Big Data, dear new Monster

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“Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.” Solzhenitsyn

As highlighted once more by the recent Verizon and PRISM scandals, mass surveillance is a reality. The increasingly centralised architecture of the internet makes spying easy: having access to ten companies’ servers means having access to the private lives of billions of people. This scandal has helped bringing surveillance into the public eye: but realisation is only the first step towards change. Today, a week after the Guardian’s article, the French press is still full of related coverage! People may be interested in this topic, after all!


Surveillance, a political question
I have (used to have?) the bad habit of blaming “technological progress” for the nightmarish surveillance it enables. Powerful entities’ ability to process huge amount of data makes possible a constant and reflexive monitoring of our behaviour.
Trying to be constructive, I will for now stick to the “there is no bad technology, only bad uses of technology” motto. And the best way to fight harmful uses of technology is political activism.

A global movement of citizens is the only way to have privacy established as a new pillar of our political systems -demanding it to be considered as one of the basic civil liberties that have to be protected.

Those who are joining the fight now will be happy to learn that the technical and ideological basis of this movement exist! For the last 30 years the hacker community has been building tools, systems and ideas with freedom, empowerment and privacy at their core.

Choose inherently privacy-protecting communication systems
eMail, instant messaging, social networks or phone calls carry a tremendous amount of information about us, as content or metadata. Aggregated, all the small pieces of information collected give impressively precise pictures of who we are, what and who do we like, dislike, have interest in, what is our normal behaviour and so on. With time passing the daily formation of our thoughts, ideas, opinions and personality can be studied -and used. The government doesn’t care about your diet or favourite pizza. Patterns are what tells a lot, we are facing profiling at a scale yet unknown. Knowledge is power. Why are we, as societies, giving so much power to those who are already in powerful positions, corporations or governments?

As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is, looking at those numbers, and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names and they’re not looking at content. But, by sifting through this so-called metadata they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.

President Obama, June 7 2013
Bouh

The technology underlying the services we use can provide strong protection for users if it is based on a few principles: a decentralised architecture, the possibility to use encryption, Open Standards, implementation in Free Software


Some concrete ideas

Use end-to-end encryption for your email:
GNUPG offers email protection based on public and private keys. For it to work, both sender and recipient must use it, its strength relies on peer to peer dynamics and everyone’s involvement. For beginners, Enigmail, a Thunderbird add-on, is fairly easy to use. If I was able to install and use it, anyone can do it!

Until recently, if the government wanted to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, they had to expend a certain amount of expense and labor to intercept and steam open and read paper mail. Or they had to listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversation, at least before automatic voice recognition technology became available. This kind of labor-intensive monitoring was not practical on a large scale. It was only done in important cases when it seemed worthwhile. This is like catching one fish at a time, with a hook and line. Today, email can be routinely and automatically scanned for interesting keywords, on a vast scale, without detection. This is like driftnet fishing. And exponential growth in computer power is making the same thing possible with voice traffic.

Philip Zimmermann, Why I Wrote PGP

What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he’s hiding. Fortunately, we don’t live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There’s safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.

Philip Zimmermann, Why I Wrote PGP

Encrypt your instant messaging:
XMPP is a widely used encryption-friendly Open Standard enabling people to create decentralised networks which are hard to track and control. Used with a Free Software client it allows you to chat in freedom. It can be combined with optional encryption add-ons like ‘Off The Record’ for Pidgin. Encrypted Voice OverIP services also exist but I don’t know much about it.
With Google discontinuing Google Talk (using XMPP), my buddy list will soon be 100% geeky. Friends, join us! Here you can find a simple How To.

Use a pro-privacy social network:
there are pro-privacy, decentralised social networks which let users decide where their data is stored, when it is deleted and what is shared with whom. As they are networks, each new person joining it makes it more attractive for others. Top of the list of privacy protecting social networks is Diaspora* – a Free Software, decentralised web application which has no central data store.
I tried to use it when I left Facebook, but quickly lost interest in the whole social network thing. Now may be the right time to have a look at it again…

Use Free Software and Open Standards:
Free Software and Open Standards put users and programmers in control. Without the four freedoms of Free Software (use, study, share, improve) the tools mentioned above could not have been created.
Even if you don’t program, using Free Software and Open Standard protect you and protect the technology and the ideas behind it. The more users the more solid in the long-run Free ICT systems will be.


The urge of advocacy
Empowering technologies become as powerful as their user and developer base is broad. Raising awareness about the need for privacy and about existing freedom-protecting technologies are two sides of the same struggle.

Here are some links which I find extremely useful to advocate digital freedom:

Join or support one of the many organisations or projects fighting against surveillance. Some are building technical tools, some are influencing legislations other are raising awareness about the importance of privacy and digital freedoms… Join the momentum!