Essays in the Category "Privacy and Surveillance"
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The Value of Encryption
In today’s world of ubiquitous computers and networks, it’s hard to overstate the value of encryption. Quite simply, encryption keeps you safe. Encryption protects your financial details and passwords when you bank online. It protects your cell phone conversations from eavesdroppers. If you encrypt your laptop—and I hope you do—it protects your data if your computer is stolen. It protects your money and your privacy.
Encryption protects the identity of dissidents all over the world. It’s a vital tool to allow journalists to communicate securely with their sources, NGOs to protect their work in repressive countries, and attorneys to communicate privately with their clients…
Cryptography Is Harder Than It Looks
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Writing a magazine column is always an exercise in time travel. I’m writing these words in early December. You’re reading them in February. This means anything that’s news as I write this will be old hat in two months, and anything that’s news to you hasn’t happened yet as I’m writing.
This past November, a group of researchers found some serious vulnerabilities in an encryption protocol that I, and probably most of you, use regularly. The group alerted the vendor, who is currently working to update the protocol and patch the vulnerabilities. The news will probably go public in the middle of February, unless the vendor successfully pleads for more time to finish their security patch. Until then, I’ve agreed not to talk about the specifics…
Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out?
Thefts of personal information aren’t unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it’s information that’s needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS.
Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or coercion, as in the 2015 cases of Ashley Madison and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The latter exposed highly sensitive personal data that affects security of millions of government employees, probably to the Chinese. Always it’s personal information about us, information that we shared with the expectation that the recipients would keep it secret. And in every case, they did not…
Why You Should Side With Apple, Not the FBI, in the San Bernardino iPhone Case
Either everyone gets security, or no one does.
Earlier this week, a federal magistrate ordered Apple to assist the FBI in hacking into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple will fight this order in court.
The policy implications are complicated. The FBI wants to set a precedent that tech companies will assist law enforcement in breaking their users’ security, and the technology community is afraid that the precedent will limit what sorts of security features it can offer customers. The FBI sees this as a privacy vs. security debate, while the tech community sees it as a security vs. surveillance debate…
Candidates Won't Hesitate to Use Manipulative Advertising to Score Votes
Advertising in the 2016 election is going to be highly personalized, targeting voters’ personal information to sway their decisions
This presidential election, prepare to be manipulated.
In politics, as in the marketplace, you are the consumer. But you only have one vote to “spend” per election, and in November you’ll almost always only have two possible candidates on which to spend it.
In every election, both of those candidates are going to pull every trick in the surveillance-driven, highly personalized internet advertising world to get you to vote for them. Or, if they think you’ll vote for the other candidate, to stay home and not vote.
In 2012, Barack Obama deftly used both social media and his own database of supporters to outmaneuver Mitt Romney, …
Security vs. Surveillance
Both the “going dark” metaphor of FBI Director James Comey and the contrasting “golden age of surveillance” metaphor of privacy law professor Peter Swire focus on the value of data to law enforcement. As framed in the media, encryption debates are about whether law enforcement should have surreptitious access to data, or whether companies should be allowed to provide strong encryption to their customers.
It’s a myopic framing that focuses only on one threat—criminals, including domestic terrorists—and the demands of law enforcement and national intelligence. This obscures the most important aspects of the encryption issue: the security it provides against a much wider variety of threats…
How an Overreaction to Terrorism Can Hurt Cybersecurity
Many technological security failures of today can be traced to failures of encryption. In 2014 and 2015, unnamed hackers—probably the Chinese government—stole 21.5 million personal files of U.S. government employees and others. They wouldn’t have obtained this data if it had been encrypted.
Many large-scale criminal data thefts were made either easier or more damaging because data wasn’t encrypted: Target, T.J. Maxx, Heartland Payment Systems, and so on. Many countries are eavesdropping on the unencrypted communications of their own citizens, looking for dissidents and other voices they want to silence…
The Internet of Things That Talk About You Behind Your Back
SilverPush is an Indian startup that’s trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones picks up the signals, and then use scookies to transmit that information back to SilverPush. The result is that the company can track you across your different devices. It can correlate the television commercials you watch with the web searches you make. It can link the things you do on your tablet with the things you do on your work computer…
The Risks—and Benefits—of Letting Algorithms Judge Us
China is considering a new “social credit” system, designed to rate everyone’s trustworthiness. Many fear that it will become a tool of social control—but in reality it has a lot in common with the algorithms and systems that score and classify us all every day.
Human judgment is being replaced by automatic algorithms, and that brings with it both enormous benefits and risks. The technology is enabling a new form of social control, sometimes deliberately and sometimes as a side effect. And as the Internet of Things ushers in an era of more sensors and more data—and more algorithms—we need to ensure that we reap the benefits while avoiding the harms…
The Era Of Automatic Facial Recognition And Surveillance Is Here
ID checks were a common response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but they’ll soon be obsolete. You won’t have to show your ID, because you’ll be identified automatically. A security camera will capture your face, and it’ll be matched with your name and a whole lot of other information besides. Welcome to the world of automatic facial recognition. Those who have access to databases of identified photos will have the power to identify us. Yes, it’ll enable some amazing personalized services; but it’ll also enable whole new levels of surveillance. The underlying technologies are being developed today, and there are currently no rules limiting their use…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.