The flip side of this is our tendency blithely to hand over private information to whoever asks for it. Even if it makes us uncomfortable, it makes us less unconfortable to subject ourselves to some unknown possible future harm, than to refuse and feel rude right now. And that's assuming it even occurs to us that there might be some future harm. So, so many times I've heard people say, "I can't imagine what could go wrong". Your failure of imagination is not an argument!
You know I was kidding, right? There's a decent chance that I'm to the [appropriate direction] of you on this stuff.
Or were you just abusing your posting powers to slur me? It's just that attitude that makes surveillance seem necessary, missy.
I know you were kidding. Two can play the little bitch game but the one with posting powers will win.
Bruce makes a good point with this essay. Another point he often makes which I haven't heard enough in the recent NSA debate is as follows. The NSA and other surveillance programs require backdoors to be built into all sorts of critical communications infrastructure. Not only do we have to worry about these guys acting badly, we have to worry about other bad actors cracking these systems and doing god knows what with them. It's stupid and it's ultimately bad for business. You'd think the right wing crowd would understand the last bit, at least.
You know I was kidding, right?
I thought it was funny.
2: It seems to me that that only (or mostly) happens in situations where you have to give the information or not get some desired thing, like a job. When does it happen otherwise?
Signing up for certain web sites, accepting cookies, etc.
When does it happen otherwise?
It think it does usually happen as a precondition to getting some desired thing, but
1. this information is often completely unnecessary, with respect to thing; and
2. the number of such things keeps growing.
I don't think I need to point to other classes of examples to show that it's a problem.
w/d, at a lot of universities the student id number is your social security number. Enough cranks complained that most universities have gradually shifted to giving you another unique id number in addition to your SSN--but who wants to remember another number? Most students, myself included, blithely recite our SSN to any unversity worker who requests an id... I mean, what could go wrong?
9 sounds right to me, but I was reading 2 not as a tradeoff between getting something and giving up privacy but one between giving up privacy and feeling like you've discomfited another. In the first case, you just need to decide how much you value that thing, in the second you need to stop being such a pushover.
Wait, I didn't get a desired thing in exchange for saying that.
Does your state permit you to have your SSN taken off your driver's license and the drivers license records which are sold to list buyers, as Illinois does? I used that privilege as soon as I became aware of it.
in the second you need to stop being such a pushover
Ah, I see what you're getting at. I wasn't very precise. I think I had in mind cases like JM's 10.
By the way, as much fun as it is to wish someone a happy birthday, we might want NOT DO THAT anymore, on the blog. I think I (for "I", read "any attentive reader") already know enough about some of the commenters here to make a downpayment on a boat.
My SSN is 406129715.
My SSN is 666-50-1337.
17: But I haven't disclosed my mother's maiden name or what hospital I was born in yet.
At my university, our SSN was our student ID number. Your student ID card was also your ID badge if you were a med student working at the hospital. So, my friend who was doing his residency had to broadcast his SSN to every person he encountered during the day.
A yacht or a coracle?
I'd have to check. It depends on the ratio of lawyers to grad students.
Oh crap, I think I have disclosed my mother's maiden name online.
Here's a neat trick, which, I think, also comes by way of Schneier. When someone asks you for your mother's maiden name, you don't have to tell them your mother's maiden name. You can tell them whatever you like, as long as you'll remember it. (This might be easier online where you're typing into a form, and you don't have to convince anyone that you're descended from the Vymnxgengi family.)
For all those non-secured online forms, where I'm like "huh, why do you want to know my birthday and zip code?", I've been making shit up willynilly for a while now. It does mean that I keep forgetting my NYT identity--I have to go to bugmenot each time, so I don't read the Times online much.
It makes me feel a bit like a crank, though.
I lie habitually and randomly on online forms -- I'm usually a very, very old man with a household income under $15K, living in zip code 23456.
It was great back when the Washington Post didn't require registration proper, but only asked for your birthday and zip code, and *gave helpful examples* of a birthday and zip code.
Has anyone tried "if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about" while at a demonstration photographing police who are photographing you? It doesn't wash with them, they'll steal and/or break your camera. So why should it wash with us?
Dave Heasman makes an excellent point.
I have to go to bugmenot each time
If you use Firefox, there's a bugmenot extension that does this automatically. You right-click in the username field, and in the menu that pops up there will be a BugMeNot option. Cycles through multiple usernames if the first one doesn't work, too. Makes things much easier.
my usual response is "I *am* doing something wrong, which is why I am worried".
I *am* doing something wrong
Too right you are. We're moving toward increasing criminalization of normal behavior. (See mumbling about enforcement of Espionage Act against the press.) Anybody could be done for anything. That, plus total awareness of what you're doing, allows highly discretionary use of "enemy combatant" declarations.
As essentially no Americans care about their rights anymore, the best outcome I see going forward is something like the UK, where you in fact have very few rights, but mainly, people behave as if you do out of habit. That is, mind, the best outcome. I can think of lots worse.
33 was me. I have no idea how that happened. Also, if we stop wishing each other a happy birthday, the terrorists have won.
24: I took that approach with my cell phone account with Virgin Mobile, for my pay-as-you-go cell phone, and I forgot the password I chose. I have no way to recover it now. I searched their site and the internet for some sort of customer support phone number, and I found nothing. The phone automatically debits my debit card every time it needs more minutes. I think when I'm done with that phone I'm going to have to physically destroy it.
7: The sign-up form for my new gym requested my SSN the other day.
I need a good way to keep up with all my passwords. I'm thinking that maybe I need to have some page online where I keep them all, encrypted. I access the page and put in my password, which activates some javascript decryption function and displays them to me when I need them. That would be awesome. Only the ciphertext is stored on the server, which is useless without the password, which is not stored anywhere.
There's some online password services, but I'm not aware of any that provably have *no* way to access your information, and so couldn't under order of a subpoena, say.
HA.
I have a page of passwords, very lightly encrypted, scotch-taped above my computer. The first line reads: "Hi burglars! Here's all my info."
35: VM's privacy policy has a number of customer service numbers. Once you get someone on the phone, they should be able to help you out.
So I remember when Chopper and maybe someone else (Domineditrix?) requested good vibes to be sent their way and it worked out for them. I now officialy request such vibes, preferably between the times of 3:30 and 5:30. In order to help target the vibes, I mention that what I'm doing is neither work nor school related, but in light of SB's new non-disclosure regime, will say no more at this time.
Wait, I didn't get a desired thing in exchange for saying that.
If you had read your Girard, you'd know that reciprocity is impossible. Impossible!
Here's something like what I was talking about. This works if you have your own webspace, and can upload a new .htm every time you change it. On the plus side, it doesn't require your host to have server side scripting, so it would work with free hosts.
On the downside, it makes brute force attacks easy, so you have to have a strong password, unless, say, you put it in a password protected directory on your server.
40: Well, it works, but you have a 50/50 chance of disappearing from the site. I'll send what vibes I have your way. So, if it works, but you disappear, nice knowing ya!
I've always seen it as "quis custodiet ipsos custodes", though I suppose word order doesn't actually matter.
My SSN is not my student ID number, nor is it on my driver's license. I take some comfort in that.
One of the problems, I think, is that your SSN is an easy way for lazy people to think they can get a whole picture of you. IMO, this is another important argument to be made against widespread, undifferentiated monitoring: the more information the government gathers, the more opportunities there are for errors in that information-gathering. The more our records are tied to one individual identifier - phone numbers, or SSNs, or a national ID # or anything - the greater the chances that an error in record-keeping can lead to big, big problems. If 867-5309 calls OBL to get this week's decoder sequence, what happens to the little old lady at 867-5306 when an agent misreads the number? That it's computerized is no defense against errors; it's just a layer of false trust.
But then, one time I was misidentified during a background check and nearly fired on the spot, so I kind of have an axe to grind. Figuratively, that is.
In the four years that I've been working at locating all my 3rd and 4th cousins, the technology available to the ordinary person to connect disparate bits of data has increased at an ever alarming rate. One should never give out one's birthday in circumstances where one is anonymous. Where one isn't, it's already out there on the internet. For now, people born in Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and California -- these are databases I know well enough to say this about -- should be particularly hesitant about giving a mother's maiden name. Such people shouldn't feel unfairly singled out -- I'm sure in a few years more, it won't matter where one was born, or where one lives.
None of this excuses government snooping. A not insubstantial number of people have seen me naked. Hardly means that I have to take off my clothes out on a downtown sidewalk whenever (well, if ever) some authority figure says I should.
A not insubstantial number of people have seen me naked.
ATM.
I hadn't thought about the genealogy thing and the maiden name problem. Shall have to stop using that one! Or use my mom's middle name instead. Or something.
My university library account uses two pieces of information for online access: my university i.d. number (available on my card) and my last name (available on my card). When I pointed out to them that this is a ridiculously insecure system, and that there's no point requiring two pieces of information, the response was "that's why, if you lose your card, you must report it immediately."
I lost my card several months ago and haven't reported it at all, because I don't want to go to the hassle of getting a new one (which requires I go to some obscure office halfway across campus and get a picture taken).
The preservation of liberty should be a consideration when determining whether to expand or contract the sphere of privacy from the government, but surely security plays a role as well. The author implies a false dichotomy, imho. For example, searches of my bags at the airport constitute a contraction of my privacy, but the resulting gain in security is worth the cost.
Besides, not all forms of surveillance are equal. Cameras in subway stations, for example, don't strike me as intrusive; cameras in my home or car or peeking through my windows, would.
Finally, the author relies on a slippery slope argument that isn't fully articulated:
1) If we give government power X, then we increase the risk that government will abuse power X.
2) Because of power's tendency to corrupt, see e.g. Cardinal Richelieu, government will abuse power X. 3) Therefore we should not give government power X.
But that's simplistic at best.
Andrew, having read a lot of Schneier,
"The preservation of liberty should be a consideration when determining whether to expand or contract the sphere of privacy from the government, but surely security plays a role as well. The author implies a false dichotomy, imho."
I didn't get that from the article, but it might have been ambiguous. But Schneier writes a lot about balancing the benefits of any security policy against the problems with the loss of privacy. So if he implied it, he didn't intend to, as it's against his philosophy.
"Besides, not all forms of surveillance are equal."
I'm sure Schneier agrees. BTW, his blog is right here, where he reprints all of his Wired articles.
"Finally, the author relies on a slippery slope argument that isn't fully articulated:"
I don't think he relies on it it all. Some surveillance is worthwhile, striking a good balance between potential abuse and benefit. Other surveillance crosses the line. I think his argument is that we can't accept promises from the government that they won't cross that line, even though they have the power and the information to. We need to withhold that information instead, so they don't have the opportunity.
Fair enough pdf. It's been a long week so I'm probably a little cranky, and I like your reading of him.
"Neither work or school related"= jeopardy auditions.
Utterly unclear. I had taken a 50 question online test (it was only available from something like 7:00 to 7:15 on one day in March, and I heard about it right before it happened, or I would have given notice to others here) and done well enough on that (scores aren't returned) to get an invite to an audition with 20 some odd others at the Waldorf Astoria. They gave us another 50 question test, and then had us play a little bit of unscored jeaopardy (buzzers and all) against two of the other auditionees just to see if we could hit a buzzer and appear on TV without looking crazy or something.
Anyway, they claim at the start that everyone there is going to be in the pool of people who could be called in the next 12-18 months. But since the whole point of that audition is to rank is, this can only be true in the sense that some person (whoever does the worst out of everyone in all their auditions) would be called if and only if everyone who auditioned better is for some reason unable to appear.
After a quick skim of the comments, I'm surprised (and maybe wrong in thinking) that no one has pointed out the apparent howler in the quoted passage, namely that if privacy is some fundamental human right, the "who's watching the watchers/power corrupts' thoughts are a misleading digression. If privacy has this exalted status, its violation is bad for that reason, and its violation would still be wrong even if power didn't corrupt.
On the other hand, the "power corrupts" thought (a quick and sort of lazy way of saying that bad things will come of diminished privacy) might be a reason to protect privacy even if it isn't some sort of basic right.
So it looks as though there's something odd going on.
What's a fundamental right? Is it a right we can, by its nature, no better defend than by saying "just because"? This account suffers from a kind of conceptual impedence mismatch. Such a defense seems more appropriate to a primitive value, than to something as abstract as a right.
Hey, I'm not the one throwing the rights talk around as if it were clear. I'm just saying that if there's some interesting notion of a right here, its ringing defense should come to more than just, oh, bad things will happen.
As for a defense, at least break me off some "plays a special role in the realization of human flourishing" or even some "endowed by creator" but don't give me that Benthamite jive.
Labs, I was wondering aloud, not attacking.
Why do you hate the military so much, SPBP?
They Benthamized me with a broom handle.
I know surprisingly little about rights. One danger here is that if we drift too far toward defending a right to X in terms of the benefits of Xing, what we're left with isn't much of a right in the robust moral sense.
That was Bentham time, S. Now it's Mill time. I'll sodomize you with a...with a... dammit, I can't finish the joke. A qualitatively distinct broom handle? Crappity crap crap.
Do you mean that if we define a right X in terms of benefit Y, we're in trouble if it turns out that Y is not actually beneficial or not actually a result of X, etc., and then we no longer have a justification for calling X a right? Just trying to follow along here.
Well, partly. Some people think that the fundamental human rights are worthy of protection even if they don't actually lead to good results in all/most/some instances-- that is, their moral value isn't dependent on results.
Or, shorter, even if X were not useful, it would still matter.
ps, yes, too, one bad consequence of defending privacy on the grounds that, say, power corrupts, is that privacy loses its value in case where its violation doesn't corrupt.
babble babble.
Yeah, I get that 67's what you're saying generally; 66 was directed more toward 64 specifically.
I'll of course make an annoucement if 56 ever moves from the potentiality stage.
70: WD, if you let us know, then you'll blow your online cover, and then the NSA will know!
FL and slol. I too know very little about rights, but I am starting to think that privacy has value in itself, not just because it allows one to exercise other rights.
What about the argument that the "fundamental" part of fundamental rights is basically materialist. If the most essential thing about being a person is the "being" part, and if the being part is grounded in the physical body, then it makes sense that things like the right to privacy, the right to freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, blah blah blah can be seen as saying that the fundamental right is the right to do what you like with your self. Up to the point, of course, where it impacts other people's selves.
Or am I talking out of my ass? If so, please don't Benthamize me.
I think there's the potential for a good Hobbes/Leviathan joke here somewhere.
You certainly don't want to be Benthamized by someone nasty, brutish, and short.
I don't know how I got into 71 with Labs, but since I've been arraigned, I answer: there's a too-frequent flippant use of "then the terrorists have won" (see my comment above) but there was at one point a very important version of that argument. Something like:
Inasmuch as certain rights are essential to being an American—that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the extent to which we deny those rights to ourselves is the extent to which we are no longer that America we would have given our lives to defend.
So, rights as a definition of identity (as human or American) without which we are not ourselves.
Oh, sweetnesse. AnalPhilosopher rails against benthamy, benthamy, benthamy.
That was indeed awesome. Also sweet, simpliciter.
I think there's the potential for a good Hobbes/Leviathan joke here somewhere.
Life may be nasty, brutish, and short, but where it counts, I'm only nasty and brutish.
I don't really like the post linked to in 75.
I don't like the post, I like the fact of the post. The only way it could have been better is if the Derb had written it himself.
Life may be nasty, brutish, and short, but where it counts, I'm only nasty and brutish.
*sigh*
I didn't mean by you.