Slashdot Mirror
Accidental Privacy Spills
ahem writes "A journalist attends the World Economic forum, and writes an email to a few friends. It's a chatty, casual conference report. The conference is a gathering of the 5,000 most powerful people in the world. The report gives a breezy insight into how stuff gets done at that level, and what the concerns are that keep the world's leaders up at night. That email was intended only for the journalist's friends. That email winds up getting plastered all over the net. Here is a very interesting discussion of the implications of this "privacy spill." Make sure you read down to the Epilogue. Here is the email itself." The Lawmeme discussion is quite thoughtful and in-depth, very good reading.
Poster says:
When will people get that email is not secure. Its the digital equivalent of a postcard, but idiots still email credit card numbers and worse.
Article says:
Encryption is fine for the digital connection, but the digital connection was already the secure part of the link. Garrett's expectations of privacy were compromised between the seat and the keyboard; the same place every technically foolproof scheme fails.
The article is more interesting than just a technological discussion, because it gets into issues of how social norms and technology interface. Of course, it's also waaaaaaay long.
hopefully i formatted it right!
With apologies for the group email... I thought this was interesting enough to pass along. These are the notes from a friend of a friend who writes for Newsday.
Adam Davis
Director, EPRIsolutions Environment Division
1299 4th Street, Suite 307
San Rafael, CA 94901
Main Office:415-454-8800
Direct:415-257-4631
Cell: 415-305-4786
Hi Guys.
OK, hard to believe, but true. Yours truely has been hobnobbing with the ruling class.
I spent a week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. I was awarded a special pass which allowed me full access to not only the entire official meeting, but also private dinners with the likes the head of the Saudi Secret Police, presidents of various insundry countries, your Fortune 500 CEOS and the leaders of the most important NGOs in the world. This was not typical press access. It was full-on, unfettered, class A hobnobbing.
Davos, I discovered, is a breathtakingly beautiful spot, unlike anything I'd ever experienced. Nestled high in the Swiss Alps, it's a three hours train ride from Zurich that finds you climbing steadily through snow-laden mountains that bring to mind Heidi and Audrey Hepburn (as in the opening scenes of "Charade"). The EXTREMELY powerful arrive by helicopter. The moderately powerful take the first class train. The NGOs and we mere mortals reach heaven via coach train or a conference bus. Once in Europe's bit of heaven conferees are scattered in hotels that range from B&B to ultra luxury 5-stars, all of which are located along one of only three streets that bisect the idyllic village of some 13,000 permanent residents.
Local Davos folks are fanatic about skiing, and the slopes are literally a 5-15 minute bus ride away, depending on which astounding downhill you care to try. I don't know how, so rather than come home in a full body cast I merely watched.
This sweet little chalet village was during the WEF packed with about 3000 delegates and press, some 1000 Swiss police, another 400 Swiss soldiers, numerous tanks and armored personnel carriers, gigantic rolls of coiled barbed wire that gracefully cascaded down snow-covered hillsides, missile launchers and assorted other tools of the national security trade. The security precautions did not, of course, stop there. Every single person who planned to enter the conference site had special electronic badges which, upon being swiped across a reading pad, produced a computer screen filled color portrait of the attendee, along with his/her vital statistics. These were swiped and scrutinized by soldiers and police every few minutes -- any time one passed through a door, basically. The whole system was connected to handheld wireless communication devices made by HP, which were issued to all VIPs. I got one. Very cool, except when they crashed. Which, of course, they did frequently. These devices supplied every imagineable piece of information one could want about the conference, your fellow delegates, Davos, the world news, etc. And they were emailing devices --- all emails being monitored, of course, by Swiss cops.
Antiglobalization folks didn't stand a chance. Nor did Al Qaeda. After all, if someone managed to take out Davos during WEF week the world would basically lose a fair chunk of its ruling and governing class POOF, just like that. So security was the name of the game. Metal detectors, X-ray machines, shivering soldiers standing in blizzards, etc.
Overall, here is what I learned about the state of our world:
- I was in a dinner with heads of Saudi and German FBI, plus the foreign minister of Afghanistan. They all said that at its peak Al Qaeda had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism -- the rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but about 200 are dead or in jail.
- But Al Qaeda, they say, is like a brand which has been heavily franchised. And nobody knows how many unofficial franchises have been spawned since 9/11.
- The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of the dollar". All of this is without war.
- If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries whose currency is guaranteed agains the dollar (which is just about everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.
- Not surprisingly, the business community was in no mood to hear about a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich -- whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes.
- Plenty are also infuriated because they disagree on policy grounds. I learned a great deal. It goes FAR beyond the sorts of questions one hears raised by demonstrators and in UN debates. For example:
- If Al Qaeda is down to merely 200 terrorists cadres and a handful of wannabe franchises, what's all the fuss?
- The Middle East situation has never been worse. All hope for a settlement between Israel and Palestine seems to have evaporated. The energy should be focused on placing painful financial pressure on all sides in that fight, forcing them to the negotiating table. Otherwise, the ME may well explode. The war in Iraq is at best a distraction from that core issue, at worst may aggravate it. Jordan's Queen Rania spoke of the "desperate search for hope".
- Serious Islamic leaders (e.g. the King of Jordan, the Prime Minster of Malaysia, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia) believe that the Islamic world must recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations. And, most importantly to the WEF, it means flourishing free trade and support for entrepeneurs with minimal state regulation. (However, there were also several Middle East respresentatives who argued precisely the opposite. They believe bringing down Saddam Hussein and then pushing the Israel/Palestine issue could actually result in a Golden Age for Arab Islam.)
- US unilateralism is seen as arrogant, bullyish. If the U.S. cannot behave in partnership with its allies -- especially the Europeans -- it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS, as well. Company leaders argued that they would rather not have to deal with US government attitudes about all sorts of multilateral treaties (climate change, intellectual property, rights of children, etc.) -- it's easier to just do business in countries whose governments agree with yours. And it's cheaper, in the long run, because the regulatory envornments match. War against Iraq is seen as just another example of the unilateralism.
- For a minority of the participants there was another layer of AntiAmericanism that focused on moralisms and religion. I often heard delegates complain that the US "opposes the rights of children", because we block all treaties and UN efforts that would support sex education and condom access for children and teens. They spoke of sex education as a "right". Similarly, there was a decidedly mixed feeling about Ashcroft, who addressed the conference. I attended a small lunch with Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other prominent Christian fundamentalists working the room and bowing their heads before eating. The rest of the world's elite finds this American Christian behavior at least as uncomfortable as it does Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist behavior. They find it awkward every time a US representative refers to "faith-based" programs. It's different from how it makes non- Christian
Americans feel -- these folks experience it as downright embarrassing.
- When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win over the nonAmerican delegates, the sharpest attack on his comments came not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative -- it came from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!
I learned that the only economy about which there is much enthusiasm is China, which was responsible for 77% of the global GDP growth in 2002. But the honcho of the Bank of China, Zhu Min, said that fantastic growth could slow to a crawl if China cannot solve its rural/urban problem. Currently 400 million Chinese are urbanites, and their average income is 16 times that of the 900 million rural residents. Zhu argued China must urbanize nearly a billion people in ten years!
I learned that the US economy is the primary drag on the global economy, and only a handful of nations have sufficient internal growth to thrive when the US is stagnating.
The WEF was overwhelmed by talk of security, with fears of terrorism, computer and copyright theft, assassination and global instability dominating almost every discussion.
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
The mood was very grim. Almost no parties, little fun. If it hadn't been for the South Africans -- party animals every one of them -- I'd never have danced. Thankfully, the South Africans staged a helluva party, with Jimmy Dludlu's band rocking until 3am and Stellenbosch wines pouring freely, glass after glass after glass....
These WEF folks are freaked out. They see very bad economics ahead, war, and more terrorism. About 10% of the sessions were about terrorism, and it's heavy stuff. One session costed out what another 9/11-type attack would do to global markets, predicting a far, far worse impact due to the "second hit" effect -- a second hit that would prove all the world's post-9/11 security efforts had failed. Another costed out in detail what this, or that, war scenario Would do to spot oil prices. Russian speakers argued that "failed nations" were spawning terrorists --- code for saying, "we hate Chechnya". Entire sessions were devoted to arguing which poses the greater asymmetric threat: nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Finally, who are these guys? I actually enjoyed a lot of my conversations, and found many of the leaders and rich quite charming and remarkably candid. Some dressed elegantly, no matter how bitter cold and snowy it was, but most seemed quite happy in ski clothes or casual attire. Women wearing pants was perfectly acceptable, and the elite is sufficiently Multicultural that even the suit and tie lacks a sense of dominance. Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel room of the President of Mozambique -- we were viewing it on closed circuit TV -- I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy from a remarkably candid head of state. A day spent with Bill Gates turned out to be fascinating and fun. I found the CEO of Heinekin hilarious, and George Soros proved quite earnest about confronting AIDS. Vicente Fox -- who I had breakfast with -- proved sexy and smart like a --- well, a fox. David Stern (Chair of the NBA) ran up and gave me a hug.
The world isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive -- especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally -- better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global wearming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi- tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.
Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.
Ciao,
Laurie
Read the email - its a gal, not a guy.
My mom never taught me to sign.
Her name is Laurie Garrett she works for Newsday, she's a well known journalist/writer.
The World Economic Forum wasn't mentioned in the mainstream press?
Really?
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
There are two mistakes in the first two paragraphs alone: "truely" and "insundry").
Your problem is that you aren't reading the right mainstream press. Information about the World Economic Forum was there to be found if you wanted to read about it. Just a guess, but I suspect that a lot of slashdotters did in fact see articles about the WEF, but didn't bother to read them. It's much more enticing when you read about it in the form of a leaked e-mail, than to go and bother to read the business section on CNN.com or to bother to pick up an issue of the Economist. I know it was in the mainstream press because I read about it in the mainstream press.
The World Economic Forum is not secret--hundreds of journalists are there covering it every year. It's not a secret society, it's just a bunch of the world's movers and shakers getting together to discuss the economy and global politics. They even have a website that, among other things, details the discussions in every meeting www.weforum.org.
One other thing. That journalist was obviously trying to make herself sound more important, as though she was one of a select few to get the kind of access she got. In reality, according to the WEF website, all journalists who are selected to attend get the same participation rights as everyone else.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
This surprises you? The written English language has suffered horribly. Reading what most people write, you'd be hard pressed to call them "literate". For example, look at the prolific use of "would of", "could of", "should of" in place of the contraction form "would've", "could've", "should've". People pronounce those improperly (should be "wood-ev" with a very short 'e' sound, and not "wood-uhv") and consequently write them as they hear them.
Then there's the ever present "lose" v. "loose" and "chose" v. "choose" misspellings, the misusage of "their", "there", and "they're", "to", "too", and "two", and so on. Sadly, these mistakes are even made by native English speakers. It would be excusable for people speaking/writing English as a second or third language (hey, I had three years of Spanish, and I still butcher the language when I try to speak it; forget about writing it).
I blame Hooked on Phonics for teaching our children to spell how things sound, and not how things are spelled.
The issue of e-mail privacy is a modestly serious one. I was stung by this in a bad way two months ago. I sent an angry personal e-mail to the president of a fundamentalist Christian 'family rights group,' who in turn took the verbatim contents of that e-mail and published them in a press release from his organization (because I'm the editor of a small but well-known newspaper).
Suddenly my personal e-mail to him was circulating in the inboxes of thousands of the group's members, and I started getting calls from the media, family rights groups, etc. Several other 'family rights' groups published the story on their websites; it went national rather quickly. I later apologized for the e-mail, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. The issue is likely to haunt me for a while, even though the hubbub from it has died down now.
Now, it's quite true that I should have known full well that if I send something out in e-mail, it could get re-distributed; it's the nature of the beast. So I'm not really too upset at anybody but myself. Even so, the flippancy of people in dealing with personal e-mail is quite striking. You also see this when people CC or BCC to people other than the primary recipient.
I feel sorry for the journalist (although her e-mail was fascinating to read!). There ought to be a higher level of trust allowed in e-mail, but since there isn't, we ought to watch what we write.
Read Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy. It is subtitled "A Political History of America's Rich," but it is really an economic history of the U.S.
Just think about the privacy implication of such cross-application leaks on a multi-user system. Rather than relying on a broken word processor, an attacker could write a program that intentionnally malloc'ed large chunks of memory, and then went searching through them for interesting data of his fellow users...
Discussion of her screw-uph ive/cat_me dia.html
http://www.fultonchaindesign.com/mt/arc
Her website:
www.lauriegarrett.com
left wing writer, email is obviously what she saw filtered through her biases
the author hadn't flattened the layers. it got noticed I think by a reporter using a slower computer than many used at the time so they saw the names appear then get blanked over where-as for most people that happened too quick to see. it was reported here on Slashdot
I think the word you're looking for is "mondegreen." It was coined by Jon Carroll, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He actually uses it in reference to misheard song lyrics ("There's a bad moon on the rise"-->"There's a bathroom on the right").
Not A Sig
Lose vs Loose drives me nuts. If I could shoot everyone who typed loose when they meant lose we would have 1) half as many internet users and 2) I wouldn't get irritated by every retard who thinks Loose and Lose are the same goddamn word. Man, when can I be one of the ruling class. BTW Lose and Loose sound nothing alike. I can't see how anyone can make that mistake. Hooked on Phonics isn't the problem here. Their vs. There I can understand.
The writer of the Feature on Accidential Privacy Spills goes on about P3P, encryption, copyright, ... but he seemingly simply forgot one point. The netiquette clearly states:
E-mail is not to be published.
The guy to blame is also clear: Adam Davis posted the e-mail to a mailing list, which is publication. (And some other guy called 'beagle' seemingly published two other e-mails of Laurie Garrett).
All this endless talk on how publishing e-mails degrades (or improves) information of the masses in a democracy, all this speculative writings on possible technologies to prevent it. This all is completely pointless. The question is how to make everyone aware and understand the netiquette and why it is necessary. The author of the feature implicitely gives some pretty compelling reasons for the why but also clearly shows he hasn't understand the netiquette since he (mockingly) proposes to Cease-and-Desist the e-mail out of publicity.
There is no need for C&D. Netiquette has been breached and any webmaster who really deserves that name should be extremly willing to remove the e-mail from any website/archive he is responsible for simply on request.
Social pressure is it. Or maybe was it. We shouldn't have let in all those AOLers a few years ago .
Just to add to this... Not only is Laurie Garrett an excellent reporter, but she is also a fabulous writer. I read the Coming Plague in 1994 as an impressionable college freshman unsure about my major and my motivations. More than any other single event, reading that book opened my eyes to the importance of disease research and its role in a changing world. Fast-forward ten years...I now have a Ph.D. in Medical Microbiology and Immunology and investigate HIV vaccine development at a major US university. A dog-eared copy of Coming Plague sits on the bookshelf in my bedroom and I still reread portions for information and inspiration. A few years back, my coworkers and I were talking about our motivation for becoming scientists. Two others also said that reading The Coming Plague sparked their interest in science. And I'm sure that we are not the only ones. This privacy incident notwithstanding, people should recognize that Garrett is one of the best (if not the best) science writers in the world today.
Actually, that would create a sparse file which ls(1) would report as having a size of "large" bytes, but du(1) would report as occuping zero blocks.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?