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Following up on an August op-ed by Susan Landau, Bellovin, Blaze, Diffie, Landau, Neumann, and Rexford have come together on an important paper:

The Protect America Act passed in August 2007 changes US law to allow warrantless foreign intelligence wiretapping from within the US of any communications believed to include one party located outside the United States. US systems for foreign intelligence surveillance located outside the United States minimize access to the traffic of US persons by virtue of their location. The new law does not—and could lead to surveillance on a unprecedented scale that will unavoidably pick up some purely domestic communications. The civil-liberties concern is whether the new law puts Americans at risk of spurious — and invasive — surveillance by their own government. The security concern is whether the new law puts Americans at risk of illegitimate surveillance by others.

We focus on security.

If the system is to work, it is important that the surveillance architecture not decrease the security of the US communications networks. The choice of architecture matters; minor changes can have significant effects, particularly with regard to limiting the scope of inadvertent interception. In attempting to collect communications with one end outside the United States, the new law allows the development of a system that will probably pick up many purely domestic communications.

How will the collection system determine that communications have one end outside the United States?

How will the surveillance be secured?

Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the “Protect America Act”

Surveillance & Society: the fully peer-reviewed transdisciplinary online surveillance studies journal.

This seems like an interesting publication, but: five years on ... why have I never heard of it? (Perhaps because it's mostly a UK publication, with one US-based editor, Torin Monahan, at Arizona State, where they have a School of Justice & Social Inquiry.) Although the description for his course opens with "How are surveillance technologies altering social life in post-9/11 worlds?", the syllabus spends a lot of time on Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. It also spends time on Paul Virilio, Steve Mann, RTMark, "Minority Report" and "Gattaca", but little of this is "post-9/11".

I am curious about how this journal fits into the literature. The editorial board is all academic; this sets it apart from, say, Studies in Intelligence, where authors tend to be practitioners/professionals (though not just of "surveillance").

I only recognize a few authors published here, like Steve Wright (2) and Steve Mann (2, 3).

To see whether this publication is getting cited elsewhere, I asked Google Scholar. Things are being cited (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, ... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Surveillance & Society Homepage

Susan Landau plants a flag now, so she can say "I told you so" in the years to come.

This change looks reasonable at first, but it could create huge long-term security risks for the United States.

Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations.

Such threats are not theoretical.

... In simplifying wiretapping for US intelligence, we provide a target for foreign intelligence agencies and possibly rogue hackers.

In its effort to provide policymakers with immediate intelligence, the NSA forgot the critical information security aspect of its mission.

You might consider this a follow-up to the article from Sunday.

A Gateway for Hackers | Susan Landau | Washington Post

The real issue is not privacy as such. It is how information about a person is used.

This new paper by Andrew Odlyzko goes well with Greg Conti's recent article, The Cost of Free Web Tools, from the May/June issue of IEEE Security & Privacy.

Abstract:

This note discusses briefly some questions on economics of privacy, especially the relation of privacy to price discrimination, as well as relevant developments in e-commerce and ordinary commerce. Various open questions that call for further research are discussed. In particular, while much interesting theoretical research has been done, and a small number of informative laboratory experiments have been carried out, much more work would be desirable, especially in some areas of behavioral economics, and there is a great unmet need for active monitoring of the marketplace.

Privacy and the Clandestine Evolution of E-commerce

Doubtlessly, modern technology has radically altered the surveillance process. What it has not done, however, is render physical pre-operational surveillance obsolete. Despite innovative Internet tools, a person sitting in an Internet cafe in Quetta, Pakistan, cannot get everything he or she needs to plan and execute a terrorist attack in New York. There are still many things that can only be seen in person, making eyes-on surveillance vital to pre-operational planning. And, as long as actual physical surveillance is required, countersurveillance will remain a key tool for proactively preventing terrorist attacks.

Surveillance in the Information Age

As you read this, remember:

American officials hope that Afghanistan’s drug problem will someday be only as bad as that of Colombia.

Now, about Mexico:

Mexican authorities for years have been able to wiretap most telephone conversations and tap into e-mail, but the new $3-million Communications Intercept System being installed by Mexico's Federal Investigative Agency will expand their reach.

The system will allow authorities to track cellphone users as they travel, according to contract specifications. It includes extensive storage capacity and will allow authorities to identify callers by voice. The system, scheduled to begin operation this month, was paid for by the US State Department and sold by Verint Systems Inc., a politically well-connected firm based in Melville, NY, that specializes in electronic surveillance.

Verint helps organizations make sense of the vast video, voice, and data they capture.

Witness Systems, a "call center" operator based in Roswell, has been bought by software maker Verint Systems.

"The purpose is to create swift investigative measures against organized crime," Calderon wrote.

"Although the proposal stems from the president's noble intention of efficiently fighting organized crime," said the president of the justice and human rights commission in the lower house of Congress, "the remedy seems worse than the problem."

The scare quotes above are my own, but I believe them.

Mexico to boost tapping of phones and e-mail with US aid

Decius wrote:

Don't you agree with them? I don't think search engines should store usage data indefinately.

As the recent Taylor ruling on the NSA case made clear, one can agree with a decision but not its line of reasoning.

Decius wrote:

I'm not sure I folllow how your distinction between a common carrier and an enhanced service provider is relevent to this discussion. I would say that the phone numbers you dial have approximately the same privacy implications as search terms. Search terms are a bit worse, but it's the same ball park.

My chief complaint was that NYT was making an apples-oranges comparison; there are legal precedents regarding the caller's expectation of privacy with regard to a common carrier, but those precedents do not apply to enhanced services.

The call detail records are a much better analogy, although the phone company has a (more) legitimate business need to retain the records (for a period of time) for billing purposes. Additionally, aggregated call records (perhaps at the level of digital-edge-to-digital-edge) play a role in long-term planning for network capacity. Since Internet search customers are not billed for service, these records do not serve that purpose.

The AOL case complicates the fundamental issue, due to the fact that a time-series history was released. For legal purposes, one would prefer to have a separate ruling on the privacy expectations associated with a single search query (and any associated record of user click-throughs). On this basis, then, the court could proceed to evaluate the implications of long-term accumulation.

Decius wrote:

As time goes on from the search, the risks associated with holding on to that information far exceed the value of storing it.

Is that really true? Or is it the time-series compilation of queries that increases the risk?

As an exercise, compare the damages associated with two cases in which 10 million search records are inadvertantly released. In the first case, the database consists of the last one thousand queries from each of 10,000 users. In the second case, the database consists of the last single query from each of 10 million users.

Decius wrote:

Unfortunately, all of the risk is borne by the searcher and all of the value is borne by the holder. This sort of imbalance is an area where it makes sense for the government to intervene.

The imbalance is real enough, but I'd be concerned that too much government intervention could stifle innovation. It is not enough to simply "empower" the customer with the authority to dictate a binary (yes or no) policy about data retention. Most customers are not in a position to make an informed judgment about this, and service providers are motivated to convince the customer of its necessity. Unless specifically prohibited, you are likely to see practices bordering on coercion ... where a web service is free if you accept the data retention policy, or $10/month if you do not. But such a development would not necessarily be bad, because it puts a valuation on the data. (One would be reliant on market pressure to make this reflect its true value.) Then legislation could set the minimum penalty for disclosure at N times accumulated value, for some N.

RE: Enter Search Term Here, Forever

NYT says Google et al are wrong to store usage data.

The storing and sharing of [search] data is a violation of users’ privacy rights.

OK, so what's their reasoning?

When people talk on the phone, they assume that the words they utter will disappear when the call is over. They certainly do not expect that their phone company is recording and storing the words, to mine for commercial purposes or to sell to other companies. People have the same expectation about the Internet searches they do: when the search is over, the words they used will disappear.

They confuse the telecom provider's role as a common carrier and basic service provider with Google's role as an information service and enhanced service provider.

Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, has introduced a bill to prohibit Internet companies from warehousing personal data, including search queries. It is a good start, but it still gives companies too much leeway to keep data. The bill should be strengthened and passed.

This seems rather heavy handed and ill-conceived. Obviously you'd need a user-consent exception to such a rule. Then search providers would force you to log in and accept a terms of service agreement. And then your semi-anonymous cookie is replaced with a login ID; is that better?

Enter Search Term Here, Forever

Rattle wrote:

A online search database for the AOL search database that runs at a decent speed is now online.

This is all too sublimely meta. Soon you will learn that this search history has been logged and then leaked, only to be mirrored widely and posted online in searchable form. The cycle continues ad infinitum. It's really quite beautiful.

RE: AOL Search Database