The Loudest Quiet War — The Fight Over Your Information

2019-02-23T08:58:22+00:00

Whether we recognize it or not, we are at war. The war is not physical, instead it is fought on computers around the world over your information. So few people are ready to call it a war because they don’t quite understand what it means to have a war over information.

Europe has started to take action on publicly visible information like cookies and stored system information, with administrative actions like GDPR. California (US) also has legislation similar to GDPR called the Consumer Privacy Act. Both of these pieces of legislation aim to have companies disclose when they are collecting information about a consumer when they visit a website. Furthermore companies must inform the user whether their information is shared with other companies or parties.

There is currently a piece of legislation in California, called Proposition 65, which requires anything which could pose a cancer or reproductive threat to have an alert attached. It has become a joke since everything, everywhere has a Proposition 65 warning now. The notice has become noise.

In much the same way, GDPR and the Consumer Privacy Act will generate the same kind of noise. When people are alerted all the time about a potential concern, it is effectively the same as never being alerted at all. Users will become blind to the notice and will agree to things which they might never have accepted had they known there was a real threat. This kind of behavior is depended upon by companies as they clickwrap their way into your life and privacy.

Though these public pieces of legislation and the companies they impact are not the only part of the war which is being fought. If anything, this is the kind of fighting which leads to TSA agent pat-downs at the airport — no real value comes from the inconvenience, but people feel like someone is paying attention so they don’t need to.

The Real Information War

While public shows of force are going on, the real fight is happening quietly on computers across the world. Companies like Facebook provide information to active threat organizations like Cambridge Analytica and the associated government bodies have hearings which provide no remedy and take no action to protect their citizens. This kind of malicious act barely registers with elected officials and, since citizens see actions like GDPR and the Consumer Protections Act, they believe they are being protected by their government.

Even as companies become aggressors in this war over information, other active threats do even more damage. Nation states and technically savvy attackers breach computer security and collect information about people including their identity information, credit card data, and more. Nations spy on nations and individuals of particular interest.

All of these threats are scattered through the news and buried somewhere deep below the top headlines. Even worse, some of the news companies are, unwittingly, complicit in this data collection effort as they force users through a cattle run of paywalls and information collection efforts, spreading user data even further across the internet.

Each system which contains data about you or someone like you, makes illicit data collection efforts easier. In the end, humans are in charge of protecting the data on these computer systems and humans are prone to mistakes. This means the only way users can protect themselves is to become ever more vigilant.

This expectation of user vigilance is, at best, unreasonable. Even professionals make mistakes, so how can we expect home users to effectively and consistently protect themselves from attackers who are constantly investigating and uncovering new ways to penetrate computers and extract information. Even worse, these users who are being expected to protect themselves from attackers only control their choice to interact with a system and must put their faith in the professionals who are protecting user data.

With the government taking limited real action, security professionals expected to stay one step ahead of motivated attackers, and ever more advanced knowledge on how to compromise data systems, our data is constantly under attack and security practices may not be able to defend against new, sophisticated breach tactics. In the end, it seems the only reasonable action a user can take to protect their data is to completely disconnect.

What A Citizen Sees

2019-02-03T08:53:01+00:00

“How do we explain to our children the president of the United States is a bad guy?” This was the first question I had for my wife the day Donald Trump was announced as the next president of the United States.

My first impression of Trump was when I was young, looking at Doonesbury in the Sunday comics and one of the characters was reading the news. “Donald Trump has changed his name to Trump T. Trump,” the headline read. I don’t recall if that was the exact line, but it was pretty close.

As far back as I can remember, the Trump name has been associated with ego and misbehavior. He spent time in and out of litigation throughout the Eighties and Nineties because of business misbehavior and contract violations. When he resurfaced in my sphere of recollection, it was for the TV show, The Apprentice. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. I found him obnoxious and self-important.

When I heard Donald Trump was running for president, I was surprised, but also relatively unfazed. I saw the Republican candidate lineup and thought, “sure, it’s changing of the guard, of course everyone will come out of the woodwork.” Trump’s ego wouldn’t let his December years go by without a shot at the Big Seat. He wouldn’t win and that would be all the better.

When Trump took the primaries and actually become the candidate representing the Republican party, I was genuinely shocked. Certainly, the GOP couldn’t have honestly considered Trump to be a viable candidate. Maybe they thought he would lose and they would try again later.

As the campaigns rolled along and debates were had, I figured, there is absolutely no way Trump would take this election. He was an inexperienced, questionably moral candidate going against a lifetime experienced Washington D.C. politician. He certainly was no match.

Yet, he spun this to his advantage.

I watched as the states turned red, one by one. Before I went to sleep that night, I already knew Trump had won. I just didn’t understand how. This person I had been watching behave badly for nearly 40 years just won the US presidency and this meant, somehow, there were a good number of people in the country who were happy with this result.

This brings us round-trip back to where we started. Today I understand far more how this all could have happened, though I will explore what I have learned in another article. Our daughter is Latina and I can only imagine what her experience could be like in a world like the one Trump envisions.

With all of the hate mongering, violence and anger which has been stirred in our nation, I fear what she will face through school and into her adulthood. I mourn the violence people are enduring now and I fear what children like our little girl will face as they grow.

So, yes, our president is a bad guy. He is a monster who is in league with monsters. We cannot continue to walk the path we are on. Subjugation, greed, and destruction are the coin of the realm for Trump. Let’s stop him from cashing in the spoils of his war.

Burning World Order

The Loudest Quiet War — The Fight Over Your Information

The Real Information War

What A Citizen Sees