Update: NSA surveillance, Bitcoin, cloud storage

Just last month, Edward Snowden was honored with our first annual Wild Duck Privacy Award (we hope that he considers it an honor). The vigorous debate ignited by his revelations extend to the US Congress, which just voted on a defense spending bill Edward Snowdento  defund a massive NSA domestic spying program at the center of the controversy.

Although the bill was narrowly defeated, it is clear that Snowden has played a critical role in deliberative policy legislation at the highest level of a representative government. Even if this is the only fact in his defense, why then – we wonder, is Snowden a fugitive who must fear for his life and his freedom?

Snowden saw an injustice and acted to right a wrong. His error was to rely solely on his own judgment and take matters into his own hands, without deliberative process or oversight. But since it is the lack of these very same protective mechanisms for which he engaged in conscientious objection, the ethical dilemma presented a Catch 22.

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Stacks of BitcoinRegular readers know that we love Bitcoin. We covered the stateless currency in 2011 and 2013. Just as the internet decentralizes publishing and influence peddling, some day soon, Bitcoin will decentralize world monetary systems by obliterating the role of govern-ments and banks in the control of money flow and savings. Why? Because math is more trustworthy than financial institutions and geopolitics. You needn’t be an anarchist to appreciate the benefits of a currency that is immune from political influence, inflation, and the potential for manipulation.

Now, comes word of a Texas man charged with running a $60 million Bitcoin Ponzi scheme. The story is notable simply because it is the first skullduggery aimed at the virtual currency — other than internet hacking or other attacks on the still fragile infrastructure. Should we worry. Absolutely not. This story has little to do with Bitcoin and falls squarely under the category of Caveat Emptor. Widows and orphans beware!

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bitcasa-sIn February, we wrote about Bitcasa, the upstart cloud storage service with an edge over diver-sified competitors and other entrenched players: Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, SugarSync, Apple iCloud, etc. WildDucks learned how to get truly unlimited cloud storage for just $49. Now they are launching unlimited cloud storage in Europe starting at €60 per year.

Bitcasa still captures our attention and sets our pulse racing. While we are disappointed that it lacks the RDDC architecture that will eventually rule the roost, their Infinite Drive technology is a barn burner. More than ever, it is clear that Bitcasa is likely to displace or be acquired by their better known brethren.

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Drew Houston-01sWe also wrote about Dropbox, but that posting wasn’t really a review. It was our plea to CEO, Drew Houston (shown at left), to adopt a fully distributed and reverse cloud architecture. That effort failed, but it is still our favorite of the entrenched players. More suited to pin stripe corporate adoption, but in our opinion, not quite a Bitcasa.

In a previous article, we introduced lesser known cloud startups with clever and unique architect-ture that yield subtle benefits: SpaceMonkey, Symform and Digital Lifeboat. That last one was in need of a life preserver. It flopped. But the IP that they created in the area of distributed p2p storage management will live on. We will all benefit.

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Stream Music Flowchart-s2Finally, in May we ran down the benefits of cloud music players and their likely future of streaming your own personal library of movies. Now, Jeff Somogyi at Dealnews has created a nifty flowchart to help you decide among many vendors in a crowded market.

Of course, a discussion of Bitcasa, Dropbox, SpaceMonkey and RDDC wasn’t our first discussion of cloud storage. Shortly after AWildDuck launched back in 2011, we applauded PogoPlug and their ilk (Tonidoplug, Dreamplug, Shiva, and other genres consumer grade network attached storage with internet access. They let you create personal cloud services and even stream media from a drive or RAID storage device attached to your home router.

 

Chilling developments in domestic spying

The US government is obsessed about your phone calls, email, web surfing and a log of everywhere that you travel. The obsession has become so intense over the past few years, that they have had to recast the definition of data gathering. After all, warrantless wiretapping and domestic spying is illegal. And so once exposed, Uncle Sam now claims that massive public eavesdropping, archiving and data mining (including building cross-domain portfolios on every citizen) does not count as “spying” because a human analyst has not yet listened to a particular conversation. The way your government spins it, if they have not yet listened into private, domestic conversations, they can gather yottabytes of personal and businesses without any judicial oversight.

The increasing pace of Big Brother’s appetite for wads of personal data is–at the very least–alarming and more specifically, unlikely to result in anything more than a Police State. To learn about some of these events, check our recent articles on the topic of Uncle Sam’s proclivity for data gathering.

Whistle blower, William Binney, explains a secret NSA program to spy on U.S. citizens without warrants

I’m Not Doing Anything Illegal. Why Should I Care?

Here at AWildDuck, we frequently discuss privacy, government snooping, and projects that incorporate or draw upon warrantless interception. In just the USA, there are dozens of projects–past and present–with a specific mandate to violate the Foreign Intelligent Surveillance Act. How can the American government get away with it? In the past decade, as leaks began to surface, they tried to redefine the meaning of domestic surveillance to exclude sweeping acts of domestic surveillance. The Bush era interpretation of USSID 18 is so farcical, that it can be debunked by an elementary school pupil. As the ruse unraveled, the wholesale gathering of data on every citizen in America was ‘legitimized’ by coupling The Patriot Act with general amnesty for past acts warrantless wiretapping. Dick Cheney invoked the specter of 911 and the urgent need to protect Americans from terrorism as justification for creating a more thorough and sweeping police mechanism than any totalitarian regime in history.

The programs go by many names, each with a potential to upend a democracy: Stellar Wind, The Patriot Act, TIA, Carnivore, Echelon, Shamrock, ThinThread, Trailblazer, Turbulence, Swift, and MINARET. Other programs thwart the use of privacy tools by businesses and citizens, such as Clipper Chip, Key Escrow and the classification of any secure web browsing as a munition that must be licensed and cannot be exported. The list goes on and on…

A myriad of dangers arise when governments ‘of-the-people and by-the-people’ engage in domestic spying, even if the motive is noble. Off the bat, I can think of four:

  • Justifications are ethereal. They are based on transient goals and principles. Even if motives are common to all constituents at the time a project is rolled out, the scope of data archived or the access scenarios inevitably change as personal and administrations change.
  • Complex and costly programs are self-perpetuating by nature. After all, no one wants to waste billions of taxpayer dollars. Once deployed, a massive surveillance mechanism, it is very difficult to dismantle or thwart.
  • There is convincing research to suggest that domestic surveillance could aid terrorists, rather than protect civilians.
  • Perhaps most chilling, is the insipid and desensitizing effect of such programs. Once it becomes acceptable for a government to spy on its citizens, it is a surprisingly small step for neighbors, co-workers and your own children to become patriotic partners in surveillance and reporting. After all, if your government has the right to preemptively look for dirt on your movement, Internet surfing, phone calls, cash transactions and sexual dalliances, then your neighbor can take refuge in the positive light of assisting law enforcement as they transmit an observation about an unusual house guest or the magazines you subscribe to.

What’s New in Domestic Spying?

This is a landmark week for anyone who values privacy and who understands that domestic spying is not a necessary tool of homeland security. This week, we are learning that US surveillance of its citizens is skyrocketing and a court case is about to either validate or slap a metaphorical wrist. Either way, each event brings us ever closer to the world depicted in Person of Interest. For now, I am citing breaking news. We’ll flush out the details soon.

Article in progress. Changes coming in the next few hours.
Figures, Photos & Links will be added. Please return soon.

Articles on Privacy & Domestic Surveillance here at AWildDuck:

Big biz & Uncle Sam like Tor, sort of…

Oceans of Data
Try to visualize all the data about you that is recorded, stored or transmitted each day in one form or another. Consider every possible source, both public and private. What if it could all be put together, correlated with data about every other person on earth and sifted by detectives whose only task is to look for subtle patterns of behavior?

Let’s start with phone calls: In addition to the number dialed, the phone company knows your location, the caller of ID of incoming calls, and even has access to the actual conversation. (Believe it or not, your government is listening). Check the phone bill of both parties and we can figure out how often you call each other. If we then learn everything we can about the people that you talk to, we can probably learn a thing or two about you. And speaking about location, did you know that both iPhones and Android phones log your precise location every few seconds and then transmit your location history to Apple or Google several times each hour? An even more ominous program discovered this week is embedded in Android phones. It sends every keystroke to your carrier even if you opt out.

What about your health records, magazine subscriptions, tax filings, legal disputes, mortgage records, banking transactions including charge card purchases? Now add your internet use – not just the sites at which you are registered, but every site you have ever visited. As that does happen, you have been recorded in some way on every website you’ve ever visited, many different agencies and companies collect different internet use statistics for public viewing, such as the stats you’re able to research using this source here as just one example. Suppose we add videos from convenience stores, traffic enforcement cameras and every ATM that you pass. Don’t forget the snapshot at the toll booth. They have one camera pointed at your face and another at the license plate. Of course, there is also a log entry from the toll payment device on your windshield and the key chain FOB that you use when you buy gas.

What about the relationships that are revealed by your old high school yearbook, old newspaper articles or that 4th grade poetry contest your daughter was in. There was a handout that night and so it counts as information related to you. How about that camera in the elevator at work? Suppose that it could recognize your face immediately and match it up with your fingerprints from your last international flight and your phone calls, web visits, hotel reservations and TV viewing habits.

Whew! That’s a lot of information to recognize or sift through in any meaningful way. But for a moment, ask yourself “What If”… What if all that data from every transaction record, GPS device, tax return and historical log could all be accurately attributed, correlated, matched and analyzed. What could be accomplished with all of this? Who wants it and for what purpose? Would their goals align with yours?

Person of Interest
In the CBS Television series, Person of Interest, a government computer looks for clues to the next terrorist event by monitoring virtually everyone and everything. The project doesn’t require its creators to build a new surveillance network. Massive amounts of data are already floating around us every day.

Of course, the data is fragmented. It was gathered for different reasons – mostly for private commerce (banking, medicine, safety). Few people consider it to impact privacy or personal freedoms, because we assume that It is too disparate and unwieldy for analysis by any single entity. Yet, in Person of Interest, the computer taps into all of these sources and mines the data for suspicious patterns.

As patterns emerge from all of this data, the computer finds converging threads based on individual behavior. Taken alone, the data points are meaningless – someone in Oregon signs for a package; someone using a different name in Rhode Island makes a plane reservation; someone in Pakistan fitting both descriptions checks into a motel and visits a convicted arms smuggler. The mobile phone carried by the last person accepts a phone call at a number previously used by one of the other individuals. Normally, no one could have ever fit these pieces together.

Eventually, the computer begins to identify suspicious activity. Depending on the programming and based on past findings, it even predicts events. But wait! Many of the patterns it finds are unrelated to terrorism. It finds clues to likely mob hits, crimes of passion, kidnapping, guns at school, and regional crime. The results are irrelevant to the machine’s purpose and in this fictional drama, the government decide that analysis would constitute illegal domestic spying. So they order the programmer to purge “irrelevant data” by adding a software routine to periodically delete extraneous results.

Of course, if the “personal” results were deleted, we wouldn’t have a new and exciting television series (my personal favorite). So, the middle-age geek who gave life to the analytics, recasts himself as a vigilante. He teams up with a former special ops agent (in the mold of Harrison Ford) and together, they follow data-mined leads in hope of saving innocent individuals.

In the US, our government has such a program. In fact, there are many Total Information Awareness projects. Unlike the Hollywood version, there was never any intent to purge personal information. In fact, it’s collection and analysis is the whole point. Another difference with the television series is that our government is not satisfied to mine public data or even legally obtained data. Instead, The federal government adds new primary data mechanisms every month and builds enormous enterprises to spy on individuals. This results in voluminous information daily, all of it available for future data mining without anyone’s knowledge or consent.

Of course, information and videos of individuals are routinely recorded wherever we go. But typically, we assume that this information is not centrally gathered, compared or analyzed. Most people assume that they are “off the radar” if they are not being actively tracked as part of an investigation. But with data mining techniques, no one is really off the radar. Machines make decisions about patterns that should be flagged and escalated for additional scrutiny.

Mixmaster: An Innocent Tool or Antiforensics?
In the 1990’s, despite a background in cryptography and computer science, I wasn’t aware of these programs. In the fields of political science and sociology, I was a ninnyhammer. It is either coincidence or perhaps prescience that I proposed and then participated in a project called a Mixmaster more than a decade ago…

The idea was simple: As you surf the web or send mail, your digital footprints are randomized so that an interloper or investigator could not piece together the participants in an internet exchange, nor determine the habits of an individual user. Well, they’re not really random, but the IP address reported to the email service or web page you visit is substituted by one associated with another participant in the project. That’s because each data leaving your PC is relayed through internet services associated with the others. We added a few simple facets to further obscure tracks:

  • Recognizing that a rogue participant might keep a log on the individuals who hand off data through his own relay (or may be compelled to do so in the future), our code automatically increased the number of ‘hops’ in relationship to the number of available peers. Anonymity was enhanced, because an unfriendly investigator attempting to trace the source of a web visit or email would need cooperation from a larger pool of participants.
  • Data between participants ware encrypted and randomized in length and even timing, to thwart possible forensic analysis.
  • A backward channel was added, but with very tight rules on expiration and purging. This allowed packet acknowledgement, web site navigation, and even two-way dialogue while still preserving anonymity.

Privacy & Politics
For most of us involved in the project, we had no endgame or political agenda. We simply recognized that it is occasionally comforting to send email, browse the web or post to a public forum without leaving a traceable return address. To those who claimed that our work might aid money launderers, terrorists or child molesters, we explained that identification and authentication should be under control of parties involved in a conversation. The internet is a new communications medium. But it was not designed to undermine the privacy of every conversation for the purpose of facilitating future forensic investigation. Investigators – if their purpose is supported by judicial oversight –have many old school methods and tools to aid their detective work. The growth of a new communication medium must not become a key to suppression or compromised privacy.

Vacuum-cleaner surveillance

Anonymous, but authenticated
There is a big difference, between identification and authentication. In a democracy, citizens are authenticated at the polls. But they enter a private booth to cast their vote and they turn in a ballot without a signature. They are identified (or even better, authenticated without identification) for the purpose of verifying eligibility. But their identity is not carried over to their voting decision. The real business is effectively anonymous.

This isn’t to say that all authorized entry systems should allow anonymous access. Of course not! Access entry systems typically might asks “Who are you?” (your User ID) and then ask for proof (typically a password). Your identity is not always required, but proof of authorized access can come in 3 forms. Very secure systems (such as banks) require at least 2 of these before allowing access:

  • something you know: A password or challenge
  • something you have: Evidence that you have a token or card
  • something you are: A fingerprint, recognizable face, or voice match

In each case, it is the person behind the door that needs your identity or authorization and not your government.

Anonymity and encryption go hand in hand. Both technologies are used to ensure that internet communication is private and does not become the affair of your friends, employer, former spouse, or government overseers. So where, exactly, does your government stand on the use of internet encryption or anonymity? In most of the world, the answer is clear. Governments stand for propaganda and crowd control. They are against any technology that enhances privacy. But this is not a universal axiom: In Germany, they stand on the side of citizens. Your data and your identity belong to you. Very little of your affairs are open to the government. But in the United States, the answer is very murky…

The NSA conducts vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all data crossing the Internet–email, web surfing… everything! –Mark Klein

Under George W. Bush, every bit of information was Uncle Sam’s business. With oversight by Dick Cheney (and hidden from legislative or judicial oversights), the executive branch concocted mechanisms of blatant domestic spying. Of course, the ringleaders realized that each mechanism violated the US constitution protection from unreasonable search, and so it was ordered and implemented covertly until a technician working for AT&T blew the whistle. Suddenly stories were surfacing that Uncle Sam was implementing a Reagan era project that had been shelved during the Clinton era. This launched a scramble to win public support for The Patriot Act, an absurd euphemism which attempts to whitewash illegal snooping as the patriotic duty of each citizen (talk about ‘deceptive’! Our leaders must think that we are sheep. Not just your garden variety grass-eating sheep, but really, really dumb sheep that feed on bull chips!).

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… until and (including preemptive data mining with programs like Dick Cheney’s “total information awareness”), back doors built into encryption chips, “deep packet” data sniffing installed at major switching center, satellite interception of phone calls, and national security letters (a euphemism for warrantless snooping).

Before the Obama administration, the answer was clear. These technologies are barely tolerated for banking, medicine and commerce. But they are to be weakened, subterfuged or thwarted when used by private citizens. In each case, the government sought to block the technology or insert a back door into the programming code (and into actual data centers) for use during any future investigation. Of course, in a bold era of predictive behavior modeling, authorized investigations often gives way to fishing expeditions for the sole purpose of information gathering.

But something has changed in the past 2 years. As news spread about Internet censorship in China, the Arab spring, and covert schools for girls in Taliban controlled regions of Afghanistan, the US government began to recognize that uncensored and even untraceable Internet use sometimes coincided with foreign policy objectives. Imagine the conundrum this revelation must have generated within the state department! On the one hand, the Patriot Act sanctions blatant acts of domestic spying (including preemptive data mining with programs like Dick Cheney’s “total information awareness”), back doors built into encryption chips, “deep packet” data sniffing installed at major switching center, satellite interception of phone calls, and national security letters (a euphemism for warrantless snooping). Yet, they also support freedom of speech and privacy for anything that supports US policy amongst our friends.

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Today, this model has been widely adopted and greatly enhanced by an open source project called Tor. In this blog, I won’t try to justify the need for robust anonymous relays. Better writers and social philosophers than me have explained why free and anonymous communications channels are central to a free and democratic society. Better writers than me have chronicled the abuse of the Patriot Act, Echelon, TIA and numerous other abuses of government forms of overreach. Better writers than me have explained how open and free communication leads to increased safety even if it sometimes facilitates communications among terrorists, digital pirates or pornographers.

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Turn of Events: Government as Advocate

  • Obama lends support to Tor
  • Tor to users: Use Amazon Cloud as bridge to anonymity (this section under development)

Additional Reading

  • Carrier IQ (CIQ): A secret routine is embedded in Android phones sends every user keystroke to the network carrier, even when you opt out of every single connectivity feature. It cannot be uninstalled and cannot be uninstalled nor even shut down!
  • Surrounded by Surveillance: Is Everything Spying On You?

    Pigeons aren’t the only ones listening. The light pole itself broadcasts conversations.

    Even municipal light posts send conversations to government agencies, supposedly to aid first responders in an emergency. But wait! The manufacturer “proudly contacted DARPA” to suggest a more sinister use for the data collected from hidden microphones?

  • Wikipedia entry: Information Awareness Office (introduction & overview)
  • Official DARPA site: Information Awareness Office
  • The Smoking Gun: Discovery of Massive “Vacuum Sweep” Domestic Spying
    Leads to Patriot Act (euphemism for act of Profound Anti-Americanism)