Mass Surveillance: Can We Blame It All On the Government?

Nicola Hahn writes Yet another news report has emerged detailing how the CIA is actively subverting low-level encryption features in mainstream hi-tech products. Responding to the story, an unnamed intelligence official essentially shrugged his shoulders and commented that "there's a whole world of devices out there, and that's what we're going to do." Perhaps this sort of cavalier dismissal isn't surprising given that leaked classified documents indicate that government intelligence officers view iPhone users as 'Zombies' who pay for their own surveillance.

The past year or so of revelations paints a pretty damning portrait of the NSA and CIA. But if you read the Intercept's coverage of the CIA's subversion projects carefully you'll notice mention of Lockheed Martin. And this raises a question that hasn't received much attention: what role does corporate America play in all of this? Are American companies simply hapless pawns of a runaway national security state? Ed Snowden has stated that mass surveillance is "about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." A sentiment which has been echoed by others. Who, then, stands to gain from mass surveillance?

Comments

depressed

[Noah Haders]

It's depressing. As a privacy-aware and generally technologically literate but not super savvy about encryption protocols, etc, I don't know what to do. I want to have some measure of privacy, but I don't want to step out of the mainstream phone ecosystem. These days is it mandatory for me to put my tinfoil hat on to get a bit of space to myself?

Re:depressed

[darkmeridian]

The only way to avoid technical surveillance is to keep everything sensitive away from email or phone calls or instant messages. There is no way to avoid being the target of the NSA and CIA if they really want to get your data. None at all. The NSA and CIA are creating these techniques against countries such as Russia, China, and Iran with devastating success. (Look at the Iranian nuclear weapons program getting hacked by Stuxnet.) You have no way to avoid the hacking of your data if they are really set in doing it.

Now, you can try to make your data so computationally intensive that the CIA/NSA hopefully will not go out of their way to hack your accounts. Email is NOT secure. But you can use PGP or whatever to try to encrypt your emails. You can encrypt your hard drives to try and avoid hacking. You can avoid the iPhone and move to an open source cell phone firmware such as Cyanogenmodâ"at least you have a CHANCE of someone finding any NSA/CIA backdoor. Use anonymous VPN religiously to avoid having the same IPs.

Otherwise, there's nothing much you can do except to decrease your electronic footprint. Everything you put out there is hackable.

Re:depressed

[Shakrai]

The only way to avoid technical surveillance is to keep everything sensitive away from email or phone calls or instant messages.

"Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink."

It was good advice before the electronic era and remains so today. For reasons a lot more applicable to us mere mortals than NSA and CIA.

Re:depressed

[Shakrai]

Richard Stallman suggests that if you carry a cell phone, you're being tracked.

Duh. That's kind of how they work. The cellular network can't deliver calls or data to your phone if it doesn't have a general idea of where you are. If Verizon knows then it's a simple matter for anyone else to find out, ranging from NSA to the private investigator working for your wife's divorce lawyer.

Thanks for the insight RMS.

Re:depressed

[kilfarsnar]

...next thing they're going to get rid of cash.

Oh, they're working on it. As with a lot of this stuff it is being sold as convenience. Most people don't appreciate the value and importance of cash and are happy to use Level Up or Apple Pay or whatever other payment method. I'm not saying those services are in league with NSA/CIA/etc. (though it wouldn't surprise me). But as the public gets more used to using cashless systems the idea or getting rid of cash will seem natural. Once that's done say goodbye to any anonymous transaction. There will be a record of every purchase we make, subject to review.

I use cash whenever possible, even when it isn't convenient. But I think it's only a matter of time.

Re:depressed

[guises]

There is no way to avoid being the target of the NSA and CIA if they really want to get your data.

This is too tin-foil-hatish. The thing is, they don't really want your data. They don't care about you, you are just one person who has gotten caught in their wide-ranging net. And further: I don't want to stop them from getting the data of people who they're really going after. If they have a genuine reason to pursue someone, sufficient to pass that tiny speedbump of getting a FISA warrant, then that is what they should do.

What I do want to stop them from doing is sweeping up everyone, including people who they don't really care about, in that wide-ranging net. So the objective is not to absolutely secure my emails and instant messages and phone calls, it's to ensure that getting those personal bits of data is sufficiently difficult that they're not going to do it for no reason. More than that: I am a lot less concerned with the NSA and the CIA doing this, who have some marginal level of oversight, than I am concerned with private companies doing this. The above poster "doesn't want to step out of the mainstream phone ecosystem," but what does that mean exactly?

Let's take it as a given that if you're running a closed-source operating system then you have no control over your own privacy. This rules out iPhones, but you can still use an Android phone with a third-party ROM. That's still mainstream, you can still run standard Android apps with that. Of course, you may have to turn to non-Google sources to get them (I get all my Android games from the Humble bundle, DRM-free). But those apps could be doing who-knows-what, so you'll need to firewall them. Not a problem, we're partway there. How about emails, phone calls, text messages, and location data? Well emails and text messages are essentially the same thing, and securing them means the same thing, the only roadblock comes from the lack of widespread adoption. If we want to noticeably increase our privacy, pushing GPG out there as hard as we can as something which everyone should be using is probably the largest difference that we can make. For you and your privacy, at least, getting your friends to use it should be your goal.

Location data: we've stopped our phone from sending back location data directly, but the phone company can still track us, and they do, by following what cell towers we're connecting to. Can we do something about that? Eh... you can get a SIM card with a pay-as-you-go plan which you register for using a fake name (or no name), paid in cash. This will help a little, but location data can never really be anonymous - how many people live in your house and travel to your workplace and back every day? Probably not too many. The same is mostly true for phone calls, they're not very securable. Encrypted VoIP doesn't work (at least in the US) with the way that data plans are structured, and if you're on a pay-as-you-go program then you don't have a data plan anyway. You could not use your cell service for calls, and only make VoIP calls from wifi hotspots, but this largely nulls the benefits of having a cell phone. I don't know what to say here, if you want to both own a cell phone and use it then regulation is really your only hope for privacy. On the plus side, by cutting out the phone manufacturer and and the various app developers there's only a single point of failure where your privacy is compromised: your phone company. If you can address that problem, somehow, then you've achieved a reasonable, but not bulletproof, level of personal privacy.

Have you stepped out of the mainstream phone ecosystem to do this? Partly. A lot of popular apps which rely on a network connection are off limits in this scenario. Facebook, first and foremost, but you're also excluding yourself from all of the other fad-of-the-moment social networking tchotchkes: Instagram, Yik-Yak, SnapChat, etc. It's not mainstream to care about privacy. I don't know what to say about that. If this is a problem for you, you can either give up or get better friends.

Re:i'm going to say something potentially unpopula

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

You are mixing random concepts here, applying the same label to them, and concluding that there is no privacy. Sounds like a straw man argument to me. But let's dissect it.

The first problem is comparing privacy from your family members to society as a whole. Sorry, but there is little power to be gained from peeking through the window of your older brother. And it will definitely not affect anybody else on your block. Now, if somebody were to drive down the street with a camera, film everybody and everything and put it on the Internet, that would be a whole different story. Google tried, and they had to blur faces, lower their cameras or stop altogether in different countries. The key difference is the scale of the operation, and number of people affected.

The second problem with your argument, is comparing police, state and government surveillance with private data collection. You might think Google, Microsoft, Facebook are evil, and should not hold your private data. You're probably right. However, none of these companies will kick down your door and shoot your dog. The very purpose of government surveillance is to retain power and control. That has always been the case, and the Internet and computers didn't change it. It has just made the rulers' job so much easier.

The beauty of total government surveillance is that it doesn't have to be total in order to achieve its goal. It is enough if most people merely believe they are watched most of the time, just like you describe. We start to self-censor. We'll be more careful about what we write, what we criticize, who we associate with. It fences our thoughts and ideas, and limits our ability to seek alternatives, which is precisely its purpose. The opposite is not privacy, it is freedom and liberty.

Sousveillance

[kulervo]

A discussion about surveillance and no one has said "Sousveillance"? Or mentioned David Brin?

As a purchaser of surveillance data, I can tell you that the answer to the question of the original post is a resounding: No.

A previous poster mentioned his license plate being tracked by the civil authorities. Well, I can tell you that corporations do that too. Tow trucks now come with cameras to read your plate to see if there is a repossession order out for your car. And when they OCR your car, they dump it into a database with a geotag, and then they SELL that data. To people like me. I won't tell you what I do with it, but it's to your economic detriment.

So, yes, people with power, the government, the corporations, the wealthy, are all going to use information to try to rule you. What are you going to do about it? Complain about tech un-savvy idiots? Hide like discrete rams among the sheep? Or are you going to stand up and look back?!

There's a lot of smug above this in the comments, so if you are really so much better than everyone else: Prove It. If you've got the Talent, pick up the tools and fight for what you think is right.

Beat Your Plowshares Into Swords

[Bob9113]

Ed Snowden has stated that mass surveillance is "about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." A sentiment which has been echoed by others. Who, then, stands to gain from mass surveillance?

Whoever has the best combination of intel and computer aided psychological operations tools. We The People can win, because we have the numbers on our side by an enormous margin. We just have to recognize that we're in a war and beat our plowshares into swords.

Learn big data. Learn information security. Learn hacking. Learn mesh networking and darknets. Learn cryptography and steganography. Build a client for your favorite communications platform and start spidering the new commons. Whatever tickles your fancy, or all of the above. Network with others with those skills. Get your friends to register and start aging off multiple social network personas, each with credible histories. Develop a following, or multiple followings with different personas, on new media.

Best case, none of the things that look like they are already happening actually come to pass, and you'll have a valuable career skill set. Worst case, you'll have the tools you need to defend the nation from a bloodless coup built on next generation propaganda.