If you build it...
Lawrence Lessig once famously wrote that "Code is law". Today, at the last day of this year's Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, Ross Anderson's talk about the risks of centralized databases suggested a corollary: Architecture is policy. (A great line and all mine, so I thought, until reminded that only last year CFP had an EFF-hosted panel called exactly that.)
You may *say* that you value patient (for example) privacy. And you may believe that your role-based access rules will be sufficient to protect a centralized database of personal health information (for example), but do the math. The NHS's central database, Anderson said, includes data on 50 million people that is accessible by 800,000 people - about the same number as had access to the diplomatic cables that wound up being published by Wikileaks. And we all saw how well that worked. (Perhaps the Wikileaks Unit could be pressed into service as a measure of security risk.)
So if you want privacy-protective systems, you want the person vendors build for - "the man with the checkbook" to be someone who understands what policies will actually be implemented by your architecture and who will be around the table at the top level of government, where policy is being drafted. When the man with the checkbook is a doctor, you get a very different, much more functional, much more privacy protective system. When governments recruit and listen to a CIO you do not get a giant centralized, administratively convenient Wikileaks Unit.
How big is the threat?
Assessing that depends a lot, said Bruce Schneier, on whether you accept the rhetoric of cyberwar (Americans, he noted, are only willing to use the word "war" when there are no actual bodies involved). If we are at war, we are a population to be subdued; if we are in peacetime we are citizens to protect. The more the rhetoric around cyberwar takes over the headlines, the harder it will be to get privacy protection accepted as an important value. So many other debates all unfold differently depending whether we are rhetorically at war or at peace: attribution and anonymity; the Internet kill switch; built-in and pervasive wiretapping. The decisions we make to defend ourselves in wartime are the same ones that make us more vulnerable in peacetime.
"Privacy is a luxury in wartime."
Instead, "This" - Stuxnet, attacks on Sony and Citibank, state-tolerated (if not state-sponsored) hacking - "is what cyberspace looks like in peacetime." He might have, but didn't, say, "This is the new normal." But if on the Internet in 1995 no one knew you were a dog; on the Internet in 2011 no one knows whether your cyberattack was launched by a government-sponsored military operation or a couple of guys in a Senegalese cybercafé.
Why Senegalese? Because earlier, Mouhamadou Lo, a legal advisor from the Computing Agency of Senegal, had explained that cybercrime affects everyone. "Every street has two or three cybercafés," he said. "People stay there morning to evening and send spam around the world." And every day in his own country there are one or two victims. "it shows that cybercrime is worldwide."
And not only crime. The picture of a young Senegalese woman, posted in Facebook, appeared in the press in connection with the Strauss-Kahn affair because it seemed to correspond to a description given of the woman in the case. She did nothing wrong; but there are still consequences back home.
Somehow I doubt the solution to any of this will be found in the trend the ACLU's Jay Stanley and others highlighted towards robot policing. Forget black helicopters and CCTV; what about infrared cameras that capture private moments in the dark and helicopters the size of hummingbirds that "hover and stare". The mayor of Ogden, Utah wants blimps over his city, and, as Vernon M Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation put it, "Law enforcement does not do a good job of looking at new technologies through the prism of civil liberties."
Imagine, said the ACLU's Jay Stanley: "The chilling prospect of 100 percent enforcement."
Final conference thoughts, in no particular order:
- This is the first year of CFP (and I've been going since 1994) where Europe and the UK are well ahead on considering a number of issues. One was geotracking (Europe has always been ahead in mobile phones); but also electronic health care records and how to manage liability for online content. "Learn from our mistakes!" pleaded one Dutch speaker (re health records).
- #followfriday: @sfmnemonic; @privacywonk; @ehasbrouck; @CenDemTech; @openrightsgroup; @privacyint; @epic; @cfp11.
- The market in secondary use of health care data is now $2 billion (PriceWaterhouseCooper via Latanya Sweeney).
- Index on Censorship has a more thorough write-up of Bruce Schneier's talk.
- Today was IBM's 100th birthday.
- This year's chairs, Lillie Coney (EPIC) and Jules Polonetsky, did an exceptional job of finding a truly diverse range of speakers. A rarity at technology-related conferences.
- Join the weekly Twitter #privchat, Tuesdays at noon Eastern US time, hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology.
- Have a good year, everybody! See you at CFP 2012 (and here every Friday until then).
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.