And now for some comedy, what a crazy world we live in.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'
When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they're not worried. "I've got nothing to hide," they declare. "Only if you're doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don't deserve to keep it private."
The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates." The legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as an "all-too-common refrain." In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus making the contest with security concerns a foreordained victory for security.
The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." Variations of nothing-to-hide arguments frequently appear in blogs, letters to the editor, television news interviews, and other forums. One blogger in the United States, in reference to profiling people for national-security purposes, declares: "I don't mind people wanting to find out things about me, I've got nothing to hide! Which is why I support [the government's] efforts to find terrorists by monitoring our phone calls!"
The argument is not of recent vintage. One of the characters in Henry James's 1888 novel, The Reverberator, muses: "If these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn't pity them, and if they hadn't done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing."
I encountered the nothing-to-hide argument so frequently in news interviews, discussions, and the like that I decided to probe the issue. I asked the readers of my blog, Concurring Opinions, whether there are good responses to the nothing-to-hide argument. I received a torrent of comments:
- My response is "So do you have curtains?" or "Can I see your credit-card bills for the last year?"
- So my response to the "If you have nothing to hide ... " argument is simply, "I don't need to justify my position. You need to justify yours. Come back with a warrant."
- I don't have anything to hide. But I don't have anything I feel like showing you, either.
- If you have nothing to hide, then you don't have a life.
- Show me yours and I'll show you mine.
- It's not about having anything to hide, it's about things not being anyone else's business.
- Bottom line, Joe Stalin would [have] loved it. Why should anyone have to say more?
On the surface, it seems easy to dismiss the nothing-to-hide argument. Everybody probably has something to hide from somebody. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared, "Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is." Likewise, in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novella "Traps," which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers in a mock-trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. "An altogether minor matter," replies the prosecutor. "A crime can always be found."
One can usually think of something that even the most open person would want to hide. As a commenter to my blog post noted, "If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph—so I can show it to your neighbors?" The Canadian privacy expert David Flaherty expresses a similar idea when he argues: "There is no sentient human being in the Western world who has little or no regard for his or her personal privacy; those who would attempt such claims cannot withstand even a few minutes' questioning about intimate aspects of their lives without capitulating to the intrusiveness of certain subject matters."
But such responses attack the nothing-to-hide argument only in its most extreme form, which isn't particularly strong. In a less extreme form, the nothing-to-hide argument refers not to all personal information but only to the type of data the government is likely to collect. Retorts to the nothing-to-hide argument about exposing people's naked bodies or their deepest secrets are relevant only if the government is likely to gather this kind of information. In many instances, hardly anyone will see the information, and it won't be disclosed to the public. Thus, some might argue, the privacy interest is minimal, and the security interest in preventing terrorism is much more important. In this less extreme form, the nothing-to-hide argument is a formidable one. However, it stems from certain faulty assumptions about privacy and its value.
To evaluate the nothing-to-hide argument, we should begin by looking at how its adherents understand privacy. Nearly every law or policy involving privacy depends upon a particular understanding of what privacy is. The way problems are conceived has a tremendous impact on the legal and policy solutions used to solve them. As the philosopher John Dewey observed, "A problem well put is half-solved."
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Guest tweeters on Sweden's Twitter account stir up controversy
If you had the keys to your country's Twitter account, what would you say?
Well, Sonja Abrahamsson has caused a bit of a stir with her tweets about Jews from the @Sweden handle.
This week's vox populi via @Sweden from Abrahamsson has delved into such curiosities as "Whats the fuzz with jews. You can't even see if a person is a jew," without intimate examination, she wrote in more explicit terms.
As you can imagine, her tweets have caught some flack and attention.
Abrahamsson, who describes herself as "a 27-year old womanlike human being from northern Sweden," is part of a government experiment entrusting its @Sweden national Twitter account to a new citizen every week.
So far, the project shows that people say the darnedest things.
Later, she tweeted that "In nazi German they even had to sew stars on their sleeves. If they didn't, they could never now who was a jew and who was not a jew."
Her related tweets go on in that manner. While her tweets are probably mostly shocking to those with broader cultural exposure, one tweet states what's obvious: "Where I come from there is no jews...."
Abrahamsson comes from a tiny town where everyone is related and owns a tractor, according to her bio on the Curators of Sweden page. Her exposure to the world may be rather limited, even as she broadcasts to it for answers.
That's not her only topic of interest, of course. Other tweets talk about her kids and the mundane doings of life.
What's unclear is the intent of the provocative tweets, which could be open to various interpretations because of language variations. Abrahamsson apologized for offending some with her musings, explaining, "I thought it was a good idea to ask the question when so many well educated people all over the world can answer. But no. Bad idea."
Maybe something significant was lost in translation with those mini missives. Then again, she earlier had posted this: "I found some pics I've shopped on da computer. This pic I call 'hungry gay with aids'," as a caption on a picture that had Queen's Freddy Mercury's face Photoshopped in it.
These curious musings come a few days after the program was in the spotlight of news coverage in the New York Times.
Abrahamsson isn't the first guest @Sweden tweeter to raise eyebrows. There was the tweeter named Jack from December. "I guess I'm drinking a lot of coffee, lighting my face up with my laptop and hanging out w friends. Oh and, you know, masturbation."
And then there was the breastfeeding mom who posted pictures of her nursing her two babies that created a bit of a controversy in March. To the reactions, she wrote that she didn't care whether others were offended: "I refuse to cover up. I refuse to be discrete. I refuse to feel shame!"
"It’s very important for us to let everyone take a unique viewpoint," VisitSweden's social media manager Tommy Sollén told the Wall Street Journal. "Every one of our curators is there with a different perspective."
Abrahamsson is the 24th curator in the initiative, which has included the likes of journalists, truck drivers and teachers, according to the publication.
Sure, every individual has an important voice in the chorus -- or cacophony -- that is a democracy. But should they really be given an online bullhorn to speak for everyone in the country?
How Microsoft and Yahoo Are Selling Politicians Access to You
Writes Lois Beckett on ProPublica:
Microsoft and Yahoo are selling political campaigns the ability to target voters online with tailored ads using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services.
The Web giants provide users no notification that their information is being used for political targeting.
In one sense, campaigns are doing a more sophisticated version of what they’ve always done through the post office 2014 sending political fliers to selected households. But the Internet allows for more subtle targeting. It relies not on email but on advertisements that surfers may not realize have been customized for them.
Campaigns use voters records to assemble lists of people they’re trying to reach 2014 for instance, “registered Republicans that have made a donation,” Yahoo’s director of sales Andy Cotten told ProPublica. Microsoft and Yahoo help campaigns find these people online and then send them tailored ads.
These messages don’t just pop up in Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Because Microsoft and Yahoo operate huge networks that provide advertising on some of the most popular web destinations, targeted ads can appear when a voter visits a swath of different sites.
Microsoft and Yahoo said they safeguard the privacy of their users and do not share their users’ personal information directly with the campaigns. Both companies also said they do not see the campaigns’ political data, because the match of voter names and registration data is done by a third company. They say the matching is done to target groups of similar voters, and not named individuals.
According to Microsoft, President Obama’s re-election campaign has recently done this kind of targeting, and both national political parties have done so previously.
The marketing site ClickZ, the Wall Street Journal, Slate and others have previously noted the ability of campaigns to target online ads to specific groups of voters. But what has not been detailed is which companies are now making the targeting possible by providing users’ personal information 2014 and which have decided it’s off-limits.
Google and Facebook told ProPublica they do not offer this kind of political matching service.
Google’s privacy policy classifies political beliefs as “sensitive personal information,” which should not be used for online ad targeting. Facebook does allow political campaigns to target political advertisements, but only on the basis of political beliefs reported by the users themselves, rather than information culled from their voting records.
FOI Documents Show TOR Undernet Beyond the Reach of the Federal Investigators
Recently released documents detail the federal government's inability to pursue cybercriminals shrouded by the tricky anonymity tools used by the Silk Road marketplace and other darknet sites - tools which are funded in part by the federal government itself. In this particular case, a citizen reported stumbling upon a cache of child pornography while browsing the anonymous Tor network's hidden sites, which are viewable with specialized, but readily available, tools and the special .onion domain.
Documents, released through a Freedom of Information Act request by Jason Smathers on MuckRock, show that after being given details of the illicit material, investigators were stymied as to the origin of the pornography's host. In the investigators' own words, "there is not currently a way to trace the origin of the website. As such no other investigative leads exist."
Smathers' request was originally for all Justice Department records mentioning the Silk Road marketplace. The Justice Department forwarded the request on to the FBI for processing. In fact, the FBI had received an almost identical request, also filed by Smathers, and rejected it, claiming at the time that responsive records could not be found.
While he is currently appealing the FBI's initial response, 11 pages of responsive documents were withheld from the Justice Department's release. The FBI cited Exemption (b)7(d) in that case, which excludes from disclosure "records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes which could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source and information furnished by a confidential source."
The FBI and DEA had been directed to investigate Tor networks, and specifically the Silk Road marketplace where users can buy and sell legal and illegal goods anonymously using a combination of Tor and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, by Senator Charles Schumer who stated that the DEA was "aware of the site" and most likely investigating it.
A nearly identical request regarding Silk Road to the Drug Enforcement Agency was rejected as being too broad or burdensome to process, while the Secret Service claimed it had no responsive documents, as did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
The DEA has touted infiltrating similar anonymous Tor marketplaces in the past.
Despite the illegal ends of these marketplaces, the technology was begun and still operates with more noble aims: It was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Lab, and later maintained by the Tor Project, a non-profit group supported financially at various times by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, various governmental and NGO entities, Google and the National Science Foundation. The technology has proven important in puncturing through Internet censorship and tracking attempts around the world.
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