Maschio Fernando
English 1106
Mr. Bliss
3/7/2017
The trove of documents published by WikiLeaks this week detailing how the Central Intelligence Agency successfully hacked a wide range of tech products including iPhones, Android devices, Wi-Fi routers and smart televisions has put privacy in the digital world in the spotlight once again. In fact, privacy is one area that’s hotly debated, as individuals, corporations, and governments clash over what can or can’t be accessed.
Privacy is a universal human right penned in international conventions, declarations and charters that were formalized at a time when private life was the default. There were clear lines and limits between private homes and public streets and buildings, between a private person and the public authorities and spaces. With the current digital infrastructure, we are heading in the wrong direction: Individuals are becoming more and more transparent, open to different types of control, manipulation and discrimination, while the powerful — government, industry and organizations — are increasingly closed off. Freedom, individual independence and democracy are fundamental reasons why the individual right to privacy is something we should all care about.
Our lives are made of data. Often, it appears that we live in and use open and too easily accessible networks. Corporations and governments are watching us and monitoring us through data. Entire conversations and memories are stored as data on our electronic devices.
The Internet of Things is connecting more devices every day, with an estimated 24 billion Internet of Things devices by 2020. This growth will change the way people carry out tasks. For example, having smart lighting can actually reduce overall energy consumption and lower your electric bill. And connected healthcare devices give people a deeper and fuller look at their own health than ever before. The volume of data generated every day continues to expand, so much that the term “big data” was coined. Big data is the latest trend in information technology. Big data is a term used for data that is so vast and complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to work with them. It is usually analyzed computationally to discover patterns, trends and associations, especially relating to human behaviors and interactions. Analytical software is used because businesses have a real incentive to collect and analyze their big data because it will lead to a more accurate analyses, which leads to better decision-making. Any company that really wants to make the correct decisions and truly cares about operational efficiency, cost reductions, and reduced risk, will have some type of business analysis software. In addition, they can determine what customers want (based on their behavior) and provide them with a better experience so that they will buy more over time. As advertising moves to apps and the web, this capability becomes more and more important as they try to reach out to more potential customers. For example, Netflix is the largest provider of streaming videos online in the United States, with over 29 million users. It has also become a treasure trove of data on social trends and popular media. They store data on what users watch, at what time periods of the day they tend to access Netflix and what type of device they access Netflix on. They also record how many times you fast forward and rewind, and when you stop watching a television show or a movie. One implementation of big data is the recommended TV shows and movies section, where they leverage the aforementioned analysis, compare it with other users with similar habits and make recommendations on what TV show or movie to watch next. However, Netflix has now decided to start producing its own original programming, and is using all the data they glean from their users to do it. It used its data to lead it to license BBC miniseries “House of Cards” for a remake. And it correlated fans of actor Kevin Spacey and director David Fincher to fans of the original, leading it to hire them for the program.
But, with all these benefits comes an added risk, as the increase in interconnected devices gives cyber criminals and hackers a lot more opportunities to get into networks. People are becoming warier about what is happening with the vast amounts of data now collected about them – with high-profile and damaging data breaches continuing to make the headlines it has never been more important to maintain the balance between protection, profit and privacy. The steals of data thieves now commonly reach in the millions, such as in the case of the LinkedIn data breach, which affected 117 million, or the attack on US retailer Target in 2013 that saw the data of 110 million customers exposed. Yahoo has been hacked twice in recent years, first in 2013 and then in 2014, compromising over 1 billion accounts. The company said that it believes the attacker in that breach was sponsored by a government, and that they found a way to forge credentials to log into some users’ accounts without a password.
A more serious threat comes from governments and other large institutions. Over the last century, governments have developed sophisticated methods of surveillance as a means of controlling their subjects. This is especially true of totalitarian states, as the passage from Westin quoted above indicates. The Soviet Union, Communist China, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and white-run South Africa all used covert and overt observation, interrogation, eavesdropping, reporting by neighbors and other means of data collection to convince their subjects that independent thought, speech and behavior was unacceptable. In many cases the mere presence of the surveillance was enough to keep people in line. Where it was not, the data collected was used to identify, round up and punish elements of the population that were deemed dangerous.
When WikiLeaks rose to prominence globally a couple of years ago, it was initially for its work posting secret government documents about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by confidential diplomatic cables. At first, they worked with the press to sift through the data. The free press has traditionally been the institution to weigh such information flows and to work to do the most public good with the least possible harm. That’s in part why NSA leaker Edward Snowden went to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras instead of publishing the information he took with him from the NSA. He knew that publishing such information would have huge implications, and he knew they would wield such data responsibly. The media sifted through much of what Snowden shared, bounced ideas off government officials, got an idea of what may do too much damage to national security, and so forth.
However, releasing such information without redacting personal information risks lives. Identities of informants could be compromised, spies exposed, and the safety of human rights activists, journalists and dissidents jeopardized when information of their activities is made public. WikiLeaks published the medical data of hundreds of ordinary people, including sick children, rape victims and people with mental health problems.
In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance, there has been a sharp increase in the use of encryption and encrypted communication apps such as Signal and Telegram. These apps offer end-to end encryption. In end-to-end encryption, data sent is scrambled so that it is indecipherable to anyone until it passes through servers and reaches the intended recipient.
Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) protects everyone from arbitrary or unlawful interferences with their “privacy, family, home or correspondence.” The international human rights community has begun the process of responding to the erosion of privacy rights that new technologies have facilitated. This report recommends that the U.N. Human Rights Committee assist in this process by issuing a new General Comment on the right to privacy under Article 17 of the Eccrine the ICCPR came into force in 1976, new information technologies have emerged, and both governments and private companies have at times employed them outside of any legal framework and without regard to individual privacy. I feel that while surveillance and information technologies have developed rapidly, the law of privacy has not kept pace with these changes. Although privacy law, at the international human rights level, is grounded in robust and pedigreed principles, it doesn’t seem to have been developed or adapted to fit the needs of the modern society. For example, it did not anticipate the development of new forms of communication like email and texting, the emergence of government capacities to intercept and process large quantities of electronic data, or the explosion of social media websites.
Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt said in 2009 in response to a question on user privacy that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”. I strongly disagree with him. I think that privacy and the ability to think and act freely without feeling out of place or watched is important to act independently and freely. People can then therefore create their own identity ,and this paves the way for innovation and creativity.