----- Original Message ----- > From: Nick M. Daly <[email protected]> > To: [email protected]; Liberation Technologies > <[email protected]> > Cc: > Sent: Sunday, February 10, 2013 2:47 PM > Subject: [Freedombox-discuss] Happy Creepy February! > >T hanks to investigative work by the Guardian, we can tell just how many > steps back online privacy's taken this year. It's unfortunate: > > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence > > A multinational security firm has secretly developed software > capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future > behaviour by mining data from social networking websites... [T]he > Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was > shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research > and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security > system capable of analysing "trillions of entities" from > cyberspace. > > In developing this product, Raytheon seems to make two fundamentally > flawed assumptions: > > 1. That people never make invalid interpretations of the data. Read up > on Type I errors for the details: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors > > 2. That collecting and sharing this data (and those invalid assumptions) > is ever desirable. This is what Daniel Solove was warning about in > his "I've Got Nothing to Hide..." article. > > https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
There are quicker and more effective arguments against the I've-got-nothing- to-hide red herring. One is this: however one defines public vs. private, there are burdensome economic costs to moving data from one sphere to the other, regardless of the underlying content: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/02/new_york_times_security_breech_how_a_chinese_hacker_tried_to_blackmail_me.html That's the effect of one highly-targeted data breach. Imagine the same company have a similar one every month, for a decade. This isn't a matter of having nothing to hide-- it's a matter of paying lawyers, admins, and consultants to quantify the cost of an unplanned data migration. The other is that, unlike civil rights activists from the 60s, the I've-got-nothing-to-hide proponents have no history of action in support of their cause. If they had a Nietzsche-level of reflection on what their words meant, they would never password protect anything and make their normative private lives subject to complete public scrutiny. If they had a fly's speck of reflection, they would at least refuse to prosecute anyone who hacked data related to their private affairs, or violated NDAs, etc. Seriously-- if you've got nothing to hide, then why go to the trouble to hide anything at all? The glaring contradiction between deed and action makes it a textbook example of hypocrisy. -Jonathan > > I wish I knew more about how Raytheon was accessing the data and what > the lag times were (between tweeting and when the tweet is searchable, > for example). > > Nick > > _______________________________________________ > Freedombox-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss > -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
