Kaspersky Publishes (Then Deletes) Article Claiming 'If You're Doing Nothing Wrong, You Have Nothing To Hide'

Privacy

from the wait,-what? dept

Kaspersky Lab, the internet security/anti-virus company published a somewhat bizarre article a little while ago, entitled “Why we should not be afraid of being watched while online.” The text is no longer there, because it’s been replaced by:

The content of this article was actually a draft of the column by an independent author. It was published accidentally, and Kaspersky Lab do apologize for misunderstanding.

Author?s views do not reflect the official position of Kaspersky Lab on the subject of privacy

At least at the time I’m writing this, you can still see the full text via Google’s cache, though that may go away soon. The really ridiculous part is actually the final paragraph. The main part of the article lists out five areas where there are benefits to sharing your info (more on that in a second) and then it comes to this ridiculous conclusion:

Apart from these five reasons, there are many more why you shouldn?t be paranoid and try to conceal your location while online. Remember if you?re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. There is almost to zero chance that you would be of interest to any secret service on the planet. The only nuisance to you will be advertisement robots ? and there are more effective tools against them than online anonymity.

The whole “doing nothing wrong, got nothing to hide” argument is so stupid and so widely debunked that anyone uttering that phrase automatically loses pretty much all credibility. Similarly, the “there’s almost no chance that you would be of interest” to any intelligence service is similarly stupid. First of all, that’s only true until it’s not true, and then it’s a bit too late. And even if 99% of people aren’t of interest, shouldn’t we be concerned about the 1% of people whose rights and privacy are abused? As the supposed quote from Cardinal Richelieu goes: “give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” There’s always a way to twist purely innocent things into looking nefarious if you want to. We should all be concerned about the power to abuse someone’s privacy.

Eugene Kaspersky has distanced himself from the article, stating that “privacy is a precious thing that people should protect no matter what. Sometimes the columnists don’t reflect our opinion.” Still, the fact that it was published (even if accidentally) on the Kaspersky website is bizarre.

As for the main part of the article, it’s actually not that crazy, but whoever wrote it gets the exact wrong lesson out of his or her own writing. The article highlights five areas where it is, in fact, potentially useful to share some information — such as doing local searches or being able to track your route. And, indeed, these are useful cases in which people very frequently find the value of sharing some information (such as location) with a third party service, in exchange for some benefit.

But the key issue here, which is totally ignored by that final paragraph, is that these decisions — including the benefits and costs — should be transparent, clear and optional. When an individual makes the decision to share information in such a manner, it should be their decision, well aware of what they’re sharing, why and what benefits there are with it. The concern that most people have is how these things are done in a sneaky fashion, with no transparency, and often for little or no benefit. To put a blanket “eh, don’t worry about it” because of some usefulness in some cases and then ignoring the abuses by saying “eh, probably won’t happen to you because no one’s that interested in you” is ignorant in the extreme.

Either way, it seems flat out ridiculous that an internet security company would publish an article. I could see it as a silly Slate pitch or something, but on a security company’s website? As Aral Balkan joked, next on Kaspersky’s website, perhaps we’ll see an article on “viruses aren’t that bad… why can’t we all just get along?”

Filed Under: anonymity, intelligence community, nothing to hide, nothing wrong, privacy, security, sharing, surveillance
Companies: kaspersky labs

If You've Got Nothing To Hide, You've Actually Got Plenty To Hide

Say That Again

from the some-analysis dept

The line “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about” is used all too often in defending surveillance overreach. It’s been debunked countless times in the past, but with the line being trotted out frequently in response to the NSA revelations, it’s time for yet another debunking, and there are two good ones that were recently published. First up, we’ve got Moxie Marlinspike at Wired, who points out that, you’re wrong if you think you’ve got nothing to hide, because our criminal laws are so crazy, that anyone sifting through your data would likely be able to pin quite a few crimes on you if they just wanted to.

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

Furthermore, he points out, that one of the big reasons why laws are changed is because people realize that the laws don’t make sense for the current times — but that’s much more difficult if law enforcement is sniffing through all your data and penalizing you any time they’ve found you’ve done something wrong.

Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?

The cornerstone of liberal democracy is the notion that free speech allows us to create a marketplace of ideas, from which we can use the political process to collectively choose the society we want. Most critiques of this system tend to focus on the ways in which this marketplace of ideas isn’t totally free, such as the ways in which some actors have substantially more influence over what information is distributed than others.

Meanwhile, over at Mashable, Julian Sanchez gives a much more direct explanation for why everyone has something to hide:

Some of the potentially sensitive facts those records expose becomes obvious after giving it some thought: Who has called a substance abuse counselor, a suicide hotline, a divorce lawyer or an abortion provider? What websites do you read daily? What porn turns you on? What religious and political groups are you a member of?

Some are less obvious. Because your cellphone’s “routing information” typically includes information about the nearest cell tower, those records are also a kind of virtual map showing where you spend your time — and, when aggregated with others, who you like to spend it with.

Furthermore, he points out the elitist obnoxiousness of the claim that you shouldn’t worry about overly broad surveillance, just because you might not be a target:

However, that seems like an awfully narrow way to think about the importance of privacy. Folks don’t usually say (aloud, anyway), “I’m white, why should I care about racism?” or, “My political and religious views are too mainstream to ever be restricted, so why should I care about the First Amendment?”

We don’t say such things not only because we care about other people’s rights as well as our own happiness, but also because we understand that we benefit indirectly from living in a certain kind of society. You may not be interested in protesting, criticizing the government or debating fringe political views — but as a citizen of a democracy, subject to the laws the democratic process produces, you’re better off in a system where those things are allowed to happen.

So, yes, even if you don’t think you have something to hide, you do, and you should be concerned about the basic civil liberties and civil rights of those around you.

Filed Under: data mininig, nothing to hide, nsa, nsa surveillance

NSA Whistleblower Ed Snowden: From My Desk I Could Wiretap Anyone: You, A Federal Judge Or The President Of The US

Say That Again

from the well-that's-comforting dept

Yesterday, it was revealed that Ed Snowden was the whistleblower, who exposed some details of NSA surveillance capabilities, often going far beyond what people expected. If you haven’t yet, you should watch his video interview with Glenn Greenwald where he goes into more detail:

“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email.

The wording here is a little unclear, since “wiretap” generally means capturing voice conversations, but saying that he would need a personal email address from the President to wiretap him suggests he’s talking specifically about access their emails. Either way, given that we keep being told that the NSA is only supposed to cover non-US persons, the fact that a 29-year-old computer guy working for the NSA claims he could get access to anyone’s email just by having their email address suggests, certainly, that there isn’t much (if any) oversight, and the NSA is clearly not careful about the data it’s scooping up.

Later in the interview, he explains why the people who say “I don’t care, because I’ve got nothing to hide” are complete and total idiots:

“Because even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made. Every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis, to derive suspicion from an innocent life, and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”

There’s a lot more in the interview, which is absolutely worth watching. No one ever got to hear Bradley Manning speak before he got whisked away. Ed Snowden appears to have put a lot more thought and planning into what he was doing than Manning, and here we actually get to hear his thoughts.

Filed Under: bradley manning, edward snowden, nothing to hide, nsa, nsa surveillance, secrecy, suveillance, whistleblower, wiretaps

Privacy Is Not Secrecy; Debunking The 'If You've Got Nothing To Hide…' Argument

Privacy

from the well-done dept

We’ve all heard the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, what are you complaining about” argument concerning violations of privacy. In fact, it seems to come up in nearly every blog post we do on the subject — especially on stories about TSA scans and gropes. There have been plenty of attempts over the year to debunk this faulty line of arguing, and Michael Scott points us to a lengthy, but excellent, article by Daniel Solove that explains why privacy matters, even if you’ve got nothing to hide. The article actually goes through a bunch of the counter arguments that people bring up (such as asking people to hand over their credit card bills or asking them to share naked photos), but Solove points out that these sorts of extreme responses don’t even get to the crux of the matter. It’s not just about the stuff we want to keep secret:

Commentators often attempt to refute the nothing-to-hide argument by pointing to things people want to hide. But the problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. By accepting this assumption, we concede far too much ground and invite an unproductive discussion about information that people would very likely want to hide. As the computer-security specialist Schneier aptly notes, the nothing-to-hide argument stems from a faulty “premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong.” Surveillance, for example, can inhibit such lawful activities as free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy.

The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures.

It goes on to note that even if you have nothing to hide, there are plenty of reasons why a loss of privacy should concern you:

One such harm, for example, which I call aggregation, emerges from the fusion of small bits of seemingly innocuous data. When combined, the information becomes much more telling. By joining pieces of information we might not take pains to guard, the government can glean information about us that we might indeed wish to conceal. For example, suppose you bought a book about cancer. This purchase isn’t very revealing on its own, for it indicates just an interest in the disease. Suppose you bought a wig. The purchase of a wig, by itself, could be for a number of reasons. But combine those two pieces of information, and now the inference can be made that you have cancer and are undergoing chemotherapy. That might be a fact you wouldn’t mind sharing, but you’d certainly want to have the choice.

Another potential problem with the government’s harvest of personal data is one I call exclusion. Exclusion occurs when people are prevented from having knowledge about how information about them is being used, and when they are barred from accessing and correcting errors in that data. Many government national-security measures involve maintaining a huge database of information that individuals cannot access. Indeed, because they involve national security, the very existence of these programs is often kept secret. This kind of information processing, which blocks subjects’ knowledge and involvement, is a kind of due-process problem. It is a structural problem, involving the way people are treated by government institutions and creating a power imbalance between people and the government. To what extent should government officials have such a significant power over citizens? This issue isn’t about what information people want to hide but about the power and the structure of government.

There’s a lot more in the article as well, and it seems like this will be a good one to point people to the next time they make this bogus argument.

Filed Under: daniel solove, nothing to hide, privacy, secrecy