Schneier on Security: The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership

I have always found the NRA's fear of a government gun registry amusing. Their membership list is the very thing they fear. Just in case their database is hack proof against everyone--from script kiddie to NSA, they send it through the US Postal system's mail scanners on a fairly regular basis...

As for the ad-tracking networks, I started routinely installing Adblock with the EasyPrivacy filter list.
Haven't had a single customer/friend complain about getting rid of the annoying ads and they get reduced tracking as a bonus.

If you're using Firefox, have Collusion running for a couple days, then reset the graph and try again with Adblock and Easyprivacy. Quite a nice difference.

So Bruce, do you have a advice to give us so that we can do something about it or is this just you tolling the bell of doom and telling us that hope has been lost? Your essay seems pretty damning and depressing.

@Smythe

You don't need to own a gun to join the NRA and likewise you don't need to join the NRA if you own a gun. Their mailing list does necessarily correspond to a list of gun owners.

"did you have your iPhone turned on when you visited a gun store"

You can't turn off your iPhone from tracking.

"Did you have your iPhone on your person when you visited the gun store?"

If you can't turn it off you can at least leave it behind.

@Someone
The main defense is government incompetence and inter-agency infighting.

If this is the same government that after 50years of close study, 1000 of agents and intelligence officers, $Bn in spy satelites and electronic eavesdropping - didn't notice the fall of the USSR until it appeared on CNN - then we are probably safe

@NobodySpecial

But now they hire private contractors to get this information for them. A great deal of them whom aren't incompetent and have absolutely no scruples when it comes to selling your information.

I echo Someone's question, what now? This sort of surveillance is obvious to anyone paying attention, but the solution is not so obvious. (I'm sure there'll be someone saying lobby politicians, or elected the right politicians, or become a politician, I'm not convinced ordinary folk can do much with any of those options.)

"No sovereign ever lived in former ages so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer by his own agency, and without the assistance of intermediate powers, all the parts of a great empire...

When the Roman emperors were at the height of their power... They frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the many; it was confined to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited.

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them...

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world...

For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd....

Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain."

"...because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."

I hate to be the devil's advocate here, I agree the situation is concerning, but I do believe it is important to ask, "What is the actual impact here".

How is surveillance hurting people. How can it hurt people. Yes, we have a right to privacy, and it does appear that privacy is being invaded on a massive scale. But, how does this effect people in a negative way.

One paper I have seen is how the threat of secret surveillance can tamper what people say. It can spread a blanket of fear on people.

People can get a sort of stockholm's syndrome, where they just go along to get along.

This increases the power of anyone in power, where they do not deserve it. I think that wheel is going to spin out of control, but has it really, already?

Is there a trend of innocuous political targets in this surveillance? Is there evidence that this surveillance data is being sold, or being used to help politician's careers?

Are ordinary, concerned people being surveilled, while extremist neo-nazi groups are being ignored?

Is business data being traded to competitors?

Are people being extorted? Is the data used in targeted leaks to manipulate the system of democracy?

Are there politicians or law enforcement agents or intel agents using this data for personal gain?

@Michael, Someone 'problem, but no solution'

People depend on free web services, and that is part of how these companies have people pay for them.

There are regulatory agencies, there is potential promise for rival politicians, there are always leaks motivated by rivals, enemies, concerned citizens.

I think the call to avoid fear, and the call to rightly consider threats is very important. That happens by sensible analysts like Bruce and by comedians mocking over reactions.

Otherwise, sounds like the wheels are out of control and the value of the power this surveillance gives far outweighs the capacity for the system to handle it.

@DF:

True enough. But it's close enough for government work. They'll consider the errors acceptable noise.

@Someone
"So Bruce, do you have a advice to give us so that we can do something about it or is this just you tolling the bell of doom and telling us that hope has been lost? Your essay seems pretty damning and depressing."

Use Tor www.torproject.org
Use encryption www.gnupg.org
Use proxy
Use Live-USB OS

Any privacy scheme can be broken. Yours will too. Have a good plan in place for when your data is breached.

@AtomBoy "Are ordinary, concerned people being surveilled, while extremist neo-nazi groups are being ignored?"
Yep. When given spying powers, UK councils were keen to spy on ordinary citizens as to whether they really were due given benefits. There's a whole list of similar events, and terrifying screwups where the wrong data was passed and someone innocent got harassed or arrested, in a variety of news articles. Here's one http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/16/...

You ask what the actual impact is. Beyond the above that has news survivor bias, we can't know that. How do you measure loss of privacy or identity theft until you know it's happened? How do you even establish that some drone in some office somewhere has ordered a snoop of your entire personal life? If you apply for a job and don't get it, will they actually say 'we didn't like what you'd written on Facebook two years ago'? If your life is stolen, how will you know what pieces of data they gathered and from where?

All the surveillance that Bruce is writing about is one-way. We the citizens are observed & catalogued, increasingly by machines that don't tire of looking through vast quantities of data. Try finding out which companies purchased your personal data, or even a given government. Look at what happened with Wikileaks when someone tried to force the US government to be transparent in its actions. No, then it's all about corporate/national security and the gates are barred.

It's not a matter just of surveillance and data mining. It's who is allowed to look at what & why. Most people given power will use it. They won't ask 'should I do this?'. We have already had anti-terrorism legislation abused to silence political protesters, and anti-terrorism surveillance laws used to spy on ordinary citizens for whether they were close enough to a given school they wanted their children to go to. It's clear that abuse of data has happened and will again.

Re: Disney and Fingerprints. It's been a long time since I've been to Disney World but at that time they were using a form of hand-geometry scanner that only used two fingers. The picture in the EPIC article is of a hand-geometry system. These don't do fingerprints, just the back of your hand to derive data from finger sizes and such. You don't even have to place your palm on the machine, as most people do. I didn't want to catch other people's colds where I worked, where they used full hand-geometry scanners, so I always kept my hand up about an inch and it still matched - no way to get fingerprints that way. I may have done this at Disney World as well.

Re: NRA Membership. I believe that the NRA inflates its membership numbers. Many years ago they sent me a membership card completely out of the blue (I have no guns and had never contacted them or any related companies). It wasn't an application either, it said I was a member of the NRA. I had no interest in that and tossed it.

And don't forget the latest and greatest tool - the Census Bureau. That's right, what used to be a Consitutional imperative - to conduct a census every ten years - has now become a gargantuan system the gov't uses to demand information from companies. "YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN..." the letter begins. "YOU ARE REQUIRED BY LAW TO RESPOND."

The lack of transparency and accountability by "big data" brokers is alarming. This type of behaviour can easily lead to situations involving inaccurate information and inappropriate usage that are very difficult if not impossible to correct. We are quickly becoming a society where your job application can be denied because your name accidentally ended up on a disability support mailing list after you searched for the wrong thing on a health site. Not only is determination wrong (due to inaccurate information), it is also illegal (due to using protected information in the hiring decision). What can we do as a society to protect ourselves from these threats?

@Someone "do you have a advice to give us so that we can do something about it..."
My two cents would be that short of staying under the radar, which these days is pretty hard to maintain for long periods, what we need is appropriate legislation that curtails & controls use of data & perhaps more importantly combination of data.

We can't stop the all seeing eyes now. There's too much money & too much power involved in gathering data, and too much of the data by itself is innocuous.

What we need is when, not if, that data turns up in court or some equivalent that we're able to say 'Ok, just where did you get this from? Was that legal? Is this an appropriate use of data from that form of data gathering? Did you combine multiple pieces of data each of which might be allowed to be gathered on its own, but not together?'.

I don't believe for a second this will happen of course.

@bruce
A little background first...

My current business enterprise, an electronics R&D laboratory, develops prototypes and applications across a plethora of markets. One area we focus on is network and information security. We are seeing a disturbing trend. Just as the wars in the Middle East was ginned up, the same is occurring in InfoSEC environment. Big mil contractors are lining up to build the great firewall of the United States. But, it gets worse, very bad indeed. Not Orwell's dystopia, Bradbury's 451.

@AtomBoy,

How would unreasonable search and seizer hurt people? Your argument is like saying, "What do you have to worry about if you haven't done anything wrong?"

It doesn't just "hurt" people, it hurts the integrity of a still somewhat free and liberated society. People get used to Big Brother walking over them until it doesn't hurt anymore.

I suppose the difference in "hurt" that one experiences is dependent upon the degree to which he doesn't feel he should be obligated as a free man to lick another's boot.

@name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons

Of course it is where things are going given the current trajectory. The argument (had in the smokey back rooms of course) will go something like this: "Pre-crime is not enough! People can still self-radicalize through the internet... so we need to control the flow."

The problem is that tech people have always thought it would be easy to one-up the system through novel technological advancements like encryption/anon, etc. They happen to be wrong this time imo (cue the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it argument). The powerstructure is using technological innovation to accelerate it's power while holding everyone else (domestically and internationally) down. Hell, that's the entire global power strategy for the post-american world. The only way the empire maintains it's dominance with equalizing technological power is by using legal and physical force to hold everyone else down.

I have some concern about this:

"When you interact with a policeman, she'll already have your personal information displayed on her Internet-enabled glasses."

I have often thought that as well. However, despite "knowing" everything about you, they will arrest you on the spot, cuff you, and haul you away if you don't provide them ALL the information they already "know" about you. The charge is likely to be interferring with a police officer performing their duties, or at least failure to cooperate with a police officer. Even if all of the information they "know" about you is good, withholding any of it from them is considered bad, you have something to hide, and will be considered uncooperative or under arrest. Their knowledge about you is not to know what they are dealing with but to intimidate and control you, which is to make you happy if you cooperate or unhappy if you don't. Only the data of "certain" will come through the filter as marked "untouchable" and those persons will be left alone.

Sound far fetched. About as far fetched as thinking that all of this collected data will be used for your good.

...only the data of "certain people"...

@999999999

Tor is fine for anonymity...if you decide to forgo much scripting and all flash and java on the web. It makes for a slow, bastardized experience. Sure, it's useful at times, but it's not a solution to the problem at hand.

The solution is the problem! The problem with "big data" is that it completely relies on the quality of input data. Capture verbose garbage, or Flood the system with garbage, and the analyst has a whole raft of problems. It's a basic signal/noise problem, amplified by the bias of the analyst. The more data you collect, the more dumb you become (at a point).

Hypothetically, one could inject garbage data likely to be labeled "positive", or inject "dirty" data on unfriendlies to crash the data set.

Profiling human beings is infinitely more difficult than analyzing an IP header, or packet stream, then further complicated by its subjectiveness.

I think Taleb said in fooled by randomness: "the more data you have, the less you know." Or something like it. Stop thinking of this as a technical problem, and start thinking of it as a human problem, read: Khaneman, Taleb, etc.

@Bob T
> "How would unreasonable search and >seizer hurt people? Your argument is like >saying, 'What do you have to worry about if you haven't done anything wrong?'"

But, it really is that argument. This is the same argument used for why cops, in general, do not make anyone nervous if we are not engaged in any major, persistent crimes.

Ordinary citizens not breaking any major crimes on a persistent basis really have no reason to fear cops. There are extreme exceptional conditions to this rule. But, those are extreme exceptional conditions, so it would be fear based thinking to consider them normal.

I think people can rightly urge that we do not over react on terrorist attacks, because more people die everyday in car crashes by far.

But, should the reverse standard be taken, that we should over react to extreme exceptions of police abuse: such as the NASA spy who wasn't, or the girl in Florida expelled permanently from school for an obvious science experiment gone wrong? Or maybe the initial suspect in the ricin investigation?

While those are scary situations of police prosecution on the fear of terrorism or espionage gone wrong, they are extremely exceptional. There are no crackdowns going down on anyone with non-mainstream beliefs.

This *may* happen in the future, but there is simply no compelling evidence that it is happening now.

If it does happen in the future it is because of fear based decision making, isn't it?

Where extreme, exceptional conditions are elevated from being three in four hundred million to being one in five?

@JeffH

You do not know how it is being used. Maybe you have been passed over for a job or promotion "because of something you said on facebook two years ago". But, do you really want to work for an employer that is that dense to judge you on an off the cuff comment made on facebook two years ago? Someone who is either a complete hypocrite, or whose standard is so narrow they never let themselves anything - ever - which could be irresponsibly misconstrued?

The register article you linked to said that *two* people were wrongly detained. From that extremely small number, there was a major political and media backlash.

How many people are wrongly detained during murder investigations? How many false suspects must be questioned there?

And released.

I think people should be wary. I agree that people have a strong tendency to abuse power. There must be checks and balances.

But without evidence that there are no substantial checks and balances, how can anyone argue that the system is completely corrupt?

I think you would have to extrapolate from extremely rare conditions to do this, at this time. And this is the exact sort of thinking we are concerned about the policing agencies of doing. And the public.

Maybe the public should extrapolate those extremely rare circumstances vastly. But, then, if that is the case, maybe the policing agencies should also do the same with terrorism.

@Frodo
"Hypothetically, one could inject garbage data likely to be labeled "positive", or inject "dirty" data on unfriendlies to crash the data set.
Profiling human beings is infinitely more difficult than analyzing an IP header, or packet stream, then further complicated by its subjectiveness."

I would agree, but this is not even hypothetical. When people are talking about secret surveillance they are talking about intelligence agencies and divisions.

These same agencies and divisions - any any country where they are mature - react in exactly this way when they either capture an agent and turn them, replace them, or discover they are themselves under surveillance.

So, this approach works perfectly and is well documented in the annals of open source intelligence.

Further, false positives are extremely detrimental to these organizations. They provide extraordinary judicial, political, and public backlash.

But, if someone intentional creates false positives just to try and mess with such agencies, they could have a hard time explaining what they were doing.

"I was just joking".

> When you interact with a policeman, she'll already have your personal information

He.

Or policewoman :)

@ Gender Police,

That's why in the UK we are encoraged to call them the nice gender nutral "Officer".

On another more apocraphal note, there is the story of a Chief Police Officer on being pressed by an irritating Journalist with a "sexist agender" in some irritation came out with the line,

"As far as I'm concerned the only difference between a police man and woman is six inches!"

(Police woman at the time had a minimum hight requirment half a foot less than that for their male colleagues)

Well, I’m mostly a political blogger, so my comment will have a bit of a different tone than others that typically appear here. This is a short repost from one of my blogs.

The info-equity movement opposes the rise of what is fast becoming a new total surveillance state. A mass observation culture, where an elite ruling patrician observer class oversees a submissive subordinate observee class. The wealthy info-elite will be entertained by the spectacle of our misery. The relationship will be non-reciprocal with total info-inequity. All information about the wealthy info-elite and their deputies will be classified Top Secret, so the info-pleb observees will never be allowed to know what the elites are doing and enjoying.