From: Jonah Bossewitch <jb2410@columbia.edu>
  To  : <cpc@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 23:30:38 -0500

Re: Paper 1 - Becoming your Own Big Brother

Apparently some MS mail clients don't like MIME-compliant mail
(http://www.netadmintools.com/part12.html).  Here is a link to my paper if
all you saw was footnotes:

http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/CPC/discuss/77.html

nite,
/jsb

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jonah Bossewitch" <jonah@ccnmtl.columbia.edu>
To: <cpc@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 8:30 PM
Subject: Paper 1 - Becoming your Own Big Brother


Jonah Bossewitch
Computers Privacy and the Constitution
Prof. Eben Moglen
Paper #1, Spring 2005

Becoming Your Own Big Brother:
A Paradoxical Approach for Retaining Control of Personal Freedom

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major
and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing has
ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, a
redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past -- which is to say
only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its
moments. Each moment it has lived becomes acitation 'a l'orddre du
jour— and that day is Judgment Day.

— Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History


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[1]


In the age of information, the possibility for omniscient surveillance
has become a reality


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[2]. The ramifications and scope of this development are just beginning
to be felt and understood by the general population. Life in a
surveillance culture will redefine the existing social order and will
radically alter our sense of privacy, anonymity, individuality, and
identity


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[3]. Many visionaries have foreseen these changes unfolding in ways
that threaten our rights and liberties, but their warnings have been
systematically dismissed as paranoid and delusional


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[4].

In the past decade we have witnessed this wave of surveillance
beginning to crest and break. The vast proliferation of digital,
networked devices, combined with a centralized infrastructure providing
services to those devices, and virtually limitless storage, has given a
new and expanded meaning to memory itself. By default, we must now
assume that our actions, positions, and relations, in both physical and
virtual spaces, are always being tracked and recorded in their every
detail


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> [5].
>
> The prospective situation is better understood by contemplating that,
> unlike matter or energy, information does not obey any conservation
> laws. As far as the laws of physics are concerned, information can be
> shuffled around and duplicated freely without affecting the original.


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[6] Furthermore, we need to tease apart what is happening, and
separately analyze the interrelated issues of ubiquitous data
collection, widespread unchecked dissemination, and the ever-improving
means to transform this data into information through smart querying,
data mining, and predictive modeling.

An Alternative Strategy

Many of the sources we have read this semester grappled with strategies
for protecting and controlling the data that constitutes our selves.
Understandably, we have focused on formulating legislative measures
—either to insure that data is not collected in the first place, or to
insure that once it is collected, it cannot fall into the wrong hands,
or be used in particular nefarious ways. Here I will introduce and
explore an alternate strategy - a technological blitzkrieg to combat
the inversion of control that is taking place with regards to our own
histories. This approach will probably need legislative support to
guarantee that it does not backfire, and render the situation more
dangerous than it started.

Consider a piece of vaporware called the BioPort (Biography Portal).
All of the components required to write this software currently exist,
and shadows of this software are already under heavy development


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[7], albeit without a conscious awareness of the privacy and the
security issues at stake.

The basic idea for this software begins with a combination blog, diary,
and appointment book. Think of this tool as constructing your
autobiography for you in real time —similar to the scrap books that
parents use to record Baby's first smile, first lock of hair, first
word, etc. Thanks to Moore and his law


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[8], storing reams of information won't be a problem – automatically
harvesting data, and being able to easily extract meaningful
information are the real challenges.

In terms of getting information into the system, it is easy to imagine
ways in which this application might automatically cull data from your
ordinary machine interactions.


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[9] Initially, it could make simple inferences based on activities
conducted within other desktop applications


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[10], but soon, other BioPort aware applications may start sending it
direct messages. It is also easy to imagine portable digital appliances
coming into play


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[11] - carry around a gps device, sync it with your BioPort, and maybe
you can find your lost keys.

The real leap happens when we imagine a network-aware BioPort, one
which is capable of recording transactions it receives over the
network. At first, the BioPort might just be used between family and
friends. For example, at a family reunion a few people might take
photographs, but an entirely different group might decide caption them,
while everyone in the family will want access to these snapshots and
captions.

But this architecture could also conceivably support an encryption
strategy which might allow trusted (or even untrusted) parties to
update your BioPort for you, on your behalf. Such a system might even
give some corporations a competitive advantage – maybe a consumer would
be more interested in using a pharmacy coupon card if they knew that
those transactions would eventually make their way back into their
BioPort. They might even choose to shop at particular sites and stores
that facilitated the transfer of information back into their BioPort,
so that it becomes easier for them to track and manage the information
in their own lives.

The personally utility of having this repository available is very
clear. With the right suite of visualization and analysis tools


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[12], the BioPort could become the ultimate psychoanalytic device – one
which allows individuals to know themselves better by helping them
identify and discern recurring behavioral patterns in their own lives.
It could also transform social spaces, by allowing communities to come
together and securely share slices of each others BioPorts.

Stepping back for a moment to consider what we have just conjured, begs
important questions about how software like the BioPort might change
the privacy equation. It would certainly accelerate and complete the
surveillance cycle, making more information than ever available to
anyone with unlimited access to your BioPort.

Would it give us any leverage or allow us to regain any kinds of
control over our data identities? It might, and this is a topic I will
continue to explore in more depth in the second half of this semester.

When people first hear about the BioPort they express shock and
indignation at the idea of software becoming responsible for something
as important as an individual’s identity. Some reassurance could be
offered in the form of a promise that the BioPort software remain free
and open. But the most important realization for the public is that in
the information age, the collection of personal information is
inevitable. We have a choice between 1) corporations gathering
information about us, and keeping it from us, in order to market to us
more effectively and 2) becoming our own big brothers and gathering and
keeping this information about ourselves.

Surely this knowledge will forever change our concept of self. There is
a real concern that omniscient historical knowledge gives external
agencies a deterministic power over individuals that threatens their
freedom, in the deepest sense — their freedom of will


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[13]. Could self-awareness be one of the most powerful safeguards of
our freedom? We need to know what they know about us, not only to
contest it, but to anticipate the “Monster’s” maneuvers, thereby
rendering it more harmless. But is self-awareness enough, or does
society, and the law, need to go further to insure that our most basic
freedoms are preserved?






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>
> [1] Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Edited and with
> Introduction by Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 254.
>
>


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> [2] Robert O'Harrow, Jr., No Place To Hide (2005).
>
>


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> [3] Demonstrating this assertion is beyond the scope of this short
> paper. The number of Science Fiction books and movies that have taken
> up this theme are too numerous to cite, and philosophers, political
> theorists, and artists have also extrapolated this idea extensively.
>
>


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> [4] Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt, Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains,
> The Growth of an American Surveillance Society, ACLU Technology and
> Liberty Program, January 2003.
>
>


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> [5] There are no technological barriers remaining to a virtually
> omniscient data collection system. With the exception of our thoughts,
> any activities which are currently (to our knowledge) private, will not
> be for much longer.
>
>


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[6] Tom Siegfried. The Bit and the Pendulum: How the New Physics of
Information is Revolutionizing Science. (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
2000). See also, Elements of Reality: A Dialogue, by Hut, P. & van
Fraassen, B. 1997, J. of Consc. Stud.4, No. 2, 167-180.

[7] Examples of various known efforts underway to create similar kinds
of applications :

Microsoft’s My Life Bits-
http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx
MIT's Haystack- http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/
Nokia’s Lifeblogs- http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,54628,00.html
Life Caching - http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/LIFE CACHING.htm
OSAF’s Chandler-
http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler Compelling Vision.htm
The Lifestream Metaphor -
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi96/proceedings/videos/Fertig/etf.htm
After the IBM Deal, Where Is the "PC" Business Headed?
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,955951,00.html?
cnn=yes Fortune, December 9, 2004




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> [8] Moore, G. Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.
> Electrionics, Volume 8, April 19, 1965.
> http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm.
>
>


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[9] See Ximian’s (not Apple’s) Dashboard Project
http://www.nat.org/dashboard or the Growl project http://growl.info/
for examples of software which allows desktop applications to notify
each other of important events.




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[10] Parsing emails alone might enable the BioPort to reconstruct
travel itineraries, grocery purchases, movie and concert attendance,
etc. People might also change their usage habits towards existing
Personal Information Tools (Outlook, PDAs) to intentionally tag and
track significant events in their lives. Then again, existing
inter-relationships could also be exploited - ie the existence of
digital photographs with timestamps, cross-referenced with gps data,
and an appointment book, would probably yield rich results.




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[11]


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> Biever, C. Cell Phones turn into Personal Assistants. New Scientist,
> November 27 2004.


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> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424753.100
>
>


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> [12] For example, envision a query interface akin to a gant chart,
> which would allow the user view the information stored in the system
> arranged chronologically at varying levels of granularity - day, month,
> year, decades. If the information where displayed intelligently, such a
> system might allow people to observe patterns in their lives that may
> otherwise have gone undetected - correlations between shifts in
> careers, relationships, travel, expenditures, whatever. This is just
> the start. Artificially intelligent data mining tools and modeling
> could also be implemented to assist people in understanding themselves
> as well as the corporations and government agencies already do.
>
>


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> [13] See, Herbert Marcuse. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology
> of Advanced Industrial Society. (1964) Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
>


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