Device Classes 4 and 5

I am a privacy advocate, computer hobbyist, writer, and mother of three teenage daughters. On my smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers, I install software that keeps my identity and my location (IP address) private, encrypts my communications, and encrypts the data on my devices. I think that these measures are fundamental to defending my dignity and autonomy. I install the same software on my daughters’ devices. I teach my daughters that many profit-seeking people and a few unscrupulous people might otherwise use information about them in ways that could harm them or make them unhappy. The solution is not to throw up our hands and declare that “Privacy is dead!” Instead, we take responsibility to make the devices that we own protect us.

I want to take these measures legally. I am a writer, past contributor to The Economist magazine, and author of Kidding Ourselves (Basic Books, New York, 1995). I have benefitted from the copyright law’s protection of my writing. Of course, the de facto protections that copyright can offer to writers are shrinking. Nonetheless, I do not abuse my practical ability to copy other people’s writing, artwork, or music. I don’t copy those works unless I have the permission of the writer or artist. I teach my daughters to exercise the same respect. They don’t make infringing copies, either.

Hypocrisy is painful. I prefer to avoid it. I want very much to be able to install privacy, security, and communication software on my devices–and my daughters’ devices–without violating legally protected rights of the manufacturers and programmers of the devices. My interest in privacy and security and their interest in protecting their work really do not seem to be in conflict. To me, this customizing is like putting stronger bumpers on my car. I am the owner, making what I bought work better for me.

Examples of the software that I install:
Cydia, a store containing third-party software for Apple devices: http://cydia.saurik.com
Tor (the Onion Router): http://torproject.org
OpenSSH: http://thebigboss.org/guides-iphone-ipod-ipad/install-and-use-ssh
Orbot, Tor for Android phones: http://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/
full-device encryption, such as Luks: http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/
Firefox modified to use “Https Everywhere,” “No Script,” and “Disconnect”: http://donttrack.us/
CyanogenMod: a higher performance operating system for Android phones: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

The U.S. Copyright Office has already made an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the jailbreaking (“rooting”) of iPhones. I had to jailbreak my iPhone 3G in order to install Tor. I also had to jailbreak my iPhone 3G in order to install OpenSSH, available on Cydia. This program gives me a terminal window with a command line and an encrypted channel to other computers. It lets me use my iPhone to communicate with a computer in Tokyo that I administer as a relay on the Tor network. I now have a little computer in my pocket from which–wherever I am–I can do lots of administration work on remote computers, such as my account on a Stanford University server and my account on a Hurricane Electric server in Fremont, California, which hosts one of my Web sites. It also lets me see the entire file system of the iPhone itself and correct corrupted files.

I would like to run all these programs on our iPad and my Samsung Android smartphone. I am considering buying an Amazon Kindle or Barnes and Noble Nook Color. I will also want to run my privacy, security, and communication software on those devices. I will have to jailbreak them. Please create an exemption in the DMCA, so that I may do so legally.

Sincerely,
Rhona Mahony

It was my suitcase that caught the attention of the TSA fellow watching the baggage X-ray monitor. He frowned. Then he waved over a stocky TSA co-worker. The co-worker picked up my suitcase and carried it down to me at the end of the conveyor belt. “Anything sharp or fragile in here?,” he asked. “Not that I can think of,” I said. What had the first fellow seen? Oh ho, the co-worker opened my suitcase and found my bamboo flutes. I had packed the flutes because I had planned to say, at the beginning of a conversation, that my unusual pastes were primitive pigments. I was going to paint the flutes with them. I hadn’t realized that on the X-ray monitor, flutes might look like clubs. The TSA forbids clubs in carry-on bags. The TSA fellow solemnly looked through each end of each flute. While he squinted, I packed my 3-1-1 bag back into my messenger bag. Oops, a snag. He couldn’t see through the third flute. It was still a stalk of raw bamboo. I hadn’t yet broken open the nodes. He picked up my whole suitcase and walked away. I didn’t see the consultation. When he came back, he wiped down the inside of my suitcase compartment with a round, white pad. He fed the pad through a machine. I suppose the machine’s purpose was to detect…explosives? Wow, I hadn’t anticipated this thoroughness. The machine sniffed, assayed, calculated…and was happy with the pad. I was free to go to Gate 82.

Janet Napolitano, Are You There?

Do TSA agents learn in their training that charcoal plus sulphur plus saltpetre make gunpowder? Don’t they watch the classic Star Trek episode (“Arena”) in which Captain Kirk improvises a cannon by finding just the right minerals–guess which ones–to mix up an explosive propellant on that distant rocky planet? Sure, my constituents were packed separately. Constituents, though, can be mixed. Sure, my constituents were wet. The TSA, though, didn’t know what they were wet with. It could have been alcohol.

It wasn’t, because I care about safety. Nothing in my past suggests otherwise. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to search me thoroughly, or superficially. And that’s why the TSA agents usually rotely follow the rules of their pantomime, rather than using educated judgment. Educated judgment is too tiring, too expensive, and needed elsewhere.

May I suggest that our new Secretary of Homeland Security reconsider the billions allocated in the 2009 budget to the Transportation Security Agency and its 48,000 employees? Many thoughtful travelers know that the rigamarole we go through on the way to our airline gates is a show to comfort the ignorant, to keep them buying airline tickets. Tell the truth, save our time, save our money. Let us resume our old carefree stroll to the gate. Spend some of the $3 billion on real police work to catch the bad guys. That would make us safer. Maybe those 48,000 TSA patriots could be put to work dismantling the wall on the border with Mexico?

Better Security with Transparent Software

Should we throw our votes into a black hole? Should we let vote-stealers snicker at us? There may be a better way.

Computer engineer Alan Dechert and his colleagues are offering a system that they call “Open Voting.” It prints out a paper ballot that the voter can read over herself. The ballot has a bar code on it that the polling station’s bar-code reader can count quickly. Third and best of all, the software that runs the system is not secret, like the software running the machines sold by Diebold, Hart Intercivic, and Sequoia. Dechert and his colleagues have published much of it at SourceForge.net. That’s why the software is called “open source”; the source code–the program that the programmer wrote–is open to inspection. Any and all of the tens of thousands of people around the world who learned the Python programming language in high school, college, or later can check over the program for mistakes and security weaknesses. Go ahead; take a look at it. As crytographer Bruce Schneier has written, anybody can invent a system that he himself can’t crack. You don’t know whether other people can crack it until you give them a chance. By publishing the software program and inviting comments and cracking attempts, the writers get to improve the program. This world-wide, collaborative improvement is a virtue of open source software. For full credit, though, Dechert and his buddies will have to publish the full version of the program.

The Open Voting system has one more advantage; it is cheap. Like most authors of open source software, Dechert, et al., are not selling the program. They are giving it away for free. Moreover, no special, proprietary machinery is necessary to run it. It runs on off-the-shelf touch screens, bar-code readers, computers, and printers that many different manufacturers sell. Your county can shop around for the best deals it can get on those machines, on-line and at the local shopping center.

Is It as Easy as They Say?

I had a chance to vote on an OVC machine in August, 2008, at the LinuxWorld convention in San Francisco. The OVC people had set up a little polling station to give people a chance to see the system in action. When I went in, a poll worker handed me an empty manila folder. I walked into the polling booth and found a touch screen and a Hewlett Packard printer. The touch screen listed my choices in big print. I pressed on my choices. The printer chugged and printed out an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper. That was my ballot. I read over my choices. Yup, I disapprove of Digital Rights Management and approve of Barack Obama. I slipped my ballot into the manila folder.

At the exit of the polling station, I fed my ballot into the bar-code reader. If people later suspect mistakes or mischief, they can refeed the ballots through the bar-code reader, or a different bar-code reader, or read them with their own eyeballs and count them with their own hands.

Barriers to Adoption

Why aren’t we voting with free, transparent software on cheap machines that give us paper ballots? First, ignorance. Many states and counties don’t know that the option exists. Second, money. Some states require that a voting system pass tests before it gets adopted. That’s a wise policy. Unfortunately, many states also require the proponents of the voting system to pay a fee for the test. Who pays the fee to test free software that runs on off-the-shelf hardware sold by many competing companies? Dechert, et al., won’t make any money from sales of the software or of the hardware. They have no future revenue stream, no venture capitalist support. They are proposing that states should charge only a low fee, or no fee at all, for tests of open source systems. Getting states to make this change, though, will take time. How many elections will take place in that time?

Los Angeles Leads the Way

Debra Bowen, California’s Secretary of State, has asked officials in Los Angeles County to consider adopting the Open Voting Consortium’s voting system. The fellow in charge is Dean Logan. I have exchanged email with his assistant, Paul Drugan.

He confirmed for me on September 19, 2008, that, “You are correct that we met with representatives of the [Open Voting] project, who gave Mr. Logan and his staff a system demonstration. Currently, we are simply reviewing possible systems and are not in a decision making mode at this time.”

He has declined to describe for me their decision-making criteria or schedule. If you live in Los Angeles County and plan to vote some time, feel free to follow up. The email address of L.A.’s Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk is: voterinfoATrrcc.lacounty.gov.

Running an election for Los Angeles County would be a challenging and revealing test for the OVC. LA has over four million voters. The biggest election that the OVC project has run so far is the one that I voted in. It had 816 voters. Should smaller counties also be running live tests? Would your county be interested?

Further Reading

Larry Magid‘s Digital Crossroads article, “Panel calls for open source software on voting machines,” on September 29, 2008

Scientific American, October 2008, “Voting Machines: Competing Candidates,” by Mark Fishetti, pp. 100-101.

That night, Olshansky didn’t want to talk about Guantanamo. We know about Guantanamo. The domestic fuss, the international scandal, and the dismay of allied governments have worn down the Bush Administration. Now everyone, even President Bush, wants to close it. Olshansky was worried about the other prisons, places less famous and places completely secret, where a still unknown number of people are locked up without being charged, without access to a lawyer, and without trial.

Prisons Less Famous, with Worse Conditions

Less famous prisons may hold as many as 1000 men. On a recent trip to Afghanistan, Olshansky heard estimates that roughly 630 men are locked inside wire mesh pens at Bagram Air Force base , under the control of the U.S. military. It was the London office of Amnesty International that learned, in September of 2005, that the U.S. was sending people captured around the world to Bagram. It was also transferring prisoners from Guantanamo to Bagram. Olshansky said that the U.S. is building a new 40-acre prison facility there, which could hold about 1200 people. She said that U.S. interrogators at Bagram purposely deprive men of sleep for days before questioning them, that some prisoners have suffered frostbite, and that some have been beaten to death.

Another less famous prison is Policharki Prison, east of Kabul. The United States built its new Block D to house people seized by U.S. authorities, many transferred from Bagram Air Force base. Block D’s commanders, guards, and staff are American. The U.S. military, however, insists that the prisoners there are in the custody of the Afghan government. It says that prisoners there cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Some prisoners at Bagram who had filed habeas corpus petitions in federal court were abruptly moved to Policharski’s Block D. About 300 men are now imprisoned there.

Secret Prisons, Conditions Unknown

Secret prisons hold an unknown number of people. Olshansky said that she had learned about two detention facilities, one in Morocco, the other in Ethiopia. Of course, The Associated Press , the Guardian newspaper (London), and many others have reported the CIA’s use of foreign prisons and even U.S. naval ships to detain and interrogate people. Olshansy asked, if we don’t even know where those people are locked up, how can we insist that they are treated decently, are allowed to meet with the International Red Cross, are given access to lawyers, and are either expeditiously charged and tried or released?

Action

"There are too many ways to count," said Olshansky. She suggested teaching basic civil liberties to children, writing letters to newspapers, getting town and city governments to pass resolutions, meeting with Congressional representatives, insisting that every profession stick to high ethical standards, and demonstrating. After a question from the audience (me), she said that she admired Cory Doctorow’s book about the "War on Terror" for young people, Little Brother . She said, "Buy copies of it for school libraries!"

The next Administration will have to decide how to handle the hundreds of imprisoned men, women, and children bequeathed to it by the Bush Administration. During the Presidential campaign, we can insist that the candidates take a stand on in favor of the ghost prisoners and against the American gulag archipelago.

A note on Olshansky’s career: In 2004, she worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) . In Rasul v. Bush , she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the Guantanamo prisoners had the legal right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court. The Justices ruled in favor of the prisoners, 6-3. That ruling made possible the large effort that followed by lawyers and activists to dig out and question the evidence against the prisoners and to challenge the U.S. military’s physical mistreatment of them. It was a dramatic victory. It helped make Olshansky famous among U.S. lawyers.

Today, 54 years after the Korematsu decision, Covington partners are again paying for the representation of despised, supposed enemies of U.S. national security. Fallkoff represents 17 men locked up in Guantanamo. The first time he went there, he said, he was surprised to learn that his client had written him a poem. More poems followed. Falkoff had, in addition to his law degree, a Ph.D. in Literature. Poems piqued his curiosity. He began to wonder how many other prisoners were writing poetry. It turned out, several were. Possibly many. He conceived the idea of collecting and publishing those poems. The military officers running Guantanamo, however, disapproved. They disapproved of the project and of the poems themselves. One intelligence officer intoned, “Poetry represents an enhanced national security threat.”

Ho, what happy words for protest poets ’round the world! Byron writing on behalf of the Greeks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning scribbling stanzas for the Italians, and so many others seeking through verse the liberation of their fellows longed for the effectiveness that the U.S. Pentagon fears. The mighty quake before the slender pen of the poet!

At least, the mighty quake before the possible disapproval of their superiors.

Falkoff was able, after months of negotation with military censors, to publish an 84-page volume, Poems from Guantanamo. The poems appear in English. The authors wrote their poems in Arabic, Pashto, and English. The original Arabic and Pashto texts don’t appear in the book, though. The censors were afraid that they might contain coded messages.

The Guardian (U.K.) ran a review of the book last year. Falkoff read one of the poems for us that night, “Death Poem,” by Jumah al Dossari:

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors or peace.”

Fallkoff said that he donates all the revenues from the book’s sales to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The CCR is a non-profit law firm in New York that takes on human rights cases. It was CCR lawyers who first won for the Guantanamo prisoners the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court. Take a look at the book. You can consider donating a copy to your local library.

That night, Raut spoke in a History Department auditorium. He looked like an expensive, East Coast attorney : dark suit, tasteful tie, erect posture. He spoke politely. So moderate, so controlled, so reasonable. His presentation was almost dull. Note that this fellow went to Harvard Law School, worked for the Federal Trade Commission, and then worked at Weil, Gotshal, an expensive New York law firm. Now he works for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. He is so square! Fire flickers somewhere underneath the conservative suit, though; he was one of the first corporate lawyers to volunteer to represent the Guantanamo prisoners in 2004.

He said, in his reasonable lecture-hall voice, that his top priority was to dispel three myths. Many Americans think that the Guantanamo prisoners are “the worst of the worst.” That is, the toughest, most murderous terrorists that the U.S. has been able to vacuum out of Al Qaeda hidey-holes around the world. As it turns out, no. They’re not. The Defense Department itself has figured out that over half of the men and boys locked up at Guantanamo never engaged in any “hostile act” whatsoever against the U.S.

Okay, so why are they there? Myth number two, Raut said, was that the Guantanamo prisoners had been captured on the battlefield, shooting or launching missiles at Americans and their allies. As it turns out, no. They weren’t. Only 5 percent of them were captured on a battlefield. Many of the others were seized by Afghan tribesmen who handed them in to Afghan or U.S. officials in return for a bounty. The bounties ranged up to $4000, many times the annual income of an entire Afghan extended family. How did the Afghans choose whom to seize? That’s hard to say. Many of their prisoners were non-Afghans–people who found themselves in Afghanistan with no relatives to vouch for them or protect them.

Surely the Guantanamo prisoners didn’t make it all the way to Cuba without having plotted, collaborated, stolen, spied, or acted reprehensibly in some way? Myth number three, Raut said, was that the Guantanamo prisoners must have been guilty of something. As it turns out, no. Many weren’t. One of Raut’s clients had been found locked in a cell of a Taliban jail. U.S. soldiers interpreted imprisonment by the Taliban as association with the Taliban. Raut described this miserable fellow as “demonstrably innocent.” Once Raut was able to make the Army connect Dot A to Dot B, the Army released him. Raut described several other prisoners, some of whom the New York Times and other major papers had written about. One Pakistani man, a chicken farmer named Abdur Sayed Rahman, was arrested because his name sounded like “Abdur Zahid Rahman,” the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister. An Afghan man was arrested because his name sounded like the name of a former Taliban provincial governor. The American hearing officer at Guantanamo told this man that he needed to contact the former governor himself to unravel the mix-up; the Army wouldn’t do it. When the man pointed out that he was being held incommunicado in Cuba, thousands of miles from Afganistan, the officer told him that he would be allowed to write a letter. He could show his results to the officer at his next hearing, which would take place one year from then.

Why are millions of dollars being spent to truck, fly, and lock up so many men with little or no evidence against them? Raut said that the Army has a procedure, codified in field manuals, for deciding whether someone it has captured should be held or released. It developed this procedure in Vietnam, when officers recognized the importance of devoting scarce vehicles, cells, and interrogators only to likely Viet Cong guerrillas, not harmless villagers. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, however, soon after the attacks on September 11, 2001, explicitly ordered the U.S. Army to set aside that procedure. All suspects, he ordered, however and by whomever captured, should be held, transported, and interrogated. That order, Raut said, resulted in poor “quality control” of incarcerated suspects.

Yes, the U.S. been pestered by many quality-control defects during George W. Bush’s Presidency. Raut is an interesting fellow: legalistic and personally conservative, but determined to challenge the national disgrace of his time. He describes his motives in this essay for Salon that was published in January of 2007. More power to him.

Marcus knows that–and explains why–all the measures put in place by the Department of Homeland Security in San Francisco are expensive, time-wasting, intrusive, and fruitless. He knows abuse of power when he sees it.

Marcus is the protagonist of Little Brother, a 2008 young-adult book by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is a writer, activist, and co-editor of BoingBoing who would prefer that people start standing up for themselves and alongside one another, starting with understanding what all this gadgetry can do against us and for us. He has had the pleasure of seeing his book leap onto the New York Times Bestseller List for young people.

Little Brother came out just in time. Its call to action is more urgent that most of us realize. A computer-abetted lockdown of an entire city isn’t only feasible, it’s happening, today, in China. The Communist Party, the Red Army, and internal intelligence officials are conducting an experiment in Shenzhen, a high-tech manufacturing center near Hong Kong. The experiment is called Golden Shield. To promote harmony and safety, all communication is recorded: land lines, cell phones, email, the Internet. All movement is monitored: by closed-circuit televisions, traffic check points, and frequent ID checks of pedestrians. Naomi Klein reported this story in the May 29, 2008, edition of Rolling Stone.

She discovered that the closed-circuit televisions in China use facial recognition software imported–possibly in violation of U.S. federal law–by an American company called L-1. Other surveillance software has come from IBM, Honeywell, and General Electric. When those companies, and the Chinese companies working with them, have fine-tuned their products, to whom shall they sell them next? Who would like to buy them?

In Los Altos, California, on May 22, Doctorow pointed out that people who seek to command and control their fellows first test their surveillance tools on those who can’t speak up. They pick as test subjects state and federal prisoners, mental patients, immigrants, and even well-to-do airline passengers afraid of missing their flight. When Naomi Klein flew back into JFK airport, she was invited to apply for a Fly Clear card. It would let her skip airports’ carry-on baggage search and X-ray lines. If she applies, she will have her photograph taken, her fingerprints recorded, and her irises scanned. Those biometric data will be encoded on her Fly Clear card, courtesy of a U.S. company called L-1.

Many adults feel too harried or powerless to challenge surveillance. Tens of thousands of them can’t even get their names deleted from the No-Fly List. Children and teenagers, though, have more time and lots more energy. I’ve met 11 and 13 year-olds who love Little Brother. Doctorow, in Los Altos, said that the Berkeley High School students he talked to were fired up about it. Thank goodness for Berkeley. This adult feels rallied and ready to take on the Total Surveillance States. Enough with photographing CCTV’s on World Sousveillance Day. How can we help the people of Shenzhen creep out from under the heavy boot of Big Brother? How those of us over and under age 25 make sure this scenario does not strangle our own countries? I’m starting by giving away many copies of Little Brother. It describes tools to start with and it’s an exhilerating adventure. This land was made for you and me. Take it back!