[Infowarrior] - Seeking Online Refuge From Spying Eyes

[Richard Forno]

Seeking Online Refuge From Spying Eyes
By JENNA WORTHAM
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/seeking-online-refuge-from-spying-eyes

Consider this scene in “The Circle,” Dave Eggers’s new novel that 
imagines a dystopian future dominated by an omnipotent social networking 
company: Mae, the young protagonist, tries to unplug from her 
hypernetworked life to go on a covert, solitary kayaking trip. But when 
she returns to shore, she is greeted by police officers who have been 
alerted to her excursion by several hidden cameras. She quickly realizes 
that very little in her life isn’t recorded, tracked and analyzed.

It’s a troubling image, one that some fear might not be limited to works 
of fiction. In fact, some elements of Mae’s scenario have emerged 
recently in the news. There was the report that the National Security 
Agency can create sophisticated maps of some people’s personal 
information and social connections. There were the recent changes to 
Facebook’s privacy settings that will no longer allow users to hide 
their profiles from public searches. In addition, Google recently 
revealed that it was considering using anonymous identifiers to track 
browsing habits online, raising hackles among privacy advocates who have 
described it as “the new way they will identify you 24/7.”

And, at the same time, drones are becoming commonplace — used by the 
government in counterterrorism efforts and by hobbyists — prompting 
discussions about the long-term impact on privacy.

These developments, among others, have spurred the creation of a handful 
of applications and services intended to give people respite and refuge 
from surveillance, both online and off. They have a simple and common 
goal: to create ways for people to use the Internet and to communicate 
online without surveillance.

Nadim Kobeissi, a security adviser in Montreal who works on an 
encrypted-message service called Cryptocat, said the security and hacker 
circles of which he is a part have long suspected that the government is 
listening in on online conversations and exchanges but “have never been 
able to prove it.” He added: “It’s been a worst-case-scenario prediction 
that all turned out to be true, to a worrying extent.”

If nothing else, the N.S.A. leaks and disclosures have brought these 
issues front and center for many people, myself included, who are 
troubled by how much of our daily and online interaction is concentrated 
in and around a handful of companies that have funneled data to the N.S.A.

“It’s sad that this is the proverbial kick in the butt that needs to 
bring awareness to this concept,” said Harlo Holmes, who works for the 
Guardian Project, a group that is building several anti-surveillance and 
privacy applications.

Ms. Holmes says interest has been surging in the Guardian Project’s 
services, which include tools that let people make phone calls over the 
Internet which the organization says cannot be recorded. More than a 
million people have downloaded an app called Orbot that allows users to 
send e-mails anonymously through mobile devices.

She said it was common to assume that people who want to avoid detection 
online are doing illicit things, like trying to buy drugs or look up 
illegal content — and that may happen. But it is certainly not the intent.

She says the Guardian Project and its peers are built for people who 
live under governments that don’t allow access to the Web or to certain 
apps, as well as for people who simply don’t like the idea of their 
online activity being tracked and monitored. Ms. Holmes says that most 
of the tools are used by people in totalitarian states. “We get a lot of 
feedback from people who use it to get access to blogs and sites they 
can’t access because of a firewall,” she said, referring, for example, 
to a government blocking access to Twitter.

Most of these services are still relatively small. For example, 
Cryptocat, the encrypted-message service, typically sees peaks of around 
20,000 simultaneous users. In recent months, that number has grown to 
27,000. But it’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands, or even 
millions, that mainstream social networking tools and services can claim.

“As good as all of our intentions are, whatever looks good and is 
user-friendly gets critical mass,” she said. “That is what is going to 
take off.”

But those who work on these services say they don’t have to compete 
directly with the Facebooks, Twitters and Googles of the world. They 
just have to offer an alternative, independent space where people can 
interact if and when they need to.

Dan Phiffer works on a project called Occupy.here that gives people 
access to a private messaging forum by creating small, localized pockets 
of Internet access. People who are nearby and whose laptops or mobile 
devices detect the network are directed to a discussion board where they 
can interact. Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the 
idea was to allow activists and organizers to interact in a way that 
would be hard for police officers to track.

His project is naturally resistant to Internet surveillance, “but its 
original purpose was not for countersurveillance,” he said. “What I am 
trying to do is build alternative online spaces for supporting activists 
and those who might be sympathetic to their cause.”

Mr. Phiffer also thinks that the project can have much larger 
implications and motivate “broader political engagement by offering a 
tool for people who are tired of the disregard of their civil liberties 
by their government.”

Of course, there is no guarantee that the Guardian Project, Mr. 
Kobeissi’s project, or any others like it are safe from being broken 
into by a government or a hacker or another entity. But Mr. Kobeissi 
said that there was an upside to all of the disturbing security 
disclosures: at least now, he said, the security world can deal with the 
information disclosed in leaks “on a per-revelation basis” to make its 
own offerings stronger and more secure.

The truth, he said, is that “we are developing software in an unknown 
environment, even though we know so much about the threats being posed.”

“The specifics are always changing,” he added.

Tools like Cryptocat, he said, are just the impetus for a larger 
discussion. “It’s not an answer by itself,” he said. “It is a 
combination of privacy and technology, democratic movement and political 
discussion that it is not acceptable to use the Internet as a 
surveillance medium.”

-- 
Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.