Sleepycatz

War on Privacy

This week one of the nation’s top intelligence officials made a startling announcement:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

Safeguard from whom? should be the question that is asked of Mr. Kern. I doubt very much that al Qaeda or Syria cares where our day to day travels take us , but my boss might, your insurance company might, political opponents might. What Mr. Kern is insisting upon is a surveillance state - one in which government collected information is seamlessly shared with business collected data. For instance: you go to an ATM at 8:00 Am, Stop and buy a coffee at 8:30 Am using a discount card, punch into work at 9:00 AM - respond your e-mail & make calls, drive home via a tollbridge at 5:00 Pm, stop off for a drink at 5:30, then go home and read your personal e-mail, visit and adult website, maybe read some blogs; the government would now know exactly where you were during the day, and what you were doing. Perhaps you visited a blog which was critical of government policies; you might now find yourself undergoing additional IRS auditing - after all it’s happened before, or find yourself bared from flying. What Mr. Kerr is suggesting is even a bit more nefarious: a two way street in which businesses have access to to personal data for their own purposes. Perhaps your employer is devout and decides to fire you because you consume pornography — there is currently no law which protects employees for actions unrelated to their work. Perhaps your health insurance company decides you are consuming too much alcohol and decides to raise your premium or drop you. All of these things are more than possible, they are probable outcomes of Mr. Kerr’s policy. Information, it has been said, is power, and once made available those with the information will make the most use of it as possible.

Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, and James Madison all published their works under pseudonyms — anonymously. And they all did so at a time in which the future of their country was far less certain then it is today. Mr. Kerr, and the administration, keep arguing that we are in greater peril today then we have ever been before. But there is little to no evidence of this. If our country is in peril, it is from the incompetence and hubris of its leaders, not from any outside force. But these same leaders cry for more power to help assuage the fear their own policies have created. Should Mr. Kerr and his administration get their way, we and future Americans will quickly learn to fear our own government and its powers. To quote a popular film, “People should not fear the government; Government should fear the people.”

Billions and Billions

Yesterday, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell offered some enlightening and frightening testimony before the judiciary committee. McConnell testified to what a number of us have been for years:

[the] Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that the terror attacks of Sept. 11, which he invoked to justify expanding US spy powers, “could have been prevented” under existing laws if intelligence agencies had “connected the dots” in analyzing intelligence.

That’s right, there was no real need for the Patriot Act, FISA revisions, or the myriad of other ‘enhancements’ to surveillance laws to prevent another 9/11. Those events could have been prevented but for the incompetence of the agencies involved. Instead, we have provided the alphabet soup of security agencies with more unfettered access to our personal data. Has this made us more secure? Well, the numbers suggest that perhaps we are less secure.

When questioned about the number of Americans currently under surveillance, McConnell responded: “It’s a very small number considering that there are billions of transactions [intercepted] every day.” Let us consider this for a moment: if the agencies are intercepting billions of transactions a day how can these be processed? Assuming that McConnell was engaging in some hyperbole, let’s assume 1bn transactions a day. Throw away 50 percent for obvious misses, and assume an average of 10 seconds to review and classify a transaction (a very generous average, given translation time) would mean that it would take 155.5 man years (56,757.5 days) to review one day’s collection of data. This enormous amount of data, obviously, cannot be properly analyzed, so they are simply collecting and storing it for future reference and correlation. This suggests that quality of intelligence data has simply been replaced by quantity. So the odds of actually preventing an event are actually less then they were prior to this massive collection simply due to the volume that needs to be plowed through. In other words: analysts would be unable to “connect the dots”, because the dot are buried in mounds of background noise.

McConnell, and his supporters, though keep insisting that huge amounts of data collection is necessary to prevent an attack. If the data was there prior to 9/11 to prevent that attack and could not be analyzed properly, how can exponentially more data be handled to prevent an attack? It can’t . For the supporters of the security state the entire debate is really about pushing acceptance of wholesale government surveillance not about useful intelligence gathering.

A Bad Treat

Thursday night the Senate ratified the Convention on Cybercrime, an international treaty between members of the Council of Europe. The treaty had been pushed hard by the Bush administration and major copyright holders, such as Microsoft, RIAA, et. al. The overall idea of the treaty is to create consistency between traditional laws and cybercrime law - a generally good idea. However, the treaty includes some pretty broad provisions, which will further deteriorate Americans’ rights of privacy and free speech.

The overall problem is generally referred to as a ‘lack of dual criminality’ in the treaty. It doesn’t sound so bad when phased like that, but what is means is that any nation signing the treaty can compel the US federal authorities to spy on US Internet users and aid in their prosecution — even if the crime they are charged with is NOT illegal in the US. So, for instance, a pro-democracy advocate in America can be surveilled by the FBI at the behest of the Russian government; a US organizer for gay rights in Poland could find all of their Internet traffic tapped and handed to the Polish police. Cnet summed it up by noting:

[The treaty] says Internet providers must cooperate with electronic searches and seizures without reimbursement; the FBI must conduct electronic surveillance “in real time” on behalf of another government; that U.S. businesses can be slapped with “expedited preservation” orders preventing them from routinely deleting logs or other data.

Large American Internet companies have shown that they are more then willing to turn their users over to torturers for a few pieces of silver. It now appears that they’ll have the protection and aid of the US government in deflecting criticism of these acts. For it’s part the US government can now move forward with plans to force ISPs to provide data-tapping facilities for all Internet traffic - something which both users and ISPs oppose, and which probability wouldn’t pass in congress.

For his part, US AG Alberto Gonzales said. “The Convention is in full accord with all U.S. constitutional protections, such as free speech and other civil liberties, and will require no change to U.S. laws.” This should make us all feel better though, as Mr. Gonzales has a splendid record on protecting civil rights