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U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are being pitched many new technologies, but government technologists have an obligation to consider ethical and moral issues such as privacy when embracing new applications, concluded a panel of technology experts speaking at the FOSE government computing trade show.
AFFIRM (the Association for Federal Information Resources Management) plans to launch a Web site addressing technology and ethics within weeks and eventually issue a white paper on related topics.
Hastings and Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, questioned whether IT vendors can be expected to present the ethical issues when they pitch their products to government buyers. Sales people are not generally trained to address difficult ethical issues while trying to make a sale; they’re trained to tell potential customers what the customers want to hear, Paller said.
The panel also addressed several questions from the audience, largely of government employees. One question was:
What’s wrong with the statement, ‘If someone has nothing to hide, why shouldn’t we be able to take their biometric data?’
Reeder answered:
I would submit to you that none of you would tolerate routine invasion of your homes and searching of your personal possessions by a police force because you had nothing to hide.
10 Downing St says the EU Justice Council has agreed to all UK anti-terrorism proposals, including communications data retention standards.
The Council:
agreed to establish new common standards for retention of communications data;
agreed to implement proposals to improve the exchange of data between countries, for example on lost and stolen passports; and
tasked EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security policy, Javier Solana, to bring forward proposals to make better use of intelligence across the EU within six months.
– 10 Downing Street, EU agrees UK anti-terror plans.
Cross-posted from vigilant.tv.
There’s an interesting debate going on at Megan McArdle’s blog where she copies a post made by ‘Contributor A’
Nick Kristof says that a national ID, in the form of a beefed-up standard driver’s license, would add security without sacrificing much or any real liberty. (He doesn’t propose forcing people to carry it at all times, like some countries do.) Is he wrong on the second count, that the loss of liberty is essentially negligible?
Please don’t answer
– Biometrics don’t work. We’re assuming for the sake of argument that the technology can be made to work.
– It won’t add that much security. Since any security gain is good, I’m for anything that adds any security at all at an acceptable cost.
– It would be expensive – again, if there’s a measurable, even if modest, security gain, we’re assuming it’s worth quite a lot in dollar terms.
– It will infringe your right to be invisible. You don’t currently really have the right to be invisible. We’re assuming you’re a normal American who pays taxes, has a social-security number, answers the census, carries a driver’s license and has a credit-rating. Those few who have none of these things can keep that right–they just may not marry, drive, fly, travel abroad, work for pay or draw any government benefit whatsoever.
– You don’t like it in theory because government is bad. I want concrete examples of how a significant number of Americans could lose concrete rights.
– Ben Franklin once said “Those who would sacrifice liberty…” Yes, we know. I want an argument, not an aphorism.
There’s nearly 50 comments, many of them quite interesting. There was a lovely rebuttal by commenter Spec Bowers:
I have strong principled objections, but that’s not what you are asking for. Here’s a pragmatic objection: What if you misplace or lose your ID? Think about how long it takes today to get a replacement driver’s license or passport. Imagine a future where you are requested several times a day to produce your ID. How miserable might your life be if you couldn’t produce it?
Quite so.
The Home Office has tried to assure us that David “Big” Blunkett’s plan to impose compulsory National Identity Cards on innocent British citizens is not a threat to privacy. Yesterday that argument was finally blown out of the water.
The Guardian reports that ID Card usage will be tracked centrally. Stephen Harrison, the head of the Home Office’s identity card policy unit, admitted yesterday that the Government is “minded” to log every single ID Card usage and store the data centrally.
As ID Cards become used for more and more things, this data shadow will become larger and larger. Every time you use your ID Card for any purpose this information will be recorded. All available in a central government database at the touch of a button.
Of course, Harrison assures us that the data is only being collected to guard against abuse and that there will be “safeguards” to protect it. Some of us have heard such words before and don’t find them very reassuring.
Harrison’s admission yesterday confirms that compulsory ID Cards will effectively mean the end of privacy in the UK.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Well, I expected Big Blunkett to try and take advantage of the Madrid atrocity to pursue his own political ends. Even I didn’t expect him to do so this quickly or this blatantly.
The Sunday Times reports that a row has erupted in cabinet after Home Secretary David Blunkett attempted to change the agreed government position on compulsory ID Cards. According to the report, Blunkett is attempting to sneak in to the draft Bill a clause that will allow a rapid move towards compulsion. This move is bitterly opposed by Jack Straw, Alistair Darling, Paul Boateng and Patricia Hewitt.
Although the draft was apparently published “earlier this month”, it seems clear that Big Blunkett is relying on public fear after Madrid to cynically push through his pet scheme.
We need to remind people at every opportunity that Spain already has a national Identity Card system – and it did nothing to stop the Madrid bombings.
Cross-posted from Big Blunkett – Watching David Blunkett
Mentioned en passant in another alarming article in which David Blunkett threatens yet further abridgements of civil liberties under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’, it is noted he and the European Commission advocated the idea of…
Joining forces with the Commission, Mr Blunkett backed proposals for a fingerprint data base of all EU citizens and tougher measures to tackle terrorist funding.
Oh wonderful.
The BBC reports that the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee has rejected the EU Commission’s agreement to automatically pass personal information about transatlantic passengers to US authorities. The committee concluded that:
“The agreement with the United States is not on a level that… gives enough protection to EU citizens”
Unfortunately, as the BBC article points out, the infamous EU democratic deficit means that “The parliament’s opinion has no legal force”.
Computerworld has an opinion article by Jay Cline about the privacy scare surrounding RFID technology who explains that the RFID hype has outpaced reality. Manufacturers and retailers have yet to agree on a universal electronic product code. RFID scanning is also far from error-free. But more important, RFID signals are so weak that they’re easily blocked by metals and dense liquids. It’s infeasible today for someone driving a vehicle down your street to intercept signals from RFID-tagged goods inside your home.
He also argues that the economics of RFID chips also limit how they’re used. Until the price of RFID chips comes down to about a penny apiece, they’ll mostly be used at the case and pallet level, clear of any personally identifiable activity. So we have several years to identify the privacy controls we want to see in RFID systems. Some companies are already creating these privacy controls. Chip makers and users are discussing how the principles of data privacy could be built into the RFID process. A top priority is notifying customers that certain items are tagged with these transmitters – which could be done by placing a common RFID logo on product packages. To give customers the ability to turn off the transmitters, some companies plan to make them peel-offs. RSA Security Inc. is also developing a chip that could be worn on watches or bags to block nearby RFIDs from transmitting certain information. So the RFID privacy ball is rolling.
Glad to hear that. Nevertheless, I will still be watching the RFID development with interest…
It takes a lot to amaze me, but Blunkett has done just that.
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?
An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.
On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.
This is insane. The state locks someone up unjustly and then demands payment for room and board? This is the true face of the people who have power over us. It is actually evil.
If this astonishing development does not cause the mother of all political storms both in Westminster and society at large, then Britain as a society has clearly become so inured to authoritarianism and arrogance by its rulers that we must be past the point of no return. Blunkett must go. Now!
Following last week’s atrocity in Madrid, the media are reporting London Underground’s plans to increase security. These plans include more plain clothes police patrolling the network and encouraging passengers to be vigilant.
There’s another aspect to the plans not mentioned in most reports. According to the BBC:
British Transport Police have also said more people using the Tube will be randomly stopped and searched
Increased security is definitely welcome, however random stop and search is worrying. It is vital that any such moves be clearly seen as a limited response to a specific threat and not allowed to become standard operating procedure.
Do we really want to live in a country where being randomly stopped and searched is considered an acceptable part of everyday life?
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Bruce Schneier has a view essay in Wired about how all the money spent on security to turn the country into a fortress may make us feel better, but it doesn’t make us any safer. As most readers of this blog will know, Bruce Schneier is CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
Many of the security measures we encounter on a daily basis aim pinpoint the bad guys by treating everyone as a suspect. The Department of Homeland Security counts on technology to come to our rescue: databases to track suspected terrorists, facial recognition to spot them in airports, artificial intelligence to anticipate plots before they unfold. But that creates a problem similar to the one you see when airport security screeners waste their time frisking false alarms. Terrorists are so rare that any individual lead is almost certainly a false one. So billions of dollars are wasted with no assurance that any terrorist will be caught. When an airport screener confiscates a pocketknife from an innocent person, security has failed.
…
Security always involves compromises. As a society we can have as much protection as we want, as long as we’re willing to sacrifice the money, time, convenience, and liberties to get it. Unfortunately, most of the government’s measures are bad trade-offs: They require significant sacrifices without providing much additional safety in return. And there’s far too much “security theater” – ways of making people feel safer without actually improving anything.
A lone (or so it often seems) voice of sanity and common sense – just what I needed to get me through today…
Information Week reports that the State Department plans to begin issuing passports with chips containing biographic information later in the year. Maura Harty, testified at a Congressional hearing Thursday that the United States needs to take the lead in issuing the new passports to encourage other nations to do likewise. Doing so, she says, will help secure our borders against terrorists and other potential troublemakers. Harty told member of the House Government Reform Committee’s hearings on the government’s US-Visit program, which requires many foreigners entering and leaving the United States to have their fingerprints and face electronically scanned.
We recognize that convincing other nations to improve their passport requires U.S. leadership both at the International Civil Aviation Organization and by taking such steps with the U.S. passport. Embedding biometrics into U.S. passports to establish a clear link between the person issued the passport and the user is an important step forward in the international effort to strengthen border security.
Of course, biometrics is foolproof and fingerprinting your citizens is going to improve border security how exactly?! Another example of a fallacy typical of the statists that if only we had total surveillance, then no crime, threat or terrorism would be possible. Balls, balls, balls.
Sorry for the outburst, it is just one stupid statement by a state official too many… Sadly, I am sure there are many more to come.
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