Privacy in the 21st century

[Michael Hardner]

his point is quite valid. Why not give me the password to your email account and let me read it. How about letting me read your PMs here?

Because it's none of your business what's in my email account, and because - since I don't see any value in sharing that with you - I don't want to do it.

[cybercoma]

But it's ok for the NSA to do it?

[Michael Hardner]

But it's ok for the NSA to do it?

What do you mean by 'ok' ? Are you talking about morality now, whereas before you were asking for me to give you access to my account - which I would do based on the value of doing that ?

I have no moral problem with my government having the right to scan my or others' emails, to read them if they find something that raises security concerns. I see value in having them do it, and I'm certainly not outraged by it.

[cybercoma]

But you're outraged at the suggestion that I be able to read your emails? Interesting.

[Michael Hardner]

But you're outraged at the suggestion that I be able to read your emails? Interesting.

I'm not outraged at the suggestion.

[dre]

to read them if they find something that raises security concerns

EVERYBODY agrees with this so Im not sure why you keep repeating it. They should be able to get a warrant and read your email, or open your mail, or tap your phone, or search your house for that matter. Its dishonest for you to keep framing the argument this way.

The problem is you seem to want to take things a lot further. In the first thread where you and I argued about this, you suggested the government being able to mine the entire corpus of data for certain keywords. This is the kind of thing that scares me, not that the government can get a warrant to read my email.

And thats exactly what the government tried to sneak into place with the Internet Surveillance Act. This would lead to massively expensive and intrusive industrial scale surveillance, required huge data centers, etc. And its a guaranteed fact that it would be misused. Once they had this shiny expensive powerful new toy, It would used not just for national security threats. It would be used to spy on political organizations, political dissidents environmental organizations, political parties, people in legal battles with the government (and their lawyers). It would be used to find tax cheaters, grow ops, and everything else you can think of.

Not to mention the fact that the government is REALLY BAD at IT, and they leak data like a sieve. All this private data could easily end up on wiki leaks or anywhere else.

But the most important thing is that the population would not be able to communicate in a setting they felt was free of government surveillance, and this would do irreparable damage to our political system and our democracy. The ability to assemble and communicate free of government monitoring is one of the most important foundations of our entire society, and people had to fight since the magna carte to position themselves as the masters and the government as the servant.

I might be unfairly characterizing your position here... You didnt mention the radical data mining/wharehousing industrial scale surveillance ideas in this thread. Maybe that was just something you flirted with in our first conversation, and now we agree on stuff?

I see value in having them do it, and I'm certainly not outraged by it.

To know that theres "value" in something you need to look at both sides the balance sheet. You havent done this... you have no idea what this will cost in terms of both money but damage to our political system, and the trust that exists between people and government, and you have no idea if there really is a security threat that justifies any of it.

Its not about you being "outraged". Its about your apparent support for objectively and measurably bad and impractical and expensive and dangerous ideas, in response to a "feeling of insecurity" that is not supported by any numbers, evidence, or data.

Edited December 16, 2013 by dre

[Michael Hardner]

EVERYBODY agrees with this so Im not sure why you keep repeating it. They should be able to get a warrant and read your email, or open your mail, or tap your phone, or search your house for that matter. Its dishonest for you to keep framing the argument this way.

Here's my full quote:

"I have no moral problem with my government having the right to scan my or others' emails, to read them if they find something that raises security concerns."

In the first thread where you and I argued about this, you suggested the government being able to mine the entire corpus of data for certain keywords. This is the kind of thing that scares me, not that the government can get a warrant to read my email.

I said 'scan or others' emails' ...

But the most important thing is that the population would not be able to communicate in a setting they felt was free of government surveillance, and this would do irreparable damage to our political system and our democracy.

There are other ways to communicate, though.

I might be unfairly characterizing your position here... You didnt mention the radical data mining/wharehousing industrial scale surveillance ideas in this thread. Maybe that was just something you flirted with in our first conversation, and now we agree on stuff?

No, I think we discussed it in the other thread. People were claiming that you "had to have the data" in order to scan it or somesuch, and argued that I didn't understand the technology... until I explained how it would work. This is a potential solution, if people are are uncomfortable with giving the data to the government, in its entirety.

I acknowledge that there is potential for abuse, but I think it would be advantageous for national security to have access to this.

As I said to GH, politics will decide how this plays out I think.

you have no idea what this will cost in terms of both money but damage to our political system,

and the trust that exists between people and government, and you have no idea if there really is a security threat that justifies any of it.

I think it's overstating it to say we have 'no' idea. You have an idea, and I have an idea - but we don't know for sure.

[dre]

Michael, why do you hate my freedom?

Haha just kidding man

There are other ways to communicate, though.

Sure but the easy exchange of information is the entire reason the internet was built? Why should we have to use "other ways", and if its necessary to monitor private communication for national security, then why not do it with these "other ways" as well.

People were claiming that you "had to have the data" in order to scan

You DO. Try "scanning" the document sitting on the corner of my desk. Let me know how it goes! And if you are suggesting that some other third party does the scanning and just builds the indexes for the government to search, this does nothing alleviate any privacy concerns. We already know that telecoms and private companies have done exactly what the government asked. \

And the problem is that ANY keyword you type into a search is going to return millions of results, and someone will have to analyze all the data to see which ones are real threats.

So yeah... You really have to have the data. End of storry.

I think it would be advantageous for national security to have access to this.

It would be! Its EASY to make an argument from utility that stripping people of their liberty would be convenient for government and law enforcement. And the data wouldnt be advantageous only for national security matters! It would be an AWSOME tool for garden variety domestic criminal matters as well, and keeping an eye on political opponents or people that are at odds with the government about anything.

If you think this apparatus would only be used for national security you are absolutely kidding yourself. In fact the reason the government gave trying to snake in the exact scheme you are proposing in C30 was online predators and child pornography.

Once it exists it will be used across the board for everything its usefull for. The surveillance state has been an authoritarian wet dream for centuries. There is literally no end to its utility.

And we are the most secure we ever have been in history already... What on earth justifies giving the government radical new powers, and letting them spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars an an industrial scale surveillance apparatus? And thats the other thing you drastically underestimate... the cost. The government spent a hundred billion dollars creating a database with a paltry 50 million long guns in it. The cost of warehousing petabytes or exabytes of data, and building an almost "google scale" search system around it will be astronomical. And the ammount electronic communications is RAPIDLY growing, and the cost of such a system will have to keep growing with it.

This is EXACTLY what I do for a living. I unpack, and content extract email and its attachments, and put all the data into searchable databases, and I write software to search it in various different ways. The cost of doing this in the private sector is AT LEAST 30 dollars per gig with some vendors charging up to 200. You do the math on what an exobyte might cost.

You honestly think Canadians will be better off spending billions of dollars on this instead of healthcare, or infrastructure?

Impractical.

Dangerous.

No necessary (according to more than 70% of Canadians)

Edited December 16, 2013 by dre

[dre]

Putting the argument aside for a second, just for interest...

If you WERE going to build such a system you would never use a boolean search technology like Google. You would need many thousands of human reviewers to comb through search results and find real hits.

You would use machine learning document classification technologies, which is what Iv spend the last few years working on. Humans train the system by providing exemplar documents, and then algorithms like SVM (single vector machine), or bayesian inference (naive bayes, or multinomial bayes), or latent symantic indexing or ridge regression, or decision forests, or TF-IDF (term frequence inverse document frequence) can be used both for classification and regression against a very large corpus, very quickly and with much more accurate results than having an army of humans running boolean searches then combing through the results.

Basically you give the system a smaller corpus of "documents of interest" and then it will assign a value for the likelyhood of all the documents in the much larger corpus as being "documents of interest".

Read about some of the classification technologies above... Information theory is really interesting stuff.

Its not something the government should be using on private speech though unless except for maybe in north korea or some other authoritarian state.

[dre]

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/16/justice/nsa-surveillance-court-ruling/index.html

A federal US court has ruled the governments collecting of telephone call metadata unconstitutional.

"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," said the judge, an appointee of President George W. Bush.

[bush_cheney2004]

No problem.....Canada or the U.K. can collect the telephone metadata instead.

[Michael Hardner]

You DO. Try "scanning" the document sitting on the corner of my desk. Let me know how it goes!

I think we're at the end of the discussion here - but to explain this (or re-explain as we went through it last time):

I get a court order indicating that you have to scan the document and give me the result. Therefore I can say that I don't "have" the data. It's more of a legal question than a technical one, you see.

[bush_cheney2004]

I get a court order indicating that you have to scan the document and give me the result. Therefore I can say that I don't "have" the data. It's more of a legal question than a technical one, you see.

It's not even that complicated.....anybody who thinks that the "spying" will stop and believes intel gathering will cease because of a "court order" is hopelessly naive, just like they were in the first place. Evidence stemming from such taps may not be admissible in court, but the data will still be quite useful. Keep using those "free" American web applications...LOL!

[dre]

I think we're at the end of the discussion here - but to explain this (or re-explain as we went through it last time):

I get a court order indicating that you have to scan the document and give me the result. Therefore I can say that I don't "have" the data. It's more of a legal question than a technical one, you see.

Yes you do. You have a inverted index that has every token in the corpus, and the byte offsets and document identifier of each one. If you dont have that you cant even search. But if you need to get a court order forcing me to turn over my document, then I dont even know what the hell we are arguing about, because thats totally fine with me... unless of course you proposing a single court order that would let the government access the private information of 30 million people without further judicial oversight. Then clearly thats unreasonable and unconstitutional.

I think we're at the end of the discussion here

Only if you want it to be. You seem to keep saying that, but then you keep posting. And you addressed very few of the issues I raised about the cost of such a system, and the fact it would cost billions of dollars per year, and the fact that the universe of data is rapidly expanding, and the fact that you would have to ammend the constitution to allow for the kind of broad untargeted siezure of information you seem to be proposing. And you have not addressed the fact that such a system would not only be used for national security either. It would be used for everything.

If you dont have enough interest in this issue to move beyond the very cursory look at it that youve taken so far, then you can just stop posting.

Edited December 16, 2013 by dre

[Michael Hardner]

Yes you do. You have a inverted index that has every token in the corpus, and the byte offsets and document identifier of each one. If you dont have that you cant even search.

I didn't search. YOU didn't hand it over, you just did the scan.

If you dont have enough interest in this issue to move beyond the very cursory look at it that youve taken so far, then you can just stop posting.

I have actually spent hours discussing this online, which is likely more than most people have - and likely more than I should be expected to look into any one issue as a citizen.

I don't need to learn about database design, or indexing to make up my mind, but merely to listen to some experts and make a best guess as to the costs and benefits as I see them. There is no correct answer to a lot of questions, so we have politics to discuss them.

[dre]

I didn't search. YOU didn't hand it over, you just did the scan.

The scan IS the data. If I dont hand it over to anyone then its all still safe on my desk. I you can search it then its absolutely useless to you.

If you want to flesh out that idea more, then youre going to have to be more specific. And if you want to comply with the constitution, you are going to need a court order for every persons data that is siezed. So your proposal actually does nothing usefull at all since the government can already get a court order to smash down my door and come and TAKE this document from my desk.

[dre]

It's not even that complicated.....anybody who thinks that the "spying" will stop and believes intel gathering will cease because of a "court order" is hopelessly naive, just like they were in the first place. Evidence stemming from such taps may not be admissible in court, but the data will still be quite useful. Keep using those "free" American web applications...LOL!

Cool story bro. The problem is nobody is saying that intel gathering should stop. And your point about taps makes me think you dont even have a summary understanding of this issue.

This wasnt about taps. This was about the NSA using an potential unconstitutional FISA order to demand customer records from companies like Verizon, Apple, Microsoft, etc. And this ruling could restore the ability of such companies to keep their customers information confidential without a specific and individual court order.

[bush_cheney2004]

...This wasnt about taps. This was about the NSA using an potential unconstitutional FISA order to demand customer records from companies like Verizon, Apple, Microsoft, etc. And this ruling could restore the ability of such companies to keep their customers information confidential without a specific and individual court order.

They are still modern day "taps" broadened way beyond basic telecommunications. Keep fighting the good fight for American rights (from Canada), as it is fun drama and will make for great high tech theatre, but all the while spooks will keep doing what spooks do.

I say again...you have no privacy...and it's mostly of our own voluntary doing...get over it.

[Michael Hardner]

The scan IS the data. If I dont hand it over to anyone then its all still safe on my desk. I you can search it then its absolutely useless to you.

Example:

Source Data:

Record 1 - Michael Hardner - called from point A to point B

Record 2 - Dre Dre - called from point C to Point D

Record 3 - M G - called from point E to F

The phone company has all of these calls. I tell the record company to scan for any calls that called from point C or used the word 'terrorist'

The phone company runs the scan, then sends me the result - the two names that satisfy the search.

I now know who I'm after, and I don't have the data. For that matter, they could send me record 2 & 3 and I still wouldn't have THE data, just some data.

[bush_cheney2004]

....I now know who I'm after, and I don't have the data. For that matter, they could send me record 2 & 3 and I still wouldn't have THE data, just some data.

Nice work....we have a job for you at the NSA !

[dre]

Example:

Source Data:

Record 1 - Michael Hardner - called from point A to point B

Record 2 - Dre Dre - called from point C to Point D

Record 3 - M G - called from point E to F

The phone company has all of these calls. I tell the record company to scan for any calls that called from point C or used the word 'terrorist'

The phone company runs the scan, then sends me the result - the two names that satisfy the search.

I now know who I'm after, and I don't have the data. For that matter, they could send me record 2 & 3 and I still wouldn't have THE data, just some data.

1. If you have a reason to be suspicious of point C, then you can get a court order, and sieze all their communications. So your system is weaker for law enforcement that whats already in place.

2. The telecom has no self interest in doing so.

3. We already have the highest cell and internet prices in the world, have forcing the telecoms to warehouse all that data to be potentially turned over as the result of one of these searches would probably increase prices 5 fold, and damage the economy.

4. The phone company doesnt have any of those records.... so they cant turn over the content for record 2 and 3 anyways. Networks dont store all the information that goes across them, they simply transmitt it.

5. . It would jeapardize national security. Right now the government can get a lot of useful information from court ordered taps that saves peoples lives. But the only reason they can get it, is because a lot of people using the system assume that its private and they can speek freely. As soon as its a public fact that the government can data mine, no terrorist is going to use email or cell phones to plan an attack, and the government gets shut out all together.

If I know you can get at the document on the corner of my desk, and its a sensitive document, Im not going to put it there.

6. Theres nothing to justify this massive costly counterproductive system.

[Michael Hardner]

Anyway, I already explained that I didn't want to get back into this ...

But although you didn't acknowledge it, it seems that you get how you can get what you want without having the data.

[dre]

Anyway, I already explained that I didn't want to get back into this ...

But although you didn't acknowledge it, it seems that you get how you can get what you want without having the data.

No, to do the "terrorist" keyword search you need to have the data.

All you are doing is playing a shell game around who has the data and where. You scheme still requires massively expensive warehousing of data, and it still requires the broad untargeted siezure of it. You expect me to feel assured that its a third party that actually maintains the index and the warehouse, but the reality we know that the government has been able to easily get what it wants from such private entity.

Also you dont seem to grasp what a computer network does. It transmitts information it does not cache it or store it. Re-purposing our network to do that is an astronomically large and expensive task, and we already have some of the highest network prices in the world.

Anyway, I already explained that I didn't want to get back into this ...

Ok well thanks for taking the time to talk to me about this that you have. And if I keep hammering on you, you should really take it as a compliment. It means Im trying to appeal to your sense of rationality, and reasonability, and If im trying to do that it means I think those things exist.

This should be an easy argument for me to win on the merits... So if you stick around these threads, then Im gonna keep trying to chip away at you.

Edited December 17, 2013 by dre

[Bonam]

5. . It would jeapardize national security. Right now the government can get a lot of useful information from court ordered taps that saves peoples lives. But the only reason they can get it, is because a lot of people using the system assume that its private and they can speek freely. As soon as its a public fact that the government can data mine, no terrorist is going to use email or cell phones to plan an attack, and the government gets shut out all together.

If I know you can get at the document on the corner of my desk, and its a sensitive document, Im not going to put it there.

The damage is already fully done in this regard. Everyone who cares at all about it now knows that the US government has the will and the ability to collect and scan through all data sent through email, telephone, instant message, irc, social media, online games, forum PMs, etc. No court order or official policy declaration from a president could possibly change that now. You really think that a terrorist that heard about the NSA stuff and decided to no longer use these forms of communication would resume communicating through these media if Obama made a speech promising that such surveillance would not happen any more?

Nah, it's all over in that regard. And terrorist or not, there's already been a culture change, from assuming that online communications are private to realizing that they are all monitored by government. It's already engrained in the way of thinking of many people I know. People constantly joke about it, refer to it. People now recognize that they live in a surveillance state, and no one will buy it if politicians, who are known first and foremost for doing nothing but lying, promise otherwise.

There is no going back.

Edited December 17, 2013 by Bonam

[eyeball]

Apparently quite a number of people put a piece of tape on their built in webcams due to stories and alleged accounts of hackers spying on people. I imagine the paranoia factor will only be enhanced by the government's creeps.