The ” FBI vs Apple ” debate may seem a somewhat esoteric debate to many, but at the very core of this [ no pun intended ] is the basis of free and open societies. No this is not an exaggeration.
National Security professionals take note. Law-makers take note. Every phone-owner take note.
Recently, Sam Harris, a commentator I greatly admire for his reasoned and always challenging analysis of major global issues, took the forcefully opposing view in the Apple v FBI debate.
Whilst very well-reasoned and convincing, I simply could not agree and felt even someone as genuinely erudite as Harris was overlooking the “grammar of the medium” in this pivotal debate. I also felt his risk assessment under-estimated the loss to the individual and the implications for the future of what we understand open societies require to function [free and open communication].
The nature of digital technology and modern communications makes the “analogue” counter-arguments he was making less relevant in my view. An ethical/moral response to this requires consideration of the paradigm shift that has occurred in the last five years with ubiquitous, personal encryption. This is the game-changer.
Given the rise of global threats and the seeming rise of increasingly authoritarian responses [not least that demonstrated in some of the US Presidential debates and even within Australian political debate] by many otherwise open and/or plural societies, this issue has major and perhaps irreversible long-term consequences for the security and openness of “free/democratic” societies.
These really are the stakes in my view.
The #KeepitlockedTim sentiment is simple, but the implications are profound.
Notably, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations, has warned that a “Pandora’s box” will be opened if Apple co-operates with the FBI.
Unsurprisingly however, Sam Harris has once again demonstrated how a reasoned and thoughtful individual can entertain opposing views, rationally consider evidence as it changes and refine or even reverse one’s opinions, based on new understandings.
His most recent podcast, Waking Up with Sam Harris, – Inside the Crucible: Syria and the Islamic State, details [in a short update] his ongoing consideration and analysis of this issue. He references further feedback he has received from a Google engineer and the eloquent and compelling opposition he has to Harris’ position.
This short reflection by Harris is very worthy of your time. Not because he has aligned with a position I hold, but the way in which he arrives at his reshaped view. This is a genuine intellectual and reasoned-thinker at work.
You can play the excerpted reflection from the link at the beginning of this post.
You can listen to the full episode of the Waking Up with Sam Harris podcast here:
Interestingly, Harris also references the position of former NSA and CIA Chief, General Michael Hayden [the only person to ever head both organisations], who said in mid-February 2016
Even when you’re just looking at this through a security lens, that’s actually not the best resolution for American security. Put another way America is more secure — America is more safe — with unbreakable end-to-end encryption,
Also worthy of note is the position taken by the Chertoff Group,
We conclude that an extraordinary access requirement is likely to have a negative impact on technological development, the United States’ international standing, and the competitiveness of the U.S. economy and will have adverse long-term effects on the security, privacy, and civil liberties of citizens.
The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.
It was 1965 when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards penned the words to “Get off of my Cloud“.
I have no doubt that Mat Honan, a senior writer at Gadget Lab shares precisely the same sentiment [although perhaps] for very different reasons.
I would encourage all of my clients, friends and colleagues to take a few minutes to read Mat’s story… There but for….
Just last week, this very experienced writer, author and technologist was hacked, and hacked in a way that has demonstrated that the profoundly simple access to cloud computing, the “connected” solution, is also the very “achilles heel” of what is essentially a modern version of the very flaws that “personal computing” was designed to alleviate.
For those of us old enough to have lived before modern computers, [which is not that old] there is a huge irony in the fact that it was Apple’s iCloud environment that was used to compromise an individual’s personal and business records, including phone, laptop and online storage.
The marketing narrative was that “We” moved to “personal computing” to wrest control from the “mainframe”, from the corporate behemoth and overlords and allow “personal” computing to inject a more human, local, friendly and secure environment. This is fine, until you have to back up a house full of teenager’s devices and coordinate tera-bytes of music files…. The cloud is useful and important, but this comes at a price.
A price that perhaps means revisiting some of the very risks [of centralisation] that personal computing was inherently designed to alleviate.
Remember Apple’s 1984 commercial?
Anyway….
As is nearly always the case in such circumstances, human gullibility and “open” and impersonal security measures all combined to create a perfect-storm that allowed some less-than-friendly-types to “assume” enough details of Mat Honan’s “identity” to trick the operators of the “cloud” environment to allow access to key entry points.
As the Wired article points out:
The very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the Web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.
This also speaks to the ubiquity and almost universal surrender of any shred of Privacy for individuals in a modern, connected, online world. Don’t get me wrong, I am a HUGE fan and advocate of connectivity, [not-withstanding my concerns] but the ubiquity with which such [once personal] information such as Bank Account numbers, phone numbers and addresses are combined/mashed/published/shared and circulated online leads to the inevitable conclusion, as experienced by Mat Honan last week.
His personal and business records,[sadly 18 months of his young daughter’s photographs] phone, computer and online backups were wiped out, because, well, just because…..
Of course, this could have been a LOT, LOT LOT worse.
If the “hackers” chose to “live” in Mat Honan’s online identity, rather than just destroy things, even if just for a few hours or days, posting as Mat online, purchasing as Mat online, transferring online services, accounts, registrations, passwords and publications, then Mat would most surely wish he had NEVER seen the cloud, let alone got on it…
This is a salutary lesson to all of us. I congratulate Mat for having the care and concern to actually publish his experience.
Small and medium businesses that maintain little or no genuine password or customer security, individuals and sole-traders that get so busy, it just seems OK to use the same password combination for a dozen or so “important” sites, families that share accounts, even large corporations who “forget” after the third down-size and outsource of the IT group, just how easy some of this can be…
All have potentially benefitted from Mat’s experience.
I say potentially, because I fear [and experience tells me] that some will read Mat’s story, MOST, sadly, may take a glance up in to the cloud, wonder for a moment, then happily give their credit card number to the Pizza guy….
Confessions of a “non-facebooker”.. or.. why the cost of admission is too steep!
If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
– Andrew Lewis
My colleague stood genuinely “stunned” for a few seconds while they tried to process the fact I was not on Facebook, had never used Facebook and clearly had no plans to ever use Facebook…
My colleague stated the obvious, one more time, just to be sure.
YOU, of all people, are NOT on Facebook? I don’t get it?
Of course, the simplest answer was that I have no friends or social network. Whilst funny, not entirely true. The realisation soon dawned on my colleague that I chose not to be “on” Facebook. This was surprising to both of us. Certainly, everyone I know uses Facebook [almost everyone I know].
Apologies to the python crew…
Having reached adulthood, graduated from school, worked a little, graduated from university,travelled a lot, all without the existence of modern computers or “the internet” and then having spent my entire working life [since] immersed in the connectivity and collaborative space that ubiqutous connectivity continues to bring to our lives, gives me a reasonable “pre and post internet” perspective. I can see the irony.
I advise individuals and organisations [at times] on their use and implementation of online technologies and the implications for their lives and business. I thought it useful to make some simple observations from someone who finds themselves awkwardly between the “builder” generation of my parents [who experienced the great depression and wars, thus suspicious of the transitory nature of “the good times” and always fiercely self-reliant and self-contained] and the confident, ambitious and achievement-oriented “Gen-Y / Millennials” or whatever ridiculous catch-all stereotype we try to use to define individual characteristics of whole generations. A generation that has only known the internet and accepts readily, and often without question, a very different definition of privacy and personal expression than I.
Of course I accept some of this as simply the age-old “generation gap”. We do things differently, “my generation” does not “get it” and “their” generation cannot view their own actions through “our” lens of experience.
In fact Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems in 1999, said, quite bluntly:
You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it
As the original author of the piece quoting McNealy said, he is right about the first part, but not about the second part.
Given we have progressed over a decade since that statement was made, I see much in the structure and ownership of data that should be carefully considered by individuals and organisations alike.
Unfeted aggregation of the minutae of 100’s of millions of people lives, as individual bits and bytes of data may not seem relevant, but cloud-based aggregation of such data [ and the subsequent corporatised use/ownership of that data] is driving deeper in to the daily lives, spending patterns, tracking patterns and “thinking patterns” of users. All this to drive advertising and other “new-media” business models has an uncanny resemblance to the “big-blue” concerns of the 60’s and 70’s.
Ironically, the rise of the personal computer was designed to lessen the centralised “main-frame” view of connectivity and place greater granular control back in to the hands of the users, avoiding the very silos that it appears millions and millions and millions and millions of people are blissfully rushing headlong towards.
We have seen in the most recent events around “sub-prime” financing, the unethical and in many cases almost inexplicable practices of financial institutions destroying any notion of credibility with lending practices that cease to be recognised as anything that even approximates what I would understand to be responsible or prudent business practice. The global financial crisis of 2009 and beyond has heralded our first glimpse of post-modern corporations that are too big to fail and pose risks on society in ways that we are only beginning to understand.
We are also witnessing a curious and at times breathless disregard for what I used to understand to be an individual’s consent to the access, use or distribution of their personal information.
However, I think that this may be a concern that many (perhaps a majority) of those my own age and certainly those younger than me, simply do not share, or for that matter, even consider to be an issue.
In an age when personal images , deep thoughts on religion or sexual orientation, political affiliations, the display of open biases and hatred and even the publication of real-time location data [pleaserobme.com] are simply bytes that get added to public spaces such as Facebook, Foursquare or twitter, I come to realize that whatever demographic and generational train this is, it has already left the station without me…
To say the least… To have a third-party possess and potentially manipulate, share or on-sell such information is a legal and ethical mine-field.
When we combine the almost universal use of Facebook or similar services, particularly on mobile devices that combine access to a unique device identifier [UDID] and have geo-location capabilities, we have the combined power of third-party [and even further remotes entities] being able to correlate UDID to a real-world individual, effectively in real-time.
Such trust in third-parties [and others] is not something I share with [apparently] the vast majority of the populace. When we consider image services, social networks, business messaging services, cloud storage and mobile data products linked to handsets, we see the move that began in the 70’s, away from the “main-frame” to the relative safety and “ownership/control” of the user and their desktop, has begun the inevitable march back in to the network or “cloud”.
The cost and extent of such infrastructure was unimaginable in the 70’s or 80’s or 90’s. Today, the cost for the average user to access all the wonderful services and products available within such a network, is a mere pittance in monetary terms.
The difference this time is that the “cost of admission” is not monetary, rather it is personal. Personal information, personal practices, routines, habits, views and preferences. All monitored and aggregated. In many cases, by [in the old language] minors. Children or minors, does not appear to be a concept that the digital age understands nor really makes provision for. Certainly miners of data is understood, but not so data of minors.
Of most concern to me is that this “cost-of-admission” is almost ubiquitous and that the use, control or transfer of so much information about individuals is opaque at best.
This has serious ramifications for governing boards and individuals alike as increasing details of employees, customers, financial transactions, location and related habits are stored and shared online in ways individuals cannot easily or readily comprehend nor in most cases, discover or retrieve.
When we consider the ethical and moral challenges of even the smallest issues to do with “accidental” use of an individual’s or organisation’s contact lists [of which we see almost daily on our own email!] and compare this to the regulatory, legal and ethical challenges being debated during the so-called “News of the World Hacking Scandal” , we come to realise that notions of privacy, identity and the right to determine what information an individual considers “personal” or “public” is still very fluid and highly complex.
Even as I have been writing this over the last week, the debate over the right of prospective employers requiring password access to applicant‘s online networks adds further confusion to the space, even soliciting response from Facebook’s Chief of Privacy!!
As Dave Winer cautions, the evidence that ethics are not as present in Silicon Valley boardrooms as we would like, is self-evident.
It is still unclear as to whether such laws are designed to protect individuals from corporate misuse or to protect existing corporate markets and trade practices from disruptive technologies.
Perhaps most sobering is Alexis Madrigal’s recent article in The Atlantic – I’m Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web..
In this she points out that the simple act of loading her morning news web site produced data thats was sent to ten different tracking and monitoring sites. In all she has found 104 other companies tracking her on the web.
[Edit April 2012 – In a very telling development, MacWorld highlights that
The makers of the mobile app Girls Around Me came under fire this past week for helping men to “stalk” unsuspecting women, but the incident also reveals how much we still have to learn about what social networks reveal about us….
Food for thought….
As an aside, there is a handy little tool called Collusion that will visualise your own “footprints” around the web.. Have a look here.
