Corporations have no personal privacy + SCOTUS Snark Watch
Extra, extra, read all about it – AT&T doesn’t have personal privacy [within the meaning of Exemption 7(C) to the Freedom of Information Act] (“[C]ould reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”).
The case is fairly straight forward
AT&T – Personal is an adjective form of Person, and congress said Corporations are Persons.
FCC – uh… no?
Third Circuit – Yeah, they totally have personal privacy
SCOTUS – uh… no, srsly?! lol what?!
Some stuff about nouns and adjectives.
But then there is some fun snark:
The noun “crab” refers variously to a crustacean and a type of apple, while the related adjective “crabbed” can refer to handwriting that is “difficult to read,” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 527 (2002); “corny” can mean “using familiar and stereotyped formulas believed to appeal to the unsophisticated,” id., at 509, which has little to do with “corn,” id., at 507 (“the seeds of any of the cereal grasses used for food”); and while “crank” is “a part of an axis bent at right angles,” “cranky” can mean “given to fretful fussiness,” id., at 530.
The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law 12 FCC v. AT&T INC. Opinion of the Court enforcement information on the ground that it wouldconstitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.
I’m probably just reading into this too much, but there is at least some snark coming out of the unanimous SCOTUS smack down.
The Brits crack some emails
This is an interesting tid bit from across the pond:
Police took months to break encrypted messages on his computer. They found he had been in direct contact with Awlaki, who is accused of having links to the attempted bombing of a plane over Detroit during Christmas in 2009 and an attempt last year to explode ink printer bombs on freight planes heading to the US.
- The Guardian
The plot came to light after expert from the Metropolitan Police Service Counter Terrorism Command spent nine months cracking 300 encrypted emails found on Karim’s hard drive.
- The Register
I say interesting, because encryption is a thorny issue. Generally, common wisdom holds a sufficiently large key size will take forever and a day to brute force. The common wisdom has to be balanced with a host of other factors such as the omnipresent human error, bad encryption (esp any encryption described as ‘proprietary’), but the real unknown is what kind of firepower various governments have at their disposal. It would be interesting to know how the emails were encrypted – a few more details on that and it could be viable to estimate what kind of number crunching 007 has over there.
Westboro Baptist Church
In a strange turn of events, news outlets are reporting Anonymous, the same ‘group’ (or loose association depending on who you listen to) responsible for the HB Gary fiasco is now threatening the Westboro Baptist Church. Or is it? Suspicions are surfacing the threat was posted by Westboro Baptist Church itself. I have an interesting observation regarding the & symbol.
First, this is the press release by ‘anonymous’ which contains some peculiar uses of the & as illustrated below.
- Free Speech & the Advocate of the People
- chauvinists & religious zealots
- attention & in the name of religion
- Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Information
- intimidation and mental & emotional abuse
- Cease & desist your protest campaign
- Kansas, & close your public Web sites.
- propaganda & detestable doctrine
- conduction & promotion
- bigoted operations & doctrines
Note the significant use of & – Westboro Baptist Church is a fascinating group to me. I feel they represent a test of our dedication to free speech, the first amendment’s Gethsemane so to speak. Something about the post sounds like the WBC. For as long as it remains up, look at WBC’s reply. Very curious. Anonymous posted a reply to the WBC reply, note the difference in word usage.
Now look at this sentence:
You have condemned the men and women who serve, fight, and perish in the armed forces of your nation; you have prayed for and celebrated the deaths of young children, who are without fault; you have stood outside the United States National Holocaust Museum, condemning the men, women, and children who, despite their innocence, were annihilated by a tyrannical embodiment of fascism and unsubstantiated repugnance.
Note the super-run-on-super-comma sentence structure with two semi-colons. This is the same type of sentence structure used by WBC. There has been some research in the past to identify unique aspects of an individual’s writing style for author identification. I’m not overly impressed by its application in general because anyone who is aware of it can alter their writing style to suit. However, if you are not aware of it you can be betrayed by your own writing style. It is contended in the anonymous second reply that WBC has left their ports open to collect IPs for legal action. That would be an interesting outcome.
Personally, I think the “Operation Westboro” call to arms sounds remarkably like Westboro Baptist Church themselves, and any evidence of a WBC honey pot only strengthens that view.
HBGary.* part II
More information, or at least a more coherent complete set of information, is available as of this morning from Ars Technica. They have done a really good job of putting the pieces into a clear picture. What I heard in passing seems to be correct, the initial compromise was a SQL injection and the rest of the time line goes from there. The hackers in question apparently compromised the mail server for a number of hours before moving further and monitored email communications for over 30 hours undetected.
The HB Gary, Inc. CEO tried to reason with anonymous to avoid the email disclosures (IRC Log while it remains up). This part was a little painful to read because it is easy to empathize with someone whose company’s value is essentially being destroyed because someone else stirred the hornet nest – but once data like that has made it into multiple hands, distributed technology is distributed technology, there really is no going back.
Aaron Barr – the individual from HB Gary Federal whose ‘research’ started this mess – was looking to do primitive data mining and correlation with social networking data to identify individuals from anonymous as well as geographic regions they were located in. According to the quotes and excepts on Ars, his hypothesis was (a) individuals friended by his targets would be less likely to secure or censor identifying information, (b) that someone’s location could be extrapolated by looking at the general geographic locations of their friends (I assume his idea was most friends would be local friends), and (c) by correlating activity times of posts to social networking sites with presence in IRC channels a connection could be drawn from IRC handle to real life identity. He appears to have had something similar to success as the chat logs indicate he had identified people connected to Anonymous members, but some of those individuals were innocent (e.g. false positives) – one of the individuals in the chat logs’ girlfriend was identified, for example. Continue reading
Social media, 3rd party data storage, and warrants
Just a quick post about this article which I came across this morning regarding warrants going after facebook data. This is a very interesting trend with both privacy as well as public policy implications for the continued advancement of technology. One of my colleagues, who I did some privacy and ethics writing with earlier this year, and I have been preparing a paper on the problems the border searches of laptops cause from a technology adoption perspective – essentially our argument in brief involves technology becoming more and more a form of external cognition, and such searches discourage the continued progress for fear of privacy violations.
The flip side of this argument, is technology is adaptive and the past has demonstrated a continued evolution of technical solutions to circumvent legal interference. The evolution of peer2peer networks from Napster to the Pirate Bay and beyond is particularly illustrative. Attempts by US corporations and ICE to shut down these systems have met with increasingly sophisticated adaptations – decentralization, distributed trackers, moves to DNS registrars and TLDs outside of US jurisdiction, encryption, private tracking and so forth.
The former, chilling effect on technology adoption, is more applicable to low technology users who are not competent to judge the measure of their privacy in an online ecosystem. The latter is more applicable to high technology users – early adopters with significant technical savvy and understanding of the implementation details these systems use. Low technology users are more apt to unwittingly void their privacy even if their expectations of it are objectively unreasonable or to not adopt the technology out of fear. High technology users are more likely to meet the legal challenges with technical solutions – like an immune system – to move the technical state of the art continuously ahead of the legal competence.
There is a paper in here somewhere, but that will have to wait until I return from my study abroad session and get back into work mode.