Carnegie Mellon University has released a report that privacy policies are too long and too complicated and regulation might be necessary to force companies to stop screwing around with people.

Tags: Big Business

Today at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, we opened with statements from representatives from the Obama and McCain campaigns (Clinton declined to attend).

Obama

Daniel Weitzner from MIT represented Obama's campaign. He opened by talking about Obama's major views as they relate to privacy and technology. Obama believes in:

• Greater accountability in government
• Keeping government information and operations open and transparent
• Citizen participation in decision making
• The appointment of a government Chief Technology Officer to oversee these types of issues

McCain

Chuck Fish, a Patent Lawyer and part of McCain's legal team came to represent his campaign. McCain believes in:

• Promoting American innovation
• Taxing the rich is a popular idea, but it's the pursuit of riches that drives innovation
• The system should reward the behaviors that we want to reward
• We need to develop a skilled workforce
• We should very lightly regulate the market and let it take care of itself until such point as they fail
• Market regulation should focus on anti-competitive behavior

Open Questions

Next were questions asked by the moderators of the panel:

Q: "What do you see as the role of government in providing access to our basic communications infrastructure (the Internet)"

(McCain) Chuck – Can't understand his answer. Very politicalese. I'm fairly certain that he didn't answer the question, but it's hard to tell.

(Obama) Dan – Rather than focus on the infrastructure, it's important to protect the openness of the Internet. Even if we were to stay on dial-up or were years behind other countries on bringing broadband to our people, that's really secondary to protecting the nature of the Internet. He also noted that McCain's view of a self-regulating market will maintain open Internet (and I agree).

Q: "NSA Wiretapping – what would their position be on liability of carriers. What changes to Fisa"

(McCain) Chuck – "Immunity is a tough question because there's competing values. We're not talking about granting indulgences…" Again, hard to follow. Many words come out, but not much is said. The only thing he said of substance in his several minute non-answer to the question was "There needs to be hearings to find out what actually happened and what harm was actually done" which is to say that he will "look into it".

(Obama) Daniel – Obama's history and future view is to strengthen judicial review of administrative subpeonas, National Security Letters and the gag orders that accompany them. When surveillance is used, there must be real, meaningful oversight. Obama voted AGAINST retroactive immunity. McCain did not vote against them (which Dan feels is tacit approval).

Obama realizes that advanced surveillance and data mining can be important tools for national security, and they should be available, but with appropriate oversight. It's important to guard against mission creep! Woo! Someone gets it!

Q: "American companies are assisting China in censoring it's citizens. What would a given candiate do about that?"

(Obama) Dan – No official position, but if Dan had to offer advice to the campain, it would be that the lesson of the efforts in the US in the mid-90's to persuade countries to adopt an open Internet should be continued. We should open a dialogue and encourage and persuade countries to realize the benefits while using our influence to lead them towards more openness.

(McCain) Chuck – No explicit policy either. But the values that the campaign holds that would apply is to go slowly and carefully. It's always wrong to believe that you can legislate the behavior of people in other countries. Show the repressive regimes the benefits that openness provides, we will lead by example.

Open Questions

Next were open questions from the audience.

Q: "Email use by President – Will your candidate use e-mail. Does McCain know how? Will they avoid requirements to save e-mails by using other services outside of the Whitehouse?"

(McCain) Chuck – McCain does know how to use e-mail. As for avoiding requirements, you can tell from the tenor of his career that any perceived impropriety is anathema. Very little is more important for himself and country than acting honorably and keeping himself clean.

(Obama) Dan – There's a real commitment in Obama tech policy to keep government open and keep the flow of information open. Hiding e-mail wouldn't meet his commitment to open government.

Q: "Bush doesn't want to use e-mail because it becomes public record, but both of these candidates have records of believing in open government. But what will they do to keep government open?"

(McCain) Chuck – Answered by listing the example of require reporting of all data about sex offenders. He seems to have misunderstood that open government is about reporting what the GOVERNMENT is doing, not citizens.

(Obama) Dan – Bush administration has gone way overboard in classifying information. Obama called for national declassification center.

Q: "Clinton administration mandate cell companies to track users for 911. Companies are tracking all the time when powered. No legal limitations for what use can be made. Should this be protected by judicial oversight?"

(Obama) Dan – No position on that, but clear position of looking at tech capabilities that are not being addressed from a privacy perspective.

(McCain) Chuck – First ask, is there a problem and does the law already deal with it? If there was a possibility of current harm or future harm, then perhaps regulation would be appropriate, but otherwise, just trust but verify.

Q: "Net Nuetrality – How far would either of you go to live up to the view that the Internet is a tool for Democracy?"

(Obama) Dan – Obama wants to maintain openness of the Internet. Before we fight what the Internet may become, we should ask if we want to go where it's going. Do we like what it's evolving too. Either way, currently the regulatory agencies lack the power to get involved.

(McCain) Chuck – Understand Internet is important. But adverse to regulation, must have real evidence of harm. Don't want to stifle innovation.

Q: "Where do you think the burden lies for protecting information. American's must show harm? Or burden on Government that there's a justification for accessing my private information"

(McCain) Chuck – Companies always have known more about us than the government. We shouldn't have solutions seeking problems, but the opposite. Show the problem before acting.

(Obama) Dan – Increase FTC enforcement authority and budget. Too much burden on individuals to negotiate their privacy rights with whoever they deal with. Though our privacy laws are more modest than others, we've seen progress in our regulation. It's not up to normal people to protect their personal security. That's unreasonable. We don't have the time, energy, or (sometimes) capability.

Q: [my question] "Does your candidate realize the problem of Congress creating laws that over-rule stronger state laws that protect our privacy and freedom and would they have the balls to veto such a law?"

(McCain) Chuck – Clearly recognizes the importance of federalism. Always the rub whether what you have is well intentioned preemption or something else. Not the campaign's policy to over-turn what approaches of 3 centuries of preemption law. In other words, leave it to congress to make the determination of what is an appropriate level of preemption.

(Obama) Dan – No general position on preemption, but it's a right thing to keep an eye on. In other areas the benefit of some mount of federalism, but preemptive will come up. Depends on context.

Summary

This affirms in my mind that Obama is far beyond McCain in understanding privacy and technology issues. Obama wants to undo some of the damage Bush has done to us in recent years and is aware that regulatory agencies are valuable. He even believes in passing laws BEFORE there's a critical breakdown.

McCain is a fool that believes the market can regulate itself.

Tags: CFP

I'm at the Computers Freedom and Privacy conference of 2008 and I'm currently sitting in an interesting panel about something I had no idea about. I assumed that deceptive voting practices meant e-voting, but what they're actually talking about is modern-day Jim Crow laws.

I suppose I should have known better, but I wasn't aware that there were still problems with disinformation encouraging people not to vote. Often the misinformation will come in e-mail or physical mail and will seem very authentic appearing to have come from some state agency or well-known organization. They will try to discourage you from voting by telling you:

• that due to massive expected turnout, Republicans would vote on election day and Democrats the day after (thus eliminating Democratic votes from the election).
• that if you have unpaid parking tickets or child support, you'll be arrested when you go to vote
• that the polling location has changed
• that any ex-cons can't vote (note that this may be true depending on the state you're in, but be sure to check before deciding not to vote)
• that the voting registration deadline has long passed so there's no point in even trying now

There's more, but that's a start. If anyone tells you that you can't vote for some reason or that your polling location/date has changed, verify the information before acting on it!

Tags: Voting Rights, Your Rights

Hopefully after seeing how easy it is to tag and track someone with RFID, people will become more aware of what a dangerous technology this could be if we don't pass strong privacy regulations to prevent their misuse.

Tags: Big Brother, RFID

Tags: Big Brother, Cameras, DC

The CFP2008 conference is coming up in late May. They're not taking registrations yet, but their information page is up at least. I wasn't able to attend last year, but the 2006 session was very cool.

The conference is the perfect place for paranoid anti-government/business privacy invasion types to congregate and complain as a group. Besides that, there are useful technical sessions about privacy technologies and such. I particularly liked the session hosted by Public Citizen where they described the ways they protect people against companies trying to stifle their free speech online. In cases where a blogger was issued take-down notices by big companies that didn't like what the blogger was saying, Public Citizen took their case for free and defended them. Very cool.

Also of note was the session about RFID where an industry crony "debated" the author of the book spychips (though to call it a debate is laughable). When the crony was challenged about his company's use of privacy protections and he didn't have any good answers for the crowd, he bacame flustered and accused us of being "technophobes" (HA!). What an idiot. But it was very entertaining 🙂

Anyway, if you'd like to meet some of the people in all the various consumer groups who are protecting your rights every day, this is an awesome way to do it.

Tags: ACM, CFP, Conferences, Spychips

This is about as clear as anyone has described the subprime mortgage lending issue so far.

Tags: Greed, Predatory Lending, Shifting Blame

Good. Avoiding credit, reading the fine print, and how not to fall for scams would be a good start.

Tags: Finances, Kids, Schools

If you're a privacy nut and have a health dose of paranoia, you'll like this new website designed by the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG): CyberStreetSmart.org. It's a nicely designed site with easy access to information on major types of online scams. Unlike the paltry efforts of some other organizations, this site is easy to navigate and keeps the information short and simple.

Tags: Scam Defense