Thursday 8 May 2014

Modern Privacy

According to Edward Snowden in last week's Guardian, everyone is now under surveillance, not just individuals but 'entire populations' by government agencies such as the NSA who operate above the law. Maybe he's right and we are living in an Orwellian nightmare, controlled by secretive powers. If this is The Matrix, then Snowden in his own mind is presumably Neo. The only glitch in the Matrix as it were, is that he lectures the West on rights and freedom from Putin's Russia. I assume Mr Snowden must have lost his sense of irony somewhere in transit.

I suppose it should make no odds, whether Snowden makes these claims from Moscow or a haven of freedom, say Denmark. Everyone likes Denmark, especially after watching three series of Borgen. They must be nice people and probably don't do much snooping or spying. Wait a minute, a whole plot line was the intelligence service victimising Muslims or was that The Killing Series 2 ?...erm...the point still stands. Either what he's saying is true or it's not, even if he does so courtesy of Vladimir Putin: the gay-hating, Stalin-loving, journalist-murdering leader of a kleptocracy.

There is a wider question, however, raised by his revelations about privacy versus security in cyberspace. Take for example, organised crime. Misha Glenny in his excellent book 'McMafia', describes how following the collapse of the Soviet Union, mafias from Eastern Europe have expanded globally. Their ranks swelled by ex-military and intelligence operatives, these crime organisations now rival the established mafias in Italy and cartels of Mexico. Globally, organised crime is estimated to account for 10% of world output. Much of that is presumably drug money, but their activities also includes fraud - which most of us have experienced.

Unfortunately for law enforcement, modern mafia are tech savvy. They use offshore tax havens,  sophisticated corporate structures and money-laundering schemes, making it hard to track down perpetrators. Terrorists from home-grown far right extremists in the US to Al-Qaida cells across the world are equally smart. Some avoid digital communication altogether; others use sophisticated codes and encryption methods to hide their presence. All of this presents a security nightmare for the police and the intelligence agencies.

'Crime' and 'terrorism' are not reasons enough to disregard legal norms and individual privacy on a whim. But we are surely deluding ourselves if we think old-fashioned methods of detection and prevention work in this new, globalised, internet-connected world. Sacrificing some privacy for enhanced security may be a trade worth making. Put the issue another way: would you mind if the security services trawled emails if it prevented terrorist outrages? It's not a simple yes or no proposition. It gets even more complicated, when you have to consider that the more the likes of NSA reveal their surveillance, the more their targets change behaviour in response.

In the UK, the moment you walk down the street, chances are you are on CCTV. Londoners are caught on camera 70 times a day on average. So at least when it comes to walking down the street, we lost our privacy long ago. The same is true for much of our web activity. When you sign up to Facebook and Instagram, you have also signed away the rights to any images or data you post on their platforms - it all belongs to Mark Zuckerberg. Google knows what you've searched and where you've been. Apple tracks your music tastes, Netflix monitors your viewing habits and Spotify probably has a better idea of what playlists you prefer than you do yourself.

Maybe emails are the last bastion of private communication. Except of course, if you email using a work address, it is, I hate to break this to you, company property. Perhaps if you email from your own computer from certain email services, you have retained a sliver of privacy. But we all now how easily emails are hacked and how slack we are with passwords - it wouldn't be hard for even an amateur to access many people's accounts.

The rise of cloud computing and software takes this process even further, where we handover our personal data to private companies to store and manage. I assume Dropbox employees don't go peeking in my folders, not sure how I would know if they did. But let's return to Edward Snowden's original claim, that we live under constant surveillance without privacy. Regardless of the NSA's snooping, digital cameras will continue to proliferate. Whether it's a Glasshole, sporting Google Glass, a camera worn on policeman's lapel, a Go-Pro attached to a cyclist's helmet or security cameras, they are getting smaller, cheaper and storing the data easier. At some point, it will be possible to record every single one of our waking moments in Hi-def, forever creating an endless Youtube feed.

In a planet, where we are constantly filming and photographing each other and Tweeting those results publicly, notions of privacy seem strange. We are conduct 24 hour surveillance of each other, so feigning outrage that the state has conducted passive data trawls is perhaps hypocritical. Despite months of front page articles, the Guardian's expose of state snooping has not caught the public imagination in the same way as MP's expenses, for example. Perhaps the reason is most people shrugged and had assumed that spying is what the security services do - it is in their job description after all.

This is not make light of the potential for abuse when state agencies can go prying as they please. But we are going to need a modern approach to these issues. You'll notice I've ducked out of providing an answer and as for privacy, that's so 20th century.