Posts Tagged ‘Privacy’

Yesterday, Ken Lipartito of Florida International University gave a lecture at Georgetown about his early research into an upcoming book entitled “Inside the Corporate Panopticon.” Lipartito’s focus is on commercial survieillance, which he sees as far more worrisome than government surveillance. I’ve copied my notes below (sloppy, mistakes, etc.), but two things Lipartito does really well:

• Elucidate how surveillance is dehumanizing: although the information obtained through surveillance (broadly defined) is personal, its use is impersonal and de-contextualized. For example, although Visa has access to vast amounts of information about me, it is hardly a definitive account of who I am. Take Michael Phelps – one photo of him doing drugs (surveillance) is taken out of context and comes to define him in the public eye; his humanity is lost to one fact.
• Explain the paradoxical, self-reinforcing cycle of surveillance: in order to find this dehumanization, people must provide context – they must provide more information, thus adding to the lack of privacy. Lipartito realized this when filling out a job application that asked if he had ever been in trouble with the law but provided no space to explain that it was a minor traffic violation. His instinct was to provide this information, but it only adds to the surveillance. The same phenomenon can be seen with the push for more financial transparency.

Inside the Corporate Panopticon

• Economic surveillance is the more important part of the surveillance
• Manifests in labor, management, credit, consumer knowledge
• Working on a book
• 1935 small town – total fingerprint surveillance
  • Had been controversial but was established by the ’30s. By this time there were 10 million files and and by ‘45 there were 100 million. Young Hoover expanded it drastically.
  • The argument of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” was made
  • 52,000 prints were collected and sent in after an enormous drive
  • Is this fear and paranoia in a small American town?
  • Yep. It happened in Berkeley, CA. These are broader
• Surveillance is not always imposed from the outside; it is often something we do to ourselves.
• Surv is a tool of social knowledge – gathering, sorting, maintaining of it is modern.
• Only over the past two hundred years have these demands arisen – a result of a distended society of relationships.
• Surv accompanied the shift from closeknit societies to urban ones of strangers
• We have little personal information, surveillance provides impersonal information
• Our lives are enabled via surv – birth cert, ssn, dmv, etc.
  • Those cut off from surv are cut off from the social benefits (illegal immigrants)
• Married women before the 70s were cut out from credit market because they couldnt get individual credit
• But we can be excluded via surv – police
• Memory hole in 1984 as dangerous because it is the lack of surveillance of the state. same story in kafka’s the trial because he cannot see the file.
• Surv’d facts are often limited and out of context
• Try to get the system to see us as we are, not as it wants to represent us. But in explaining ourselves, we are caught in the web.
• Mac 1984 ad plays to the myth that surv is easy to attack and see
• Modern economy runs on information. Much surv focuses on state, but commerce survs too
• Surv isnt brought about via one decider or technology. Surv grows on itself.
• Scientific knowledge can be transformed to surv, too (dna, etc.)
• Fingerprinting was taken to by eugenicists (Galton)
• Much of surv seeks to measure and categorize the human body
  • Anecdote about shoe sizing science (xray)
  • “needed level of exactitude”
  • Transfered authority from customer to shoe
  • What prevailed was not xray machines, but the branick foot measurers
  • “When surv is to be done on a large scale, the cheap and easy to use techs increase the spread of surv.”
  • Measuring of the body is implicated in far worse scenarios: slavery
  • “strange technologies of surveillance” and with surv, strange often meet soft – paper, bit/bytes.
  • Anything that augments memory/transfering info aids surv [what way does the flow happen? intentional tech or incidental?]
• Kodak brought archivable surveillnce to the masses
  • Newspapers brought wider circulation to photography, causing worse spread of private info
  • Prompted the first calls for privacy protection – Brandeis and Warren article – “right to be left alone”
  • privacy was now a matter for both government and private business
• corporations are giant information processing machines
• [short on time so moves on to labor]
• surv techniques were use in factories by a utopian welshman who sought “new harmony” where factory owned life and play, etc.
• by the 20th century, labor surv grew to facilitate info flow from floor to manager
• and personal lives were penetrated – ford.
• firms that invest in workers also raise the level of intrusion – efficiency experts, hr, drug tests, company towns, computer monitoring.
• calls into question those who think networked economy is more humane. he thinks it is a higher form of surveillance
• science of consumption – quant and psych methods
• “tell me what you buy and i will tell you who you are”
• focuses on predicting wants.
• surveillance categories capture the current zeitgeist – rice as female. muslim as terrorists.
• google continues a long time trend
• is surv a step towards panopticon or is it necessary to allow living in a globalized world
• credit reporting used to be investigation but in the 70s that started to change to constant surveillance
  • these investigations encoded the prejudices of the time
• credit rating ignored the complexities of local conditions. homogenized experience.
• the answer to criticisms of surveillance is often ‘more surveillance’
• FICO and other algorithms allowed them to say that the credit rating was objective [what about the values embedded in algorithms]
• epistemological conundrum of the marketplace
• information reduces uncertainty, but there is no way to determine reliability of information. which leads to more and more surveillance
• “1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual”

Today Georgetown hosted the Eighth Scholarly Communications Symposium to discuss the implications of the Google Book Search Settlement. Siva Vaidhyanathan and James Grimmelmann both had great points to make. The session was recorded and will hopefully be posted soon, but in the meantime here are my notes:

James Grimmelmann

• Google Book Search (GBS) started out as an indexing project
• The scale makes individual negotiation prohibitively expensive
• Hanging over all this is the orphan works prohect
• Google is becoming potentially the world’s largest book seller
• This is an elegant solution to breaking the orphan works logjam because it is opt-out
• “Google may become the only game in town for serious online access to many of these works.”
• Book Rights Registry
• Settlement makes almost no provision for the privacy of readers
• Privacy is at the hear of an intellectual history that libraries are at the center of
• No consumer-rights work
• First sale, etc. are shot
• All copyright owners are bound by this because of its class-action nature
• If this lawsuit was to try the copyright status of GBS, it didn’t need to be class-action
• Class-action was necessary to solve orphan works, but paradoxically throws all those unknown owners behind the worrisome provisions
• “This is not the way these types of things should be done in a democracy. We have public institutions to solve gigantic issues, not the courtroom. The courtroom’s adversarial approach is the wrong way to determine the future of information.”
• But the settlement is still a net positive

Siva Vaidytanathan

• Most books will never pop out in GBS. Even rediscovered works will only make a couple cents a year.
• GBS will have minimal impact on out-of-print works – otherwise they would be in print
• Lessig, Doctorow, etc greeted GBS with much excitement. It was a big company fighting for fair use.
  • Copying was incidental and necessary – what mattered was the user experience
  • Siva disagreed with Doctorow over whether or not Google indexing would be a boon to authors
• Sony Betamax had created the general right to copy for personal uses and gave breathing room for technology companies
• Fair use isn’t supposed to be decided en masse. It need to be determined on a case-by-case basis
• Libraries should have done this, especially because they have special rights under copyright
• “Nothing about Google is just about what’s on the screen.” GBS was about gathering the lexicon of humanity – they want semantic analysis of text to improve search function. This was not simply about creating an index.
• Google was imposing the copyright norms of the web onto the rest of the world – the default is expecting copying by search engines
• If Google had lost, they would have been betting their whole business
• Deal with libraries was quid pro quo – libraries got a digital copy of everything they gave Google. That is payment for the use of the material. That was the APA’s silver bullet.
• Google needs to still care about this project in ten years.
• “Why are we betting everything on what may be a fly-by company in the scale of history.” We are sacrificing better options for expediency.
• The nondisclosure agreements are anathema to scholars and academics, but that’s how Google works
• Libraries are one of the few noncommercial places in America. Google’s vending machine is troubling because it changes that.
• Deeply troubled by lack of user confidentiality
• We need to know how book search algorithm works
  • It doesn’t reflect what experts consider the top books in a given field
• The gatekeeping function is about standard and term setting. That’s where winners and losers are picked. This is far subtler than it used to be.
• Not convinced we’ve missed the opportunity
  • Outlining the Human Knowledge Project (like Human Genome Project where scientists rejected Venter’s Solera – a private project. The two databases complement each other)
  • Pool resources globally – to preserve and extend the record of human knowledge

Q&A

• Budget setters may stop physical collections
  • Scans are not archive quality and have errors that may be undiscovered
• Because the libraries are not parties to the lawsuit, they have no real standing
• Google’s presence takes the air out of any other digitization plans
• Access medium, not a preservation medium.
• Rare materials should be digitized more because that’s what people cannot get access to
• Open Content Alliance is a “heartbreaking” story

I have a new post up on Techdirt about my (sorta) home town of Chicago rushing head first into a Big Brother network of surveillance cameras:

Under the auspices of fighting crime and preventing terrorism, Chicago’s Police Superintendent Jody Weis is hyping CCTV as having “limitless” crime-fighting potential. The reality, as is evident to anyone who has actually researched this type of thing, is that studies have shown municipal surveillance cameras to have little to no positive effect on crime. Further, London is widely known to have the most extensive CCTV network in the world, but that served as little deterrent to the terrorists of July 2005. But instead of bringing this up, the Sun-Times and Chicago officials point to a test in which “live video was used to catch a petty thief in the act of sticking his hand in a Salvation Army kettle outside Macy’s State Street.” Given the cost in both dollars and civil liberties, it is hard to justify catching petty criminals stealing some coins from charity.

Head on over to check the rest of it out.

From 1987, via @torproject, comes this emotional appeal for anonymity (and reuse):

The contemporary ego is enormous, and suits for plagiarism are not uncommon. “I wrote this,” is the accusation. “You copied it.” How times have changed! Up through Shakespeare’s day, writers were more interested in basing their thoughts on older works than in writing something totally original. School children would compress the works of the classics or elaborate on them. They learned through imitation. Instead of having to guarantee to their professors that every word they uttered and every thought they conceived was theirs alone, they were expected to show that everything they said had been said before. Even Shakespeare’s plays were developed from histories and older plays and romances and stories, the authors of which are unknown in many cases.

Read on.

This morning, Rebecca MacKinnon spoke at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about the Internet in China. The talk examined the role of the ‘net in shaping public discourse in China:

Cyberspace has clearly become one of the liveliest public forums in China, despite the efforts by the Chinese government to control online access and content. China’s netizens have become more skillful and assertive in utilizing the Internet to voice their opinions and, occasionally, force the Chinese government to become more responsive.  But the Internet has also allowed more nationalist and radical views to contend for influence and sway public opinion.  How is online public opinion changing Chinese society? Will the new freedoms found in the virtual world lead to greater political participation or help fuel resurgent nationalism? How is the Chinese government responding to online activism?

I was able to attend it and greatly enjoyed the event. Rebecca’s slides and my notes from the event are below. I embedded them with Scribd because the formatting was funky.

RMack Speech Notes

Update: Here is the link to the video of Rebecca’s speech.

Also, here’s the paper I wrote last semester about the role of American Internet companies operating in China. Rebecca’s work was instrumental in my research.
Freedom Fighters – The Role of Internet Corporations in Promoting Digital Freedoms by Kevin Donovan [Updated]

My friend Ben pointed me to a post about how privacy in today’s world is alive and strong, and while I agree with the main sentiment, I think the post is ultimately misguided.

The argument, basically, is that people historically did not have a lot of privacy; the small communities into which we were born, where everyone knew everything, did not leave space for privacy. In fact, the much heralded “death of privacy” brought about by digital networks is really just a return to the traditional state of affairs. Laurent, the blogger in question, adds to this by saying that we are actually better off than our ancestors because:

“If you can’t control the conversation improve it! Become the one stop source of info about yourself. Have a profile, more active than any other profile for all matters related to you. This way your content will always beat others’ content, and you get your control back. Then it’s up to you to not being photographed while drunk at that Spring break party. But that was a good ideas (not being photographed) well before Facebook right?

Now that you are back in the driver seat, you have your privacy back. Just of a different kind. You have built a space that could be called “publicy”, or “the plausible me”. It is a credible space where people expect to see information about you. Whatever credible information you say in there will be taken as true by the world.” [Emphasis pre-existing.]

It’s a seductive argument, right? “Stop complaining, and start doing something!” And he’s right, but only if he had stopped there.

Instead, he encourages people to actively mislead people on their public profiles to “build [their] private” self. However, the rise of ubiquitous sensors and citizen reporting will make your efforts futile, and as soon as your credibility is shot, your public profile you spent so much time building will be useless. In fact, it might be useless already, because we live in a world of gatekeepers, there is no guarantee that your active profile will out-rank those photos from Spring Break.

And finally, he ignores a whole class of people who need to be private – dissidents, journalists, etc. It is very simplistic to think that an individual can successfully lie about their activities when digital networks are becoming so pervasive. Although in the past we could tell our small community that we were doing something else, today, GPS, CCTV, RFID and a bunch of other acronyms make your activities known to a wide range of third parties who can suck all the data up and store it for far longer than the memory of a tight-knit community. And best of all? Today, you cannot leave the tight-knit community which is the world.

This fall, a wide ranging group of academics, activists and businesses announced the Global Network Initiative – a set of principles and governance mechanisms for ICT corporations operating in authoritarian states. As readers of this blog know, this is just the type of thing I’m interested in, and I jumped on the opportunity to write a term paper about the topic.

So, for my Science and Technology in the Global Arena course I wrote a paper about the role of American Internet companies operating in China. A lot has been written on the subject, of course, but I think the paper adds to the field by arguing that these companies could do much more beyond the Global Network Initiative (which is still laudatory). It is embedded below and a PDF is available here. Let me know what you think.

Freedom Fighters: The Role of Internet Corporations in Promoting Digital Freedoms

When I was younger, I had very clear political ambitions. I wanted to climb the D.C. ladder.

That is, until I realized that some of my political convictions were strongly against the politically correct positions high-powered politicians were expected to have. In middle school I was writing my Senators condemning China over its Tibet policies. More recently, my digital history is strewn with strongly worded denouncements of powerful interests like the big content industries. All of this is not even touching on the realities of friendships played out online – jokes that may strike third parties as off-color or unprofessional.

The reality of having lived a strongly opinionated and Internet-heavy life is that I have a history of content which could easily be dug up by opposition staffers after a would-be appointment. Luckily for me, for the most part I don’t think my skeletons will ever be worthwhile to dig up. But plenty of my generation’s closets will be searched. What to make of the coming storm?

The Economist jumps into this fascinating question with a very smart article discussing the future of politics and reputation. Astutely noting, “who has a closet without a skeleton?,” the article uses Obama’s intensive vetting process as a harbinger of things to come.

But I don’t think that covering up people’s unsavory pasts is likely to be sustainable. Instead, I think we are moving towards a society of disclosure and acceptance – Obama never had to confront breaking news that he tried cocaine because he disclosed it well before he was a Presidential candidate. Not everyone can have best-selling books, though.

Instead, I think the next forty years will be a roller coaster where my generation’s past will sink many a rising star. Only the most adept will be able to avoid the career-stunting attention paid to their youthful indiscretion, but, in the end, we’ll (hopefully) have a society more accepting of the human, in failure and success. We’ll turn the media spotlight on ourselves and recognize that we’ve all done things we’re not proud of and that it doesn’t mean we are unqualified for public office.

The Economist reaches much the same conclusion. Although it seems that, “Only the very blandest, most media-savvy and controlled people, who have never uttered a controversial sentence in their lives, will be deemed fit to hold public office…” another possibility is that “Perhaps, when dirt on almost everybody becomes readily available, politics will lose its hypocritical, moralistic tone… That could make people realise that politicians, too, are only human, and make them more forgiving of minor transgressions.”

What do you think? Are we destined for blandness or acceptance?

For my excellent Information Privacy course this past semester, I wrote my term paper on the Department of Homeland Security policy of searching digital devices, including laptops, at the border. I discuss the law regarding such warrantless searches, the specifics of the policy, and why we should oppose the ineffective and privacy infringing practice. The PDF is available here and an excerpt below.

“In the rush to search laptops, a more important question is missed. The debate is not security versus privacy. It is a question of liberty, of autonomy, and of human dignity. This was what Benjamin Franklin knew when he uttered the now famous declaration that “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” It was what Bruce Schneier recognized when he wrote, “The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.” In a democracy, its citizens have the good fortune to know that the pendulum swings between opposing poles, but more importantly, they have the power to push the pendulum where they see fit. On the topic of searches of digital devices at the border, the pendulum needs pushing towards liberty.”

And here’s the Scribd embed:
Passport, Please. Password, Please.

Last week, over at Techdirt I wrote a post that proved to be quite controversial. “Do We Really Want an Internet Run By Lynch Mobs?” pointed to some recent activities by cybercrime experts and ISPs to disconnect the companies (like McColo) hosting botnets, spammers and other online criminals. Although the specific examples were undertaken so as to minimize unintended consequences and spillover, I worried that they set a precedent for extralegal solutions to illegal activity. Instead of causing a hiccup in online crime and forcing the criminals to move to other jurisdictions, secruity experts should be working with law enforcement inside of existing legal institutions to punish proven criminals. Amidst the uproar in the comments about the metaphor of “lynch mobs,” I think my main point was missed: if private entities come to see themselves as enforcers of the law, then we stand the chance of eliminating important concepts like due process, judicial oversight and democratic input.

Some of the folks involved with taking McColo offline thought it was nonsense that what they did could be abused – after all, they were very conscientious of making sure that the spammers they were punsihing were indeed guilty. My argument wasn’t so much with them, but with the style of enforcement. By no means does the law always get things right, but the checks and balances within it help avoid rash decisions. Take the news out of Michigan State University where a student government leader was found guilty of spamming university faculty after emailing 391 professors about a controversial change in the academic calendar. Although the scale differs, MSU is attempting to do the same thing HostExploit.com does – use extralegal efforts to stop cybercrime. As EFF, FIRE and others point out, in doing so, they overstep constitutional boundaries.

Today’s big news about the RIAA suspending their “sue-the-fans” policy made it clear that extralegal law enforcement is about to explode in popularity. Instead of continuing to file lawsuits against people they allege were downloading or making available music on p2p systems, the RIAA has “hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.” The ISPs will agree to cut off service for repeat offenders (2-3 times).

This has a number of problems. As Fred Benenson points out, the courts are starting to turn against the RIAA’s tactics and legal theories about “making available” but ISPs need not heed those esoteric copyright differences. Instead, they can simply amend their Terms of Service (ToS) to reflect the extralegal arrangement worked out between the RIAA and themselves. Just as the courts are beginning to realize that identifying users based on IP address is flimsy proof at best, ISPs will use this approach to kick users off from the Internet.

Reasonable people may argue that companies should be free to construct ToS to their liking and customers can either take them or leave them; through market forces ToS will become acceptable to both parties, goes the argument. In reality, though, ISPs hold a disproportionate amount of the power in the relationships. It is obvious why few people read ToS – they are infamous for their illegible legalese. They are written by corporate lawyers who have a keen interest in covering all their bases and are often written to give incredible leeway to the company enforcing them. And with the little local competition in the broadband market that most Americans have, taking your business elsewhere is difficult.

As Mike says in discussing this at Techdirt, “These days, an internet connection is a necessity — and taking it away from people because someone is sharing the gift of music with others not for any sort of commercial gain is totally unbalanced.” In promoting freedom of expression, it is critically important to err on the sie of unfettered Internet access. Internet access, per se, may not be a right, but it is crucial to a free information age: Koffi Annan once said, “And of course, the information society’s very life blood is freedom. It is freedom that enables citizens everywhere to benefit from knowledge, journalists to do their essential work, and citizens to hold their government accountable. Without openness, without the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers, the information revolution will stall, and the information society we hope to build will be stillborn.”

A society of rash decision-making, biased towards revoking Internet access is not one to which we should move, whether the auspices be copyright protection or spam elimination. The legal system can be frustratingly slow and wrongheaded at times, but Americans are lucky to have one of the most robust, honest systems in the world and we shouldn’t toss it away.