[ExI] Technology, Not Law, Limits Mass Surveillance

[J.R. Jones]

Scary.  Encryption encryption encryption huh?  Carrier pigeons?


On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 5:43 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

>
>
> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/516691/technology-not-law-limits-mass-surveillance/
>
> Ashkan Soltani
>
> July 1, 2013
>
> Technology, Not Law, Limits Mass Surveillance
>
> Improved technology enabled the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. Future
> improvements will make collecting data on citizens easier and easier.
>
> Recent revelations about the extent of surveillance by the U.S. National
> Security Agency come as no surprise to those with a technical background in
> the workings of digital communications. The leaked documents show how the
> NSA
> has taken advantage of the increased use of digital communications and
> cloud
> services, coupled with outdated privacy laws, to expand and streamline
> their
> surveillance programs. This is a predictable response to the shrinking cost
> and growing efficiency of surveillance brought about by new technology. The
> extent to which technology has reduced the time and cost necessary to
> conduct
> surveillance should play an important role in our national discussion of
> this
> issue.
>
> The American public previously, maybe unknowingly, relied on technical and
> financial barriers to protect them from large-scale surveillance by the
> government. These implicit protections have quickly eroded in recent years
> as
> technology industry advances have reached intelligence agencies, and
> digital
> communications technology has spread through society. As a result, we now
> have to replace these “naturally occurring” boundaries and refactor the law
> to protect our privacy.
>
> The ways in which we interact has drastically changed over the past decade.
> The majority of our communications are now delivered and stored by
> third-party services and cloud providers. E-mail, documents, phone calls,
> and
> chats all go through Internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Skype, or
> wireless carriers like Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint. And while distributed in
> nature, the physical infrastructure underlying the World Wide Web relies on
> key chokepoints which the government can, and is, monitoring. This makes
> surveillance much easier because the NSA only needs to establish
> relationships with a few critical companies to capture the majority of the
> market they want to observe with few legal restrictions. The NSA has the
> capability to observe hundreds of millions of people communicating using
> these services with relatively little effort and cost.
>
> Each of the NSA programs recently disclosed by the media is unique in the
> type of data it accesses, but they all share a common thread: they have
> been
> enabled by a massive increase in capacity and reduction in cost of
> surveillance techniques.
>
> NSA’s arrangement with just a few key telecom providers enables the
> collection of phone records for over 300 million Americans without the need
> to set up individual trap-and-tracer registers for each person. PRISM
> provides programmatic access to the contents of all e-mails, voice
> communications, and documents privately stored by a handful of cloud
> services
> such as Gmail, Facebook, AOL, and Skype. A presidential directive, PPD20,
> permits “offensive” surveillance tools (i.e hacking) to be deployed
> anywhere
> in the world, from the convenience of a desk at CIA headquarters in
> Langley.
> Finally, Boundless Informant, the NSA’s system to track its own
> surveillance
> activities, reveals that the agency collected over 97 billion pieces of
> intelligence information worldwide in March 2013 alone. The collection,
> storage, and processing of all this information would have been
> unimaginable
> through analog surveillance.
>
> Recent documents indicate that the cost of the programs described above
> totaled roughly $140 million over the four years from 2002 to 2006, just a
> miniscule portion of the NSA’s approximately $10 billion annual budget.
> Spying no longer requires following people or planting bugs, but rather
> filling out forms to demand access to an existing trove of information. The
> NSA doesn’t bear the cost of collecting or storing data and they no longer
> have to directly interact with their targets. The technology-enabled reach
> of
> these programs is vast, especially when compared to the closest equivalent
> possible just 10 years ago.
>
> What we have learned about the NSA’s capabilities suggests a move toward
> programmatic, automated surveillance previously unfathomable due to
> limitations of computing speed, scale, and cost. Technical advances have
> both
> reduced the barriers to surveillance and increased the NSA’s capacity for
> it.
> We need to remember that this is a trend with a firm lower bound. Once the
> cost of surveillance reaches zero we will be left with our outdated laws as
> the only protection. Whatever policy actions are taken as a result of the
> recent leaks should address the fact that technical barriers such as cost
> and
> speed offer dwindling protection from unwarranted government surveillance
> domestically and abroad.
>
> Ashkan Soltani is an independent researcher and consultant focused on
> privacy, security, and behavioral economics.
>
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