There’s a lot of confusion about the actual versus rhetorical security integrated with Apple’s iMessage product. I’ve tried to suggest, in the linked article, how Canadians can use our federal privacy laws to figure out whether Apple is, or the company’s critics are, right about the company’s security posture.
Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
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Freelancers are second-class journalists—even if there are only freelancers here, in Syria, because this is a dirty war, a war of the last century; it’s trench warfare between rebels and loyalists who are so close that they scream at each other while they shoot each other. The first time on the frontline, you can’t believe it, with these bayonets you have seen only in history books. Today’s wars are drone wars, but here they fight meter by meter, street by street, and it’s fucking scary. Yet the editors back in Italy treat you like a kid; you get a front-page photo, and they say you were just lucky, in the right place at the right time. You get an exclusive story, like the one I wrote last September on Aleppo’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, burning as the rebels and Syrian army battled for control. I was the first foreign reporter to enter, and the editors say: “How can I justify that my staff writer wasn’t able to enter and you were?” I got this email from an editor about that story: “I’ll buy it, but I will publish it under my staff writer’s name.”
- Francesca Borri, Columbia Journalism Review. Woman’s Work.
FJP: A fast-paced, fiercely heartfelt essay on the downsides to freelance work abroad and the madness of war.
(via futurejournalismproject)
This speaks volumes about contemporary war reporting: not only are ‘dirty wars’ outsourced to freelancers, but the credibility linked to successfully covering them is either denigrated or obviated to the public.
From an editorial in the Cape Breton Post:
Elections Nova Scotia also touts “a dozen ways to vote.” But that’s a little misleading. Nine of those “ways” involve a write-in ballot.
Conspicuously, none include electronic voting. The significance of Doiron’s claim that Elections Nova Scotia’s changes will make it easier for people to vote fizzles when we consider the fact that electronic voting allows people to vote from virtually anywhere.
The Cape Breton Regional Municipality successfully implemented e-voting during the last round of municipal elections in 2012, with 26,949 — or 32.8 per cent — of CBRM electors voting electronically.
And as Postmedia News recently reported, Elections Canada has been touting Internet voting since 2008, although budget cuts put the kibosh on plans to introduce online voting in byelections held this year. But at least Elections Canada acknowledges the potential value of e-voting.
So, what are the chances of an elector voting electronically in a provincial election anytime soon?
“The registration and voting and the security — maintaining the integrity of the election — is still a very tricky game,” Doiron told the Globe and Mail. “And that’s one of the reasons that no provincial or federal authority has online voting yet because it’s just not secure enough for the kind of integrity we have to deliver.”
The CBRM had e-voting success. And at the federal level, barriers to implementing electronic voting seem to be more fiscal in nature than about security.
I’m curious as to how the author of this opinion piece concludes that fiscal issues are more significant than security issues. I presume that they are referring to Elections Canada’s decision to scrap an e-vote test, but despite not running the test the federal agency recognized that security was an issue with online voting.
These security challenges have been highlighted repeatedly: a recent election in Nova Scotia used online voting, and officials cannot guarantee that votes were recorded properly based on significant technical deficits. Similarly, voting events during the NDP Leadership election in 2012 suffered from third-party interference, which ultimately caused people to not vote. Moreover, even if the servers that recorded votes in both situations were secured all of the intermediary systems were not; consequently it is functionally impossible to assert that the malware-ridden computers that people vote on or intermediary network points didn’t alter voting outcomes.[1] This isn’t to say that malware or intermediary interference did affect the outcomes, but that the authoritative conclusions of online votes are much, much weaker than those reliant on paper ballots.
Voting matters. A lot. And folks that insist that we can ignore the security and privacy issues either don’t care enough to learn the detailed problems of online voting, or don’t seem to care that most verifiable online voting mechanisms enable the tracking of how people vote. That kind of tracking is something that a large number of people fought hard to excise from our democratic electoral systems. We invite it back in at our peril.
For more on this point, see “Online Voting and Hostile Deployment Environments” ↩
jakke said: Actually I don’t agree at all. That’s directly analogous to leveraging (some is a positive externality to credit, too much is a negative externality to risk, the threshold differs depending on whom you’re talking about) and we can regulate that.
The literature that has looked at the economic of privacy over the past decade or two has been absolutely dismal, insofar as efforts to operationalize the ‘value’ of privacy are pervaded with assumptions of rationality, comprehension, ability to enact privacy choices, and so forth. The literature on privacy more generally is still struggling – after 40+ years – to really move beyond squabbling about what ‘privacy’ even means. The consequence is that ascertaining the externalities linked to privacy infringements/violations/concerns/(term of the month) necessarily requires adopting one definition or another.
Unlike more ‘defined’ harms (e.g. X percentage of Y particulate in the water is linked to Z) those linked with privacy have a tendency to be more normative, and harder to measure as a result. Ascertaining what the chilling effect of corporate surveillance, or the consequences of non-transparency in how communications infrastructures subtly modulate discourse and association, is an exercise in theory as much as anything else. Consumers, for lots of good reasons, are poor rational actors in lots of areas, and privacy is argued to be one of those areas.
So the quotation was emergent from a (longer) argument concerning the efficacy of economic analyses of privacy and place such analyses have within the broader dimensions of the contested individual, communal, and intersubjective natures of privacy. It’s on these bases that economic analyses fall short: while they *might* improve the situation, marginally, what is improved will be regarded as perpetuating the harm by some, and being the wrong measure of alleviating harms by other.
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2013.7.10
Antitrust law is ill prepared to handle a “market” where some percentage of consumers consider a loss of privacy a gain and others consider it a loss. Economic reasoning in general falters in the face of externalities, but usually we can all agree that, say, pollution is a harm (or negative externality) and flowers are a boon (or positive externality). Privacy preferences are much more idiosyncratic.
Frank Pasquale. (2010). “Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries.“ Northwestern University Law Review 104(1).
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2013.7.10
… the cultural, political, and privacy concerns raised by the new business alliances of search engines, social networks, and carriers cannot be translated into traditional economic analysis. They raise questions about the type of society we want to live in–a holistic inquiry that cannot be reduced to the methodological individualism of economics.
Frank Pasquale. (2010). “Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries.” Northwestern University Law Review 104(1).
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2013.7.9
Canadian carriers detect over 125 million attacks per hour on Canadians, comprising 80,000 new zero-day exploits identified every day. The vast majority of attacks are undetectable by traditional security software/hardware.
From “The Canadian Cyber Security Situation in 2011”
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2013.7.9
We can draw a distinction here between Big Data—the stuff of numbers that thrives on correlations—and Big Narrative—a story-driven, anthropological approach that seeks to explain why things are the way they are. Big Data is cheap where Big Narrative is expensive. Big Data is clean where Big Narrative is messy. Big Data is actionable where Big Narrative is paralyzing.
The promise of Big Data is that it allows us to avoid the pitfalls of Big Narrative. But this is also its greatest cost. With an extremely emotional issue such as terrorism, it’s easy to believe that Big Data can do wonders. But once we move to more pedestrian issues, it becomes obvious that the supertool it’s made out to be is a rather feeble instrument that tackles problems quite unimaginatively and unambitiously. Worse, it prevents us from having many important public debates.
As Band-Aids go, Big Data is excellent. But Band-Aids are useless when the patient needs surgery. In that case, trying to use a Band-Aid may result in amputation. This, at least, is the hunch I drew from Big Data.
Evgeny Morozov, “Connecting the Dots, Missing the Story”
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2013.7.8
…PETs are a technological fix to a sociological problem … [they] introduce another dimension of social hierarchy into cyberspace, not one that aggravates the divide between the information rich and poor, but between those with technological savvy to assert their personal preferences and those who do not possess such expertise…An over-emphasis on PETs leaves the surveillance imperatives being designed into information infrastructures unscathed, while fostering particularistic struggles over the uses of technologies.
Dwayne Winseck, “Netscapes of power: convergence, network designed, walled gardens, and other strategies of control in the information age”
Excited Pixels 