PERSONAL PRIVACY AND FREEDOM

Audio-book Review
By Chet Yarbrough

(Blog:awalkingdelight)
Website: chetyarbrough.com

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World

Written by: Bruce Schneier

Narrated by: Dan John Miller

Bruce Schneier’s book is about the battles with government and the open market for personal privacy and freedom in the information age. 

The seriousness of the subject is diminished by millions who revel in the knowledge, accessibility, and convenience of the internet. However, Schneier explains how our appreciation and use of the internet threatens privacy and freedom. What is needed is a perfect balance between personal privacy and public utility.

Perfect as an adjective for balance between private use and public utility is oxymoronic.  All human beings are emotionally and intellectually imperfect.  The general public conducts their lives within normative social boundaries.  They are generally not criminal, sexually perverted, or psychologically impaired.  However, all human beings transgress some social boundaries. 

Most individuals feel appropriately guilty for their transgression; suffer the personal and societal consequence, and then get on with their lives.

This loose definition is a fair description of all human beings.  However, Schneier argues that the internet categorizes, spindles, and mutilates human lives in a more public and destructive way than ever before in history.

The borer beetles of the internet are well-known; e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, the Federal Government, and a host of smaller species.  Some borer beetles can kill a forest, while others benefit nature’s ecology by getting rid of weakened trees to regenerate healthy trees.  Schneier suggests America is at a crossroad where captured data from the general public will either grow into a society’ killer or a humanized friend.

Facebook is in the news today because it is being investigated as a monopoly for predatory acquisition of potential competitors. To some, Facebook is a borer beetle of a diminishing forest of internet companies.

Schneier suggests or implies government, eleemosynary, and private entities continually gather personal information and mine it for public and private purposes.  The government’s objective is to protect American citizens from crime and terrorism.  Churches, charities, and private industry mine private data, not to commit crime or terror, but to increase donations in the first case and profitability in the second.

On some level, Schneier suggests there is no harm; no foul.  On another level he argues, surveillance, big data collection, and unregulated invasion of privacy attacks the foundation of democracy.  Though the right to privacy is not explicitly protected by America’s founding documents, Schneier suggests the internet encroaches on the 4^th 5^th and 9^th articles of the Constitution.

Schneier acknowledges the benefits of the internet; e.g. educational opportunity, communication timeliness, shopping convenience, banking access, and interconnectedness.  Every article written in this blog is benefited by information available on the internet. Convenient purchase of consumer goods requires no trips to a local vendor.  The bank writes checks with a few taps at a computer terminal.  A personal Ipad, Iphone, and laptop communicate with each other via Bluetooth with input only required once; on one device.  A wonderful life with no harm, no foul—right?

Schneier notes there is a price paid for these benefits. Unquestionably, the internet is a great source of valuable information and convenience.  However, it is also a vehicle for illicit activity. The internet reveals personal information about users that embarrass, bully, and sometimes ruin lives.  It disseminates bigotry that recruits like-minded miscreants.  It provides access to bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial instruments for fraudulent use.

Every purchase made on the internet becomes a factoid in the history of a purchaser.  All of these factoids are accumulated and used by privately owned search-engine companies (like Google, AOL, and Amazon) to profile personal habits and preferences.  That information is sold to retailers for a fee.  Private retailers use that information to customize their sales pitches to consumers.  The retailer adjusts prices according to buyer’ purchasing and income profile. The search engine owner sells the retailer a first position on internet searches.  That first position increases probability that the profiled consumer will purchase from that retailer who has enough information to estimate how much you are willing to pay.  The public is being manipulated by retailers that know where you are, what you buy, and what you are willing to pay, or capable of paying.  Retailers who purchase data from search engine owners can estimate (if not know) your net worth, sexual orientation, educational achievement, and personal preferences.

The internet is a money machine for search-engine owners.  First, the search-engine owner raises revenue by selling personal information and then increases income by selling positions on search-engine advertising web pages.  The retailer benefits by having personal consumer information and a primary position on web-page searches.  It increases the retailer’s odds of being seen on a search and the consumer’s likelihood of purchase. 

Schneier implies the consumer is being controlled by Goliath’s data collection.  The David in this hidden battle is the consumer with only hope and a sling shot to defend themselves.

The internet is a supersonic communications vehicle.  There is no waiting for the mail.  Instant messaging and the twitterverse are part of the spindling and mutilating process of the age.  Thinking before one speaks is yesterday’s reality.  Today, even in the race for President of the United States, speaking without thought is commonplace. 

Internet access provides a forum to convince people of the corruption of society.  With the click of a mouse, fiction competes with truth to lead and mislead the public.  Publicly shared television news programs created by professionals are now created by anyone with access to the internet.  There is no incentive or structure to fact-check reports posted on the internet.

Schneier suggests government intrusion into private lives has gone too far as a result of 9/11 and other terrorist events around the world.  Schneier implies that Edward Snowden is a hero; not a traitor. 

Snowden exposed the covert surveillance of the NSA (National Security Administration) in gathering information about private citizens without their knowledge; and without probable cause, or judicial consent.  Schneier argues that big data surveillance, by private enterprise and the government, have colluded to compromise freedom and control of the individual.

Schneier suggests that promulgation of fear, exacerbated by public access to the internet, causes the government to overreact.  He notes how the Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, stated that he did not want to be accused of not protecting British citizens because of lax surveillance of private citizens. 

This climate of fear pervades the politics of our time.  It is not the first time American abandoned the principles of privacy and freedom.  Schneier notes examples:

• the “Alien and Sedition Act” passed by Congress and signed by President John Adams,
• the incarceration of American Japanese during President Roosevelt’s administration, and the McCarthy witch-hunt for communists in the 1950 s. 

He suggests those were mistakes made then and the same mistakes are being made now.

Schneier offers solutions.  He acknowledges the necessity of surveillance but believes government oversight should be strengthened.  Government regulation should require judicial warrants for spying on an individual.  He argues that mass data collection is an unwarranted invasion of privacy that has little value in defeating terrorism.

Only after the fact, did mass surveillance reveal the Boston marathon bombing perpetrators.  He suggests the same is true for the shoe bomber and the terrorist attack of the disability hospital in California.  Schneier suggests that consumers should know who in the private sector is accumulating their personal information.  Private citizens should have a right to opt out of private sector data collection by any internet user.  He believes a set of rules should be established for government to follow when seeking specific surveillance.  Schneier suggests those rules should be designed for transparency; legislatively adopted, and justified by legislators to their constituency.

Schneier suggests there is credible benefit in accumulating data about medical history of individuals but that this data should be encrypted in ways that limit access to those authorized by the individual.  In general, Schneier is a proponent of encryption to secure the privacy of individuals.

Schneier’s book aptly describes the threats and benefits of big data.  Terrorism is real but its threat cannot become an excuse for denying the privacy and freedom of the individual.  Terrorism is just one of many risks in life.