Eben Moglen on Privacy: The Union, May it Be Preserved

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html

by nkurz • 13 years ago

79 14 13 years ago

nkurz• 13 years ago

Eben Moglen is a law professor at Columbia. He's also one of the smartest people in the world on the social and legal issues of the internet. This is the third in a series of talks he's given for the Software Freedom Law Center. Despite the URL, it's not really about Snowden -- it's about privacy and it's essential role in the future of democracy.

Quoting at length to encourage you to read the whole piece:

  I would urge you also to consider that privacy is an 
  ecological rather than a transactional substance. This is 
  a crucial distinction from what you are taught to believe 
  by the people whose job it is to earn off you.

  Those who wish to earn off you want to define privacy as a  
  thing you transact about with them, just the two of you. 
  They offer you free email service, in response to which 
  you let them read all the mail, and that’s that. ...

  This is a convenient fraudulence. Another misdirection,
  misleading, and plain lying proposition. Because—as I 
  suggested in the analytic definition of the components of
  privacy—privacy is always a relation among people. It is
  not transactional, an agreement between a listener or a
  spy or a peephole keeper and the person being spied on.

  If you accept this supposedly bilateral offer, to provide
  email service for you for free as long as it can all be 
  read, then everybody who corresponds with you has been 
  subjected to the bargain, which was supposedly bilateral
  in nature. 

  ...

  Environmental law is not law about consent. It’s law about 
  the adoption of rules of liability reflecting socially 
  determined outcomes: levels of safety, security, and 
  welfare.

  When you take a subject which has previously been subject  
  to environmental regulation and you reduce it to 
  transactionality—even for the purpose of trying to use 
  market mechanisms to reduce the amount of pollution going 
  on—you run into people who are deeply concerned about the 
  loss of the idea of a socially established limit. You must 
  show that those caps are not going readily to be lifted in 
  the exhilarating process, the game, of trading.

  But with respect to privacy we have been allowed to fool 
  ourselves—or rather, we have allowed our lawyers to fool 
  themselves and them to fool everybody else—into the 
  conclusion that what is actually a subject of   
  environmental regulation is a mere matter of bilateral 
  bargaining. A moment’s consideration of the facts will 
  show that this is completely not true.

  ...

  It is technically feasible for Google to make Gmail into a 
  system which is truly secure and secret for its users. In 
  which mail is encrypted—using public keys in a web of 
  trust—within users’ own computers, in their browsers, and 
  in which email at rest at Google is encrypted using 
  algorithms to which the user rather than Google has the 
  relevant keys.

  This means donating Gmail’s scant profit to the world, 
  consistent with the idea that the Net belongs to its users 
  throughout the world. Which, in the long run it is good 
  for Google to be seen not only to believe, but to act 
  upon.

  There are many, many, very thoughtful, capable, dedicated   
  people at Google who must choose either between doing what 
  is right or naming what is wrong.

  The situation at Facebook is different. Facebook is strip-
  mining human society.

  The idea of social sharing, in a context in which the 
  service provider reads everything and watches everybody 
  watch, is inherently unethical.

  But we need no more from Facebook than truth in labeling.

  We need to no rules, no punishments, no guidelines. We 
  need nothing but the truth.

  Facebook should lean in and tell its users what it does.

  It should say "We watch you every minute that you’re here. 
  We watch every detail of what you do, what you look at, 
  who you’re paying attention to, what kind of attention 
  you’re paying, what you do next, and how you feel about it 
  based on what you search for.

  “We have wired the web so that we watch all the pages that 
  you touch that aren’t ours, so that we know exactly what 
  you’re reading all the time, and we correlate that with 
  your behaviour here.”

  To every parent Facebook should say, “Your children spend 
  hours every day with us. Every minute of those hours, we 
  spy upon them more efficiently than you will ever be able 
  to.”

  Only that, just the truth. That will be enough.

Amen.

aufreak3• 13 years ago

I would like to add this - kind of the major point he's getting into --

The anonymity of reading is the central, fundamental guarantor of freedom of the mind. Without anonymity in reading there is no freedom of the mind. Indeed, there is literally slavery.

GuerraEarth• 13 years ago

I was at this talk. Extended Q and A. Speaker makes lots of sweeping oratorial gestures: "There is sufficient villiany, but not enough heroism," etc. The talks are substantive and another in the series is scheduled for Dec. 4. Small reception follows.

cowpig• 13 years ago

This is the best piece I have seen on this issue, by an immeasurable margin, of the dozens I see pop up on HN every day. Thank you for sharing this.

bitdiddle• 13 years ago

Eben Moglen's arguments are quite convincing. His talk titled "Die Gedanken Sind Frei"[1] really strengthened my convictions in favor of free software.

[1] http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.h...

D9u• 13 years ago

I concur with the appreciative comments here, and thank the OP for sharing this, as the speaker touches on aspects of the privacy issue in ways that I had not yet considered.

The ecology of privacy, and the tendency for some to convey said privacy into a transaction is an aspect I find fascinating.

Many thanks!

hipsters_unite• 13 years ago

At the risk of crossing the streams, this reminds me of the 4Chan thread also currently on the front page- "Actually interesting post [0 comments]".

A very good article, I wish more people I knew had the patience to read it. Perhaps then they'd get as upset as I am about all the NSA revelations.

Edit: That all came off as a bit pompous. What I meant was, it's hard to get people to care about their online privacy if they're not fully aware what they've given away, and I think this article covers that well.

quesera• 13 years ago

This is part 3. Parts 1 and 2 are:

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartI.html

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartII.html

Part 4 will be on December 4th.

All are interesting and important, but this movement isn't even a movement yet, and all this highly technical (legalistic and linguistic, not so much technology) writing is still in the theoretical foundation stage.

Our MLK isn't here yet. I wonder if our society can produce or support one. Sometimes I even wonder if that was a design goal.

nmcfarl• 13 years ago

I particularly liked this formulation as it's clear, and drives home the point that metadata matters, in a way that everyone can understand:

  Illegal interception of the content of a message breaks your secrecy.

  Illegal interception of the metadata of a message breaks your anonymity.

  It isn’t less, it’s just different. Most of the time it isn’t less, it’s more.

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

That was a good read. I sent the text transcription link to family and friends, many of who don't really get why I care about privacy.

declan• 13 years ago

There's much to like in Eben Moglen's talk. But in claiming no whistleblowers have "come to us from industry," he does a grave disservice to Mark Klein, an AT&T technician turned whistleblower who documented illegal NSA spying at the company's Folsom Street (San Francisco) center and elsewhere in AT&T's network.

swombat• 13 years ago

Excellent speech, well worth reading. Very interesting angle on the spying situation that I wasn't aware of.

ChristianMarks• 13 years ago

Eben Moglen is one of the most impressive speakers you might have the privilege to hear-in addition to his razor sharp argument and crystal clarity, Moglen speaks without notes.

llamataboot• 13 years ago

"We went from listening to armies and embassies to listening to global trade and now we are fastening spying on entire societies, with a skill and energy that only a growing empire can still manage. We shall talk about the world where a nation of 1.3 billion people gains a Content Monitoring System in sixteen months, against the ordinary suppositions of every Indian person who thinks, “they can’t do that.” But, thanks to the new Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton—erstwhile employer of one Edward J. Snowden—yes they can.

The procedures—mind you only the procedures—of totalitarianism are a leading American export these days. I wish we weren’t here. I wish that everything we thought we did in the twentieth century we had accomplished. I wish we had defeated totalitarianism. I wish we had eliminated smallpox. I wish that we were growing the Net that we deserve to have, in which every human brain could learn and every human being could grow, nourished by the knowledge and the support of all the others."

Eben Moglen on Privacy: The Union, May it Be Preserved

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