In my last book, I spent some time on the issue of terrorism and how governments use that to justify monitoring and surveillance in their own countries.
In today's Wall Street Journal [White House Seeks CEOs' Help on Terror] there is a story on a White House gathering in Silicon Valley that is going to ask some CEOs to help in discouraging the use of the Internet as a recruiting tool for terrorists. James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney General, and James Comey, Director of the FBI are all invited though we will have to see if they actually attend. Some people from Facebook, Google and Yahoo will also attend, but we shall see if the CEOs actually come. Let's see if Tim Cook from Apple gets invited. His views on encryption, one of the "other subjects that will be broached" are public knowledge.
What our government is doing is linking the use of the Internet with monitoring and disruption of terrorism. China does the same thing to justify the turnover of source code and encryption technologies that give them access to industrial secrets of every business operating in China. Russia does it to justify the intense monitoring of citizens of its own country. At the same time, both of these countries use the publication of Edward Snowden's stash of documents as the reason for not doing business with the United States. Purely hypocritical.
There are a number of countries of who monitor their own populations much more than the USA, mostly in the Middle East, but some on every continent. They all use the same "national security" justification. They buy sophisticated software suites (mostly made in the US) to monitor almost any activity of any citizen. These are law enforcement tools that are not being used for the kind of law enforcement we thought of when making them. It is the kind of law enforcement that says, "You cannot speak ill of the government in power" or don't say anything about the king or his relatives. We have seen a lot of that in almost every country that uses these tools.
Most of these tools are not looking at content, though they are quite capable of that. They look for associations. That has limits. If drug dealer El Capo wants to make a drug shipment to San Francisco, it would be nice to know that he is dropping it off at a warehouse on the south side of town. Without looking at content of a transmission, that is very hard to figure out. So, we always end up with the "back door" argument for law enforcement. Some of Silicon Valley stopped buying that argument when encryption became the only way to protect information that thieves all over the world were taking. Add the element of terrorists using the same mechanisms to protect their contacts with other terrorists, and you have the basis of a disagreement. It is a disagreement that is not new.
The Wall Street Journal article points to a less than enthusiastic groundswell of support for changing what industry has done to protect our transmissions. Terrorism is the justification that almost every government has used successfully. It doesn't seem to be working very well this time. It isn't because privacy is more important than national security, because there won't be any privacy if our national security isn't protected. All those countries in the Arab Spring have figured that part out. This time, we have to do something different. We have to protect people from thieves, terrorists, and hackers all at the same time. Maybe all those good minds in the Valley can figure out how to stop terrorists from hiding in plain sight, and using our technology against us, but I doubt it. I know for sure that they can protect us from governments who monitor their own citizens.
No comments:
Post a Comment