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Chris Soghioian reports on a little-known industry that does something you might have thought illegal: provide to governments detailed data, including graphical presentations, of who is calling whom. The companies data-mine phone records to infer clusters. The story shows an example, taken from a corporate presentation, of a Google Earth map of Indonesia mashed up with phone data on 50 million people, crunched to reveal small groups of dissidents with a habit of calling each other.

But it couldn’t happen here, I hear you cry. If the government wanted this work done for them, where would they get the data? The cell phone companies, such as Verizon and Sprint, can’t legally turn it over without a court order, right?

Well, sort of right. But it turns out that wiretap laws don’t protect the data when it’s in the hands of other companies that the cell phone companies use for services related to your phone calls. For example, the cellular carrier doesn’t actually own any cell phone towers; it relies on companies such as Tower, Inc. for those. Tower, Inc. passes the phone calls on to the cellular carrier for processing, but isn’t covered by the same restrictive laws about use of that data. According to the article, suppose the National Security Agency wanted to conduct surveillance of the phone habits of U.S. citizens within the U.S.

Thus, while it may be impossible for the NSA to legally obtain large-scale, real-time customer location information from Verizon, the spooks at¬†Fort Meade¬†can simply go to the company that owns and operates the wireless towers that Verizon uses for its network and get accurate information on anyone using those towers–or go to other entities connecting the wireless network to the landline network. The wiretapping laws, at least in this situation, simply don’t apply.

And with the gag orders attached to data requests in the Patriot Act era, no one would probably be the wiser if this were happening right now.

Caylee Anderson is the Florida toddler whose mother Casey failed to report her missing for a month and who has been jailed for child endangerment (she’s out on bail). No one yet knows what happened to the little girl, but CNN reports this tidbit today:

Authorities said they have found traces of chloroform in the car Anderson drove and Internet searches of chloroform Web sites on her computer.

Searching computers is as much a part of criminal forensics now as searching a crime scene or the home of a suspect. And because, as we say, bits don’t go away, it can be even harder to eradicate digital fingerprints than it is to eradicate real ones.

Most likely the authorities were just checking the web browser history on Casey’s computer. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, look for a “History” menu on your browser; it’ll show ¬†where you’ve been to on the Web. The default setting on Safari, a browser I use on my Mac, is to save the history for a week, but I can make it longer. It’s a convenience; every now and then I want to go back to something I was looking at a few days ago, and by using the history I can find it quickly. When I search using Google, the history records not just that I was using Google, but what I was searching for. Bingo, if you’re a gumshoe and can get access to my machine. (There is an entirely separate issue of whether Google is keeping its own record of my searches and would turn it over to law enforcement. We talk about that in Blown to Bits also.)

Suppose Casey wanted to cover her tracks — what should she have done? Well, Safari has a “Clear History” command; that would be a good place to start. There’s also a “Reset Safari” menu item (try it — it will let you choose what to reset and give you the option of canceling or following through). Firefox calls this “Clear Private Data.”

But most people are PC and Internet Explorer users. I assumed Casey is too, and checked what Microsoft says about clearing the history of Explorer searches.

Have you seen those Mac ads where a geeky Bill Gates figure fumbles about the complexities of Vista, side by side with a cooler, more normal Mac user? (As a personal caricature, it’s actually unfair to Bill; when he was the age of the actor, he was wiry and energetic, like a coiled spring, not the doughy goofball the ad depicts. Of course, the ad doesn’t claim that’s supposed to be Bill. And in any case ads aren’t required to be fair about things like that.)

Here’s what Microsoft has to say about How to Clear the History Entries in Internet Explorer for version 6:

1.	Close all running instances of Internet Explorer and all browser windows.
2.	In Control Panel, click Internet Options.
3.	Click the General tab, and then click Clear History.
4.	Click Yes, and then click OK to close the Internet Options dialog box.

If the cached addresses are still listed in the Address box in Internet Explorer, use the following steps:

	1. Quit Internet Explorer.
	2. Delete all of the values except for the (Default) value from the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs

NOTE: Values in this registry key are listed as Url1, Url2, Url3, and so on. If you delete only some values and the remaining values are not in consecutive numerical order, only some of the remaining entries are listed in the Address box. To prevent this behavior from occurring, rename the remaining values so that they are in consecutive numerical order.

Even if Casey had tried to cover her tracks, she probably couldn’t have managed, if she was using the version of Explorer that is most widely in use. No wonder Microsoft is mounting its own funky advertising campaign, starring Jerry Seinfeld and the real Bill Gates, to humanize its products.

And no wonder Google sees an opportunity with its new Chrome browser, as we discussed recently. And indeed, no wonder, as David Pogue noted, Chrome has

something called Incognito mode, in which no cookies, passwords or cache files are saved, and the browser’s History list records no trace of your activity. (See also: Safari, Internet Explorer 8 [which is now available in Beta].) Google cheerfully suggests that you can use Incognito mode “to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays,” but they’re not fooling anyone; the bloggers call it “porn mode.”

That’s a useful feature for anyone planning a crime, too!

P.S. There is yet another issue. Even if the history isn’t visible through the menu commands, traces of it may well still be stored on disk in a way that a brute force search of disk blocks, one by one, would reveal. “Deleted” doesn’t actually mean that the bits have been destroyed utterly. In both the offense and defense of computer forensics, you can almost always do a better job if you spend more time and money, so how confidently one can say that bits are “gone forever” depends on the cash value you attach to destroying them or discovering them.

Political contributions have long been a matter of public record in the U.S. But there’s “public” and there’s “very public.” With the Internet, they are now very public.

In Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits we mention a couple of sources for campaign contribution data. But the Huffington Post’s is just outstanding. Click on the link, type in your Zip code, and you immediately see a neighborhood map decorated with little blue donkeys and red elephants, which you can click on and mouse over to reveal your neighbors’ names, who they’ve contributed to, and how much. (Or, if you live in my neighborhood, blue donkeys with no red elephants.)

It’s very invasive, even though in principle there’s no more data disclosure than there was in the days when you had to go to the Town Hall and ask to see the files.

Google has changed its terms of service for its new Web browser so that it no longer claims the right to use your content in its advertising. This fixes a problem about which we blogged yesterday. CNET story here. It seems the old language was just cut and pasted — with specific intention or not — from those for some other Google services.

Google has released a new web browser, called Chrome. I haven’t tried it yet (at the moment only the Windows version has been released). David Pogue has a rundown in the New York Times. It sounds great.

In the spirit of watching what your bits are doing, I thought I’d note one interesting clause in the Chrome Terms of Service (the legal prose to which you have to agree before you can download the software):

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Perhaps there are similar clauses in the agreement you have to click before you can use Internet Explorer; I don’t know. But my non-lawyerly reading of that says: If you use our browser to upload to Picasa the cute picture you took¬†of your roommate¬†at the party¬†with a jug in each hand, we can use that photo in our national advertising campaign. Not privacy-friendly, and I’m surprised that Google thinks it’s necessary to assert such a sweeping right to use your text and images for commercial purposes without asking your permission at the time.

Thanks to Ina Fried of CNET for pointing this out.

NebuAd, as we discussed earlier, extracts information from the individual data packets reaching you to help target advertising to you that will be relevant to your interests. Depending on how you look at it, this deep packet inspection is either a frightening invasion of your privacy — many people are not happy to think that anyone is keeping track of what web sites they are visiting — or a service that will benefit everyone, Internet users by not showering them with ads they don’t want to see, and ISPs by helping them make more money from advertisers (some of which, they argue, would be used to improve their services).

The subject has come up in Congressional hearings, where Rep. Ed Markey is talking about a federal Internet privacy law. Part of Markey’s proposal would be a requirement that customers opt-in to such privacy-infringing practices. Not needed, argues Cable One, which has already deployed this technology on a trial basis. As reported by Multichannel News, the company explains,¬†‚ÄúCable One customers opted in to our monitoring of their Internet usage and content consistent with this third-party test when they agreed to our AUP.” That is, the fine print in one of those endless “I agree” documents you have to click on in order to get Internet service implied that the company was free to collect such tracking information, and customers should have nothing to complain about.

No doubt we all click on those forms too quickly. But if there are only one or two choices of Internet Service Provider in your neck of the woods — and almost every neck of the woods is exactly like that — what good would it do to fully understand the implications of the fine print? In the absence of competition, the communications companies have much freer rein. They are inviting federal regulation by such see-no-evil pretenses.

HIPAA is the very strong privacy policy for medical records to which all doctors and hospitals must adhere. As we blogged recently, the Department of Homeland Security has issued guidelines stating that border agents may seize and examine any laptop — even, presumably, the laptop of a doctor who happens to have carried medical data with him out of and into the U.S. (Here are the actual DHS policies. They are extraordinarily sweeping and worth reading.) ¬†A blogging doctor’s explains the inconsistency.

HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is the law that governs the privacy of your medical information. It is very, very detailed, and requires quite a bit from your doctor. You’ve signed a form at the office of every provider you’ve visited that notifies you of your privacy rights. I cannot discuss your care in a hospital elevator. I can’t send you an email regarding your health without making it very clear that any information in the email cannot be considered secure. I cannot disclose your health information to anyone else except under very specific and limited circumstances. HIPAA has radically changed the way we do things with health information (sometimes for the better, sometimes not).

Moving on to Homeland Security—DHS agents may, for any reason or none at all, seize my laptop and demand any security or encryption codes. My laptop not infrequently contains information covered by HIPAA (known as PHI, or Protected Health Information). Because of that, my laptop is secured via HIPAA-compliant security measures. Under the new DHS guidelines, I can be required to hand over my laptop and help officers access the information¬†without any suspicion of wrong-doing. We have a little problem here…

Unlimited government authority is always dangerous. I wonder if Chertoff plans to blow off this medical privacy fol-de-rol as a threat to national security.

One of the basic bottom lines of Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits is that the Orwellian nightmare of constant government surveillance through advanced technology hasn’t worked out quite that way. The government is doing it, to be sure. But so are teenagers with their GPS systems and cameras in their cell phones. So are corporations, who can boost their profit margins at tad by keeping track of the digital fingerprints we leave everywhere without thinking about it. And so are jealous husbands and suspicious mothers, who install spyware on the computers that their family members are using.

The spyware business is going mainstream now, supported by the social movement toward flexible work hours, work-at-home arrangements, and the dispersal to domestic settings of jobs like answering 800 numbers. Those social trends are a boon to parents who need to work from home, and will doubtless become even more popular now that moving the employee to the office in a gas-guzzling automobile has become even more expensive, by comparison with moving the bits representing the workload to the worker’s home. Socially useful as work-at-home may be, it has always been tainted with an odor of unprofessionalism. How is anyone to know if the worker is really working?

Last Wednesday, July 30, Sue Schellenbarger of the the Wall Street Journal reported on the trend to install software on those workers’ computers which takes screen snapshots every ten minutes or so, and logs every keystroke and web site visited. Some even take periodic webcam photos and screen outsourced call centers using voice recognition, waiting for hot-button words or just tonal indications that the call-center employee is getting angry. (Sorry, no link; it’s the WSJ. I wonder if Mr. Murdoch will change that.) Mentioned in the story are oDesk.com¬†and Working Solutions. Some expect employees to time their bathroom breaks so the clock is not running while they pee.

If you’ve never seen Chaplin’s¬†Modern Times, you should. It’s hard not to think that there will eventually be some workplace standards for stay-at-home bits workers in the way there are for assembly line workers — developed either through legislation, collective organization, or competitive pressure, as certain businesses succeed by having happier and less stressed employees.

The Higher Education Act is now at the President’s desk and is certain to be signed. The full text can be viewed here. Like most such laws that update ones previously passed, it is almost unreadable, because it is really an edit log: “change this word to that, add this sentence at the end of that paragraph,” etc.

It includes many disclosure and reporting requirements (colleges will have to include textbook costs in their online catalogs, for example). While I am all in favor of more transparency, my guess is that this will mostly result in colleges adding more clerks to satisfy the requirements, or, for colleges unable to afford more hires, conversion of educational and student-service positions into bean-counting and bean-reporting positions.

A lot of recent interest in the bill has come because of the entertainment industry’s efforts to pressure Congress into making colleges copyright enforcers on its behalf. Colleges are in a unique position — their residential students have no choice of Internet Service Providers. All the bits that students get go through the college’s connections to the Internet. Monitor and choke off illegal activity there, and students have nowhere else to get their bits.

The problem, as I noted in the Commencement issue of the Harvard Crimson, is that colleges should be the last place where communications are monitored for anything without probable cause. Students who have come to college to have new worlds opened up to them, to explore ideas and works that would have caused them shame and shunning at home, should not have every bit they are reading screened for appropriateness. That’s what we expect of Chinese universities, not American universities. If the entertainment industry (which pays a lot of the bills for many congressional campaigns) can get filtering installed on college’s networks, they will likely use that as a precedent to pressure Congress to act against other ISPs. And if the government can compel colleges to exclude this particular kind of material, it can compel colleges to keep out other kinds of bits it deems bad for the young to be consuming.

The compromise version of the Act that is at the President’s desk doesn’t mandate that colleges filter all incoming bits, only to disclose what weapons they are using to help the entertainment industry’s anti-“theft” crusade. But Congress hands the entertainment industry a different huge gift. It mandates that colleges develop plans to buy music subscription services. Here is the relevant language:

`SEC. 494. CAMPUS-BASED DIGITAL THEFT PREVENTION.

• `(a) In General- Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable–
  `(1) make publicly available to their students and employees, the policies and procedures related to the illegal downloading and distribution of copyrighted materials required to be disclosed under section 485(a)(1)(P); and

  `(2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.

Is there another area of private industry from which Congress mandates that colleges plan to buy subscription services? This section goes on to promise grants to colleges who fight the good fight against piracy. The recording and movie studios are rubbing their hands and setting up their money-changing tables right now, waiting for the colleges to line up to negotiate with them as federal law will soon demand.

Here’s a suggestion. Let’s instead pass a law requiring colleges to inspect laptops at the border of their property, the way DHS inspects laptops at the U.S. border, without probable cause. Students arriving as freshmen will have their laptops searched as they are unloaded from their parents’ cars. Same after they come back from winter break, etc. Ipods too, of course.

The reason this won’t happen is that students and their families wouldn’t stand for it. There would be face to face confrontations of a kind not seen since the draft protests of my youth.

The problem with network monitoring, and what makes it a more plausible and acceptable alternative, is that no one would see it happening. We all tend to accept intrusions that are logically equivalent to physical searches, even if we know they are happening, if we don’t see them happening.

The entertainment industry is winning in its efforts to force public and other private institutions keep its anachronistic business models alive for a few years longer. As much money as they claim to be losing, they have plenty to lobby Congress to do their bidding.

The Massachusetts legislature is considering a bill that would require registration of prepaid cell phones. Here is the beginning of the text of H 4799:

(a) Any person making a retail sale of a prepaid cell phone shall, as a precondition to the sale, obtain and photograph or photocopy one or more documents identifying the purchaser by name and providing his address. The seller shall, for each retail sale, make and keep for a period of 2 years a record which shall include, but not be limited to, the following: (1) the serial number and manufacturer of the phone; (2) the phone number assigned to the cell phone; (3) the service supplier who will supply wireless service to the phone; and (4) a copy of all documents related to the identification of the purchaser.

And of course the retailer would have to turn that information over to the state.

People with bad credit pay cash for these throwaway phones. Immigrants who don’t have papers use throwaway phones. I’ll bet teenagers who don’t want their parents to know who they are talking to buy these phones.

And no doubt drug dealers use these phones. And that is the reason this bill is coming forward–as an aid to the police.

So this is a fairly standard liberty-security issue, of the non-terror variety. It would help the police get the bad guys if they knew they could get data on anyone, good or bad.

But if cell phones, why not email accounts, which you can get without showing ID (with Gmail for example, they are free and set up from the comfort of home)? Or postage stamps–wouldn’t it help the gumshoes if they could trace a cancelled stamp back to the identity of the person who mailed it?

It reminds me of Judge Richard Posner’s view of the FISA surveillance legislation, that it “retains value as a framework for monitoring the communications of known terrorists, but it is hopeless as a framework for detecting terrorists.” What you really want is not to be able to surveil the people you already suspect are terrorists. You want to be able to surveil everyone, and just pick out, from what you learn, the bad guys from the good.

The founding fathers had been through all that, and that’s why they wrote the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees no searches without “probable cause.” As usual with these bills, the people who would be obviously disadvantaged by the loss of privacy are not everyone’s favorites, and that’s the way these bills gain plausibility. Who cares if illegal immigrants can’t get cell phones, or 15-year-olds need their parents’ approval?

But this cell phone bill feels to me like one that trades too much privacy for too little security. I say keep the information out of the hands of the government; it’s none of their business if I want to buy one of these phones.

PS. Excellent opinion piece by Tim Wu in the NYT today about broadband deployment, summarizing, as it happens, the main argument of Chapter 8.