[Advisors] FW: Can citizens roll back silent army of watchers?

[michael gurstein]

From: sid-l at googlegroups.com [mailto:sid-l at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of
Sid Shniad
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2013 3:30 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Can citizens roll back silent army of watchers?

 

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/09/23/can_citizens_roll_back_
silent_army_of_watchers.html

Toronto Star   Sep 23 2013


Can citizens roll back silent army of watchers?


Edward Snowden's revelations exposed the huge scope of government
surveillance of private citizens.

By David Lyon 

For once, newscasts over the northern summer contained real news. Of course,
it had long been suspected that the U.S. National Security Agency
<http://www.nsa.gov/>  (NSA) spies on citizens and foreigners at home and
abroad. The news, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden
<http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/08/01/edward_snowden_leaves_moscow_a
irport_now_what.html> , is that evidence now stares us in the face. 

The NSA collects telephone data on millions of Americans, provided by phone
companies such as Verizon. And a system called Prism gives the NSA and FBI
access to Internet companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and
Yahoo. Non-Americans outside the U.S. are tracked by Prism. As is often the
way with leaks, they continue. But what do they mean? Why are they
important? And who cares?

The Snowden leaks draw attention to three prominent trends in surveillance. 

One, governments undertake mass surveillance on their own citizens. Not just
careful, targeted surveillance of suspects but blanket surveillance of any
citizen, whether or not he or she has committed a crime. The NSA system, for
instance, can capture and watch 75 per cent of all U.S. Internet traffic,
including foreigners' communications. Since most Canadian Internet traffic
travels through American network cables, that includes our communications.
Ordinary citizens find themselves under the magnifying glass as calls,
texts, emails and searches are subject to systematic snooping.

Two, corporations share their "own" data supplies with government with
mutual benefit. You think police have the edge with face-recognition
technology or profiling? No way. Facebook dwarfs such systems. Tagging seems
like fun but feeds the advertisers. And marketing data also feed into
surveillance conducted by government agencies. No wonder the NSA teams with
Internet companies. But it means that government departments are not alone
in monitoring groups and individuals; it's a complex partnership.

Three, ordinary citizens unwittingly co-operate by supplying raw data
through mundane, everyday Internet use. Just using the net to communicate
means you can be watched. "Deep Packet Inspection" enables Internet carriers
to monitor "headers" (with the address) and sometimes content, along with
"metadata" of time-and-place and message length on all users. 

Some dismiss such metadata as being "like a phone book" but actually, mass
analysis makes metadata very revealing. The fact that "mere" metadata also
seems trivial to users inhibits questioning such practices.

But asking questions is long overdue. Fears fanned by 9/11 "security" and
the fun fostered by Facebook distracts us from what's really going on: the
surveillance playing field now tilts perilously in favour of large
organizations and away from individuals and groups. Such surveillance
undermines our relationship as citizens to the state - we may naively comply
but we didn't consent. 

Internet companies, too, should be hearing from us. It's not just that
someone might find out things about us that they have no need to know -
important though that is - it's that government and corporations intercept
and analyze our data, sorting us into categories for differential treatment.
Can you name your threat-risk assessment (TRA) at CSIS or your
postal-code-based consumer segment? No. But those classifications can make a
big difference to your actual choices and life chances.

Who will ask these questions and more? It isn't just a matter of "catching
up" with new technology, although recognizing that Canadian law lags
pathetically behind reality would be a start. It's also about why
technological potential is permitted to become political destiny, why
everyone has become a suspect and why organizations are so resistant to
calls for accountability for sensitive personal information. 

Canada, blessed with much better personal data protection than many other
countries and a long history of innovative thinking about communications,
could still take the lead in reversing the trend toward unwarranted and
disproportionate surveillance. The so-called digital era is not
self-propelling, nor is it inevitably destructive of trust or care for
vulnerable groups. 

It's up to us to keep up the pressure for answers and, more important, for
public debate on surveillance today. There's already a palpable groundswell.
One key site for information is SecretSpying.ca
<https://openmedia.ca/secretspying> .

David Lyon is director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's
University. His newest book (with Zygmunt Bauman) is Liquid Surveillance
(2013).

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