How Google paved the way for NSA's intercepts - just as The Register predicted 9 years ago Much hilarity has greeted Eric Schmidt’s deeply sincere “outrage” at his “discovery” that the NSA was spying on Google. For example, Vanity Fair pointed Mr Schmidt to some helpful Google searches. But the NSA is merely treading in some well-worn footsteps – some of which were made by Google itself. Let us refresh your memory …
The point I started to eliminate Google was when they unified their privacy policy, which lets them match your web visits (from Google Analytics and Google adverts) to your searches, to your Android device, to your location, to your identity, to the YouTube videos you watch, even to the telephone number you give in case you lose the account login*
ALSO BE CAREFUL IF YOU USE CLOUD PRINT.
Those documents you print go through Google servers and hence through NSA data captures. If you print commercially sensitive data using Cloud print, business emails, identity document copies, political campaign leaflets, medical or financial documents, any customer data, or any other document of interest to a spying agency, then you are exposing that data to the NSA by using Cloud Print.
To get an idea of how unique your browser is, visit Panopticlick (link below), my browser is unique to 1 in 3.5 million, together with the IP address, it's totally unique. Google has this data now and the policy change gave them permission to make that link between all their sites.
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
For me, Gmail is gone, replaced by Yandex. Google has gone, replaced by DuckDuckgo (and waiting for a non-US search alternative). Android will be gone soon, replaced by a generic (non Google'ified) Android generic.
I am sympathetic a little for the NSA thing, but Google assembled this data for themselves, so of course others would grab it. They should not have assembled it, they should not have been allowed to assemble it.
* [Added] Oh I haven't even got the association data yet. By analyzing your location metadata, who you associate with, where you shop, political affiliations, who you sleep with and so on. NSA of course grabs that same data.
Good point on CloudPrint. One of the more interesting points brought out in the testimony given by the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ is that they are also interested in any intelligence that may present an "Economic Threat" to the UK. I can't speak for the rest, but it wouldn't surprise me if such were the case for the other four-eyes (pun intended). So be real careful about what you leave up, or transit through, the cloud about your business practices/dealings.
Thankfully I don't have to worry about these things anymore.
“Simply put, if a computer programmed by people learns the contents of a communication, and takes action based on what it learns, it invades privacy.”
So Spam Filters and the like are illegal too? Virus scanners? Send an email over the Public Internet and it will pass through several such systems with your knowledge or approval.
That definition is far too broad to be useful.
“Simply put, if a computer programmed by people learns the contents of a communication, and takes action based on what it learns, it invades privacy.”
So Spam Filters and the like are illegal too?
The problem here is that "learns" is not a term of art in IT or computer science, nor does it have a clear meaning in applicable law, just like "read". That was, after all, the whole point of the article this thread is commenting on. Numerous commentators seem to have missed this point. Rasch's warning was that Google was arguing that automated processing of text did not constitute "reading", because it did not involve "learning". So if Google's argument is accepted (by the courts, or the general populace, or whomever1), then "learn" is no more effective than "read" was.
If people want to draw lines in the sand, they must make them sharp and straight enough to mean something. "A computer ... learns" does very little to constrain interpretation.
1One of the problems with both Rasch's argument and the article is that they conflate the possible audiences for Google's argument. Is the issue that the courts might accept it, and deem privacy law inapplicable because machines are not "reading"? That's one danger. Is it that the citizenry will accept it, and decline to be outraged at their loss of privacy, because their texts are not being "read"? That's a different danger. Is it that government organizations with only the most tenuous inclination to follow the law, which they have largely suborned anyway, will be persuaded by it? Well, maybe, but that barn door appears to be swinging in the wind already.
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"We're clearing them with the NSA's Reg-sniffing snoopers first"
Either a case of Daily Heil or you are embarrassed to have your reasoning challenged. I tend to think it is the latter one. In short: USG reads telegrams since 1920s. ALL of them. Nothing has changed in their policies.
Encrypt or perish.
In my mind redefinition of "reading" is not the scariest thing about the current situation. Far more serious is the fact that the slurped information is stored indefinitely, without your permission or, until the Snowden era, knowledge. [Yeah, yeah, we all suspected - we are not a representative sample.] This means that this information can be reused at will, accessed by either algorithms or humans, and practically inevitably open to abuse.
Redefinition of "reading" becomes practically irrelevant once the information is stored in a persistent form. Were your mails, search queries, news items you click on, etc., processed by algos in real time in order to create some short-lived (!) statistical "profile" for ad targeting, and were the actual inputs deleted after processing, it would not be as big a problem.
While users agree that Google store certain information (hard to imagine mail, calendar, contacts, etc. be useful otherwise), I suspect that the vast majority of people don't realize how much information is stored (search queries, news items clicked upon, location from mobile devices - obvious to us here but not to John Q. Public), or that it is stored whether or not one signed off on ToS or created an account, or that i can be shared with 3rd parties. And the government having it all without a warrant is an altogether different kettle of fish, indeed.
Why do your think Xerography and microfiches were invented ? War (US Army and Navy copying all telegrams in the US ca. 1925) as the mother of every invention surely applies to these two technologies.
Need to store 5000 telegrams ? Put them on a microfiche.
Why do your think Xerography and microfiches were invented ? War (US Army and Navy copying all telegrams in the US ca. 1925) as the mother of every invention surely applies to these two technologies.
Oh yes, because there are no other economic drivers for document duplication and storage technologies. Try reading a little history. I recommend Yates, Control Through Communication. Not that it's likely to do you any good.
When the only tool you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
The predecessor of NSA, the Army and Navy intelligence offices read ALL telegrams as early as the 1920s. to that end they physically collected all telegrams from Western Union, Cable and Wireless and similar telegraph operators and brought them back next day. (source:Charles Bamford)
A certain Mr Yardley broke all Japanese diplomatic ciphers in the pay of USG so that they could read those for political gain (fleet limitation talks etc). Source: Bamford and Mr Yardley himself (he "snowdened" after Minister Stimson laid off Yardley and his skilled personell)
So they have a long history of reading messages IN TOTAL and this magazine wants to tell us they need any sort of legal technicality to read all emails ? That's simply irrational. The US Army is the same army as in the 1920s and so is the US Navy. Only the US Army Air Force is now called US Air Force. Certainly they inherited US Army customs. Air Force General Clapper, chief of US intelligence, is the modern form of General Der Nachrichtentruppe and flew with the 6994th security squadron in Vietnam listening to adversary radio emissions, producing emitter location fixes and transcripts.
Radio outfits such as the 6994th produced about 90% of useful intelligence in Vietnam and that means Clapper is the undisputed king of the secret government business and has been for a long time. They simply don't know any other effective way of gathering intelligence than Fishtrawling Intelligence (so to speak).
Source: 6994th security squadron website. Very interesting read.
Do we really think they need any permit to read each and every bit of internet communications ? They have given themselves the General Permission in 1921 or so. It has not been rescinded since.
Those were the days, weren't they!?
Commentards were a thing of the future and that bloke with the unspellable name spent half his day waffling on about a little known industry called music, and the other half reading all the letters he'd been sent (about music). A much more innocent time, when no one cared whether biting hands got you demotion in the search engine rankings, or not.
A time when Adobe Reader was only any good for reading stuff (not hacking someone elses PC) and Lester had yet to grow out of playmobil and into paper planes. When people could type more than 140 characters in one go, and liking something didn't necessarily involve a thumb. A time when only you knew that your cat was adorable and the longest duration video on a porn site finished four minutes sooner than was appropriate.
This was back when you needed a crane to get a laptop off your ... lap ... and the only tablets anyone wanted came from a bloke named Kev, who you met round the back of the bus station before heading to a club.
</nostalgia>
... I remember reading the linked articles - and a fair few other pieces - at the time ... Nice for those who dared to put fingers to keyboard, way back then ... all that tin foil they were posted, turned out to be more use for the covering the turkey than their head :-)
Edit: Because it looks like a guitar ... music ... Oh yes it does :-p
"U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html
"Thousands Of Firms Trade Confidential Data With The US Government"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-14/thousands-firms-trade-confidential-data-us-government-exchange-classified-intelligen
"Government Built Spy-Access"
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/06/government-built-spy-access-into-most-popular-consumer-program-before-911/
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