Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is
m.guardiannews.com
m.guardiannews.com
Now I'm not claiming that this will be easy (and it may not even be possible), but this whole episode has made me seriously reconsider my long-term career direction in terms of the type of research I want to be doing. Pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created the "Internet 1" so to speak, and everything since then has been building on that. There's been plenty of projects that have worked towards getting around these surveillance measures (Tor for example), and I think we need more things like this.
We need to fundamentally rethink the design of the Internet, because the current design is broken. Just like TCP/IP provides the infrastructure to abstract over different networking technologies and physical links (and the failure/slowness of individual links), we need something that abstracts over the basic, unencrypted (or encrypted but subject to centralised sabotage, like SSL) communication layer. Something that third parties can't intercept, at least not with anything like the ease with which they do today. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, that email is still unencrypted by default, and we don't have public-key cryptography built in to every mail client and turned on by default.
Most importantly, we need more distribution, and to stop relying on centralised service providers, who are necessarily subject to the laws of the country in which they operate (see: recent articles discussing impacts of the issue on US cloud firms operating in foreign markets). Facebook should be a protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely different perspective.
I certainly don't have the answers to these questions. But it's made me curious and it's something I'll be giving a great deal of thought to in the coming years.
As Albert Einstein once said: "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them".
http://blog.cloudflare.com/deep-inside-a-dns-amplification-d...
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDel
Note, this doesn't help at the endpoint under attack. It requires a qos shift on the infrastructure leading to that thin last mile pipe, so the last mile packets they get are the the good flows.
Also, a warning: CoDel itself is pretty experimental still. It is only just being deployed as the default in proprietary routing hardware this year. Other queueing disciplines are an option, but the default (fifo) is a sack of garbage that causes a lot of these issues in its simplicity and inability to bias bad traffic from the good.
If that's true, then now you just need to solve two problems: (1) how to keep the stuff (which you know is being broadcast to absolutely everyone) secret, and (2) how to coordinate the communication. Isn't that just cryptography and synchronizing watches while exchanging secrets in meatspace, stuff that's been known since before computers were part of it?
(The point of ignoring power and bandwidth is to determine if this is ever possible in any universe, not just if it's possible for us right now.)
You know how your phone runs out juice really fast on 4g? Do that, all the time, on everything. Data centers would melt.
Or maybe then someone could prove that real freedom is impossible due to the physics of the situation, or that freedom is possible today for exactly X people because we must limit ourselves to X devices in the world for the system to work, or that we need to harness the power of 1000 suns to achieve true freedom -- whatever, to me it still seems an interesting thought experiment to establish the boundaries of the problem. I can see why more practical minds may hate this approach.
EDIT: Ah, or maybe there is a bitrate at which free communication is possible today -- if everyone sends only 96 bits per day or 8 bits per day at equal intervals, would this keep the internet from melting down. Over time, that bitrate would increase.
Amateur Radio may address this directly or protocols to model, build upon. License requirements are also becoming more relaxed, accessible:
Packet radio is a form of packet switching technology used to transmit digital data via radio or wireless communications links. It uses the same concepts of data transmission via Datagram that are fundamental to communications via the Internet, as opposed to the older techniques used by dedicated or switched circuits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
SailMail is radio based e-mail system designed for yacht owners operating beyond line-of-sight radio links to the internet. Much of its underlying technology is built upon the Winlink software originally developed by amateur radio enthusiasts .[1] Operation on SailMail network frequencies requires a license for the Marine Radiotelephone Service.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailmail
SSB as a speech-scrambling technique
SSB techniques can also be adapted to frequency-shift and frequency-invert baseband waveforms. These effects were used, in conjunction with other filtering techniques, during World War II as a simple method for speech encryption. Radiotelephone conversations between the US and Britain were intercepted and "decrypted" by the Germans; they included some early conversations between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill. In fact, the signals could be understood directly by trained operators. Largely to allow secure communications between Roosevelt and Churchill, the SIGSALY system of digital encryption was devised.
Today, such simple inversion-based speech encryption techniques are easily decrypted using simple techniques and are no longer regarded as secure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#SSB_...
Also, commercial use of amateur radio is prohibited which means using e.g. an open WiFi access point with your call sign as the SSID could be trouble if someone were to go to amazon.com... it's a gray area though.
One could build an anonymization tool that adds randomness addressing those one by one.
For instance, to avoid our e-mail exchanges being analyzed, this tool could exchange random e-mails in the background with people we don't know. Just to mess up with who our contacts are.
To make a list of "users of Tor" being no longer useful, the tool would send and receive data to the Tor network one random day per week.
It would anonymize searches (this already exists) by making random searches. It should visit random websites
But would you add random contacts to your Facebook account? To Skype? ...
Dealing with all aspects is hard, it would waste electricity and resources, and I think it would just make analysis harder, not impossible.
To be clear: for those that are able, advocating for a permanent policy change is the better solution. Government access to all user data could become a requirement to run a legitimate business. Even if we were able to convert everything to an anonymous P2P traffic-flooded web, we would still live in fear (will the 5th protect you?).
That is why we need both activists and engineers.
But more radical, long term solutions are still important! An exciting prospect.
We can slow the expanding encroachment by introducing say the Amash bill, but the real solution must come first from defensive technology, secondarily protected by policy.
Policy changes come about because of technical reality. Better technology is always superior to government policy.
By all means, pursue both the technical and political solutions. But creating and distributing tools has proven to be the better method of change than depending on governments.
As much as we might not want to depend on the government, we're subject to policy.
If security is outlawed, only outlaws will be secure.
Moral of the story: Illegalization doesn't make things impossible, it pushes their cost up high enough to make them economically infeasible.
The only problem is getting that first key into the network, like is the issue with all man in the middle and cert attacks. But I think it is more reasonable to get a physical copy of a key (or get it over a lan where nobody can intercept or manipulate) over a local net.
For example, I imagine Linux distros could include the public keys to sign network communications the same way they sign packages. Microsoft could have centralized easily exploited public keys by governments for their OS, but that is what you sign up for. You link into a massive web of trust sharing public keys but never private ones, and nobody except the endpoints can decrypt it, and you have no public trusted certs to exploit (everyone is a certificate authority).
You would have to use a web of confidence approach like bitcoin, where you confirm against multiple peers the validity of a provided public key until you have a satisfactory confidence threshold if you want to be really thorough.
Such as, preventing network timing attacks to figure out which internet subscriber is communicating with another subscriber, by routing more directly between two peers, thus bypassing surveillance points as much as possible.
It should also be possible to defend against nationstate enforced network splits by introducing adhoc connections, as easily as deploying a pair of devices across borders.
There might ideally be a method of compensating routers in real time with some distributed currency, to incentivize the growth of this network.
It's really difficult to bypass surveillance efforts by global telecoms, when most people get their internet channeled through central systems.
What we need are better routing systems. Take a look at CJDNS which has a novel routing protocol. I don't know what the scaling limitations there are, there doesn't appear to be documentation on empirical or theoretical performance guarantees; but it's a start, and there's a growing community behind it.
With ever-cheaper devices, it should become possible to create a new family of router hardware that connects devices in a mesh fashion, scalable to the world at large. It's not going to be easy to design, and it sure as hell won't be easy to get physical adoption for (considering that the current internet is "good enough" for most), but it's possible.
P.S. I've created a subreddit at /r/fourthtech if anybody wants to get into deep technical discussions about various topics on better internet/communication protocols.
https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/rfcs/Whitepap...
Node to node encryption would make packet inspection rather difficult, for one.
BTW, I don't think CJDNS is necessarily going to win. See: http://www.mail-archive.com/liberationtech@lists.stanford.ed...
But soon, somebody will to come up with a mesh protocol that is simple and scalable.
To solve this, you need a hierarchical network (like the Internet has), however now it's no longer flat, and certain nodes will have more power/influence than others. On a global scale this will undoubtedly lead to similar political problems with control and privacy.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong on the details here, but this is a network theoretical problem that needs to be solved before you start designing all the other bits and only realize much later that the network will be congested beyond usability for meshes larger than some trivial size.
I don't agree with this as the first step. The first step is decentralising the control of people's identities.
This doesn't necessarily mean brand new protocols or ways of doing things. All that would be necessary as a first step would be a movement to set up a number of independent non-profits to provide basic Internet services; email, media sharing, chat, and Facebook-style "wall" systems being possibly the minimal viable subset.
Each non-profit could cover a defined geographical area; a small city or county, etc. This would allow them to target marketing and fund-raising locally, and prevent the problem of there being too much choice for consumers within this new ecosystem (possibly eventually ending up with a subset of organisations having the majority of the users).
The non-profits could link in with each other easily through an OpenID Connect based network, so that you can follow someone's feeds just by entering your email address, even if they're on another organisation's system. Users who don't have an account on this network could still follow users on the network, using email as a fallback delivery method.
The best bit? The technology to do this is mostly based on off-the-shelf systems and standards. Very little that's entirely new has to be written, nobody has to change the way they use the Internet, and all of a sudden, it'd be much harder for a Government agency to coerce every single organisation into giving up keys, passwords, or automated user data access.
Once Governments have eventually figured it out, hopefully the movement will be in full swing and the people participating in it will be able to effectively develop and market a properly decentralised, cryptographic system that doesn't depend on a network of authoritative nodes, if that becomes necessary and generally useful.
Absolutely not! That's precisely why technologists and scientists have always been easily manipulated. Any technology, any technology, can always be turned on its head and abused. If technologists really have the power they've come to believe they possess, it must be used politically. Politics cannot be avoided. Trying to eschew politics is merely following a policy of not caring, and yielding power to those who openly espouse politics.
> Facebook should be a protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely different perspective.
Yes! But this could only be done by raising political awareness.
The biggest problem with the internet is not government control. You can see how government control, when exposed (and it will always be exposed as it always has been), creates an uproar. When people are aware and upset, things will be kept in check.
The biggest problem is that articles such as this claim that "US cloud services cannot be trusted" only when government surveillance is in play. But services couldn't have been trusted beforehand. People give up information — and information is power — to private corporations. Those corporations are under far less scrutiny and oversight than the government, but that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that people surrender information voluntarily; possibly because they don't care, and possibly because the corporations have been able, through far more effective propaganda than any government could ever hope to produce, convinced the people that the corporations have their best interest in mind.
The worst form of exploitation happen when people voluntarily surrender power. People actively support the abuse, then they don't mind, and then it may be too late.
The solution must be politics and laws. Just like antitrust laws try to prevent corporations from amassing too much power, so too new information laws must prevent them from doing the same.
Cloud services are an entirely different issue, and the issue isn't necessarily resolved politically, but by mass decentralization. Things like OwnCloud are a great starting point and people today generally have the bandwidth to run their own micro-servers at home, or, possible, if battery life improves, on their phones. Some things are impossible to decentralize, for example search, at least until technology and storage advances sufficiently that we can all host our own Google search product on our phones, and Google search becomes an app that can be paid for and downloaded, with live changes to the index being streamed to the device. It sounds absurd in today's world, but tomorrow could be different.
[0] http://education.illinois.edu/wp/commercialism/history-of-th...
One thing is sure, though. If you think corporations can't, or won't do all those things if they could (putting aside the fact that governments are elected while corporations aren't), then you're not familiar with US history:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the...
No, let's fight the abuse with whatever we can get our hands on.
There is strictly no reason for this to be an either/or question. Everyone should become active with what's their expertise, education, equipment, resources.
Along with your advice, I would keep this in mind. Whether it's mesh, or neutrinos, or a "black box" technical and legal jurisdiction that sufficiently isolates inbound and outbound messages (which can in turn be encrypted for travel over more compromised segments). Sneakernet (perhaps in conjunction with a resurgence in NNTP or the like). Or something else.
You have to continue to ensure that there is a route -- a physical route -- around the "damage".
And I'm not speaking foremost nor particularly to piracy, something that gets too often pushed to the for as a... "false flag" issue. I'm speaking to freedom of communication, as a human right and a basis (although not the only) for a complete and healthy society.
The other major problem, centralized unencrypted services, isn't helped by rewriting basic Internet protocols.
But I still do have hope, and the community at HN exemplifies it. Even if politics and society won't change enough to prevent further spying (or, on the scale of decades, a worse NSA-fueled catastrophe), at least all the smart techies of the world are growing aware, getting outraged, and getting organized over what's been revealed. In many ways, our real control over technological progress is the best we can ask for.
If you know how to program, if you're thinking about learning, if your business depends on the internet, or if you're otherwise in a position to create technology of any flavor: the responsibility is on you--on us--to shape the internet and future technology in a way that will protect humanity's privacy and civil rights for generations to come.
Are you sure it's not just that the only people currently talking about this issue are white, college-aged, middle-to-upper class American men?
And for you to whip that out, I really hope you aren't one of the born-here Americans you talk about, because you would be just as bad as the people who supposedly don't care: you would be appropriating the experiences of the underprivileged to back your own, unrelated endeavor.
And why mustn't acabal be a "born-here American" to suggest that Americans have never lived under a totalitarian state? That's an off topic remark designed to call acabal's expertise into question as a means of discrediting them without directly addressing the points they bring up.
I think acabal brings up a valid point. It's hard to whip people into action when they're not yet having direct negative consequences, even if we can clearly see the writing on the wall. People are resistant to change.
Would you consider it ok if the NSA asked someone who cleans your house to take pictures of everything in your house when you're not there, and send them to the NSA for storage? How about if the NSA promises not to open the package until some future date that you are under investigation for a crime and they can get a warrant from a secret court?
And then do you trust that they will never open that package before then?
And are you ok with the process being supervised by a secret court that you may not petition or file suit in unless you have evidence that you have been specifically targeted?
If this scenario would upset you then the current situation should also.
Of course if only those committing crimes need privacy then by all means open up your house for inspection.
You also believe that we have reached a steady state, in which we wouldn't want to keep increasing amounts of or personal information on the internet? Or perhaps you mean we are putting more and more personal information on the internet but that in the future we should have less privacy then we enjoy now?
I do not agree. I consider password protected accounts by the very nature of keyed entry to cary an expectation of privacy. Weather they are effectively secure is not the issue, the fact that your back door lock is broken doesn't cause you to lose constitutional protection.
I still think my example is an apt,and predominately accurate (if simplified) "common man's guide" as to why they should care about the NSA's activities.
(Downloadable) one page sheets, with the most popular pro (NSA) opinions and very simple, fact based rebuttals. Just fighting fire with fire - isn't the NSA prepping news commentators with similar taking point memos?
Suppose we had a repeat of that in 2030, and the US wanted to purge everyone who believed in some "bad" ideology, summarized by a single word, like "communism", except which we can't hope to predict now.
Imagine further that this purge is being enforced by halfwits who don't actually understand the ideology in question, who get wrapped up in their own hysteria, and who are looking for any excuse to burn witches at the stake.
And finally, imagine that said halfwits have an indexed, fully searchable database of all the Facebook statuses you've ever posted, all the Google searches you've ever made, and all the e-mails you've ever sent.
Scared yet?
EDIT: could someone please upvote mkmkmmmmm. I think I managed to downvote his comment when trying to confirm it.
Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, which I think you could say was the NSA of its time.
Did you ever run red lights? Did you ever smoke pot? Did you ever drink alcohol under age? Ever downloaded a copyrighted content off the net?
If yes, then why did you not walk to your nearest police station to confess right after you did so?
There are things that the state "frowns upon" yet we do anyway. We do so because we, as individuals, have decided we do not see no harm. Well, now it won't be up to us.
If your idea for law enforcement is just to wait for the crooks to turn themselves in then it's not a great idea. If your idea for law enforcement involves the possibility of the state being able to investigate crimes then you have to be ready for the idea that such investigations could, theoretically, be used under due process against anyone, not just criminals.
This isn't to say that NSA surveillance is good, but I think the justification for why it's bad needs to be different, as all you've really said is that the state should disband the police, military, and all other parts of the national security apparatus that can be used without prior individual consent.
The question was to come up with something that people could relate to. Mostly, I am hearing "nothing to hide". That is why I listed things where at least one is something you may have done.
You do them because they are nothing like a bloodstained knife or an IED. That is the point. They are all "bad", but on a whole different level. So you do these activities because you can get away with it and also you do not see no harm even though they are officially not OK.
Now imagine a surveillance state where even these lesser evils are known to the powers that be. Either you believe that the state won't act on that information or you really do have something to hide. If it is the latter then you should be at least aware of the fact that your privacy is being eroded and Summer of Surveillance is a prime example of that.
That was my line of thinking.
The conversations/articles on HN mostly reflect the tech communities own echo chambers and biases more than anything else.
which is because they understand the implications of it. Most people, from my experience, have limited understanding of privacy and the consequences. The way I think of it is this: most people in this country don't realize they should be playing at least checkers while a very few people are actually playing chess.
The thing that gets is the crap that you pass under the banner of "Think of the children". Once the investment and infrastructure is done "in the name of the children", then it takes a very few (and highly paid) individuals to turn that technology and infrastructure into anything they want.
It's a slippery slope.
Take all the MIC funding and redirect it into education, infra, science and social services.
Make the world better rather than weaponizing idiocy to defend a farked up system.
Luckily we don't need everyone to be on board to defeat the surveillance state. Just need enough special interests (EFF, ACLU, tech community, a loud vocal minority) and money. The game has to be played like any other lobby.
That very much depends. For encryption to work, you literally need everyone on board. You depend on society doing it, too. So better start educating people about it.
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bon...
But there have been those getting tired of the news; understandably so, the repetitive hum of media coverage these days is enough to infuriate anyone who has the capacity to remember stuff. The author of this article seems to be pretty infuriated at the the public's fascination with Snowden and wants, rather ambitiously in my opinion, the public to shift their attention to the core of the issue.
I'm not sure if the public is capable of maintaining interest in such a passive evil (I guess I probably don't think too highly of the public). I do think, however, that the public is capable of fixating on the Snowden story because it is a rather interesting story. And the longer the public stays fixated on Snowden, the weird guy living in a Russian airport, the longer the NSA's wrongdoings also stay in the public consciousness.
I say, keep the melodrama coming, if only to keep alive the story of injustice to the public. The success of Snowden's whistleblowing (i.e. in terms of tangible impact) may actually rest on it.
Whoa horsey. The author is making the same mistake as he accuses the press of: missing the story.
If you want a good repeat-after-me line, repeat after me: "this has nothing to do with the NSA either" All intelligence agencies are either doing this or have plans to do it -- including lots of European ones which are breaking their own laws while doing so. That's yet another shoe that hasn't dropped. Who knows how long it'll take for our European friends to figure it out. Might be a while.
But the larger point is valid: the internet as a conduit between a person and the larger world is a cesspool of corporate and government eavesdroppers. We're not operating the net: the net is monitoring our thoughts and recording them for others to inspect at their leisure. This is not a good thing.
So the story isn't Snowden, and it's not the NSA either. It's what has become of the dream that was the internet, and the question of whether anybody is left that cares enough about privacy and anonymity to do something about it.
It falls to the citizens to try and drag those implements off their governments. I'm not sure if they collectively have the will for that tussle though.
"It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started
claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building
a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the
ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered
nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize
robustness and survivability, including the capability to
withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks."
That part there really illustrates the corporate fascism which has permeated the US government.
Who's to say that some analyst working for a private corporation isn't selling our stolen information to some nefarious third-party for whatever reasons?
The idea that any "oversight" would preclude the above scenario is about as believable as the insistence by "high level" government appointees claiming that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" collect data from American's communications.
It spells out my worst fear of later generations of digital natives will actually live in a world best described as Orwellian or even post Orwellian... even more ridiculously pervasive. They wouldn't know any better.
Ultimately data can never tell the whole story, but yet we'll act on it as if it does.
The public has made it very clear how little they care about their privacy on the Internet when they started adopting things like GMail, Facebook, iCloud, etc. and not just as a convenience, but to actually run and manage their personal lives.
People, businesses, everyone didn't just not resist the New World of digital surveillance, they explicitly begged and pleaded for these new capabilities to be pushed to the fore as a matter of convenience to them.
So who do we blame for this 'new norm'?
This advertisement paid for by your friendly, co-located, on-premise, enterprise hardware vendors.
To me, this stole the end-of-article emphasis from the issue about Internet stopping being global.
I do believe however that enterprises act more rationally than consumers. So while consumers seem to be falling in to the "meh, I don't have anything to hide" camp, enterprises tend to be a bit more conservative. The thought of the NSA's private contractors going through customer data and hr records could actually be enough to slow down some of these enterprise SaaS companies.
Privacy is one such problem, but it's one we can work together to solve. Humans are capable of this, and capable of more than just writing stuff to cause division like the article.
all they need is just one underpaid programmer without a soul working at facebook to compromise the whole database.
wouldn't it be much easier in a case such as this one, for verizon to just have some retard patsy create that backdoor? I would imagine this to be a get out of jail free card for those guys really pulling the strings. all you gatta do is drop all the blame on some naive techie and let him go down in flames.
IMO, the next up in this chess game, is a traitor techie willing to compromise a whole nation to pay his bills.
The fate of the internet's not the story. The fate of democracy is.
The fate of democracy's not the story. The fate of our society is.
The fate of our society's not the story. The fate of humanity is.
Lol, no, you aren't.
What you do is use every platform available.
Lol, no, you don't.
What you do is exclusively use one of the "darknet" platforms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29
Of course, everybody wins from using one of the encrypted distributed p2p platforms, not just activists.
For private coordination, that's another matter.
Sure the internet had that possibility not to be monitored and for a time it probably was, but clearly no longer. Further, I think the idea of mass data collection is monstrous however there is nothing I, nor you can really do about that except perhaps hiding as much of our data as we can (via encryption). Even if our data is encrypted in the end if they want your data they can get your data.
The thing I find interesting about this article is the idea that eventually the internet could be closed off only to a few nation states. I disagree this would ever happen because Pandora's box has been opened and some communication will always be allowed via wireless connections, hidden cables, or some other method. Obviously, the average user might be affected, but just like the soviet union fell so would what ever country decided to block off their nation.
People don't care about surveillance for the most part, as someone already commented: "I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were "Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching terrorists..."" They do however care if you disconnect their internet, and if any country was to do that in the end it would fail. The point being, the article stated that nation states of internet would develop and my reasoning points to that not happening (at least based off what i've seen). In my honest opinion, the internet has always been a place to communicate, but about as secure with my data as a friend you never quite trust with your secrets. What scares me is not the internet surveillance or my government hunting down (in my opinion) an innocent man. What horrifies me the most is that no matter what we do the surveillance will only become more intense (as the price of computing/computers gets lower) and there is no going back. 50 years from now, what am I going to be faced with and will I be able to continue to just ignore these B.S. laws we have, or if I unlock my cell phone will I really go to jail for 10 years?
That's what thoughts keep me up at night, not the idea of my data being collected at mass online (although I would stop it if there was any way I could), but the idea that even offline walking down the street or in my own home I may be required to follow the laws which are outright ridiculous.
I do, however, object to mass surveillance of all traffic, with the goal of either retroactively looking at the records or putting together patterns.
And I'd like to see both legal and technical solutions to that problem. Legal, in that I'd like to see enough pushback to demonstrate widespread belief in the fundamental wrongness of mass surveillance, and technical, in the form of systems to enforce the inability to tap communications at any point other than the two endpoints. I'd like to see our networks and communication protocols designed to make it impossible to spy on traffic between two parties without either the consent and cooperation of one party or an ongoing security breach of the physical systems of one party. That would result in a world in which you can't cast a broad net, but instead can only do targeted surveillance of specific individuals.