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Anti-Terrorism Hypothetical: Bulk Scanning of Hosted Files? (justsecurity.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The tech community has spoken: we don't want the NSA or any other government agency running bulk surveillance on us, and we don't want tech companies to help them. But Bruce Schneier points out an interesting hypothetical raised by Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain: "Suppose a laptop were found at the apartment of one of the perpetrators of last year's Paris attacks. It's searched by the authorities pursuant to a warrant, and they find a file on the laptop that's a set of instructions for carrying out the attacks. ... The private document was likely shared among other conspirators, some of whom are still on the run or unknown entirely. Surely Google has the ability to run a search of all Gmail inboxes, outboxes, and message drafts folders, plus Google Drive cloud storage, to see if any of its 900 million users are currently in possession of that exact document.
If Google could be persuaded or ordered to run the search, it could generate a list of only those Google accounts possessing the precise file — and all other Google users would remain undisturbed, except for the briefest of computerized 'touches' on their accounts to see if the file reposed there." Zittrain asks: would you run the search? He then walks us through some of the possible complications to the situation, and the pros and cons of granting permission. His personal conclusion is this: "At least in theory, and with some real trepidation, I'd run the search in that instance, and along with it publicly establish a policy for exactly how clear cut the circumstances have to be (answer: very) for future cases to justify pressing the enter key on a similar search." What would you do?
If Google could be persuaded or ordered to run the search, it could generate a list of only those Google accounts possessing the precise file — and all other Google users would remain undisturbed, except for the briefest of computerized 'touches' on their accounts to see if the file reposed there." Zittrain asks: would you run the search? He then walks us through some of the possible complications to the situation, and the pros and cons of granting permission. His personal conclusion is this: "At least in theory, and with some real trepidation, I'd run the search in that instance, and along with it publicly establish a policy for exactly how clear cut the circumstances have to be (answer: very) for future cases to justify pressing the enter key on a similar search." What would you do?
What about false positives - like if a document has been mass-mailed or put as a part of a story etc.?
I an imagine that we would end up into a situation of "guilty unless proven innocent".
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Other email providers exist, which ones do we force or ask to scan all their documents?
Do we force companies to scan theirs too?
Get developers to add backdoors scanners to all their software?
This isn't a new problem.
Even though it's hypothetical, it's still dumb.
Once the government has the ability to scan files belonging to hundreds of millions of users for a specific document, it might be easy to broaden that. Searches for similar documents. Searches for a standard set of illegal materials - say known child porn images. Searches for copyrighted materials like movies and audio.
Specifically searching for a specific document with a known like to terrorism doesn't bother me, but the extensions do. I absolutely do not want to give the government the right to search for anything illegal - and I don't see a clear way to enforce the distinction.
The innocent have nothing to fear, but there are few absolutely innocent people
How about searching the account of the one person they've identified to find out which other accounts he had mailed that to?
Then the government can get warrants to search those accounts as well.
As long as they are not in another country or otherwise protected or delete all records after a certain time.
Too complicated for me. We should refer this one to Bennett Haselton.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Lets deal with threats like ISIS at their source rather than playing wack-a-mole with our liberties here at home.
The problem with this search is that government is too big and too unaccountable to be allowed that capability. Governments and law enforcement agencies routinely act unjustly. They use violence and threats needlessly, acting as bullies rather than public servants. And they are almost never punished when they commit crimes.
If governments showed humility and served the public, maybe you'd consider letting them search something occasionally. But that sort of government seems like an impossible fantasy these days. So no. Not until they prove they can be trusted -- which unfortunately means probably never.
This didn't make the DHS smarter. It only made Bruce dumber.
Let's start with his example: the Paris attacks. The Paris attackers plotted everything using... wait for it... SMS. Just about the least-secure communications system ever devised. About the only way they could have fucked up worse would be if they planned the attacks inside a police station, talking to each other with bullhorns. That's not surprising, of course; the criminal geniuses whose masterplan was "get guns and shoot people with them" aren't going to think of using encryption, decentralized communication, or anything else that even the average slashtard knows how to do.
Now let's move on to Bruce's example. So the police capture or kill a suspect, find his place of residence, find his laptop, his laptop is unencrypted, the terrorist masterplan is just sitting there in plaintext, and... that's it? There aren't any other or better investigative leads? Their best and fastest strategy is to ask Google or whoever to scan all the data of 900+ million users? There's no other evidence on the laptop, no "electronic paper trail" from his online communications, nothing useful in his apartment, they couldn't recover his phone, they can't track the gun he used, they've got *nothing* except a mass surveillance dragnet? The cops just gotta twiddle their thumbs for several hours while Google/Apple/Microsoft/Yahoo/whoever process their request and get back to them? The same terrorist who was so smart he covered all of his tracks was also so dumb he left this vital, identifying, incriminating piece of evidence just waiting for the cops to find it?
It took me as long to read about this idea as it did for me to invent a countermeasure to it. Take some JPEG of a stupid meme, append the terrorist masterplan to the end of the file (or just stick it somewhere in the EXIF data), attach it to an email with the subject line "ch34p V14Gr4!!!!," and use a compromised webserver to bulkmail it your co-conspirators (and a few hundred thousand other people). I'm pretty sure even the dumbest terrorist can manage to download a JPEG, open it with Notepad, and scroll past the gibberish until he finds something he can actually read, and meanwhile the counterterrorism geniuses are working their way through a pool of suspects big enough to populate San Francisco.
This is fucking stupid, Bruce. You're asking me to buy some hypothetical scenario where the perpetrators are so dumb that this strategy would work and yet so smart that this is the best strategy that would work.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour wasn't unusual; the US Navy imagined exactly that scenario. Similarly, bin Laden didn't predict the damage from flying a plane into a building; recently published novels did that. Also, the US DHS spent a few years discussing every kooky attack vector there was. What exactly qualifies as "instructions" in this description?
It gets worse: The FBI profile for a terrorist includes possessing a Casio digital watch, or a pocket reference to the US constitution. The slippery slope here, is the government can use any criteria to scream "look, terrorist". Everyone forgets the US government has a lot of difficulty dealing with slippery slopes, instead choosing an all-or-nothing policy.
These are weasel words like "suspicious people" justifying mass surveillance. How many times has a government stopped every car on a highway and searched it? How many times have the police done a house-to-house search of a neighbourhood? Yet, when that personal 'space' is stored on the hard drive of some corporation, ransacking the 'neighbourhood' is encouraged, which sets a precedent: The corporation is responsible for national security; the hard drive can be searched at any time the government has a problem; plus, the government can push the cost of such ransacking onto the corporation.
To be clear on this ... while you may trust President A not to abuse this, that means that you must also trust Presidents B, C, D, etc. Eventually there will be someone elected that you really do not agree with.
And that person will have all the authority you supported for the people you did agree with.
And none of the inhibitions on abusing that authority.
Supposedly the USSR had copy machines etched so that it was possible to track down the source of aberrant materials. A means of tracking is also done with consumer copiers in the name of reducing fraud, but there is no law restricting it solely to that use.The Federalist Papers would be an anathema today.
Exactly how much further down this rabbit hole do we want to go? Yes, it is fine and good that these measures will only be used with the best of intentions, but if the difference between a police state and your liberal democracy is intentions, you are already fucked.