net.wars

Seventeen MPs showed up for Thursday's Backbenchers' Committee debate on privacy and the Internet, requested by Robert Halfon (Con-Harlow). They tell me this is a sell-out crowd. The upshot: Google and every other Internet company may come to rue the day that Google sent its Street View cars around Britain. It crossed a line.

That line is this: "Either your home is your castle or it's not." Halfon, talking about StreetView and email he had from a vastly upset woman in Cornwall whose home had been captured and posted on the Web. It's easy for Americans to forget how deep the "An Englishman's home is his castle" thing goes.

Halfon's central question: are we sleepwalking into a privatized surveillance society, and can we stop it? "If no one has any right to privacy, we will live in a Big Brother society run by private companies." StreetView, he said, "is brilliant - but they did it without permission." Of equal importance to Halfon is the curious incident of the silent Information Commissioner (unlike apparently his equivalent everywhere else in the world) and Google's sniffed wi-fi data. The recent announcement that the sniffed data includes contents of email messages, secure Web pages, and passwords has prompted the ICO to take another look.

The response of the ICO, Halfon said, "has been more like Sir Humphrey than a shark with teeth, which is what it should be."

Google is only one offender; Julian Huppert (LibDem-Cambridge) listed some of the other troubles, including this week's release of Firesheep, a Firefox add-on designed to demonstrate Facebook's security failings. Several speakers raised the issue of the secret BT/Phorm trials. A key issue: while half the UK's population choose to be Facebook users (!), and many more voluntarily use Google daily, no one chose to be included in StreetView; we did not ask to be its customers.

So Halfon wants two things. He wants an independent commission of inquiry convened that would include MPs with "expertise in civil liberties, the Internet, and commerce" to suggest a new legal framework that would provide a means of redress, perhaps through an Internet bill of rights. What he envisions is something that polices the behavior of Internet companies the way the British Medical Association or the Law Society provides voluntary self-regulation for their fields. In cases of infringement, fines, perhaps.

In the ensuing discussion many other issues were raised. Huppert mentioned "chilling" (Labour) government surveillance, and hoped that portions of the Digital Economy Act might be repealed. Huppert has also been asking Parliamentary Questions about the is-it-still-dead? Interception Modernization Programme; he is still checking on the careful language of the replies. (Asked about it this week, the Home Office told me they can't speculate in advance about the details will that be provided "in due course"; that what is envisioned is a "program of work on our communications abilities"; that it will be communications service providers, probably as defined in RIPA Section 2(1), storing data, not a government database; that the legislation to safeguard against misuse will probably but not certainly, be a statutory instrument.)

David Davis (Con-Haltemprice and Howden) wasn't too happy even with the notion of decentralized data held by CSPs, saying these would become a "target for fraudsters, hackers and terrorists". Damien Hinds (Con-East Hampshire) dissected Google's business model (including £5.5 million of taxpayers' money the UK government spent on pay-per-click advertising in 2009).

Perhaps the most significant thing about this debate is the huge rise in the level of knowledge. Many took pains to say how much they value the Internet and love Google's services. This group know - and care - about the Internet because they use it, unlike 1995, when an MP was about as likely to read his own email as he was to shoot his own dog.

Not that I agreed with all of them. Don Foster (LibDem-Bath) and Mike Weatherley (Con-Hove) were exercised about illegal file-sharing (Foster and Huppert agreed to disagree about the DEA, and Damian Collins (Con-Folkestone and Hythe complained that Google makes money from free access to unauthorized copies). Nadine Dorries (Con-Mid Bedfordshire) wanted regulation to young people against suicide sites.

But still. Until recently, Parliament's definition of privacy was celebrities' need for protection from intrusive journalists. This discussion of the privacy of individuals is an extraordinary change. Pressure groups like PI, , Open Rights Group, and No2ID helped, but there's also a groundswell of constituents' complaints. Mark Lancaster (Con-Milton Keynes North) noted that a women's refuge at a secret location could not get Google to respond to its request for removal and that the town of Broughton formed a human chain to block the StreetView car. Even the attending opposition MP, Ian Lucas (Lab-Wrexham), favored the commission idea, though he still had hopes for self-regulation.

As for next steps, Ed Vaizey (Con-Wantage and Didcot), the Minister for Communication, Culture, and the Creative Industries, said he planned to convene a meeting with Google and other Internet companies. People should have a means of redress and somewhere to turn for mediation. For Halfon that's still not enough. People should have a choice in the first place.

To be continued...

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Politicians change; policies remain the same. Or if, they don't, they return like the monsters in horror movies that end with the epigraph, "It's still out there..."

Cut to 1994, my first outing to the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference. I saw: passionate discussions about the right to strong cryptography. The counterargument from government and law enforcement and security service types was that yes, strong cryptography was a fine and excellent thing at protecting communications from prying eyes and for that very reason we needed key escrow to ensure that bad people couldn't say evil things to each other in perfect secrecy. The listing of organized crime, terrorists, drug dealers, and pedophiles as the reasons why it was vital to ensure access to cleartext became so routine that physicist Timothy May dubbed them "The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse". Cypherpunks opposed restrictions on the use and distribution of strong crypto; government types wanted at the very least a requirement that copies of secret cryptographic keys be provided and held in escrow against the need to decrypt in case of an investigation. The US government went so far as to propose a technology of its own, complete with back door, called the Clipper chip.

Eventually, the Clipper chip was cracked by Matt Blaze, and the needs of electronic commerce won out over the paranoia of the military and restrictions on the use and export of strong crypto were removed.

Cut to 2000 and the run-up to the passage of the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Same Four Horsemen, same arguments. Eventually RIPA passed with the requirement that individuals disclose their cryptographic keys - but without key escrow. Note that it's just in the last couple of months that someone - a teenager - has gone to jail in the UK for the first time for refusing to disclose their key.

It is not just hype by security services seeking to evade government budget cuts to say that we now have organized cybercrime. Stuxnet rightly has scared a lot of people into recognizing the vulnerabilities of our infrastructure. And clearly we've had terrorist attacks. What we haven't had is a clear demonstration by law enforcement that encrypted communications have impeded the investigation.

A second and related strand of argument holds that communications data - that is traffic data such as email headers and Web addresses - must be retained and stored for some lengthy period of time, again to assist law enforcement in case an investigation is needed. As the Foundation for Information Policy Research and Privacy International have consistently argued for more than ten years, such traffic data is extremely revealing. Yes, that's why law enforcement wants it; but it's also why the American Library Association has consistently opposed handing over library records. Traffic data doesn't just reveal who we talk to and care about; it also reveals what we think about. And because such information is of necessity stored without context, it can also be misleading. If you already think I'm a suspicious person, the fact that I've been reading proof-of-concept papers about future malware attacks sounds like I might be a danger to cybersociety. If you know I'm a journalist specializing in technology matters, that doesn't sound like so much of a threat.

And so to this week. The former head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, at the RSA Security Conference compared today's threat of cyberattack to nuclear proliferation. The US's Secure Flight program is coming into effect, requiring airline passengers to provide personal data for the US to check 72 hours in advance (where possible). Both the US and UK security services are proposing the installation of deep packet inspection equipment at ISPs. And language in the UK government's Strategic Defence and Security Review (PDF) review has led many to believe that what's planned is the revival of the we-thought-it-was-dead Interception Modernisation Programme.

Over at Light Blue Touchpaper, Ross Anderson links many of these trends and asks if we will see a resumption of the crypto wars of the mid-1990s. I hope not; I've listened to enough quivering passion over mathematics to last an Internet lifetime.

But as he says it's hard to see one without the other. On the face of it, because the data "they" want to retain is traffic data and note content, encryption might seem irrelevant. But a number of trends are pushing people toward greater use of encryption. First and foremost is the risk of interception; many people prefer (rightly) to use secured https, SSH, or VPN connections when they're working over public wi-fi networks. Others secure their connections precisely to keep their ISP from being able to analyze their traffic. If data retention and deep packet inspection become commonplace, so will encrypted connections.

And at that point, as Anderson points out, the focus will return to long-defeated ideas like key escrow and restrictions on the use of encryption. The thought of such a revival is depressing; implementing any of them would be such a regressive step. If we're going to spend billions of pounds on the Internet infrastructure - in the UK, in the US, anywhere else - it should be spent on enhancing robustness, reliability, security, and speed, not building the technological infrastructure to enable secret, warrantless wiretapping.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 2:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wish I had a nickel for every time I had the following conversation with some British interlocutor in the 1970s and 1980s:

BI: You should never have gotten rid of Nixon.

wg: He was a crook.

BI: They're all crooks. He was the best foreign policy president you ever had.

As if it were somehow touchingly naïve to expect that politicians should be held to standards of behaviour in office. (Look, I don't care if they have extramarital affairs; I care if they break the law.)

It is, however, arguable that the key element of my BIs' disapproval was that Americans had the poor judgment and bad taste to broadcast the Watergate hearings live on television. (Kids, this was 1972. There was no C-Span then.) If Watergate had happened in the UK, it's highly likely no one would ever have heard about it until 50 or however many years later the Public Records Office opened the archives.

Around the time I founded The Skeptic, I became aware of the significant cultural difference in how people behave in the UK versus the US when they are unhappy about something. Britons write to their MP. Americans...make trouble. They may write letters, but they are equally likely to found an organization and create a campaign. This do-it-yourself ethic is completely logical in a relatively young country where democracy is still taking shape.

Britain, as an older - let's be polite and call it mature - country, operates instead on a sort of "gentlemen's agreement" ethos (vestiges of which survive in the US Constitution, to be sure). You can get a surprising amount done - if you know the right people. That system works perfectly for the in-group, and so to effect change you either have to become one of them (which dissipates your original desire for change) or gate-crash the party. Sometimes, it takes an American...

This was Heather Brooke's introduction to English society. The daughter of British parents and the wife of a British citizen, burned out from years of investigative reporting on murders and other types of mayhem in the American South, she took up residence in Bethnal Green with her husband. And became bewildered when repeated complaints to the council and police about local crime produced no response. Stonewalled, she turned to writing her book Your Right to Know, which led her to make her first inquiries about viewing MPs' expenses. The rest is much-aired scandal.

In her latest book, The Silent State, Brooke examines the many ways that British institutions are structured to lock out the public. The most startling revelation: things are getting worse, particularly in the courts, where the newer buildings squeeze public and press into cramped, uncomfortable spaces but the older buildings. Certainly, the airport-style security that's now required for entry into Parliament buildings sends the message that the public are both unwelcome and not to be trusted (getting into Thursday's apComms meeting required standing outside in the chill and damp for 15 minutes while staff inspected and photographed one person at a time).

Brooke scrutinizes government, judiciary, police, and data-producing agencies such as the Ordnance Survey, and each time finds the same pattern: responsibility for actions cloaked by anonymity; limited access to information (either because the information isn't available or because it's too expensive to obtain); arrogant disregard for citizens' rights. And all aided by feel-good, ass-covering PR and the loss of independent local press to challenge it. In a democracy, she argues, it should be taken for granted that citizens should have a right to get an answer when they ask the how many violent attacks are taking place on their local streets, take notes during court proceedings or Parliamentary sessions, or access and use data whose collection they paid for. That many MPs seem to think of themselves as members of a private club rather than public servants was clearly shown by the five years of stonewalling Brooke negotiated in trying to get a look at their expenses.

In reading the book, I had a sudden sense of why electronic voting appeals to these people. It is yet another mechanism for turning what was an open system that anyone could view and audit - it doesn't take an advanced degree to be able to count pieces of paper - into one whose inner workings can effectively be kept secret. That its inner workings are also not understandable to MPs =themselves apparently is a price they're willing to pay in return for removing much of the public's ability to challenge counts and demand answers. Secrecy is a habit of mind that spreads like fungus.

We talk a lot about rolling back newer initiatives like the many databases of Blair's and Brown's government, data retention, or the proliferation of CCTV cameras. But while we're trying to keep citizens from being run down by the surveillance state we should also be examining the way government organizes its operations and block the build-out of further secrecy. This is a harder and more subtle thing to do, but it could make the lives of the next generation of campaigners easier.

At least one thing has changed in the last 30 years, though: people's attitudes. In 2009, when the scandal over MPs' expenses broke, you didn't hear much about how other qualities meant we should forgive MPs. Britain wanted *blood*.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some fifteen years ago I reviewed a book about the scary future of our dependence on computers. The concluding note: that criminals could take advantage of a zero-day exploit to disseminate a virus around the world that at a given moment would shut down all the world's computers.

I'm fairly sure I thought this was absurd and said so. Since when have we been able to get every computer to do anything on command? But there was always the scarier and less unlikely prospect that building computers into more and more everyday things would add more and more chances for code to increase the physical world's vulnerability to attack.

By any measure, the Stuxnet worm that has been dominating this week's technology news is an impressive bit of work (it may even have had a beta test). So impressive, in fact, that you imagine its marketing brochure said, like the one for the spaceship Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "Be the envy of other major governments."

The least speculative accounts, like those of Bruce Schneier, Business Standard, and Symantec, and that of long-time Columbia University researcher Steve Bellovin agree on a number of important points.

First, whoever coded this worm was an extremely well-resourced organization. Symantec estimates the effort would have required five to ten people and six months - and, given that the worm is nearly bug-free, teams of managers and quality assurance folks. (Nearly bug-free: how often can you say that of any software?) In a paper he gave at Black Hat several years ago, Peter Gutmann documented the highly organized nature of the malware industry (PDF). Other security researchers have agreed: there is a flourishing ecosystem around malware that includes myriad types of specialist groups who provide all the features of other commercial sectors, up to and including customer service.

In addition, the writers were willing to use up three zero-day exploits (many reports say four, but Schneier notes that one has been identified as a previously reported vulnerability). This is expensive, in the sense that these vulnerabilities are hard to find and can only be used once (because once used, they'll be patched). You don't waste them on small stuff.

Plus, the coders were able to draw on rather specialised knowledge of the inner workings of Siemens programmable logic controller systems and gain access to the certificates needed to sign drivers. And the worm was both able to infect widely and target specifically. Interesting.

The big remaining question is what the goal was: send a message; do something to one specific target; as yet unidentified; simple proof of concept? Whatever the purpose was, it's safe to say that this will not be the last piece of weapons-grade malware (as Bellovin calls it) to be unleashed on the world. If existing malware is any guide, future Stuxnets will be less visible, harder to find and stop, and written to more specific goals. Yesterday's teenaged bedroom hacker defacing Web pages has been replaced by financial criminals whose malware cleans other viruses off the systems it infects and steals very specifically useful data. Today's Stuxnet programmers will most likely be followed by more complex organizations with much clearer and more frightening agendas. They won't stop all the world's computers (because they'll need their own to keep running); but does that matter if they can disrupt the electrical grid and the water supply, or reroute trains and disrupt air traffic control?

Schneier notes that press reports incorrectly identified the Siemens systems Stuxnet attacked as SCADA (for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) rather than PLC. But that doesn't mean that SCADA systems are invulnerable: Tom Fuller, who ran the now-defunct Blindside project in 2006-2007 for the government consultancy Kable under a UK government contract, spotted the potential threats to SCADA systems as long ago as that. Post-Stuxnet, others are beginning to audit these systems and agree. An Australia audit of Victoria's water systems concluded that these are vulnerable to attack, and it seems likely many more such reports will follow.

But the point Bellovin makes that is most likely to be overlooked is this one: that building a separate "secure" network will not provide a strong defense. To be sure, we are making many pieces of infrastructure more vulnerable by adding new vulnerabilities. Many security experts agree that the deployment of wireless electrical meters and the "smart grid" has failed to understand the privacy and security issues this is going to raise.

The temptation to overlook Bellovin's point is going to be very strong. But the real-world equivalent is to imagine that because your home computer is on a desert island surrounded by a moat filled with alligators it can't be stolen. Whereas, the reality is that a family member or invited guest can still copy your data and make off with it or some joker can drop in by helicopter.

Computers are porous. Infrastructure security must assume that and limit the consequences.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. This blog eats all non-spam comments; I still don't know why.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Anyone who realizes how important the Web is," Tim Berners-Lee said on Tuesday, "has a duty of care." He was wrapping up a two-day discussion meeting at the Royal Society. The subject: Web science.

What is Web science? Even after two days, it's difficult to grasp, in part because defining it is a work in progress. Here are some of the disciplines that contributed: mathematics, philosophy, sociology, network science, and law, plus a bunch of much more directly Webby things that don't fit easily into categories. Which of course is the point: Web science has to cover much more than just the physical underpinnings of computers and network wires. Computer science or network science can use the principles of mathematics and physics to develop better and faster machines and study architectures and connections. But the Web doesn't exist without the people putting content and applications on it, and so Web science must be as much about human behaviour as about physics.

"If we are to anticipate how the Web will develop, we will require insight into our own nature," Nigel Shadbolt, one of the event's convenors, said on Monday. Co-convenor Wendy Hall has said, similarly, "What creates the Web is us who put things on it, and that's not natural or engineered.". Neither natural (biological systems) or engineered (planned build-out like the telecommunications networks), but something new. If we can understand it better, we can not only protect it better, but guide it better toward the most productive outcomes, just as farmers don't haphazardly interbreed species of corn but use their understanding to select for desirable traits.

The simplest parts of the discussions to understand, therefore, were (ironically) the mathematicians. Particularly intriguing was the former chief scientist Robert May, whose approach to removing nodes from the network to make it non-functional applied equally to the Web, epidemiology, and banking risk.

This is all happening despite the recent Wired cover claiming the "Web is dead". Dead? Facebook is a Web site; Skype, the app store, IM clients, Twitter, and the New York Times all reach users first via the Web even if they use their iPhones for subsequent visits (and how exactly did they buy those iPhones, hey?) Saying it's dead is almost exactly the old joke about how no one goes to a particular restaurant any more because it's too crowded.

People who think the Web is dead have stopped seeing it. But the point of Web science is that for 20 years we've been turning what started as an academic playground into a critical infrastructure, and for government, finance, education, and social interaction to all depend on the Web it must have solid underpinnings. And it has to keep scaling - in a presentation on the state of deployment of IPv6 in China, Jianping Wu noted that Internet penetration in China is expected to jump from 30 percent to 70 percent in the next ten to 20 years. That means adding 400-900 million users. The Chinese will have to design, manage, and operate the largest infrastructure in the world - and finance it.

But that's the straightforward kind of scaling. IBMer Philip Tetlow, author of The Web's Awake (a kind of Web version of the Gaia hypothesis), pointed out that all the links in the world are a finite set; all the eyeballs in the world looking at them are a finite set...but all the contexts surrounding them...well, it's probably finite but it's not calculable (despite Pierre Levy's rather fanciful construct that seemed to suggest it might be possible to assign a URI to every human thought). At that level, Tetlow believes some of the neat mathematical tools, like Jennifer Chayes' graph theory, will break down.

"We're the equivalent of precision engineers," he said, when what's needed are the equivalent of town planners and urban developers. "And we can't build these things out of watches."

We may not be able to build them at all, at least not immediately. Helen Margetts outlined the constraints on the development of egovernment in times of austerity. "Web science needs to map, understand, and develop government just as for other social phenomena, and export back to mainstream," she said.

Other speakers highlighted gaps between popular mythology and reality. MIT's David Carter noted that, "The Web is often associated with the national and international but not the local - but the Web is really good at fostering local initiatives - that's something for Web science to ponder." Noshir Contractor, similarly, called out The Economist over the "death of distance": "More and more research shows we use the Web to have connections with proximate people."

Other topics will be far more familiar to net.wars readers: Jonathan Zittrain explored the ways the Web can be broken by copyright law, increasing corporate control (there was a lovely moment when he morphed the iPhone's screen into the old CompuServe main menu), the loss of uniformity so that the content a URL points to changes by geographic location. These and others are emerging points of failure.

We'll leave it to an unidentified audience question to sum up the state of Web science: "Nobody knows what it is. But we are doing it."

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)