Feudal Security
schneier.com
schneier.com
Or putting on other imaginary hats:
...it's time we step in in our role as technology corporations to circumvent and mitigate broken government regulations which harm our customers...
...it's time we step in in our role as malevolent crackers to cease-and-desist thieving things which do not belong to us...
...it's time we as terrorists, child pornographers, and film pirates stop doing naughty things, so that people stop asking for digital surveillance...
How is the counterfactual, "we the governments", any more sensible than the "we the corporations", or the sillier ones? Schneier isn't a government. Inference along the aligns of "If I were the government I would...", in a democracy where you and everyone who kind-of agrees with you are an insignificant fringe, is barely more rational than pretending to be any other third party.
The main effect of this reasoning flaw is to accede more powers to the biggest digital-rights threat of all, national governments, out of the fatal illusion that they will be used to protect you, as imagined in your "If I were government" fantasy. The evidence strongly suggests that the government--which you are not--would much rather use new powers against you, to the benefit of established, paying clients (MPAA).
...we, as private citizens, should oppose regulation of our networks, because governments have been very bad at it, and we do not control them well enough to expect better.
For the obvious reason that governments, at least in democratic countries, are supposed to be about the people governing themselves. Governments are a means to solve cooperation problems.
Sure, this theory does not perfectly translate into practice. But it is the normative ideal of democracy. Hence your comment just comes off as snarky without really adding much to the discussion other than the point that yes, government power also must be restricted when it comes to information, just like it must be restricted in other areas of life. This is a useful point, but one that you might have made using much fewer words.
Further, the cognitive dissonance in this viewpoint is strong, in that they can see how treating any other composite entity, e.g. corporations, or a single corporation, or whatever as a monolith will be ridiculed as "you can't judge this composite entity as a whole based on a subset of it's components". Similarly when the effects of the entities they like look like the results the fear from the government, it is all OK, because some magical thinking results in not understanding what a choice really is (namely that somehow being forced to do something because it is the only choice that minimizes harm when the mechanism is not government is freedom, but when it is government it is tyranny).
It's not that government can't do good things, it's that when they screw up, they do it real bad, and fixing it, if at all possible, takes decades.
If the government can pass a sensible internet privacy and security law, then I'm all for it. It's just that the potential of times probability of a screw up that makes everything worse for everyone is very high.
Yes there are people to whom government becomes the hammer. But they are not the same set of people who say "lets not go overboard with the nails guys". (for all nails)
But that's a strawman. Companies are ultimately guided by the concern for profit - but they can only make a profit (long term) by providing a value to all their stakeholders. Of course companies can some times profit in the short term by screwing over one group of stakeholders, but generally they only get to do that once per stakeholder group.
> The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.
Hardly. Yes, it can solve the problem (it's hardly a rule that government actually solves the problems it takes on). But even the problems that can reasonably be said to be solved, there are more often than not some unintended consequences.
This is semantic wrangling. It is generally pretty easy to create corporations. It would be even easier if the "regulation is strictly forbidden" crowd had their way. As it exists now, corporations are fairly anonymous, and as such, spinning out a corporation per "screwing" is not that hard. Sure long term value per corporation is non existant, but the long-term value of the strategy is pretty straight forward. It has already been shown that investment as it exists today favors short term profit over long term value anyway. Numbers this quarter are generally the main driver.
Further, without regulation preventing the screwing over of people, why wouldn't every company choose the guaranteed profit over other methods. They could just take the profit safe from the fact that anyone not generating gobs of cash right now could be simply "competed out of the market" via mechanisms that are currently illegal as monopolistic. It isn't conjecture either - those rules are a response to companies getting rid of the competition then as soon as the specter of "a good company" isn't looming over them, they returned to screwing people over.
Yes, a very crude and usually ineffective one. So are corporations.
There is no good means to solve cooperation problems in the general case. The only way we know of that actually works is to have a group of people who are all committed to a specific goal and who all share the same factual beliefs as to how best to reach that goal. That is very rarely true, which is why cooperation problems rarely get solved very well.
That's my point: Schneier is not dictator. Network regulation would be in his interest, if he could dictate what form it would take; as a minority in a democracy, he's on the wrong end of the regulatory pointy stick.
You're right, I'm treating a democracy as competing factions, not as a cooperating monolith ("people fighting themselves" ; "people governing themselves").
With the corporation, I only have illusion of control, zero transparency, and often contractual binding to an entity that only has incentive to take advantage of me.
Now, as far as government working properly: surely, it often doesn't work well. For one, governments are often too large (in citizen count) for individuals to participate effectively. This often leads to powerful interests taking over. But, perhaps this is because our governmental structures were invented way too long ago to be current.
The 'private citizen' part is interesting. I would prefer to have peer-to-peer relationships that are effective and strong enough. But, that's a ways off, isn't it?
I'd much rather take my chances with democracy.
Says who? Or, more to the point, whose army? When the corporations that hold your email and bank statements refuse to be dumped, you'll need someone to break into their server rooms, wipe their hard drives, and arrest or shoot anyone who resists. I want those people to obey the law, and be under democratic control.
If I opted into using their service and agreed to their TOS that included them keeping my data. Then thats my fault.
But if they act maliciously, them having my data is hardly going to keep me from continuing to use their service.
You forget that all service providers have these TOS. You don't have a choice.
> Them having my data is hardly going to keep me from continuing to use their service.
If you've been using a Gmail account for several years, good luck closing it if you don't want to lose future emails sent to that address.
Citizen votes are non-binding. Politicians can do whatever they want once elected.
The vast majority of people don't even pay attention to what they do once in office, unless it's particularly bad.
Then once in office they don't have to face the consequences of reelection for 4-6 years.
Government transparency is getting better thanks to technology. But at the same time there are more and more 500-page bills that even the politicians don't read. And more agencies with ever growing power who operate in secrecy.
Transparency exists in corporations because they must operate in a market of both investors and customers. Both of those require visible results. In both the short and long term.
Governments are not result-driven. The negative effects of most policies often take effect long after the politican is gone.
In addition, the opportunity cost of Government backed economic and social policies are notoriously difficult to track. But arguably even if they were, based on recent political debates where things like the Fiscal cliff were not even mentioned, I doubt it would matter.
I suspect that much of the agency we feel in our dealings with both of these groups is illusory, perhaps inspired by a conditioning to approve of the broad basket of behaviors they were going to exhibit anyway. Even more imaginary, however, may be the thought that a strong embedding in a peer-regulating group will give us more agency. Humans had that arrangement for thousands of years, but most recent (last few centuries anyway) changes in society have undermined it. Society is the sum of choices we all make, and we don't seem to be returning to the village green.
The general bargain is "You provide some services, I agree to let you see the data that I put in and either show me some advertising or charge me a small fee." This holds true for Facebook, Google, Apple... The problem is that many people assume that their data will be kept reasonably (not perfectly) private. Advertisers get to specify the attributes of people who will see their ads (age, large geographical area, expressed interests) and not, say, phone number, name, birthday and address.
But that bargain has not actually been struck.
And if you do read the pages and pages of legalese, and manage to comprehend it all, it can still all be changed out from under you.
People who realize this generally aren't happy about it.
The amount of software that is being automatically downloaded , installed and executed every day on millions of devices from a handful of "trusted" servers is really quite frightening.
You just know that someone out there is busy trying to work out how to forge Apple certificates.
From seizing domains[1], blocking fairly random sites[2] to threatening ISPs over content[3], governments make Google, Canonical and the like look very attractive in comparison. Especially considering you can dump them with only moderate effort and cost.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/feds-seize-101-do...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/uk-isps-block-pirate-bays-artist-pr...
[3] http://olgierd.bblog.pl/wpis,jak;urzad;celny;bogu;ducha;winn...
A government still can, and will, seize domains, block sites, and issue takedowns and warrants on content to Google. Suppose I own xyzzy.com, set up to use Google Apps to handle mail and serve some web pages. Just like if I was hosting at home or in a colo somewhere, the government can still come in and demand the data. In fact, the biggest difference is that companies like Google are more likely to just roll over--see the stories about cell carriers just handing over tons of information just because law enforcement said please.
> companies like Google are more likely to just roll over
More likely than who?
What is needed is a portable VM image that provides file sync, email and blogging straight out of the box.
Datacenter providers tend to care less about what you are doing (unless it's hurting their network).
I use ownCloud for dropbox-like sync and sharing (it's better than dropbox!), postfix + dovecot + roundcube for email, a Jabber server for IM, and am moving to Kolab for other groupware - Calendar, Tasks, RSS, Contacts, etc - encrypted on my linode instance. All connections are encrypted.
And it's a VM image, so I can always take it out of their system and use it elsewhere.
If Google had more control over the government (and how know, they eventually might 10 years from now), we'd have similar problems with them.
That was one of the author's points. We're becoming a culture where you pretty much buy into one provider or another provider. One of his assumptions was that it's only going to get more locked in and more difficult to switch. His conclusions were thinking about the future based on those assumptions.
Vive la résistance!
It wont be an issue unless people make it, and for most people security isn't even a consideration.