NOTE: I found this mini-essay I wrote in the web archives (http://web.archive.org) and thought it was worth a re-read 7 plus years later. I wrote this shortly after I saw the World Trade Center attacks on TV.
2001 – The Year of the Great Privacy Debate:
To what extent do we value personal privacy?
By Jeremy Castro (9-11-01)
“ECHELON is perhaps the most powerful intelligence gathering organization in the world. Several credible reports suggest that this global electronic communications surveillance system presents an extreme threat to the privacy of people all over the world. According to these reports, ECHELON attempts to capture staggering volumes of satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic, including communications to and from North America. This vast quantity of voice and data communications are then processed through sophisticated filtering technologies. This massive surveillance system apparently operates with little oversight. Moreover, the agencies that purportedly run ECHELON have provided few details as to the legal guidelines for the project. Because of this, there is no way of knowing if ECHELON is being used illegally to spy on private citizens.” (taken from www.echelonwatch.com)
The year of 2001 was supposed to be the “Year of the Great Privacy Debate.” With the broadening use of digital and Internet based communications, the ability for others to intercept those communications have become great. Mobile phones are in the hands of kids calling for a ride home from school and CEOs of major corporations closing a multi-billion dollar deal. Email and instant messaging (IM) are used for more than novelty and casual exchange. People and businesses conduct much of their daily communications over such mediums. In the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, with phone lines down in New York City, email and IM took over as the most available and efficient method of communicating to the world the horrors witnessed by the city. We use these mediums of communication to relay all levels of information from one place and person to another. There is no doubt that there is information floating around these communication networks that is private to individuals and some that is valuable to others.
Everyday, but especially today, many government and news agencies around the United States are searching valuable information on these communicatin networks. Today they are searching for clues as to how this event on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 took place and how it took place without warning. They are looking for clues and asking questions, but as of this writing, they have no clue.
One question that arises is, How did this happen without our knowledge? We spend billions of dollars in the name of National Security and yet something as dramatic and horrific as this could still happen in this country without warning. How could such a strategic and orchestrated attack take place within our boundaries without a hint of what was to come? A plan like this must have been in the planning stage for some time by the attackers and communication over phone lines (land and mobile) and the Internet were inevitable during that process.
There are many “spying” or communication “monitoring” systems set up around the globe by numerous government agencies, US and foreign. The two most widely known entities are code named Carnivore and Echelon. The organizations and agencies behind these systems use this technology to monitor communications over the phone and radio lines and also the Internet. They search and scan privately transmitted communications filtering for keywords in hopes of thwarting terrorism, drug dealing and smuggling, organized crime and anything that endangers public safety and national security.
In this, the year of the Great Privacy Debate, the question of the motives and techniques of Carnivore and Echelon have taken center stage in the public debate forum. Personal privacy is of great value to the people of this country and the world and the use of monitoring technology often violates that very right. In response to these monitoring technologies, as well as in response to security, there has been a surge in the development in privacy and security tools. With the possible death of many aspects of personal privacy in the dawn of the Internet, people demanded tools to protect their rights to communicate freely.
In the dawn of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, there is a big question that now looms over those that have fought hard against the likes of Carnivore and Echelon.
To what extent do we value personal privacy?
Assuming the attackers communicated using traditional methods (land and mobile phone lines and email), these sophisticated monitoring systems should have gotten a hold of something suggesting this attack. It was orchestrated in such a way that many people had to have been involved, which indicates the need of communication. If these attackers used “normal” means of communication, Carnivore and Echelon should have picked up on something – that is unless they had access to advanced means of communication, namely encryption devices and encryption software.
So again, the balance between personal privacy and national security is questioned. With an incident as dramatic as this, the balance has been shifted. The great privacy debate is not new to the 21st Century, it is only debated upon in a different context. Whether it be Roe vs. Wade or Echelon and Carnivore, it is a debate that lives on searching for a balance.
In his book, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (Random House, 2000), Jeffrey Rosen says, “The future of privacy will be determined not by the inherent nature of the Internet, but by social choices about how much privacy we as a society think it is reasonable to demand,” But, he adds, “People’s subjective expectations of privacy tend to reflect the amount of privacy they subjectively experience; and as advances in technology … have made ever more intrusive surveillance possible, expectations of privacy have naturally diminished.”
Today, we have a new social choice to make. We will never be able to return to the same point in the debate as we were prior to this morning prior to 8AM EST September 11. Again, how much do we value personal privacy? Is it worth 10,000 to 20,000 American lives? How many are to follow with similar incidents?
“Another company capitalizing on increased privacy awareness is APMsafe.com. Mr. Castro says once the Clinton administration loosened its stance on exporting encryption technologies, it freed up companies like his to take advantage of technical solutions to privacy problems. He claims APMsafe’s edge for encoding emails comes from its encryption tools being easier to use than past technologies. “If a product is easy to use, it will integrate itself into your daily email routine,” he says. “If you’re sending a letter, you’ll go a little out of your way to find an envelope because of the privacy it provides. We’re trying to make the public aware of its privacy options, and right now, sending unencrypted emails is like sending a postcard through the mail.”" (Red Herring. Online Privacy Matters”)
As someone who was (and still hopes to be) heavily involved in the security industry and within the privacy debate, I am at an ethical fork in the road. We developed a highly secure email encryption program that allows someone to send a secure message with complete confidence that it will not be intercepted. That includes hackers and thieves, but more importantly, monitoring technologies such as Carnivore and Echelon. The fork in the road was reached today when these terrorists attacked the principals of our country – democracy, capitalism and military. More fundamental is the attack on our personal privacy and personal freedom. When I was developing, selling and pitching these security products, the most abundant negative response was in regards to national security. The products and services that we developed and sold could indeed be used by terrorists and law abiding citizens alike. The privacy now debate takes a different direction with respect to the realm of high-level encryption products and systems.
Personally, the scariest part of this debate is in either side of the argument. With today’s incident, both sides of the debate present scary situations. To the side in favoring personal privacy (use of uncapped encryption levels, banning of such systems as Carnivore and Echelon for example), it appears that our intelligence agencies will never be able to gather enough information required to uncover terrorist attacks such as the one today. People can orchestrate these threats to national security with confidence that they are doing so in private thanks to encryption technology. Encryption historically has been used primarily for military purposes, from Caesar to Hitler.
On the other side of the debate stands the face of national security. If “Enemy of the State” conditions existed, people attempting to orchestrate these attacks would eventually leak important information leading to the demise of the plan. Without encryption software for email and VoIP and encryption hardware for analog land telephone lines, one of our many monitoring systems would surely have caught glimpse of what was to come. If we chose this direction in the fork, is it not impossible to imagine someday living a world similar the one constructed by George Orwell in his look at a futuristic society in 1984 (New American Library, 1989)?
The people of this country, citizens and elected officials, will not have to ask the question, stated above, To what extent do we value personal privacy? It was indeed correct to say this year, 2001 is the year of the Great Privacy Debate.
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