Quotulatiousness

June 15, 2013

Cory Doctorow explains why you should care about PRISM

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

In the Guardian, Cory Doctorow spells out a few good reasons why you should be bothered by PRISM and other governmental data-trawling efforts:

The revelations about Prism and other forms of NSA dragnet surveillance has got some people wondering what all the fuss is. When William Hague tells us that the innocent have nothing to fear from involuntary disclosure, it raises questions about exactly what harms might come about from being spied upon. Here are some reasons you should care about privacy, disclosure and surveillance.

We’re bad at privacy because the consequences of privacy disclosures are separated by a lot of time and space from the disclosures themselves. It’s like trying to get good at cricket by swinging the bat, closing your eyes before you see where the ball is headed, and then being told, months later, somewhere else, where the ball went. So of course we’re bad at privacy: almost all our privacy disclosures do no harm, and some of them cause grotesque harm, but when this happens, it happens so far away from the disclosure that we can’t learn from it.

You should care about privacy because privacy isn’t secrecy. I know what you do in the toilet, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to close the door when you go in the stall.

You should care about privacy because if the data says you’ve done something wrong, then the person reading the data will interpret everything else you do through that light. Naked Citizens, a short, free documentary, documents several horrifying cases of police being told by computers that someone might be up to something suspicious, and thereafter interpreting everything they learn about that suspect as evidence of wrongdoing. For example, when a computer programmer named David Mery entered a tube station wearing a jacket in warm weather, an algorithm monitoring the CCTV brought him to the attention of a human operator as someone suspicious. When Mery let a train go by without boarding, the operator decided it was alarming behaviour. The police arrested him, searched him, asked him to explain every scrap of paper in his flat. A doodle consisting of random scribbles was characterised as a map of the tube station. Though he was never convicted of a crime, Mery is still on file as a potential terrorist eight years later, and can’t get a visa to travel abroad. Once a computer ascribes suspiciousness to someone, everything else in that person’s life becomes sinister and inexplicable.

Hiding your data in plain sight

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Ronald Bailey gathers up some resources you might want to investigate if you’d prefer not to have the NSA or other government agencies watching your online activities:

First, consider not putting so much stuff out there in the first place. Wuergler devised a program he calls Stalker that can siphon off nearly all of your digital information to put together an amazingly complete portrait of your life and pretty much find out where you are at all times. Use Facebook if you must, but realize you’re making it easy for the government to track and find you when they choose to do so.

A second step toward increased privacy is to use a browser like DuckDuckGo, which does not collect the sort of information — say, your IP address — that can identify you with your Internet searches. Thus, if the government bangs on their doors to find out what you’ve been up to, DuckDuckGo has nothing to hand over. I have decided to make DuckDuckGo my default for general browsing, turning to Google only for items such as breaking news and scholarly articles. (Presumably, the NSA would be able to tap into my searches on DuckDuckGo in real time.)

Third, TOR offers free software and a network of relays that can shield your location from prying eyes. TOR operates by bouncing your emails and files around the Internet through encrypted relays. Anyone intercepting your message once it exits a TOR relay cannot trace it back to your computer and your physical location. TOR is used by dissidents and journalists around the world. On the downside, in my experience it operates more slowly than, say, Google.

Fourth, there is encryption. An intriguing one-stop encryption solution is Silent Circle. Developed by Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption system, Silent Circle enables users to encrypt their text messages, video, and phone calls, as well as their emails. Zimmerman and his colleagues claim that they, or anyone else, cannot decrypt our messages across their network, period. As Wuergler warned, this security doesn’t come free. Silent Circle charges $10 per month for its encryption services.

However, your mobile phone is a beacon that can’t be easily masked or hidden:

Now for some bad news. Telephone metadata of the sort the NSA acquired from Verizon is hard — read: impossible — to hide. As the ACLU’s Soghoian notes, you can’t violate the laws of physics: In order to connect your mobile phone, the phone company necessarily needs to know where you are located. Of course, you can avoid being tracked through your cell phone by removing its batteries (unless you have an iPhone), but once you slot it back in, there you are.

For lots more information on how to you might be able to baffle government monitoring agencies, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense Web pages.

June 14, 2013

Reason.tv – Tap It: The NSA Slow Jam

Filed under: Government, Humour, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:07

June 11, 2013

“Who hired this goofball?”

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Jim Geraghty talks about Edward Snowden and the NSA:

Everybody’s going to have an opinion on Edward Snowden, today the world’s most famous leaker.

In the coming days, you’re going to see a lot of people talking past each other, conflating two issues: one, did he do the right thing by disclosing all these details of the vast NSA system to gather data on Americans? And two, should he be prosecuted for it?

Of course, you can do the right thing and still break the law.

[. . .]

This may be a story with no heroes. A government system designed to protect the citizens starts collecting all kinds of information on people who have done nothing wrong; it gets exposed, in violation of oaths and laws, by a young man who doesn’t recognize the full ramifications of his actions. The same government that will insist he’s the villain will glide right past the question of how they came to trust a guy like him with our most sensitive secrets. Who within our national security apparatus made the epic mistake of looking him over — completing his background check and/or psychological evaluation — and concluding, “yup, looks like a nice kid?”

Watching the interview with Snowden, the first thing that is quite clear is that his mild-mannered demeanor inadequately masks a huge ego — one of the big motivations of spies. (Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego; others throw in nationalism and sex.)

Snowden feels he has an understanding of what’s going on well beyond most of his colleagues:

    When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.

What’s more, he feels that no one listens to his concerns or takes them seriously:

    And when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about. And the more you talk about the more you’re ignored. The more you’re told its not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.”

My God, he must have been an insufferable co-worker.

    ‘Look, you guys just don’t understand, okay? You just can’t grasp the moral complexities of what I’m being asked to do here! Nobody here really gets what’s going on, or can see the big picture when you ask me to do something like that!’

    ‘Ed, I just asked if you could put a new bottle on the water cooler when you get a chance.’

Update: Politico put together a fact sheet on what we know about Edward Snowden. It’s best summed up by Iowahawk:

Federal government denies collecting electronic data on Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Oh, well, if the government denies doing something I guess they pretty much have to be telling the truth, right? Unfortunately, the photo accompanying this Toronto Star article doesn’t show if Peter MacKay is crossing the fingers on his left hand:

The Conservative government flatly denies Canadian spy agencies are conducting any unauthorized electronic snooping operations.

After facing questions from the NDP Opposition about how far he has authorized Ottawa’s top secret eavesdropping spy agency to go, a terse Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay left the Commons, telling the Star: “We don’t target Canadians, okay.”

A former Liberal solicitor general says that doesn’t mean other allied spy agencies don’t collect information on Canadians and share it with the Canadian spying establishment.

Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who was minister responsible for the spy agency CSIS in 2002-03, told the Star that in the post-9/11 era a decade ago it was common for Canada’s allies to pass on information about Canadians that they were authorized to gather but Ottawa wasn’t.

The practice was, in effect, a back-door way for sensitive national security information to be shared, not with the government, but Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and, if necessary, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

CSEC is a new bit of alphabet soup in the public sphere … I’d never heard of the organization until yesterday. Tonda MacCharles explains what the agency is empowered to do:

The CSEC, an agency that is rarely in the public eye, has far-reaching national security powers to monitor and map electronic communication signals around the globe.

It is forbidden by law to target or direct its spying on Canadians regardless of their location anywhere in the world, or at any person in Canada regardless of their nationality.

The National Defence Act says CSE may, however, unintentionally intercept Canadians’ communications, but must protect their privacy in the use and retention of such “intercepted information.” The agency’s “use” of the information is also restricted to cases where it is “essential to international affairs, defence or security.”

CSEC’s job is to aid federal law enforcement and security agencies, including the military, in highly sensitive operations. It was a key component of Canadian operations in Afghanistan, for example.

June 10, 2013

No surprise here – there’s also a maple-flavoured PRISM

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

In the Globe and Mail, Colin Freeze covers the Canadian data collection program that was approved by the Martin government in 2005 and “renewed” by the Harper government in 2011:

Defence Minister Peter MacKay approved a secret electronic eavesdropping program that scours global telephone records and Internet data trails — including those of Canadians — for patterns of suspicious activity.

Mr. MacKay signed a ministerial directive formally renewing the government’s “metadata” surveillance program on Nov. 21, 2011, according to records obtained by The Globe and Mail. The program had been placed on a lengthy hiatus, according to the documents, after a federal watchdog agency raised concerns that it could lead to warrantless surveillance of Canadians.

There is little public information about the program, which is the subject of Access to Information requests that have returned hundreds of pages of records, with many passages blacked out on grounds of national security.

It was first explicitly approved in a secret decree signed in 2005 by Bill Graham, defence minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

It is illegal for most Western espionage agencies to spy on their citizens without judicial authorization. But rising fears about foreign terrorist networks, coupled with the explosion of digital communications, have shifted the mandates of secretive electronic-eavesdropping agencies that were created by military bureaucracies to spy on Soviet states during the Cold War.

The Canadian surveillance program is operated by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), an arm of the Department of National Defence.

Daniel Ellsberg on rolling back an “executive coup” against the US constitution

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

In the Guardian, Daniel Ellsberg explains why the Snowden leak is so important:

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material — and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa — but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: “It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp.”

For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense — as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time — as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads — they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.

The fact that congressional leaders were “briefed” on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country.

Edward Snowden is “one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

The identity of the NSA whistleblower is revealed by the Guardian:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations — the NSA.

[. . .]

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me.”

Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added: “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

June 9, 2013

Original author of the Patriot Act decries its current abuse

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

In the Guardian, Jim Sensenbrenner demands to see the current misuse of the Patriot Act brought to an end:

Last week, the Guardian reported that the Obama administration is collecting records of every call made to, from or within the US, as well as records of many digital communications. President Obama has tried to deflect criticism by claiming “every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.” While some members of Congress were briefed — particularly those on the intelligence committees — most, including myself, were not.

The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law.

I was the chairman of the House judiciary committee when the US was attacked on 11 September 2001. Five days later, the Justice Department delivered its proposal for new legislation. Although I, along with every other American, knew we had to strengthen our ability to combat those targeting our country, this version went too far. I believed then and now that we can defend our country and our liberty at the same time.

[. . .]

In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as “two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress”. But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting.

To obtain a business records order like the one the administration obtained, the Patriot Act requires the government to prove to a special federal court, known as a Fisa court, that it is complying with specific guidelines set by the attorney general and that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation. Intentionally targeting US citizens is prohibited.

Technically, the administration’s actions were lawful insofar as they were done pursuant to an order from the Fisa court. But based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the Fisa court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended.

June 8, 2013

Don’t put too much faith in denials from Verizon and other companies…

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

As Mic Wright points out, the companies named in the Prism leaks may not be acting as free agents:

Pastor Niemoller’s “First they came…” poem is over-quoted but with good reason. It is far too easy to be complacent. Addicted and reliant as many of us are on free web services, it’s more convenient to just accept the companies outright denials that they have been complicit with the NSA’s programme. But look closely at those statements and things become rather less clear, as Michael Arrington pointed out.

The tech industry’s denials have been carefully drafted and similarly worded. It is not unfeasible to imagine that those companies have turned over users’ personal information to the NSA in another fashion. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement was one of the strongest: “Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information…”

Zuckerberg’s words are reassuring until you consider that any company that receives an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act — the legislation the Obama administration is using to justify the broad surveillance — is forbidden from disclosing they have received it or disclosing any information about it. It’s not surprising that no mea culpas have emerged from major tech firms or that Palantir — the big data surveillance company with the $5 billion valuation and CIA funding — denies any connection with the project. The NSA has been a Palantir client and one of the company’s co-founders, billionaire investor Peter Thiel, also sits on Facebook’s board.

Feingold was right, back in 2001

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Former US senator Russ Feingold was the only member of the senate to vote against the original Patriot Act:

He took a stand against the legislation because it increased the federal government’s authority exponentially and didn’t require enough judicial oversight.

Now here we are more than a decade later and it has been revealed that the U.S. government has been collecting massive amounts of data on millions of Americans every single day, using provisions found in the Patriot Act as justification.

Through the secret “PRISM” surveillance program and court orders compelling at least Verizon to provide records on all its customers, the FBI and NSA have enjoyed access to unthinkable amounts of Americans’ data, all without ever informing the public of alarming domestic surveillance.

In his address on the Senate floor in 2001, Former Sen. Feingold seemingly warned the U.S. about the exact thing so many Americans are outraged over today.

[. . .]

“In 2001, I first voted against the PATRIOT Act because much of it was simply an FBI wish list that included provisions allowing our government to go on fishing expeditions that collect information on virtually anyone,” the statement read. “Today’s report indicates that the government could be using FISA in an indiscriminate way that does not balance our legitimate concerns of national security with the necessity to preserve our fundamental civil rights.”

“This is deeply troubling. I hope today’s news will renew a serious conversation about how to protect the country while ensuring that the rights of law-abiding Americans are not violated,” he added.

June 7, 2013

Who is Glenn Greenwald?

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

The New York Times profiles Glenn Greenwald:

After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers.

On Thursday night, he followed up with an article written with a Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, that exposed an N.S.A. program, Prism, that has gathered information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years.

“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”

May 31, 2013

Everyone is watching – the rise of “Little Brother”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

In The New Yorker, Maria Bustillos talks about the ubiquity of non-government surveillance:

… the same technological advances that have empowered the rise of Big Brother have created another wrinkle in the story. We might call it the emergence of Little Brother: the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import, and to share the results with the rest of us. This has become immeasurably easier and more likely with the near-ubiquitous proliferation of high-quality recording devices. (As I learned after publishing this, the term had been coined earlier, and Cory Doctorow used it in 2007 for his book of the same name.)

The era of Little Brother was perhaps inaugurated in November, 1963, with the Kodachrome II 8-mm. film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination inadvertently captured by the Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. George Holliday’s videotape of the March, 1991, beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, and Scott Prouty’s forty-seven-per-cent video, which arguably cost Mitt Romney the Presidency last year, fall into the same class.

There is a surprisingly rich and dynamic academic literature developing around the concept of “sousveillance,” a term coined by the University of Toronto professor and inventor Steve Mann to describe privately made recordings that can serve as a counterweight to institutional and government surveillance. Mann is famous for approaching these questions from the perspective of wearable computing, a field in which he is one of the earliest pioneers; his apparent eccentricity is belied by the gravity and lucidity of his writing, which is heavily influenced by Foucault’s views on panopticism:

    One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and acquiescence to it is to resituate these technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority. We call this inverse panopticon “sousveillance” from the French words for “sous” (below) and “veiller” to watch.

    Sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism,” a term invented by Mann (1998) for a philosophy and procedures of using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations. Reflectionism holds up the mirror and asks the question: “Do you like what you see?” If you do not, then you will know that other approaches by which we integrate society and technology must be considered.

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

May 1, 2013

Google Glass may not be evil, but it will enable lots of less-than-ethical activities

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Jason Perlow on the current capabilities of Google Glass and the easy to envision upgrades that will soon be possible:

Because Glass is an Android device, runs an ARM-based Linux kernel, and can run Android user space programs and custom libraries, any savvy developer can create code that modifies the default behavior in such a way that recording can occur with no display activity showing in the eye prism whatsoever.

And while the default video recording is 10 seconds, code could also be written that begins and stops recording for as long as needed with a custom gesture or head movement, or even innocuous custom voice commands like: “Boy, I’m tired” to begin, and “Boy, I need coffee” to end it.

You could write and side load an application that polls the camera and takes a still photo every 30 seconds, should you say … want to “case” and thoroughly photodocument a place of business prior to committing a crime, or even engage in corporate espionage. Or simply capture ambient audio from unsuspecting people around you.

[. . .]

Once you have root on a Glass headset, any number of custom software packages could be installed without Google being able to prevent one from doing things that would make your hair stand on end, such as on-the-fly image and audio processing.

This is the kind of stuff that until now, only major intelligence agencies could do with very expensive surveillance equipment. Just wait until Israeli and Eastern European startups, which are staffed with former intelligence personnel who have a huge wealth of knowledge in using this kind of technology, get a hold of this thing.

April 18, 2013

Neologism of the week: “Glassholes”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

Jason Perlow explains why Google Glass (or similar devices from other vendors) are inevitably going to be part of the future, and why many already refer to the users of such devices as “Glassholes”:

It could certainly be argued that whenever a new consumer technology enters society, those who are quick to adopt it are typically ridiculed by the have-nots. Eventually, many of these technologies become commonplace and are more accepted by the mainstream, particularly when they become more affordable.

This has pretty much always been the case, starting with the radio pager, then the cellular phone, text capable handsets, and then, of course, Bluetooth headsets, the smartphone and the tablet.

People who first used these things were once seen very much as elitist and not part of the mainstream, and they were considered disruptive.

To some extent, even with their popularity, they are still considered disruptive when used in various social contexts.

[. . .]

With Glass, because the device is being worn and there’s no indication of when it is being used, one has to assume that the wearer is recording everyone all of the time.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have serious issues with the notion that I could be recorded by everyone at any time.

Look, I am aware that law enforcement and government agencies have us under surveillance, and it’s not uncommon for people to be photographed and videoed hundreds of times per day, particularly if you live in a major city.

The growth of public surveillance has all kinds of civil liberties concerns, but it’s a done deal … you probably can’t avoid being recorded many times per day unless you stay at home with the blinds down (and turn off your cell phone, and avoid the internet, and …). The social and cultural issues around private surveillance will provide some fascinating legal wrangles in the very near future: where does my right to record (“lifelog”) all of my activities conflict with your right not to be so recorded? Will the concept of privacy be one of the first things jettisoned over the side?

Governments and law enforcement agencies will want maximum opportunity to use their surveillance tools — both for specific investigations and for general purpose Big Brothering — and if that means abandoning any pretense of protecting your privacy against invasion by non-government agencies, they’ll take it. They’re already 9/10ths of the way there as it is.

There are things you only say and do with close friends in confidence, others which may be revealed in private business meetings, et cetera. We all know and have seen what happens when supposedly “private” or unauthorized recordings are made behind closed doors and then leaked to the general public, either intentionally or accidentally.

It can cost someone their career. It can destroy one’s personal reputation. It will most certainly cause one strife with one’s friends and family. And as we have most recently seen, it can also cost you a Presidential Election.

He also discusses the possibility of social and technical controls to provide anti-lifelogging zones, which I strongly suspect will be simultaneously introduced almost immediately when Google Glass or similar technology is released to the public, and almost certainly more of a hassle for non-users of the technology for little or no actual benefit. It will be the usual politician’s syllogism: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.” As for the technical side, there is almost nothing more tempting to a certain kind of hacker than the technical equivalent of a “Do not touch” sign.

Obviously, for this type of anti-lifelogging tech to work, there has to be an agreed upon API or programmatic trigger signals that cannot easily be defeated by hackers.

But if it cannot be made to work, or if the effectiveness of the tech cannot be guaranteed, then I forsee situations where people will be forced to remove and surrender their devices in order to prevent the possibility of recording, as well as a change in our culture to be much more careful about what one says, even in very intimate situations.

And that is an Orwellian chilling effect that I think could be very harmful to the development of our society as a whole.

This chilling effect was evident in decades past in East Germany while the country was in fear of the ever-watching eyes and ears of the Stasi, which had perhaps the largest informant and surveillance network of any nation per capita in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, the USSR included.

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