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A story by Emily Steel in today’s Wall Street Journal, “The Ad Changes with the Shopper in Front of It,” reports that retail stores are increasingly moving to in-store advertising. The declining prices of flatscreen displays explains part of the surge. But of course with a digital advertising screen, the ads can change depending on local conditions. Proctor and Gamble is playing with some interesting ideas (my paraphrases):

• * Put RFID tags on shampoo bottles. Then when a customer picks up a bottle from the shelf, flash at her some suggestions about matching conditioners.

That one is pretty weak, actually. But the next one is not.

• * Put a camera at the screen to watch who is standing in front of it. Suggest different hair care products depending on the customer’s appearance. Can’t you just see it? “Hah! She’s graying. Let’s make sure she knows that even a computer notices, and pitch some hair coloring.”

It’s inevitable that these things will be tried. Will they work? Probably, creepy as they seem at first.

And of course a camera at the check-out could match faces and track what people actually buy, as correlated with what they looked at and what advertising they saw …

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.

We have an op-ed in the Providence Journal about social adjustment to geolocation technologies.

There is also a transcript on-line of an interview that will be published in Architecture and Governance Magazine, which is oriented toward information technology managers.

The Washington Post reports (picked up by the Boston Globe) that many police forces are attaching GPS devices to cars to track suspects’ movements. When charged with a crime, suspects have challenged the evidence on the basis that it was obtained without a search warrant. Courts have accepted the explanation that no warrants were needed because this is just a technological version of what the police could have done by following the suspect in person.

Koan 5: “More of the Same Can Be a Whole New Thing.” It sure feels that way, doesn’t it? GPSs are expensive now, but getting cheaper quickly, like all digital technologies. Suppose they cost only a few bucks. Then if a crime is committed in a neighborhood, and the police want to see who from that neighborhood returns to the crime scene, they could just attach GPS’s to everyone’s cars, and close in on the one that goes to the crime scene. Without any worry that the rest of us could take umbrage at the police tracking us without probable cause to think we had committed any crime.

One of the repeated lessons of Blown to Bits is that metaphors matter. We use them to describe digital phenomena, and then we use our intuitions based on the metaphor to decide how things should work or what should be prohibited.

Under the federal Wiretap Act, it is illegal to “intercept” an email. But what does that mean in a digital world in which messages are repeatedly stored momentarily in one computer and forwarded to another computer? Does “intercepting” just mean catching the bits in transit between computers? If you snarf a copy from an intermediary computer during the milliseconds while the bits are stored there, is that “interception” too?

Not according to a district judge in California. The case of Bunnell et al v. the Motion Picture Association of America involves a hacker named Anderson who was hired by the MPAA to obtain records from a file-sharing service that was distributing digital movies. Anderson managed to gain access to the service’s email server and have copies of emails forwarded to him, which he then passed on to the MPAA in exchange for $15,000. The company complained that this constituted an illegal theft of its corporate email. The judge ruled no, as reported by the Washington Post.¬†”Anderson did not stop or seize any of the messages that were forwarded to him. Anderson’s actions did not halt the transmission of the messages to their intended recipients. As such, under well-settled case law, as well as a reading of the statute and the ordinary meaning of the word ‘intercept,’ Anderson’s acquisitions of the e-mails did not violate the Wiretap Act.”

The case is being appealed, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief asking that the judge’s interpretation of “interception” be reversed. Were it allowed to stand, the EFF points out, the Wiretap Act would become meaningless as it applies to email in a store-and-forward network. The government could have lawful access to any email at all, without bothering with search or wiretap warrants.

For reasons I can’t really explain, our standard metaphor for surveillance is the eye. Big Brother is watching. “Surveillance” itself means watching over.

But being listened to is probably more intrusive than being watched. What you say in your relaxed moments is a read-out of what is going on in your brain, revealing plans and abstract thoughts far better than watching your physical movements.

That’s why we worry so much about surveillance of email. But what about our normal bit stream, the one that comes out of our mouths rather than from our fingertips on the keyboard?

Voice recognition has been just around the corner for decades, but two recent stories suggest that the digital explosion is not only making it a reality, but poised to be a tool of public security — or oppression — ¬†almost immediately.

A story by Shai Oster and Gordon Fairclough in the Wall Street Journal yesterday reports that as part of its “security” preparations for the Olympics, China has equipped 70,000 taxis with microphones that can be turned on remotely. The Journal reports, “Security experts say there is little likelihood that all conversations in taxis are monitored.” That is doubtless correct, but remember what we say in Blown to Bits: “Computers will get powerful enough if you wait.”

Today’s New York Times has a glowing review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a PC voice recognition package. The reviewer, David Pogue, reports that it is extremely accurate even without training. It’s designed as office software, to transcribe dictation to Microsoft Word or to help RSI-afflicted computer users browse the Web. But the same technology could, of course, be used for other applications, such as the screening of 70,000 audio streams from taxis listening for conversations about Tibet or demonstrations. The review notes that this particular package is not unique in its accuracy.

Given the aggressiveness with which U.S. officials screen bits, even domestic emails, can there be any doubt that this country is considering large-scale automated eavesdropping?

And even if not, think of the corporate uses. Financial services firms already closely monitor email into and out of their buildings, looking for evidence of shady transactions. It would be such a boon to be able to listen in on every outside call placed by an employee …. Maybe even the only fiduciarily prudent thing to do, once it becomes feasible.

Bits are bits, and the limitation that only email bits are easily monitored is a temporary and rapidly fading inconvenience. Voice screening will soon be coming to a theater near you.

The Department of Homeland Security may take your laptop at the U.S. border and remove it to an off-site location for as long as it wants. Doesn’t matter if you are a U.S. citizen. There it may examine its contents and have any text it contains translated.

WITHOUT HAVING ANY REASON TO THINK YOU HAVE DONE ANYTHING WRONG.

I love Michael Chertoff’s explanation of why border guards won’t bother with the niceties of probable cause provided for in the Fourth Amendment: “As a practical matter, travelers only go to secondary [for a more thorough examination] when there is some level of suspicion. Yet legislation locking in a particular standard for searches would have a dangerous, chilling effect as officers’ often split-second assessments are second-guessed.”

He’s right, of course. The Bill of Rights has a chilling effect on the government. That’s what it’s there for!

That’s what happens when the contents of Internet packets are inspected en route from the source to the destination for analysis of what’s in them. For example, if your Internet Service Provider were to peek inside the packets for this web page, en route from our web server to your home, to make sure they aren’t carrying a copyrighted movie instead. It’s exactly as though Fed Ex were opening the packages and deciding whether they were OK by Fed Ex standards before delivering them.

Dave Reed’s testimony before Congress yesterday on this subject is well worth reading. What’s nice about it is that his argument that this practice should be prohibited is fundamentally not based on civil liberties grounds, but on economic grounds — that allowing these practices will staunch the growth of the Internet by making innovation at the endpoints impossible, and it is the innovation at the endpoints (along with the great improvements in packet delivery, without peeking at the contents) that have resulted in VoIP, streaming video, and hundreds of other technologies built on top of Internet protocols but for which the protocols were never designed in the first place.

The testimony is clear, well-organized, and plainspoken. Highly recommended.

Can the government search your email without telling you it is doing so?

The USA PATRIOT Act gives the federal government broad authority to search electronic communications crossing the US border, under the general guise of anti-terrorism and the rough analogy that the government could search your possessions as you brought them into the country. But what about purely domestic eavesdropping, not part of any terrorism investigation?

In an important 8-5 decision, the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court has ruled that such clandestine searches of email are at least sometimes not “unreasonable searches” in the sense of the Fourth Amendment. The Register (UK) has an excellent summary of the ruling is in an article aptly called “Court cheers warrantless snooping of e-mail.” The Court’s decision is here. It doesn’t actually endorse the constitutionality of the law under which the clandestine email snooping took place, saying instead that the issue was not “ripe” for a decision on constitutional grounds. The defendant, Steven Warshak, could have used other means to keep the evidence out of court.

The dissenting opinion of Judge Boyce Martin and four other judges takes a far dimmer view. I quote its last paragraph in full:

While I am saddened, I am not surprised by today’s ruling. It is but another step in the ongoing degradation of civil rights in the courts of this country. The majority makes much of the fact that facial challenges are no way to litigate the constitutional validity of certain laws. Yet our Supreme Court has no problem striking down a handgun ban enacted by a democratically elected city government on a facial basis. See Dist. of Columbia v. Heller, — U.S. —, 2008 WL 2520816 (June 26, 2008). History tells us that it is not the fact that a constitutional right is at issue that portends the outcome of a case, but rather what specific right we are talking about. If it is free speech, freedom of religion, or the right to bear arms, we are quick to strike down laws that curtail those freedoms. But if we are discussing the Fourth Amendment’s right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, heaven forbid that we should intrude on the government’s investigatory province and actually require it to abide by the mandates of the Bill of Rights. I can only imagine what our founding fathers would think of this decision. If I were to tell James Otis and John Adams that a citizen’s private correspondence is now potentially subject to ex parte and unannounced searches by the government without a warrant supported by probable cause, what would they say? Probably nothing, they would be left speechless.

At a hotel in San Francisco where I stayed a few days ago, taking a can of Coke out of the fridge automatically puts that item on your room bill. Same if you take a candy bar from the case nearby or a nip from the liquor cabinet. Each item is on top of a sensor which fires when the item is removed. There are no “did you have anything from the minibar this morning” questions at checkout. Instead you are presented with a bill showing, along with the charges for the room and taxes, all the particulars of your in-room eating and drinking self-indulgences.

I asked if I would have been charged if I removed a can of Coke and then decided to put it back (I actually drink only Diet Coke, and can imagine making that mistake with an under the counter fridge). The answer was no — as long as I put it back quickly.

How should I think about the fact that the bits stating that Harry Lewis consumed a can of Diet Coke at exactly 9:22:02 PM on June 24, 2008, will likely be preserved forever, mixed into some data aggregate for analysis purposes, but also retrievable as an individual factoid if there were some reason to do so?

The granularity of the digital explosion is astonishing. Ordinary life is being blown not just to bits, but into microscopic digital dust.