To me, if we can criminalize something like a major oil spill such as BP/Deepwater Horizon, how is this much different? It's not like they did the oil spill on purpose, but they still need had consequences for those risks that they were taking. Software companies, esp larger ones like Facebook, should have the same kind of consequences for their risks of software bugs that cause these kinds of privacy breaches.
Also, as someone else below pointed out to someone else with a similar tone as your phrasing of "criminalize software bugs": "intentionally obscuring the debate. Gross negligence is an entirely different standard than just software bugs."
The government does a good job in this area forgiving innocuous violations, as long as all parties disclose it immediately and follow procedure.
The problem is that we're all giving our data away to these "free" platforms. That makes it difficult for a user to argue that they've "lost" something of value when there's a breach. But of course the user has lost something of value. Facebook has built their entire company around the value of our information but we let them have it both ways. It's valuable when they're selling it but worthless when they fail to protect it. Statutory damages for data breaches would deter negligence and (partially) compensate users who have been victims of data breaches.
Come to think of it, does anyone know of good auth resources for a mean stack that isn't a copy paste blog? I'm trying the udacity auth course as a starting point (uses oauth2)
The relevant rfc and drafts perhaps? https://tools.ietf.org/wg/oauth/
Also checkout OWASP https://www.owasp.org/
If your implementing openid connect, use a certified lib https://openid.net/developers/certified/
Dex by coreos, Open Policy Agent, Kubernetes docs & code are all good examples, lots of frameworks have docs / code.
Case in point look at the quality of medical software today. Hospitals still use windows xp and other completely insecure and outdated software. Because absolutely nobody wants to deal with the nightmare that is HIPAA.
"But HIPAA" has never, in my experience, been employed except by people who find the idea of doing the right thing inconvenient or inconveniently expensive. (It is virtually never that hard and its benefits are clear.)
There are reasons for not modernizing tech stacks in the medical space. HIPAA is, in every case I've ever observed, not a meaningful one.
Thank you for directly attacking my character without even addressing my actual argument.
I'm not arguing against HIPAA, I'm arguing against such regulations in spaces that don't require that kind of sensitivity. I think that medical data absolutely requires the protections it has. But it absolutely has had the unintended consequence of making current medical data more insecure and stifling innovation in the space. Most doctors don't even follow HIPAA compliance sending patient medical records over email.
I would estimate that 40% of doctors today are not compliant with HIPAA, sending X-rays and other similar patient information over email with providers that they haven't signed BAAs with.
>There are reasons for not modernizing tech stacks in the medical space. HIPAA is, in every case I've ever observed, not a meaningful one.
Then please enlighten us. Up until a few years ago (maybe even just a year) you couldn't use AWS to host medical data. Today you can't use Google Cloud to host medical data unless you are a large enough business to be able to get into contact with one of their sales reps. Can you even sign a business associate agreement with digital ocean? So up until a year ago you could not even have a small healthcare startup hosted on the cloud. Please explain to me how this hasn't stifled medical software innovation.
If it isn't HIPAA it's some other outdated regulation.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/why-doctors-offices-sti...
"But it's hard, for no actual reason I will define" is not a meaningful argument. So--when one hears hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
> I would estimate that 40% of doctors today are not compliant with HIPAA, sending X-rays and other similar patient information over email with providers that they haven't signed BAAs with.
Probably true! But that's their own damned fault. Medical has Artesys and similar, dental has Apteryx and similar. This problem is largely solved but for hands-on unwillingness to use them.
Those providers should be nailed to the wall, the wall should not be torn down for them.
> Up until a few years ago (maybe even just a year) you couldn't use AWS to host medical data.
AWS has been signing BAAs since at least...2013? I believe the first time I looked into it was 2014. But, regardless--if your innovation was so tremendously stifled by this, I'm not particularly sympathetic. I've been running my own services and writing them too for at least a decade and you can do thou likewise, I promise. I am, however, saying that today it's very easy to do so 'cause Amazon is all-too-happy to sign one.
Also, I haven't had to use GCP for HIPAA-covered entities--found their BAA pretty easily though!--but even assuming you're correct the idea that you have to, hiss, talk to somebody before getting them to take some legal responsibility for your held PHI, I don't find that to be a particularly nasty requirement. I still find it odd that AWS will just let you sign right through with AWS Artifact.
Azure's all-too-happy to sign one, too. Not that I'd recommend it.
So you're fine with financial losses, loss of privacy, and the material harm that goes along with both? Disregarding the impact that data breaches imply is just naive.
> Case in point look at the quality of medical software today. Hospitals still use windows xp and other completely insecure and outdated software. Because absolutely nobody wants to deal with the nightmare that is HIPAA.
I wrote medical device software for more than a decade. HIPAA has nothing to do with it. Many systems run on outdated platforms because the cost of replacing them is deemed to outweigh the benefits. That determination is debatable on a case by case basis, but in practice we see a hell of a lot more damage being caused by breaches of companies running on modern technology than we do e.g. hospital systems or LIMS.
please, if there is provable material harm they can take it to civil court.
We regulate the finance industry not because of a risk of physical harm, but because financial harm can be equally serious and civil suits do not act as a sufficient deterrent to bad behavior by the powerful. Why do you feel this sort of thing is different? I believe the only real difference is that this sort of thing is new, not well understood by most, and we just haven't caught up.
And your "nightmare" scenario of (civil) liability flowing from programming bugs already exists in the investment world and it hasn't come apart at the seams. Google Axa Rosenberg. A coding error in their trading algorithm went undiscovered for two years. Negligent for sure, but not why the SEC went after them. The problem was they didn't promptly disclose the error to investors and they didn't promptly correct it. Algorithmic trading firms should have mechanisms to catch errors, correct errors, and disclose those errors to investors. And after seeing Axa Rosenberg's $250 million fine and Rosenberg's lifetime ban from the industry guess what they all implemented?
This is false.
Source: Works for a company that has mandatory HIPAA training for every employee every six months.
citation please. Here's mine:
> Criminal penalties
>
> Covered entities and specified individuals, as explained below, who "knowingly" obtain or disclose individually identifiable health information, in violation of the Administrative Simplification Regulations, face a fine of up to $50,000, as well as imprisonment up to 1 year.
>
> Offenses committed under false pretenses allow penalties to be increased to a $100,000 fine, with up to 5 years in prison.
>
> Finally, offenses committed with the intent to sell, transfer or use individually identifiable health information for commercial advantage, personal gain or malicious harm permit fines of $250,000 and imprisonment up to 10 years.
Source: American Medical Association
https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/hipaa/hipaa-vio...
To me that trumps a non-lawyer’s interpretation of a non-legal web site.
That they have a different company risk profile doesn't necessarily change the facts at hand. And, TBH, they don't have to tell you the truth if it helps achieve their immediate goals. (They can tell you you'd be personally and criminally liable. It might make you do what they want better. It might also not be true.) Or it may all be in good faith. But what you describe doesn't square with anything I've ever worked with, at multiple clients and employers.
My guess as to why the draconian position is more about the internal process. You have to identify and disclose breaches in a timely way; if you don’t the company is at risk.
From HHS summary of the rules:
(See: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg... ) (it’s also laid out in the regulation which I don’t have time to find.)
“Criminal Penalties. A person who knowingly obtains or discloses individually identifiable health information in violation of the Privacy Rule may face a criminal penalty of up to $50,000 and up to one-year imprisonment. The criminal penalties increase to $100,000 and up to five years imprisonment if the wrongful conduct involves false pretenses, and to $250,000 and up to 10 years imprisonment if the wrongful conduct involves the intent to sell, transfer, or use identifiable health information for commercial advantage, personal gain or malicious harm.”
Building Code
229. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction sound, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, the builder shall be put to death.
233. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction sound, and a wall cracks, that builder shall strengthen that wall at his own expense.
Bugs in houses have been criminalized for a very long time. Online data may be less fundamental than safe housing, but housing our data safely becomes proportionally more important as more of modern life depends on it.
[0] http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Hamm.htm
If a social media company leaks private photos of its users, the company's executives and senior staff shall have its photos leaked.
I would love something like that. Nobody protects anyone else's interests in this modern world unless there's Skin in the Game. Would highly recommend reading Nassim Taleb's book of the same name; he is popularizing this term, and its implications to society.
You misunderstand what "eye for an eye" means.
"Eye for an eye" means let the punishment fit the crime.
Before "eye for an eye" was established by religious texts, the common retaliation for poking someone's eye out was death.
"Eye for an eye" was a step towards a more civilized justice system.
[0]: https://www.angieslist.com/articles/hiring-contractor-whats-...
And houses are not free.
Are you seriously suggesting that information in this day and age does not have the power to directly cause harm, including lethal harm, to people?
Also - that it can be used for organizing bad behaviours is an entirely different subject that has little to do with quality or security.
But Facebook is a company that actively snoops and uses the data of its resources, the end-user. It's like a security guard who's paid to prevent shoplifting actively ignoring violent crimes because it's not related to stealing, or a baby food company ignoring that some metal got into their food because the food is still OK if you pick out the metal bits.
If the government wants to hire people to decide what counts as what - they should do that.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2225633/software/knight...
https://www.qa-financial.com/articles/cftc-fines-societe-gen...
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/citigroup-fined-7m-over-software-b...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-30125728
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/06/microsoft...
Right. Companies like FB are entrusted with the private information of hundreds of millions of people. There should be investigations as there would be in a plane crash. If negligence is found, there should be appropriate punishment doled out.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-crash-boeing/bo...
When there is irreparable damage I believe it should be criminalized. You cannot regain privacy after an incident such as this, it is irrevocably taken from you against your will.
If you’re using OSS for mission-critical software you must either ensure that it’s fit for purpose or pay someone to do it for you. Nothing in the Linux Kernel documentation suggests that it can/should be used for flying airplanes of securing PII without doing additional due diligence.
The other big difference is that (for the most part) keeping a passenger plane in the air isn't an adversarial task. Actual breaches are the result of active bad actors, which is completely different from the problems you encounter in designing a plane.
So criminal action seems crazy to me, though I can definitely see a great case for changing the incentives around storing user data. Could definitely see a good case for fines (and even an ongoing per-user tax, to make it an up front cost) for storing PII.
Wang&already, 2006: “Information leakage through covert channels and side channels is becoming a serious problem, especially when these are enhanced by modern processor architecture features. We show how processor architecture features such as simultaneous multithreading, control speculation and shared caches can inadvertently accelerate such covert channels or enable new covert channels and side channels. We first illustrate the reality and severity of this problem by describing concrete attacks. We identify two new covert channels. We show orders of magnitude increases in covert channel capacities. We then present two solutions, Selective Partitioning and the novel Random Permutation Cache (RPCache). The RPCache can thwart most cache-based software side channel attacks, with minimal hardware costs and negligible performance impact.”
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.190...
When my dad went to college, a very old and bitter professor (this was Civil Engineering, communist Eastern Europe) told the students on the first day in class something along the lines of: "If you know you're stupid or don't give a shit about your work, just go home and save everyone the trouble of dealing with your future fuckups. Mistakes here can cause deaths or losses of huge amounts of money".
I believe we've reached the point in which negligence in the software world can cause loss of lives, even when the software is not operating a crane or an airplane (think Grindr leaking account data over http in Saudi Arabia).
So you're minimizing the issue by asking if we should criminalize software bugs. We should and currently do criminalize negligence. If bugs are a result of negligence (you know, 'move fast and break things', 'better to ask for forgiveness than for permission') then fines, jailtime and criminal records should be a'coming. This is no longer child-play, this is the new world which runs on software.
Anywhere else its a plain case of malpractice whether its law or medicine, etc.
It happens with such regularity that I'm amazed anyone here would be kind enough to accept their fake apologies for clearly malicious actions.
There is risk in any human endeavour that touches upon someone else's life, in every domain. But, for example, only some of the deaths that occur in a hospital are the result of malpractice. That is the type of mistake for which we hold others accountable: not the mere act of providing insufficient care, but the act of providing insufficient care as a result of a dereliction of professional duty or a failure to exercise an ordinary degree of professional skill or learning.
IMHO:
1. If this was a novel, or very complicated breach, that Facebook did everything possible to avoid, but avoiding it was beyond the knowledge and skills of their security, engineering and QA teams, who otherwise did their absolute best, then it's at the very least defensible. One could argue that you shouldn't handle private data if you can't do it securely, but risk is inherent to anything, and perhaps worth it under the right circumstances.
2. If this was just "move fast and break things" policy, then a big fine is in order, and if no insurance is in place, whoever approved it should get to pay it out of their own pocket. This is the equivalent of a civil engineering company designing a collapsing bridge because everyone showed up at work hungover, or skipped safety calculations because they just take too damn long and time to market is critical.
If you think gee, this was just a bunch of photos, man, it's not like a bridge collapsed, how certain are you they didn't end up traded on the black market, or used for blackmail? Bet-your-company's-profits certain they weren't?
3. If this was deliberate policy -- not just accident, but a conscious business decision that was then reverted and declared a breach -- then whoever came up with it and/or approved it should be facing jail time.
Edit: also, it pisses me off that people are trying to decide how responsible we should about what we do based on other fields. They don't fine companies that write crashing firwmares for planes or cars or they fine it X amount, clearly we're only doing computer stuff so we should be fined less, no?
What the hell? First, they are fined (see, for instance, Toyota, who were fined 1.2B for their infamous acceleration firmware bug). And second, even if they weren't, we shouldn't be aspiring to do the worst thing that's still acceptable! We should be striving for better than anything else, not for well, at least we're not worse than civil engineers...
Sounds like you're suggesting that we criminalize software bugs.