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Cyber insecurity hurting humanity
By Frank Bruni
There is a square in the upper right-hand corner of your computer keyboard that probably looks more banged up than it did a week or two ago: It is the one marked “delete.” I bet that you have been giving it a workout lately, pressing it hard and often, moving relentlessly over your e-mails, fretting, fussing and killing off nearly as many words as you birth. Are they open to misinterpretation? Is their tone too mischievous or mean-spirited? Delete, delete, delete. Better safe than “Sony’d.”
I also bet that it is all been coming back to you and coming to a head: The invasive games that Facebook has played, the data that Uber holds, the alarms that Edward Snowden sounded, the flesh that Jennifer Lawrence flashed to more people than she ever intended.
The Dear Leader is late to this wretched party and the breach that his regime in North Korea apparently orchestrated is less revelation than confirmation. You can no longer assume that what is meant to be seen by only one other individual will not find its way to hundreds, thousands, even millions. That sort of privacy is a quaint relic.
The lesson here is not that Hollywood executives, producers, agents and stars must watch themselves, nor is it to beware of totalitarian states — it is to beware, period. If it is not a foreign nemesis monitoring and meddling with you, then it is potentially a merchant examining your buying patterns, an employer trawling for signs of disloyalty or indolence, an acquaintance turned enemy, a random hacker with an amorphous grudge, or of course, the US government.
While this spooky realization prompts better behavior in certain circumstances that call for it, and is only a minor inconvenience in other instances, make no mistake: It is a major loss. Those moments and nooks in life that permit you to be your messiest, stupidest, most heedless self? They are quickly disappearing, if not already gone.
It is tempting to try to forget that by homing in on other strands of the stories that bring it to our attention, such as when the discussion about Sony turned to the entertainment industry’s hasty capitulation to threats of terrorism.
“I think they made a mistake,” US President Barack Obama said on Friday last week, referring to Sony executives’ decision to pull the movie The Interview from theaters. “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.”
He added that the US government would respond to North Korea’s actions “proportionally,” but that it has not yet determined how.
Days earlier, the focus was as much on the adolescent nastiness that the hacking of Sony’s systems exposed as on the vulnerability to exposure that it underscored. You could gape at the way all of those temperamental titans typed and decide that they got what they deserved, just as you could chalk up those naked celebrity selfies to spectacularly bad judgement.
Yet, there is a bigger picture and it is terrifying: We are all naked. The methods by which we communicate today — the advances meant to liberate us — are robbing us of control. Smartphones take photographs and record audio, voicemail is violable, texts wind up in untrustworthy hands (just ask former US representative Anthony Weiner), while hard drives and even the cloud have memories that resist erasure. And the Internet can circulate any purloined secret fast and infinitely far.
The specter that science-fiction began to raise decades ago has come true, but with a twist. Computers and technology do not have minds of their own, they have really, really big mouths.
“Nothing you say in any form mediated through digital technology — absolutely nothing at all — is guaranteed to stay private,” Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist for the New York Times, wrote in a blog post on Thursday last week.
He issued a “reminder to anyone who uses a digital device to say anything to anyone, ever. Don’t do it. Don’t e-mail, don’t text, don’t update, don’t send photos.”
He might as well have added: “Don’t live,” because self-expression and sharing are not easily abandoned, and other conduits for them — landlines, snail mail — no longer do the trick.
We “don’t have real choice,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller last month. “It’s not like picking up the newspaper and realizing ice cream has too many calories and you can start eating frozen yogurt, information that people can act on.”
Rotenberg was explaining a remarkable survey that had just been published by the Pew Research Center, which found that overwhelming majorities of Americans seriously questioned the confidentiality and security of their social media activity, online chats and texts, but pressed on with all of these.
This is not a contradiction, it is more accurately labeled a bind.
Many people have begun to sanitize their exchanges, in manners that could be silencing important conversations and gagging creativity.
Late last year, the PEN American Center surveyed 528 of its members, including many journalists and fiction writers, and found that 24 percent of them said that they had avoided some topics in e-mails and telephone calls for fear of surveillance or exposure. Sixteen percent had at times refrained from Internet research for the same reason. There were issues they did not dare to engage, stories they did not want to touch.
One unnamed writer who participated in the survey complained of “a chilling effect on my research, most of which I do on the Internet. This includes research on issues such as the drug wars and mass incarceration, which people don’t think about as much as they think about foreign terrorism, but is just as pertinent.”
Another expressed the worry “that by the time we fully realize that we live in this condition, it will be too late to alter the infrastructure patterns.”
Maybe encryption services will help, or maybe what US journalist Farhad Manjoo called an “erasable Internet” will come to the rescue, but that still leaves some essential forms of communication unaddressed and enhanced protections could be trailed in short order by newly ingenious routes around them.
“The hackers are going to get better,” Obama said. “Some of them are going to be state actors. Some of them are going to be non-state actors. All of them are going to be sophisticated and many of them can do some damage.”
It is not just creativity that is in jeopardy and it is not just candor; it is secure islands of unformed thought and sloppy talk, places where people take necessary vacations from judgement, allowances for impropriety that make propriety possible — and these are not, or should not be, luxuries.
Delete, delete, delete — that is a bit of your humanity being snuffed out.
Frank Bruni is a columnist for the New York Times.
source: Taipei Times
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