Category: Quotations

Categories
Aside Quotations

2014.4.19

the [Australian Security Intelligence Organization] ASIO said that Snowden’s leaks will make it more difficult for the organization to collect meaningful data about a person, so the organization should be given more leeway to perform its surveillance duties. In its proposal, the ASIO asserted that certain technological advances are detrimental to its spying on bad actors (a refrain that is not often heard, as it’s generally accepted that technology is making it easier to spy on citizens).

…

Smaller state police organizations joined the ASIO in asking that telecom companies be obligated to retain customers’ metadata for a substantial period of time. (The ASIO cited as a preferred model President Obama’s proposal earlier this year to compel telecom companies to keep customer data rather than having the NSA siphon that data into its own repositories.) But police organizations like the Northern Territory Police and the Victoria Police also went further in requesting that the Australian government require companies to keep IP addresses and Web browsing history as part of its metadata collection.

The Northern Territory Police, for example, argued for a two-year retention of Web browsing history. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the police thought “a shift away from traditional telephony services to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and others meant that data may be included in browser histories and was ‘as important to capture as telephone records.’”

Megan Geuss, “After Snowden, Australia’s cops worry about people using crypto”

So, given that Australians are decreasing their trust in their government based on what they’re learning their intelligence services are presently doing, the same services argue that they should have even more access to Australians’ private communications? Because more data retention combined with shadowy access to telecommunications data will improve trust in government and, as a result, strengthen the democratic spirit of the Australian people, right?

Categories
Links Quotations

2014.3.18

If you find yourself wishing your province had a competitive fourth provider, you could move to friendly Manitoba or set up shop under Saskatchewan’s living skies. But you wouldn’t have to stay for long. It’s hard to believe, but this is the truth: it’s cheaper to buy a roundtrip plane ticket to Regina or Winnipeg, subscribe to one of these plans and then use it back home, than it would be to sign a contract in Toronto or Calgary.

For the Telus 1GB plan, you could fly roundtrip from Calgary to Regina for $369 and save yourself $350 (after paying for the plane ticket) on a two year 1GB plan.

For the Rogers 10GB plan, you would save a whopping $1,180 dollars after the price of airfare if you flew from Toronto to Winnipeg and signed up for service there.

It might sound crazy, but check for yourself. If you decide to fly to Winnipeg, look me up. I’ll even pick you up at the airport.

Aside from pushing up demand for air travel, it’s hard to see how this kind of pricing is beneficial to anyone but the wireless carriers’ shareholders and management. Canadian carriers like Bell, Telus, and Rogers are supposed to be affected with the public interest – not opposed to it.

We as a country won’t even get close to having a fair market until you can walk, not fly, to a provider offering reasonably priced service.

Ben Klass, “Wireless Carriers’ High Flying Prices”

Ben’s written a nice, punchy, piece about the new cellco price hikes. You should go read it.

Categories
Links Quotations Writing

2014.4.18

In that “Binders Full of Women” program we did, we learned some of the reasons why it’s so hard to find female guests. For example, if we’re doing a debate on economics, 90% of economists are men. So already you’re fishing in a lake where the odds are stacked against you. And unfortunately, it’s the same for foreign affairs, politicians, the sciences, labour issues, and the list goes on. The vast majority of “experts” in the subjects we cover are men.

But we’ve also discovered there also seems to be something in women’s DNA that makes them harder to book. No man will ever say, “Sorry, can’t do your show tonight, I’m taking care of my kids.” The man will find someone to take care of his kids so he can appear on a TV show. Women use that excuse on us all the time.

No man will say, “Sorry, can’t do your show tonight, my roots are showing.” I’m serious. We get that as an excuse for not coming on. But only from women.

No man will say, “Sorry can’t do your show tonight, I’m not an expert in that particular aspect of the story.” They’ll get up to speed on the issue and come on. Women beg off. And worse, they often recommend a male colleague in their place.

Steve Paikin, “Where, Oh Where, Are All the Female Guests?”

People are (fairly) critiquing Paikin’s language in his blog post. In particular, his comment that “we’ve also discovered there also seems to be something in women’s DNA that makes them harder to book” is drawing significant ire.

At this point I’ve given hundreds of interviews to journalists from all mediums, and from all over the world. What I’ve learned is that it is critical to simply be direct with a producer (who is often who you’ll be initially speaking with) to suggest how you could contribute to a given piece. A significant element of the interview process is the producer ascertaining if you’re a good ‘fit’ for the medium, if you have something interesting to contribute, and how to shape the story in question. Sometimes you’ll run into a producer who is very explicit about what they want: the narrative has been arranged before to speaking with you and you’re unlikely to change what’s in place very much. Other times you can shape the story as an expert.

I don’t know precisely how TVO tends to generally develop their stories, but in my very anecdotal experiences producers have tended to come with pretty specific stories or narratives in mind and are unable to significantly re-structure the discussion based on my input. The result has been that despite my willingness to do what Paikin suggests – do some side research to get caught up on the specifics of a topic that’s in my field of study – it’s often the case that I cannot ‘fit’. It may just be that I’ve always been a tertiary possible guest (as opposed to the headliner person(s) who might be more successful in shaping the story), or something common with how TVO conducts their operations. I don’t know.

In general, people are sometimes reluctant to deal with the media because the production timelines tend to be compact (e.g. get called in the morning, to appear on live television a few hours later and often with the guest incurring travel or child-care expenses) and people who aren’t used to – or don’t want to accommodate – this kind of chaos and expense might justifiably refuse to participate. Given that women in the workforce are routinely underpaid and expected to engage in equivalent or greater degrees of ‘productive’ work than their male counterparts, there is very practical workplace (to say nothing of home care duty) rationales for waiving off media interviews that have little to no clear benefit, and piles of possible downsides.

If TVO really wants to improve their female guest selection they should simply refuse to run shows where they cannot book at least X% female guests. And then do aggressive outreach with the employers of the women whom they want to have on the show: prove to employers that being on the show matters so that employers free up their female employees to speak on a given topic. It’s not enough to just target high-qualified women, you also have to ensure that the structures limiting their participation are also actively engaged and alleviated. Expecting women to just behave like men both ignores the contributions women can provide (i.e. they’re not men!) and the challenges that women have to overcome on a daily basis as compared to their male counterparts. Paikin should know that, and I suspect he does, but the tone of the post almost entirely devoid of such sensitivities.

In the interests of disclosure: I’ve been interviewed as a possible person to appear on The Agenda a few times, though never ultimately been selected to appear. The Agenda is one of the very few show’s I’ve actively watched for years, and I really really like it and generally respect Paikin and the entire crew. And I routinely suggest female colleagues that TVO (and other journalistic mediums) should speak with. I don’t know the ‘success’ rate of booking those colleagues.

Categories
Aside Links Quotations

2014.4.18

If the going metaphor of the startup is that male hackers are stars whose physical characteristics are a source of status and power, the role of women in startups often becomes tinged by differently sexualized and submissive ‘groupie’ expectations. Because even though employers might imagine that startup slogans like “who’s your data” are denatured of their original sexual meanings, they aren’t. Deploying terms for engineers that invoke sexual dominance signals that the startup at some subconscious level wants to emulate a model of power where men perform while others watch and wait, intent on servicing their needs. Some startups even make the desired correlation between women workers and selfless service explicit, as in the app “Geisha” which served links to web designers in the guise of a red-cheeked, submissive female product mascot. The Geisha app deploys fetishized racial stereotypes towards an all-too-common model of tech culture in which men are centered and powerful while women serve them from the position of exotic ‘other.’ The Geisha app’s deployment of racial and gender stereotypes was so blatant that it even received criticism on Hacker News, which prompted the app to change its name.

Kate Losse, “Sex and the Startup: Men, Women, and Work”

Kate Losse, once again, doing a terrific job critiquing the masculine and sexist working conditions in Silicon Valley. You should really read her book The Boy Kings to understand what it was like working at Facebook; it’s an absolute eye-opener.

Categories
Links Quotations Writing

2014.3.17

We agree that Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things, and Big Data analytics are all trends that may yield remarkable new correlations, insights, and benefits for society at large. While we have no intention of standing in the way of progress, it is essential that privacy practitioners participate in these efforts to shape trends in a way that is truly constructive, enabling both privacy and Big Data analytics to develop, in tandem.

There is a growing understanding that innovation and competitiveness must be approached from a “design-thinking” perspective — namely, viewing the world to overcome constraints in a way that is holistic, interdisciplinary, integrative, creative and innovative. Privacy must also be approached from the same design-thinking perspective. Privacy and data protection should be incorporated into networked data systems and technologies by default, and become integral to organizational priorities, project objectives, design processes, and planning operations. Ideally, privacy and data protection should be embedded into every standard, protocol, and data practice that touches our lives. This will require skilled privacy engineers, computer scientists, software designers and common methodologies that are now being developed, hopefully to usher in an era of Big Privacy.

We must be careful not to naively trust data users, or unnecessarily expose individuals to new harms, unintended consequences, power imbalances and data paternalism. A “trust me” model will simply not suffice. Trust but verify — embed privacy as the default, thereby growing trust and enabling confirmation of trusted practices.

Ann Cavoukian, Alexander Dix, and Khaled El Emam, “The Unintended Consequences of Privacy Paternalism”

I’m generally sympathetic to the arguments made in this article, though there are a series of concerns I have that are (I hope) largely the result of the authors trying to write an inoffensive article that could be acted on by large organizations. To begin, while I understand that Commissioner Cavoukian has developed her reputation on working with partners as opposed to tending to radically oppose corporations’ behaviours I’m left asking: what constitutes ‘progress’ for herself and her German counterpart, Dr. Dix?

Specifically, Commissioners Cavoukian and Dix assert that they have no intention to stand in the way of progress and (generally) that a more privacy-protective approach means we can enjoy progress and privacy at the same time. But how do the Commissioners ‘spot’ progress? How do they know what to oppose and not oppose? When must, and mustn’t, they stand in the way of a corporation’s practices?

The question of defining progress is tightly linked with my other concern from this quoted part of their article. Specifically, the Commissioners acknowledge that a ‘positive-sum’ approach to privacy and progress requires “skilled privacy engineers, computer scientists, software designers and common methodologies that are now being developed, hopefully to usher in an era of Big Privacy.” That these groups are important is true. But where are the non-engineers, non-software designers, and (presumably) non-lawyers? Social scientists and arts and humanities scholars and graduates can also contribute to sensitizing organizations’ understandings of privacy, of user interests, and the history of certain decisions.

Privacy isn’t something that is only understandable by lawyers or engineers. And, really, it would be better understood and protected if there were more people involved in the discussion. Potential contributors to the debates shouldn’t be excluded simply because they contest or demand definitions of ‘progress’ or come from a non-lawyerly or computer-development background. Rather, they should be welcomed as expanding the debate outside of the contemporary echo chamber of the usually-counted disciplinary actors.

Categories
Quotations

Sensitive personal information revealed in smartphone metadata, study finds

The ability to draw similarly revealing information about Canadians’ lives is just as possible, said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow specializing in privacy and surveillance issues at the Citizen Lab at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

The debate over the secret interception of digital, transactional records from smartphones and mobile devices, including their locations, numbers called, duration and Internet sites browsed, extends beyond the claimed security intelligence needs of the CSE and the massive, bulk metadata collection practised by the NSA.

Parsons believes some Canadian telecommunications companies could use metadata to deliver advertising and sell consumer intelligence to marketers. “Canadian companies do recognize this kind of data as a place to make money,” he said. “There is clear value in it.”

Sensitive personal information revealed in smartphone metadata, study finds
Categories
Links Quotations Writing

2014.3.14

At its core, respecting the user means that, when designing or deploying an information system, the individual’s privacy rights and interests are accommodated right from the outset. User-centricity means putting the interests, needs, and expectations of people first, not those of the organization or its staff. This is key to delivering the next generation of retail experience because empowering people to play active roles in the management of their personal data helps to mitigate abuses and misuses. To this end, Aislelabs provides an opt out site that allows individuals to choose not to have their retail traffic data included in any anonymous analytics.

Quotation from “Building Privacy into Mobile Location Analytics (MLS) Through Privacy by Design” (.pdf)

It’s incredible that any company – let alone a Canadian Privacy Commissioner – would claim that an opt-out mechanism for hidden and secretive tracking technologies (i.e. monitoring your mobile devices as you walk through the world so retailers can better sell you things) constitutes “putting the interests, needs, and expectations of people first, not those of the organization or its staff.” For such an assertion to be valid the ‘people’ should be given the opportunity to opt-in, not out, of a surveillance system that few will know about and fewer will understand. There are vast bodies of academic and industry literatures which show opt-out mechanisms generally do not work; they’re not effectively centralized and they add considerable levels of friction that hinder consumers’ abilities to express their actual interests. And that’s just fine for many retailers and analytics companies because they’re concerned with turning people into walking piggy banks, not with thinking of individuals as deserving any semblance of a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Categories
Quotations

2014.3.13

The term “identifiers” is NSA jargon for information relating to an individual, such as telephone number, email address, IP address and username as well as their name.

The document – which is undated, though metadata suggests this version was last updated in June 2012 – does not say whether the oversight process it mentions has been established or whether any searches against US person names have taken place.

James Ball and Spencer Ackerman, “NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone calls”

Perhaps foolishly, but I find it amusing that metadata is being used to evaluate how/when other metadata identifiers were being used to track the world’s populations…

Categories
Quotations

2014.2.26

The NSA can’t break Tor and it [ticks] them off. Most crypto drives the NSA batty,” [Bruce Schneier] said. “Encryption works and it works at scale. The NSA may have a large budget than all of the other intelligence agencies combined, but they are not made of magic. Our goal should be to make eavesdropping more expensive. We should have the goal of limiting bulk collection and forcing targeted collection.

Bruce Schneier, quoted in Dennis Fisher, “The NSA is ‘not made of magic’”
Categories
Quotations

2014.2.14

Politicians are welcome to do strange things at home –read a book for pleasure, think for themselves–as long as they do it in private and nobody finds out. A politician who does random things in public, in front of cameras and microphones, is not merely departing from the disciplined advancement of a political idea, he is undermining it.

Paul Well, The Longer I’m Prime Minister