The Internet is a surveillance state

[Eugen Leitl]

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surveillance/index.html

The Internet is a surveillance state

By Bruce Schneier, Special to CNN

March 16, 2013 -- Updated 1804 GMT (0204 HKT)

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

    Bruce Schneier: Whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the
time on the Internet

    Schneier: Our surveillance state is efficient beyond the wildest dreams
of George Orwell

    He says governments and corporations are working together to keep things
that way

    Schneier: Slap-on-the-wrist fines notwithstanding, no one is agitating
for better privacy laws

Editor's note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of "Liars
and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive."

(CNN) -- I'm going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set
of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified
because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used
to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was
identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good
computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his
identity, he slipped up.

Bruce Schneier

And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David
Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She
never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network.
Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The
FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and
hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or
not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google
tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook
does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our
iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was
tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour
period.

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data
about us. Unmasking Broadwell's identity involved correlating her Internet
activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and
computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved
and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up
intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

News: Cyberthreats getting worse, House intelligence officials warn

Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing
habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your cell phone,
there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and
that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like,
and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on
Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us
to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell
phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters.

There are simply too many ways to be tracked. The Internet, e-mail, cell
phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines: these have
become necessities, and it's fanciful to expect people to simply refuse to
use them just because they don't like the spying, especially since the full
extent of such spying is deliberately hidden from us and there are few
alternatives being marketed by companies that don't spy.

This isn't something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in
the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services
are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will almost certainly
know who you are; there are lots of ways to be tracked without cookies.
Cellphone companies routinely undo the web's privacy protection. One
experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time videos of students on campus and
was able to identify one-third of them by comparing their photos with
publicly available tagged Facebook photos.

Maintaining privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even
once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the
wrong thing, and you've permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous
service you're using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI got him. If the
director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no
hope.

In today's world, governments and corporations are working together to keep
things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect
-- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy
on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the
powerful spy on the powerless, and they're not going to give up their
positions of power, despite what the people want.

Fixing this requires strong government will, but they're just as punch-drunk
on data as the corporations. Slap-on-the-wrist fines notwithstanding, no one
is agitating for better privacy laws.

So, we're done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of
porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does.
Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are
all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because
increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social
networking sites.

And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or
is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from
company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the
government accesses it at will without a warrant.

Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a
fight.