
The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership - 1337biz
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-31/the-public-private-surveillance-partnership.html
======
PaperclipTaken
This paper offers little with regards to future steps to protect your data,
and basically accepts that we must give all of our information to
corporations, and protect ourselves by improving our government.

But future technological advancements can help us escape giving our data to
corporations. Imagine using a bittorrent style service to back up your
(encrypted) files instead of drop box. Imagine using freenet to back up your
files. Imagine using bitcoin to replace credit cards. Imagine using a mesh-
network to avoid centralized ISPs.

A lot of these technologies aren't practical yet, but are moving forward.
Changing the govenrment will be a long, slow, painful process. While we are
waiting on the bureaucracy, we can work to advance decentralized technologies
that will help put privacy back in our own hands.

~~~
dragontamer
What?

Bittorrent tracks every IP address you interact with. An FBI-planted "seeder"
or even FBI-controlled "peer" can prove which IP addresses are downloading or
uploading illegal material.

Every transaction in BTC is _forever_ recorded into the public ledger. Every,
_single_ one. BTC is a goldmine for information, and is hardly private at all.
Pseudo-anonymous is as close as you're gonna get, and after one transaction,
your BTC wallet will forever be associated with a particular purchase.

The mesh-network is the closest idea you've got... but at the end of the day,
the ISP is the weakest link. You're connecting to the internet somehow, and
that means trusting Verizon, Comcast, or whoever to keep up with Network
Neutrality. If Verizon / Comcast bans (or degrades the performance of) Tor
nodes, and if ISPs hellban Tor nodes, then the system dies easily.

The first step to creating progress is to understand the current limitations
of systems, and understand why they would or wouldn't work.

\------------

Also, COINTELPRO and Project SHAMROCK. Public/private partnership has existed
for an extremely long period of time. The political solution IMO is the most
logical one, as it stopped Project SHAMROCK before, as well as Nixon's abuses
of the government intelligence system. What was the FISA court created for,
and is it effective at it's job? What has changed since the 1970s
implementation of the FISA court? What are the citizen's responsibilities of
the FISA system?

A key is fully understanding politics and US history, which the typical
American is unfortunately extremely ignorant about. If you don't like the
current situation, then learn a little history, learn a little politics, and
do something about it.

EDIT: The answer btw, is to be aware of the "watchdog" systems that have been
built into our democracy. The watchdogs are the House Select Committee on
Intelligence, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. As I've stated
in my previous posts, the members on these Committees are charged with
creating and drafting laws, and have full Top Secret clearances... and the
ability to investigate any intelligence agency they so please. These
committees were created in response to previous abuses (ie: see the projects I
listed above), and are staffed by bipartisan groups.

Why were Senators like Wyden and Udall ignored when they were extremely vocal
of these programs before? Were Americans just ignorant on these issues? Did
people not care? Do people not realize the importance of listening to Senators
/ Representatives?

~~~
russellsprouts
You could definitely use BitTorrent sync securely for personal use, like
DropBox. The issues with illegal downloading are totally separate. If you are
downloading a public torrent, you join a swarm and upload pieces of it to
others, where they can see your IP address. If you are just syncing your files
with it, no one else joins the swarm.

~~~
iuguy
But the source and destination IP addresses of each system in the swarm are
leaked in the IP headers. How does the protocol avoid leaks?

------
azakai
> We have no choice but to share our personal information with these
> corporations, because that’s how our world works today.

While (as usual) the article makes some strong points, it ends on this, which
is not convincing. We can certainly control the _amount_ of information we
share with these corporations. Cold turkey is indeed very hard, but using
their data-collecting services less, diversifying by not using multiple
services of a single company, or switching at least partially to a competing
product that collects less data - are all certainly possible.

Saying we are powerless and must use these services, and therefore we have to
lobby government to legislate a fix, is like saying that trans fats are super-
dangerous but so tasty that we have no choice but to eat them, so we need
government to ban them. We should both take responsibility and eat less trans
fats, and also try to limit their use through government regulation.

~~~
munin
no, it isn't. everything is a data collecting service. want to not share this
information? then don't do the following:

\- use a credit card

\- use a cell phone

\- use toll roads

\- buy utilities

\- buy plane tickets

\- use a rewards card at a grocery|electronics|drug store

\- use an ATM

\- visit a doctors office

\- walk down a street, or into a conveience store, or into a shopping mall,
where a CCTV camera can see you

\- rent property

\- own property

\- rent a car

\- have a "regular" job

\- buy gas (for the car that you can't own or rent, natch)

don't do the above, and proooobbly a lot of your data won't wind up in some
database. do just a few of those things, and you probably have no privacy. do
all (and more) of them, and probably "big data" will know when you are going
to have relationship trouble before you do

~~~
BrandonMarc
Sadly, you can add to that list:

\- drive on a road near a police car, a bridge, or many buildings

... since all of the above, often have license-plate scanners attached,
compiling a comprehensive history of _individual_ driving patterns.

~~~
sliverstorm
The police car one has been that way forever, because police cars have been
equipped with dash cams for a while now. That said, dash cams on police
vehicles have generally been positive.

~~~
BrandonMarc
Dash cams have been around for a long time, but their utility has chiefly been
to record what's happening right in front of the vehicle, at minimal
resolution. The result is not a comprehensive data feed of everything
happening, but merely an eyewitness of events.

Not many people see the "data", and the dash cams & their data are (mostly)
not used beyond some basic purposes.

On the other hand, the license-plate scanners [0] are higher resolution,
pointing in every direction, are also attached to road infrastructure
(numerous bridges and buildings), and their _purpose_ is to collect and
compile data which then goes into a massive, shared (among the executive
branch) system ... in a way, more invasive than a giant "Google Analytics" for
public roads. After all, Google Analytics doesn't make it easy (possible?) to
see visitors' IP addresses, and even an IP address doesn't tell you the likely
human behind it.

Therefore, to avoid leaving footprints for all these "Little Brothers" to see,
it's necessary to not drive an owned car on roads that may be adjacent to many
bridges, or certain buildings, or may happen to have a police car on them.

\----------

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition)

------
andrewfong
I wonder if this is the flip side of "information wants to be free". Nearly
all use of modern software generates sensitive information, and if that
information is online, it will be made available to others, including the
government, eventually.

~~~
gnosis
_" Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.
Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute,
copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it
can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.
It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual
property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of
new devices makes the tension worse, not better."_

\-- Stewart Brand [1] - spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and reprinted
in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The quotation is an elaboration from his
book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand#Aphorisms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand#Aphorisms)

------
yourcelf
Moxie Marlinspike gave a fantastic talk on this subject in 2010, even down to
the government mandated tracking device vs mobile phone:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk)

------
jonaford
I was disappointed after having seen the title. I was hoping for a discussion
on information asymmetry and a call to arms from the public to balance the
scales via a publicly controlled mass surveillance system.

~~~
skybrian
In that case you should be reading David Brin.

------
autodidakto
"Cells phones are tracking devices" used to be how cliche, wild-eyed
conspiracy theorists were identified. Glad to see the mainstream (bloomberg
and others in general, not Schneier) catching up.

------
wavefunction
some would call this fascism

some would, some woodn't

------
hannibal5
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism)

~~~
wavefunction
yo we got egoistists confusing their selves with their employers an it's just
up the alley of all weak willed creatures who crave illusion over substance...

