Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace (33 page)

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Authors: Ronald J. Deibert

Tags: #Social Science, #True Crime, #Computers, #Nonfiction, #Cybercrime, #Security, #Retail

BOOK: Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
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12
In a May 2012 article:
Sam Biddle outlines the physical elements of the Internet that could be targeted in “How to Destroy the Internet,”
Gizmodo
, May 23, 2012,
http://ca.gizmodo.com/5912383/how-to-destroy-the-internet
.

13
The cause of the severed cables is unknown:
The 2008 severing of cable systems in the Mediterranean Sea is detailed in Asma Ali Zain, “Cable Damage Hits One Million Internet Users in U.A.E.,”
Khaleej Times
, February 4, 2008,
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=theuae&xfile=data/theuae/2008/february/theuae_february121.xml
. See also Andrew Blum,
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
(New York: HarperCollins, 2012).

14
a defunct and wayward Russian satellite:
The 2009 satellite collision is detailed in “Satellite Collision Leaves Significant Debris Clouds,”
Orbital Debris Quarterly News
13, no.2 (2009). The Kessler Syndrome is discussed in detail in Burton G. Cour-Palais and Donald J. Kessler, “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt,”
Journal of Geophysical Research
83 (1978): 2637–2646. See also Daniel H. Deudney, “High Impacts: Asteroidal Utilization, Collision Avoidance, and the Outer Space Regime,” in ed. W. Henry Lambright,
Space Policy in the Twenty-First Century
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

15
Space is also an arena within which state intelligence agencies:
The literature on American and Soviet space assets developed during the Cold War is sparse because of secrecy. Some important exceptions are Jeffrey Richelson,
America’s Space Sentinels
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999); William E. Burrows,
Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security
(New York: Random House, 1986); James Bamford,
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
(New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Ronald J. Deibert, “Unfettered Observation: The Politics of Earth Monitoring From Space,” in ed. W. Henry Lambright,
Space Policy in the Twenty-First Century
.

3: BIG DATA: THEY REAP WHAT WE SOW

1
Big Data: They Reap What We Sow:
On big data, see danah boyd and Kate Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon,”
Information, Communication, & Society
15, no.5 (2012): 662–679; and David Bollier,
The Promise and Peril of Big Data
, Aspen: The Aspen Institute, 2010,
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/pubs/The_Promise_and_Peril_of_Big_Data.pdf
.

2
Malte Spitz had virtually every moment of his life tracked:
The Malte Spitz timeline can be found in Malte Spitz, “Six Months of My Life in 35,000 Records,”
http://www.malte-spitz.de/blog/4103927.html
.

3
IBM predicts that in 2013, we will be producing five exabytes:
IBM explains big data in “What is Big Data?,” IBM,
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/
. See also “200 Million Tweets Per Day,” Twitter, June 30, 2011,
http://blog.twitter.com/2011/06/200-million-tweets-per-day.html
. In “Gigatweet/Counter,”
GigaTweet
, November 6, 2011,
http://gigatweeter.com/counter
, the tweet-tracking service determined that as of November 6, 2011, 29,700,500,268 tweets had been created. GigaTweet’s counter has since stopped due to “technical changes in the way Twitter generates their tweet IDS.” See also Alex Hudson, “The Age of Information Overload,” BBC, August 14, 2012,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9742180.stm
.

4
mobile data traffic more than doubled:
Cisco’s latest global mobile data traffic forecast can be found in “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011–2016,”
Cisco
, 2012,
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11–520862.pdf

5
Simply by collating the number, location, and frequency of search queries:
More on Google Flu Trends can be found at “Tracking Flu Trends”
Google Official Blog
, November 11, 2008,
http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2008/11/tracking-flu-trends.html
.

6
Researchers at Stanford University are testing an app:
The M-Maji water app has been discussed in Sarina A. Beges, “In Kenyan Slum, Mobile Phones Pinpoint Better Water,” Program on Liberation Technology, October 26, 2012,
http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu/news/in_kenyan_slum_mobile_phones_pinpoint_better_water_20121026/
.

7
The big-data market stood at just over $5 billion:
David Floyer, Jeff Kelly, and David Vellante list IBM, Intel, and HP as the current big-data market leaders (by revenue) in “Big Data Market Size and Vendor Revenues,” Wikibon, May 29, 2012,
http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Big_Data_Market_Size_and_Vendor_Revenues
.

8
Customized dating and vacation ads:
Claude Castelluccia, Mohamed-Ali Kaafar, and Minh-Dung Tran examine the privacy concerns generated by the practice of tracking users’ online behaviours in “Betrayed By Your Ads!: Reconstructing User Profiles from Targeted Ads,” (Paper presented at the 12th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Vigo, Spain, July 10–13, 2012),
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2359017
.

9
A tracking-awareness project:
More on the Collusion tool is provided on Mozilla’s website at “Introducing Collusion: Discover Who’s Tracking You Online,”
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/
. The
Wall Street Journal
has documented the widespread use of tracking technology and what this type of surveillance means for consumers and society in its “What They Know” series:
http://online.wsj.com//files/19/21/82/f192182/public/page/what-they-know-2010.html
.

10
The small print included with many applications and/or service contracts:
Tom Kelly investigates fourteen popular mobile apps and documents the type of personal information and data the apps can access in “Free Apps ‘Can Spy on Texts and Calls’: Smartphone Users Warned of Privacy Dangers,”
Daily Mail
, February 27, 2012,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2106627/Internet-firms-access-texts-emails-pictures-spying-smartphone-apps.html
.

11
Facebook’s European headquarters is in Dublin, Ireland:
Ireland has strict privacy laws to which Facebook must adhere, as reported in Kashmir Hill, “Max Schrems: The Austrian Thorn In Facebook’s Side,”
Forbes
, February 7, 2012,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/07/the-austrian-thorn-in-facebooks-side/
.

12
Over the years, Facebook’s default privacy settings:
A timeline documenting changes to Facebook’s privacy policy can be found in Kurt
Opsahl, “Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 28, 2010,
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline
.

13
caught uploading members’ mobile phone contacts:
In 2012, many major app companies were sued in a class action lawsuit for selling mobile apps that uploaded users’ address book data without their knowledge or consent. Companies included Path, Twitter, Apple. Facebook, Beluga, Yelp, Burbn, Instagram, Foursquare, Gowalla, Foodspotting, LinkedIn, Electronic Arts, Kik Interactive, and more. See “Tons of Companies Sued in Class Action Lawsuit over Uploading Phone Addressbooks,”
Tech Dirt
, March 20, 2012,
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120316/00561518126/tons-companies-sued-class-action-lawsuit-over-uploading-phone-addressbooks.shtml
. See also Julia Angwin and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “Selling You on Facebook,”
Wall Street Journal
, April 7, 2012,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577327744009046230.html?mod=WSJ_WhatTheyKnowPrivacy_MIDDLETopMiniLeadStory
; Nick Bilton and Nicole Perlroth, “Mobile Apps Take Data without Permission,”
New York Times
, February 15, 2012,
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/google-and-mobile-apps-take-data-books-without-permission/
; “Now Twitter Admits ‘Harvesting’ Users’ Phone Contacts Without Telling the Owners as Apple Announces Crackdown,”
Daily Mail
, February 16, 2012,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2101934/Apple-moves-stop-Facebook-Twitter-accessing-iPhone-users-address-books-permission.html
; “Statement of Justin Brookman,” Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, Hearing on Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones, and Your Privacy, May 10, 2011,
https://www.cdt.org/files/pdfs/20110510_mobile_privacy.pdf
; and Lito Cruz, Andre Olober, and Kristopher Welsh, “The Danger of Big Data: Social Media as Computational Social Science,”
First Monday
17, no.7 (2012),
http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3993/3269
.

14
U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that Facebook had engaged in:
The FTC accused Facebook of deceiving “consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.” This was documented in Dominic Rushe, “Facebook Reaches Deal with FTC
Over ‘Unfair and Deceptive’ Privacy Claims,”
Guardian
, November 29, 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/29/facebook-ftc-privacy-settlement
.

15
freedom of information request to find out more about the secret agreement:
Electronic Privacy Information Center’s (EPIC) executive director, Marc Rotenberg, believed that the Google–NSA agreement covered more than just the Google breach, and that both Google and the NSA were in talks before Google found out that it had been compromised in a computer attack. See Adam Gabbatt, “Google Teams Up with National Security Agency to Tackle Cyber Attacks,”
Guardian
, February 5, 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/google-national-security-agency-cyber-attack
; and Jaikumar Vijayan, “Google Taps NSA to Safeguard Its Data,”
Computer World
, February 4, 2010,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/188557/google_taps_nsa_to_safeguard_data.html
.

16
Network operators and service providers vary:
See “Retention Periods of Major Cellular Service Providers,” United States Department of Justice,
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/09/retentionpolicy.pdf
.

17
Polish NGO Panoptykon found that Polish authorities:
Panoptykon discusses the effects of Poland’s data retention policies in “How Many Times Did the State Authorities Reach Out for Our Private Telecommunications Data in 2011? We Publish the Latest Research,”
Panoptykon
, March 4, 2012,
http://panoptykon.org/wiadom-osc/how-many-times-did-state-authorities-reach-out-our-private-telecommunications-data-2011-we
.

18
find a way to integrate as much data as possible:
The Total Information Awareness system is discussed in Shane Harris,
The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State
(New York: The Penguin Group, 2010). The
Washington Post
has been documenting the national security buildup in the United States that has occurred since 9/11 in “Top Secret America,” blog,
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america
.

19
As former CIA director David Petraeus explained:
Petraeus’s remarks at the 2012 In-Q-Tel CEO Summit are available at “Remarks by Director David H. Petraeus at In-Q-Tel CEO Summit,” Central
Intelligence Agency, March 1, 2012,
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2012-speeches-testimony/in-q-tel-summit-remarks.html
.

20
In 2012, the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information:
German data protection officials accused Facebook of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent,” and demanded that Facebook destroy all archives of files based on facial recognition technology. See Violet Blue, “Why You Should Be Worried About Facial-Recognition Technology,” CNET, August 29, 2012,
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57502284-93/why-you-should-be-worried-about-facial-recognition-technology/
.

4: THE CHINA SYNDROME

1
“In China, the Internet came with choke points built in.”:
The OpenNet Initiative has documented Chinese cyberspace controls in “China,” in
Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace
, eds. Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 271–298. See also Milton Mueller, “China and Global Internet Governance: A Tiger by the Tail,” in eds. Deibert et al.,
Access Contested
, 177–194; and Greg Walton,
China’s Golden Shield
, International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2001.

2
Contrary to the principles of network neutrality:
Network neutrality
is a term coined by Tim Wu. For Wu, “Network neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally.” See Tim Wu “Network Neutrality FAQ,”
http://timwu.org/network_neutrality.html
and “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination,”
Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law
2 (2003). See also Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney, “No Tolls on the Internet,”
Washington Post
, June 8, 2006,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/07/AR2006060702108.html
; and Milton Mueller,
Net Neutrality as Global Principle for Internet Governance
(Syracuse: Internet Governance Project, 2007).

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