We put privacy on the forefront of the agendas of our MPs. We become more active in the democratic process than before.
Fighting organizations with larger amount of money that we will ever have, was always a dead end. You can't fight fire with fire. If you create a new powerful encryption tool, you're starting an decryption race from Americans, Chinese, Russians and who-ever-has the power to pursuit it. If they can't break it, they will try to bend it, etc.
So the only thing that was ever going to work, is to held them accountable. Make Keith Alexander and the others who made unwarranted mass surveillance possible, accountable. Press towards that direction.
Snowden gave a huge leap towards that direction to the masses. He managed to stir discussion to topics that were never discussed before.
All we need to do is let our MPs know that privacy matters, for our own good.
And by "we" I mean the entire technology community. Fighting for privacy on the front of politics is the only meaningful way.
And once again, only through education people can reach enlightenment.
Behind the scenes politics: GCHQ intercepts internet backbones, records millions of Yahoo video chats.
Front of house politics: Every UK company with a website has to put a warning on their website that they use cookies.
http://i1.wp.com/blog.silktide.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/0...
It boggles my mind that Americans haven't put Keith Alexander behind bars. Lying to Congress is supposed to be a felony. I feel like the rule of law is dead along with privacy.
The EFF, IDL, and other technology advocacy groups are terrible at getting legislation passed in the US. Just plain awful. The only thing they can do effectively is say no.
This is exactly the kind of response I'm talking about when I say, "unring the bell". Our lives are out there, already. You, me, anyone with a Facebook account, an email address, a cell phone - we're exposed, and the options before us are to either eschew all technology entirely, or to figure out how to live without privacy.
The ability to track the movements and activities of everyone in the world is the kind of tool that sits on the same level as nuclear weapons, as jet engines, as automatic weapons. We're never going to experience a world where systemic and universal surveillance is not happening again.
The question I think we should start asking ourselves is, how do we live in this world?
A completely false and thoroughly unhelpful dichotomy. It's comments like this which lead to defeatist attitudes and a lack of push-back (which, unsurprisingly, becomes self-fulfiling).
Options include:
- Engaging in the political process. What's the point of democracy if people are unwilling to use it? There are so many fringe interest groups that have managed to get their way because they've figured the system out and how to play it. It's fucking irritating when smart technical people simply write off this piece of the process. If you want to 'hack some (non-computer) system to your advantage', let it be this one.
- Advocate for and try to use secure technologies. Security on the internet is a farce and ordinary people are constantly misinformed or poorly educated on the issue. Even developers don't get it right. It's in this state because the hard work of coming up with secure crypto is only a third of the problem. Another third is making it useable by normal people/devs and the final third is actually working on getting adoption of products and services that incorporate it. Of course, this directly conflicts with any business model based on advertising so it's time for new models too. Anything that gets decent crypto usable and widely deployed is a good thing for everyone.
- Understand that 'privacy' is a multi-faceted thing (and help others understand). It's completely ridiculous and unhelpful to talk about it in binary terms and it's made worse when people confuse privacy with anonymity. There's a scale on which people treat these things which is obvious when you consider behaviour rather what people say about it.
Change doesn't occur overnight, it takes schlep and conviction.
The thing is that I don't want to erase or use a fake name in my StackOverflow or Twitter account. I know perfectly well that at any time my data could be exploited by a third party.
That's why I'm saying that the only way to get over this, is to make large part of the population aware of the issue.
And the more people use the internet the easier will become.
You can reject it, but in a democratic country that's the way things work: Politicians want (and sell themselves easily) for more votes. Exchange your vote for privacy, the administration might want to control our lives using espionage, but if MPs don't get votes they can't support the administration and I believe they will turn their back to the administration way more easily if they know that they will gain more votes (more raw power).
So all you have to do, is put the issue high on the agenda, nothing more. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not impossible either.
Once an NSA executive goes in jail for mis-conduction will have set a precedent. Same thing will happen in Germany, etc. Then you can say that you are relatively safer because everyone who is going to exploit our data, could face prison. And that's not an entertaining thought, especially for politicians and executives.
We don't really know how to live in this society yet! No one has a definite solution, but greater public awareness will definitely accelerate the outcome, whether it be a solution for the general populous, or a "solution" for those in power.
Not by party, by region, or by anything else I could discern. Although the leadership/establishment of both parties are not on our side, e.g. Boehner and Pelosi (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/25/pelosi-boehner-nsa_...)
The political answer is pretty clear: elect enough non-establishment politicians, President and VP, both houses of the Congress, and we can get this fixed.
As for who, I don't watch the Democratic party at this level (but note the ones already elected in the Congress who are fighting this), but on the Republican side perhaps Ted Cruz, not Rand Paul, who's stances on drones showed he is poser, in general "Tea Party", we want to be left alone types. The latter aren't Republicans per se, in fact they're an existential threat to the establishment GOP, which is why the latter has been complicit in their suppression.
Implicit in the above advice, and observation of that first vote, if this is really one of your most important issues, forget about parties and PC, vote for and donate money to individuals who share these values.
If, on the other hand, voting for or donating money to a "Republican" is unthinkable, then you've demonstrated this is not actually a very important issue for you.
However:
> Fighting organizations with larger amount of money that we will ever have, was always a dead end. You can't fight fire with fire.
I'm not sure how you define "more money tha[n] we will ever have" -- but that certainly includes most companies and political parties -- and I can't accept that -- those are exactly the kind of organizations we must fight?
And, yes, you can absolutely fight fire with fire. In terms of politics, I'd say wide general strikes is one way to do so -- when one party tries to control the means and output of production, one way to "fight fire with fire" is to shut down production. While not getting as much media attention as it deserved, this was a major factor in the first stages of the Egyptian uprising (not that what has happened there lately is very encouraging).
IMHO you fight fire with fire if you don't mind getting burned. But speaking of privacy we don't want transparency for all, we want our privacy back without having to hide every digital step we take.
Now, you mention Egypt. I understand that both US and UK are leaning towards a digital pseudo-democracy but surely the situation is not as bad as it was in Egypt. You still get to vote, you (and me) might not like the results, but ultimately that's what democracy is all about: accepting the results of the (voting) majority and having to make even uncomfortable decisions.
No. It is not.
Simply because something is technically possible doesn't mean that it must happen.
Simply because a thing does happen doesn't mean it must be allowed.
Legal protections can be created. Governments and corporations can be legally obliged to turn over or destroy records. Failure to do so can be subject to audits. The operating presumption is that the surveillance is happening, which should oblige a tremendous benefit of the doubt to anyone challenging or refusing such surveillance.
At another level: surveillance countermeasures will become more prevalent and effective. Small-scale tools such as data fuzzers (running a constant set of quasi-random Internet searches and traffic from your IP, generating white noise to frustrate microphones, laser-blinding cameras, whatever). If you've read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, the nanobot wars he describes are likely to become a reality -- your own personal defense devices seeking out and destroying surveillance bots. People realizing that a principle of least privilege and of least capability should apply to technologies: "smart paper" may be nifty and keen, but one of the advantages of plain old dumb paper is that it's not electronic, and doesn't have arbitrary programmatic capabilities. When we've got a record of microprocessor bugs being placed in electric teakettles and irons, the benefits of solid cast-iron cookware or other dumb-as-rocks tools are clear.
http://www.ibtimes.com/russia-accuses-china-spying-imported-...
At the government level, pushing back against elected officials (hey, California, when are you going to dump DiFi?). Massive lawsuits against corporate spies can have similar chilling effects on them, as well as loss-of-business. There remains considerable power in collective action, so long as people are willing to use it.
I haven't actually seen a "consumer" data fuzzer though outside of Twitter and Twitch bots.
Similarly, I was suggesting defenses which might simply emit signals or project a cone of silence where bots are detected.
I'm also not aware of any case being made for destruction of government property, say, where tracking devices have been found on vehicles (there are a few news stories concerning this), though I recall at least one in which the US government agency involved (the FBI) wanted its tracker back.
-- Jacob Appelbaum ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s )
1) NSA can do a whole lot right now, regardless of the law, because Internet security is so broken
2) If we do fix Internet security, then they will be very limited - again, regardless of the law.
Like take end to end security for example. A judge can request a company to give up the key even to all of their users data - like they did with Lavabit. But if it was true end to end security, with the key on the client's side, there's nothing they could've requested from the company, making FBI and NSA much more limited in the data they can gather. They would basically have to try and tap only the important targets - you know, like they used to.
We will fix Internet security, and I'm starting to see a trend already of high quality secure apps that the public could use (compared to before when most were just unusable by normal people), and we're going to see more of it.
But it doesn't have to be that way. What if there was an organisation - let's call them "the NSA" or "GCHQ," whose mission was to ensure the privacy of its citizens?
Then we'd get better encryption, stronger tools and we'd have a nation-state on our side fighting all the others.
All it takes is a change in the politics.
It's a big world, and we are not indispensable. We will lose dominance in telecom infrastructure and services because of the NSA.
The question isn't "what can we do to get our privacy back?", the question is, "what do we do now that we've lost our privacy?"
Well ... you live without it.
Ordinary people have been living under the whims of capricious deities from thousands of years. It doesn't really matter if you believe in deities directly, it may as well be natural disasters, cruel landlords, plagues of locusts, drought/weather, mob bosses, as the whims of the spirits, so what you do is just carry on living.
Yes. If not now, it will be. I say this for two reasons.
1. The commercial value in killing privacy is too high. Nearly every company you deal with (and nearly every individual you deal with in matters that concern money) is much better off the more private information they can find out about you.
We've grown reliant on email and text messaging, and on social networking, and on internet search, and on internet shopping, so that nearly everything we do is a potential leak of information to some entity that can profit from that information.
Almost no one is willing to disentangle themselves from that to the extent that would be necessary to maintain privacy. Some might leave Facebook, or switch from Google to Duck Duck Go, but there are so many ways your privacy gets compromise that plugging one or two holes doesn't really save you.
2. I think that physical threats are going to increase, largely due to technology. Things that currently would take a well organized and well funded terrorist organization are going to eventually be in the reach of your random crazy person. People that nowadays are limited to crude bombs that take out a few people will be able to readily build large bombs that kill dozens or hundreds. I expect home-made biological weapons to become relatively easy at some point, adding a whole new level of destructive capability.
I think we'll reach a point where disgruntled ex-employees, disgruntled ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends, members of religious and political cults, and the like are killing more people a year than all the major terrorist groups combined can do.
Since these attacks will be coming from within, often from people who seem pretty ordinary until they go off the deep end, my guess is that there will be no way to prevent them other than extensive surveillance.
Since the above two factors make loss of privacy inevitable in my opinion, I think the focus should be on making sure our information is not misused, rather than trying to stop it from being gathered at all.
Take surveillance. I think we need to automate it. Get humans out of the loop. I don't care if AI spies on me, as long as it only alerts humans when it sees me doing something bad (or if it sees that I need aid), and we have sufficient public auditing to ensure this.
Criminals always left DNA at crimescenes, even before people knew it existed.
In the past if someone dodged work to go to a protest there would be witnesses all along the way - phonecall to work, boss recording them as ill, train passengers seeing them, DNA left on the train, dogs smelling their scent, mud from their home area dropped on the street, coffee shop worker in the city serving them, other protesters seeing them, all sorts of historic record that this happened, and nothing else happened, just no way for humans to pull that together.
History only happened one way. The uncertainty about what happened somewhere/somewhen has always been in our understanding, not in the world itself.
I think, if given the choice between convenience and privacy, people will pick convenience, and this will never change. That's where we're at, and it's about time we start accepting that fact.
When people learn how technology works, they work it to their advantage. People are learning their communications and movements are logged permanently. People will learn how to use technology is a way so that this will not happen.
Before this thinking was the realm of tin foil hatters - people are paying attention to it now, and are looking around - telegram/textsecure vs whatsapp. I suspect from your defenseless reaction you didn't see the snowden revelations coming.
Two years ago nobody would have given three moments notice to facebook acquiring whatsapp. People around me are reacting like so: "I need to stop using whatsapp immediately".
This guide is a good place to get started - social technology that doesn't have to leave you completely isolated. (If enough of your friends care about yours and their privacy). http://freedombone.uk.to/
I deleted my Facebook account 3 years ago and up until a few months ago I was able to spin up anonymous google accounts when I needed them. Fortunately I have the skills to create Facebook and Google equivalents for both myself and my family.
We just need to get more options out there and fragment the industry to the point where data collection becomes difficult again. Plus we need to lower the hurdles to get alternatives up and running.
So let's remove the barriers, remove the sign offs and make it really easy for people to find alternatives.
It's too late, we can't unwind this clock. So what now? I feel like everyone's trying to unbreak the glass, unring the bell, whatever metaphor you'd like, but no one's trying to think of how to live in this world.
What does a person do, when everything there is to do leaves a trace, and the rules for what is and isn't acceptable behavior are constantly in wild flux?