Schneier: transparency is not security
Bruce Schneier's latest column takes on the notion of the "transparent society," in which all parties disclose everything and privacy is traded for knowledge. I've always been skeptical about this idea because there's no way to be sure that the powerful are really disclosing everything (in the UK, the tax-man has a special, secret high-security online tax-filing system for the hyper-rich, which came to light last December -- if the rich get their own tax-system, why should we believe they won't have their own "disclosure" system, too?). But Schneier addresses another, more compelling dimension: when the powerful disclose their information to you, you can't do much with it; but when you disclose to the powerful, there's plenty that can be done to you.
An example will make this clearer. You're stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer's ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.Link (via Futurismic)You can think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value, to you, of more information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.
Another example: When your doctor says "take off your clothes," it makes no sense for you to say, "You first, doc." The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals.
the latest
latest episodes
Bruce's analysis is far too simplistic. The police officer and doctor examples are silly. In the real world -- in case after case -- information technology turns the tables on authority figures in power. Just ask NY governor Eliot Sptizer! http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2007/12/people-in-authority-sometimes-abuse.html
I agree with Benjaminwright. Just ask Kiwamai Killpatrick, Detroit's own THUG mayor. I'm glad someone was able to get those text messages from the evil grip of the telcom provider.
Schneier is the security kind of a typical publicity whore. From the information security point of view, most of his publications make little of any sense.
He's the one who suggested writing your passwords down so you don't forget them. Just ignore the dude. :)
What's the problem? Aren't policemen and doctors supposed to have more control? They wouldn't be terribly useful if they didn't. In these situations, the power imbalance is actually beneficial.
Aren't policemen and doctors supposed to have more control?
I can't see any reason why doctors should have more control. It's your body. They give you the fact(oid)s and you decide what you want to do with the information.
The real concern isn't equality of control/power...though with full transparency, there will be equality: while the officer is pulling up your record (nominally clean, for the vast majority of citizens), you can use your trio/iphone/whatever to pull up a list of all complaints/citations for that officer, including a history of the last dozen/50/whatever people he's queried (in case there's a disturbing pattern, etc.), and assure that those "big brother" cameras and mics are recording the entire encounter...not an issue if you're law-abiding, but possibly career-threatening to the officer if he's not properly doing his job...especially if you send a text link of the live footage to a friend and ask them to review it and post it to youtube if they don't hear from you in the next 20 minutes...all things possible with true transparency.
The real concern is that once those in "power" have the surveillance technology, there's no way to stop them from using it. The police officer doesn't need you to willfully disclose your name to add you to a "secret terrorist watch list"...once that list exists, they can put your name on it whether they talk to you or not. The only possible way to counteract this is to remove as much of the secrecy as possible...yes he might add you to a "not-so-secret terrorist watch list", but as long as it's "not-so-secret", you'll be able to find out, and fight back.
As others mentioned, the transparency he describes in his example isn't really transparent. True transparency would give everyone access to all those databases, access to who is looking them up, the ability to know who is spying on you and to spy on them back, etc...
I'm not sure that this would be a good thing, but it's more equal than the example described.
The police officer could add you to a list, but in a truly transparent society, you'd know that you were on the list and why and what the list was for.
Another example: When your doctor says "take off your clothes," it makes no sense for you to say, "You first, doc." The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals.
Spoilsport!
I notice all of the criticisms of the article here thus far are of Schneier's examples. What does Spitzer (I won't address Killpatrick [sic] as I'm not familiar with the background) have to do with security?
I assert that his underlying argument is perfectly sound - transparency is not security. The security cameras blanketing London are a fairly good example - they are good at shifting criminal activity away from surveilled areas, but they do almost nothing to prevent terrorism. The July 7 bombers were almost all recorded by the cameras. Even routine crime isn't prevented by surveillance, merely recorded - which of course does make it easier to prosecute.
The basic point is that unless your notions of transparency includes reading people's thoughts (worldwide, no less), occasionally someone may be able to inflict harm onto society.
#9 w000t is correct. Several of the commenters appear not to have read the article or understand the argument being made.
Reply to W000T: Bruce Schneier's article isn't really about security, it's about quality of life in a world of abundant digital recorders (cameras, microphones, databases, etc.). He argues that quality of life declines when powerful people have lots of information about weak people. But the "problem" that Bruce defines doesn't exist in the world that I witness. On a daily basis I see technology crushing the putatively powerful, such as Meatpacker Westland/Hallmark, http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2007/12/people-in-authority-sometimes-abuse.html#c8027027836748409397 and the chief executive of Deutsche Post AG http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2007/12/people-in-authority-sometimes-abuse.html#c5009178820286280555. Technology and knowledge are power blind
Actually, Spitzer may be an excellent example of Schneier's point. (We don't know all the facts yet.) We do know, though, that it wasn't some informal network of bloggers Bringing Knowledge to the People that socked it to him.
His name was, apparently, given out to the media by an insider on an investigation run by the FBI. Now the FBI is not well known for the way it stands up for the Little People when politics is involved. Maybe it's coincidence that the FBI leaked only his name out of 9+ important people under investigation, maybe it was a chance to whack on a prominent NY Democrat in an election year, maybe the anonymous informant was pissed off at Spitzer's hypocrisy in denouncing prostitution rings in NYC while visiting one in DC, maybe he plans to collect a favor from someone in Wall Street who still has it in for Spitzer, or maybe some other reason. All the same, I don't think you can call that one for Transparency. Just DC political backstabbing as usual.
yeah, the cops example bugged me too. when the cops stops you and asks for your name, you film him and the entire transaction is loaded onto the internet. if the cop threatens to bust you when you've done nothing wrong (as recently happened to one kid) then you are indeed made more secure.
i agree that making individual's lives more transparent *to the government* is not making us more secure. but making our lives more transparent to each other may in fact be making us more secure.
when any piece of clothing can contain a audio or video recording device, and full-time wireless internet becomes commonplace, it's going to be mighty hard to abuse, rape, or rob someone and get away with it.
Re #9 and UK CCTV. I actually think it should be a legal requirement that every CCTV in a public place should be a publicly accessible webcam.
Of course that might lead to an escalation of the neighbourhood watch and curtain twitchers into lynch mob justice.
Of course transparency should not be equated with security, no matter how many examples there are (#6 emittime's, and of course Brin's) extreme transparency leading to security.
I've liked plenty of stuff Schneier writes, but don't get what Cory sees in this - Schneier is arguing against a strawman transparency that isn't really transparent. The definition of a transparent society is that there is no secret terrorist watch list, we all have access to the police databases (and all share information about police, as emittime points out). It's as if Schneier's saying the Internet wouldn't be transformative because only some computers will be able to connect to it.
If you want to say that sufficient transparency cannot be achieved - Cory's "there's no way to be sure that the powerful are really disclosing everything" - that's one thing. Or you could reasonably object to the transparency approach by arguing that other, non-informational power differences make it a bad idea. But Schneier is doing neither of those here.
(The transparent response to the above two concerns are that there's no way to be sure the powerful won't learn what they really want to learn, and that transparency can go a long way toward reducing non-informational power differences - while acknowledging that other shifts in that direction are certainly welcome and probably necessary.)
@#5- Whether the doc ought to have more control or not, they certainly _do_. If the factoid they give you is "You have cancer", you aren't legally allowed to prescribe and administer your own chemotherapy, for example. Nor would any hospital allow you to try and carve out the tumor.
For that matter, the doc is the only one who can actually, legally, say "That thing's cancer, alright".
Everything Schneier writes falls under the general heading of "security." It's his gig, ya know. So, the cop pulls me over for speeding and I instantly link to the "Logos." The face recognition'ware identifies the officer as Joe Doe. It then gives me every detail about this man that is currently in the public domain data base. "Oh my God," I say to myself, "this guy's been divorced, twice! Oh my God, he's diabetic!" So, how much data will I be able to use to my advantage when Officer Doe asks for my license and registry? How much of an advantage am I going to have when I can say, "I might have been speeding, officer, but I know that you have five complaints in your file and your grades in high school were miserable. So there!"
What is Schneier suggesting, really? That if we were all linked like the Borg, that we would have no power disparities in this society? So, Bruce, are you going to be the first to suggest that real Transparency is only achieved with the absolute loss of individuality? IS that what you want?
The exact opposite Jeff. Transparency, or honesty, strengthens individuality and freedom. So it is key to having a life worth living. It is not however a panacea which is what I believe Scheier is saying here. Those who would dominate others thrive in secrecy and lies but they are not necessarily defeated through greater transparency.
Those who are on the shorter end of the power dynamic need simply to exert their power through elections and laws or failing that, through other means. Most people don't vote and know next to nothing about what is going on politically. When you willingly give up your power no amount of transparency is going to get it back for you.
You have to want it back and be willing to fight or even die for it. That is the gift of George Bush.
Noen, I think this Transparency talk is becoming foolish. We are primates and require social structure that is based on Top Dog psychology. Cory is Top Dog here, and he has the power to get rid of my ass if he wants to. NO system, private or public is without power structures. It's our nature. It is nice when we can trust that there is a ballance of power, and that is what we strive for.
Y'all sound like die-hard communists do when they claim that the theory of communism is perfectly sound, it's just that the Soviets weren't communist /enough/ - they didn't establish the extreme communist utopia where all the USSR's problems would have worked themselves out!
Bruce is talking about the real world, not techo-fantasy land where all people have hidden cameras in their clothes that automatically post to YouTube. In the real world, law enforcement and government officials have way more power in most situations. And I'm not just talking about "information is power" power, I'm talking about "kicking your ass, locking you up, and taking your shit" power, and "access to more money than you could ever dream of" power. When the government already has these advantages, it's not hard for them to bend surveillance technology to work overall to their advantage.
But that's just theory - I can tell you something about using monitoring technology against the police, because I've done it fairly extensively, in the real world.
You see an arrest, traffic stop, or police harassment going down. You walk over and start recording with your video camera, keeping a reasonable distance. The cop comes over and tells you to stop filming. You ask for his name and badge number - which you have a right to know in the US. He may or may not provide them.
If you stop filming, you're usually allowed to go on your way. If you continue filming, there's a significant chance you will be detained and searched yourself, during which your camera footage may be deleted or film exposed. It's even possible (though not common) that you'll be arrested. Although charges will be ultimately dropped, you'll spend a day or two in jail.
If you actually happened to film a cop breaking the law, it's much more likely you will be harassed and have your equipment seized. If you're filming at a political demonstration, it's not unheard of for police to simply grab your camera and walk away, or smash it on the ground.
Civil liberties groups are surprisingly unenthusiastic about taking on cases like this (they're common and not precedent-setting), so you'll probably have to go it yourself.
If you have the time and resources to bring a civil lawsuit and have good evidence and witnesses, you may get a modest settlement from the city/police department, or maybe not. If there's good publicity, the officer will at best be given paid leave and a training course or something. You will fail if you bring criminal charges.
The point of this is not that monitoring the cops is a waste of time - it's absolutely vital that we do it. The point is that every step of the way, the government is using its other forms of power - primarily wealth and violence - to inhibit your surveillance efforts. Meanwhile, it uses its power to assist and proliferate its own surveillance apparatus.
Surveillance technology is a tool, and though it's technically accessible to everyone, it's no surprise at all that the government is able to use the tool very effectively and freely themselves, while persecuting those who try to use it independently.
There is no such thing as "Top Dog psychology" Jeff. In real psychology people who are open and honest are healthier than secretive liars. Obviously total interpersonal (or governmental) transparency is undesirable. That is the point your are making and I don't disagree with it. The Transparent Self
I'm in agreement with zikzak. Throw the lying, cheating, filthy bastards out and pass laws to prevent these criminal excesses from happening again. The roots of this problem lies with Newt Ginrich when he transformed the GOP into a state of anti-Democrat war all the time and by any means legal or not.
I've read Schneier's piece but not Brin's book, so forgive me if I'm a little confused. There's a big difference between individual privacy and transparency in government, and I think Schneier is mixing apples and oranges. No, I shouldn't be able to spy on my neighbor. No, the government shouldn't be able to spy on me. Surveillance cameras of public places operated by the government should be a matter of public record, and indeed are routinely released. He asks, "Why don't defendants have a right to those recordings (of police interrogations), just as they have a right to an attorney?" Obviously, defendants do have a right to those records. They would be evidence and must be turned over to the defense. His example of a police officer demanding ID is a situation in which a government agent is exercising authority and, as such, has responsibility (as Zikzak points out) to identify himself to you. If for some obscure reason you want your doctor to disrobe, he or she has the ability to agree or refuse. You then have the option of continuing the examination or walking out and finding another doctor. In other words, I didn't find Schneier's article to be particularly useful to my understanding of surveillance, security, privacy or much else.
Great sci-fi book on this subject, "The Truth Machine," by James Halperin:
http://worldcat.org/oclc/35590869&referer=brief_results
Noen said, :There is no such thing as "Top Dog psychology" Jeff. "
Dude, look it up. It's real, and saying it's not just tells me you know almost nothing about animal behavior. Including human animals. That's me, barking at you. Defend yourself or get on your back so I can pee on you.