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Courtesy of Salon‘s Andrew Leonard:
“Let’s file this one under the category of things we were reasonably sure were happening already, but are still greatly annoyed to have confirmed. New York City, reports Kashmir Hall in Forbes, has been tracking the movements of cars equipped with E-ZPass RFID tags all over the city — not just at the toll booths for which New York drivers presumably purchased their E-ZPasses to get through.
The surveillance was uncovered when an electronics tinkerer who styles himself ”Puking Money” hacked his E-ZPass to, no joke, go “moo cow” each time it was pinged by a reader.”
This story courtesy of Akiva Miller:
“Reuters reported yesterday that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been starting criminal investigations of drug-related offenses based on information obtained from from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records – information that usually cannot be used in criminal investigations not related to national security matters. The DEA agents were directed to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated. This practice violates defendants’ constitutional rights to a fair trial. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805
This Reuters context piece helps explain how this practice differs from the NSA Surveillance program, and is a far worse violation of civil rights: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-nsa-idUSBRE9740AI20130805
Meanwhile, USA Today reported that the Justice Department is now reviewing the DEA’s techniques: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/05/justice-dea-special-operations-shield/2620439/
This revelation exposes how surveillance practices are going beyond the narrow realm of national security needs and are increasingly being employed against Americans for ordinary law enforcement purposes – the very realm where civil rights are vital safeguards against agency violation. Now that unlawful surveillance has been exposed in the fairly controversial area of drug enforcement, one can imagine the reaction if it turns out other agencies are using similar tactics: How would businesses react if the IRS were illegally obtaining their phone records, and then started a “random” audit on its secret surveillance target? Or how would gun rights supporters feel if the ATF Bureau were listening to phone conversations and arresting unregistered gun owners claiming “reliable informants” had led them to their targets? It wil also be interesting to see how this will affect the convictions of drug-related charges who may have been victims of these tactics. ”
Position 1: Snowden is a whistleblower and what the government is doing is illegal: http://www.whistleblower-insider.com/the-simmering-storm-over-americas-secret-surveillance-court/
Position 2: Snowden leaked classified documents improperly, and in fact, there are many controls and restrictions governing surveillance: See this talk by Robert Litt (General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligenceat) at a recent a Brookings event http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/GovernmentInte
26000 pages of law enforcement data reveal: low hit rate, lots of variation across states and cities with regard to data retention policies.
Possibly, because the idea is faulty. Something which this program in Texas is experiencing. Though, they seem to be replacing RFID with hundreds (!) of surveillance cameras. And why? To enjoy more federal funding.
See the following link
I was invited to be a panelist at this year’s Personal Democracy and Freedom (PDF) conference held here in New York City. The panel was titled, “Battling Big Brother” and the idea was to comment on the degree to which individuals may be caught up in collateral damage from government collection and mining of data for the purpose of national security. I great question, indeed!
I wanted to make a few comments on that panel, and thought I’d reproduce some of them for this blog below.
I’m sure by now everyone is familiar with the hype around collecting and mining big data for individual patterns. And it’s not going to shock anyone to state that government, just as with private sector (e.g. facebook and google) have great interest in doing this.
As far as commercial interests are concerned, from what I see, these often focus on advertising — how can content providers effectively identify their visitors in order to present them with relevant ads? On one hand, the consumer benefits are obvious. Think of all the free online services and mobile apps that we use every day — they are likely supported by advertising. On the other hand, there are privacy concerns when people are tracked, and other personal characteristics inferred, without their consent (e.g. target pregnancy girl). Moreover, there may be economic consequences from price discrimination which may also be seen as unfair. E.g. when those of higher income receive greater discounts than lower income people.
Public interests of big data include, among other things, law enforcement and national security. But they have an advantage that private sector doesn’t in their ability to link many more kinds of disparate data sources and make more important inferences. They can combine CCTVs, drones, and of course, data collected from the private sector like phone records, emails, search engines, and network traffic from ISPs. I think we can all agree that the benefits of preventing bombings, and cyber attacks using these big data sources are large. What is of debate is how state agencies go about that and what tradeoffs we are willing to accept (e.g. PRISM and Verzion phone metadata collection).
I now want to talk for a few minutes about two recent news stories that I think are relevant to this discussion. The first is this week’s supreme court decision to allow DNA collection at the time of arrest for a violent crime. Ostensibly, this is done to because of the strong force of recidivism: the notion that a criminal caught for one crime may have committed some other, unresolved crime. The novelty — and risk — is that DNA is thought to be a better detection mechanism than fingerprints because it’s more difficult to conceal one’s DNA at a crime scene. But again, consequences occur when we feel that the government is overstepping its authority — when they suddenly have access to data we don’t think they otherwise should. What interests me most about the ruling, however, is the question: does DNA collection really work? I think there is a legitimate issue of whether law enforcement is more effective when they can obtain this information. I think this is important because if many more criminals are caught who would otherwise not be, then it becomes a discussion of tradeoffs. However, if there is no measurable effect, then the policy seems strictly bad. Similar questions can — and probably should — be asked of other forms of government data collection and surveillance: unless there is clear evidence of the effectiveness, where is the justification?
The other story is one authorizing military commanders to engage in what’s called ‘active defense.’ i.e. to hit back at attackers who conduct cyber attacks on military systems. The benefits of this style of defense have been debated (at least) in the IT security community for many years, and it’s interesting to see acknowledgement of this kind of behavior by the military now. Perhaps this is due to reportedly dramatic increase in espionage from China. There have also been calls by private companies (e.g,. those victimized by loss of IP) to engage in the same kind of behavior. What is not clear, however, is what force of retaliation is suggested, and what kind of collateral damage may be caused by this.
Now, to the question of what can individuals do? On one hand there are a host of privacy enhancing technologies and practices that individuals can employ: when searching online, you can use duckduckgo; when looking to browse anonymously you can use TOR; when purchasing groceries, you can use someone else’s loyalty card number; you can choose not to register a DC metro card; etc, etc. This makes us very empowered as consumers. However, on the other hand, at some point, you *will* leave a digital trail. You will need to go outside (where you’re likely to be captured on CCTV); you will need to buy something with a credit card, or take out a loan (adding to your credit profile); make a call on your cell phone; or you will simply forget to use one of those PETs. And so I’m quite conflicted regarding the extent to which individuals really have any power to control their digital trails at all. To me, the persistence and ubiquity online tracking and surveillance as an unstoppable force and that while we may be able to redact some entries from the mountains of data files we leave, I don’t see any practical solution to avoiding creation of those files to begin with.
PDF Program: http://personaldemocracy.com/conferences/nyc/2013/program
I recently had a chance to learn about and speak with folks from a company called comScore. Essentially, this company offers free stuff to consumers in exchange for tracking all their web browsing activity. And they can get very detailed information about one’s buying habits. This can be very good for research, and potentially socially useful in other ways (advertising, etc).
However, collecting that much personal browsing information about so many consumers (millions) seems very very risky. I’ll even go so far as to suggest a ticking timebomb of liability because of the concern of a data breach (i.e. some one hacking into the company stealing all this information). As it turns out, that liability is coming from consumer concerns that the company collected and sold data without the consumers’ consent. (now, I’m not really sure how people would be unaware of that, given that this is the company’s business model).
I’ve examined privacy litigation in previous work (here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1986461) and based on our work, that the class was certified in this current laswuist suggests bad news for comScore. We found that class certification was very strongly correlated with settlement. I don’t know how big the class will finally be, but if it does get into the millions, multiply that by the statutory damages from their ECPA and SCA claims and yikes!
By: Hannah Baker
Link: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-think/
Discussion: This post by Adam Rifkin on techcrunch.com discusses Tumblr, one of the newer social networking/blogging websites. According to a quoted survey, Tumblr is now the most-used social networking site among both the 13-18 and the 19-25 age groups. While the survey’s informality and small sample size make its conclusions less than certain, there can be no denying the increasing popularity of Tumblr, especially amongst teenagers.
But, I can’t be the only one who has been frustrated by trying to read anything on Tumblr. The search is poor, the comment threads are impossible to follow, and the “reblogging” mechanism can make it difficult to figure out who originally posted any particular picture or piece of information.
What I found most intriguing about the Techcrunch.com post was its suggestion that Tumblr’s technological limitations may be a feature rather than a bug. Rifkin suggests that the problems people have in searching Tumblr is a bonus for many of its users, who want to be anonymous without necessarily gaining a large audience of unknown anonymous internet people. They want a personal page, like a Facebook page, but without Facebook’s corresponding public visibility.
Rifkin’s idea can be extended to some of Tumblr’s other seeming problems. Conversations and comment threads are difficult to follow, giving people the freedom to comment without complete accountability even to their online personas, yet without having to resort to complete anonymity.
I like the suggestion that privacy can be protected, not by deliberate privacy controls such as those offered on Facebook, nor by complete anonymity, but by less-than-perfect design. Whether or not Tumblr’s poor search system and lack of a good commenting system are deliberate, they function to protect the users’ privacy, to the point where better technology might be bad for the site.
This raises the larger question of whether better technology will always take off if it leads to a decrease in privacy. On the one hand, older, more private forms of technology seem generally to be abandoned. Few modifications to a cell phone will give a call the total privacy that comes when calling from a payphone, but payphones are now few and far between. Kindles and other e-readers are becoming increasingly popular, even though the readers’ notes and highlighting may be collected and seen in a way that is impossible with a physical book. On the other hand, Tumblr’s new popularity– despite the fact that, as Rifkin describes, it is a terrible platform by most standard metrics– may point in a new direction.
By: Katrina Henderson
President Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan set forth billions of dollars worth of incentives for medical health providers in order to urge them to begin using electronic medical records (EMR). The plan hoped to encourage health care providers to streamline medical care, due to the fact that EMR systems are both more efficient and accurate than paper records. The use of electronic records helps to reduce paperwork, eliminate handwriting errors, coordinate patient care, eliminate unnecessary tests and procedures, as well as provide direct access to health records.
Since this stimulus plan was put in place, the switch to electronic medical records has been quite large. By early 2012, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had already spent 25.9 billion on electronic health information systems. Recent research regarding family doctors, which are the largest group of primary care physicians, suggests that in 2011, about 68 percent of family doctors were using electronic health records. This percentage shows the use of such records has doubled between 2005 and 2011. Many health care providers still have concerns regarding these records. The first regarding EMR system is the cost of implementation and training. The second concern is patient privacy and who has access to this protected health information.
When it comes to privacy, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) attempts to mitigate any concerns by enacting rules to protect patient privacy. These rules, most recently tweaked by the HIPAA Omnibus Rule, create safeguards, which Covered Entities, and now their Business Associates, must implement in order to better protect patients’ personal health information. The over 500 pages of the Omnibus Rule are quite a lot to grasp. Included within the rules are four final rules, which (1) modify the HIPAA privacy, Security, and Enforcement Rules mandated by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), (2) incorporate increased penalty structure within the HIPAA Enforcement Rule, (3) replace the “harm” threshold with a more objective standard under Breach Notification for Unsecured Protected Health information, and (4) prohibit most health plans from the use or disclosure of genetic information for underwriting purposes.
The Rule became effective on March 26, 2013. Covered Entities and Business associates still have 180 days past the effective date to become compliant with the Rule’s provisions. It is too soon to tell whether or not the new rules will be effective in terms of increasing health information privacy. For now the questions many health care providers and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services may be asking are how much will compliance with these new rules cost and will the government incentives be enough to cover those expenses. It does not seem as though expansion of the use of EMR systems will slow due to the fact that physicians will be assessed a penalty for not adopting an EMR system by 2015. However, there may be a push for more guidance and financial assistance with implementation and compliance measures, especially by the newly liable Business Associates.
References:
http://www.healthit.gov/patients-families/benefits-health-it
http://www.medicalrecords.com/physicians/meaningful-use-government-incentives-information