Data and Goliath
Authors: Bruce Schneier
SELECTED BOOKS BY BRUCE SCHNEIER
Carry On: Sound Advice from Schneier on Security
(2013)
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive
(2012)
Schneier on Security (2008)
Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World
(2003)
Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
(2000)
Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C
(1994 and 1996)
To Karen: DMASC
Contents
Part One: The World We’re Creating
1. Data as a By-product of Computing
4. The Business of Surveillance
5. Government Surveillance and Control
6. Consolidation of Institutional Control
7. Political Liberty and Justice
8. Commercial Fairness and Equality
Part Three: What to Do About It
14. Solutions for Corporations
15. Solutions for the Rest of Us
16. Social Norms and the Big Data Trade-off
I
f you need to be convinced that you’re living in a science-fiction world, look at
your cell phone. This cute, sleek, incredibly powerful tool has become so central
to our lives that we take it for granted. It seems perfectly normal to pull this device
out of your pocket, no matter where you are on the planet, and use it to talk to someone
else, no matter where the person is on the planet.
Yet every morning when you put your cell phone in your pocket, you’re making an implicit
bargain with the carrier: “I want to make and receive mobile calls; in exchange, I
allow this company to know where I am at all times.” The bargain isn’t specified in
any contract, but it’s inherent in how the service works. You probably hadn’t thought
about it, but now that I’ve pointed it out, you might well think it’s a pretty good
bargain. Cell phones really are great, and they can’t work unless the cell phone companies
know where you are, which means they keep you under their surveillance.
This is a very intimate form of surveillance. Your cell phone tracks where you live
and where you work. It tracks where you like to spend your weekends and evenings.
It tracks how often you go to church (and which church), how much time you spend in
a bar, and whether you speed when you drive. It tracks—since it knows about all the
other phones in your area—whom you spend your days with, whom you meet for lunch,
and
whom you sleep with. The accumulated data can probably paint a better picture of how
you spend your time than you can, because it doesn’t have to rely on human memory.
In 2012, researchers were able to use this data to predict where people would be
24 hours later
, to within 20 meters.
Before cell phones, if someone wanted to know all of this, he would have had to hire
a private investigator to follow you around taking notes. Now that job is obsolete;
the cell phone in your pocket does all of this automatically. It might be that no
one retrieves that information, but it is there for the taking.
Your location information is valuable, and everyone wants access to it. The police
want it. Cell phone location analysis is useful in criminal investigations in several
different ways. The police can “ping” a particular phone to determine where it is,
use historical data to determine where it has been, and collect all the cell phone
location data from a specific area to figure out who was there and when. More and
more, police are using this data for exactly these purposes.
Governments also use this same data for intimidation and social control. In 2014,
the government of Ukraine sent this positively Orwellian text message to people in
Kiev whose phones were at a certain place during a certain time period: “Dear subscriber,
you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” Don’t think this
behavior is limited to totalitarian countries; in 2010, Michigan police sought information
about every cell phone in service near an expected labor protest. They didn’t bother
getting a warrant first.
There’s a whole industry devoted to tracking you in real time. Companies use your
phone to track you in stores to learn how you shop, track you on the road to determine
how close you might be to a particular store, and deliver advertising to your phone
based on where you are right now.
Your location data is so valuable that cell phone companies are now selling it to
data brokers, who in turn resell it to anyone willing to pay for it. Companies like
Sense Networks specialize in using this data to build personal profiles of each of
us.
Phone companies are not the only source of cell phone data. The US company Verint
sells cell phone tracking systems to both corporations and governments worldwide.
The company’s website says that it’s “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions
for customer
engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance,” with
clients in “more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries.” The UK company
Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a “blind” call to a phone—one that
doesn’t ring, and isn’t detectable. The blind call forces the phone to transmit on
a certain frequency, allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter.
The company boasts government customers in Algeria, Brunei, Ghana, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, Singapore, and the United States. Defentek, a company mysteriously registered
in Panama, sells a system that can “locate and track any phone number in the world
. . . undetected and unknown by the network, carrier, or the target.” It’s not an
idle boast; telecommunications researcher Tobias Engel demonstrated the same thing
at a hacker conference in 2008. Criminals do the same today.
All this location tracking is based on the cellular system. There’s another entirely
different and more accurate location system built into your smartphone: GPS. This
is what provides location data to the various apps running on your phone. Some apps
use location data to deliver service: Google Maps, Uber, Yelp. Others, like Angry
Birds, just want to be able to collect and sell it.
You can do this, too. HelloSpy is an app that you can surreptitiously install on someone
else’s smartphone to track her. Perfect for an anxious mom wanting to spy on her teenager—or
an abusive man wanting to spy on his wife or girlfriend. Employers have used apps
like this to spy on their employees.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) and its UK counterpart, Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ), use location data to track people. The NSA collects cell phone
location data from a variety of sources: the cell towers that phones connect to, the
location of Wi-Fi networks that phones log on to, and GPS location data from Internet
apps. Two of the NSA’s internal databases, code-named HAPPYFOOT and FASCIA, contain
comprehensive location information of devices worldwide. The NSA uses the databases
to track people’s movements, identify people who associate with people of interest,
and target drone strikes.
The NSA can allegedly track cell phones even when they are turned off.
I’ve just been talking about location information from one source—your cell phone—but
the issue is far larger than this. The computers you
interact with are constantly producing intimate personal data about you. It includes
what you read, watch, and listen to. It includes whom you talk to and what you say.
Ultimately, it covers what you’re thinking about, at least to the extent that your
thoughts lead you to the Internet and search engines. We are living in the golden
age of surveillance.
Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy said it plainly way back in 1999: “You have zero
privacy anyway. Get over it.” He’s wrong about how we should react to surveillance,
of course, but he’s right that it’s becoming harder and harder to avoid surveillance
and maintain privacy.
Surveillance is a politically and emotionally loaded term, but I use it deliberately.
The US military defines surveillance as “systematic observation.” As I’ll explain,
modern-day electronic surveillance is exactly that. We’re all open books to both governments
and corporations; their ability to peer into our collective personal lives is greater
than it has ever been before.
The bargain you make, again and again, with various companies is surveillance in exchange
for free service. Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt and its director of ideas Jared Cohen
laid it out in their 2013 book,
The New Digital Age
. Here I’m paraphrasing their message: if you let us have all your data, we will show
you advertisements you want to see and we’ll throw in free web search, e-mail, and
all sorts of other services. It’s convenience, basically. We are social animals, and
there’s nothing more powerful or rewarding than communicating with other people. Digital
means have become the easiest and quickest way to communicate. And why do we allow
governments access? Because we fear the terrorists, fear the strangers abducting our
children, fear the drug dealers, fear whatever bad guy is in vogue at the moment.
That’s the NSA’s justification for its mass-surveillance programs; if you let us have
all of your data, we’ll relieve your fear.
The problem is that these aren’t good or fair bargains, at least as they’re structured
today. We’ve been accepting them too easily, and without really understanding the
terms.
Here is what’s true. Today’s technology gives governments and corporations robust
capabilities for mass surveillance. Mass surveillance is dangerous. It enables discrimination
based on almost any criteria: race, religion, class, political beliefs. It is being
used to control what we see, what we can do, and, ultimately, what we say. It is being
done without
offering citizens recourse or any real ability to opt out, and without any meaningful
checks and balances. It makes us less safe. It makes us less free. The rules we had
established to protect us from these dangers under earlier technological regimes are
now woefully insufficient; they are not working. We need to fix that, and we need
to do it very soon.
In this book, I make that case in three parts.
Part One describes the surveillance society we’re living in. Chapter 1 looks at the
varieties of personal data we generate as we go about our lives. It’s not just the
cell phone location data I’ve described. It’s also data about our phone calls, e-mails,
and text messages, plus all the webpages we read, our financial transaction data,
and much more. Most of us don’t realize the degree to which computers are integrated
into everything we do, or that computer storage has become cheap enough to make it
feasible to indefinitely save all the data we churn out. Most of us also underestimate
just how easy it has become to identify us using data that we consider anonymous.
Chapter 2 shows how all this data is used for surveillance. It happens everywhere.
It happens automatically, without human intervention. And it’s largely hidden from
view. This is ubiquitous mass surveillance.
It’s easy to focus on how data is collected by corporations and governments, but that
gives a distorted picture. The real story is how the different streams of data are
processed, correlated, and analyzed. And it’s not just one person’s data; it’s everyone’s
data. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is fundamentally different from just a lot of individual
surveillance, and it’s happening on a scale we’ve never seen before. I talk about
this in Chapter 3.
Surveillance data is largely collected by the corporations that we interact with,
either as customers or as users. Chapter 4 talks about business models of surveillance,
primarily personalized advertising. An entire data broker industry has sprung up around
profiting from our data, and our personal information is being bought and sold without
our knowledge and consent. This is being driven by a new model of computing, where
our data is stored in the cloud and accessed by devices like the iPhone that are under
strict manufacturer control. The result is unprecedented corporate access to and control
over our most intimate information.