"I Have Nothing to Hide"

2021·0.99 MB·english

by  Heidi Boghosian [Boghosian

For my parents,
Marilyn and Varujan Boghosian,
with love
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE: PERSONAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY
MYTH 1 “Smart homes are more secure”
MYTH 2 “I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear”
MYTH 3 “Encryption and anonymity tools—those are for
terrorists!”
MYTH 4 “We should worry about government, not corporate,
surveillance”
MYTH 5 “The USA doesn’t have national ID numbers”
MYTH 6 “Surveillance drones are just for war”
MYTH 7 “Surveillance makes the nation safer”
PART TWO: PROTECTIONS AND IMMUNITIES
MYTH 8 “No one wants to spy on kids”
MYTH 9 “Police don’t monitor social media”
MYTH 10 “Biometrics technologies are foolproof”
MYTH 11 “Metadata doesn’t reveal much about me”
MYTH 12 “The Constitution protects reporters and their
sources”
MYTH 13 “The attorney–client privilege is sacrosanct”
MYTH 14 “They can’t design devices and platforms for privacy”
MYTH 15 “Congress and courts protect us from surveillance”
PART THREE: IMPACT ON AUTONOMY, COMMUNITY, AND
SOCIETY
MYTH 16 “Surveillance doesn’t influence how I act”
MYTH 17 “Teenagers don’t care about privacy”
MYTH 18 “Surveillance affects everyone equally”
MYTH 19 “‘If You See Something, Say Something’ is a civic
duty”
MYTH 20 “Surveillance can’t predict future behavior”
MYTH 21 “There’s nothing I can do to stop surveillance”
Surveillance and Privacy Timeline
Acknowledgments
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Do you know where your data is?
Most of us do not.
It’s astounding how we’ve embraced the digital age without such
an awareness. Late-night television news watchers from the late
1960s through the 1980s remember what became a parodied
catchphrase: “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”
Celebrities like Andy Warhol and Grace Jones even appeared on
screen to invoke the public service announcement mantra, urging
parents to keep track of their kids.
Fast forward to the electronic age. Youngsters—the so-called
iGeneration—spend hours online each day. Virtual forays can be as
sinister as walking unattended in the streets after dark. A public
service warning about the perils of electronic mass surveillance is
long overdue.
That’s because most Americans are unfit as digital parents. They
let the family’s personal information roam far and wide, through
electronic devices and social media platforms. Hundreds of data
trails remain, like breadcrumbs in a forest. In this epoch of data-as-
commodity, these crumbs give strangers—commercial data
aggregators who mine and analyze our habits—a means to monitor
us 24/7 and to influence our thinking. When we don’t take
precautions to secure our personal information, such intruder entities
exercise more and more control over our lives.
When third parties control our information, we are vulnerable to
discrimination by landlords, employers, or service providers based
on age, race, disease and mental health history, and other qualities.
Autonomy and personal freedoms perish when private data is up for
grabs. Gone is the option of being anonymous when we want to
voice an unpopular opinion or share a tip about fraud. Also harmed
is freedom of expression and personal agency over our thoughts,
actions, and self-perception.
And that’s why we must demand to know where our data is and
how it serves as the keystone of the surveillance state.
WHO’S GUARDING THE CROWN JEWELS?
Northridge, a data analytics firm, suggests that in the “data
economy,” data is more valuable than oil. “Like oil, raw data’s value
comes from its potential to be refined into an essential commodity.”1
And what is the refinement process for our data? It is the linking of
different information sets to create dossiers on every American to
sell to third parties.
The US data brokerage industry is estimated to be worth over
$200 billion, while the European Commission, as of 2020, estimated
the European data market to be worth £106.8 billion.2 Mining,
summarizing, and analyzing data are also politically useful. The
British firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a case in point. During its
brief life, from 2013 to 2018, the conservative political consulting
group claimed it had amassed enough data points on American
voters to construct targeted political ads and influence elections.3
The firm paid Dr. Aleksandr Kogan of Cambridge University to
develop a personality quiz app, “thisis yourdigitallife.” Touted as
being for academic use, the app scraped data from Facebook users’
friends, without the social network’s knowledge.
Algorithms then combined this data, according to former CA
staffer Christopher Wylie, “with other sources such as voter records
to create a superior set of records . . . with hundreds of data points
per person.”4 The firm also purchased data from giant aggregator
firms such as Acxiom, Experian, and Infogroup. It was then easy to
personalize direct political advertising to unsuspecting individuals.
Disinformation and fear-based messaging were sent to people whom
CA identified as emotionally unstable or who might make snap
decisions, to dissuade them from voting, according to whistleblower
and former CA staffer Brittany Kaiser. Kaiser says there are
hundreds of other “Cambridge Analyticas” out there.5
Despite practices like this, Madison Avenue advertisers aren’t
creating PSAs urging data protection. Slogans like “If You See
Something, Say Something,” addressed later in this book, in Myth
19, convince civilians that spying on one another is a civic duty. Apps
like Neighbors and Nextdoor are popular vehicles to share
information about home repair recommendations, attempted auto
thefts, or suspicious activity. And for $2,000 a year, Flock Safety will
install a private license plate reader on a pole to track the comings
and goings of all cars on your street. These apps, cameras, and
social media platforms influence profit and politics, while marketing a
false sense of benign community.
The prevailing message is clear: share your personal information
for convenience and total connectivity. Tech companies market the
tools of electronic surveillance as our friends, while disguising the
lucrative business of gathering and selling personal data as essential
for security: “Smart” homes are more secure. Biometrics are
unhackable. Surveillance makes the nation safer. And so on.
Preferences expressed on Facebook, as the Cambridge Analytica
scandal shows, purportedly enliven exchanges with friends but can
also reflect, and affect, our choices in the voting booth. The masters
of the surveillance state—marketers, contractors, and government
agencies—make it easy to enlist but quite difficult to get answers
about what they do with our information. That’s like stashing the
crown jewels in a motel room safe, and then leaving the code on a
Post-it. Yet we do it daily.
TECH ILLITERATES ON HIGH
Every two seconds a new victim of identity theft is born in the United
States. Experian estimates that more than 30 percent of data breach
victims will have their identity stolen.6
Why is that? Once they amass our information, aren’t big
corporations and the government safeguarding it in their databases?
Lawmakers aren’t doing enough to learn about cybersecurity and
hold large database managers accountable for data breaches.
Sloppy security practices—both by corporations and government
agencies—expose wide swaths of credit card numbers, social
security numbers, passwords, and other personal information to
hackers.
Another reason identity theft is an epidemic in the US is that
federal law enforcement agencies (the FBI, NSA, and others) handle
data under the illusion that they are computer geeks, super sleuths
able to avert threats to national security with the press of a computer
key. In fact, the entire government suffers from tech illiteracy that
was exposed when the FBI tried to force Apple to provide access to
a terror suspect’s iPhone in 2016. A 2020 audit of the FBI’s
information security program and practices identified weaknesses or
“control deficiencies, in five of the eight domain areas that need
strengthening to ensure adequate protection of the Bureau’s
information systems and data.”7 As Emily Dreyfuss noted in Wired:
“Digital illiteracy at every level of government endangers the security
of the nation and the functioning of democracy.”8
Errors abound, corrupting the dossiers held on millions of
Americans. The mundane task of entering data incorrectly can be life
altering. That happened to Muslim graduate student Rahinah
Ibrahim. She was stranded in Malaysia for nine years after the
United States barred her reentry in 2005. An FBI agent had
mistakenly added her to a terror watch list by checking the wrong
box on a form.9
The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database has also
been susceptible to errors in profiles of individuals. This database is
a central resource for more than eighty thousand law enforcement
agencies. Defying common sense, the FBI, in 2019, exempted the
NCIC database from provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974’s mandate
that federal agencies keep all records used by the agency accurate,
relevant, and complete.10 This means that more than thirty-nine
million NCIC records, relied on by law enforcement, may include
errors.
Each day new privacy intrusions come to light. During the upsurge
in online learning due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, hackers set
their sights on e-learning portals such as Unacademy. More than
sixteen billion sensitive records were exposed in data breaches
between 2019 and the summer of 2020, according to the blockchain
startup SelfKey.11 The company claims that the first quarter of 2020