Snowden Urges Privacy Fight

The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden today—on the one-year anniversary of the first published surveillance leak from his revelations—urged those attending the annual Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan to "take back their privacy with technology."

Appearing via Google Hangouts from Russia in a conversation moderated from the PDF stage by Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow, Snowden said "we're seeing a growing appetite for surveillance control among government institutions and it is something we're not just seeing locally, but around the world." A year ago, Snowden said, "none of us really had the full picture" about how far the government had gone to track citizen cellphone calls as well as facial images across the social sphere. Today? "Public interest in privacy has grown," Snowden says. People are worried about their privacy again. "Our government has created programs that are watching not just everybody in America, but also everybody in the world."

The good news? Snowden says Netizens don't have to rely on governments to protect their privacy rights anymore. "We're past the point where citizens are entirely dependent on governments to defend our rights," he said. "We don't have to ask. We can take back our privacy with technology."

Snowden endorsed the Reset the Net campaign, officially launched from the PDF stage earlier today, which calls on tech companies and citizens to work harder to strengthen privacy rights online and "shut off the lights to government surveillance" by popularizing anti-snooping technology. The campaign, backed by a nonprofit called Fight for the Future—the group behind last year's successful Stop SOPA initiative—urges major websites like Google, Tumblr, Wordpress, Twitter, Dropbox, Tumblr and others to promote consumer encryption tools that would make it harder and more expensive for the NSA to snoop indiscriminately on American citizens. The campaign also is working to drive more Web traffic to a coalition of personal encryption companies like Text Secure, ChatSecure, RedPhone and others. "Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the U.S. Congress fails to do the same," Snowden said. "The first effective step that everyone can take to end mass surveillance is to adopt encryption."

One of the nation's top encryption experts, Bruce Schneier, addressing PDFers just before Snowden, said fighting back also will require legal firepower and a more strident, pro-privacy mindset among public advocates of greater privacy. "Fighting back is going to be, primarily, a legal battle and we (who oppose government spying) are not going to win this unless we also win the social battle"—meaning the fight for more citizens' hearts and minds, Schneier said.

"The drivers of all of this surveillance and control," said Schneier, "are fear and convenience—if you're the U.S., it's the fear of terrorism, and if you're China, it's fear of citizens rebelling—and convenience, of all of these products and services we consumers have at our fingertips. As long as people on the street are scared [about security threats] and want free stuff," Snowden added, "we are not going to do better here. We've got to fix these things."

Both Schneier and Snowden called on netizens to get more political, and Barlow suggested people also need to exhibit more courage. [Barlow used the PDF stage to announce the launch of the Courage Foundation, a fund amassed to support Snowden's legal defense.] But Snowden insisted he didn't do anything that anyone in the audience wouldn't have done themselves, were they in his position, knowing what he knew at the time. "I'm no hero," he said. "...We all have the ability as citizens to act."

"When I look over the last year," Snowden added, "I had to give up a lot to do what I did, and my biggest fear was that nobody would care or talk about this. But people in this room today show me how wrong I was. The fact that we are talking about this here, today, means we will get a better, more accountable government. All I did was return information to public hands that should have never been turned over in the first place."

PDF14 continues through Friday afternoon. Watch this space for updates.

— Marcia Stepanek

[Twitter photo, top, by CauseGlobal]

Turning the Outside In

The continuing disclosures about National Security Agency (NSA) leaks are either totally unsurprising, or the stuff of shock and outrage. Spying on friendly governments and their citizens? Tell us something new, right? Still, many ordinary people around the world are genuinely alarmed. Each new Snowden leak—mostly recently, that the NSA has broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world to collect data from hundreds of millions of user accounts—is either earth-shattering news, or simply confirms what many already knew or suspected.

Wikileaks triggered similar debates: What did we already know? What should we have known? Who should have known it?

It's true that spying by governments—including spying on their own citizens, enemies, allies, and frenemies—is not new. It’s even expected, post 9/11, and comes as no surprise to government insiders. But the vast scale of NSA spying, enabled by our nation’s shift to a high-velocity digital infrastructure, is novel. Millions of ordinary people suddenly have detailed knowledge that only insiders previously had. Their shock at the extent of the spying is real and consequential.

But focusing on who-knew-what-when misses the real significance of the ongoing Snowden leaks. Civil libertarians and digital freedom activists assert that the issue is less about whether governments spy on each other and their citizens, and far more about how our massive, digital infrastructure is rapidly eroding our long-standing and accepted boundaries between society’s insiders (those “in the know”) and those who know far less—insider-outsider boundaries that diplomacy, good governance, and politics have relied on for centuries.

Suddenly, those who were once exclusively privy to the inner-most secrets of our government are not the only insiders anymore. “Our digital tools have empowered dissenting insiders and are emboldening them to shine a light on all sorts of shadows previously left uninvestigated,” says sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, “ensuring there will always be dissenting insiders if an action is controversial or if oversight is weak.” There will be more Edward Snowdens, she asserts, because leaking is not only getting easier, it’s becoming more expected, if not more respectable. Public polling data continues to reflect rising support for Snowden’s whistle-blowing.

And the blurring of lines between who’s inside and out is happening everywhere. According to digital researcher danah boyd, it’s why teens are leaving Facebook in droves; they’re spooked by their parents’ ability to interrupt their insider postings with embarrassingly jarring, off-topic commentary or “reminders to bring a sweater.” It’s why institutions are finding that the internal communications they meant for a few insiders are suddenly exposed to the world. Consider last year’s high-profile leak by a dissenting insider at the Komen Foundation, disclosing the breast cancer nonprofit’s plans to defund Planned Parenthood under political pressure from GOP opponents. The leak, which Komen’s leaders refused to address for days amid supporter uproar, spread like wildfire through social media networks, and cost the organization thousands of supporters and millions of dollars in lost or cancelled contributions—the organization has never fully recovered.

The eroding insider-outsider boundaries fostered by our expanding digital infrastructure are also upsetting political strategists. This past weekend’s progressive Stop Watching Us rally against NSA spying began as a progressive anti-NSA rally, but Libertarian groups insisting that they should be included just days prior to the event crashed it. The resulting “joined-hands” dissent against government excess triggered a controversial, pre-rally blog post by writer Tom Watson, who urged some of the biggest names in civil liberties and digital freedom of information to stay home rather than march with political outsiders: “[Progressive] organizers trade their own good names and reputations to stand alongside—and convey legitimacy to—a [Libertarian Party] that opposes communitarian participation in liberal society and rejects the very role of government itself.” Critics of Watson’s column accused him of working against political compromise. Supporters, though, suggested that the Libertarians were intentionally crashing a political party not meant for them but unavoidably open, thanks to the digital political infrastructure that makes insider strategy secrets—and organized surprise—ever-harder to handle on all levels. (An informal data survey of marchers revealed that crashers mixed in with political compromisers from all sides of the political spectrum.)

Information will always be power, but now more people have it—and increasingly, they’re not always the “right” people, depending on who is drawing the lines. Our 21st-century governance and leadership can no longer depend on old, established norms about what constitutes “proper” levels of public knowledge and who gets to know more. Security clearances? No longer are those at the top of the leadership pyramid that can control access—nor the conversation.

What really makes the Snowden leaks so provocative—and, frankly, so unsettling to so many—has less to do with Edward Snowden and much more to do with the power of our digital tools to flip who’s out and who’s in—across society.

“The outsiders are peeking in and moving in, and they are here to stay,” says Tufekci. That is the big story to watch. Each new Snowden leak is just another wake-up call about how profoundly our digital tools are redefining the balance of power, big and small.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Elisabetta Stoinich; reprinted with permission from the Stanford Social Innovation Review) 

#StopWatchingUs

Last updated at 9pm EST

Thousands of people marched on the streets of Washington, D.C., today to protest the National Security Agency's post-9/11 national security apparatus, in a public demonstration they called The Rally Against Mass Surveillance. The crowd, representing an online and offline coalition of more than 100 public advocacy groups from across the political spectrum known as Stop Watching Us, demanded an end to government spying, chanting and waving banners that read "Yes, We Scan" and "Thank you, Edward Snowden." Many showed up wearing costumes and carrying props, including cardboard spy cameras and plaster drones. One protester wore a papier-maiche mascot head of Barack Obama and carried an "Obama-cam"; others wrapped their heads in yellow police barrier tape reading, Caution, Do Not Enter.

Protesters were cheered on in absentia by Snowden, the exiled NSA whistleblower who first disclosed the agency's surveillance programs. In a rare public statement prepared for the rally and read to the crowd, Snowden said "it is time to remind our government officials that they are public servants, not private investigators." The NSA, one of the biggest surveillance agencies in the U.S., was Snowden's workplace before he began leaking some of the agency's top-secret documents to the press in June.

"In the last four months, we've learned a lot about our government," Snowden said. "...Today, no telephone in America makes a call without leaving a record with the NSA. Today, no Internet transaction enters or leaves America without passing through the NSA's hands." Americans are fed up with government and with their lawmakers in Washington, Snowden added. "We are witnessing an American moment in which ordinary people from high school to high office are standing up to oppose a dangerous trend in government. ...We're told (by those in Congress and government) that what is unconstitutional is not illegal, but we will not be fooled. It is time for reform. Elections are coming, and we are watching you."

Another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, showed up in person, talking to reporters about recent revelations that the U.S. government had tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and some 35 other world leaders. Drake told the crowd that any domestic surveillance legislation that may result from the Snowden leaks "must include whistleblower protection" because with them, "government employees will be more likely to turn a blind eye" to abuses of power.

The publicity campaign for today's rally kicked off on Wednesday with the release of a celebrity-studded public service announcement, a video that urged people to join protesters today "to end mass, suspicion-less surveillance" of American citizens. By the end of the rally, the video had wracked up more than 875,000 views on YouTube.

Indeed, more people attended today's rally digitally than in person. Rally organizers said before today that they expected more than 500,000 to participate in the march and in live-streamed "rally watching parties" occurring concurrently in eight other cities. The number of marchers who showed up in Washington, including several busloads from New York City, appeared to number only in the single-digit thousands, a smaller in-person crowd than organizers had hope for and expected.

The march was not without its critics on both sides of the ideological divide, with some saying the coalition of progressive liberals and right-wing Libertarian Party leaders represent, at best, an unsustainable mix of those who would change government and those who would abolish it completely. Rally supporters included members of the American Civil Liberties Union, Chinese activist Ai Weiwei, journalist Glenn Greenwald, as well as leaders of the uber-conservative Libertarian Party, including Gary Johnson, its 2012 candidate for U.S. President.

But Snowden, in his remarks today, insisted that "this isn't about red or blue or party lines and definitely not about terrorism. It's about power, control and trust in government. ...It is about the unconstitutional, unethical and immoral actions of the modern-day surveillance state and how we must all work together to remind the government" to stop "trampling on our right to know, our right to associate freely and to live in a free and open democratic society."

Chief rally organizer Rainey Reitman of the progressive Electronic Freedom Foundation, a pro-privacy group founded in 1990 to protect online privacy and free speech, said "we are not building this coalition for a rally today. We are starting with a rally and we will stop when the NSA stops spying on all of us." Added former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee for U.S. President last year: "There are members of Congress who wrote the Patriot Act (after 9/11) and are now vowing to fix it, but the only way to fix it is to repeal it. ... We're mad as hell."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Graphic, top, courtesy rally co-sponsor Ben and Jerry's. Photos: CauseGlobal)

Machine Rule

In his just-released book, Delete, author Viktor Mayer-Schonberger explores the surprising phenomenon of perfect recall in the digital age and makes a strong case for reintroducing the capacity to forget.

To be sure, Mayer-Schonberger isn't suggesting that all of the bits and bytes about us be subject to erasure. But he is one of the first privacy advocates to assert that "the balance between what we remember and what we forget has been unsettled" by the always-on, data-hungry machines we have created to help us keep track of each other. But much information, Mayer-Schonberger asserts, is better left ungathered—or, at the very least, allowed to escape digital eternity. "We need to be able to delete," he says. Part of being human is to consistently re-contextualize the past as it relates to the present; machines rob us of that choice.

Cause Global caught up with Mayer-Schonberger recently to talk about how unbridled digital recall is reshaping society and human behavior. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

A number of books have been published recently about the limitations of human memory, including Total Recall: How the E-memory Revolution will Change Everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. But you argue in your book, Delete, that the capacity to forget serves a human purpose and must be integrated into our data-rich culture. You say our personal freedoms are at risk.

I’ve been interested in privacy for better part of the last two decades, and have been working on both sides of the Atlantic on information privacy issues. Privacy always has been dear to me, and this culture's perfect recall problem became clear to me when I started thinking about our digital world’s ability to record a lot more data than the analog world. The threat that eminates from this problem is not just of a privacy nature, but there is another type of danger that is at least as threatening and as problematic. Humans yearn to remember, although they mostly forget. We've developed tools to lighten this biological limitation, like books and videos, to help us remember things and they've proven to be extremely helpful to us. But until a few decades ago, these tools did not unsettle the balance between remembering and forgetting. To remember was the exception; to forget, the default. In the digital age, this balance has been altered fundamentally. Today, forgetting has become costly and difficult, while remembering is inexpensive and easy. With the help of digital tools we—individually and as a society—have begun to unlearn forgetting, to erase from our daily practices one of the most fundamental behavioral mechanisms of humankind.

We're forgetting how to forget?

It’s becoming real for most of us extremely quickly. Maybe 20 years ago or so, if a politician made a gaffe on live TV, it was played over and over again and we laughed and it ruined a political career. These days, it's not just public officials who might experience this. It's pretty much everybody now. Just consider this: in 2007, two out of three young Americans created or uploaded digital content onto the Internet or to some social networking site. So two out of three people partook in the weaving of this thick digital blanket and this, for many, was able to impede or destroy our careers. You have more and more of these examples coming up as YouTube and many other portals function as hubs, where you can upload everybody else's information, gaffes and outtakes and laugh about them. I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of the South Korean person who has been laughed at and criticized hundreds of thousands of times online because her dog pooped on the subway and it was recorded on YouTube.

This kind of permanent memory will lead to bullying?

It has already for some people, but more troubling is how the fear of such behaviors might be influencing large numbers of people in society. It would be horrible if we were to stop expressing ourselves because we start fearing that 20 years from now, or sooner, our utterances will be held against us. What does this do to free speech? Our democracy, our nation, our culture, will be much poorer and much more impoverished. So I'm suggesting that we create new legal and social tools not to encourage self-censorship, but instead create ways of choosing how long we want to preserve the information we put online. Inherent in this, of course, is an acknowledgment that some kinds of information loses validity over time, and therefore it needs to be discarded—or labeled, at least, as being past its expiry date.

This suggests that the facts don't always serve us. Why is the capacity to forget an advantage?

Researchers have found that perfect human memory is actually not an advantage but a disadvantage, because it disables people from deciding, over time, to move on. Perfect recall locks and anchors everything that has ever happened to the present. People who cannot forget feel they are always tethered to the past; they remember all of the wrong decisions they made in the past, which makes them afraid to decide in the present. Perfect digital memory, then, not only creates a power imbalance between the past and the present but impedes on our ability to decide and act quickly in the present.

Further, it's about information control. Perfect digital recall gives us no choice or control over how accessible our information is, or how long-lived it is in the public sphere. Much of what is online about us at any given time is accessible to anyone, will live forever, and occur out of context. In the past, we could control who 'saw' us and when and under what circumstances. We had a better chance of being able to explain.

Moreover, human remembering has not been a process of mechanistically retrieving facts from our past, but rather, as Daniel Schacter so eloquently argued, the constant reconstruction of our past based on the present. In other words, the past as we remember it is constantly evolving. The past captured in digital memory is constant, frozen in time. It is likely these two visions will clash, yet neither is an accurate and complete depiction of what or who we are.

What can we do about it?

It’s a collective action problem; my 'expiration date' proposal is meant to say there is a way we can start to introduce some selective forgetting into our digital world. We can start a movement by introducing new technologies. A number of companies, from Microsoft to ask.com, all offer the ability to forget, to allow expiration dates on certain kinds of data. In fact, Yahoo and Microsoft have announced they will delete some things after nine months so they will have selective forgetting implemented.

Have you gotten any pushback on the book?

Most pushback has come from people who run the large search engines. Others, of course, have said it is ridiculous not to be able to delete. Other pushback comes from people who accuse me of wanting to destroy archives and libraries. That is not at all what I want to do. I don't want forced forgetting. I want us, as a society and as individuals, to be able to choose what to remember. If nothing is done—if the status quo persists—we will lose a lot of the democratic and open, robust debate we have in society. That would be horrible. Equally horrible would be a world in which we become so locked to the past that we become frozen in the present, afraid to take risks and innovate, and to simply live for the moment.

—By Marcia Stepanek

(Photo, top, by Peeter Viisimaa for istock.com)
(Photo, middle, of Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, courtesy of Princeton Press)

Reality Mining

A few years ago, MIT media arts professor Alex Pentland distributed one hundred Nokia cell phones to students and faculty. Each was equipped with software that let Pentland’s team map the social interactions of the people carrying the phones. They tracked some 130,000 interactions, including calls, text messages and the proximity of the devices to each other, as measured by Bluetooth.

The goal: to learn about the behaviors of social networks and the types of people who influence their dynamics the most. “We weren’t able to measure this stuff at such a large scale before smart phones,” says Pentland, the author of the recent book, Honest Signals, and the chief of the Human Dynamics Lab at MIT. “By using data from mobile phones, electronic ID badges, or digital media—what I call ‘honest signals’—we can create a God’s-eye view of how people in organizations interact,” Pentland says. "We can even see the rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city.” Mining mobile data this way would be useful, he says, for tracking such things as flu outbreaks and traffic patterns. (See video here)

Pentland calls this new field of dynamic data “reality mining.” Along with Columbia University Chief Scientist Tony Jebara and a half-dozen other location-awareness technologists and researchers, Pentland co-founded Manhattan-based startup Sense Networks a couple of years ago to make commercial use of the data: the company’s Citysense application for iPhones and BlackBerries is one of the company’s first commercial applications of the research. For now, it’s a free download that shows which areas of San Francisco are the No. 1 hotspots for nightlife—where most people are going or gathering at any given time.

“Half of the people in the world have cell phones and are creating data, tons of it now,” says Sense CEO and Co-founder Greg Skibiski. “This data, in a few years, will be the lingua franca of the entire planet about how people move around globally. We believe location data is the best descriptor of who is a human being.” Adds Pentland: “The motion detectors in your iPhone, for example, know if you’re sitting or walking. Web 2.0 stuff is nice but reality-mining is different.”

To be sure, reality mining raises red flags among privacy advocates. Writer Howard Rheingold says: "The same technology that could let you know if a good Chinese restaurant or old friend is in the vicinity could also betray your location to a totalitarian government, neighborhood spammers, and your vindictive ex-spouse.”

But that's why Pentland and Sense Networks are now pushing what they call a New Deal on Data —an informal privacy pact for the mobile Net set that Pentland unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. “People always say, what about my privacy? But what if privacy can go beyond that? Pentland queries. "Like what about data ownership?” The New Deal on Data, Skibiski says, is based on old English common law tenets that give indivdiuals the right of poessession, use, and disposal. "If you’re a company and you're keeping people's location data, your customers should own their own data and have a say over whether they should be destroyed. It's something we all [in the geo-location industry] should be working towards.”

But are they? So far, says Skibiski, MySpace adheres to it and Facebook is considering it. Nokia, which is working with movie theaters in geo-location experiments to measure theater attendance patterns, also supports the proposal. “There’s a need for some guidance here, absolutely, so as to protect against abuse—but most companies get it, I think," says McDowell, who is leading a Nokia experiment for Remax, the real estate company, to enable people to point their iPhones at a house that’s for sale and get information about its dimensions. “I don’t want to know if you’re visiting your girlfriend," she says. "I just want to know if you are driving down the highway at a certain speed so I can predict traffic flows in a region.”

For more on the new world of geo-location services, check out Mathew Honan’s recent take for Wired on the promise and the perils of context-aware devices.

—Marcia Stepanek

(This post first appeared on PopTech and is being reposted here with permission)

(Illustration by AskinTulayOver for istock.com)