Laura Poitras: ‘Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies’
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
"The door opened, and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man burst in — it's the only way to describe his entrance — trailed by a couple of deputies. He was both the oldest person in the room by 20 years and the only one wearing a suit. He was in the building, he explained with the delighted air of a man about to secure ironclad bragging rights forever, and he just had to stop in and introduce himself to Zuckerberg: Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, pleased to meet you.
They shook hands and chatted about nothing for a couple of minutes, and then Mueller left. There was a giddy silence while everybody just looked at one another as if to say, What the hell just happened?"
I'd love to think that the reporter answered that question- What is the director of the FBI doing at facebook? What does he mean he was just in the building? In what world does someone as powerful as the director of the FBI come into your company needing to burst in on the ceo rather than have a scheduled meeting with the CEO? Does he have an office in the same building?
Instead, we get a puff piece about Facebook's growth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel#Software
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5...
That said, doesn't take anything away from Facebook as a service. Facebook adds extreme value to your social life connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not. It's excellent at what it does IMHO and if used properly is really what web-2.0 is all about. I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, by someone else because that was what people needed badly to stay connected.
Facebook is just a tool. If you are in the intel business or you are a possible target (e.g. prominent figure of some sort) and fairly young to understand how the internet works, you use FB for PR and nothing else. Maybe not even that.
Every social network can be used for data mining from intelligence agencies. Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat. It doesn't interfere with their lives. The HN crowd is composed mostly by hackers. It's natural for us to see where all this might go wrong, because that's what we do and it's natural for others not to care until the shit hits the fan.
I'm eagerly waiting for her Snowden related movie/documentary.
Is something that achieves a goal but has tons of externalities excellent at what it does? It's often said that democracy is pretty inefficient due to all the friction in the decision processes. Does that mean that dictators are excellent at what they do? Or are you just ignoring all the negative effects in order to make that statement?
"I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, [...]"
You are implying that the only way to achieve the benefits of facebook is by operating like facebook. How do you know that a different system that provides roughly the same services, but without a central agent that sees everything and can influence everything couldn't have been invented instead?
"Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat."
So far, I would agree.
"It doesn't interfere with their lives."
That, though, I think, is probably false. How do you know what opportunities we as a society are missing because of the dominance of facebook? I totally agree that people don't notice it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's misleading to think of this as just "things that might happen". The effects are already happening, and not just a little bit.
For me the strong linkage that Facebook does with my identity (and between me and others) has great value. It's a public place more than a private one, and for private things I go elsewhere.
>You are implying that the only way to achieve the benefits of facebook is by operating like facebook. How do you know that a different system that provides roughly the same services, but without a central agent that sees everything and can influence everything couldn't have been invented instead?
A big part of the value-add in FB is the general assumption that "you are talking to this specific person that you have met in real life" (say high school friends). Some identification server at the least and centralisation.
> How do you know what opportunities we as a society are missing because of the dominance of facebook?
Genuinely curious as to any ideas you might have on this. Did you have anything in mind? Or is it just speculation.
First of all: How did you determine "the measurable externalities of facebook"?
Secondly: "Committing speech" without an audience/with a heavily limited audience is about as useful as not being able to say anything, though. See also "free speech zones". (No, I am not saying that that's quite the situation we are in with facebook (yet), but that freedom of speech is more complicated than "you can speak somewhere").
"For me the strong linkage that Facebook does with my identity (and between me and others) has great value. It's a public place more than a private one, and for private things I go elsewhere."
I do appreciate the difference between private and public places and the use of identifying people for certain purposes. What I disagree with is total surveillance of public places, and also the unconditional requirement of identification. If I go outside, I don't expect to be invisible - that does not mean that I am ok with having to always wear clearly visible ID and an officer following me and recording everything I do and say. The same applies on the internet.
"A big part of the value-add in FB is the general assumption that "you are talking to this specific person that you have met in real life" (say high school friends). Some identification server at the least and centralisation."
I don't think you absolutely need any centralization for that at all, a web of trust in principle should do, I'd think. But in any case, a central authority for that purpose certainly wouldn't need to be more than a directory server that provides a mapping between "real" and "online" identities - essentially a phone book. There is no reason why such a service should be able to read all your communication, to see how much you communicate with whom, to track which websites you visit and like, to collect photos of you, ... and all the other stuff that facebook does in addition. Also, such a service would not need to have any network effect, as it should be perfectly possible to operate multiple such services competing with each other without that being an obstacle to the user, if the actual communication is independent from the identification service.
"Genuinely curious as to any ideas you might have on this. Did you have anything in mind? Or is it just speculation."
A bit of both, I guess?
One part is "just" speculation, though with some grounding in reality: If you have a system with a strong network effect under the control of a single entity, that tends to lead to a (de facto) monopoly. And monopolies tend to not be particularly supportive of anything that might weaken their position, such as commoditization of their service, and also have rather limited motivation for innovating themselves. A historical precedent of this would be the telephone operators in many countries: In some places, you were forbidden from connecting your own modem to your phone line in order to dial up some BBS, because the operators themselves were offering some new "interactive digital services" or whatever that usually were less interesting and more expensive than the innovation of BBS networks. Or more recently, mobile providers have been keeping internet access excessively expensive in order to protect their SMS business, and lateron telling their customers that they couldn't use the internet access for instant messaging. And in any case, starting a new service directly on top of the telephone or mobile network is difficult. Compare all that to the internet: It's a commodity by its very design (though some telcos have been trying to reverse that recently, see net neutrality), and it's absolutely trivial to start a new service - anything that can use a TCP connection you can just do, no need to ask anyone for permission, no need to convince anyone it's a good idea, no need to change anything about the network to support your new service, just do it.
Long story short: Centralized services with a network effect tend to be an obstacle for innovation because they prevent competition.
As a specific example to think about: How easy would it be to put an encryption layer on top of facebook? How easy might it have been on an open, distributed system?
The other part is the fact that a lot of (public) social interaction nowadays happens on facebook, and anyone who values their privacy is effectively excluded from that. What effects does that have on democratic decisionmaking, for example?
Yes, there were several projects that opted for a decentralized version of Facebook and all of them failed to gain any traction. Why?
What are the facts that are already happening related to Facebook that affect the populations?
Nope, you are confused about the difference between comparing and equating. It is perfectly reasonable to compare an amoeba to an elephant, and to highlight similarities between the two (for example, both use DNA for genetic information), and the confusion is on your part if you think that therefore an amoeba weighs multiple tons.
"Yes, there were several projects that opted for a decentralized version of Facebook and all of them failed to gain any traction. Why?"
What do you think? You made the claim, it's not my job to provide the evidence.
"What are the facts that are already happening related to Facebook that affect the populations?"
Just read this thread for examples? The most obvious example: Some people who value their privacy are excluded from some parts of social life due to network effects/social pressure from facebook, even where the loss of privacy is not an inherent part of the respective activity. That's a loss for these people at the very least, and not unlikely to also be a disadvantage for society as a whole, if such people are effectively removed from the social fabric of society.
You can compare Apple to Oranges, they are both fruits. You can compare Donald McDuck to an asteroid if you like. But that doesn't make it meaningful just because you said so. Same with a social network and a military state.
> What do you think? You made the claim, it's not my job to provide the evidence.
I didn't make a claim, I just stated the obvious. Any similar, privacy-oriented social network that has then less 10% of Facebook's adoption is obviously not doing well as a FB competitor.
> Just read this thread for examples? The most obvious example: Some people who value their privacy are excluded from some parts of social life due to network effects/social pressure from facebook, even where the loss of privacy is not an inherent part of the respective activity. That's a loss for these people at the very least, and not unlikely to also be a disadvantage for society as a whole, if such people are effectively removed from the social fabric of society.
I understand what you're saying, but you're whining about a choice because you don't like either outcome :-) ... That's a pretty much standard situation and applies to virtually anything I can think of.
Indeed. You may not have noticed that in order for a comparison to become meaningful, you have to point out the similarities that you think are relevant to your argument. Which is what I did with the externalities of a dictatorship and the externalities of a social network, but which you unfortunately failed to do for your comparison.
"I didn't make a claim, I just stated the obvious."
You very much made the claim that "I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, [...]". Given that I question that claim, it's obviously pointless to then just claim that it's obvious. If I thought it was obvious, I probably would not have questioned it.
"Any similar, privacy-oriented social network that has then less 10% of Facebook's adoption is obviously not doing well as a FB competitor."
Sure, and now, please demonstrate that there was no reasonably reachable path that would have led to a different outcome. Before you answer, please read and understand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect .
"I understand what you're saying, but you're whining about a choice because you don't like either outcome :-) ... That's a pretty much standard situation and applies to virtually anything I can think of."
Your point being? Something that's bad becomes good if you (supposedly) can't change it?
It's already gone wrong. People will accept their reality and continually redefine what going wrong means. Read Slashdot circa 2003 and see how the mindset has already shifted.
What does "stay connected" mean? Is having a larger number of weak connections better than a smaller number of strong connections? Are online connections as meaningful and satisfying as offline connections?
I'm always somewhat skeptical about psychology studies for a number of reasons, but the studies that have been conducted on Facebook and online social networking are consistent enough to suggest that your argument warrants deeper analysis. Many of these studies, like this one[1], find that Facebook increases feelings of loneliness and unhappiness.
I think you should consider that Facebook and services like it implicate a number of human emotions and desires, many of which are not always a positive influence's in one's life if indulged without limit. That doesn't mean that Facebook is without positive value, but I think its success is a lot more complicated than it "connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not."
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2419419/All-lonely-F...
Thinking about it though, the NSA probably knows as much about me as they would if I had a facebook account. My social network can be put together from texts, phone calls and emails, plus potential access to the content of all of those things. My Google history would fill in any gaps about my interests or moods. I can't think of a lot of things that people put into facebook that wouldn't be reflected somewhere else.
Screw it, use facebook. If the government paints a target on you, it doesn't matter what you do. Any privacy concerns may be best addressed through legislation and oversight.
I hear that a lot, and it frustrates me very much, because it fundamentally betrays an understanding of Facebook's true nature.
I do not have a FB account, never have, and never will. Yet, my pictures are on there. Because my peers inevitably do use FB and take pictures of social gatherings where I'm at... and I get tagged. I have really no real recourse to this. At this point I actually cannot tell my friends to not take pictures of me... because that is not a reasonable request. A group picture has me in addition to other folks... the other folks may want the picture to be up on FB. So now, if I don't want to be on Facebook, I have to kill my social life.
If you are worried about police violence, just leave the country! And screw it, why not give a DNA sample for the federal database? If the government paints a target on you, they can get a blood sample anyhow!
That something else is also bad is not a reason for progressing further in that direction. Yes, mass surveillance is bad in any form, that's not a good reason for creating more structures that are prone to mass surveillance. If anything, it's a reason to get rid of those old services that are from a time when mass surveillance was still technically challenging and replace them with something that protects your privacy, rather than something that destroys it for good.
Also, no, addressing a problem through legislation and oversight that can much more effectively be addressed by other means, is not a sensible idea. We don't build bridges that can't carry the load that normal citizens without special training are likely to put on them and then legislate to keep them from destroying the brige, we build bridges that simply work, as that's much more efficient. Similarly, it's much more efficient to build a system that doesn't present a gigantic abuse potential and to then try and legislate that problem away. In particular, when the thing that's at risk is the ability to legislate. If centralized communication hubs get too much power, that risks undermining democratic decisionmaking.
Hell, even "Just don't use the internet" and "just don't use FB" are two extremely different propositions.
But you fail to catch a crucial part of this: it adds value to your social life at the expense of so many other things. It may add some social value to your life, but corrupts and molds society at large. I think the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it. I touched on this in a comment below as well.
Social networking is a task that should probably be left for a 'Public Benefit Corp.' to do, as Ello seems to be trying to do. I'm hoping and praying that these sorts of companies start to take off, that pay-for-service becomes cool and commonplace again.
Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't.
You might prefer using sites and apps that guarantee your privacy, but most people simply don't care.
That they don't see it does not mean there is no threat (to both their privacy and to their lives in general as secondary effects of the global loss of privacy).
"It is sort of absurd to think what you do online is private."
I find it absurd that you say that. I chat with friends via our own jabber server, for example, via TLS connections - how is it absurd that that is in fact perfectly private? I find neither the expectation of privacy absurd, nor the fact that that is in fact private.
"Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't."
I don't get what you are trying to say here. Are you just stating the obvious fact that those people who do transport your data technically can look at it, or are you implying that therefore they have the right, they should have the right, that you should have no expectation of them not looking, ...?
Before you answer, please consider: Do you think the same applies to letters? To phone conversations on analog phone lines?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
Yeah, extreme value. It's a wonder how people got anything done in the dark ages, like the mid-nineties. Not to mention those unfortunate to not even have internet, like Einstein, Onasis, Henry Ford, Tesla, Hemmingway, Churchil, etc etc.
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...
"Actually, Brooke, that's been discredited as any kind of real threat, the people that use that site are the people that no one would mind seeing bombed anyway."
The Onion's article is great - just remember that the situation is no joke.
It's a bit William-Gibson-esque to think about things in these terms but on the other hand it seems like an eerily good fit.
(PS instead of merely down voting me it would rather be more interesting for us all to read your comments)
So I have no doubt that a much more powerful agency like the NSA etc will have even better abilities to snoop around.
Yes. It's about social networks, not Facebook in particular. The alternative is choosing not to participate. This is an intrinsic problem. You participate in a social network; you choose to be connected; you learn more about people and things in general, and as a result, people learn more about you. With technologies, there've always been trade-offs.
That's wrong.
I'm not participating, but I know that other people are posting pictures of me and reporting my whereabouts on facebook.
I've read somewhere that at some point in East Germany, 30% of the population were informants for the secret police / intelligence agencies. Today, wherever Facebook has traction, it's more like 80%, and they report MORE data than those 30% did (But I wouldn't blame them, because, well, 99% of people "reported on" are also reporting on themselves).
And I'm sure that every competent intelligence agency already has a live copy of the facebook database, whether by NSL or by bugging. If they didn't, they wouldn't be competent.
Trade-offs for sure.
If even 'regular' security checks take this into account, then I'll bet you dollars to donuts that it's certainly looked at when they suspect you of something, or as dragnet profiling/surveillance.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/where-is...
"I think that it's really important that the people who are doing free software and peer review can do vetting and ensure that things are backdoored."
[ insert generic remark about journalists competence here ]
Comments in here skeptical that they engage in any foreign surveillance.
Deleted comment
Terrorists have faces too. When they take their masks off they engage in social networking just like everyone else. It is very useful to know their sleeping, and waking patterns, who they are 'friends' with, where their support comes from and what they like and dislike.
Remember that Facebook, Google and others are trying to create at-scale automated psychological profiling - so that they can create better ads. All of this amounts to a huge amount of information they have about where you browse, what you by, when you comment.
But yeah... those be TLA agencies aren't exclusively anti-terrorist. They deal with many international actors through which they can gain an advantage for the United States.
Sort of like Peter Thiel claiming that Twitter execs were smoking pot all day when promoting his book.
Say crazy shit = eyeballs on your product.
Edit: I should point out that I don't think the statement about Facebook was "crazy" or in this case even controversial. However my general statement about how PR uses click-bait headlines and takeaways holds true.
Mostly because I personally think the long-term effects of corporations, particularly Facebook, ganging on our society is going to be immensely more deleterious than anything our government could do or wants to do. When Facebook thwarts free and organic growth of something in favor of content pushed by those who have money (shoddy companies selling fat-loss pills which are going to moreso fuck you up than make you lose weight), I consider that something seriously screwed up. When it reduces exposure of content that's non-compatible with your views on your feed to keep you warm and cozy, perhaps in an attempt to prime you for certain political ads, that's some serious shit.
Facebook really IS something extremely horrible, people don't realize it. It's very sad that even on HN you see strong defense of Facebook. Facebook and its founder have been involved in one sleazy act to another (from privacy zuckering (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...) to offering his friends private information -- "yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard; just ask; i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns" - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fac...).
Right now, it isn't Poitras who has done one thing after another to make me doubt the words coming out of her mouth, it's someone else.
That one line however, get's published across the web and because of the context (Snowden/NSA) and mention of Facebook, it will grab eyeballs.
I generally discount things people say in interviews while promoting something like a book, movie, product etc.
EDIT: To clarify: if something is true, it's true, no matter where it's said.
Now this kind of thing has reached the level of self-promoters, authors, etc all of whom want a cut of the outrage pie before it complete dissipates, the same way breathless exposes of the horrors of the Bush administration were hard sells by the time of his second term as outrage exhaustion was quickly met during his first.
I'd love it if HN was generally more resistant to sensationalist promotional material. Barring that, getting this off the front page most likely just makes some other marketing message take its place. One that doesn't remind us about a deep uncomfortable truth of our profession.
(FWIW Even though I take issue with your comment, I think it being so light is a disgusting indicator of the state of HN. The reason downvoted comments were made harder to read is because downvotes were used sparingly, not simply on anything that might take away from the outrage)
I think even billionaires want their causes to succeed, so even if it's a book that accounts for 1% of their wealth, they still want it to do well and will say and do things that help it to succeed.
Also, as AngrySkillzz pointed out, the "ideas" put forth in the book are more important to them (than the money earned) and they can indirectly benefit their business by having these ideas, or opinions take hold.