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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.
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.
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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?
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.