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As part of the FTC’s “Reclaim Your Name” initiative, FTC Commissioner Julie Brill delivered the Sloan Cybersecurity Lecture at NYU-Poly. Her talk focused on the rise of big data as a social force, the historical role of the FTC in privacy protection, and the roles that different parties (i.e. engineers, lawyers, policymakers, and advertising industry members) can play in ensuring both privacy and utility in the era of big data.

The lecture was followed by a lively and enlightening panel discussion, chaired by Katherine Strandburg (NYU). The panel members were Julie Brill (FTC), Jennifer Barrett Glasgow (Acxiom), Julia Angwin (WSJ), and Daniel Weitzner (MIT). The discussion centered on issues attending big data, with panelists discussing transparency, accountability, anonymity, and potential harm or discrimination that large-scale machine learning can facilitate. Finally, the panelists presented their views on the potential for privacy protection via legal or industry directives.

To find out more, read the lecture notes or the panel notes.

On the 27^th of September, we organized an extra Privacy Research Group (PRG) meeting on the technical implications of the NSA and GCHQ surveillance programs as revealed by Edward Snowden and The Guardian. Specifically, given what we know from media reports and discussions among the security community, the meeting provided us with an opportunity to explore answers to the following three questions:

 

1. What are the technical surveillance capabilities of the NSA and GCHQ?
2. What are some implications of these surveillance capabilities for technical communities (e.g., cryptographers, technical standards makers, and developers), their practices, and the tools that they develop and deploy?
3. What are some necessary and desirable technical and policy measures in response to the global, intrusive and secretive mass-surveillance programs of the NSA and GCHQ?

 

At this meeting, in addition to the regular PRGs, we were lucky to welcome our guest Arvind Narayanan (http://randomwalker.info), who is currently an Assistant Professor at Computer Science and CITP at Princeton University. Arvind helped us kick off the meeting with an impromptu lecture on symmetric, asymmetric, and elliptic curve cryptography, as well as an introduction to Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) based on Certification Authorities. He also explained the role of these cryptographic building blocks and infrastructures in helping computers do authentication and initial cryptographic handshakes on the Internet – both important steps for establishing secure communications.

 

In the discussion that followed, we turned to what we exactly should imagine as “backdoors” implemented by these intelligence agencies. This led to the following interpretation of backdoors with some examples:

–  crypto backdoors: e.g., attacks on elliptic curve cryptography that are developed by researchers working for the NSA and concealed from the rest of the world.

–  software (and crypto implementation) backdoors: e.g., Man in The Middle (MITM) attacks using implementation weaknesses in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

–  hardware backdoors: e.g., embedding into consumer devices processors that have weak(ened) pseudo random number generators, which are used in deriving cryptographic keys. Note that the example is a mix of hardware and crypto backdoors.

–  infrastructure backdoors: e.g., obtaining rogue certificates from Certification Authorities (CAs). This could or could not be combined with a legal backdoor.

–  organizational backdoors: e.g., embedding NSA personnel in companies, or vice versa.

–  legal backdoors: e.g., asking companies to hand over cryptographic keys and putting the company employees under a gag order.

–  user backdoors: e.g., crunching passwords or running black operations to steal keys or hijack operating systems.

– standards backdoors: e.g., using influence in technical standards bodies to recommend weak(ened) cryptographic building blocks and protocols, or sabotaging the progress of cryptographic standards for standards that would constrain NSA surveillance activities.

Next, we turned our focus to the different reactions from various communities in response to the revelations about the use of backdoors in the NSA/GCHQ surveillance programs. For example, in response to crypto backdoors, cryptographers have taken to intensively re-evaluating those cryptographic primitives and protocols that are secure against crypto backdoors and that may provide better protection against mass surveillance. We all had heard of claims that, given knowns and unknowns about NSAs cryptanalytic capabilities, symmetric crypto is assumed to be more secure then asymmetric crypto. This is surprising given the differences in the construction of the two cryptographic primitives. In a nutshell, symmetric cryptography is based on creating an elaborate design that scrambles clear text into an encrypted text such that the design cannot be attacked in any way other than a brute force (i.e., trying out all possible secret keys one by one) that is too costly to succeed in a reasonable amount of time. Asymmetric crypto on the other hand relies on fundamental mathematical principles, i.e., number theory and the complexity of certain computations. But, how is it that an approach that “scrambles” text into encrypted information, as is the case in symmetric cryptography, is seen to be more reliable than an approach which relies upon mathematical principles, as is the case in asymmetric crypto?

 

The logic of this unintuitive reasoning builds on some of the assumptions that underlie these cryptographic primitives. Asymmetric cryptographic algorithms depend on the fact that, given the inputs, some functions are easy to calculate, but, given the output, it is difficult to calculate the inputs — such functions are also known as one-way functions. For example, it is easy to identify two large prime numbers and to take their product, but it is difficult to identify those original prime numbers given their product only. This property makes it possible to announce the product of the prime numbers to the world, also called the public key. The public key can then be used to encrypt messages. The person who knows the prime factors, that is, the secret key, is then the only one that can decrypt these encrypted messages. This setup of public and privacy key pairs works if the person picks large enough prime numbers to generate the keys such that it would be impractically long for somebody else to calculate the associated prime factors, given what is currently known about number theory. The hook is in that last bit: it is not known whether NSA mathematicians know more than the general public about number theory, and specifically about prime factorization. If so, it could be that mathematicians at NSA are able to factor larger numbers than is currently assumed feasible, and hence would be able to decrypt communications that rely on smaller keys. Given historical evidence that NSA researchers were at times years ahead of their colleagues in the civilian world, e.g., in the development of elliptic curve cryptography, it has been commonplace in discussions about the NSA revelations to extrapolate on NSA’s current capabilities.

 

In our discussions, the opacity of what researchers at NSA may know led to some remarks about mathematics and how it is currently practiced. There is an imbalance between the “open” science culture that most mathematicians and cryptographers are avid participants of, and the closed scientific culture that NSA is cultivating. The parallel “closed” world that NSA researchers inhabit has access to the “open” research results but the reverse does not hold. While the NSA may regard their opacity as “necessary” to keeping ahead in the national security game, it creates divides among mathematicians and cryptographers. The distrust this divide creates may have negative consequences for keeping alive the open research culture most of these researchers adhere to and that relies on the ideals of achieving “open” participation, collegial respect and collective knowledge creation with the objective of guaranteeing secure communications for everyone.

 

One of our participants went a step further and put it into words as follows: “It is probably the case that you can trust the math, but you should not trust the math”. This remark pointed out the necessity to take with a grain of salt some of the claims of mathematicians and NSA people, especially given that, at times, mathematics can also function as a communal belief system, and some of these beliefs may change with time.

 

Our discussion also took a short detour on a possible meta story that the NSA is “managing” the revelations to strategically debunk popular belief in cryptography, break up the crypto community, or dismiss aspirations to use technology to circumvent government surveillance. We agreed that it would be important for the communities that are most affected by the conspiracies surrounding the revelations to take measures to address some of these matters and to avoid greater damage to the community through conspiracy thinking.

 

Another interesting line of inquiry was in the comparison of the different backdoors, their advantages and disadvantages to NSA as well as the society at large. Members of the information security and cryptography communities have repeatedly spoken against weakening security for the sake of surveillance, as this would provide backdoors not only to the NSA, but also to other parties with sufficient incentives. While one PRG participant argued that, for example, some of the cryptographic backdoors that were revealed would only make communications susceptible towards NSA surveillance and not towards others, this was seen to rely on the assumption that NSA’s backdoors would remain secret, uneasy to discover and hence secure. However, past cases indicated that this might not always hold true. In the case of DigiNotar, the Certificate Authority based in the Netherlands, it was speculated that the hackers had perhaps been exploiting a pre-existing NSA backdoor. The question was then, whether, given the risks associated with the hijacking of cryptographic, software and hardware backdoors by unintended others, it would be “less risky” for society in general if the NSA would predominantly use legal backdoors, e.g., asking for data followed by gag orders, as their modus operandi. Even if the latter were preferable from a security point of view, most of us agreed that the current legal and organizational set up provides the NSA with disproportionate powers. The accumulation of such powers in the hands of the NSA is unacceptable given its negative consequences for society in general, be it in the US or elsewhere. We also observed that that the feasibility of designing and deploying technology to provide reasonable protections from mass surveillance programs and to guarantee secure communications to society in general can be jeopardized, even if the NSA and GCHQs mainly relied on intrusive use of legal backdoors.

 

We covered many more topics that ranged from the role of standards organizations like NIST, the manipulation and sabotaging of standard setting procedures, to the lack of transparency and accountability in the functioning of the FISA courts. An interesting one of these was the relationship between the Going Dark program of the FBI and the NSA’s surveillance programs.

The Going Dark program is an initiative to increase the FBI’s authority in response to problems the FBI says it is having in implementing wiretapping measures in the context of new technologies. Juxtaposed with the current Snowden revelations, we shortly discussed weather the Going Dark initiative was a public facing project to legalize the already existing surveillance programs of NSA.

 

In terms of moving forward, we shortly considered the development of technologies based on encryption and principles of technical and organizational decentralization, i.e., avoiding large information collections as held by Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Some people in the room were confident that, if we were to deploy such technologies and design principles, we would be able to achieve greater protections against surveillance programs like that of the NSA and the GCHQ. Others voiced skepticism towards such long-standing proposals, which have only rarely come to materialize successfully, require a good dedicated community to keep secure, and often do not scale to the masses. However, this is a greater subject worthy of another session, and for the curious who want to go deeper into the subject in the meantime, below are some links to articles on the topic from Arvind Narayanan and some of the PRGs.

 

We thank all participants of the meeting and look forward to the next round of NSA revelations.

 

 

A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures

http://randomwalker.info/publications/critical-look-at-decentralization-v1.pdf

 

What Happened to the Crypto Dream?

http://randomwalker.info/publications/crypto-dream-part1.pdf

http://randomwalker.info/publications/crypto-dream-part2.pdf

 

Unlikely Outcomes?

http://randomwalker.info/publications/unlike-us.pdf

Hi all – if anyone’s interested, the (perhaps too cryptic) slides which accompanied my talk last week are available below. Many thanks for everyone’s feedback – more is certainly welcome!

PRGPresentation

Among the revelations about NSA surveillance this summer was the news that the United States engaged in massive surveillance of foreign governments and citizens, including embassies, delegations, and politicians of its allies and trading partners, and the offices of the European Union and the United Nations.

These revelations raise questions about the status of electronic surveillance under international law. In the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes the government to intercept the communications of foreign targets (any “non-United States Person”) without a court order, at the authorization of the Attorney General. Other countries have no legal restrictions at all on electronic surveillance outside their own borders, or have adopted extraterritorial legal frameworks to permit their governments to engage in foreign communications surveillance of other countries.

Recently, however, there is a trend to see communications surveillance as a matter of human rights. Under this view, might cross-border espionage by a state be considered to be a violation of international human rights law?

Conventional wisdom viewed international espionage at peacetime as unregulated by international law. To be sure, countries that conduct espionage on foreign soil violate the domestic laws of those countries, and acts of espionage are viewed as “unfriendly acts” among nations. However, there are currently no international customary norms or treaties forbidding such actions. It is argue that the very clandestine nature of espionage places it beyond the power of international law to regulate.

However, earlier this year, the UN Human Rights Council received the “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue”.  The report ties the practice of communications surveillance, including foreign intelligence surveillance, to the human rights of privacy and freedom of opinion and expression. Recently, a coalition of non-governmental organizations issued a declaration of “International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance”, which ties surveillance to human dignity, the freedoms of expression and associations, and the right to privacy, but treats all surveillance activities equally and does not draw a distinction between foreign and domestic surveillance.

It is hard to predict what affect, if any, will the trend to regard unlawful electronic surveillance as a matter of human rights have on foreign intelligence gathering under international law. Both the report of the HRC Special Rapporteur and the International Principles do not suggest any international measures against foreign surveillance, and confine their recommendations to countries’ domestic laws. Nevertheless, viewing mass electronic surveillance across borders as a violation of international human rights law might add weight to the diplomatic calls on the United States and its intelligence-sharing allies to limit their dragnet sweep of the world’s communications.

 

References:

 

Information on US surveillance activities against foreign counties:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17/the-nsas-global-spying-operation-in-one-map/

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-nsa-documents-show-how-the-us-spies-on-europe-and-the-un-a-918625.html

On the international law of espionage:

A. John Radsan, The Unresolved Equation of Espionage and International Law, 28 Mich. J. Int’l L. 595 (2006-2007).

Geoffrey B. Demarest, Espionage in International Law, 24 Denv. J. Int’l L. & Pol’y 321(1995).

 

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue

http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session23/A.HRC.23.40_EN.pdf

 

International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance.

https://en.necessaryandproportionate.org/text

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.”

Click through for the grizzly details.

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