Data and Goliath : The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

537 Pages·2017·1.92 MB·English

by  Bruce Schneier

Data and Goliath
The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by
Bruce Schneier
2015
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Data and Goliath
The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
Copyright © 2015 Bruce Schneier
Published: March 2015
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 978-0393244816
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You are under surveillance right now.
Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who’s with you. Your
online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you’re
unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and
casual friends. Google knows what you’re thinking because it saves your private
searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever
mentioning it.
The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information.
Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and
advertisements we each see, but also the prices we’re offered. Governments use
surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger
worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse,
lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches.
Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it
promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it
promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making.
But have we given up more than we’ve gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert
Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He
shows us exactly what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs
and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you
to protect your privacy every day. You’ll never look at your phone, your computer,
your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.
“Data and Goliath is sorely needed. On top of the ongoing avalanche of stories of
cyberwarfare, data breaches, and corporate snooping, the Snowden revelations have
left many people confused and cynical about protecting their own privacy. My hope
is that Bruce Schneier’s new book will empower people to join the conversation in
the courts and elsewhere about how to think seriously and honestly about our
current digital surveillance state and more importantly, how to build a digital
society run by the consent of the governed.”
—Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
“Bruce Schneier has written a hugely insightful and important book about how big
data and its cousin, mass surveillance, affect our lives, and what to do about it. In
characteristic fashion, Schneier takes very complex and varied information and
ideas and makes them vivid, accessible, and compelling.”
—Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of
Justice under George W. Bush
“The internet is a surveillance state, and like any technology, surveillance has both
good and bad uses. Bruce Schneier draws on his vast range of technical and historical
skills to sort them out. He analyzes both the challenge of big brother and many little
brothers.
Anyone interested in security, liberty, privacy, and justice in this cyber age must
read this book.”
—Joseph S. Nye Jr., Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and author
of The Future of Power
“Bruce Schneier is the most consistently sober, authoritative, and knowledgeable
voice on security and privacy issues in our time. This book brings his experience and
sharp analytical skills to important and fast-evolving technology and human rights
issues. Much has been said about the way our government, financial institutions,
and online entities gather data, but less is said about how that seemingly infinite
ocean of data is used, or might be used. In the face of a vast spectrum of possibility,
clouded in secrecy, Bruce’s book is a voice of steady reason.”
—Xeni Jardin, co-editor of BoingBoing
“Data and Goliath is the indispensable guide to understanding the most important
current threat to freedom in democratic market societies. Whether you worry about
government surveillance in the post-Snowden era, or about Facebook and Google
manipulating you based on their vast data collections, Schneier, the leading, truly
independent expert writing about these threats today, offers a rich overview of the
technologies and practices leading us toward surveillance society and the diverse
solutions we must pursue to save us from that fate.”
—Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard
Law School and author of The Wealth of Networks
“Data, algorithms, and thinking machines give our corporations and political
institutions immense and far reaching powers. Bruce Schneier has done a
remarkable job of breaking down their impact on our privacy, our lives, and our
society. Data and Goliath should be on everyone’s must read list.”
—Om Malik, founder of Gigaom
Contents
Introduction
I
The world we're creating
1
Data as a By-product of Computing
2
Data as Surveillance
3
Analyzing Our Data
4
The Business of Surveillance
5
Government Surveillance and Control
6
Consolidation of Institutional Control
II
What's at stake
7
Political Liberty and Justice
8
Commercial Fairness and Equality
9
Business Competitiveness
10
Privacy
11
Security
III
What to do about it
12
Principles
13
Solutions for Government
14
Solutions for Corporations
15
Solutions for the Rest of Us
16
Social Norms and the Big Data Trade-off
About The Author
Introduction
If you need to be convinced that you’re living in a science-fiction
world, look at your cell phone. This cute, sleek, incredibly
powerful tool has become so central to our lives that we take it for
granted. It seems perfectly normal to pull this device out of your
pocket, no matter where you are on the planet, and use it to talk to
someone else, no matter where the person is on the planet.
Yet every morning when you put your cell phone in your
pocket, you’re making an implicit bargain with the carrier: “I
want to make and receive mobile calls; in exchange, I allow this
company to know where I am at all times.” The bargain isn’t
specified in any contract, but it’s inherent in how the service
works. You probably hadn’t thought about it, but now that I’ve
pointed it out, you might well think it’s a pretty good bargain. Cell
phones really are great, and they can’t work unless the cell phone
companies know where you are, which means they keep you
under their surveillance.
This is a very intimate form of surveillance. Your cell phone
tracks where you live and where you work. It tracks where you
like to spend your weekends and evenings. It tracks how often you
go to church (and which church), how much time you spend in a
bar, and whether you speed when you drive. It tracks—since it
knows about all the other phones in your area—whom you spend
your days with, whom you meet for lunch, and whom you sleep
with. The accumulated data can probably paint a better picture of
how you spend your time than you can, because it doesn’t have to
rely on human memory. In 2012, researchers were able to use this
data to predict where people would be 24 hours later, to within 20
meters.
Before cell phones, if someone wanted to know all of this, he
would have had to hire a private investigator to follow you around
taking notes. Now that job is obsolete; the cell phone in your
pocket does all of this automatically. It might be that no one
retrieves that information, but it is there for the taking.
Your location information is valuable, and everyone wants
access to it. The police want it. Cell phone location analysis is
useful in criminal investigations in several different ways. The
police can “ping” a particular phone to determine where it is, use
historical data to determine where it has been, and collect all the
cell phone location data from a specific area to figure out who was
there and when. More and more, police are using this data for
exactly these purposes.
Governments also use this same data for intimidation and
social control. In 2014, the government of Ukraine sent this
positively Orwellian text message to people in Kiev whose phones
were at a certain place during a certain time period: “Dear
subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass
disturbance.” Don’t think this behavior is limited to totalitarian
countries; in 2010, Michigan police sought information about
every cell phone in service near an expected labor protest. They
didn’t bother getting a warrant first.
There’s a whole industry devoted to tracking you in real time.
Companies use your phone to track you in stores to learn how you
shop, track you on the road to determine how close you might be
to a particular store, and deliver advertising to your phone based
on where you are right now.
Your location data is so valuable that cell phone companies are
now selling it to data brokers, who in turn resell it to anyone
willing to pay for it. Companies like Sense Networks specialize in
using this data to build personal profiles of each of us.
Phone companies are not the only source of cell phone data. The
US company Verint sells cell phone tracking systems to both
corporations and governments worldwide. The company’s
website says that it’s “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence
solutions for customer engagement optimization, security
intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance,” with clients in
“more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries.” The UK
company Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a
“blind” call to a phone—one that doesn’t ring, and isn’t detectable.
The blind call forces the phone to transmit on a certain frequency,
allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter. The
company boasts government customers in Algeria, Brunei,
Ghana, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the United States.
Defentek, a company mysteriously registered in Panama, sells a
system that can “locate and track any phone number in the
world…
undetected and unknown by the network, carrier, or the
target.” It’s not an idle boast; telecommunications researcher
Tobias Engel demonstrated the same thing at a hacker conference
in 2008. Criminals do the same today.
All this location tracking is based on the cellular system.
There’s another entirely different and more accurate location
system built into your smartphone: GPS. This is what provides
location data to the various apps running on your phone. Some
apps use location data to deliver service: Google Maps, Uber, Yelp.
Others, like Angry Birds, just want to be able to collect and sell it.
You can do this, too. HelloSpy is an app that you can
surreptitiously install on someone else’s smartphone to track her.
Perfect for an anxious mom wanting to spy on her teenager—or
an abusive man wanting to spy on his wife or girlfriend.
Employers have used apps like this to spy on their employees.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) and its UK counterpart,
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), use
location data to track people. The NSA collects cell phone location
data from a variety of sources: the cell towers that phones connect
to, the location of Wi-Fi networks that phones log on to, and GPS
location data from Internet apps. Two of the NSA’s internal
databases, code-named HAPPYFOOT and FASCIA, contain
comprehensive location information of devices worldwide. The