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Daniel Ellsberg On WikiLeaks, Google and Facebook

Posted by Soulskill on from the locking-out-big-brother dept.

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.

25 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. I dare say by Grapplebeam · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those companies shouldn't have all our information either.

    --
    There is no -1 Disagree.
    1. Re:I dare say by discord5 · · Score: 2

      Those companies shouldn't have all our information either.

      Now if we can only convince everyone to stop giving out their information to them.

      Let's take a look at facebook and twitter alone. I don't have an account, but sure enough some of my friends have public profiles. After about 10 minutes of googling I've found out that a friend of mine is nearly done building a house (with the address included, ideal for stealing building materials, such as copper tubes which is worth quite a bit these days), a woman I know has a bladder infection (really? why is this on the Internet?), a coworker has just gotten an achievement for a videogame that posted it on twitter (during work hours, productive friday I assume). A little googling reveals quite a lot these days, and most of the time it's stuff people put online without thinking about who can read it.

  2. Personal data == money by djlemma · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Personal data == money by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's how things seem work these days

      Exploiting personal data for profit is nothing new. Spies, snitches and blackmailers have been doing that for millenia. And conning people out of giving out their personal data isn't new either. The internet just makes suckers get suckered faster and in the comfort of their own living room.

      --
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  3. An admirable man by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:An admirable man by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What Ellsberg did can be seen as patriotic, but Assange is not and was not a U.S. citizen, so even if you think there was a value in having the information leaked, he did not do it for love of country

      All the more reason to respect Assange. Love of humanity is a more respectable motive than love of country.

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    2. Re:An admirable man by bberens · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't think Assange is as radical as you might believe. Something tells me if someone leaked complete/accurate documents on how to make nuclear weapons he would be unlikely to publish them. He's already exhibited the behavior of filtering some (all?) leaks through major international news organizations to minimize the danger to others. It would be really interesting to see what he's redacted.

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    3. Re:An admirable man by Trailwalker · · Score: 2

      Assange was simply trying to embarrass the U.S.

      If this is true, Julian was wasting his time. The U.S. government does this regularly, all by itself.

    4. Re:An admirable man by bhartman34 · · Score: 3, Informative
      Well, let's start here:

      Asked why WikiLeaks did not review all of the Afghan war logs before releasing them last month to make sure that no Afghan informants or other innocent people were identified, Schmitt said that the volume of the material made it impossible.

    5. Re:An admirable man by gambino21 · · Score: 2

      I'll ask again: How are Assange's motives even a little altruistic, based on the evidence?

      How about the fact that he is putting himself at great risk by exposing unethical and unlawful behaviour of the most powerful country in the world. There is a possibility that he will be locked up indefinitely in an American prison somewhere and not given a trial. Leading American politicians have called him a terrorist and/or called for his assassination. By making himself the face of Wikileaks, he's basically putting a big target on his head. And what does he get in return, fame? Maybe some money from a book deal which will likely be spent on legal fees. Would you trade places with him?

    6. Re:An admirable man by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      > How are Assange's motives even a little altruistic, based on the evidence?

      He helped those people targeted for assassination by a corrupt African government.

      But that was their first leak. You obviously weren't paying attention to WikiLeaks way back then. Just so you know, they've been leaking things for *years* before they got that stuff on the USA that put everyone into patriot mode, including all kinds of criminal wrongdoing that people would have liked to keep bottled up.

    7. Re:An admirable man by bhartman34 · · Score: 2

      > Assange leaked documents for the sole purpose not of informing people (because most of the information had come out), but to embarrass the U.S.

      Really? You don't think he found it unconscionable that our military contractors had hired "dancing boys" (underage male prostitutes) or you do think that had come out before?

      That wasn't part of the Afghan war diaries. That was a diplomatic cable. And no, I don't think he found it unconscionable. I think he decided it would be embarrassing for the U.S. And in fact, the incident was reported before WikiLeaks leaked the cable. The new information is that the Afghan government tried to squash the reporting.

      And what about when he leaked the information on assassination plans by a corrupt African government (his first leak). How did that come about to embarrass the USA?

      I have no reason to believe it did. We were discussing the Afghan situation, not Africa. Anyway, pointing to one or two incidents in the flood of documents released by WikiLeaks doesn't absolve Assange. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

    8. Re:An admirable man by Hatta · · Score: 2

      He has exposed many bad deeds at great risk to his safety and comfort. That sounds like altruism to me. I can't read minds, so I don't know what his motives really are. But I don't see anything that suggests otherwise. I would do the exact same thing in his position, but for fear of my safety.

      Also, based on your other posts you seem to think that Assange having political motivations excludes altruism as a motive. I would argue that altruism requires political motivation.

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    9. Re:An admirable man by bhartman34 · · Score: 2

      He has exposed many bad deeds at great risk to his safety and comfort. That sounds like altruism to me. I can't read minds, so I don't know what his motives really are. But I don't see anything that suggests otherwise. I would do the exact same thing in his position, but for fear of my safety.

      You don't have to read his mind. You can look at what WikiLeaks leaks, and how it leaks it. You can also read his interviews (such as the one he did with TIME).

      Also, based on your other posts you seem to think that Assange having political motivations excludes altruism as a motive. I would argue that altruism requires political motivation.

      Altruism is a selfless concern for others. Assange isn't doing this out of a selfless concern for others. He's doing it out of a concern for himself (the world he lives in, the way people see him, the ideologies he espouses).

      Donating to a charity that you don't benefit from is altruistic. Donating a kidney is altruistic. Running into a burning building to save a stranger is altruistic. Leaking documents of one's political enemies (whether they're good people or bad people, by any definition) is not.

  4. Eheh by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --

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    1. Re:Eheh by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      History books are written by people and people have motives.

      History is NOT what you read.

      You're right. HIstory books can't possibly represent the entire depth of human experience for each historical event. Just different people at the time an event is occurring will see that event differently and remember different details due to seeing the world through different individual filters and having different motives, the same thing occurs among historians. The good thing is that while history books are written by people, all with their own motives and their own filters, there are a lot of history books and a lot of historians, and the best research is always peer reviewed. So while we can't get a 100% accurate accounting of the past that represents the entire depth of human experience for that event, if we do enough research we can get a pretty good idea.

      And Ellsberg was quite villified; the good news is that this generally means that as villified as Assange is now, history will probably remember him quite differently. :)

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    2. Re:Eheh by mcgrew · · Score: 2

      But the decades of Bread and Circusses have dult your memory till it now seems all quant and harmless.
      Did you mean "dulled"?

      Urban Dictionary: dult
      a deliberately dumb or dull insult, used when replying to someone who said or
      wrote something stupid or insipid.

      www.urbandictionary.com/define.php%3F... - Cached - Similar

      Now realize this. History books are written by people and people have motives.
      History books are written by historians. Physics books are written by people, and people have motives.

      Have a real history book about the 1920s; the book's full text is at the link, gratis. This book was required reading in a mandatory undergraduate level history class I took at SIU in the late seventies (I still have the paperback version). It seems that a lot of what went wrong in the 1920s was exactly the same as the 2000s, including a drug prohibition (the drug alcohol in the '20s), stock market crash, and a housing market meltdown (obviously, the 1929 crash and its resulting depression was worse).

      This book is an attempt to tell, and in some measure to interpret, the story of what in the future may be considered a distinct era in American history: the eleven years between the end of the war with Germany (November 11, 1918) and the stock-market panic which culminated on November 13, 1929, hastening and dramatizing the destruction of what had been known as Coolidge (and Hoover) Prosperity.

      Obviously the writing of a history so soon after the event has involved breaking much new ground. Professor Preston William Slosson, in The Great Crusade and After, has carried his story almost to the end of this period, but the scheme of his book is quite different from that of mine; and although many other books have dealt with one aspect of the period or another, I have been somewhat surprised to find how many of the events of those years have never before been chronicled in full. For example, the story of the Harding scandals (in so far as it is now known) has never been written before except in fragments, and although the Big Bull Market has been analyzed and discussed a thousand times, it has never been fully presented in narrative form as the extraordinary economic and social phenomenon which it was.

      Further research will undoubtedly disclose errors and deficiencies in the book, and the passage of time will reveal the shortsightedness of many of my judgments and interpretations. A contemporary history is bound to be anything but definitive. Yet half the enjoyment of writing it has lain in the effort to reduce to some sort of logical and coherent order a mass of material untouched by any previous historian; and I have wondered whether some readers might not be interested and perhaps amused to find events and circumstances which they remember well which seem to have happened only yesterday-woven into a pattern which at least masquerades as history. One advantage the book will have over most histories: hardly anyone old enough to read it can fail to remember the entire period with which it deals.

      As for my emphasis upon the changing state of the public mind and upon the sometimes trivial happenings with which it was preoccupied, this has been deliberate. It has seemed to me that one who writes at such close range, while recollection is still fresh, has a special opportunity to record the fads and fashions and follies of the time, the things which millions of people thought about and talked about and became excited about and which at once touched their daily lives; and that he may prudently leave to subsequent historians certain events and policies, particularly in the field of foreign affairs, the effect of which upon the life of the ordinary citizen was less immediate and may not be fully measurable for a long time. (I am indebted to Mr. Mark Sullivan for what he has done in the successive volumes of Our Own Times to dev

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  5. Google by Enderandrew · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

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  6. Re:Slipper Slope Illustrated by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You are assuming that Wikileaks isn't going to censor the list to prevent that type of data going public, or that these accounts belong to individuals for that matter. While I'm sure that some of them will do, it's also possible that the list will include shell accounts for corporations and other organizations, possibly including organized crime and may even shed some light on the whereabouts of the billions that have been salted away by tin-pot dicators and other corrupt government officials. From what I've read about the leaker of the data the point of the leak seems to be more about what the Swiss banks are turning a blind eye to than the private finance details of individuals and chances are the leaked details will be focussed on this rather than some random Joe Public who has avoided paying some taxes.

    I guess we'll find out in a few weeks though, unless the Bank of America data is going to follow the Cables.

    --
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  7. It's one thing when it's your government by TomDLux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  8. If it's in their interests, they'll protect it by Julie188 · · Score: 2

    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

  9. Time to encrypt information stored in the cloud by jonniesmokes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  10. Re:Slipper Slope Illustrated by sycodon · · Score: 2

    As long as the government continues to look the other way when the wealthy commit crimes (a readily provable truth) it would be unethical for someone with the ability to do so to not refer the matter to the public.

    So you are good with anyone deciding that some person has comitted a crime and deserves to have private information leaked?

    Again, as long as governments operate this way (another demonstrable truth) playing by the same rules is more than reasonable.

    So, since "government" leaks private information, then anyone can leak private information, even if the subjects are not in the government? Ever here what two wrongs add up to?

    --
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  11. Re:I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's simple. The boss has the right to know what his employees are doing on his time as he's paying for it. In democracy the government is supposed to be working for us as we are the ones financing it, ergo we are it's boss and it's our employee.

  12. Re:I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So it's OK to protect the information of individuals from the government but it's not OK to protect the information of the government from individuals?

    Pretty much. Privacy is something that only a person can have, and government is not a person.