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Daniel Ellsberg On WikiLeaks, Google and Facebook
angry tapir writes "The Silicon Valley companies that store our personal data have a growing responsibility to protect it from government snooping, according to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Discussing the growing role of Internet companies in the public sphere, Ellsberg said companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter need to take a stand and push back on excessive requests for personal data."
Ellsberg spoke as part of a panel at an event from the Churchill Club, which included Clay Shirky, Jonathan Zittrain and others discussing the WikiLeaks situation.
Those companies shouldn't have all our information either.
There is no -1 Disagree.
Something tells me that companies that have a lot of data on their users are going to be leveraging it to their own benefit, not the benefit of their users.. It's how things seem work these days.
While I can't entirely join in with those who claim that Assange is a media whore, Ellsberg's low-key style in releasing the Pentagon Papers certainly makes him look all the more respectful. I'd recommend reading his memoirs for a portrait of a truly committed and sincere American citizen.
Sadly, as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that American history isn't a straight path of progress, but a cycle of ups and downs. The gains we got in the late 1960s and early 1970s in weakening undemocratic power structures are pretty much all gone now.
Time heals all wounds. Ellsberg was a villified as Assange is now. But the decades of Bread and Circusses have dult your memory till it now seems all quant and harmless.
Those who dare to stand out are often the oddballs of society. And society rarely looks on them kindly. Nobody likes someone who rocks the boat especially while they are sitting in it.
So you have realized that history is not a straight line. Good for you. Now realize this. History books are written by people and people have motives.
History is NOT what you read.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just recently a Swiss Bank employee gave to Wikileaks information related to a few thousand or so customers who have "secret accounts".
So now we've gone from government secrets to the private information of individuals. This is the Slippery slope in action. Sure...some will say these are tax cheats and deserve it, but the person who leaked this has no idea if these people actually cheated on their taxes.
Next, it will be private information of people who are of some political persuasion the leaker happens to dislike.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Google already famously fought Bush's request to hand over search data on all users and then changed their policies to anonymize logs sooner.
They also fought the government in Brazil in handing over data on a group sharing photos over Orkut. To my knowledge, this is the only know case where Google did eventually hand over government data, after a judge forced them to. And the data was a group of child pornographers sharing pics.
And then there is this:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-wins-floating-data-center-patent/17266
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I dare say history is what u read, but not what actually happened with ALL the diversity of life.
Some people read history, very few make it, and THEN someone else writes about it. Then the tea party and ID proponents rewrites it;)
Steeltoe anonymized;)
Anarcho-Capitalism leaves no room for the welfare state, which means that quality of life in your utopia wuold be lower than some countries currently existing. Give up your juvenile dreams of fighting the system or whatever, and try instead to bring aspects of the Nordic countries to wherever you live.
yes, they hold part of responsibility , but the biggest part is on users who publish their personal infos then proclaim not to be published.
His comments are especially appropriate in the context of another recent article: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/01/19/2018206/US-Supreme-Court-Says-NASA-Background-Checks-OK
The waiver that the gov't is demanding that "low risk" contract employees, who don't deal with classified or even particularly sensitive information, sign lets them get access to anything they want from the googles and facebooks and twitters of the US.
Why is not possible to to have a higher quality of life without a welfare state than with one? Everything else is not the same of course.
Take a state in which certain members are rounded up and sent to gas chambers - say the Jews, the homosexuals, and the liberals. And in which anyone can be taken by the government and sent to the salt mines on a whim. And in which nobody is allowed to leave the state. But which has a welfare system in which the government pays the unemployed, the elderly, the sick, etc a good income (though of course most of them are just sent to the salt mines).
And another state which enshrines civil liberties and the government isn't allowed to kill on a whim, sending someone to prison requires convincing a jury that they should be. Travel is completely unrestricted. But there's no welfare system. The sick, the elderly, and the unemployed are forced to rely on the charity of others.
Are you really absolutely certain that the first state has a better quality of life than the second? You realy can't think of a case in which the non-welfare state would have a better quality of life than some other welfare state?
As a Canadian, I'm concerned about so many US companies having information about me, which they (may) make available to a foreign ( i.e., US ) government.
Even worse are companies doing work for the Canadian government, such as Loughheed and the Canadian census. Will our census information be stored somewhere in Tennessee or Idaho? Will US government employees be searching through Canadian data, searching for marijuana users or criminal Darwinists?
Looking to the application/cloud service providers to protect your personal data is like looking to a car dealership to tell you when you *really* need that repair. If they think it's in their best interests to protect their customer's data, they will -- but it's costly for them to do so (even to use encryption for all stored personal data), so what's their motivation? AND do we want other people protecting our data? It's our job to protect our data ... what we need are privacy laws/protections/policies that make it easier for us to control what's stored on us, when, where, for how long and how to get rid of it. I smell a booming area for Silicon Valley startups offering tools that hunt out info on you and walk you through the steps to get rid of it.
Julie
www.opensourcesubnet.com
In other news, Ellsberg tells sharks they have a growing responsibility to protect us from marine predators...
The maintenance of a welfare state requires people to care about their fellow citizens enough to accept high taxation for their sake. Barbaric murderousness is thus considerably less likely.
I can't think of a state that has existed in real life which has a high quality of life without having a health welfare system. There's plenty of states that have little to no government intervention and equally little government welfare. Places like the Bahamas. All that happens there is that wealthy people create shell companies there, but actually "live" in nice places with very healthy welfare systems.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Sooner than later.
The technology is there. I think it is time we finally start to encrypt information stored on web servers. Keeping the contents of email on servers encrypted is fairly do-able. But keeping facebook information private is a bit of an oxymoron. Someone could also produce a USB key which decrypts data (assuming a public/private key system) so that the private keys of individuals could be somewhat limited in how many copies need to be made. Still the headers of email, would be public, but if the account is anonymous and at least one reliable anonymizing mail relay is used, the system could work. I myself don't see my privacy as a big deal. Its the fact that the total privacy of all individuals is being compromised. That means any goverment or corporation able to access and search the data of Google or Facebook could quite easily suppress dissent or stop negative publicity. The email accounts of journalists are especially a concern.
For social networks, I think the solution, is to decentralize the system, encrypt it, and open source it, so it cannot so easily be searched and stored. Diaspora, while still in alpha, seems like a good direction to go. If the user's data is stored encrypted, then the user could issue and revoke public keys associated with the data. In this way "friends" could be managed instead of a simple binary flag in a centralized type system. The issuance and revocation of public keys would also allow for white lists to finally be made to combat spam. If one large internet mover (hear me Google?) started this initiative, then it would start to gain some real traction.
No system is perfect, but the the current system can be very much improved upon.
No one said anything about any "utopia"! I'm talking about the pure hard science of economics. (Not to be confused with the socialist corruption of economics that is based on political cronyism and not empirical reality.)
This is the creationism vs evolution debate applied to economics. Human ignorance and failure to understand complex emergence-based systems leads to perceived need for top-down order, whether from the church or from the state. Blind faith in coercive monopolies (governments) cannot reliably produce objectively valid results compared to a scientific process of open inquiry, open experimentation, and individual responsibility for the results (free market capitalism).
The Nordic Potemkin Villages are moderately wealthy (though still much poorer than comparable U.S. states), because they have been the most capitalist countries in the world for centuries, and it takes more than a few decades of welfare statism to destroy it, but their days are numbered. Every time those countries move to the left their economy nears collapse, so they move back to the right, and in spite of high government spending they have some of the highest levels of economic freedom anywhere in the world, which, along with cultural momentum, is what's keeping them afloat.
Private charity is an order of magnitude more efficient at providing for poor people than a government monopoly, because private institutions exist in a competitive environment and are directly accountable to their donors for providing cost-effective results. Government bureaucrats only care about their job security - the more they screw up, the better off they are.
I mean, I agree with all that, but I don't really get the logic when I really think about it.
I guess it should be called public data or just data.
There is nothing personal there anymore. Word "personal" lost on meaning. Every sentence with personal in it, is just a phrase.
"sending someone to prison requires convincing a jury that they should be"
I'm a tad suspicious of the US legal system due to the fact that the US has ~4% of the gobal population and ~25% of the global prison population.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.