[bestbits] Reform surveillance

[Mike Godwin (mgodwin@INTERNEWS.ORG)]

I take your point, Gene. As I've said, I'm okay with putting commercial entities under scrutiny for their roles in this. But -- speaking only for myself -- I can't be satisfied with focusing on search-engine cookies as if they were the root of the problem. The Ryan Lizza article demonstrates how peripheral a concern they are, if our issue is with massive government-driven surveillance.

Certainly happy to discuss strategic and tactical approaches further off-list.


--Mike



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From: Gene Kimmelman
Sent: 12/11/13, 8:52
To: Mike Godwin (mgodwin at INTERNEWS.ORG), Kevin Bankston, James S. Tyre
Cc: michael gurstein, Mishi Choudhary, bestbits
Subject: RE: [bestbits] Reform surveillance
And Mike,  you'll never change that culture!  Yes, use policy to constrain the best we can. But even the most likely US self-correction is unlikely to touch Prism/section 702 concerns for non-US law abiding citizens.  So why not raise the cost of blanket surveillance? I don't want to do strategy on this list but will just observe that civil society isn't strong enough to move policy without business support.  And that support tends to grow the more policy threatens business' bottom line....


-------- Original message --------
From: "Mike Godwin (mgodwin at INTERNEWS.ORG>
Date: bestbits at lists.bestbits.net>
Subject: RE: [bestbits] Reform surveillance



Just to add a small comment to this, and without detracting at all from the great Washington Post story today about the use of Google cookies, I think the Ryan Lizza piece in the New Yorker goes into great detail about the culture of surveillance in the intelligence agencies and where it comes from. It's not built on commercial data-mining, although it is happy to capture commercial data-mining opportunistically.  As Kevin pointed out earlier in the thread, when we first learned about NSA's bulk data collection, we learned how they were using the phone companies (willing participants) as distinct from the tech companies (who, from everything we've elicited so far, have not been willing collaborators). We could eliminate Google cookies tomorrow, and the whole bulk-collection culture and apparatus would remain in place.


--Mike




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From: Mike Godwin (mgodwin at INTERNEWS.ORG)
Sent: 12/11/13, 7:23
To: Kevin Bankston, James S. Tyre
Cc: Gene Kimmelman, michael gurstein, Mishi Choudhary, bestbits
Subject: Re: [bestbits] Reform surveillance

By comparison, see Ryan Lizza’s long article in this week’s New Yorker:

'In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information.’

Ryan Lizza: Why Won’t Obama Rein in the N.S.A.?
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/16/131216fa_fact_lizza?mbid=social_retweet
 via @NewYorker

(Note: I want to emphasize again that I think what commercial internet companies do is absolutely worth scrutinizing, but agencies’ capture of commercial data-mining is a symptom of surveillance culture, not its cause.)

--
Mike Godwin | Senior Legal Advisor, Global Internet Policy Project
415-793-4446
Skype mnemonic1026
Address 1601 R Street NW, 2nd Floor Washington, DC 20009 USA

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From: Kevin Bankston <bankston at opentechinstitute.org<mailto:bankston at opentechinstitute.org>>
Date: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 at 7:16 AM
To: "James S. Tyre" <jstyre at jstyre.com<mailto:jstyre at jstyre.com>>
Cc: "genekimmelman at gmail.com<mailto:genekimmelman at gmail.com>" <genekimmelman at gmail.com<mailto:genekimmelman at gmail.com>>, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at internews.org<mailto:mgodwin at internews.org>>, "gurstein at gmail.com<mailto:gurstein at gmail.com>" <gurstein at gmail.com<mailto:gurstein at gmail.com>>, "mishi at softwarefreedom.org<mailto:mishi at softwarefreedom.org>" <mishi at softwarefreedom.org<mailto:mishi at softwarefreedom.org>>, "bestbits at lists.bestbits.net<mailto:bestbits at lists.bestbits.net>" <bestbits at lists.bestbits.net<mailto:bestbits at lists.bestbits.net>>
Subject: Re: [bestbits] Reform surveillance

Indeed.  Now *this* is a hook of talking about ad-motivated tracking in relation to NSA!  As the story says...


The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.

...

For years, privacy advocates have raised concerns about the use of commercial tracking tools to identify and target consumers with advertisements. The online ad industry has said its practices are innocuous and benefit consumers by serving them ads that are more likely to be of interest to them.

The revelation that the NSA is piggybacking on these commercial technologies could shift that debate, handing privacy advocates a new argument for reining in commercial surveillance.



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