Power dynamics, cyberspace, and civil liberties: Technology

• Let us first consider free expression.
  • Technologies that tend to enhance free expression.
    • Electronic mail, of course, is the biggie. The Internet essentially started with electronic mail as its primary communications medium, and has historically fought hard to keep it free. By its very nature, electronic mail is extremely hard to censor, especially simple, point-to-point mail, because of the distributed and robust nature of routing protocols.
    • Usenet news is another widespread, very-difficult-to-censor technology. One can censor the users at a particular site by dropping that group, and one can attempt (often with very limited success) using cancelbots, but in general netnews is quite hard to control.
    • The World-Wide Web, as a publishing medium par excellance, has gone a long way towards promoting semi-permanent expression, as opposed to the ephemera of netnews and the limited distribution and unsearchability of electronic mail.
    • Cryptography has protected free expression in a number of ways, by allowing people the privacy to express their opinions to some without undesireable others listening in.
    • Hand-in-hand with cryptography is anonymity, which protects expression by allowing unpopular opinions to be expressed without fear of retribution. (For instance, Supreme Court decision has recently upheld related forms of anonymity, though not yet in electronic forms.)
    • The very ubiquity of the net helps enormously in protecting expression---it goes everywhere, and is becoming increasingly essential to entire economies. This makes the simplest and most drastic expedient to reducing this expression---dropping off the net---increasingly infeasible.
    • This ubiquity is made possible, in part, by the large and growing number of (via Internet service providers, who provide access for a small fee to the public, and by geographically-based, often free providers such as community networks (as described here in a thesis by Anne Beamish).
  • Technologies that tend to limiting free expression.
    • Lawyers are a major limiting factor to free expression. This can come about in many ways; one major way is the tendency to support police entrapment as the Tomases have recently discovered. Lawyers also work in Congress and tend to pass bills that attempt to control, for example, so-called pornography. They can also irritate people by their very presence, at least if they spam a lot, potentially leading to restrictions to avoid the spam. They have also been known to help aggressively pursue trade-secret harrassment cases for certain religions, as the Scientologists have shown so well.
    • Certain Internet technologies, such as Usenet news, have shown themselves vulnerable to forged cancellation of previously published information. For example, the cancelbots used by the Scientologists fall into this category, as do those used against the infamous Canter & Siegel.
    • Peer pressure has occasionally been useful at restraining free expression, though usually it is only applied in large scale to individuals who have demonstrated that it doesn't work against them, but only their service providers.
• Let us now turn our attention to issues of privacy.
  • Technologies that tend to enhance privacy.
    • PGP, by any metric, must be a major entry in privacy-enhancing technologies. This package enhances communications privacy by encrypting the contents of communications; to foil traffic analysis, however, one must also turn to forms of anonymity, such as that provided by anonymous remailers.
    • Laws can also help, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act [ECPA], although their effectiveness is most limited to large-scale corporate infringers and as a check on police aggressiveness---small-scale violations of (especially) communications privacy are rarely detected or prosecuted.

      In addition, the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] and CPSR's uses of it can be quite informative; a US District Court has recently ruled that the National Security Council is not exempt from it, either.

  • Technologies that tend to limit privacy.
    • Cryptographic policies in the United States, in particular ITAR and export controls, are a major limiter of privacy for those who care about communications privacy. Since packages like PGP are essentially available to any individual already (whether inside the US ot not), the major effect of such policies is to prevent corporations from easily incorporating strong cryptography into their products, hence limiting good privacy to those with the technical knowledge to get it themselves.

      A potential additional motive is that any delay raises the chances of practical quantum computation, which would enable breaking prime-factoring and discrete-logarithm algorithms (which make up most of quantum cryptography) in polynomial (hence practical) time. (Of course, while quantum cryptography can help even the odds again, it requires quantum hardware, which is hardly common.)

      Even graduate students these days are suing the government about these policies.

      Other technologies, such as those associated with key escrow, are designed to limit privacy by making the keys potentially available to others. The much-maligned Clipper Chip and the Skipjack algorithm are the best-known of these, although so-called fair cryptosystems such as those by Silvio Micali can get around many of their technical and some of their political disadvantages. Of course, many think that the combined technical and political blunders associated with the introduction of such systems, combined with their inherent distastefulness to many of their potentials users, may have rendered them dead.

    • Laws (e.g., current counterterrorism legislation in the face of the Oklahoma bombing).
    • Ubiquity of data. We've all heard about egregious violations of privacy due to, e.g., the leaking of credit card information, or even which videos get rented (c.f., Bork's nomination). But how many people know that gets 300 to 500 subpoenas a day for records of who is sending mail to whom?
    • Laziness. Most people don't bother using PGP, and they often transmit transactional information such as credit-card numbers in the clear. This is technology-related insofar as the available technology has a large effect on what the minimum effort actually is.