Yes, we're being watched. Then what?

Bruce Schneier is a longtime Internet spying expert and author of the Schneier on Security blog. In an emphatic CNN opinion piece, Schneier says the world of 1984 has arrived. We now live, he writes, in a world where everything, "... you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant."

In short, says his headline "The Internet is a surveillance state." And, he wants to show that there's very little we can do to evade it. He cites the cases of people like CIA director David Petraeus's paramour Paula Broadwell, who, despite avoiding her home computers or personal email, was tracked by the FBI which correlated her name and hotel registration data. Or, even the Chinese military hackers who were found because they accessed Facebook.

But more important is the amount of data that both corporations and governments can acquire and correlate about us. He cites the case of "One reporter [who] used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period."

None of this probably comes as big surprise to most of us. But what Schneier doesn't seem to address is the uneven nature of all this info gathering. Not even cheesy criminal hackers seem to get caught very often. In fact, criminals of all sorts seem to go about their business every day - barely deterred by online snoops. And while corporations acquire far too much information about us and our buying habits, that doesn't necessarily translate to usable surveillance.

The case of Paula Broadwell is also instructive. All the data tracks she left would have been of no consequence if there hadn't been an FBI team working overtime to find out who was getting cozy with the CIA director - and even so it took them months. As any researcher can tell you, data isn't information, and information isn't analysis.

Certainly it's disturbing to realize you're being tracked. But it's unclear yet whether, for most of us, this amounts merely to an annoying amount of advertising - or a real threat to our security. Nevertheless, we are right to object and right to fight to stop it.

For most people, the Internet is a tool for work, for communication, for information and for entertainment. At Speed Matters, we believe that civil liberties groups and community activists - as well as labor organizations - should continue to fight unwarranted intrusion into personal affairs, by whatever technology. Whether we can or not, as Bruce Schneier says, is another question.

Schneier on Security (website)
http://www.schneier.com/

The Internet is a surveillance state (CNN, Mar. 16, 2013)
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surveillance/index.ht