Acidus:

Think of cookie storage like having to remember an errand to do after work by shouting it at the end of every sentence you say.

Matt Knox:

It's hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

Julia Angwin:

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.

Beacons can track what a user is doing on the page, including what is being typed or where the mouse is moving.

Eric Porres:

We can segment it all the way down to one person.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

David Moore:

When an ad is targeted properly, it ceases to be an ad.

Sean Cheyney:

We're driving people down different lanes of the highway.

The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

Caterina Fake:

It's an incredible amount of data.

Bruce Schneier:

More is coming.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

Decius:

We need to balance privacy interests with the state's interest in monitoring suspected criminals.

Cory Doctorow:

I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure.

Ryan Singel:

Google unveiled a Government Requests Tool that shows the public how often individual governments around the world have asked for user information, and how often they've asked Google to remove content from their sites or search index, for reasons other than copyright violation.

The numbers reflect only criminal investigations, and do not include national security investigation powers such as National Security Lettters or FISA warrants, which companies are often not legally allowed to disclose.

Matt Higgins:

The nice thing is, it's not a free for all. We're taking care of the problem responsibly. We're targeting the troublemakers, and we're hoping the troublemakers will be gone someday.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

Maybe You And Your Innocence Shouldn't Be Doing It In The First Place

Christopher Soghoian:

Over the last few years, consumers, corporations and governments have rushed to move their data to "the cloud," adopting web-based applications and storage solutions provided by companies that include Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Unfortunately the shift to cloud computing needlessly exposes users to privacy invasion and fraud by hackers. Cloud based services also leave end users vulnerable to significant invasions of privacy by the government, resulting in the evisceration of traditional Fourth Amendment protections of a person's private files and documents. These very real risks associated with the cloud computing model are not communicated to consumers, who are thus unable to make an informed decision when evaluating cloud based services.

This paper will argue that the increased risk that users face from hackers is primarily a result of cost-motivated design decisions on the part of the cloud providers, who have repeatedly opted to forgo strong security solutions already used in other Internet based industries.

With regard to the intrusion upon user privacy performed by government agencies, fault for this privacy harm does not lie with the service providers; but the inherently coercive powers the government can flex at will. The third party doctrine, which permits government agents to obtain users' private files from service providers with a mere subpoena, is frequently criticized by privacy scholars. However, this paper will argue that this doctrine becomes moot once encryption is in use and companies no longer have access to their customers' private data. The real threat to privacy lies with the fact that corporations can and have repeatedly been forced to modify their own products in ways that harm end user privacy, such as by circumventing encryption.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Caught in the Cloud: Privacy, Encryption, and Government Back Doors in the Web 2.0 Era

Garry Wills:

The momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed.

Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task. A new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry.

Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

Rebecca Solnit:

Some of the worst crimes in the American landscape are hiding in plain sight.

Jules Winnfield:

The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.

Thomas Powers, in May 2005:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Entangled Giant

Kevin Whitelaw:

Users have been flocking to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, where they voluntarily share all kinds of details about their lives.

Jonathan Franzen:

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives.

Matt Zimmerman:

Everyone, if they are posting information online, unless they are taking very specific technological measures to prevent disclosures, should assume that that information is going to be able to be obtained through the legal process.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Andrew Keen:

In the future, I think there will be pockets of outrageously irresponsible, anonymous people ... but for the most part, we will have cleansed ourselves of the anonymous.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

It's the collapse of inconvenience. It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it.

Gotcha! Why Online Anonymity May Be Fading

Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

It is a long way from putting clips on wires to having government standards for electronic eavesdropping. How did this come about? Does wiretapping actually make us more secure?

In 2007, Congress legalized warrantless wiretapping; in 2008, it went a long step further, not only legalizing new wiretapping practices but also giving retroactive immunity to telephone companies that had colluded with the government in performing warrantless electronic eavesdropping.

We are moving from a world with a billion people connected to the Internet to one in which 10 or 100 times that many devices will be connected as well. Particularly in aggregation, the information reported by these devices will blanket the world with a network whose gaze is difficult to evade.

The end of the rainbow would be the ability to store all traffic, then decide later which messages were worthy of further study.

Bellovin, Blaze, Diffie, Landau, Neumann, and Rexford:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

A.O. Scott:

"The Lives of Others" illuminates ... the moral no man's land where base impulses and high principles converge.

Anthony Lane:

You might think that "The Lives of Others" is aimed solely at modern Germans. A movie this strong, however, is never parochial, nor is it period drama. Es ist fuer uns. It's for us.

Louis Menand:

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people's lives. They enjoy it excessively. It's not one of the species' more attractive addictions ...

Communications Surveillance: Privacy and Security at Risk

Tom Malone, in November 2008:

Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.

Decius, in February 2009:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort. This is just another brick in the wall.

Now, Carrie Johnson and Ellen Nakashima:

In a letter, the Obama administration recommended that Congress move swiftly with legislation that would protect the government's ability to collect a variety of business and credit card records and to monitor terrorism suspects with roving wiretaps.

But Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich also told Democrats that the administration is "willing to consider" additional privacy safeguards advocated by lawmakers, so long as the provisions do not "undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities."

Several civil liberties groups are exhorting Congress to use the expiration to begin debate on an array of domestic surveillance issues. One priority is national security letters: no judge signs off on these, and recipients are usually barred from talking about the letters.

Durbin and Feingold want to tighten standards for obtaining national security letters so that the government must show some "nexus to terrorism," heightening the current standard of showing "relevance" to a counterterrorism investigation. The senators also want a judge to be able to review the appropriateness of the gag order on the letters' recipients.

Their new bill, expected to be out this week, will also seek to repeal the legal immunity granted to telecommunications companies included in last year's domestic surveillance legislation. The bill would also ensure that new powers granted under last year's law would not be used as a pretext to target the communications of Americans in the United States without a warrant.

Tune in:

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary will hold a hearing entitled "Reauthorizing the USA PATRIOT Act: Ensuring Liberty and Security" on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. in Room 226 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building.

Jello:

Not finding the exciting, entrepreneurial nexus of our dreams, we figured we'd start one of our own.

Thomas Powers, in May 2005:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

From the archive:

The phone is ringing! Answer it!

White House Seeks Renewal of Surveillance Laws, Perhaps With Tweaks

Katie Shilton:

Participatory sensing opens the door to entirely new forms of granular and pervasive data collection. The risks of this sort of data collection are not always self-evident. Even if we give people options for managing their data, they may not understand the benefits of doing so. Data literacy must be acquired over time through many avenues. Public discussion and debate about participatory sensing will be critical to educating participants about the risks and possibilities of sensing data.

Because time is such a critical factor, application interfaces should encourage participants to engage with the data from the point of collection through analysis, long-term retention, or deletion. Systems should enable continued engagement to allow participants to change their data practices as their context changes. The crux of engaging individuals with decisions about their data is refusing to put that data in a black box. Instead, analyzing, learning from the data, and making ongoing choices about the data become the goals of sensing.

Two from 1999:

Deployment of ubiquitous computing technology will increase rapidly over the next decade, reaching epic proportions and raising challenges in dealing with a deluge of sensor data and real-time context/metadata.

Thad Starner has suggested that a possible solution to these privacy problems is to make information collection systems wearable. If the user carries all of his computer and context tools on his person, he alone has the ability to decide who gets access to this information and who does not.

And where are we now?

The number one privacy risk associated with suspicionless Customs searches of laptops is the fact that Customs officers will view innocent people's personal information.

Bruce Sterling:

Poor folk love their cellphones!

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Decius, in August 2008:

Don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Noam Cohen's friend, in February 2009:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Decius, in March 2009:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Four Billion Little Brothers?

Skip Hollandsworth reports on how a pair of undercover cops infiltrated the secret world of Houston dogfighting.

"We just figured it was piddly shit, something for the local animal-control officers."

Then they started Googling.

"Nothing is slowing these guys down, absolutely nothing," the informant said. "They make Michael Vick look like a pussy."

Manning and Davis had seen their share of homicide victims and had been in a few bloody fights themselves, but they had never witnessed anything like this. They left as quickly as they could and drove to the nearest bar, dog blood still on their boots. "What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?" asked Manning.

"My dogs were great dogs. They were beautiful, strong dogs. Oh, man, they were beautiful."

(For the full article in four parts, see 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Robert McNamara:

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.

Michael Tomasello:

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals.

Bringing Down the Dogmen

James Risen:

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.

Thomas Powers, in May 2005:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

George Bush, in February 2008:

First of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

We're having a debate in America on whether or not we ought to be listening to terrorists making phone calls in the United States. And the answer is darn right we ought to be.

Decius, in February 2007:

It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.

Decius, in February 2009:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort.

Noam Cohen's friend, in February 2009:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Decius, in March 2009:

We are very close to the point where the 4th amendment will be an anachronism - a technicality that has very little impact on everyday life - and a radical reconsideration will be necessary in order to re-establish it.

Decius, in August 2008:

Don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Jello, in June 2009:

The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from.

Decius, in March 2009:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Rivest, Schneier, Bellovin, Applebaum, Cranor, Cheswick, Soghoian, Spafford, Lynn (!), Moss, Neumann, et al:

Dear Dr. Schmidt,

The signatories of this letter are researchers and academics in the fields of computer science, information security and privacy law. We write to you today to express our concern that many users of Google's cloud-based services are needlessly exposed to an array of privacy and security risks. We ask you to increase users' security and privacy protection by enabling by default transport-level encryption (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs and Calendar, a technology already enabled by default for Google Voice, Health, AdWords and AdSense.

As a market leader in providing cloud services, Google has an opportunity to engage in genuine privacy and security leadership, and to set a standard for the industry.

Extent of E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress