Privacy

 

I spent a year in Dallas one week. Southern Methodist University had volunteered as the crash test dummy for the beta release of our library software. Wandering down the hall, I noticed a PC. I got on and brought up our company’s web site. It was 1995. When I attempted to reach our mainframe, a firewall stopped me. I knew it was possible to reach it from the internet so I called up our hex support and told them:

-The only people you are blocking are customers and employees.

Support graciously allowed me in. Normally we come back from these jaunts with scraps of paper trying to remember what we did. This time I put my changes in our source base and had it reinstalled. Monday morning, I hit the office clean. Then I made it a habit to check SMU for their dumps each day and brought them across the web.

The same situation is happening for privacy. Let us review phone surveillance. In the American Civil War, soldiers realized that rather than knocking over telegraph lines it was possible to toss a wire over the line and through inductance over hear the enemy’s messages with an earpiece. Sometimes inductance would operate the opposite way and operators would recognize that they were being monitored. Then the operators might send false information or encoded messages. Even when the code is unbroken, the fact of coded messages is useful.

In World War I communication wires were strung across battlefields.  This made it worthwhile to crawl out, splice the line and steal communications. If you could be certain of the result, this might lead to false information being sent or even giving false orders to the enemy. Sometimes they communicated audibly rather than Morse code.

The FBI made use of this technology during prohibition. They could not make recordings. Sometimes transcripts were presented in court. More often they made use of the information to provocateur or build cases. Sometimes they used parallel construction, claiming a “reliable informant”.

By the fifties phone tapping became common. Sometimes wire recorders were used. Eventually a German company came up with a phone switching device that allowed phone companies to provide surveillance as a service. In our new century surveillance is almost a by-product of digital compression and server technology. Nowadays surveillance, even video surveillance, is a matter of extending backup retention.

Old fashioned taps would be of little use on a digitized compressed signal. Even listening devices, bugs, use cell phone technology. It is much safer and more discrete to communicate as a cell phone than an analog radio signal. Why carry around some super spy recorder when you can just turn on your cell phone recording?

A major issue is identification. Traditionally credit bureaus identify us. Same name, similar birthdate, social security, address, phone, probably the same person. Credit agencies should be tracking our user IDs, IP addresses, email, but so far have not had the inclination. Marketers have developed advertising ID. Government agencies do their best. Sometimes government agencies check credit. Those requests are tracked.

For government or marketing purposes similar persons may have similar behavior and ambiguous identity is acceptable.

The only two groups that are explicitly denied our information are medical and law enforcement. This is bizarre. If you want doctors and police to behave intelligently, they have to know who you are. Just as my support people conscientiously installed their firewall, we are putting ours in the wrong place.