate if fired. Still, if Obama is like most people in positions of power, he fires no subordinate without first asking himself, "Could this person damage me?" If Obama is a normal person, rather than an unusually principled person, the answer factors into his decision. Look at what Brennan said in March, immediately after denying that the CIA spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee, when Andrea Mitchell asked if he'd resign his post if that turned out to be wrong:

... if I did something wrong, I will go to the president, and I will explain to him exactly what I did, and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.

He's a smart man.

All this may be irrelevant to his continued tenure. Perhaps Obama has always believed and continues to believe that Brennan is doing a heckuva job. But just as secret torture acted as a cancer on the U.S. government, encompassing acts so barbaric and criminal that, even recently, the CIA spied on a Senate subcommittee investigating the subject, America's semi-secret policy of semi-targeted killing rendered everyone involved complicit in activities sufficiently dubious that all desire their secrecy. Would you fire a guy who knows as much about your most morally fraught acts as Brennan knows about who Obama has killed in secret? Yeah, me neither. This isn't the biggest cost of presidents who hide arguably illegal actions by declaring them state secrets. But it is certainly one of the costs.

There's inevitably a need to review the job performance of people party to these secrets. They typically keep their jobs. So George W. Bush left us a CIA staffed partly with people willing to torture, and Obama will likely leave us with a CIA that includes torturers, people willing to kill American citizens in secret without due process, and people willing to spy on their Senate overseers. The Senate intelligence committee was established precisely to stop this sort of thing from playing out, but it is failing in its duties, as yesterday's crimes spawn today's efforts to spin or suppress those crimes. If the Senate doesn't act now to rein in the CIA, what will it take?

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Keith Alexander Wants to Patent Method For Detecting Cyber Threats -- Is That Ethical?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 11:28:22 -0400

Keith Alexander is trying to explain himself. The former director of the NSA stoked astonishment when reports surfaced that he would ask from $600,000 to as much as $1 million per month as a cybersecurity consultant. What could make him so valuable, save the highly classified secrets in his head? A congressman went so far as to speculate that he'd be selling state secrets. But it isn't so, Alexander says. In an interview with Foreign Policy, he offers a new accounting:

The answer, Alexander said in an interview Monday, is a new technology, based on a patented and "unique" approach to detecting malicious hackers and cyber-intruders that the retired Army general said he has invented, along with his business partners at IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., the company he co-founded after leaving the government and retiring from military service in March. But the technology is also directly informed by the years of experience Alexander has had tracking hackers, and the insights he gained from classified operations as the director of the NSA, which give him a rare competitive advantage over the many firms competing for a share of the cybersecurity market.

Details on the "unique approach" are thin, but it wouldn't surprise me if Freedom of Information Act requests are already being prepared to send to the U.S. Patent Office:

Alexander said he'll file at least nine patents, and possibly more, for a system to detect so-called advanced persistent threats, or hackers who clandestinely burrow into a computer network in order to steal secrets or damage the network itself.

As FP notes, these are the sorts of "cyberattacks" that Alexander harped on while in government, claiming they already represented "the greatest transfer of wealth in American history."

Let's mull that over. While responsible for countering cybersecurity threats to America, Alexander presides over what he characterizes as staggering cyber-thefts and hugely worrisome security vulnerabilities. After many years, he retires. And immediately, he has a dramatically better solution to this pressing national-security problem, one he never implemented in government but plans to patent and sell!

FP's Shane Harris talked to some lawyers and reports:

Alexander is believed to be the first ex-director of the NSA to file patents on technology that's directly related to the job he had in government. He said that he had spoken to lawyers at the NSA, and privately, to ensure that his new patents were "ironclad" and didn't rely on any work that he'd done for the agency—which still holds the intellectual property rights to other technology Alexander invented while he ran the agency.

Alexander is on firm legal ground so long as he can demonstrate that his invention is original and sufficiently distinct from any other patented technologies. Government employees are allowed to retain the patents for technology they invent while working in public service, but only under certain conditions, patent lawyers said. If an NSA employee's job, for instance, is to research and develop new cybersecurity technologies or techniques, then the government would likely retain any patent, because the invention was directly related to the employee's job. However, if the employee invented the technology on his own time and separate from his core duties, he might have a stronger argument to retain the exclusive rights to the patent.

This is an emperor-has-no-clothes moment. We're supposed to believe that Alexander went home and developed much of a million-dollar-per-month cybersecurity technology in his spare time, while doing two different demanding national-security jobs, without using NSA resources or classified information, in a way that was somehow separate from his core duties, which included a cyber-security portfolio?

It beggars belief:

He was the longest-serving director in the history of the NSA and the first commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, responsible for all cybersecurity personnel—defensive and offensive—in the military and the Defense Department. From those two perches, Alexander had access to the government's most highly classified intelligence about hackers trying to steal U.S. secrets and disable critical infrastructure, such as the electrical power grid. Indeed, he helped to invent new techniques for finding those hackers and filed seven patents on cybersecurity technologies while working for the NSA.

He'd now have us belief that in his spare time he was developing even better techniques than the ones he developed in government. Even if true that would be a scandal! Harris posed the obvious question: "Asked why he didn't share this new approach with the federal government when he was in charge of protecting its most important computer systems, Alexander said the key insight about using behavior models came from one of his business partners, whom he also declined to name, and that it takes an approach that the government hadn't considered. It's these methods that Alexander said he will seek to patent."

So there you go.

Alexander toils in his spare time. The million-dollar idea is almost there ... but not quite. Then, just as he retires, a mystery man comes through with a veritable flux capacitor. How fortuitous!

The business partner, whose name we're not allowed to know, and with whom Alexander was able to collaborate immediately upon leaving his job, but not before, contributed the crucial insight—ostensibly without any assistance from his future business partner, who had access to all the most useful possible classified information—but despite coming up with this ostensibly invaluable intellectual property independently, the mystery man is willing to cut Alexander in for a seven- or eight-figure payday.

As if that weren't enough:

Alexander said they were particularly worried about threats like the Wiper virus, a malicious computer program that targeted the Iranian Oil Ministry in April 2012, erasing files and data. That will come as a supreme irony to many computer security experts, who say that Wiper is a cousin of the notorious Stuxnet virus, which was built by the NSA—while Alexander was in charge—in cooperation with Israeli intelligence.

The man who both presided over the creation of the most sophisticated cyber-weapon in history and hyped the threat of cyberattacks more than anyone else in America will now patent and privately sell for millions a product to stop cyberattacks. When did the business partnership with the mystery man form, one wonders? The whole story, which could only happen in America, would seem to lend some urgency to Jason Leopold's lawsuit trying to secure Alexander's financial disclosure forms from the NSA, which is refusing to give them up.

If the limited facts on offer don't stink enough to prompt a congressional inquiry—ideally one that gets Alexander testifying under oath—what possible fact pattern would rouse the branch of government charged with oversight? At the very best, he is stoking a perception of impropriety so extreme that it speaks poorly of his character that he's chosen to retire in this fashion. If anything more nefarious is going on, hopefully either Congress or the press will be able to expose it. The stakes are certainly high enough to justify digging.

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New Surveillance Whistleblower: The NSA Violates the Constitution

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 16:16:58 -0400

John Napier Tye is speaking out to warn Americans about illegal spying. The former State Department official, who served in the Obama administration from 2011 to 2014, declared Friday that ongoing NSA surveillance abuses are taking place under the auspices of Executive Order 12333, which came into being in 1981, before the era of digital communications, but is being used to collect them promiscuously. Nye alleges that the Obama administration has been violating the Constitution with scant oversight from Congress or the judiciary.

"The order as used today threatens our democracy," he wrote in The Washington Post. "I am coming forward because I think Americans deserve an honest answer to the simple question: What kind of data is the NSA collecting on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?"

If you've paid casual attention to the Edward Snowden leaks and statements by national-security officials, you might be under the impression that the Obama administration is already on record denying that this sort of spying goes on. In fact, denials about NSA spying are almost always carefully worded to address activities under particular legal authorities, like Section 215 of the Patriot Act or Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. An official will talk about what is or isn't done "under this program," eliding the fact that the NSA spies on Americans under numerous different programs, despite regularly claiming to be an exclusively foreign spy agency.

Executive Order 12333 is old news to national-security insiders and the journalists who cover them, but is largely unknown to the American public, in part because officials have a perverse institutional incentive to obscure its role. But some insiders are troubled by such affronts to representative democracy. A tiny subset screw up the courage to inform their fellow citizens.

Tye is but the latest surveillance whistleblower, though he took pains to distinguish himself from Snowden and his approach to dissent. "Before I left the State Department, I filed a complaint with the department’s inspector general, arguing that the current system of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons under Executive Order 12333 violates the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures," Tye explained. "I have also brought my complaint to the House and Senate intelligence committees and to the inspector general of the NSA."

These steps—which many say Snowden should've taken—produced no changes to the objectionable NSA spying and wouldn't be garnering attention at all if not for Snowden's leaks. It is nevertheless telling that another civil servant with deep establishment loyalties and every incentive to keep quiet felt compelled to speak out. As Tye put it:

I have never made any unauthorized disclosures of classified information, nor would I ever do so. I fully support keeping secret the targets, sources and methods of U.S. intelligence as crucial elements of national security. I was never a disgruntled federal employee; I loved my job at the State Department. I left voluntarily and on good terms to take a job outside of government. A draft of this article was reviewed and cleared by the State Department and the NSA to ensure that it contained no classified material.

When I started at the State Department, I took an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States. I don’t believe that there is any valid interpretation of the Fourth Amendment that could permit the government to collect and store a large portion of U.S. citizens’ online communications, without any court or congressional oversight, and without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Such a legal regime risks abuse in the long run, regardless of whether one trusts the individuals in office at a particular moment.

This act of conscience illuminates yet another path a surveillance whistleblower can take. If more current and former federal officials believe the NSA is in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment, they should consider declaring themselves too. "Based in part on classified facts that I am prohibited by law from publishing," Tye wrote, "I believe that Americans should be even more concerned about the collection and storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than under Section 215." I wonder what he saw but isn't revealing.

(Image via Rena Schild/Shutterstock.com)

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The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 13:14:42 -0400

Consider the latest leak sourced to Edward Snowden from the perspective of his detractors. The National Security Agency's defenders would have us believe that Snowden is a thief and a criminal at best, and perhaps a traitorous Russian spy. In their telling, the NSA carries out its mission lawfully, honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy of innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden's actions as a wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations.

But their narrative now contradicts itself. The Washington Post's latest articledrawing on Snowden's leaked cache of documents includes files "described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained" that "tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."

The article goes on to describe how exactly the privacy of these innocents was violated. The NSA collected "medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque. Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam ..."

Have you ever emailed a photograph of your child in the bathtub, or yourself flexing for the camera or modeling lingerie? If so, it could be your photo in the Washington Post newsroom right now, where it may or may not be secure going forward. In one case, a woman whose private communications were collected by the NSA found herself contacted by a reporter who'd read her correspondence.

Snowden defenders see these leaked files as necessary to proving that the NSA does, in fact, massively violate the private lives of American citizens by collecting and storing content—not "just" metadata—when they communicate digitally. They'll point out that Snowden turned these files over to journalists who promised to protect the privacy of affected individuals and followed through on that oath.

What about Snowden critics who defend the NSA? Ben Wittes questions the morality of the disclosure:

Snowden here did not leak programmatic information about government activity. He leaked many tens of thousands of personal communications of a type that, in government hands, are rightly subject to strict controls. They are subject to strict controls precisely so that the woman in lingerie, the kid beaming before a mosque, the men showing off their physiques, and the woman whose love letters have to be collected because her boyfriend is off looking to join the Taliban don’t have to pay an unnecessarily high privacy price. Yes, the Post has kept personal identifying details from the public, and that is laudable. But Snowden did not keep personal identifying details from the Post. He basically outed thousands of people—innocent and not—and left them to the tender mercies of journalists. This is itself a huge civil liberties violation.

The critique is plausible—but think of what it means.

I never thought I'd see this day: The founder of Lawfare has finally declared that a national-security-state employee perpetrated a huge civil-liberties violation! Remember this if he ever again claims that NSA critics can't point to a single serious abuse at the agency. Wittes himself now says there's been a serious abuse.

The same logic applies to Keith Alexander, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Stewart Baker, Edward Lucas, John Schindler, and every other anti-Snowden NSA defender. So long as they insist that Snowden is a narcissistic criminal and possible traitor, they have no choice but to admit that the NSA collected and stored intimate photos, emails, and chats belonging to totally innocent Americans and safeguarded them so poorly that a ne'er-do-well could copy them onto thumb drives.

They have no choice but to admit that the NSA was so bad at judging who could be trusted with this sensitive data that a possible traitor could take it all to China and Russia. Yet these same people continue to insist that the NSA is deserving of our trust, that Americans should keep permitting it to collect and store massive amounts of sensitive data on innocents, and that adequate safeguards are in place to protect that data. To examine the entirety of their position is to see that it is farcical.

Here's the reality.

The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution—but even if you disagree that it's illegal, there's no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. It has already been taken and given to reporters. The necessary reform is clear. Unable to safeguard this sensitive data, the NSA shouldn't be allowed to collect and store it.

(Image via Flickr user stephenmelkisethian)

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Former NSA Chief Clashes With ACLU Head in Debate

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 11:58:00 -0400

ASPEN, Colo.—Is the NSA keeping us safe? That was the question that MSNBC used to frame a debate Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which The Atlantic co-hosts with The Aspen Institute. The debate featured Keith Alexander, former head of the National Security Agency; former Congresswoman Jane Harman; and former solicitor general Neal Katyal spoke in defense of the signals intelligence agency. Anthony Romero of the ACLU, academic Jeffrey Rosen and former Congressman Mickey Edwards acknowledged the need for the NSA, but argued that it transgresses against our rights with unnecessary programs that violate the Constitution. The two teams also spent time arguing about Edward Snowden and whether his leaks were justified. By the end of the 90 minute session the civil libertarian team handily beat the national security state team in audience voting.

Keith Alexander began the debate by arguing that the NSA made things safer for American troops in Iraq circa 2007, that its international monitoring of terror groups has resulted in tips that helped the FBI and the CIA to stop terrorist attacks, and that NSA plays a vital role safeguarding the United States from cyber attacks.

Anthony Romero of the ACLU was at his strongest when pressing the other team to explain why the American people shouldn't have a right to privacy in their metadata, given how revealing it can be. He rejected the notion that the phone dragnet is permissible because, although the NSA keeps records of virtually every phone call made, it only searches that database under a narrow set of conditions. The 4th Amendment does not just protect against unreasonable searches, Romero pointed out. It also protects us from unwarranted seizures. If the FBI went into a person's closet, took a box without opening the lid, and never peeked inside until getting a warrant a year later, the seizure would be problematic. The NSA does the digital equivalent and acts as if it is unobjectionable.

"The threat of terrorism is real," Romero said. "We need to meet the challenge of those threats... the question is what kind of NSA do we want? Do we want an NSA that's accountable, properly reined in by a more robust set of checks and balances, a system that goes back to the first principle that the government can only infringe upon our basic privacy rights, the right to be left alone, by evidence based on individualized suspicion? Or do we have an NSA that continues with business as usual?"

During the portion of the debate dedicated to audience questions a doctor stole the show:

I'm Jay Jacobson, an infectious disease physician from Utah. I take the phone calls from people who either have or worry about HIV or other STDs including people who are or imagine that they will soon be pregnant. One federal law, HIPPA, obliges me to fulfill my oath to protect their confidentiality.

The metadata program makes me worry that my pledge has now been weakened and will potentially be broken. My question is some clarity about where metadata resides and who has access to it. Before 9/11, I was well aware that my telephone calls were kept by my telephone company. They acquired the same data: who I called and how long I spoke. They did it for billing purposes. I also understood, correct me if I'm wrong, that the government, under judicial authority, could access some of those records if indeed it could specify the reason for doing so. I was not so worried at that time about the phone company breaching the confidentiality pledge that I had made. I'm much more worried now. I wonder if both panelists could respond to where that data is now and why it cannot reside in an area where it can only be accessed with judicial authority.

Alexander acknowledged that call records are currently stored in a government database, said he wouldn't mind if someone other than the government kept the records so long as the NSA could access them, and explained the FISA court rules for querying the database. He claimed NSA analysts must always explain how a query is related to terrorism and said that there is 100 percent audit-ability. "Only 35 to 37 people are trained to look in that case, and we have emphatic access restrictions," Alexander stated. "The court, Congress, and the administration through multiple levels audit that 100 percent. Nobody has made a mistake on that program."

Retorted Anthony Romero, "I don't believe it, General Alexander. When you tell me that we have all these great controls, and forensic trails, and making sure that only this person can have access to this, I don't believe you anymore. You know why? Because you had a 28-year-old contractor in Hawaii who walked away with the crown jewels. And if your controls were that good then that would not have happened. So you'll have to forgive me. I don't trust the government when you say, trust us, we have all these great checks and balances in place. They can only access it if they need to, if they have the proper authority, I just see–"

"–So you admit your client took more than he needed," Alexander said.

"I didn't admit to anything," Romero replied.

"You said he took the crown jewels, that he took everything, when he only needed one. How are you going to defend that?"

Romero replied that while one document would have revealed the Section 215 dragnet, it wouldn't reveal all sorts of other NSA programs, like Bull Run, which revealed the way that the NSA deliberately installed backdoors that weakened the security of products made by American corporations. Alexander responded by talking about how many terrorist attacks happen in the world. "We're arguing about self-adctualization," he said, "when around the world they're trying to survive."

In the ensuing conversation, the NSA's practice of recording the full audio of virtually every cell phone call in the Bahamas also came up. Harman, who seemed least informed among the panelists, denied its existence. Katyal said those who would undermine the NSA, despite its success preventing terrorist attacks in America, are like a man in a rain storm who tosses away his umbrella because he's not getting wet. In addition to choosing the civil liberties team as the winners by debate's end, roughly three-fourths of the audience said that protecting privacy was more important than keeping safe from terrorism. When MSNBC showed partisan and gender breakdowns, Republicans and women were likelier to side with the NSA. Men and independents were very likely to side against the NSA.

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Edward Snowden's Other Motive for Leaking: Better Encryption

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Tue, 13 May 2014 12:27:50 -0400

A few pages into Glenn Greenwald's newly released book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, there is a fascinating passage that transforms my understanding of why the contractor leaked NSA secrets.

The familiar rationale still applies. Edward Snowden wanted to inform Americans about the actions of our government and to spark a debate about mass surveillance. "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name," he reportedly wrote in a note to his collaborators, "and that which is done against them."

Actually, though, he had a second motive. Thomas Jefferson once wrote: "In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." Snowden wrote:

While I pray that public awareness and debate will lead to reform, bear in mind that the policies of men change in time, and even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it. In words from history: Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.

Even if most people had ignored Snowden, he might not have judged his own actions a total waste. After all, they might have inspired a single cryptographer to innovate. That could be hugely significant.

The quote above isn't the only one that supports this analysis. Greenwald reproduces another paragraph that Snowden wrote to reporter and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras early in their correspondence, characterizing it as "the crux of what he viewed as his mission." Snowden wrote:

The shock of this initial period [after the first revelations] will provide the support needed to build a more equal internet, but this will not work to the advantage of the average person unless science outpaces law. By understanding the mechanisms through which our privacy is violated, we can win here. We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search through universal laws, but only if the technical community is willing to face the threat and commit to implementing over-engineered solutions. In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man.

I may be forgetting about a statement or series of statements that Snowden made over the last year. But as best I can remember, these are the clearest passages that we have indicating a second primary motive. Snowden was trying to reach the masses to inform us and spark a debate that somehow reined in the NSA.

He was also trying to reach elites. In leaking, he hoped to inform and influence a small subculture of tech influencers. Regardless of how Americans reacted to his leaks, he hoped they'd awaken to the ideology and reach of the surveillance state, and that at least some programmers would be inspired to thwart it with technology.

This is in keeping with statements Snowden has made about the importance of encryption. It also casts additional doubt on the theory that he's been a Russian spy all along. If that were true, why would he fabricate this other rationale in private correspondence with Poitras? With that, I'm going to delve back into Greenwald's text. I'm guessing there will be more of interest in future posts, and I'll update this one if I come across another relevant passage, or if anyone sends me an old Snowden quote that is relevant to this second motive for leaking.

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Is State Surveillance a Legitimate Defense of Our Freedoms?

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Mon, 05 May 2014 11:02:02 -0400

Is state surveillance a legitimate defense of our freedoms? The question was put to Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, during a debate Friday evening in Toronto. Alan Dershowitz joined him to argue the affirmative. Glenn Greenwald and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian argued against the resolution.

Going in, I expected to disagree with Hayden, who presided over the NSA's illegal program of warrantless wiretapping in the years after the September 11 attacks. But I want to emphatically agree with the very first remarks he made in the debate.

"State surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms," he said, restating the resolution. "Well, we all know the answer to that. It depends. And it depends on facts."

He quickly clarified:

It depends on the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves. What kind of surveillance? For what kind of purposes? In what kind of state of danger?

And that's why facts matter.

In having this debate, in trying to decide whether this surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms, we really need to know exactly what this surveillance is.

Hayden was trying to defend the NSA with those remarks. He argued that facts matter, and that the Washington Post got some facts wrong when reporting on slides leaked by Edward Snowden, making the NSA look more aggressive than is the case. But in doing so, he unwittingly echoed a core belief of the national-security state's critics. He's absolutely right: To judge whether a particular kind of surveillance is legitimate, one must know exactly what's being considered and its purpose.

Yet the NSA hid many types of surveillance from the American people. In fact, many members of Congress were unaware of exactly what was being done and why. By Hayden's own logic, neither American citizens nor those members of Congress could meaningfully decide whether the NSA's activities were legitimate! I've made the same claim repeatedly. The difference is that I find it alarming and he doesn't. It's that anti-democratic mindset I've warned about before.

* * *

What follows is my transcription of Hayden's whole opening statement, should anyone want to read, endorse, or rebut it. Video of the whole debate is here.

State surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms—well, we all know the answer to that. It depends. And it depends on facts. It depends on the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves. What kind of surveillance? For what kind of purposes? In what kind of state of danger? And that's why facts matter. In having this debate, in trying to decide whether this surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms, we really need to know exactly what this surveillance is. And I freely admit, that's hard, okay?

This stuff has been pushed out into the public domain, and you've had a chance to look at it. And sometimes it's been pushed out there in a way that, well, let me be kind, it's not clear. And other times it's been put out in a way that's just wrong.

Let me give you an example. And by the way, no one has to have ill intent to make it wrong. This is actually really complicated stuff. There was one slide that was pushed out into the public domain over a program called Boundless Informant. If I were actually thinking of names that would eventually become public that's probably not one I would pick, okay? But what it was was a heat map of the world and it showed metadata events that NSA in one way or another acquired in different parts of the world. It clicked off tens of millions of metadata events that the NSA was getting according to the map from France and Spain and Norway. And so immediately the story was, "Hey, these guys are ripping off the phone bills of a whole bunch of Europeans." The reality of the story was that the French, Spanish, and Norwegian services were providing NSA metadata that their services had collected, not in their own countries, but in internationally recognized theaters of armed conflict. It was a team ball effort, but it got rolled out as very aggressive collection on the part of NSA.

So it's hard. It's complicated. Sometimes though this stuff just gets rushed to the darkest corner of the room. All ties go to the most ominous description of what's happening. And sometimes it doesn't even have to be a tie, it just goes to the most ominous description.

Something called the Prism program, that's the NSA having access through Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to materials on their servers, in the United States, materials affiliated with a legitimate intelligence target. That got shoved out the door that NSA is free-ranging on the servers of Google and Microsoft and Yahoo, that it just was an uncontrolled NSA exploration of this data. That's just not wrong. [Ed. note: I presume he meant to say, "That's just wrong."] Now that story was pushed out, the Washington Postis one of the places that pushed that out, they corrected it on their web site over several days without notifying people that the article had been changed.

But let's skip all that.

Let's just all assume that we can get to the hard truth, that we can actually boil this down to what CSEC is doing here and NSA is doing across the lake and GCHQ is doing in Great Britain and ASD is doing in Australia. Even then you've got a problem. Because even then you're walking into a movie theater late in the third reel, and you're looking at a scene, a snapshot of the third reel and you're saying, "Aha, the butler did it!"

Actually, you need to go back and look at the whole movie. You need to see what went on before. Because if you know what went on before you may have a different interpretation of what you think the butler is guilty of. There are three or four things that happen that NSA and all these organizations have tried to solve. Enormous volume. How do you conduct signals intelligence to keep you safe in a tsunami of global communications? Well, the answer to that is bulk collection of metadata. Another issue that's out there prominently is NSA is mucking about in those global telecommunication grids that have your emails. No one complained when NSA was doing Soviet strategic microwave rocket signals. Well, the equivalent of those Soviet microwave signals are proliferator, terrorist, narco-trafficker, money-launderer emails, coexisting with yours and mine, out there in Gmail.

And if you want NSA to continue to do what it was doing, or CSEC to continue to do what it's doing, what it had been doing to keep you safe, it's got to be in the stream where your data is.

There's a couple other things too. After 9/11, the enemy was inside my country. That's the 215 program, metadata. Who might be affiliated with terrorists inside the United States? And finally, when the enemy wasn't in my country his communications were. It's an accident of history, but it's a fact, most emails reside on servers in the United States. They should not deserve constitutional protection if the email's from a bad man in Pakistan communicating to a bad man in Yemen. And the Prism program is what allowed us to get those emails to keep everyone safe. There's a lot more to talk about but you're going to start clapping in about nine seconds. So I'm going to go back to the podium.

Thank you.

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