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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."
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Anything that catches stupid people is good. I used to tell people years ago, when I ran a computer store: "Don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't be comfortable shouting across a crowded room." How hard is that to understand? If you can't figure that out, you have no business running a huge conglomerate like HP. Man, oh man.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
There's a certain amount of irony in that the issue which gets the folks in Congress interested in technology, is watching one of their own get busted because he didn't understand that what he was sending over the "tubes" could be saved at either end.
I guess if you can't convince them that "knowledge is power," maybe we should work on "knowledge is not getting indicted."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Does this mean all those chat room transcripts where I posed as an eighteen year-old 5'4" 110lb blonde cheerleader on AOL back in 1995 are still out there somewhere. . .?
It's been happening for quite awhile. Nearly ten years ago, I had the displeasure of dealing with someone within our organization that was exploiting security holes to gain more access than they should have had. Once we were on to them, we were deluged with evidence - weblogs, files on the PC, program history, and more.
The moral of the story is stay squeaky clean, or assume that some day you'll have to pay the piper. Your wife could be looking at your browser history. Your e-mail could be hacked. Live life as if all your secrets were public knowlege.
It's strange to think that technology really could lead to a more moral society. Usually politicians are preaching the opposite.
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......"
This is a good point.
I think what it boils down to is this: the Constitution isn't an exclusive document. It wasn't intended to mean, "everything is illegal, except for a few certain things." They enumerated the really big important stuff that they thought the Government needed to avoid, but they weren't giving Congress a carte blanche to trample on the other rights that people had always assumed that they had.
Unfortunately, the Ninth Amendment doesn't seem to get a whole lot of respect from the USSC or anybody else. It pretty much gets ignored; rather than drawing on the "pneumbra" and other IMO shaky legal arguments, I think it would have safe to just say 'hey, people have always had a certain right to privacy, therefore it's protected under the Ninth Amendment.' That makes it harder to chisel away at established freedoms, even if they weren't one of the top eight that made it into enumerated Amendments, or into the body of the Constitution itself.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That is silly.
Such a statement is analogous to declaring security dead because systems have been compromised in the past. Like security, the means to privacy must and are continuing to evolve. Adoption of these mechanisms may be a bit behind the curve, but that in no way means that privacy is “dead” for anyone or everyone. In the past, rotational cyphers, Enigma, and “security envelopes” were enough to keep your messages secure (for a while). These days, we have incredibly powerful tools for keeping our data private, we simply have to be willing to use them.
And that is happening. Who does not use strong encryption for conducting electronic commerce? Nobody. As for privacy in email and other forms of communication, eventually, after enough scandals like those recently at Hewlett-Packard, people will adapt to protect themselves. Then the baseline will be raised and those who would wish to violate privacy will resume efforts in advancing the sophistication of their tools. Then those on the privacy side will move on again. This cycle will repeat again and again.
Privacy is an arms race, in a manner of speaking, and just because privacy is behind at times in no way means that it is a lost cause.
Join Tor today!
Secrecy is no more dead than it has been for a long while. There are some people who just don't seem to understand the medium. Sending messages across the internet is not like passing a letter to a person across the table from you. It's more like passing a letter along through a chain of 20 people -- any of which can read it as they handle it. You don't send secret things that way, or if you do, there's this little thing called encryption that you might want to look into. Also, much like a letter, once it is out of your hands you can't gaurantee that it won't come up at some later time when you least want it to. Also, are you _sure_ you can trust the person you're communicating with? Can you even verify that you're talking with who you think you're talking to?
The same basic rules of secrecy that have always applied still apply today. First and foremost, if you want to keep something REALLY secret, keep it to yourself!
Privacy, however, is a different matter.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
The Republicans have spent so much time destroying our privacy and installing their surveillance state and now they have fallen victim to their own monster.
I suspect they will be huge champions of privacy after this.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
You know, first it was some Chinese emporer trying to burn the bamboo parchment, then it was Nixon trying to erase tapes (remember those?) from his private discussions. Then it is Ley trying to shred documents and emails. Now it is congressman trying to hide behind the idea that the net is fleeting.
My guess is that in fifty or so years, some senator will be brought down not knowing the two way VOIP product was archiving everything at some central server.
Maybe he should have talked to Senator Gore, who invented the thing. He'd know where all the super sekret filez are kept.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Speak for yourself.
Personally, I'm not at all convinced. I value my own privacy. Perhaps more objectively, I recognise that no-one is perfect, and if you dig hard enough you can turn up dirt on anyone. I also recognise that most people in the world are basically good, decent people, and I would prefer to respect a reasonable level of privacy and live in a world where we saw the good in people. You can't do that in a world where everyone's whole life story is computerised, often against their will and without their knowledge, and the media delight in data mining on anyone of any conceivable interest (or at least, worth a few more sales).
Now, governments on the other hand, they should have no right to privacy; on the contrary, IMHO they should be required to justify any attempt to withhold information from the public to an independent authority. Businesses should also be subject to much stricter openness requirements than individuals.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Now it turns out the IMs might have been a prank by the page involved. He has lawyered up with Timonthy McVeigh's old lawyer (which can't be good considering McVeigh was executed) and was supposedly goaded into creating the fake IM's. That is the scarier problem since emails and IM's or almost any computer information can be faked, time-stamped and passed off as real by anyone reading this post. I don't think we have seen the last of the dirty tricks on either side of the aisle. It's funny, I always thought fake photos and videos would be the bane of the Criminal Justice system, it turns out it fake data files.
How to be consistent? One man's treasured "transparency" is another's outrageous "death of privacy". Certainly no technical distinction exists between my IMs, your IMs, and Foley's IMs. Nor is there a technical distinction between the way Foley's secrets were exposed and the way anyone else's could be exposed.
I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in the cases of oral-genital intimacy unless it has in some way obstructed the interstate commerce.
J. Edgar Hoover
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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!