Cicso and the quest for easy evesdropping

At news.com, tech and policy journalist Declan McCullagh has an interview with Cisco's Fred Baker [1, 2] about evesdropping capabilities the company is building into its equipment. The interview itself is interesting in that it sheds some light on the thorny issues a technologist has when building (or not building) such technology into protocols and hardware. More interesting (and IMHO more important) is this snippet of the conversation:

[Declan/Cisco]: Have you had requests for this capability, directly or indirectly, from government agencies? Yes and no. [...] We've had discussions with government agencies, but (they're generally not) asking us to build a product. They do that with ISPs, who then come to us.

The substance of the privacy rights of Americans derives from the constraints the Constitution imposes on the government. The argument usually goes something like this: if you don't like that company's products, then don't buy them. The power of the marketplace is deemed to be the appropriate arbiter of privacy issues in the private world.

Our world is increasingly one in which government regulation is implemented by the private sector at the direct or indirect behest of the government. With the absence of Constitutional protections defining the proper and allowable role of the private sector in this regard, there is good reason to be cynical -- to fear that when faced with Constitutional constraints the government will just outsource the work to the private world.

And this isn't just an abstract, paranoid whine. In the article, there is a short discussion about the (lack of) audit trail capabilities alongside the evesdropping capabilities. Why are there none? Because the customers aren't asking for it? Lacking legal constraints, what customer would ever ask for audit capabilities? Do we need them? How do we make sure we get them?

11:21:16 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

The Right Angle

Pat travelled to a distant country to take our culture and a little bit of journalism there. To teach them, newly emerged from under the foot of a tyrant's boot. To teach them how to build a free press. It doesn't come naturally after years of cowering in the dark.

And now another tyrant has taken up residence, in the great tradition of that land: a thug with a brutal approach to governing. Yet this tyrant is different from the last. He is a friend of the west: he facilitates pipelines and military bases, a friend of freedom indeed.

But Pat sees things the way they are, new bases set up in perpetuity, corruption and graft, the shiny new boots of a new fearless leader. And Pat's writing pulls no punches: jabs at the autocrat, ridicule for the hypocritical bureaucrats singing the praises of freedom, willfully blind to the land still squirming under a different boot.

And then Pat feels the squeeze. The bureaucrats have a way of catching up with you when you cross their path. They don't like the light of day. They don't like their hypocrisy exposed. They don't renew Pat's papers.

So Pat is no longer free to write, no longer free to teach. Because freedom is in the eye of the beholder and Pat isn't looking at things from the right angle.

9:41:40 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []