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Snowden: 'The Central Problem of the Future' Is Control of User Data (techcrunch.com)
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey interviewed Edward Snowden via Periscope about the wide world of technology. The NSA whistleblower "discussed the data that many online companies continue to collect about their users, creating a 'quantified world' -- and more opportunities for government surveillance," reports TechCrunch. Snowden said, "If you are being tracked, this is something you should agree to, this is something you should understand, this is something you should be aware of and can change at any time." TechCrunch reports: Snowden acknowledged that there's a distinction between collecting the content of your communication (i.e., what you said during a phone call) and the metadata (information like who you called and how long it lasted). For some, surveillance that just collects metadata might seem less alarming, but in Snowden's view, "That metadata is in many cases much more dangerous and much more intrusive, because it can be understood at scale." He added that we currently face unprecedented perils because of all the data that's now available -- in the past, there was no way for the government to get a list of all the magazines you'd read, or every book you'd checked out from the library. "[In the past,] your beliefs, your future, your hopes, your dreams belonged to you," Snowden said. "Increasingly, these things belong to companies, and these companies can share them however they want, without a lot of oversight." He wasn't arguing that companies shouldn't collect user data at all, but rather that "the people who need to be in control of that are the users." "This is the central problem of the future, is how do we return control of our identities to the people themselves?" Snowden said.
Pandemics
Civil and international war
The ongoing islamisation of the population
Pollution and the depletion of natural resources, including fossil fuels
Science denial
Donald Trump
The collapse of the European Union
America's sovereign debt
All of these things concern me more than control of my personal data.
Yes, control of my personal data concerns me - particularly my genome and corporations' attempts to patent something that is inherintly part of me and which they didn't invent. But the above issues are bigger problems.
Technology has often caused people's minds to change and develop. For example, the popular novel, and the stories, may have been the big thing which increased people's empathy for others in that period in history. Knowledge (awareness) is often transformative (for the mind).
So is this new world all about "companies controlling the info", or is it that there's so many organisations collecting information that, come 2050, everyone will wake up in the morning knowing what every politician had for breakfast that day and who they are meeting? Will we browse the supermarket aisles and, instead of seeing simple labels like "organic", we'll actually see the whole production chain history of that product?
And what will that kind of awareness do to the development of the human mind? We may look back at today's age and wonder in amazement at how simple-minded all our news and views about the world were. It may mean the end of ideologies and most religions. We're only just beginning.
...thats a problem of the past - and we-the-people have lost the war...
Feed the NSA and GCHQ just what they expect to see.
All the West has is data collection. Junk encryption supported by the big US and UK brands was the way in so offer keywords to the collectors.
So the NSA and GCHQ gets everything thanks to the support of US and UK brands.
Give the security services everything they could every want with digital collection.
Lots of online meetings, conversations, chats, forums, faith, cults, politics in every daily internet log kept by the ISP.
Make it interesting, get the contractor or gov worker addicted to the next days amazing fictional instalment. Add some story arcs over the years.
If your a journalist create a few dozen amazing whistelblowers and informants deep in gov or retired. People who have found a conscience after decades in gov and now just want to talk. Create a hint of their decades of documents and add future meetings to the cloud OS. Create a code that they can use.
Don't get fancy, just that material has been sorted and further clarification is needed.
Walk around with your cell phone in city areas, cafes full of "contacts" i.e. government workers and contractors.
Stop for 5 or 10 minutes during for a file hand over. It will show up nice on a map of cell phone movements.
A journalist cell phone stopping for a "meeting" can result in the questioning of 10's of security clearances in minutes. Ensure the contractors have to consider every phone thats next to a journalist everyday for weeks, months, years. Thats 100's of government workers and contractors who had trackable contact with a journalist known to have cultivated a lot of informants. Turn digital tracking into a script and a total work of fiction.
Make sure 100's of fictional files exist packed with keywords any gov would find interesting. Ensure all networked computers running everyone fav US consumer junk OS's.
Slowly a gov worker or contractor will slowly understand that its all fictional junk.
That is the real the problem with tracking your own citizens digitally. The ability for creativity outpaces digital collection that can only focus on keywords and can only afford to task so many contractors to read vast amounts of fictional material and make a determination.
Long term the security services will then have consider the option to task teams of 9 people in shifts per interesting person. Thats East German numbers of gov workers and informants to track one person who can use a consumer OS...
If the US and UK govs want the "normalisation” of government surveillance give them something to read.
Support the junk US bands, their developers, big brand cryptographers who only have the skills to help govs and fill your devices with fictional fun.
If your onto a real story, use your brain and paper notes, avoid CCTV, give your tracked phone to a friend for the day.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
is there a transcript someplace, rather read than watch a vid
By moving to Moscow? By way of Hong Kong?
Just kidding. Snowden is an excellent American. Living in Moscow. Odd when you care to ponder. Says much more about how effective bin Laden was than anything; ... still crazy after all these years.
indeed, certain things make no sense whatsoever. There is no reason why everyone shouldn't be more in control of their cyber services like Hillary was. Sure it scares the centralized power structure when people have more traditional levels of control over what is known and knowable about themselves. In Clinton's case that put the onus on her to provide the documents required, instead of the simpler situation of maintaining no control over the documents and instead storing them in the government cloud (which from Snowden's revelations about PRISM, we know includes Google/Facebook/alltheotherrecentralizedservices 'clouds').
To put it another way, it is 2016 jesus years, and the functionality in common inexpensive android mobile phones voicemail and callerid service is a massive regression compared to what common inexpensive landline users of the 90s had. The way we got here was a lot of very orwellian handwaving by large companies that ordinary people needn't and shouldn't be concerned with maintaining that level of tinfoil hat control over their data and functionality.
For instance, that there was a slashdot post recently about Trump's ability to send unblockable alerts to mobile phone users, is just something that from an engineering perspective is ridiculous. Everyone should have at least as much 'root' on their phone as is required to keep it fucking quiet even to the point of not caring about being alerted that some other city got nuked, or your neighbor's child was abducted. Now for fucking christs sake, I'm not in favor of helping out child kidnappers, but my phone is MY FUCKING PHONE.
Read The Message.
The above mentioned law, voted in France in... 1978 (!) offers a good start: government entities are allowed to collect user/citizen data and make databases out of it. But they are expressly NOT allowed to share it with others (even other branches of the govt). This should be expanded to the private sector. And it also should actually be _applied_ because in later years in France they've been stepping all over this law.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Remind us what country you're living in right now Eddie? Perhaps ask your mate Putin about government data control, misinformation and spying.
I agree with Snowden, think he made a great attempt on warning everyone, which unfortunately wasn't effective enough... there, I said it.
Here's the thing: data collection and the erosion of privacy is only the beginning. Government and big corporations are still not leveraging their power much, but they are building it, and in time they'll use it. I imagine it now as something like pollution right around the industrial revolution. The general population will be mostly dismissive of it's consequences, mostly because they cannot understand how much it'll affect them in the future, and how many economies are currently being built around it.
The majority will say that it's a worthy tradeoff for all sorts of reasons, usually rooted in fear or convenience. Fear of terrorism, fear of criminals, fear of the future, because it makes my life easier, because I get services I could not get otherwise, because I can call for Uber with my voice alone, etc.
"I have nothing to hide" or "my life is boring" arguments must be something pretty close to people in the past thinking "but I live in farmland" or "the air is clean enough in my garden/city". It's because dangers like those requires a certain level of abstraction and/or statesmanship that most don't have or can't be bothered with.
People can easily let go of fundamental democratic rights as long as they don't perceive it as a threat. Problem is, much as we're only seeing large scale disasters and climate change overall only now (and some are still in denial of the challenges we'll be facing from now on), the consequences of privacy erosion and large scale data collection will only be felt, fully leveraged and weaponized, in a few decades. By then, it'll already be too late to do something... we'll at most be able to mitigate consequences if we survive the onslaught.
Democracy relies on a delicate balance of power between governments and the people. What data collection essencially does is handle too much power in the hands of a few. Eventually, the imbalance of power corrupts. We might get lucky for a while with politicians/businesses who either don't want to make use of that power, or politicians who don't know how to, but with it just sitting there waiting for someone to seize the opportunity, it'll eventually happen.
It doesn't have to be anything like over the top dystopic fiction too, at least not for quite a while. Much like Hitler didn't get to form the 3rd reich overnight, lots of predominant muslin countries were much less radicalized in the past, and North Korea didn't just expontaneously form out of nowhere, changes are gradual.
You really don't need to be a genius to understand the problem though. The devices you use in a daily basis are a huge part of you now.
For mass surveilance, the main problem is going through all that data and picking what's relevant to use. This problem will get solved with AI eventually.
And then, whatever agency decides to use this will be able to pull your dossier and decide from a miriad of choices how to control you.
They'll know where you are, what you are doing, who are your friends, who you have been in contact with, what are your interests, what devices you use to further extract more information, what is your position in relation to politicians and laws, what or who can be used to change your mindset, what your weak points are, what blind spots you have, etc etc.
And all that is only considering that the data remains on a government or private company's hand without leakage. They still have an interest to keep the country in general intact, since they depend on it to thrive. All that data falling into the hands of hackers and criminals living in other countries, then the scenario gets a whole lot grimmer.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Every social media and other interaction added up to make a 'citizen score'.
"In this world, anything from defaulting on a loan to criticising the ruling party, from running a red light to failing to care for your parents properly, could cause you to lose points. And in this world, your score becomes the ultimate truth of who you are – determining whether you can borrow money, get your children into the best schools or travel abroad; whether you get a room in a fancy hotel, a seat in a top restaurant – or even just get a date."
I know people think government surveillance is new, but it isn't. In the 1800s the government routed all their telegraph lines through their offices so they could monitor them. Based on that monitoring, they arrested many journalists that they said were against the state. And *gasp* they didn't have a court order, or any oversight. Anything you send over a network is monitored. Anything. Networks are not secure. Never will be either, simply because the purpose of a network is to share information between endpoints. And with access anyone can be an endpoint on the network.
Why are we continually subjected to "Snowden Says"? It's not like he was some eminent security mind or data theorist. He's just some dork with a thumbdrive.
The merit of Snowden is to have pinpointed the lack of transparency, not to be a hero of privacy. Privacy is a lame concept, which mainly helps criminals from governments to street gangs do their things. Let's bet on transparency: your user data will be valueless and the political system will have no choice other than comply.
Snowden has offered to come back home and go to prison. It is time for him to put his words into action and return to the United States.
His past actions and success at a very high risk task give me confidence that privacy is an important issue for him, even more than personal liberty, from there I conclude he has given a lot of thought to these issues, so what he says is related to topic of user privacy is likely to be well thought through and not first random thought that popped in his mind. If he starts talking about random topics I might up vote your comment.
This "dork with a thumbdrive" has actually worked on surveillance programmes and on projects to collect and make sense of our data. That should give his opinions some weight. In addition, in previous interviews he has shown good insight in matters of privacy. This is not some dimwit celebrity telling us how to vote or save the planet; but a knowledgable insider actually worth listening to.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Why are we continually subjected to "Snowden Says"? It's not like he was some eminent security mind or data theorist. He's just some dork with a thumbdrive.
You come across as an authoritarian, believing who says something to be important, and not what is being said.
His statements seem to hold up to logic, and appear to be well thought out and valid. That's the value.
His fame only serves to get his thoughts spread; it doesn't lend any credence or to his words, nor do they invalidate them.
If Snowden (or Trump, for that matter) says something valuable, I'll check it out. If he utters twaddle, I'll discard it just as much as I'd discard balderdash from any other person.
Why are we continually subjected to "Snowden Says"? It's not like he was some eminent security mind or data theorist. He's just some dork with a thumbdrive.
My thoughts as well. He hasn't really said anything new or insightful, just re-hashing stuff you can read on /. any given day. But I suppose since it is uttered by his lips, some will fawn over his infinite wisdom.
WTF has he said that hasn't been said 1000 times already?
"Snowden acknowledged that there's a distinction between collecting the content of your communication (i.e., what you said during a phone call) and the metadata (information like who you called and how long it lasted)."
Snowden would also acknowledge that there's a distinction between being waterboarded and having a drink of water... but that doesn't mean the government hasn't waterboarded people.
You don't input it they don't collect it. It is just as simple as that. Companies dont care about you, and if they did they would care about your so called privacy and your data that you input on many sites even this one. You want privacy controlled, then look no further then the person between the keyboard and chair. That is the biggest issue in today's social networked environment. Its not a Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, or other [insert company name here] problem. Please quit blaming big brother and companies for lack of privacy, and blame the user. I expect no privacy online as its the public domain, anything I send over the internet is on their for good for anyone to find. And I am too lazy to login to my slashdot account, so thats why I am posting under anon coward
"[In the past,] your beliefs, your future, your hopes, your dreams belonged to you"
They still do. It's just that some others know what those things are. You still get to pick them. And long before most people reading this were born, there were people who were interested in knowing what they are so they can sell stuff to you, and various non-marketers could get at that too.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
That's not really the point. Do you actually think /. is some widely read resource?
Snowden gets bigger news coverage by notoriety alone, which means that thing being said 1000 times already actually gets to more people.
Google is regularly referred to as the "world's largest private surveillance operation." Facebook owns the complete details of your life. AT&T hands them complete telecommunication records. Why does the government need intelligence agencies when private companies cache all the info they collect into massive data warehouses just waiting to be searched?
What if it were legislated/court ruled that an individual has a copyright interest in any and all data that is personally identifiable? Certainly a company recorded it, but _MY_ click created it. They of course can use it as necessarily intended (implied consent), but cannot copy and send it anywhere else without explicit (annual?) consent. Database holders might have the right to strip personal identifiers and average data from users (min 12?) then use the aggregates as they wish.
No he doesn't. I can't be bothered to check, but is this a headline news item on CNN? I doubt it. He gets a lot of coverage on ./, that's basically it.
This is why Uber's statement the other day was so ludicrous to me - I don't care how secure their systems are, I don't want them fucking tracking me in the first place (something their unfathomable arrogance won't allow them to acknowledge)! If a business model really relies on this form of stealing to prosper, it is not a good business model (likely not sustainable, either). The funny thing is, it likely ISN'T necessary for most, and just boils down to fucking greed.
The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10... He's a pathological liar, who hides behing "TOP SECRET" for an explanation as to why he has never done anything other than give pre-rehearsed interviews.
He was then employed for less than a year in 2005 as a "security specialist" at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a non-classified facility.[36] In June 2014, Snowden told Wired that this was "a top-secret facility" where his job as a security guard required a high-level security clearance, for which he passed a polygraph exam and underwent a stringent background check.[16]
(From Wikipedia)
He's a fame seeking sharepoint admin who abused the trust placed in him multiple times. The side effect of that was that we got to learn about the massive spying program but let's not pretend like Snowden is some genius hacker hero.
Possibly the most inconsequential post I've seen today. Also completely ignorant if the only news source you watch is CNN. Every major media outlet has its share of topics it won't cover; Snowden gets on the front page of BBC News America at least once a week. He's on RT every single day, but that's a bit of a different matter depending on one's perspective.
If only there was a law to regulate all this data collection. Maybe we could call it the General Data Protection Regulation.
"The US election is a choice between Goldman Sachs and Donald Trump."
DJT, "Thanks Eddy, let me introduce you to the 5 GS employees I have already named to cabinet / executive positions in my administration.
While I am very concerned about my online privacy (and much more concerned in regards to megalithic corporations) those words out of one of Putin's propaganda mouthpieces makes me less concerned about my privacy & more concerned about what their game is.
WTF has he said that hasn't been said 1000 times already?
It's not so much what he said that was new. It's that he proved it.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
It is already too late. The laws in-place were not meant to and do not seem to do a decent job protecting anyone. This has led to corporations and the government to do things that Snowden mentioned. It has already happened and corporations are making huge profits off of it and the government is getting its benefit as well. Some one please explain how the we are supposed to get the two groups to suddenly stop doing what is profitable and convenient. Really, how?
Nice run-on. Periods are your friend.
While I agree with you that any strong ideology or just general identity is fundamentally weaponizable, I disagree that we are somehow moving away from it. People have simply replaced religion with ideology, nationalism and other equally powerful forces. It's not as clear perhaps, but it's still very much alive and well. Western liberal democracy and human rights for example: in my opinion, it is not some universal view but an ideology that is accepted and driven by large numbers of people around the world. Yet that ideology has been used, like any other group think, to rally people to arms, sometimes justly (battling fascists), sometimes through questionable means (battling Marxists with brutality in the third world for "the greater good"), sometimes through questionable sincerity (US interventionism in the post Cold War era from Kosovo to Iraq). All these things done under the banner of the Western Liberal Order that is now being challenged by Islamists, the Chinese, the Russians and others.
If you want to take a less extreme example, you can just look at domestic politics in the United States: passionate people who believe they are engaged in a life or death struggle to "protect the nation" from the "others (the Donald, the religious, the gays, SJW, facists, communists, etc.)" to stop a perceived evil (massacre of the unborn! trampling of civil liberties! oppression of people of color!) with some believing that more and more extreme tactics are needed.
It's hardwired into who we are as humans, and it doesn't take much at all to nudge people into action.
It is ironic that the champion of internet freedom was interviewed by Jack Dorsey, who has been deleting the Twitter accounts of anyone that strays from the approved narrative.
Why do you care what Martin Luther King Jr or Patrick Henry said?
Because courage (combined with good judgement) was an important part of their expertise, and courage just happens to be what America doesn't have any of. We are a nation of cowards.
Lost of dorks have thumbdrives, but how many actually use them to serve their country? Snowden did something more heroic than probably anyone reading this sentence. (I sure as fuck wouldn't want to live exiled in Russia, would you?) It was both a sacrifice and also done for the right reasons, in the cause of justice. We listen to him because we need more people to be like him, and maybe we want that to include ourselves, too.
And let's face it, the guy is saying the right things. Statements like "The answer to bad speech is more speech," are obvious common sense to us but in wider society it's downright controversial. I think a lot of dorks forget that! Stuff like that needs to be said over and over, not just assumed.
For some, surveillance that just collects metadata might seem less alarming, but in Snowden's view, "That metadata is in many cases much more dangerous and much more intrusive, because it can be understood at scale." He added that we currently face unprecedented perils because of all the data that's now available -- in the past, there was no way for the government to get a list of all the magazines you'd read, or every book you'd checked out from the library. "[In the past,] your beliefs, your future, your hopes, your dreams belonged to you," Snowden said. "Increasingly, these things belong to companies, and these companies can share them however they want, without a lot of oversight." He wasn't arguing that companies shouldn't collect user data at all, but rather that "the people who need to be in control of that are the users." "This is the central problem of the future, is how do we return control of our identities to the people themselves?" Snowden said.
How collecting metadata can be more dangerous than collecting data that lead to metadata in first place? Snowden speaks nonesense here. Then all the examples he is giving are related to data collection and not metadata collection. Your beliefs, your future, your hopes and your dreams are not lying in the metadata.
Frankly, Snowden is overrated on these topics. I am a bit tired he is given the microphone by fucking journalists which have no clue about what they intend to talk about.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Snowden has a hammer, and everything looks like a nail. IMHO, the central problem of the future is finding enough affordable energy and being able to deploy it without wrecking the environment.
Also, being able to detect and prevent Earth-colliding asteroids. If we had two years to divert a planet-killer, suddenly not caring if FaceBoook knows I bought a dildo.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Since nobody can afford to own their own home anymore, and there's no social safety nets, and all the jobs are being automated, so everyone will just get kicked out of their rented homes and die in the streets en masse.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Snowden is full of S**T. Next he will probably be saying that information placed on a server by God no longer belongs to God, but the sysadmin.
Even with slavery there was some type of internal freedom, because "the owner" only was owning the physical part and capacity, never what was inside the person mind ... until now.
The collective behavior indicates what I am trying to accomplish, what are my feelings, my thoughts. The data is there, the only needed thing is to dig enough.
For some time I have been trying to discover what it is exactly the "666" written on the Bible. Initially my thoughts were related with the DNA, as it is a number. It is simple, if you can code something inside it, then it is possible to locate you, as if this is a mark on your hand or your forehead. But really, there is a more simpler way to do this.
You don't need to change what the other person is ... what you need to do is to classify it, externally, and you will be able to control the person environment.. Do the person like red cars? Then flood the market with red cars and make them cheap enough or offer special credit facilities, everything designed around "statistics".
And if the person belongs to a "class" that you really don't like, then eliminate it from the market spectrum, send the person to an unknown corner. This is really scary.
What credentials does snowden have that anyone should care what he has to say?