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

[Irish_Samurai]

While I am all for privacy rights, I must ask the question. Are we entering an age where unreasonable Search and Seizure isn't required anymore to commit acts that the population perceives as an invasion of their privacy? Is it now possible for passive and non intrusive observation to yeild the same results? If so, do we need to define our privacy or attempt to limit passive observation?

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.

Filtering

[TheRecklessWanderer]

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.

Lessons Learned?

[Kadin2048]

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."

Re:Lessons Learned?

[wickedsteve]

So those tubes are transperant tubes, eh?

Oh Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

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. . .?

Re:Oh Crap

[Aqua_boy17]

That...was you???

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......"

Ninth Amendment: "I don't get no respect."

[Kadin2048]

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.

The pretext is nonsense.

[Jerk City Troll]

... [S]ecrets can no longer be kept in the information age. There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive.

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.

Who says transparency is a virtue?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web

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.

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!