The
Internet is a surveillance state
Bruce
Schneier
CNN,
16
March, 2013
I'm
going to start with three data points.
One:
Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad
set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were
identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network
infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.
Two:
Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement,
was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he
practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service
to protect his identity, he slipped up.
And
three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David
Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity.
She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home
network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she
e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several
different hotels -- and hers was the common name.
The
Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or
not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time.
Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access
to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple
tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called
Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his
Internet use during one 36-hour period.
Increasingly,
what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about
us. Unmasking Broadwell's identity involved correlating her Internet
activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves
computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product.
Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data
companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives
from a variety of sources.
News:
Cyberthreats getting worse, House intelligence officials warn
Facebook,
for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing
habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your
cell phone, there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit
TVs.
This
is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time,
and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state
looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George
Orwell.
Sure,
we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on
Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that
allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can
turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it
matters.
There
are simply too many ways to be tracked. The Internet, e-mail, cell
phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines: these
have become necessities, and it's fanciful to expect people to simply
refuse to use them just because they don't like the spying,
especially since the full extent of such spying is deliberately
hidden from us and there are few alternatives being marketed by
companies that don't spy.
This
isn't something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice
in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet
services are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will
almost certainly know who you are; there are lots of ways to be
tracked without cookies. Cellphone companies routinely undo the web's
privacy protection. One experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time
videos of students on campus and was able to identify one-third of
them by comparing their photos with publicly available tagged
Facebook photos.
Maintaining
privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even once
to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the
wrong thing, and you've permanently attached your name to whatever
anonymous service you're using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI
got him. If the director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the
Internet, we've got no hope.
In
today's world, governments and corporations are working together to
keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data
corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more
and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy
data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless,
and they're not going to give up their positions of power, despite
what the people want.
Fixing
this requires strong government will, but they're just as punch-drunk
on data as the corporations. Slap-on-the-wrist fines notwithstanding,
no one is agitating for better privacy laws.
So,
we're done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort
of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse
does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly
where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private
conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted
by e-mail, text, or social networking sites.
And
welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do
or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed
around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and
where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.
Welcome
to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a
fight.
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