Tag Archives: privacy

Gay Marriage May Pave The Way For The Legalization Of Polygamy

Posted by on April 19, 2013 Comments Off

In the US, marriage licenses were introduced the late 1800s in most states as a way to stop interracial marriages. By the early 1900s, the legal age of sexual consent was raised from 12 (roughly the age when puberty starts) to 16 — though some states still allow marriage as early as 14 years old. The marriage license was then also used to prohibit marriages with people that were too young. Also in the late 19th century, polygamy became illegal throughout the country in response to the rise of the Mormons, and marriage licenses were used to stop it as well. Finally, as homosexuality came out of the shadows in the 1970s, the licenses were used to prevent gay marriage.

marriage license

Since marriage is usually a religious rite, in a country with nearly unlimited religious freedom the government’s interest in marriage should only pertain to secondary issues of taxation and arbitration (inheritance, custody, distribution of assets, etc). Given that, the various prohibitions on marriage by government have never made any sense from the standpoint of civil rights. The issue first came to a head in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court invalidated miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Almost fifty years later, the Court is now poised to invalidate the prohibition of gay marriage. If it does, marriage licenses will only have the power to prohibit polygamy and violations of age of consent.

A federal suit challenging Utah’s polygamy law was brought in 2011 by the cast members of the Sister Wives reality TV series, and a decision should come soon. Regardless of the outcome, an appeal will likely be made to the 10th Circuit, and then the Supreme Court. Which brings us back to the current gay marriage case: Justice Sotomayor, who will likely vote for legalization of gay marriage, asked attorney Ted Olson, who is arguing that gay marriage is a fundamental civil right, if any restrictions on marriage can exist. His answer was a “yes”: polygamy can be banned because it’s a law prohibiting conduct, whereas gay marriage bans are based on discrimination of a class of people based on their status as homosexuals. Given that both arguments can be applied to both gays and polygamists, it’s a very weak one.

The Brown Family, from TLC’s ‘Sister Wives’

 

Prohibition of interracial marriages was based on racism — the view that non-whites were lesser versions of humans, maybe even sub-human, and it would thus be almost as morally wrong for whites to marry them as it would be to marry animals. The prohibition of gay marriage and polygamy is based on religious beliefs. The concept of age of consent is based on a parental desire to prolong the chastity of childhood beyond its natural end at puberty. None of these legal prohibitions have anything to do with the government’s monetary and arbitrative interest in the private, and usually religious, institution of marriage. All four prohibitions are based on the moral fashions of certain periods in our history — fashions which are now changing. In fact, marriage itself is increasingly being seen as an outdated fashion, made pointless by the ease of divorce.

It’s also important to note that legal prohibitions of marriage have little bearing on reality. Whether or not they’re allowed to marry legally, interracial, gay, and polygamous couples/triples/etc still act like they are married for all purposes that matter: they live together, they have sex, they share expenses and have children. The only differences are legal, and therefore artificial: they have to jump through hoops to get certain rights like hospital visitations and power of attorney, and are denied certain benefits, like sharing insurance plans. It’s reminiscent of other toothless prohibitions, like those on alcohol and drugs. If 20th century legislation has taught us anything, it’s that it is almost impossible to legislate morality in a free country: as long as they have the right to privacy, the people will do what they want in their own homes.

Of course, our right to privacy is increasingly being threatened by technology, and it is now easier than ever for a fascist state to impose moral dictates on its population. Which in turn means that it is now more important than ever that our laws not curb the freedoms upon which America was founded.

See also:

via NPR

Petraeus Resignation Highlights The Importance Of Privacy, And Our Lack Of It

Posted by on November 16, 2012 Comments Off

NPR has an interesting article on the privacy implications of the Petraeus scandal. The former commander of the US military’s Central Command and then-CIA director had been very carefully conducting an affair with a journalist. Rather than writing each other emails using their own addresses, they created a GMail account in which they would write draft emails: Petraeus would write a draft, log out, then Mrs. Broadwell would log in, read the draft, and write her own. Pretty crafty, but given that he knew all kinds of terrorist tricks from his manhunts, it was maybe not crafty enough. Regardless, the whole thing would’ve probably worked, except that the FBI got involved, and this is where the lack of our electronic privacy comes into focus.

David Petraeus and his wife, Holly Knowlton

 

We’ve seen before why everyone needs privacy from the government, and Petraeus is a prime argument for it: he did nothing illegal or even, as far as his job, unethical. Yet he was forced to resign because his mistress sent threats to another woman, which led the FBI to their draft GMail account. Very easily at that, because the feds have the power to read all your email that’s older than six months, just by asking. With a warrant, they can read anything of yours that’s online.

In this age, that basically means your whole life. David and Paula should’ve stuck to old-fashioned paper mail and burned the letters or even kept them — no warrant against Mrs. Broadwell would’ve covered searching Petraeus’ property. So in the leap from paper to electronic mail, our privacy has been eroded so much that one of the most powerful figures in the country was brought down by accident. Imagine how much damage the feds can do to you if they actually try.

David Petraeus and his mistress, Paula Broadwell

 

Of course, technology giveth as much as it taketh away. There are much better alternatives to clandestine communication than a draft folder in a bogus email account. Lifehacker and Gizmodo both have articles on what they could’ve done better:

  • Used a VPN to hide their IP addresses
  • Used encryption, perhaps through a service like Hushmail, to keep the FBI (or anyone) from reading the racy emails — at least for a few years, anyway, until they break the encryption
  • Used a disposable email account that automatically destroys emails after 10 minutes
  • Used text messages written in code and then deleted

But given the considerable hoops that they would’ve had to jump through just to not be accidentally outed, perhaps it’s time to revisit the extent of law enforcement’s snooping powers, and the ease with which they can be wielded. And given that just a month prior to this incident, several people’s homosexuality got outed by accident on Facebook, our everyday technology needs to have more privacy protection built in from the beginning also.

Oh, and if all this resonates with you like a tuning fork, donate to EPIC.

See also:

 

From NPR, Lifehacker and Gizmodo

That iPhone Is Probably The Most Secure Thing You Own

Posted by on August 15, 2012 1 comment

Ever since the 3GS model, iPhones have had built-in, automatic hardware encryption. That, coupled with a robust operating system with very few security flaws, makes it simple to keep anyone from getting to your data: just turn on password protection for the lock screen (Settings –> General –> Passcode Lock) and pick a strong password, which has more than 10 characters that aren’t words in the dictionary. Once the phone is powered off, it would take even the NSA 25 years to crack its security.

 

This is because Apple uses 256-bit AES encryption keys that are stored in the phone’s hardware — the same technology used by the government to store top-secret data. Each iPhone has its own key that is randomly generated and stored nowhere else in the world but on that phone. All the data stored on it is always encrypted using that key, meaning that if someone took its memory out manually and tried to read it, it would look like gibberish, unless they had the key with which to decrypt it. The only way to get that key is from the phone itself, while it’s running.

If the phone has no PIN set, getting the key is fairly trivial — but if it does have one, then the intruder would have to guess it first. Using software, PINs can be entered about 12x per second, so what makes breaking in take longer is how many passwords the intruder has to enter before guessing correctly. The longer the password, the more possible combinations of letters and numbers there are to try, and they grow exponentially: a 4-digit PIN takes 13 minutes to guess, a 6-digit one takes a day, and a 10-digit PIN takes 2.5 years.

The strong encryption key and PIN lock — combined with the option to wipe the phone’s data after 10 incorrect PIN entries and the Find My iPhone feature — most likely makes it the hardest consumer good from which to steal information, including safes. The only other smartphone with similar data protection is the once-mighty Blackberry. There are, however, two gotchas to watch out for, both related to data duplication:

  1. The cloud: almost all the information on the iPhone can and usually is pulled from or duplicated on a computer on the Internet. If someone breaks into that computer, they have access to it without going through your phone.
  2. Your home computer: when you sync the iPhones with iTunes, a popular option is to backup the phone’s contents on that computer. Someone could easily hack into that backup file and get all the data on your iPhone, without ever touching it. It might be a little out of date, but still a major treasure trove.

From Technology Review, via Slashdot

Facebook Eavesdrops And Tells On You To The Cops If You’re Bad

Posted by on July 13, 2012 Comments Off

Like any good Big Brother, Facebook has to make sure you don’t do anything out of line. After all, as Spiderman taught us, with great power comes great responsibility — and it would be pretty irresponsible for Mark Zuckerberg to not stop statutory rape, drug deals, or movie piracy if he could. And can he ever! After all, everything you say and do on Facebook is stored forever in its metallic memory banks, along with who you said it to and how you know each other.

 

But thankfully, according to Reuters, our robot overlord tries to protect your privacy from the eyes of other humans and only alerts a warm-blooded person if something looks really suspicious — like if you were going to meet up with a 13 year old girl with no mutual friends after school for some statutory rape. And then, that helpful person calls the cops, sends them your entire Facebook history, and voila! Spiderberg saves another person from the menaces of society. If only cell phone carriers, Skype, Gmail, and heck, even the US Postal Service and UPS did the same thing — think how many lives it would save! Total, automatic surveillance: the utopian panopticon of the future. After all, if you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about?

See also:

 

From Reuters, via CNET

Why Privacy From Government Is Necessary For Everyone

Posted by on June 14, 2012 2 comments

The ACLU blog has a great post which explains how all of us have plenty to hide and why privacy is not just a right, but an integral part of human nature. The post focuses on privacy from the government, mostly because while almost everyone agrees that we need privacy from the general public, many people have much more relaxed attitudes about government snooping. Since the government is made up of people, that may seem like an arbitrary distinction until you realize that most people think of the government not as a group of people, but rather as an entity — a sort of deity that wants what’s good for us and protects us.

This is not the government. (Photo by Christopher Connell)

 

Therefore, the thinking goes for some, just like it’s okay if God knows what books you buy, when you go to sleep and what route you take to work, it’s also okay if the government does. This holds even though if your credit card statement, diary and GPS history ended up on the Internet, that would be an egregious breach. But every once in a while, the news reminds us that the two scenarios are in fact the same — and that one group of people (the government) is no better or worse than another group of people (Internet users) — via stories about abuse of power from government employees. For example, a month ago, a thousand UK government employees were disciplined for illegally accessing people’s work and medical records; in the US, news broke out last year that the FBI was abusing national security powers to get private information on people who weren’t national security risks.

This is the government. (Photo by Steve Shannon)

 

We give these institutions impersonal names like “the government” and “the police” which makes us forget that they are just a group like any other. So given that government is made up of people, a percentage of whom are bound to be less-than honorable, here are the ACLU’s list of reasons why you need to be able to hide things from them:

  • Certain things are just sensitive: maybe you don’t want anyone to know you have a third nipple, or that you’re pregnant, that you go to a mosque, that you constantly watch awful movies, that you have a crush on Kim Jong Un, etc, etc. The sum of things that are perfectly legal that you’d want to hide could fill a barn. And no one has any business knowing those things without you specifically letting them — not your coworkers, not your friends, your parents, your children, and definitely not police officers or other government workers. Even if you live you a life free of anything that anyone could object to and you are a completely open book, there’s always nudity: there’s no rational reason for it, but you probably don’t want anyone seeing you naked — government employees included.
  • Government workers make mistakes: since they’re just people, they’re fallible. Maybe as a result of just-for-the-hell-of-it surveillance, your crush on Kim Jong Un coupled with some email to your brother ranting about the war in Afghanistan and that copy of Mein Kampf you bought to see what the fuss was all about lands you on a watch list, or worse, in the middle of an investigation. The less data available about you, the less likely you’ll be harassed or wrongly prosecuted.
  • Discrimination based on normal things: one of the recent developments from all the data credit card companies have on us is that they decide credit worthiness based on your spending history. If you shop at cheap stores, maybe you don’t have a lot of money, so your credit will go down. If you frequent bars, maybe you have a drinking problem, so your credit will go down. If you buy a set of butcher knives and some lye, maybe police officers will rate you as more likely to kill someone. If you do a Google search on how to kill someone in their sleep, police officers might arrest you.
  • You’re already doing illegal things: laws being what they are, everyone is guilty of breaking one sooner or later. Maybe you speed, maybe you copied your friend’s CD, maybe you smoked pot in college, or got into a bar brawl: no one is innocent. The only thing saving you from fines and jail time right now is the fact that the government doesn’t know everything you do. Imagine the potential damage to your life if an ambitious prosecutor or a politician you crossed could get access to a video tape of your entire existence.

Therefore, until the day when the possibility for abuse and mistakes on the part of government employees is completely eradicated and until the day laws don’t make criminals out of all of us, the need for as much privacy as possible is absolutely paramount to our freedom.

See also:

From ACLU, via Lifehacker

Fun With Privacy

Posted by on January 26, 2012 1 comment

The Internet’s been grumbling about Google consolidating its various privacy policies into one, and a couple of funny privacy matters shook out of the whole affair.

Skipity

A search engine called Skipity has the worst (yet funniest) privacy policy ever. It’s a riot to read — so you should do that, — but to summarize: it starts out with legal nonsense, then goes on to say they don’t think you really care about privacy and that they will use whatever information they can get about you, if it can turn them a profit. You also grant them permission to insert a microchip in your body, use your secrets, watch you through your webcam and lie to you. If they get a chance to sell your data, they “will jump at that opportunity like a pitbull on a fresh steak.” Paragraph 8 reiterates that it’s not a joke:

8. We are serious about all of the above. So don’t go trying to sue us later with some nonsense like ‘I thought that was all satire.’ All your privacy are belong to us. We mean it.

They also disclose that they like chocolate chip cookies and bacon. It may be the only honest privacy policy on web, and a brilliant publicity stunt.

 

The Guessing Game

An Ars Technica writer tweeted about a Google page she found where you can see in what gender and age-bracket demographic Google thinks you belong. (Apparently Google is trying out for a job at the carnival.) Slate did an informal poll around their office and found it was mostly wrong: it guessed 4 out of 16 people’s demographics completely right, but thought a bunch of women were men, that people in their 30s were twice as old, and had no guess at all for three people. Slate also adds that besides Google’s guess, you can also see what other companies think of you: BlueKai, AOL Advertising, Bizo, Lotame, Yahoo, and Exelate. You may be thinking that you’ve never even heard of most of those, but they have certainly heard of you. The good news is that most of them give you the ability to opt out of from them tracking your every move.

 

And finally, a couple of years ago, The Onion had a very funny and relevant article called Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology.

From Skipity, Slate, and The Onion via Slashdot, Forbes and Neatorama

Unanimous Supreme Court Rules GPS Tracking Constitutes A Search, Probably Needs A Warrant

Posted by on January 23, 2012 1 comment

According to Wired, in a rare case of unanimity on a privacy matter, the US Supreme Court ruled (PDF) that police placement of a GPS device on someone’s car is equivalent to a fourth ammendment search:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. (4th Ammendment to the US Constitution)

The majority opinion, written by Justice Scalia, more or less said that the government was using an electronic spy to do the searching. Just because they didn’t have an actual person rifling through the car, doesn’t mean it’s not a search, because “the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area.”

 

The US Supreme Court in 2009. Scalia is second from the right, on the bottom. John Roberts is left of him.

 

The one thing the Supreme Court wasn’t unanimous on, was the point at which a warrant is required for such a search. The specific case they were hearing was of a D.C. drug dealer that was tracked by the FBI, via a GPS device on his car, for 28 days. All nine justices agreed that for tracking someone for that length of time, the feds had needed a warrant. As to the the maximum period the police could track someone without a warrant, five of the justices stayed silent; the other four said that to avoid ambiguity, they should always just seek a warrant.

The case probably went south for the Obama administration when Chief Justice Roberts asked their lawyer if the FBI could attach GPS trackers to the justices’ cars, secretly and without a warrant:

So your answer is, ‘yes,’ you could tomorrow decide that you put a GPS device on every one of our cars, follow us for a month; no problem under the Constitution?

For that, and other details of the deliberations back in November of 2011, check out the Wired article from back then.

From The US Supreme Court (PDF), Via Wired

Surprise! The Feds Are Still Abusing The Patriot Act

Posted by on September 22, 2011 2 comments

Ever since the overreaction to 9/11 caused the Patriot Act to be created as a vehicle to fight terrorism by means of eroding civil liberties, the FBI and Justice Department have been abusing it — from using national security letters to get information unrelated to national security, to using it to go after drug traffickers to using it to fight the homeless. And now there’s something going on in the shadows, about which two senators are raising a vague alarm. They both sit on the Intelligence Committee, which oversees the FBI, among other agencies, and while they can’t tell us exactly what’s going on, they sent a letter to the US Attorney General asking him to set the record straight about some thruthiness.

At the heart of the matter is secrecy: secret rulings made by a secret court that can’t be made public due to national security concerns. What the two senators are saying is that the government is interpreting these secret rulings as allowing them to get private information on people that aren’t threatening national security — like possibly you, the most intelligent of readers. So again the FBI is abusing the Patriot Act to get information unrelated to national security.

Note that the senators aren’t necessarily disputing the secret ruling that possibly allows all this — they just want the actions to be public knowledge. They’re also warning that secret interpretations of secret rulings made by secret courts amount to secret law, which implies that we’re witnessing the birth of a secret shadow government.

From The New York Times, via NPR

You Are Google’s Product, Not Their Consumer

Posted by on September 7, 2011 Comments Off

There’s been a big uproar around a comment Google’s former CEO and current Chairman, Eric Schmidt, said the other week when asked why they are so adamant that people use real names on Google Plus. His answer: Google Plus “essentially provides an identity service with a link structure around your friends” — and you thought it was just a neat way to see your friends’ photos. Free Software Magazine has a very interesting analysis of the situation via an equally interesting Business Week article, which points out the identity service is not so much to help us regular folk keep spammers and cyber bullies at bay, as it is a cash cow for Google.

Why? Because anonymous user data is much less valuable to advertisers than real data. If they can tie your name and zip code to your Google searches, well the sky’s the limit on what they can learn about you; then they can show you ads that are better tailored to your interests, so that you’re more likely to buy their stuff, making their ad campaigns a lot more effective. And here’s how Google advertises itself to investors:

Who are our customers? Our customers are over one million advertisers, from small businesses targeting local customers to many of the world’s largest global enterprises, who use Google AdWords to reach millions of users around the world.

In other words, Google sells you — the digital shadow of you, at least — to advertisers, and that’s how they make money. So their end goal isn’t to make you happy, but rather to make the people who keep their lights on happy: the advertisers. The only thing they have to do is make sure that people use Google services: the search engine, GMail, Android phones, Google News, etc. And that’s the extent to which they care what you think: so that you will keep using their services, and they can keep selling you to advertisers. The hardest part of their job is probably to walk this fine line between pissing people off enough to leave and keeping advertisers interested in their user data. But as long as they keep creating services that are better or cheaper than anything else, then people will keep coming back to rent themselves out to the advertisers.

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. — Andrew Lewis

And finally, The Onion had a funny video a while back about Google’s new opt-out program:

From Free Software Magazine and Business Week, via Slashdot

Undercover Policing Is Getting A Lot Harder

Posted by on August 30, 2011 Comments Off

TechWorld Australia has an interesting article that points out how much harder it is to find qualified police officers to send undercover in the age of the Internet. Since everyone under 30 now has pictures of themselves strewn all over MySpace, Facebook, Twitpic, Flickr and Google Plus/Picasa, the chance of a bad guy coming across an undercover cop’s real picture, or someone recognizing the undercover cop in a Facebook album is now high enough to raise the alarm. And the next decade will make it even worse, as facial recognition algorithms become more mainstream. Facebook already has facial recognition built-in, supposedly to help you tag people in pictures more easily — it recognizes the same face in all the pictures of an album, so you only have to tag them once. Therefore it’s not a stretch to think that in the year 2025, you could search for a picture on Google or Facebook and it would tell you exactly who that person is; which, for the mafia, will be an invaluable tool.

Riot Police in Manchester, England. Photo by Phil Long

 

A study done on the New South Wales police found that the vast majority of them use social networking, and everyone under 26 had uploaded photos of themselves onto the Internet. Which isn’t that bad, because they could theoretically take them down and hope no one copied them, however unlikely that is. But what’s worse is that 85% of them had pictures of themselves uploaded by someone else. And since people start social networking in their teens, by the time they become police officers 10 years later, they are all over the Internet. The worst part of it all though: once you found the undercover’s real Facebook page, you can identify their friends and family, which is not the kind of info you’d want a den of thieves to have.

From TechWorld Australia