Tag: government

Apple v FBI Doesn’t Address the Real Challenge

In a story that appeared Monday in The Guardian, writer Danny Yadron projects a hypothetical, but not technically unrealistic, future scenario in which we imagine our driverless car hijacks a run to the grocery store, transporting us instead to a police station because face-recognition software resulted in our being wanted for questioning in an investigation.  The eerie itself, Yadron reports, comes from engineer and former US government privacy policy consultant  Ashkan Soltani, who warns that this kind of circumstance could become reality if Apple loses its fight with the FBI over whether or not it must write code to circumvent the security system of San Bernardino terrorist Sayed Farook’s iPhone.

Of course, it is not farfetched to anticipate new forms of abuse in our increasingly networked lives, and it is prudent to seek remedies in policy and caselaw precedent that may preempt such scenarios; but I’m not sure that a ruling one way or another in the Apple case would be quite so prophetic as some observers suggest.  In fact, assuming we do become increasingly networked and adapt to the holistic Internet of Things as effortlessly and rapidly as the technologists expect us to, the matter of protecting civil liberties in this future society seems increasingly paradoxical. After all, government agencies are supposed to be our hedge against the excesses of private enterprise that might invade our privacy or run afoul of anti-trust restrictions; or government agencies are meant to protect us from criminal abuse of the same systems. But do we simultaneously expect private enterprise or “white hat” hackers to protect us from the overreach of government?

Yadron’s article addresses several aspects of this challenge, citing competing points of view from the policy, law-enforcement, and technology sectors.  And there are no easy answers.  For one thing, the current Apple case involving the cell phone of a known terrorist and a warrant issued by court order may be too specific to beg the broader question as to who controls the code that runs our day-to-day lives.  As of yesterday morning, the FBI announced that they may be able to crack the iPhone without Apple’s help; but even if the presently-suspended legal case were to proceed, Yadron notes that the court could rule in the FBI’s favor in this one extraordinary instance while remaining silent on the much larger question.

My own assumption is that, with regard to cases involving law enforcement, the public is still served by the courts and due process and that new legislation may not be necessary to adapt to new technology. For instance, as dramatic as the futuristic arrest by driverless car scenario may sound, it would be an illegal detention according to existing statute, at least the way Soltani imagines it.  But if similar automation were one day used to capture a wanted criminal based on evidence and an arrest warrant, due process would not necessarily suffer just because the arrest would be partly effected via code. Particularly as we anticipate an inevitable increase in automated law enforcement practices, if we cannot continue to invest faith and power in judicial oversight, we’re basically hosed.

With regard to living day-to-day in a networked society, though, we probably have to imagine scenarios more subtle than the automated arrest by our own robot vehicles—like undetectable invasions that track habits and behaviors, all organized into data that could be used to manipulate or determine opportunities for jobs, education, healthcare, insurance, credit, and so on.  The opportunities these encroachments provide for mischief by corporate, criminal, or government entities are indeed new territory—much more so it seems than the Apple/FBI case—and could easily demand new legislation.

Yadron quotes science fiction writer Bruce Bethke, who gives examples like your cellphone notifying your health insurance provider when you enter a tobacco shop. Users of Google Now on their Android phones have opted into a “service” that cross-references search, GMail content, location, etc. to anticipate their wants and needs and then provides suggestions via  Cards.  Why anyone finds this more helpful than creepy is a mystery to me. All I imagine is Montag’s doe-eyed wife, subservient to the system in Fahrenheit 451, when I contemplate the capacity for this technology to push behaviors, including political or social beliefs. Even at its most benign, it just sounds annoying, like they should have called it Google Nag instead of Google Now.

Meanwhile, we should expect to see a growing market for anti-surveillance products and services for what can only become an increasingly paranoid world in which we are voluntarily spying on ourselves.  As AlterNet reports, English designer Adam Harvey is making wardrobe that will shield against thermal imaging, and he’s demonstrating makeup techniques that will confound face-recognition software. Such efforts are endorsed by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future because the presumed abusers of surveillance technology will be government agencies, but what about the more subtle private-enterprise promises of the networked society?

Will we live in “smart” homes enjoying their many conveniences but always sure to wear our cloaking PJs?   Will we need to buy and vigilantly update an array of countermeasures to protect our privacy inside our own walls because now they really do have ears?  As we interact with our own homes and vehicles and with one another, we will constantly be sending data to somebody’s servers somewhere.  We are already doing this, though not as holistically as the Internet of Things implies.  How do we write legislation that protects against corporate, government, or criminal abuse of these data and systems?  Or more immediately, whom can we expect to represent civil liberties in this context?

Because I think organizations like EFF and Fight for the Future are often haggling over small potatoes while getting nowhere near the larger question.  These digital rights activists—who are dependent upon Silicon Valley support by the way—make a lot of noise about our “right” to jailbreak these disposable, hand-held devices—something very few of us will ever bother to do—without coming close to having the real discussion about whether or not public agency oversight will be able to protect consumers in a fully-networked future.  When too much of the emphasis on anti-surveillance assumes “government” will be the only abuser, we forget that there is a profit motive in all this monitoring by private enterprise.  Meanwhile, as Google’s presence in Washington increases considerably, are legislators and executive branch officials getting advice from Google on how to protect us from Google?  Because one way or another, we seem to be voluntarily becoming a surveillance society, and I wonder if there will ultimately be an opt out button.

Why I’m not losing sleep over PRISM.

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Photo by WekWek

I’m probably about to anger a few friends, but I’ll state at the outset that of all the things I’m concerned about in this world (and there are many), the PRISM program doesn’t even get on my radar.  No, I do not think Ed Snowden is a particularly heroic whistleblower, and I am not alone in that belief, but bear with me, and let me first offer a bit of context as to why this story is exactly the kind of digital-age phenomenon that inspired this blog.

The seeds of The Illusion of More were planted amid the brouhaha over the SOPA/PIPA bills while observing the unprecedented role of social media on our political process.  Even if I hadn’t supported those bills, I considered the mechanics and the tone of the reaction against them to be a truly dysfunctional combination of hysteria, ignorance, lazy journalism, and corporate manipulation.  As a result, I began paying closer attention to my own habits and biases as well as those of my friends, realizing that even we GenXers who finished college before the internet went public seemed to be abandoning many basic rules of reasoning for the sake of sharing news fragments and incendiary headlines.  And even if one does click on a shared article, for example, the quality of so much reportage has been degraded by the expansion of media itself to the extent that even traditional news organizations now source one another and work hardest to capture traffic and cover the meta story rather than soberly investigate the crux of the matter. Then, we add political and vested interests and individual biases, and I began to wonder if this tool that is supposed to foster a better informed electorate wasn’t having exactly the opposite effect.

The seminal moment for me happened the day one of my smartest friends shared a viral story about why a particular senator voted against a bill for which he had in fact voted “Aye.” It doesn’t get more basic than Yes v No, and it was while discussing these phenomena with my friend, political operative Cormac Flynn, that I first used the expression “illusion of more” to describe the paradox in which more access seemed to be making people less well-informed.

One of the problems with viral, emotional stories is that they create an instantaneous bandwagon of apparent consensus which, in turn, creates social pressure in an environment like Facebook to either be on or off said bandwagon even before there is time to seek out a voice from among the ever-shrinking population of reflective and experienced professionals. In fact, voices like Thomas Friedman, Michael Moynihan, David Brooks, and Alan Dershowitz do offer sensible recommendations to tone down the hysteria over Prism in favor of a conversation that includes the recognition that counter-terrorism intelligence gathering is not some bogeyman invented by “the government” in order to create an authoritarian state.

It is as though all those Americans running out to buy copies of 1984 forgot that 9/11 ever happened, and I agree with Friedman, who writes, “If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: ‘Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.’ That is what I fear most.” In short, if we maintain a constant witch hunt against even the legitimate actions of our national security forces, we risk bringing about conditions that would foster real, rather than theoretical, threats to civil liberty.

Consider the typically brief interval between Ed Snowden revealing his identity and TV news polls asking Is he a hero or a traitor?  This side-show makes great filler and creates synergy between social media and broadcasting, but it is an utterly useless distraction from the very question it pretends to be asking. General consensus had already formed across the political spectrum, long before we ever heard of Mr. Snowden, that all things government are bad and, thus, all so-called whistleblowers are presumed altruistic.

Social media has aggravated this oversimplified bias, and it is one we cling to at our peril, if we consider its larger implications. While oversight is an essential, and believe it or not still extant, component of the American system, a universal and unwavering distrust in “the government” is tantamount to distrust in one another, and this is the cancer that grows into a malignant threat to civil liberty. “The government” still comprises millions of fellow citizens who are as diverse, as well-intentioned, or as flawed as those of us who are not “the government.” But if one automatically judges a story like the Snowden leak through the “government bad” filter, there is no way to come to any conclusion other than the one already assumed. Thus, we cannot rationally determine whether Edward Snowden is really warning us about something sinister.

On the subject of privacy, I’m hardly the only person to mention that through social media and GPS enabled phones, we already volunteer more information about our lives than the NSA could want or possibly find of any practical use. So, watching friends and colleagues use Facebook and Twitter to share their fears about the government listening to our calls and reading our emails is satire that ought to be self-explanatory. Or as humorist Andy Borowitz put it:  “Man with 9,000 photos on Facebook angry over government spying.”

In all seriousness, I do wonder if the indignation over Prism is not only overwrought but functionally obsolete since we chose to give up privacy at least a decade ago. Moreover, if you might agree that universal distrust in “government” implies a distrust in one another, then how do we reconcile the dichotomy of social media?  Why do I trust that none of my 400+ “Friends” will not use the information I share to cause me harm, and by the same token, why should I assume that my friend at the FBI will misuse someone’s information? To be blunt, if everyone is really worried, why don’t we see a mass abandonment of social media?

Don’t get me wrong. I assume my life is a potentially open book in the digital age, but when considering my personal level of concern vis-a-vis government abuse, the calculus goes something like this:  take the information we already share voluntarily, which is considerable; add (if you want) the information we believe to be private; divide that total by the vast but still limited analytic capacity of intelligence services; then factor for the reality that most analysts really are looking for specific needles in the haystack; and the answer is probably such a small increase in actual surveillance of concern that I wonder if we have measurably tipped the scale away from the value of liberty.

Is Prism really a major increase in substantive invasion of privacy, or is the program more like the cops and soldiers we see at the train station, who are indeed seeing all of us but by are by no means interested in all of us? Within the intelligence services, relevant and contextual analysis would have to be dramatically outpaced by the rate of data collection, and it’s a given that most of the data are meaningless, dynamic, and rapidly obsolete.

Thus, if Occam’s Razor is our divining rod, then the government’s statement that the NSA is not listening to our phone calls or reading our emails, is actually the most rational conclusion. The explanation from the Obama administration really is the one that makes the most sense — that what’s being gathered is metadata for the purposes of pattern detection, which is both legally and technologically a very different animal from mining the content of a phone call or an email.

Of course, in the video segment on The Guardian, Ed Snowden describes a system in which all our data are gathered, analyzed (although he doesn’t define how it’s analyzed), and stored in such a way that it can be used at some point in the future against any one of us. This raises two natural fears we might describe as the cockroach and The Crucible.* In Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, a cockroach falls into the machinery at the Ministry of Information and changes the printed name of a wanted man by one letter; and this absurd error sets the plot in motion when the innocent man is summarily abducted, tortured, and murdered by the faceless authority.  And, of course, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible dramatizes how the motivation of personal vendetta can maliciously abuse state authority to destroy a fellow citizen. These fears are very real and continue to be borne out every day and in most societies, but does a program like Prism increase the likelihood of either the cockroach or The Crucible, or is it  being blown out of proportion and shattering some lingering illusion of privacy to which some of us still cling?

As this story unfolds, and each opportunist makes hay while Snowden’s sun shines, I seriously advocate settling down on the rhetoric that a program like Prism moves America closer to authoritarian rule. It’s true that, in theory, a government agency can spy on everyone (think China), but how effectively this translates into authoritarianism depends on factors other than the intelligence apparatus being employed.

In the U.S. for instance, I tend to have faith in our love of social chaos as a humanistic buffer against authoritarian rule. We Americans have been openly cussing and spitting at one another from Day One, and our lack of a common culture is good for democratic health the same way cross breeding is good for genetic health. To have an authoritarian state requires that a substantial segment of a given population have faith in the authority, and this usually depends upon something cultural like religion, race, or tribe. And while we do have those types who would define what it means to be a “real American,” it’s worth remembering that most of us are still mutts, and this includes those inside the defense and intelligence communities, the halls of Congress, and the White House.

I was no fan of George W. Bush, primarily because I considered him to be incurious about the complexities of the world, and his famous decisiveness is a tragic flaw when it is not tempered by contemplation. Still, during his last press conference, he was asked about some of the programs started under his administration and the promise by Obama to change directions.  Bush essentially said, “I wish him luck,” which was both sincere and sardonic. And I remember thinking in that moment that no matter who the president is, he or she will get a security briefing that very few people in the world ever see. And I wondered then if some of Obama’s more idealistic promises of transparency might come back to haunt him once he was privy to more of the complexities of the global security landscape. We can choose to pretend otherwise, but cyberspace is without question a new battlefield just as it is a new social sphere.  I think it’s right that we debate matters of security in telecommunications, but we cannot have an effective debate based on the premise that nobody in the entire apparatus of our elected government knows anything every time one guy blows a whistle.

*ADDENDUM:  In this story by Gail Collins, we find a perfect example of the cockroach  in the story of the wrongful incarceration of Brandon Mayfield.