On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Eleanor Saitta <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I'm not. I'm trying to solve specific technical problems which > support larger social ends. > I don't think "privacy preservation" is a technical problem, or at the least, not largely a technical problem. I think it's (mostly) a legal and social problem. > > This is fine. I'm not saying that using a network like this will make > you invulnerable to HUMINT. What I am saying is that networks can a) > force your adversary to use HUMINT (which is a lot more expensive), > and possibly even give you some tools to help maintain your social > graph integrity, etc. > I don't think "forcing your adversary to use HUMINT" is what most people understand by "privacy preservation." Further, the snoops use HUMINT to get technical access. it only takes one compromised friend on Facebook to allow downloading a huge amount of data, for example. I don't even think it's clear that HUMINT is more expensive than technical intelligence, and the budgets of snoop agencies are not so constrained that cost is something we can take comfort in. > If we build tools that force spooks to use HUMINT to get in, we've won. > I really disagree with this, and I don't think it's what most people understand by "privacy preservation." I don't think members of WikiLeaks or LulzSec feel their privacy has been preserved because the penetration involved (but was not limited to) HUMINT. > > Privacy-preserving, as a property, doesn't mean "if you don't think > about what you're doing in the world you can run black ops on this > platform". It means "you can keep what you're doing here private > against mass observation by the motivated and targeted observation by > the non-resourced". Or, at least, I think that's a bar that's > actually meaningful and can be achieved; what you're talking about can't. > > I'm having trouble parsing the two properties you lay out here; they are both much more complicated than I'd want to make them. I find privacy to be a simple property: "I'm not going to be snooped on by the govt without a warrant; companies are not going to collect my data and do inappropriate things with it." These are matters of law and governance. I believe that the world in which law and governance ensure these principles is not only achievable, but the only meaningful kind of privacy we can hope for. Our political sphere is governed by laws, not human beings. Back to the original proposition, which did not appear to be yours: building a social network and proclaiming it to be "privacy-preserving" suggests to users that they will not be spied on. While there may be some truth to the difficulty such networks would pose for commercial data collection, any sense of security from government spying such a network creates will be false. That will be true until and unless we have a legal structure built to prevent that spying, in which case the technical methods aren't necessary to begin with. -- David Golumbia [email protected]
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