You Are Being Watched: Open Society vs Surveillance

Do you believe, if I say that you live in a science fiction world? Let’s begin with a short story.

Today I took the public transport to office and on my way, I had breakfast at a coffee shop till I reached my destination, I met several individuals; a bus driver, the person who is seated next to me on the bus, and the waiter who served me coffee.

But what would have happened if, the bus driver kidnapped me and asked me for ransom? Or the person seated next to me threatened my life to steel my purse? Or the waiter at the coffee shop poisoned my food?

Society doesn’t work like this, society works on trust. The nature of society requires some measure of trust and humans are a trusting species. 

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

- Helen Keller

Trust is a complicated concept, and this word is overloaded with many meanings. All complex ecosystems require cooperation and trust. This is true for biological ecosystems, social systems, and sociotechnical systems. Also, in any cooperative system, there also exists an alternative parasitical strategy. A tapeworm in your digestive tract, thieves in a market, spammers on e-mail, and people who refuse to pay their taxes. These parasites can only survive if they're not too successful. That is, if their number gets too large or too powerful, the underlying system collapses. If there are too many tapeworms in your digestive tract, you die and they die. Too many thieves in a market and no one visit the market anymore and the thieves starve. Too many people stop paying their taxes, and you get Greece [by: Bruce Schneier].

Most of us recognize this, that it's not in our long-term best interest to act in our short-term self-interest. But not everyone follows this truth. That's why we need mechanisms to induce trust and why we need security. 

Nowadays we hear lots of terrorizing news such as; cyber terrorism, cyber war and cyber crime. 

Cyber War it’s not a military action, where there are guns, bombs and people dying. (We love to use the word ‘war’ where there is no war - war on terror, war on drugs and war on crime but ignore or dislike using the word ‘war’ when there is an actual war. We will say anything else other than war.) In a real war situation, you most often know ‘who’ is attacking and ‘why’ they are being attacked. But in Cyber War you don’t know when, why or who is attacking. To control cyber threats, we need lawful surveillance. Once again ’lawful’ is a complex word.

The number 3000 - This is the number of times a single citizen is surveillance in UK with 5 million CCTV cameras with in 24hrs, and most heavily surveillance country in the world.

What does privacy mean and why it’s important?

Privacy is the right to be left alone, or freedom from interference or intrusion. Information privacy is the right to have some control over how your personal information is collected and made use of.

Have you ever questioned yourself: ‘How Much Does Google Really Know About Me?’ Believe me, they know more than your wife. So we have lost our privacy

Privacy & security - isn’t is the same thing? No, not real but they are first cousins. Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you do not have to accept less of one to get more of the other.

"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Data privacy is focused on the use and governance of personal data, on the other hand security focuses more on protecting data from malicious attacks and the exploitation of stolen data for profit.

When Edward Snowden leaked massive troves of information about the National Security Agency's collection of electronic data and started a debate over the trade-offs between security and privacy. Unfortunately, the security vs privacy debate is largely over. As cyber-technologies pervaded our daily lives, we surrendered privacy, usually voluntarily. Consequently, framing the decisions before us as a contest between privacy and security is misguided; privacy died with the information age.

Are we surrendering our privacy for technology? A BIG yes but Information and Communication technologies also make life better. It improves productivity, efficiency, and economic growth and such benefits come at a price. Simply look at your mobile phone. This is a cute, sleek and an incredibly powerful tool which has become so central to our lives that we take it for granted. It seems perfectly normal to pull this device out of your pocket, no matter where you are on the planet, and use it to talk to someone else no matter the location. You are making an implicit bargain with the carrier: “I want to make and receive mobile calls; in exchange, I allow this company to know where I am at all times.” A mobile phone can’t work unless the mobile companies know where you are, which means they keep you under their surveillance.

“Everything around you, you called life was made up by people and no smarter than you. You can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things, so then other people can use.”

Your cell phone tracks where you live and where you work. It tracks where you like to spend your weekends and evenings. It tracks how often you go to church (and which church), how much time you spend in a bar, and whether you speed when you drive. It tracks—since it knows about all the other phones in your area—whom you spend your days with, whom you meet for lunch, and whom you sleep with.

Let me explain simple terms. In a public place, whatever the place you think of, an unknown person approaches you and asked your personal details (it can be your name, age or mobile no). Will you give out this information? 

Nearly 99.9% will say ‘NO’, because the person is unknown to you & why should I give it to an unknown person? When the enemy is known, we defend us, if unknown, we expose more than the enemy wants, this is what happens in this information age. 

Now, how many of you have social network accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn)? Do you know how much of personal details we are uncovering? On the other hand, social networking plays a bigger role in our lives. We need social network, to be connected with our friends, to business for marketing and for exposer. Technology evolution comes with a price; we have to bare it. 

“There is no patch for stupidity.”

- Kevin Mitnick

In 2013 Edward Snowden the whistle blower, sacrificed his life and exposed NSA’s secret surveillance. The whole world got shocked that we are under surveillance; subsequently US official said that they are not collecting personal information (content), collecting only “meta-data” (context). The intended point was that the NSA wasn’t collecting the words we spoke during our phone conversations, instead, they collect only the phone numbers of the two parties, and the date, time, and duration of the call. 

Collecting metadata on people means putting them under surveillance. Imagine that you hired a private detective to eavesdrop on someone. The detective would plant bugs in that person’s home, office, and car. He would eavesdrop on that person’s phone and computer. And you would get a report detailing that person’s conversations. 

Now imagine that you asked the detective to put that person under surveillance. You would get a different but nevertheless comprehensive report: where he went, what he did, who he spoke with and for how long, who he wrote to, what he read, and what he purchased. That’s metadata & metadata is surveillance data.

Telephone metadata alone reveals a lot about us. The timing, length, and frequency of our conversations reveal our relationships with others: our intimate friends, business associates, and everyone in-between. Phone metadata reveals what and who we’re interested in and what’s important to us, no matter how private. It provides a window into our personalities. It yields a detailed summary of what’s happening to us at any point in time.

Over the period of time, accumulated personal data can probably paint a better picture of how you spend your time than you can, because it doesn’t have to rely on human memory. Most of us have at-least one or more social network accounts, and do various activities. Adding our friends, new posting, status updates, chatting & many more activities.

Web search data is another source of intimate information that can be used for surveillance. (You can argue whether this is data or metadata. The NSA claims it’s metadata because your search terms are embedded in the URLs.) We don’t lie to our search engine. We’re more intimate with it than with our friends, lovers, or family members. We always tell it exactly what we’re thinking about, in words as clear as possible. Google knows what kind of porn each of us searches for, which old lovers we still think about, our shames, our concerns, and our secrets. If Google decided to, it could figure out which of us is worried about our mental health, thinking about tax evasion, or planning to protest a particular government policy. I used to say that Google knows more about what I’m thinking of than my wife does. But that doesn’t go far enough [by: Bruce Schneier].

" Eavesdropping gets you the conversations (content); surveillance gets you everything else (context)”

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt admitted as much in 2010: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” You may ask how do they can do this? One way to think about it is that data is content, and metadata is context. When you have one person under surveillance, the contents of conversations, text messages, and emails can be more important. But when you have an entire population under surveillance, the metadata is far more meaningful. One way to think about it is that data is content, and metadata is context. Metadata can be much more revealing than data, especially when collected in the aggregate.

Think about the day to day activities; shopping at supermarket. How many of you have privilege cards? Think of a simple activity, at the supermarket cashier you give privilege card to gain points. We use that gain points so that we can redeem one day. Do you know how much of personal information can be gathered by this? When we register for a privilege card we give our name, address, contact no and much more to the supermarket. When do shopping, this privilege card and credit cards are associated with our bill. By doing this we share our shopping pattern, our personal information, our banking information. And our shopping pattern can be matched by the product companies and special discounts.

“Hoaxes use weaknesses in human behavior to ensure they are replicated and distributed.  In other words, hoaxes prey on the Human Operating System..”

- Benjamin Franklin

Not only that, now we get wearable device (Google glass, Bio sensors), IoT devices picking up in technology era. All these devices generate data about you and surroundings. Recently Google claims their quantum computer is 100,000,000 times faster than a classical computer, in simple terms, an instruction can be executed in a hundredth of a second; with a classical computer it’d take about 100 days.

Sunny Kim, State University of New York, Albany, where she studied economics, after graduation she returned to South Korea to take up a job. But she stayed connected with her US friends on Facebook and the messaging app KakaoTalk. In South Korea, she met a man who would become her boyfriend. She’d regularly share snaps of them together on Facebook. Kim also regularly posted pictures of her friends, crafts, food, and her puppies to Facebook. A friend told BuzzFeed News: “It seemed like she was happy, eating and living well.” Kim went missing on 2 May, according to reports. On 18^th May Kim’s body was found in a suitcase buried in a hill. Her boyfriend confessed to her murder. Kim’s sister said she didn’t realize Kim was dead at first, because Lee impersonated her for two weeks by responding to texts sent to her phone.

If Lee can impersonate for two weeks -why can’t a super computer?

“When you call your family at home, are you really talking to them?”

This is day may not be too far.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety...”

- Benjamin Franklin