getting to know our numerical selves

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Bloomberg Businessweek

Politics & Policy

Balancing Security and Liberty in the Age of Big Data

By Paul Ford on June 13, 2013

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-13/balancing-security-and-liberty-in-the-age-of-big-data

A very large Internet company once had the noble impulse to share some of its data with the research

community. It made three months of log files from its search service available to all. The company took many

steps to preserve privacy, removing personal information and randomizing ID numbers in the belief that this

would make it impossible to identify any of the more than 650,000 customers whod used the service. But

Internet hobbyists, professional researchers, and journalists were able to ferret out many of the users. No.4417749, for example, was a Georgia widow. Another user appeared to be planning a murder. Today, the

AOL (AOL) Search Log Scandal is remembered as one of the weirdest missteps in Internet history.

That took place an epoch ago, way back in 2006. Now anyone with a few dollars and a knack for computers

can rent some cloud capacity and set up a stack of totally free technologies to deal with enormous amounts of

data. Managing this data is a key part of functioning as a large Internet company. If youre the intelligence

apparatus of a global superpower, and your job is to keep an eye on people who are contemplating terrible

acts, this data is incredibly valuable. Youre going to do what you can to get your hands on it. Once you do,

you can employ beautiful, supple pieces of softwaresome with point-and-click interfaces and little

iconsto help you understand what youre seeing. Its powerful stuff.

Thats essentially whats been going on. From a series of leaks to the Guardian newspaper weve learned that

Verizon (VZ) turns over logs of all its callsthe numbers, locations, and other metadata, but not audio

from calls themselvesto the National Security Agency every day. Thanks to a 29-year-old Booz Allen

Hamilton (BAH) consultant named Edward Snowden, we also learned of a program called Prism. The detailsare uncertain: At first it seemed that companies such as Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB),

and Microsoft (MSFT) had given the NSA open access to all of their user information. Now it seems that

these companies are merely streamlining the way that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests work,

setting up a secured drop-point service for the NSA to use. Of course, this implies that there are so many

requests that a special expediting system is neededand since we dont know how much data is being

shared, nor which is domestic or international, the leak about the NSA program has become a global

sensation.

Public debate about how to strike a balance between security and liberty in the age of global terrorism and

Big Data is long overdue. And despite the insistence of the countrys elected leaders that the NSAs activities

pose no threat to law-abiding citizens, we cant merely shrug off the details. The total absorption of our

telecommunications system into the national security apparatus should give all of us pause. But it shouldnt

be shocking. Thats because the vast digital trove of secrets amassed by the government isnt a secret.

Amid all the fury over the Snowden leak, its easy to forget that when asked in a March 12 hearing if the

NSA collects any type of data at all on millions of Americans, the director of National Intelligence, James

Clapper, said, No sir, not wittingly. Later, on NBC, Clapper offered this explanation: What I was thinking

of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers of those books in the metaphorical library. Collecting data, he

said, would mean taking the books off the shelf, opening it up, and reading it.

ncing Security and Liberty in the Age of Big Data - Businessweek http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/125430-balancing-

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In other words, the NSA is building a giant card catalog of human beings, many of whom are Americans.

Theyre not actually collecting their conversations, or the people themselves, but all the data about their

conversationsnot the data but the metadata.

Its entirely possible that Clapper believes he has drawn a sensible ethical line here. Yet as that AOL case in

2006 made clear, metadata can be revealing. Search histories or call logs like those the NSA ingests and

presumably stores are hardly the same as Dewey Decimal numbers. Theyre more like the index in the back

of a book. What the NSA seems to be doing is treating hundreds of millions of people like open books and

indexing them: Who are they, who do they know, where have they been, and so forth.

Data thats well-defined and cleanly organized can be connected to whole other swaths of data. So once you

build big organized indexes of human beingsone of their search terms, one of their phone calls, for

exampleyou can merge them into one mega-index. And you can combine that mega-index with other

mega-indexes. Theres enormous power in linking things. Google famously got its start by judging the way

one page connected to another on the Web. Facebook has its social graph of interconnected people and

organizations. Person A connects to person B, and by inference to all of person Bs friends, too.

This capability is so powerful and compelling that it gets hard not to link things. That a midlevel external

consultant such as Snowden could have access to so many poorly designed PowerPoint slides doesntnecessarily demonstrate that the NSA is bad at keeping secrets. It could imply that these programs are so

typical inside the organization that theyre almost taken for granted. Perhaps people like Director Clapper

really do believe, or have chosen to believe, that building a huge index to the invisible library of humanity is

essentially a clerical act that doesnt fall under the same moral category as surveillance. He might argue that a

program like Prism doesnt involve digging up secrets so much as combining ways of seeing the world.

But theres a weird side effect for the rest of us. We are not just ourselves anymore. Each one of us has a new,

statistical self living in databases around the world. Its those selves, uniquely identified bundles of behavior,

that marketers target and companies try to reach. These are remarkable, distributed portraits of what we read,

what we eat, and where we sleep. When it comes to our statistical selves, the difference between the NSA and

private companies such as Facebook or Google or Amazon.com (AMZN) lies in what the government can do

with the data it collects. Its building that giant index so that, if it needs to, it can actively cross the line

between your statistical self and your real, physical self. Its the difference between would you like to

receive local coupons for businesses you love? and why is there a van in front of our house?

Do we have a choice? Not much of one, not yet. Its possible but very burdensome to encrypt all of your data

and become less snoopable. Americans, according to polls, just dont care that much about this sort of

privacy. As long as the line between the statistical self and the real self isnt crossed, why worry? Full

participation in modern culture, one could argue, requires us to continually leave these data trails, to build

these other selves, all bound to be indexed inside the NSAs secret empire at Fort Meade, Md.

Will that change, now that the extent of surveillance has been revealed? Its hard to imagine the president

doing much, since the executive branch has become an executive dashboard: a world of online petitions and

spreadsheets and briefings produced from the very data under discussion. The legislature could act, but no

one ever went broke underestimating the technical savvy of the U.S. Congress.

There are, however, some basic questions an informed citizenry can and should ask. Where is this data being

collected? Where does it come from? How long is it stored? Which databases are linked? And another one:

Can I see? To its credit, the NSA does allow you to request your own file and see the information it has on

record. You can mail the request to Fort Meade, fax it, or e-mail it (with a special digital signature). It takes a


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while to process; obviously the NSA would prefer not to share this information with you. The irony is that

the NSA is very likely the organization that best understands the digital self-portraits weve painted over the

Internet years. Searching for terrorists, its built an unbelievably large index of human events.

As the conversation unfolds, its likely that the media will focus on individuals: Edward Snowden and his

motives, or the terrorists caught out. But dont forget all of that data, all those captured moments. We deserve

to know this databases shape and how it protects us. As the weeks go on and people in power talk about

needles, keep your eye on the haystack.

2013 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved. Made in NYC


6/17/2013

getting to know our numerical selves

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