NSA Cheerleader Ben Wittes Takes A Written Swing At The Anti-NSA Crowd And Misses His Target Entirely

from the pro-surveillance-jackassery dept

Benjamin Wittes, adjunct NSA apologist at the Brookings Institution and the most prolific blogger at Lawfare, has just unloaded a post meant to portray those opposed to the NSA as simpleminded strawmen/women who are triggered by certain letters rather than by the critically-important nuances.

Here's the gist of it, which I can hopefully convey without copy-pasting the entirety of the short, extremely self-satisfied piece.

I was at the National Security Agency yesterday giving a Constitution Day speech and I learned details of a shocking collection program: The government is bulk collecting all traffic on Twitter. Under a program menacingly called “Bulk Data in Social Media” and abbreviated—appropriately enough—as BDSM [insert proxy self-amused snicker here], Twitter has been providing all public traffic since 2010 for a massive government database that, as of early last year, contained 170 billion tweets. The goal of this program? To “collect the story of America” and to “acquire collections that will have research value” to analysts and others.

Those of you who are not the morons Wittes makes you out to be will already know where this is headed. Wittes breathlessly adds in italics that Twitter does this voluntarily without a court order or FISA court review.

Then he drops the "bombshell."

Why would NSA do all this?

It wouldn’t. The agency I’m talking about here is the Library of Congress.

Yes, the Library of Congress is collecting every Tweet with the blessing of Twitter itself, and has been doing so for years. It was in all the papers. Those of us opposed to the NSA's bulk collections are supposed to stare deep inside ourselves as Wittes fumblingly twists the rhetorical knife.

So here’s the question: If you were shocked when you read the first paragraph of this post and relieved when you read that the agency doing all this collection is not NSA but the good guys over at the Library of Congress, and that the good guys are actually planning to make that data available widely, why did you have those reactions? And do those reactions make sense?

First of all, no one with any amount of sense would claim that the government can't access or collect public messages on a public platform. That's an expectation we live with when we use these services. But the collection of every public tweet for archival and research purposes is far different than the collection of private metadata and communications for the purposes of rooting out threats to the nation's security. (Or fighting drug wars, etc.)

It's called intent. Wittes should look that up. Also, he should perhaps look into the difference between public and private info if he's got the time.

While many people use social media to lay bare certain aspects of their lives, a high percentage of them do not reveal everything, or at least not as much as "just metadata" can reveal. Many intimate details about a person's life can be revealed by the data they "voluntarily" hand over to third parties. Cops can track people's movements with license plate data. The NSA can peer deeply into a person's life with bulk phone records. People don't "volunteer" this information, but there's no way to opt out. Vehicles travel outside on public roads. Phone connection data is collected because phone companies need to track usage for billing (and are required to do so by the federal government).

Billions of tweets are all given up voluntarily by Twitter users. Even those who regret tweets they've sent or accounts they made still know in the back of their mind it's been archived somewhere. It's public speaking on a public platform.

Which brings us to another major difference between the two: transparency.

The Library of Congress has addressed this collection program publicly a number of times. Twitter also publicly announced this partnership. If anyone wanted to avoid being part of this collection, they could simply avoid using the platform -- a choice more realistic than the government's continued assertion that travel and communication are "luxuries" in which we wlllingly exchange our rights for convenience.

What has the NSA announced? Not a goddamn thing. It's only talking now because someone took its secret programs and spread them all over the internet. Now it has to address these issues, but even in this era of forced openness, it still deploys a tremendous amount of black ink.

I'm sure Wittes' post garnered a few chortles from like-minded individuals (including some he heavily elbowed in the ribs), but the whole setup is disingenuous. It conveniently ignores crucial differences between the two forms of collections in hopes of portraying the anti-NSA crowd as ultimately no more complex than single-celled organisms. The good news is that those of us on this side of the divide are constantly underestimated by those whose views skew more towards Wittes'.

This sort of presumptive arrogance is what allowed a government contractor to walk out the door with thousands of classified documents from the top national security entity in the world -- one with a massive budget and the best minds the government could hire. The NSA simply believed nothing of that scope would happen to No Such Agency, even with an obviously lax set of internal controls. Now it's been burned. And yet, its apologists still think they can talk down to everyone on the other side of argument.

Filed Under: ben wittes, communications, library of congress, metadata, nsa, private, public, sharing, surveillance, volunteering
Companies: twitter

'Secret' DHS Twitter Account Isn't Following Anyone Interesting, So Why Is It Secret?

from the looks-like-a-pretty-boring-feed dept

It's no secret that various law enforcement and government agencies "monitor" Twitter, and sometimes to do that properly, they need to have an actual Twitter account. Apparently for Homeland Security, that Twitter account is @DHSNOCMMC1, which (as you might imagine) is a "protected" account, so you can't see its tweets. However, Carlton Purvis noticed that this account followed a few hundred other Twitter users, and wondered who they were. Purvis filed a FOIA request, asking for the follower list, but also for any authorized apps and widgets that DHS uses. It took a while (and many, many followups), but DHS finally sent back the list, and it's basically just a big list of news media (CNN, Al Jazeera English, ABC, etc.) and various government and law enforcement agencies (FEMA, FDNY, Chicago Police, etc.). The response notes that "in acordance [sic] with DHS Privacy direction, DHS NOC MMC follows only authorized accounts and never follows accounts of private individuals." Of course, Purvis notes that there are actually two (somewhat random) individuals on the list: District of Columbia Mayor Vincent Gray and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate. Somewhat random. But that really raises the larger question: what is DHS doing with this account, and why is it "protected" in the first place. If nothing on the list is controversial (and it doesn't seem like it), and they're clearly not using the account to tweet out publicly, why not just leave the account "open" and just not tweet. Then people wouldn't even wonder who they're following.

In terms of apps used, they admit to using TweetDeck and TweetGrid to monitor the service, so it's likely that they've set up some searches, for which you don't have to be following any individuals directly. But it still makes you wonder how effective the whole process really is. Perhaps DHS thinks that's what it needs to do, ever since Twitter told the feds to take a hike when it came to PRISM.

Filed Under: foia, homeland security, private, secrecy, twitter

Yahoo Needs To Go Private To Right Itself

from the staying-public-is-dangerous dept

Pretty much everyone now recognizes that Yahoo needs to reinvent itself these days. Its image and brand have been severely tarnished due to both poor management choices, an inability to compete successfully with search advertising and (of course) the fight concerning the possibility of a Microsoft merger. But, of course, all of this has only made the spotlight shine even more brightly on management -- which makes it much, much harder for the company to reinvent itself. So, I'm in agreement with those who think the real answer is for some private equity firms to take Yahoo private. Outside of the glare (and short-term focus) of the public markets, Yahoo might have the chance to reinvent itself for real, rather than being pulled in a different direction every few months. It can then return to the public markets later, or potentially sell itself again to another company under more favorable terms.

Filed Under: private, private equity, public, reinvent
Companies: yahoo

IRSeeK Suspends Search Engine Pending Changes To Address IRC Community Concerns

from the public-or-private? dept

Slashdot points to the heated debate over IRSeeK, a "search engine" for public IRC channels. Although IRC channels are technically public, a lot of IRC users are uncomfortable with the notion of their off-the-cuff comments being recorded for posterity. I think the flare-up reflects the complicated dynamics of "public" versus" private" information. Although we often use these words as though they're two discrete categories, "public" and "private" are actually points along a spectrum. In the physical world we've developed an elaborate system of subtle social conventions regarding when it's appropriate to listen in on, record, and share the communications of others. Conversations overheard at a restaurant or on the bus obviously aren't as private as conversations in your living room, but people would still feel their privacy was being invaded if someone surreptitiously recorded them and then published them on the Internet. There are a lot of different degrees of "public" and "private" in our daily lives.

The same principle applies in cyberspace: the fact that a communications forum is "public" doesn't necessarily mean that people are comfortable with it being recorded, archived, published, and indexed by search engines. Unfortunately the online world is so new that the relevant social conventions have yet to fully emerge. Facebook, for example, caught a lot of flack when they introduced news feeds that let you keep tabs on your friends' actions. That resistance appears to have largely evaporated as people discovered how useful the feature could be. By the same token, IRSeeK could turn out to be a very useful service, and so initial resistance shouldn't necessarily be a reason to abandon the idea. A search engine could be particularly useful for tech support forums, because it would allow users who had a particular problem to search the logs for references to their particular problem before asking about it.

But it's important that IRSeeK help to develop clear social norms so that people know when their conversations are being recorded and how the archives will be used. And to their credit, they appear to be doing just that. It has announced that the search engine will be suspended until they've found ways to address the community's concerns, and it also mentions several measure it's considering to address the community's concerns. The most important, from my perspective, is to develop an analogue to the web's robots.txt file, so that IRC operators have a straightforward way to opt out of archives and search engines. IRSeeK also mentions giving their bots standard names so that other IRC users will know their statements are being recorded. And it may avoid indexing nicknames to make it harder to track a given user's activities across multiple IRC channels. IRSeeK's swift response to community outrage and its apparent willingness to modify its services to address community concerns suggests that it may successfully navigate these tricky issues and come up with a service that's genuinely useful without being overly intrusive.

Filed Under: irc, private, public
Companies: irseek