The Age of Technological Transparency

endychavez writes "Executives and politicians may be starting to realize that privacy is dead and secrets can no longer be kept in the information age. There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive. Just ask Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley. In a piece at eWeek, Ed Cone from CIO Insight talks about the specific technologies that brought them down." From the article: "Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival. We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun's blogging CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak more directly to stakeholders. But transparency needs to be understood as more than a slogan or a strategy. It's a reality. It can be imposed on you by the Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not."

Comments

Privacy is a myth

[Marxist Hacker 42]

There is no guarantee of privacy anywhere in the Constitution- only a requirement that the evidence gathered can't be used against you in court.

Re:Privacy is a myth

[Anonymous Coward]

That is incorrect.

The Bill of Rights is explicitly written to define government invasions of privacy illegal (mainly in the Fourth Amendment).

It says nothing about being "used against you in court." This is merely the means courts employ to limit, in practice, the abuse of such illegally collected information. Nonetheless, it is the unreasonable search and seizure itself which is Constitutionally forbidden.

Re:Privacy is a myth

[TheRaven64]

Now, it's been six or seven years since I last read the US Constitution (I'm British, so it doesn't directly affect me), but I seem to recall that the Bill of Rights made it very clear that it was not an enumeration of all rights that individuals had. If I remember history correctly, there was some dispute amongst the founding fathers as to whether it should be included at all, since people might start saying 'the Bill of Rights doesn't guarantee your right to X, so you don't have that right.'

Re:Privacy is a myth

[jfengel]

There's an explicit statement that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." (the tenth amendment).

Unfortunately, that's been rendered effectively null by a vigorous reading of the Commerce Clause, "The Congress shall have Power ... to regulate Commerce ... among the several States". (Ellipses are for clarity, not to torture the syntax.)

Just about everything has been crammed into that. The original civil rights laws were justified on the idea that merchants have to sell you stuff no matter what your race because you might be from out of state (Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States et al. (1964)). California's in-state medical marijuana laws were overturned because legal marijuana, even in-state, affects the flow of marijuana elsewhere (marijuana being a fungible commodity).

So you can pretty much stick a fork in the idea that the 10th Amendment reserves you any rights that Congress can't take away. There are other places where you might derive a right to privacy (say, Amendment IV, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"), but Amendment X won't help.

Re:Privacy is a myth

[Homology]

> So you can pretty much stick a fork in the idea that the 10th Amendment reserves you any rights that Congress can't take away.

Exactly, it was proved once again when Military Commissions Act 2006 was passed: rollback habeas corpus, use torture, and provide immunity for US officials from torture prosecution.

I believe it is more complicated than you make it.

[rolfwind]

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/c onlaw/rightofprivacy.html

It starts off:

"The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information. In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain rights" in the Bill of Rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." The meaning of......"

And no one is concerned?

[vinnythenose]

Having evidence on your hard drive these days is pretty much a guarantee of guilt. However, people seem to forget that should someone want to, it is relatively easy to plant information.

You ever piss off a pscyhopathic computer geek and you're screwed.

You'll turn on your computer one day to find illicit files all over the hard drive with timestamps ranging back through history. It'll look like you've been collecting whatever it is for months.

Or hell, someone doesn't like you, they forge their log files on their computer and claim you were sending nasty IM stuff, when the authorities don't see the matching logs on your computer, they will just assume that you cleared them out to protect yourself.

Yup, those timestamps are obviously immutable written in stone and never lie.

Recommendation: Deniable Encryption

[arodland]

Use a tool such as Off-the-Record Messaging. You get authentication to protect you against man-in-the-middle attacks, strong encryption, and a clever scheme that makes it so that if someone does manage to break a key and read a conversation, or if one of the parties to the conversation snitches, it still can't be proven that you've said anything in particular; the key material for authentication is published after the fact, so that while it's valid at the time you're having the conversation, afterwards anyone could forge a message that would pass authentication. So if someone comes out and says that you said X, and that they have logs and packet dumps to prove it, you can "prove" that you actually said Y, and that you have logs and packet dumps to prove it, and from a mathematical perspective both of your claims are equally credible -- either or both of you could be presenting a forgery. Fun!