Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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34 International Experts Weigh in on Mass Surveillance on Snowden Anniversary

34 International Experts Weigh in on Mass Surveillance on Snowden Anniversary:

Today, a group of over 400 organizations and experts, along with 350,000 individuals, continue to rally in support of the 13 International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance (the Necessary and Proportionate Principles) a year to the day after Edward Snowden first revealed how governments are monitoring individuals on a massive scale. The international experts who supported the Necessary and Proportionate Principles has issued a press release containing quotes from professions weighing in on the need to end the mass surveillance.

Christopher Parsons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto (Canada):“The past year has revealed that dragnet state surveillance has enveloped the world despite our nations’ privacy and data protection laws, laws that have demonstrably been diminished, undermined, and evaded by privacy-hostile governments over the course of the past decade. It is critical that we take the initiative and work to better endow our privacy commissioners and data protection regulators with the powers they need to investigate and terminate programs that inappropriately or unlawfully invade and undermine our individual and collective rights to privacy.”

 

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Aside Humour

Harper: Trust Me

Cartoon by Greg Perry

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Spidey Senses tingling over C-13

Spidey Senses tingling over C-13:

Critics of the new omnibus privacy-restricting legislation, says a Conservative Member of Parliament, would tie Spider-Man’s web-slinging hands.

This is the piece of the day – stylistically, perhaps the past month – on C-13. You should read it. Now.

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Quotations

2014.7.2

[Mark Carney’s] prescription: End through strict regulation and resilience tests the scandal of too-big-to-fail, where “bankers made enormous sums” and “taxpayers picked up the tab for their failures.” Recreate fair and effective markets with real transparency and make every effort — through codes of conduct and even regulatory obligations — to instill a new integrity among traders (even if social capital cannot be contractual). Curtail compensation offering large bonuses for short-term returns; end the overvaluing of the present and the discounting of the future; ensure that “where problems of performance or risk management are pervasive,” bonuses are adjusted “for whole groups of employees.”

Above all, understand that, “The answers start from recognizing that financial capitalism is not an end in itself, but a means to promote investment, innovation, growth and prosperity. Banking is fundamentally about intermediation — connecting borrowers and savers in the real economy. In the run-up to the crisis, banking became about banks not businesses; transactions not relations; counterparties not clients.”

In other words, human beings matter. An age that has seen emergence from poverty on a massive scale in the developing world has been accompanied by the spread of a new poverty (of life and of expectations) in much of the developed world. Global convergence has occurred alongside internal divergence. Interdependence is a reality, but the way it works is skewed. Clinton noted that ants, bees, termites and humans have all survived through an unusual shared characteristic: They are cooperative forms of life. But it is precisely the loss at all levels of community, of social capital, that most threatens the world’s stability and future prosperity.

Roger Cohen, “Capitalism Eating Its Children”
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They Knew Our Secrets. One Year Later, We Know Theirs.

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Links Writing

Canadians are lax on privacy, Senate committee hears

Canadians are lax on privacy, Senate committee hears:

Bill S-220 would create parliamentary committee to oversee intelligence and security efforts

The fact that a former director of CSEC is asserting that it’s Canadians’ own fault that their privacy is being infringed upon is hopefully just rhetoric and not reflective of his real beliefs. As he must know, there are enormous pressures that individuals face to use contemporary communications services and never be cognizant of the full ramifications about the use of those services.

Such pressures have little to nothing to do with social media: just consider the leaking of information from mobile and desktop systems that follows from just leaving the device on or using it for the most basic functionalities. In the drive to make corporate consumer surveillance ‘transparent’ consumers have become grossly disadvantaged; learning and understanding how systems work, today, requires an immense effort. Such an effort should not be demanded to log into email or social media accounts, or fully grasp why a targeted ad has been displayed.

Of course, Mr. Adams knows this. He understands that privacy has not been designed into services and that, once alerted to gross and pervasive failures, informed people are routinely astounded, shocked, and angry. Most of the Internet uses the equivalent of Pintos and the NSA, CSEC, and other five eyes partners know exactly where the gas tanks are. They’re just reluctant to tell the rest of us and then blame us when we learn we’ve been rolling around the Internet-equivalent of privacy deathtraps.

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Critics decry new Privacy Commissioner’s appointment

Critics decry new Privacy Commissioner’s appointment:

Daniel Therrien, nominated as Canada’s next privacy commissioner, is too close to the data-mining programs he must critque, the opposition says

For the letter the civil liberties groups, academics, and concerned citizens signed onto, see this .pdf

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Google to deploy 180 low-orbit satellites that provide Internet access

Google to deploy 180 low-orbit satellites that provide Internet access:

Billion-dollar project will complement Google’s balloons and drones.

It would be particularly interesting to see if Google tried to marry its satellites with its Loom project, to the effect of not having to integrate Loom balloon networks with known censorious ISPs in various countries around the world. If Google could  overcome technical and regulatory hurdles it could, by routing through space, try to proxy data access via ‘open’ Internet nations. Of course, this would mean that Google would become the ‘real’ pipe to the Internet itself…

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Quotations

2014.7.1

The lack of teaching skills means we are supporting institutions that not only don’t do what we idealize them to do, they don’t value and professionalize the things that we expect them to do well. In fact, we have gone to extremes to prevent the job of university teaching from becoming a profession. The most obvious example is hiring adjunct professors. These are people who are hired for about the same wage as a fast food server, and are expected to teach physics or philosophy to 18 year olds. They don’t get benefits or even long-term contracts. So, in effect, they never get the chance to develop into highly skilled teaching professionals. Instead, they spend most of their time worrying about heating bills and whether they can afford to go to the doctor.

Now, of course, universities will argue that they are research organizations. And that is true. Universities do value research over teaching. Meaning that tenured and tenure-track professors, even if they love teaching, cannot prioritize it, because their administration requires them to be good researchers. Indeed, if you admit that you are a middling to average researcher and want to focus on teaching, you become viewed a burden by your department.

Yet, for the great majority of people, their only interaction with a university is through the people doing the teaching. It’s as if a major corporation, say General Motors, decided that their public face would not be their most visible product—hello Chevy Volt—and instead decides to place the janitorial service front and center. Then, just to top it off, decided not to train the janitors.

Chris Lee, “Universities can’t fulfil the myth, but they can’t become a vocational school either”
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On Creating a Prototype Transparency Notice

On Creating a Prototype Transparency Notice:

… the traditional website privacy policy is failing to protect the interests of online consumers. The argument was based on the idea that the privacy policy’s main goal was to protect the owners of the site, and that it had been mis-sold as a vehicle for better consumer information.

Instead, we put forward the idea of a transparency statement, as a device solely dedicated to informing visitors, principally about how their information is treated. When writing the article, we had no idea really what the transparency statement would look like, but of course the immediate challenge coming back was to produce one.

I think everyone who’s reasonable can agree that privacy policies are an insufficient way of informing individuals about how their personal information is collected, retained, used, and disclosed. But I don’t think that a ‘transparency notice’ is quite the response either. I also have no real clue as to what the appropriate solution really should be…