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The House passed the revised and extended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the Senate is sure to follow suit next week. ArsTechnica has a good explanation of how the bill undercuts constitutional assurances that the government will not spy on its citizens. And also of why the guarantees that really, truly the government will play by the rules now are nothing more than was already present in the previous legislation and ignored by the the Bush administration.

Today’s news (see the Washington Post story) is that Obama will vote for this bill, while promising to watch its application if he becomes president.¬†

One of the things Obama stressed in his primary campaigns was that he voted against the war in Iraq, and that Clinton voted for it. Obama cast himself as the cautious one, the one prepared to say that the president’s say-so for going to war was not enough. Certainly, many who voted for the war did so out of fear that they would seem weak if Saddam Hussein really did have WMD’s; Clinton and others erred on the side of not being seen as risking the security of the nation, and Obama roundly criticized them for having done so.

Here Obama is doing the same thing. His reputation in military and defense matters being open to question because of his inexperience, he is trying to establish himself as a strong defender of national security. He apparently doesn’t need to court the civil libertarian voters, believing they have nowhere else to go.

It doesn’t look like this can be an issue for the debates, since McCain is planning to vote the same way. I wonder what Clinton’s plans are.

 

I have a short piece on the InformIT web site on the difficult question of sites such as juicycampus.com, which invite anonymous slander. Anyone attacked on these sites must experience deep pain and feel utterly helpless. Here is an unsolved problem in our legal and social system, how to provide some protection against such viciousness without imperiling the freedom of the Web as an expressive medium.

I have a piece in the Boston Globe this morning about social networks and other threats to privacy. It’s the most e-mailed.

I didn’t pick or get consulted on the title; that’s generally the rule for these opinion pieces. I’m a bit sorry that it comes out as picking on Facebook, which is merely the most successful and probably no worse on privacy matters than many other sites. As a title for this piece about the privacy wars, I might have chosen instead Pogo’s classic wisdom, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

One of the reasons that we wrote “Blown to Bits” was because we realized that so much of what goes on is connected to the changes digital technology has brought, and we wanted everyone to understand the implications.¬† Not a day goes by when we don’t see more bits stories.

Like today.¬† A witness¬†alleged that the driver of an MBTA trolley that crashed was talking on her cell phone at the time.¬†Thanks to the fact that cell phone service is now all “bits” that allegation is gone. Recent news stories reported that the cell phone records show no phone, text, or Internet activity at the time.

“We were able to recover the driver’s cell phone at the scene. We issued legal process to access records of her phone calls and text messages as well as her Internet usage on the phone, and engaged in forensic analysis,” Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said in a statement.

We should all be aware that every single thing that we do with our handy little phones is tracked and stored.  It may take a warrant to retrieve those data, but they are there for the asking.

That wasn’t the only bits story today.¬† The front page of USA Today reported that visitors to the Olympics are at risk of being hacked by the Chinese government.¬† That story won’t be news to anyone who has read Blown to Bits – we talk at some length about how digital communications can be monitored and analyzed, about how search results vary from country to country, and, most importantly, how digital censorship can be a powerful tool for molding the thinking of a nation.

The Celtics (sadly!) lost to LA last night.  How, you might ask, is that one a bits story?  Answer РKobe. whose 36 points made the difference, was cleared of charges to some degree because the cellphone text messages of his accuser were all stored, and subsequently retrieved.  You may have thought those message went away after you sent them.  Not so.

As my hero, Ron Popeil likes to say, “wait, there’s more.”¬† According to the Washington Post, the Red Cross was fined because six units of blood were improperly washed.¬† That’s six units out of literally millions.¬† Imagine finding that needle in a haystack if the records weren’t all bits.

The list has no end.  We are living in a bits world, with endless possibilities and perils.

Vontu, Tablus, Code Green, PacketSure, — these are all players in the world of “data security,” of making sure that valuable, confidential, protected, secure data doesn’t leak out. It’s a noble calling. After all, we don’t want our private information leaking everywhere, and corporations, for sure, don’t want theirs sneaking out the back door either.

Here’s what they do. They listen to everything passing through the company network. Often, they sit in a place on the network where information heads out the digital door to the Internet. They are “configurable.” That means that, like much of the software we use, the administrator can set up rules. “If Susan Black sends an email that includes the word ‘Prada’ or ‘Tiffany’ then …” Oh wait, that isn’t exactly the kind of rule you would expect for data security. My point exactly.

The tools that guard against data leaks are nothing more or less than digital wiretaps. The marketing term is “content inspection agents.” I love marketing-speak. The folks in marketing could have just named them “eavesdroppers.” Unlike the wiretaps of old, they don’t require a human listener. They have digital listeners; software that can be configured to detect whatever the administrator might think is suspicious, and then take appropriate action. That action might be as severe as blocking the transmission, or as aparently benign as keeping a copy for administrative review. The tools can look at every form of network traffic, because they operate at the deepest level, inspecting all the bits as they pass by.

Like so many innovations in our digital world, things developed for one purpose can be directed, or mis-directed to another. So it is with these tools. Guarding against data leaks is like protecting the homeland from terrorists. No one would ever argue against it. The question is, which of our assumptions about personal privacy are being sacrificed along the way. Our observation is that, for the most part, we don’t care. The more we know about the world of bits, the more we will come to accept that Big Brother is watching and listening, and we will just have to accept that new reality.

I got an email yesterday from a sales agent for Palisade Systems, which offers a product called PacketSure. The “Packet” in that name refers to Internet packets, the little blocks of bits that are the unit of information the Internet transports. And “Sure” means that the product will make sure the packets going into and out of your business won’t contain information you’d rather not see crossing the boundary into and out of the outside world. For example, movies you don’t want your employees wasting their time watching, or Social Security Numbers that might be client or employee data leaking out, or medical records which are private by law. The web site has a short demo video that gives the idea.

As originally conceived, the Internet was simply a packet delivery system. A computer at a junction point in the network was just supposed to look at the address part of the packets so it could send them off on the proper outgoing link. Those computers were slow enough that it wasn’t practical for them to do much more anyway in the way of peeking inside packets, and it also wasn’t feasible to do much scanning of bits as they entered or left host computers at the edge of the Internet.

With faster computers and much more concern about undesirable uses of the Internet, it is now possible, as the email I received states, “to manage communications across over 150 different protocols and¬†applications ‚Ķ¬†to block, log,¬†report, and alert based on company policy.” Not only possible — it may well be wise or even necessary, given the variety of laws and regulations now in place about appropriate handling of data.

But the “based on company policy” part makes this technology much more than a tool for legal compliance. It gives the company complete control over the web sites employees are allowed to visit, the content of their email, and the use of office computers for sharing pictures. It is as though your office phone were locked to work only with certain other phone numbers, and was subject to a constant wiretap to boot. (Except that, I suspect, most personal communication out of offices these days probably goes by IM or email: Telephone conversations are less private because they are audible.)

Questions: If there were a home version of this product, would you buy it to keep your children in line? Should a university install these boxes to monitor or prevent students’ illegal music and movie downloading? If you were the government of Myanmar, would you want to install the system for the entire country?

Like so many other ingenious and useful technologies, this one is wonderful or terrible, depending on how it is used. A few years ago, no one needed to face the question of whether such systems were good or bad, because there was no practical way to build them. Now they exist, and they will keep getting cheaper and better. And I’m sure no one from Palisade Systems does ethics checks on its customers before shipping the PacketSure products.

After moaning about surveillance and privacy a few days ago, I wanted to acknowledge the other side. The electronic traces we now routinely leave behind during our daily lives are also left by criminals, and the data is now valuable for solving crimes.

Neil Entwistle is the British-born man who allegedly killed his wife and 9-month-old daughter in Hopkinton, Massachusetts with a gun in 2006. As the notorious case moves to trial, some aspects of the prosecution’s evidence are being published. Entwistle Googled how to kill with a¬†‚Äúknife in the neck‚Äù and also visited service-providing web sites with names such as¬†blondebeautyescorts, halfpriceescorts and hotlocalescorts. Based on previous reporting, it appears that this information was culled from Entwistle’s home computer, rather than from Google. (Check your web browser’s “History” menu on your own computer to see how this information might have been retrieved.)

In other news, the Italians have again proved that they are smarter about tracing digital breadcrumbs than Americans are at hiding them. In Blown to Bits, we explain how an Italian blogger managed to uncover sensitive military information from the official US Army report on the shooting by American troops of an Italian intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari. Today, Italian security experts reveal that they were able to link the CIA to the abduction in Milan of radical Imam¬†¬†Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, simply by noting which cell phones were in use in the vicinity of the site of the kidnapping. (Sorry, of the “extraordinary rendition”; that’s the official US term.) The cell phones reported their location to nearby cell phone towers, as cell phones are constantly doing, and the Italians were able to sort through the stored location data after the fact to identify the culprits. The Italians seem almost contemptuous that the CIA would provide so little challenge to their electronic sleuthing abilities.

Bits changed everything. We are so familiar with the transformation that most of us barely remember the old way. Before bits, only people could transform information, re-arrange it so that it served a different purpose. The phonebook listed names in alphabetical order. Want to know the name that belonged to a number and you were out of luck. Want to know the phone number of the person who lives at a particular address – out of luck again. Not so now that bits have arrived. Digital information can be rearranged and repurposed. Type a phone number into Google and bingo, the name appears.

For the most part the ability to manipulate data is wonderful. Sometimes, though, it’s a bit creepy.

We’ve written about the difference between information that is available and information that is accessible. I came across a mashup the other day – the combination of a couple of existing components – that definitely fell into the creepy category. Federal Elections Commission data has been available for years, and the tools to search that database have been getting better and better. Combine FEC data and Google maps and you get Fundrace. Take a look at http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com

Just like the phonebook example, rearranging the data and presenting it in new ways transformed the experience. No need to search just by name any more. Want to see who your neighbors are supporting – just look at the map. How about searching by employer? Color coding by candidate, dots that correspond to the size of the donation Рpretty soon data become information, and what once seemed to be a relatively private activity becomes public and accessible.

Some estimates of the value of Facebook run as high as $15 billion. How can that be? It’s just some software and some people, right?

Wrong. It’s data about who hundreds of millions of people know, and who those people know, and how often they communicate, and what they are interested in. Every time someone agrees to be your Facebook friend, the two of you have established a link in Facebook’s gigantic friendship graph. Even the fact that you asked that person is probably recorded somewhere, even if he or she ignores you.

As far as I know, the connections between Reverend Wright and Barack Obama, and between Reverend Hagee and John McCain, were not discovered by electronic sleuthing. But such connections are going to be easier to discover in the future than in the past. Facebook data would be a gold mine, but it won’t help much if you decide to stay off such social networking sites. It’s easy for computers to connect people whose names appeared together in old newspaper articles. Photos and videos will be subject to face recognition, so it will be possible to build a huge “appears-in-the-same-image-with” graph automatically. Public figures will have to worry more and more about their associations, as it looks like the public interest in their circle of acquaintances will not diminish anytime soon.

And the power of the government to create such structures of social connections will be even greater than what can be gathered from public sources. The UK may implement a massive data aggregation system, including data on every phone call, email, and instant message in the nation. The fight against terror demands such ubiquitous surveillance, goes the claim.

Would we live our lives differently, fearing that our everyday social contacts, and our adventurous escapades, are all going to wind up in the government’s great social network? How will the world change when clumsy attempts at romantic outreach, phone calls placed to wrong numbers, and group photos snapped at parties all turn into contextless edges in that permanent, all-encompassing social graph?

In Blown to Bits, we write about the various reasons we willingly surrender our privacy. Promises of convenience, economy, and safety all make practices acceptable that would once have been offensive.

Enter Teensurance, a mashup of automobile insurance and global positioning systems aimed at parents of teenagers. With the GPS installed, Mom and Dad can: locate the car instantly; find out instantly when Johnny is exceeding a 60mph; find out when Johnny has driven more than 10 miles from home; know whether Johnny actually arrived at Sam’s house; and get a phone call or email if Johnny is driving after his midnight curfew. The company reports lower accident rates in families using their service.

Whatever its lifesaving merits, getting young people used to such a way of life accommodates them to a new and different understanding of civil liberties. And it is another step toward the infantilization of teenagers, a phenomenon about which I have written in another book.