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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.
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!"
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.
Well, at least Diaspora wasn't designed from the ground up to facilitate this sort of spying, and has as one of its design goals attempting to prevent such unwanted breaches of privacy. They may not always be successful, but such efforts I consider a fair sight better than Facebook, which was on the other hand designed from the ground up to convert its users' privacy into revenue.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
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.)
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.
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."