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Links Quotations

There are two types of laws in the U.S., each designed to constrain a different type of power: constitutional law, which places limitations on government, and regulatory law, which constrains corporations. Historically, these two areas have largely remained separate, but today each group has learned how to use the other’s laws to bypass their own restrictions. The government uses corporations to get around its limits, and corporations use the government to get around their limits.

This partnership manifests itself in various ways. The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect.

Here’s an example: It would be reasonable for our government to debate the circumstances under which corporations can collect and use our data, and to provide for protections against misuse. But if the government is using that very data for its own surveillance purposes, it has an incentive to oppose any laws to limit data collection. And because corporations see no need to give consumers any choice in this matter – because it would only reduce their profits – the market isn’t going to protect consumers, either.

Schneier’s article, “The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership,” does a terrific job in striking to the heart of the ‘arrangements’ between our corporate partners and America’s governing bodies.
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Links Quotations

Mr. Cope, I am Canadian. Like virtually every other Canadian I know, I rely on my mobile phone in my personal life and for my livelihood on a daily basis. The “critical situation” I face comes every month, when I open my wireless bill wondering whether I’ll be able to afford to pay it. Your company, along with Canada’s other major wireless providers, have had 30 years to address this situation. But you’ve failed. Posting huge profits and paying dividends year after year might satisfy your shareholders, but individual Canadians and their families are being hung out to dry. It’s time for a change. Faced with a choice between an American company fighting to gain a foothold in a hostile market or a Canadian one who takes my hard earned money for granted, I’ll pick the lesser of two evils. And if you don’t know which that is by now, I’ll happily send you a copy of my monthly phone bill.

Ben’s letter is awesome. You should really go read all of it.
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Quotations

2013.8.2

One reason for the “stamp and leak” culture is the institutional failure of the intelligence community to find an effective way of allowing people uncomfortable with certain secrets to protest them without leaking to the public. Channels that allow for proper and credible adjudication are essential. David Grannis, the staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says he is not aware of a single instance where a whistleblower from within the community successfully navigated the complex rules set up by agencies to handle complaints. And simply put, the people who work with secrets have little faith in the inspectors general, no matter how independent they are, and have every reason to believe, because they can read newspapers, that their whistleblowing will end their careers if done internally.

Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
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Aside Quotations

2013.8.2

What are Google’s Nexus devices for if not to be purchased by large numbers of consumers? Google’s take on that issue has been consistent: they’re “halo” devices meant to educate the rest of the ecosystem. Burke put it to us this way: “Basically what Nexus allows us to do is set the standard … [we can] demonstrate how Android runs and hopefully influence other device manufacturers to take what we’ve done and do even better.”

That explanation has often been difficult to take at face value. Though the phones have usually been elegant devices, they typically launched with specs that were behind the curve. The Galaxy Nexus had a pretty terrible camera, for example, and the Nexus 4 lacks support for LTE. Now that Google sells top-end “Google Play edition” phones that run stock Android, the Nexus line seems more irrelevant than ever.

That brings us to the other — and more important — reason the Nexus line exists: Google simply needs hardware on which it can develop Android. Burke says “as an engineering team creating a mobile platform — we can’t do that in the abstract. We need to do it on a real device that we’re carrying with us.” When people ask me about the Nexus line, I like to joke that if you need to create a few hundred polished and usable devices for Google engineers, why not make a few hundred thousand more and sell them to hardcore users?

I think that acknowledging Google wants to control some of its own hardware for internal development purposes – as well as to better enable external developers to produce software for Android – continues to strike to the heart of why the ‘Nexus’ line exists. Arguably the recent ‘Play Edition’ of manufacturers’ flagships phones could address consumers’ desire for stock Android experiences, but I don’t think that the Play Editions will fully satisfy developers’ interests in working from a stock, no-nonsense, quickly updated platform.
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Quotations

2013.8.2

… it is obvious that for all the academic critique, ‘privacy’, as a concept, as a regime, as a set of policy instruments, and as a way to frame advocacy and activism, is not going to disappear. On the contrary, it displays a remarkable resilience as a way to regulate the processing of personal information by public and privacy organizations, and as a way for ‘privacy advocates’ to resist the excessive monitoring of human behaviour. Like it or not, privacy frames the ways that most ordinary people see the contemporary surveillance issues. Surveillance scholars have got to live with it.

Colin J. Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy: The concept and the regime”
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Quotations

2013.8.1

When members of the intelligence community brief Congress on highly classified programs, they’re incentivized to do so in a way that provides the necessary amount of detail to satisfy legal and administrative requirements, and not a shred more. Since most members of the intelligence committees aren’t experts, an imbalance is built into the system. The briefers will use technical language, knowing that members often can’t share with their staffs enough information to develop follow-up questions. Members know this and tend to be the alert for weasel words or any hints or indications that there are depths to the particular program that might not be visible in a briefing. The less trust there is between institutions, the more games are played in the briefings. These games have become endemic, which for oversight is troubling. The less trust we have in government, the more likely it is for freelancers and hobbyists, people who traffic in classified information that is expressly often pulled from its context, to decide whether to publish secrets. Don’t blame this on the lone wolves. Blame it on the gatekeepers for failing to maintain credibility.

Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
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Quotations

2013.8.1

The role of public reason is not so much to eliminate or even diminish political disagreement, as it is to provide democratic citizens with reasons and arguments that, if valid and sound, they can accept as democratic citizens. Were laws and policies are decided for purely nonpublic reasons, it could not be said that democratic citizens are politically free. Their political power is being used against their will in ways they cannot endorse as citizens. Public reason then is a condition of political autonomy and collective self-rule.

Samuel Freeman, “Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment”
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Quotations

2013.7.31

An important test of the deliberative legitimacy of a political process … is the degree to which groups may not only gain a hearing for their opinions about issues and proposals already under consideration but are able to initiate discussion of problems and proposals.

Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy”
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Quotations

2013.7.30

Obama’s first director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, wanted the CIA to use its [drone strike] capability more strategically. His reading of the intelligence suggested that the collateral harm of the operation–the anger that the strikes caused among Pakistanis, even though the targeting was precise–was damaging to U.S. security interests. The CIA, in a deft bureaucratic move, simply stopped providing Blair’s office with advance notice of strikes. The dispute went all the way to the Office of the Vice President, which sided with the CIA, although Blair “won” the ability to have a director of national intelligence representative at CIA covert action briefings at the White House.

Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
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Writing

The Painful Process of Updating Android

Android fragmentation is a very real problem; not only does it hinder software developers’ abilities to build and sell apps but, also, raises security issues. In a recent report from Open Signal, we learn that 34.1% of Android users are using the 2.3.3–2.3.7 version of Android, whereas just 37.9% of users using 4.x versions of the operating system, most of whom are themselves using a years-old version of Android. In effect, an incredibly large number of Android users are using very outdated versions of their mobile phone’s operating systems.

It’s easy to blame this versioning problem on the carriers. It’s even easier to blame the issue on the manufacturers. And both parties deserve blame. But perhaps not just for the reasons that they’re (rightly!) often crucified for: I want to suggest that the prevalence of 2.3.x devices in consumers’ hands might have as much to do with consumers not knowing how to update their devices, as it does with updates simply not being provided by carriers and manufacturers in the first place.

Earlier this month I spent some time with ‘normal’ gadget users: my family. One family member had a Samsung Galaxy S2…which was still using version 2.x of the Android operating system. Since February 2013, an operating system update has been available for the phone that would bring it up to Android version 4.1.2, but my family member neither knew or cared that it was available.

They didn’t know about the update because they had received no explicit notice that an update was available, or at least didn’t recall being notified. To be clear, they hadn’t updated the phone even once since purchasing the device about two years ago, and there have been a series of updates to the operating system since purchase time.

The family member also didn’t care about there being an update, because they only used the phone for basic functions (e.g. texting, voice calls, the odd game, social networking). They’re not a gadget monkey and so didn’t know about any of the new functions incorporated into the updated Android operating system. And, while they appreciate some of the new functionality (e.g. Google Now) they wouldn’t have updated the device unless I had been there.

A key reason for having not updated their phone was the absolute non-clarity in how they were supposed to engage in this task: special software had to be downloaded from Samsung to be installed on their computer,[1] and then wouldn’t run because the phone’s battery had possess at least a 50% charge,[2] and then it took about 3 hours because the phone couldn’t be updated to the most recent version of Android in one fell swoop. Oh, and there were a series of times when it wasn’t clear that the phone was even updating because the update notices were so challenging to understand that they could have been written in cipher-text.

Regardless of whether it was Rogers’, Samsung’s, Google’s, or the tooth fairy’s fault, it was incredibly painful to update the Android device. Painful to the point that there’s no reason why most people would know about the update process, and little reason for non-devoted Android users to bother with the hassle of updating if they knew what a pain in the ass it was going to be.

The current state of the Android OS ecosystem is depressing from a security perspective. But in addition to manufacturers and carriers often simply not providing updates, there is a further problem that Android’s OS update mechanisms are incredibly painful to use. Only after the significant security SNAFUs of Windows XP did Microsoft really begin to care about desktop OS security, and Google presently has a decent update mechanism for their own line of Nexus devices. What, exactly, is it going to take for mobile phone manufacturers (e.g. Samsung, HTC) and mobile phone carriers (e.g. Rogers, TELUS) to get their acts together and aggressively start pushing out updates to their subscribers? When are these parties going to ‘get’ that they have a long-term duties and commitments to protect their subscribers and consumers?[3]

  1. In theory there is an over the air update system that should have facilitated a system update in a relatively painless way. Unfortunately, that system didn’t work at all and so Samsung’s software had to be used to receive the updates.  ↩
  2. Really, this made no sense. To update the device it had to be plugged into a computer; why, then, did the phone (which was charging because it was plugged into the computer) need to have a 50%+ charge?  ↩
  3. I actually have a few ideas on this that will, hopefully, start coming to fruition in the coming months, but I’m open to suggestions from the community.  ↩