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Justice

Will Yahoo Buying Tumblr Mean Less Privacy for Users?

By Andrea Peterson on May 20, 2013 at 1:11 pm

Tumblr announced on Monday it was being bought by tech giant Yahoo! for $1.1 billion in one of the largest social media buyouts in years, but while the purchase will make Tumblr’s founders rich, it may bode poorly for the privacy protections of Tumblr users.

In a recent report card from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), comparing which tech companies protect user’s data from government snooping, Yahoo received one of the lowest scores with only one out of five stars. Tumblr performed significantly better, receiving three stars for requiring a warrant for content, fighting for users’ privacy rights in Congress, and publishing law enforcement guidelines.

A Yahoo spokesperson told reporters in January that the company was requiring warrants for email content data on fourth amendment grounds, joining Google others tech giants. It’s not yet clear how Yahoo will integrate Tumblr into the company, although Yahoo has promised “not to screw it up” in a press statement and said Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business with David Karp remaining as CEO.

Online privacy law has lagged significantly behind technology advancements. Under the statute governing law enforcement access to digital communications — including private messages over Tumblr’s Fanmail and Yahoo email — the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA) of 1986, content data over 180 days old stored remotely only requires an administrative subpoena to access, which has a lower threshold of proof than a probable cause warrant.

There are a number of current legislative proposals to update ECPA, one of which was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in late April. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled email providers cannot be compelled to turn over the content of messages without a probable cause warrant no matter how long the information has been stored in the cloud in United States v. Warshak. That ruling only applies to the four states in the court’s jurisdiction.

Security

Did The Assad Regime Just Kill The Internet In Syria?

By Andrea Peterson on May 15, 2013 at 11:00 am

Traffic to Google Services in Syria on May 15th, 2013

For the second time in less than two weeks, Syria has disappeared from the internet, just as opposition forces attacked the main prison in Aleppo in an attempt to free hundreds of regime opponents. The outage started around 10:00 am local time with traffic disappearing and Syrian government websites including the state news agency SANA also going down.

A Syrian communications department official speaking on the condition of anonymity to the Associated Press claimed the outage was the result of a an internet cable cut in a Damascus suburb and would take around four hours to restore. However, internet outages in Syria have historically come at tactically significant times for the regime — for example when it was rumored that government forces were mixing chemical weapons last November or during a rare public address by Assad in January.

Experts say the outage resembles the one that occurred around this time last week, with James Cowe, chief technology officer at internet research firm Renesys telling the AP:

It looks like a replay of what happened on the seventh and eighth [...] It’s entirely consistent with a technical fault at a central facility; it’s also completely consistent with a decision to use an Internet kill switch.

Other regimes facing upheaval have shut down the internet using a “kill switch” before to stunt the organizing ability of opposition forces — most notably Egyptian revolution, where 20 million users were essentially cut off from the global Internet by the Mubarak government. If the Assad regime intentionally took down the internet, it likely did so to make it more difficult for opposition groups to communicate within their organizations and share information about regime actions with the outside world.

While Syrian opposition leaders have relied on the internet for a number of communication needs, the frequency of internet outages and regime surveillance has forced them to build up alternative communications channels — sometimes with technological help from the U.S, which as of last November “provided some 2,000 communications kits, pieces of equipment” to opposition forces since the civil war broke out.

Economy

How New Legislation Could Give Smartphone Owners Control Over Their Privacy

By Andrea Peterson on May 10, 2013 at 3:45 pm

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) is having a busy week fighting for stronger consumer protections. First he introduced legislation that would stop companies from using private arbitration to escape facing judgment in courts, and yesterday he introduced H.R. 1913, the Application Privacy, Protection and Security (Apps) Act of 2013, a bill that could fix the gap between the privacy consumers expect from apps on their mobile devices and the experience they actually receive. Rep. Johnson explained the bill during a speech to the State of the Mobile Net conference:

The APPS Act would require that app developers give effective notice about data collection and obtain consent from consumers before collecting personal data. Trust in the mobile marketplace is crucial to its continued growth. Transparency is the cornerstone of this trust.

The APPS act would also require that developers securely maintain personal data. And it would give consumers a clear way to permanently delete their personal data once they stop using an app.

Smartphones are a regular feature of modern life, with 114 million Americans using them as of July 2012, but developers for mobile apps have struggled to keep pace with consumer privacy expectations. A February Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report showed that 57 percent of all app users “have either uninstalled an app over concerns about having to share their personal information, or declined to install an app in the first place for similar reasons” and less than one in three “feel they are in control of their personal information on their mobile devices.”

And there is an awful lot of personal information on mobile devices that many apps can access — including contact lists, browsing habits, and geographic location. One 2012 study discovered 19 percent of Apple iOS 5 apps accessed address books without user knowledge or consent and 41 percent tracked location. It also found more than 40 percent of them didn’t encrypt user data once it was collected, potentially leaving it vulnerable to hackers.

A number of consumer advocates have praised the APPS Act, including experts from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Consumer Federation of America, and Consumer Watchdog, Privacy Project Director at Consumer Watchdog. Susan Grant, Director of Consumer Protection at Consumer Federation of America calls it “a common-sense approach to an urgent problem,” saying the legislation will “give consumers the information and control they need to use apps with confidence.”

Justice

The FBI Doesn’t Think It Needs A Warrant To Read Your Email

By Andrea Peterson on May 9, 2013 at 10:30 am

(Credit: Wikipedia)

You may think your email is private, but federal investigators may not agree. Documents uncovered via Freedom Of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) suggest the FBI is not obtaining warrants to read email, citing an outdated federal computing law from the 1980s. According to an excerpt from the 2012 FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide:

“In enacting the [Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA)], Congress concluded that customers may not retain a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in information sent to network providers…[I]f the contents of an unopened message are kept beyond six months or stored on behalf of the customer after the e-mail has been received or opened, it should be treated the same as a business record in the hands of a third party, such as an accountant or attorney. In that case, the government may subpoena the records from the third party without running afoul of either the Fourth or Fifth Amendment.”

ECPA, the law governing access to email and cloud stored data, was passed at a time when the cost of online storage was so high it seemed unthinkable that anyone would store data there indefinitely, so anything left on networked storage for longer than 180 days was considered abandoned and required only an administrative subpoena to access. But in the time since it became law, the price of online storage went down and many people started to rely on free cloud based email solutions like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail as digital storage lockers.

There have been numerous efforts to update ECPA to be more in line with current consumer behavior and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches and seizures, but none as of yet have succeeded. The most recent attempt to update the law to clearly require a probable cause warrant hit a major milestone in April when S.B. 607, a standalone fix, was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) introduced a companion bill to the House on Tuesday, although a similar proposal was already introduced by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) earlier this year.

But while the law has not yet been updated, the courts and tech companies are adapting to the way consumers use these services in the modern era. In the 2010 case United States v. Warshak, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel including two Republican-appointed judges ruled email providers cannot be compelled to turn over the content of messages without a probable cause warrant regardless of how long it has been stored in the cloud, but that ruling only applies to the four states in the Sixth Circuits’ jurisdiction. Earlier this year a number of tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo announced they go beyond ECPA and require warrants for email content data on Fourth Amendment grounds.

Alyssa

What The Internet Fame Of Cleveland Hero Charles Ramsey Tells Us About Race, Trust, And Community

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 8, 2013 at 3:37 pm

Over the past several days, we’ve heard a great deal, about the happy (if you can call the tend of ten years of torment straightforwardly happy) ending to a horrific triple—or maybe quadruple—kidnapping in Cleveland, and the man who brought it about. Charles Ramsey, who lived near the house in which Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus were held, raped, and tortured for a decade, became a hero when he responded to Berry’s calls for help, thinking he was intervening in a simple domestic violence incident. And he has become an internet celebrity thanks to an interview he gave about the case afterwards. The speed with which the latter status has eclipsed the former has been striking, and raised interesting and important questions about our willingness to turn people of color into memes rather than heroes.

At NPR, Gene Demby points out that the ways in which men like Ramsey become memes, and the grounds on which they’re treated as if they’re likable, are reductive rather than respectful, cute rather than heroic—and when those images crumble, the credit we extend to them and the rewards that follow tend to disappear:

But race and class seemed to be central to the celebrity of all these people. They were poor. They were black. Their hair was kind of a mess. And they were unashamed. That’s still weird and chuckle-worthy.

On the face of it, the memes, the Auto-Tune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amid the hood backdrop — the gnarled teeth, the dirty white tee, the slang, the shout-out to McDonald’s — we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent.

And at Slate, Aisha Harris breaks down the ways in which the “memorable soundbites” uttered by people like Ramsey or Antoine Dodson becomes the most memorable thing about them, rather than the acts that brought them to public attention in the first place. She writes:

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

I think both Harris and Demby are correct, and that it’s worth sorting out both a conscious and unconscious set of impulses that are at work in meme-ifying people in these particular circumstances.
Read more

Security

Syria Goes Offline, Again

By Andrea Peterson on May 7, 2013 at 5:29 pm

(Credit: AP)

According to security researchers at Umbrella Labs, war torn Syria effectively went offline today:

“At around 18:45 UTC OpenDNS resolvers saw a significant drop in traffic from Syria. On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet.“

Here’s the illustration from Umbrella Labs:

While the cause is unclear, internet outages in Syria have come at tactically significant times for the Assad regime in the past. Last November 92 percent of web traffic went offline as the regime was rumored to be mixing chemical weapon components, and 78 percent of traffic went offline in January when Assad gave a rare public address.

Today’s outage makes it even harder to know what exactly is going on in Syria because much of the outreach and organization by rebel forces relied on the internet, such as Youtube videos.

Update

Google Transparency Reports are showing traffic to Google Services in Syria has resumed as of 10:30 am GMT on May 8th, suggesting that the outage lasted around 19 hours.

Economy

How Elite Users Getting First Access To Tech Reinforces Inequality

By Andrea Peterson on May 2, 2013 at 4:15 pm

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Wearing Google Glass (Credit: NDI Twitter)

Close your eyes and think of the last person you saw wearing Google Glass. While it may have been Madeleine Albright, it’s more likely the wearer looked something like the stream of dudes pictured on the White Men Wearing Google Glass Tumblr. While the Tumblr is obviously a self-selecting sample, it reflects all too well most depictions that accompanied media coverage of the device so far. But the real issue is less media coverage and more an inherent level of early adopter privilege that allow some more access to and influence over emerging technology.

And being part of that early adopter class isn’t just about who gets to play with the fun new toys first, it’s about who has the ability to influence the development of uses for technology that will guide future products and how the device is rolled out to a larger audience. While the technology itself is neutral, the ways society decides to use it are not — and due to a variety of social and economic factors, an elite class often gets to make the first decisions about how technology is used before it trickles down to other classes who might have different, perhaps even more immediate, needs for it.

As Jamelle Boiue pointed out earlier this year, implicit networking connections and economic opportunities have made influencers in the tech sphere a fairly homogenized group that includes a lot of white males. While communities of color are huge users of technology, they are often underrepresented among those providing commentary that helps craft the future of the space or designing the actual technology — as are women.

When Google’s own Sergey Brin inadvertently confirmed assumptions of who the initial audience for Google Glass would be when it comes to gender by contrasting using Google Glass with the “emasculating” experience of a smartphone at a TED talk, it was likely just poor word choice. But it also hit a little close to how women using technology are stereotyped and reinforced the logic behind the findings of some research suggesting cultural stereotypes drive women down other career paths despite aptitudes for math and science.

But the lack of that female input in the early stages of development and user testing can result in tech overlooking resources or services more geared towards their needs. Remember how Apple’s Siri couldn’t find abortion providers, but could find strip clubs and escort services?

The systematic exclusion of minority and female voices from the development and early use of tech products is an unintentional byproduct of a larger system of social and economic inequality that is by no means exclusive to this particular device. But the White Men Wearing Google Glass Tumblr can be a vehicle to discuss how the structures controlling who has access to technological developments first influence its deployment, and if incorporating diversity into that system can maximize the benefits of technological innovations for all potential users.

Health

Can Social Networks Tackle Unhealthy Body Images Without Resorting To Censorship?

By Andrea Peterson on Apr 30, 2013 at 5:55 pm

(Credit: Vice's Motherboard Blog)

Pro-anorexia (pro-ANA) and -bulimia (pro-MIA) communities tend to promote thinspiration, or “thinspo,” material, which encompasses images and messages that encourage thinness often to the point of self-harm. Thinspo images have been chased from social network to social network — but despite the fact that many platforms have policies discouraging their promotion, the material frequently ends up making its way back, even on sites with outright bans. Two recent petitions urging other major tech sites to take action against thinspo highlight the delicate balance that tech companies walk between protecting users from harmful content and censoring free speech, as well as the larger question of the effectiveness of censorship in helping those struggling with body image issues help themselves.

What is and is not acceptable on private social media sites is governed by content policies — meaning that platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all have control over the type of content they allow on their networks to a certain extent. In fact, tech companies and their content policies have arguably have the most influence over the development of online freedom of expression on an international scale. While most tech companies oppose censoring political or religious content, many — including Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest — have moved to ban content promoting self harm, such as pro-ANA and pro-MIA images or pages, to various degrees of success.

A recent Change.org petition calls on Twitter to join their ranks, urging signers to “[h]elp make Twitter accountable for managing the users of its service to stop this harmful trend by banning thinspiration hashtags and monitoring dangerous user activity.” However, banning hashtags like “#proANA” or “#thinspo” may just lead to the development of new hashtags, or push users onto yet another community. And historically, Twitter has taken a hands-off approach to monitoring or punishing user speech, giving a free range to porn users and controversial content — they’re even being sued in France for refusing to reveal the identities of anti-Semitic users who used (and later deleted) a hashtag that translates to “a good jew.”

The second petition is addressed to search giant Google, in response to the fact that the search giant indexes millions of results for pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia sites. Instead of asking for those sites to be banned or de-listed, however, activists are asking for a banner to be displayed with information for a helpline and recovery support at the top of results to eating disorder queries. This move is not unprecedented — results for Google queries related to suicide currently display the number for the National Suicide Hotline at the top, and Pinterest displays the number for the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) hotline on searches for thinspo related terms.

Read more

Security

How A Handful Of Tech Employees Control The Future Of Free Speech Online

By Andrea Peterson on Apr 29, 2013 at 5:37 pm

Seeing the diversity of opinions online, it’s sometimes easy for the average user to forget that freedom of speech is not a universally held value. Not so for global tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google who are increasingly finding themselves setting the standards for online free speech, whether they like it or not.

As private entities, tech companies have control over what they put on their platforms within the bounds of locally applicable law — essentially creating codes of conduct as part of their End User Licensing Agreements defining how it expects users to behave on their sites. However, most of the decisions about what is and is not allowed end up being made by handful of employees who manage content policies, whom Jeffrey Rosen calls “the Deciders” in a recent feature for the New Republic. But for these “Deciders,” it’s often not clear where the line should be drawn on offensive speech and who it must be drawn against:

Some Deciders see a solution in limiting the nuance involved in their protocols, so that only truly dangerous content is removed from circulation. But other parties have very different ideas about what’s best for the Web. Increasingly, some of the Deciders have become convinced that the greatest threats to free speech during the next decade will come not just from authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and Iran, who practice political censorship and have been pushing the United Nations to empower more of it, but also from a less obvious place: European democracies contemplating broad new laws that would require Internet companies to remove posts that offend the dignity of an individual, group, or religion.

While the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) passed a resolution declaring freedom of expression online a human right, from outright desire for control in authoritarian regimes to concern about whether individuals should have a “right to be forgotten” in democratic nations, the allure of censorship can be hard to fight. The pull is enough that Google’s 2012 Transparency Report revealed government requests to remove content more than doubled since 2011. Even users aren’t entirely clear about what they want: In a recent survey of internet users in several Arab counties, 61 percent agreed people should be able to express their opinions online “no matter what those opinions might be,” but 50 percent also agreed the internet in their countries should be more tightly regulated.

Many tech companies have already staked out a claim on the side of freedom. The Global Network Initiative (GNI), a non-governmental organization which counts Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft among its members, works to further global freedom of expression and privacy rights online. It’s most recent report warned of a “wave of troubling legislative proposals threaten rights to free expression and privacy in both repressive regimes and democratic societies, as do the efforts of some governments to increase their control over the Internet through intergovernmental processes.”

But decrying that wave doesn’t by itself make the internet a safer place for freedom of expression. While the “Decider” model can be used to keep controversial speech online, it has its own limitations. As Nicole Wong, now the “Decider” at Twitter, told Rosen five years ago while working in a similar role at Google, “the Decider model is inconsistent[...] The Internet is big, and Google isn’t the only one making these decisions.”

Update

An earlier version of this post listed Twitter and Facebook as GNI members. Twitter is not a member and Facebook is currently an observer of the group.

Justice

Bill Requiring Probable Cause Warrants For Email And Cloud Data Passes Senate Judiciary Committee

By Andrea Peterson on Apr 25, 2013 at 10:30 am

One of the backbones of computer privacy law was written almost 30 years ago, when virtually no one stored massive amounts of personal information on remote computer servers. The computing world looked nothing like it does today, when our credit card information, love letters, health data and personal finances can often be found on Gmail’s servers or elsewhere in the computing ‘cloud.’

While technology and the way we have used it has changed, computer privacy law has not — but a bill that just passed the Senate Judiciary Committee today hopes to change that. The Senate Judiciary Committee just approved S.B. 607, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2013, legislation updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) to require probable cause warrants before accessing the content of private communications and files stored in the cloud.

The bill was introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) earlier this year after a similar proposal was attached to bill loosening regulation on sharing of video watching habits over social networks last winter, but dropped without notice over the holiday break. Due to the expense of networked storage when the legislation was written, the law did not prepare for how most current email and cloud storage hosting options function — rather it assumed anything left in online storage over 180 days was abandoned, and such should only require an administrative subpoena rather than a warrant to obtain from internet service providers (ISPs).

Stakeholders including tech companies, civil liberties groups, and think tanks have advocated updating the law via groups like the Digital Due Process coalition, arguing it has not adapted with the technology, leaving a pathway for law enforcement to access most archived email without the same level of due process expected for other forms of personal communications under the Fourth Amendment. Many companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo announced earlier this year they are requiring warrants for email content data on Fourth Amendment grounds, and the most relevant case law is U.S. v. Warshak, a 2010 U.S. appeals court judgment that ruled strongly in favor of probable cause warrants from a court as a requirement before forcing service providers to turn over email content no matter the amount of time it was stored in the cloud.

Documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) just before tax day reveal that the Criminal Tax Division at the IRS stated “the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server” in a 2009 handbook. However, an IRS spokesman flatly responded to reports about the release: “Contrary to some suggestions, the IRS does not use emails to target taxpayers. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong.”

The bill still must pass the full Senate, the House, and be signed by the President for the law to be updated, but there are signs of ECPA movement on the House side. A similar cloud data warrant requirement proposal was introduced by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) earlier this year, and this morning the House Judiciary held a hearing on ECPA as it relates to geolocation privacy and surveillance.

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