March 29, 2024

The Death of Privacy

May 9, 2007
Bruce Schneider, author of “Beyond Fear” and one of the world’s foremost security experts, spoke at Michigan Technological University recently and his message was chilling. Privacy is dead.
He wasn’t merely referring to the surveillance cameras that are everywhere—in shopping malls, on buses, by ATM machines, at busy intersections and outside government buildings. These have played important parts in tracking down criminals, kidnappers, armed robbers, and people who run red lights. Those are external watchers outside of our control. What Schneider talked about was how we expose ourselves.
About 40 percent of all telephones are now cellular. They not only allow us to tell people what corner we are turning while we drive one-handed. They also tell the telephone people where we are. In order for you to receive a cell phone call, the system has to know where you are. Your phone is in effect a tracking device.
If a record is kept of your cell phone’s whereabouts, it can also map your movements. Rental cars with GPS locators can notify the rental company how many miles you have driven, if you exceeded the speed limit, and if you drove beyond the state lines into restricted territory. Parents can use that information to find out where that teenaged driver went and if he was drag racing on some country road.
If you have OnStar installed in your vehicle, the FBI can reportedly activate that microphone without your knowledge and in effect bug your conversations in the car. They can also turn on your cell phone and listen in to your conversations without your knowing it.
In a past column I wrote about tiny microwave-activated chips that can be installed behind your car license plate so when you pass a toll booth you are automatically billed without having to scramble for change to toss into the bin. Of course, such devices can also track your movements from checkpoint to checkpoint.
Public transit in Portland, Oregon has GPS in all the buses and streetcars. If there’s an incident aboard the bus, the driver need only press a hidden panic button and the police know within 20 feet where the bus is so they can lay an ambush. The GPS system is used on Portland’s streetcars to signal signs in the corner shelters which indicate how many minutes it will take for the next car to arrive and when the next one will follow. This isn’t tied to the schedule, but to the position of the car itself.
As the Foley scandal in Washington reiterated last year, every email, even every keystroke you ever make on your computer is recorded. Did you send someone an obscene or threatening message? Did you get one? Deleting it doesn’t make it go away. As one commentator put it, if you take the card out of the library card file that doesn’t mean the book is no longer on the shelf. Forensic computer experts can mine your hard drive to retrieve information you deleted long ago.
Add to that, your phone records are logged by the system. When we get our long distance phone bills they list all the numbers we called, when the calls were made, and how long we talked. Similar records are kept by the phone company and are available for investigators.
Credit card purchases are also tracked and have been used to follow lost victims of Alzheimer’s who drove off from purchases, not knowing where they were headed.
Timothy McVeigh believed the government had inserted a chip under his skin. The microwave-activated chips are now being inserted into credit cards, like our university’s ID card, which can be used as a cash card to use in copy machines on campus. Similar chips are inserted in the latest passports, driver’s licenses, and other identification. Supposedly, you can disable those by putting them in the microwave oven and roasting them, but you may then have a brown hole in your document.
One would think that collecting such data would overload the system, but Schneider states that storage is now so cheap and hard drives so huge that it is easier to store and keep all that information than it is to remove it. Collecting data can be automatic. Finding it and deleting it takes time. An example of how much information can be stored in a little space, my one gigabyte flash drive which is no bigger than two sticks of chewing gum currently stores well over 1,000 manuscripts including a dozen novels and it’s no more than half full. That’s about 30 years of records.
I pointed out to Schneider that with everyone armed with a cell phone, a mugger takes a chance that his assault will be witnessed and several people are likely to call 911 at once. “Yes,” he said. “There’s very little crime in a police state.”
Except, of course, if the state itself is the criminal and the crime is invasion of our privacy. There are fewer and fewer places left where you are not observed, but are not observed — yet.
Visit the web site www.hu.mtu.edu/~hlsachs where you can listen to two stories, read a third, read reviews, and find links to the publishers of my books.


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