Fluent Essays

For this chapter, I offer you the choice of a quick read or a quick listen: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century (Links to an external site.)I can comfortably say that anything you do on the internet is tracked, recorded, stored, and available to some person, corporation, entity, or government somewhere. No matter how much you use incognito browsing (that only hides your actions from your internet history - your ISP knows you went to that porn site as does the porn site), a VPN (your VPN knows where you went and so does the site you visited; some VPNs sell your data, too), or services on the Dark Web (Onion / TOR browser, etc.), the sites you visit may places tracking beacons in your browser to verify your identity or, if a Dark Web site has been seized by a government agency or organized crime group, they will do more to track and identify you. Of course, your routine web surfing is tracked by every marketing company that successfully places a tracking beacon or cookie in your browser data and is using that to generate data to profile and market their advertisements to you. For this chapters discussion, comment about your observations of your loss of privacy and the benefits you derive from the willing surrender of that privacy. When you go to Amazon, do you have to log in? If not, Amazon has stored a cookie identifying you and your browser may also have stored your password. Its great to have easy access and it may be worth the loss of privacy, but had you considered that Amazon tracks and sells that data (as does every other website, especially Facebook) and identifies you based on information provided and your browser fingerprint?Post one comment about the privacy you have surrendered to obtain the benefits of shopping, easy access to social media, news services, or similar sites and your perception of whether you felt any choice in sharing that data, losing that privacy, and making your life that much easier. Once again, as with the chapters of this week, you only need to post once BUT, look ahead to the last chapter for the written assignment that spans this weeks set of chapters. yar___steinmetz11.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Cybercrime and Society, Third Edition © Majid Yar & Kevin F. Steinmetz Chapter 11 Cybercrimes and cyberliberties: Surveillance, privacy and crime control Discussion • Think of some ways our day-to-day uses of the Internet are subjected to surveillance. What are they? 3 Introduction • Tension between surveillance and monitoring online content and the protection of users’ privacy and confidentiality – Offenders and privacy enhancing technology – Actors of the criminal justice system wants to reduce abuse of Internet privacy via greater surveillance 4 Introduction • Critics vs. authorities – Risk of losing control over our personal information – There exists a legitimate need to access such information – Political dissidents and electronic surveillance • Reducing consumer access to online privacy protection – risk of criminal threats 5 From surveillance to dataveillance • Rise of “surveillance studies” • Emergence in the 1970s – Foucault’s panopticism o Surveillance – key instrument in discipline and control o Emphasis on observation and inspection to normalize suspect populations o Sites include the prison, the hospital, the school, etc. • Today – a “society of control” o Monitoring for purposes of inclusion and exclusion o Growth of the “electronic eye” (Lyon, 1994) 6 From surveillance to dataveillance • Historically, surveillance has taken shape around the visual monitoring of physical persons • Now – the “space of flows” (Castells, 1996) – Virtual territories (Internet being the most prominent) • From surveillance to dataveillance – Observing and collecting digital footprints – Seizing technologies that “informate” (Zuboff, 1984, p. 10) o People and experiences → data o Commercial use of data trails and “data exhaust” (Zuboff, 2015, p. 79) o Fears of its use to sort, classify, control, and exclude 7 The development of internet surveillance • Original architecture of the Internet – no tracking – Netscape Navigator and the introduction of “cookies” (1996) o A record of the users’ activities • Collection, analysis and distribution of user data – big business – The digital “gold rush” for commercial sectors – Google and its revenue from target advertising o Routinely surveils its user base 8 The development of internet surveillance • Rise of “information brokers” or “data brokers” – Creating datasets and selling them to companies – “Big Data” and the kinds of information collected 9 The development of internet surveillance • Growth of new social media platforms – Purely based upon selling personal information to third parties – Facebook – $40 billion in revenue; Twitter – $2.4 billion in revenue – Data brokers routinely scour social media for user data o E.g. Nielsen accused of “data scrapping” in 2010 o E.g. Cambridge Analytica in 2018 10 The development of internet surveillance • Cause for alarm? – Data protection and privacy laws – The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) o To regulate the use of personal information for commercial sectors o Ability to ask companies how their data is being used (empowering individuals) 11 The development of internet surveillance • Businesses and regulatory bodies in the UK have had to adjust and include these privacy rules – U.S. – individual data protection laws are more piecemeal o E.g. HIPAA, FCRA, and COPPA 12 The development of internet surveillance • Critics of the over-reliance on statutory measures – Regulations do not cover situations where the individual gives “consent” – Differences in legal provisions/legal pluralism • Leaving privacy to business self-regulation and consumer choice – possibilities for exploitation where it is commercially advantageous – Insecure repositories of personal information (e.g. Equifax breach) – “People searches” (Gallagher, 2018) – Other security risks 13 The development of internet surveillance • Surveillance and data collection by government agencies – Not always separated from commercial trade of personal data • Governmental surveillance and “data mining” – E.g. post-9/11 U.S. and UK • U.S. – most stored histories regarding surveillance programs – ACLU’s explanation of the PATRIOT Act o Expands “records searches,” “secret searches,” “intelligence searches,” and “trap and trace” searches – Historical issues surrounding the Fourth Amendment 14 Discussion • Can citizens trust states when it comes to their privacy? 15 The development of internet surveillance • Pentagon launch of the “Total Information Awareness” project (2003) – To integrate information technologies for collecting, collating, and cross-matching intelligence data – Discontinued due to privacy concerns • Report one year later – evidence of “ubiquitous” government data mining – Little oversight and accountability – Carnivore search system 16 The development of internet surveillance • The “ECHELON” project – The search of worldwide e-mails for triggers – Controversial power and scope of usage 17 The development of internet surveillance • The case of Edward Snowden – Revelation of the massive harvesting of data of the NSA – The PRISM program and “XKeyscore” – International outrage over surveillance measures • The wider development of a “network of policing” – Private companies regularly receive request of information from government actors o E.g. Facebook information requests 18 The development of internet surveillance – Some companies have resisted these requests over two major concerns o Inclusion of law enforcement may set companies against their customers o Retention of data means a massive increase in storage capacities and costs 19 The dilemmas of surveillance as crime control: Encryption • Encryption clashes between state surveillance and user privacy – Documented uses of encryption and criminal activity – The “Going Dark” problem • How encryption works – The reordering of data according to a pattern specified by a “key” – “Brute-force” possible, although unlikely – Today’s 256-bit encryption and its growth and accessibility 20 The dilemmas of surveillance as crime control: Encryption • Growth of encryption = concern for law enforcement – Ongoing battle of subjecting encryption to statutory regulation – UK – “key deposit” system and law enforcement’s requirement of disclosure (Akdeniz, 1997) – U.S. – repeated attempts at “backdoor” installations until 9/11 21 The dilemmas of surveillance as crime control: Encryption • Efforts to regulate encryption may be counterproductive – Criminal awareness means alternative methods may be used • Encryption and challenges within government • The need to establish greater information security (e.g. ecommerce) – Businesses need to invest in “technical controls” (NCSC, 2017, pp. 18-19) 22 The dilemmas of surveillance as crime control: Encryption • Resistance to anti-encryption laws and the computer security industry – Regulation of encryption could mean stunted economic growth 23 Discussion • If it comes to a choice between security and liberty, on which side should we err? 24 ... 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