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Eben Moglen: Social Networking "Creating Systems of Comprehensive Surveillance"
An anonymous reader writes "Eben Moglen, founder of the Freedombox project, has taken to yelling at journalists reporting about social networks. One wonders if this messaging will work to end proprietary, centralized social networks or not."
Moglen is right, and that reporter is a moron.
Given that Moglen is simply stating the obvious, that might as well have been the title of the story.
It seems to me the most germane question the reporter asked was, "What's the damage?" And Moglen failed spectacularly to answer it in anything approaching a coherent way.
Gotcha: If I happen to upload pictures of a couple of my friends (I generally don't) and those friends, unbeknownst to me, happen to be on the run from the Myanmar secret police (who are "evil"), then I've informed on them and they're going straight to the Ministry of Love.
Coulda used a slightly more concrete, real-world example, myself, by hey, I'll keep the warning in mind.
Breakfast served all day!
I teach different college level IT courses and Moglen's sentiments are always part of "Intro" courses.
RMS and Moglen, who would've guessed, 10 years ago, they'd be right?
Paranoia, it's not just for the fringe anymore.
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
It's a good thing Diaspora is totally secure and will prevent this sort of spying. Alternatives FTW!!!
Really, Freedombox? I'd never heard of that project before now, but I have most definitely heard of Professor Eben Moglen. I know him as the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, providing legal assistance to non-profit Free/Open Source Software developers, including among its clients the FSF (Moglen worked on drafting the GPLv3 for one), Wine, BusyBox, and Plone among others. I do think that this is a much more significant thing to mention about him.
And yes, he is absolutely right about Facebook and modern social media. All of the things he's said are obvious to anyone.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
When I first got on the Internet in the early 90s, it was the height of folly to put your personal information online.
Nothing I've seen in the intervening years has changed my opinion about that.
The solution is simple; lower the signal-to-noise ratio. During the early cold war years, they did that by radio jamming. Nowadays spam serves that purpose (intentionally or not). Instead of closing your FB account, create 5 fake ones, and stuff them full of crap.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
To state that he is stating the obvious would be stating the obvious so much so that the title of your post should be the same as mine.
I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about. I'm a married man so I get ads about meeting women and ovulation tests. I live in Vancouver and I've just finished a big house renovation, so I get ads for extended-stay suites IN Vancouver. Where's this big 'tracking' conspiracy if not even the mothership can get it right?
proprietary, centralized social networks or no
The entire history of the internet is one of moving from open and decentralized facilities to proprietary and central authorities.
IM: IRC -> a ton of separate proprietary apps
Discussions: usenet -> a ton of separate web-forum fiefdoms
Email: RFC based email -> proprietary solutions on facebook and so on
Personal web pages -> using central proprietary services like facebook
This all seems idiotic and totally the wrong direction to me, but there's no way of denying the fact that for whatever reason, Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet, as opposed to a more equal/peer-to-peer and open-standard approach.
moglen: the users are the victims and even the stuff you write which purports to be critical will do everything except telling people the central fact, which is they have to stop using.
reporter: I think that’s totally relevant and will definitely put it in. (N.B.: In the end, I did not put this in the story for several reasons, not the least of it was the fact that it was late and over word limit.)
Alienating reporters is a sure-fire way of getting your cause, no matter how good, totally disrespected. Even if they understand you, they never forgive.
In the long run, there are softer vectors to attack than social networking. A lot of these fears would apply equally well to private social platforms which were not encrypted, just the NSA etc. would have to scrape the data off the wires rather than having nice databases to mine. But the paydirt is still VISA and tax records and face recognition tied to passport databases. I bet social network data, when you get right down to it, is just a nice-to-have compared to the passport biometrics database combined with pen registers etc. for communications.
You might find http://guptaoption.com/cheapid interesting from this perspective: it's a proposed biometric ID card standard which blinds governments to the biometrics of their population except under special circumstances, and enforces this arrangement with strong cryptography. The passport and driving license databases are key, and this is one way to get rid of them.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
The good thing about social networking is being able to share. Unfortunately, the bad thing about social networking is also being able to share: what is shared will always inevitably include "actionable" details about either you or people with whom you have relationships.
What does Moglen propose to this woman and reporter as a solution to the problem? Why, that she and by extension everyone else simply not network, not share, perhaps not even have relationships... because the logical conclusion of those relationships is always the sharing of information that might prove useful to someone else for control or profit.
While I'm enough of an outcast that I can almost vaguely begin to follow Moglen's directive, most of the people in my life network couldn't. They don't want to exist in a social vacuum, nor could they even psychologically survive in a such a fashion.
The real conundrum here, which Moglen seems to ignore for convenience, is that when information is set free then that information is now free for everyone, for any purpose or intent, good or bad. I wonder... is what Moglen proposes, in terms of attempting to control and censor one's own information, really that different from a copyright regime? The only difference is who is doing the controlling. Ultimately it's all about self-interest, whether it's using information to do harm to others or concealing information in order to avoid harm from others. Why, isn't that precisely the reason that people and corporations and governments keep secrets, to avoid that information being used to their detriment by others? What a coincidence! So Moglen, in a paroxysm of epiphany, declares that rather than doing away with all secrets we should instead be keeping more of them? Genius!
Perhaps the solution is to live such a virtuous life that no skeletons, no actionable information, exists? Social networking is the small-town paradigm applied to the Internet: there's no point in trying to hide what you know or what you've done, because *everyone* will know about it soon enough.
If the data is available from a website, the government can crawl it. robots.txt is a polite request not to search the content of a website, not a physical lock or encryption.
It may be EASIER for the governments to find "miscreants" on social networks because they're all in one database and more easily scanned, but that definitely doesn't mean you're safe from prying eyes ANYWHERE on the internet. If you post it where others can read it, the three-letter agencies can, will, and DO read it.
Privacy on the internet is an illusion, nothing more. It has alway been so, will always be so, and cannot be otherwise if people are to share information.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I loved that rant.
Eben Moglen is SO friended.
Put a notice on my FB status that Im leaving and included a link to this article. Cue the Slashdot effect!
Just read the headline which reminded me of this case of 'surveillance' helping to solve a crime! Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire
I've been using Picassa on my PC, which includes facial recognition, the interesting part is the hundreds of people who I have know knowledge of who appear large enough to be recognized and grouped together, merely because they happened to be near someone or something I was photographing.
The news that Facebook is scanning all photo uploads with similar technology really makes me cringe.
Eben is right, and he's NOT paranoid... just ahead of the curve.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your facebook group.
Has anyone started a p2p social network that could replace facebook?
Something like, I dunno, Usenet but with Web content and your cached updates are encrypted with your public key?
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
This all seems idiotic and totally the wrong direction to me, but there's no way of denying the fact that for whatever reason, Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet, as opposed to a more equal/peer-to-peer and open-standard approach.
The proprietary product designed for the masses replaced jany number of argon-filled apps with clumsy UIs that only the techie ever found easy to use.
Yes, he did seem to yell at the guy but if you read the article, he was asking the stupidest questions. Then to remark that he "can't" just close his Twitter or FB account...I mean, at that point I would've yelled at him. I mean HE asked what he could do to stop having his information being misused. There's your answer. If you don't want to do it, then don't but there isn't some magic button to make everyone use your information in a nice way, you either stop putting your information out there or put it out there knowing people will use it for whatever they want to -- even if that ends up screwing you over.
Another idea is to create an anonymous or pseudo-anonymous account on Twitter or FB that doesn't use your real name. It will stop basic, cursory-level searches while still allowing you to 'be out there'. You need to be careful though because although Twitter doesn't seem to care, FB seems somewhat intent (in my experience) upon deleting accounts that seem like they're created with fake names.
Many people use failbook. Some of them understand that it makes a lot of valuable data. A number of those believe that the data is used by various government agencies. And a very few of those believe a governmental agency could do wrong.
This is why such bullshit keywords as "think of the children" and "terrorism" can be used to do just about anything. It's like people stop thinking and raise their hands up once they hear the magic words.
People are way too stupid and gullible. Sometimes I think they deserve what's coming to them. Too bad I will have to share their faith.
You cannot be serious. Well, if you are, the reason is: the government gets cc'd on every scrap of data they have.
...that nibbles at Facebook is A Good Thing. We need to destroy Facebook before it destroys too much of us, and our social interaction.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
So the only way he can tell people to get off of them is by going around yelling it.
He's right, but he's also a crazy neckbeard who shares RMS's talent for alienating anyone who doesn't already agree with him in every particular. With friends like that, the FSF hardly needs enemies.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I just opted not to use Facebook.
There are two perspectives on this matter that get conflated as they often do in similar situations. One is personal responsibility, the other is expectation of how people will behave. We often, upon concluding that it's unrealistic most folks will act rightly, instantly absolve ourselves of the same responsibility. In other words, because we don't expect others to do the right thing, we believe it's okay if we don't. Interestingly, this tendency to follow suit in misbehavior is one of the forces that we're factoring in when we conclude how people will act and how realistic right behavior is.
On the lighter side, it's the same old criticism from your parents about being a sheep along with your friends, as in "Would you jump off a cliff if all your friends did?" On the darker side, it enables things like The Holocaust.
It isn't black and white, granted. Game theory and philosophy of ethics barge in when we start talking about individual right action in the face of mass misbehavior. I've made my decision, though, to do right regardless of what's popular.
information wants to be free. Remember that? It cuts in all sorts of directions, and we all have to learn how to live in the new world. Afraid of secret police? Removing information from society is not the solution. Keeping governments from getting back to secret police situations is.