Year: 2013

The Oddities of CBC’s Snowden Redactions

/ Christopher Parsons / 3 Comments

cbcThe CBC has recently partnered with Glenn Greenwald to publish some of Edward Snowden’s documents. Taken from the National Security Agency (NSA), the documents the CBC is exclusively reporting on are meant to have a ‘Canadian focus.’ Many of the revelations that have emerged from Mr. Snowden’s documents have provided insights into how the NSA conducts its activities both domestically and abroad, and have also shown how the Agency’s ‘Five Eyes’ partners conduct their affairs.

Journalists have redacted documents or provided partial copies since first reporting on the Snowden documents in summer 2013. To date, no common method or system of redacting documents has been agreed upon between the journalists and news agencies covering these documents.

In this post I want to spend some time talking about the redactions that the CBC has made to the sole Snowden document it has (thus far) released to the public. I begin by explaining how I got my – almost entirely unredacted – version of the document and why I am comparing my copy to the ‘publicly released’ version. Next, I discuss the various redactions made by the CBC and comment on the appropriateness of each redaction. Where I think that information ought to have been released, or the redacted information is outside of the ‘personal information’ reason the CBC gave for redacting information, I provide or describe the information to the public. Finally, I write about the need for a more robust way of redacting documents: as I will make clear, the CBC’s approach seems (at best) scattershot and (at worst) inappropriate. The CBC is the journalist source that will  be controlling the Canadian Snowden documents and, as a result, has a public obligation to dramatically improve its explanations for why it is redacting sections of the leaked documents. Continue reading →

A National ID Card By Stealth? The BC Services Card – Privacy Risks, Opportunities & Alternatives

/ Christopher Parsons

2013-National-ID-Card-by-Stealth-coverThe policies, politics, and technologies associated with Canadian identity documents and their surrounding data architectures are incredibly important issues because of their capacities to reconfigure the state’s relationship with its residents. The most recent such system, the BC Services Card, is designed to expand digital service delivery options that are provided to residents of British Columbia by the provincial government and by corporations. The government, to date, remains uncertain about what services will be associated with the Card. It also remains uncertain about how data linked to the Card’s usage will be subsequently be data mined, though promises that such mining efforts will be exciting and respective of people’s privacy.

Vague statements and broad policy potentials are the very things that make people concerned about identity systems, especially systems that are untested, expensive, and designed with unclear intentions, objectives, or benchmarks.

To try and unpack the policy issues associated with the Services Card, Dr. Kate Milberry and I have written a report wherein we suggest that the Services Card may operate as a kind of ‘proto Pan-Canadian’ identity card. Specifically, the Card is designed to be massively interoperable with other province’s (similar) identity document systems as well as with the federal government’s digital delivery service. Similarly, the Card is meant to interoperate with private businesses’ services. To this end, the lead vendor for the project, SecureKey, has already secured telecommunications and financial organizations as key service delivery partners.

The Services Card isn’t necessary good nor evil. But it is a system that has received little public attention, little external technical scrutiny, and even less external policy critique. The province of British Columbia, and indeed residents of other provinces that are taking up the SecureKey offering, need to be properly consulted on the appropriateness, desirability, and feasibility of the Services Card architecture. To date, this has not been performed in British Columbia nor by the Government of Canada. The document that Dr. Milberry and I have written is meant to contribute to the (limited) public discussion. Hopefully the provincial and federal governments pay attention.

Funding for this report was secured by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), and provided for through the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Contributions Program. The text in the report is reflective of the BCCLA’s position towards the Services Card; the report does not, however, necessarily reflect the position of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The executive summary, and download link, of  the report follows.

Executive Summary

For the last several years, British Columbia has been developing the technical infrastructure and legal framework for a comprehensive integrated identity system as part of its “technology and transformation” approach to governance. Otherwise known as “Government 2.0” or e-government, this approach will aggregate the personal information of citizens in order to link and share this data across government bodies. The BC Services Card is the latest in a series of major information technology projects that is part of the Government 2.0 mandate. It is a mandatory provincial ID card that enables access to a range of government services, beginning with health care and driver licencing. The BC Services Card is a key element of unprecedented changes in the way the province collects, accesses and shares personal information, including highly sensitive health information, amongst departments, agencies and even private contractors.

The card is just part of BC’s wide-ranging vision for integrated identity and information management—a vision that scales and interoperates on a federal level. Indeed, the system is not only envisioned to extend to other provinces, in essence forming a pan-Canadian identity architecture, but the ID card is expressly intended to provide authentication conducted by the private sector and facilitation of commercial transactions governed by PIPEDA and applicable provincial private sector privacy legislation. The importance of developments with the BC card for national identity management cannot be overstated: the BC Services Card model is interoperable with the federal system, and thus a (proto) Canadian ID card, and is also meant to be used for commercial and e-commerce transactions. Thus, developments in BC have critically important implications for ID systems provincially and federally, and involve both the public and private sector.

This report examines the normative, technical and policy implications of the BC Services Card and the federal and commercial implications of the technical systems underlying the Services Card. Throughout the report, the ID system is examined from the perspectives of security, privacy and civil liberties, and generally echoes the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC’s call for broad and meaningful public consultation before Phase II of the card program is implemented. Emergent from the analysis of the Services Card is a call for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to work with provincial privacy commissioners to issue a joint resolution on the applicable privacy and security standards for the provincial systems on the basis that they will ultimately compose the national federated system. The report concludes with provincial and federal recommendations for designing an identity system that is secure, privacy-protective, trusted and fit for purpose.

Download: A National ID Card By Stealth? The BC Services Card – Privacy Risks, Opportunities & Alternatives

The Politics of Deep Packet Inspection: What Drives Surveillance by Internet Service Providers?

/ Christopher Parsons / 1 Comment

UVic CrestToday, I am happy to make my completed doctoral dissertation available to the public. The dissertation examines what drives, and hinders, wireline network practices that are enabled by Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) routers. Such routers are in wide use by Internet service providers (ISPs) in Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, and offer the theoretical capacity for service providers to intrusively monitor, mediate, and modify their subscribers’ data packets in real or near-real time. Given the potential uses of the routers, I was specifically interested in how the politics of deep packet inspection intersected with the following issues: network management practices, content control and copyright, advertising, and national security/policing.

Based on the potential capabilities of deep packet inspection technologies – and the warnings that such technologies could herald the ‘end of the Internet’ as it is know by citizens of the West – I explored what has actually driven the uptake of the technology in Canada, the US, and the UK. I ultimately found that though there were variations in different states’ regulatory processes, regulators tended to arrive at common conclusions. Regulatory convergence stands in opposition to the divergence that arose as elected officials entered into the DPI debates: such officials have been guided by domestic politics, and tended to reach significantly different conclusions. In effect, while high-expertise regulatory networks reached common conclusions, elected political officials have demonstrated varying degrees of technical expertise and instead have focused on the politics of communications surveillance. In addition to regulators and elected officials, court systems have also been involved in adjudicating how, when, and under what conditions DPI can be used to mediate data traffic. Effectively, government institutions have served as the primary arenas in which DPI issues are taken up, though the involved government actors often exhibited their own interests in how issues were to be taken up or resolved. The relative role of these different state bodies in the case studies arguably reflects underlying political cultures: whereas regulators are principally involved in the Canadian situation, elected officials and courts play a significant role in the US, whereas the UK has principally seen DPI debates settled by regulators and elected officials.

Ultimately, while there are important comparative public policy conclusions to the dissertation, such conclusions only paint part of the picture about the politics of deep packet inspection. The final chapter of the dissertation discusses why the concepts of surveillance and privacy are helpful, but ultimately insufficient, to appreciate the democratic significance of deep packet inspection equipment. In response, I suggest that deliberative democratic theory can provide useful normative critiques of DPI-based packet inspection. Moreover, these critiques can result in practical policy proposals that can defray DPI-based practices capable of detrimentally stunting discourse between citizens using the Internet for communications. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how this research can be advanced in the future; while I have sought to clear away some of the murk concerning the technology, my research represents only the first of many steps to reorient Internet policies such that they support, as opposed to threaten, democratic values.

Formal Abstract:

Surveillance on the Internet today extends beyond collecting intelligence at the layer of the Web: major telecommunications companies use technologies to monitor, mediate, and modify data traffic in real time. Such companies functionally represent communicative bottlenecks through which online actions must pass before reaching the global Internet and are thus perfectly positioned to develop rich profiles of their subscribers and modify what they read, do, or say online. And some companies have sought to do just that. A key technology, deep packet inspection (DPI), facilitates such practices.

In the course of evaluating the practices, regulations, and politics that have driven DPI in Canada, the US, and UK it has become evident that the adoption of DPI tends to be dependent on socio-political and economic conditions. Simply put, market or governmental demand is often a prerequisite for the technology’s adoption by ISPs. However, the existence of such demand is no indication of the success of such technologies; regulatory or political advocacy can lead to the restriction or ejection of particular DPI-related practices.

The dissertation proceeds by first outlining how DPI functions and then what has driven its adoption in Canada, the US, and UK. Three conceptual frameworks, path dependency, international governance, and domestic framing, are used to explain whether power structures embedded into technological systems themselves, international standards bodies, or domestic politics are principally responsible for the adoption or resistance to the technology in each nation. After exploring how DPI has arisen as an issue in the respective states I argue that though domestic conditions have principally driven DPI’s adoption, and though the domestic methods of governing DPI and its associated practices have varied across cases, the outcomes of such governance are often quite similar. More broadly, I argue that while the technology and its associated practices constitute surveillance and can infringe upon individuals’ privacy, the debates around DPI must more expansively consider how DPI raises existential risks to deliberative democratic states. I conclude by offering some suggestions on defraying the risks DPI poses to such states.

Download ‘The Politics of Deep Packet Inspection: What Drives Surveillance by Internet Service Providers?’ (.pdf)

AT&T’s Anti-Infringement Patent

/ Christopher Parsons

AT&TNetwork surveillance is a persistent issue that privacy advocates warn about on a regular basis. In the face of Edward Snowden’s disclosures, the public has often been concerned about how, when, and why corporations disclose information to policing, security, and intelligence services. Codenamed projects like PRISM, NUCLEON, and MAINWAY, combined with the shadowy nature of how data is collected and used, makes Snowden’s very serious revelations a hot topic to talk, write, and think about.

However, it’s important to recognize that the corporations that are entrusted with significant amounts of our personal information often independently analyze and process our information in ways that we don’t expect. In this post I discuss a patent that AT&T received a little over a year ago to analyze the personal communications of its subscribers to catch instances of copyright infringement. I begin by outlining providing information concerning AT&T’s patent. From there, I discuss other companies’ efforts to develop and deploy similar systems in Europe to shed more light on how AT&T’s system might work. This post concludes by considering a range of reasons that might have driven AT&T to file for their patent, and notes why it’s important to place patents within the broader policy ecosystem that telecommunications companies operate within instead of analyzing such patents in isolation. Continue reading →

How to Dispel the Confusion Around iMessage Security

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

Image by Graham BrennaApple’s hardware and communications products continue to be widely purchased and used by people around the world. Comscore reported in March 2013 that Apple enjoyed a 35% market penetration in Canada, and their desktop and mobile computing devices remain popular choices for consumers. A messaging service, iMessage, spans the entire Apple product line. The company has stated that it “cannot decrypt that data.”

Apple’s statements concerning iMessage’s security are highly suspect. In what follows I summarize some of the serious questions about Apple’s encryption schemas. I then discuss why it’s important for consumers to know whether iMessages are secure from third-party interception. I conclude by outlining how Canadians who use the iMessage application can use Canadian privacy law to ascertain the validity of Apple’s claims against those of the company’s critics. Continue reading →

BC Services Card Report Released

/ Christopher Parsons

Screenshot_2013-04-15_11_24_PMThe proposed imposition of identity cards tends to gets people riled up. This is especially true of the people who are going to have to carry the documents in their purses and wallets. In British Columbia the provincial government has slowly, and quietly, developed an identity card termed the ‘BC Services Card’. The Services Card will effectively be a required piece of documentation for all BC residents as of about 2018; it will be used to access non-emergency medical services, as well as to-be-decided government services provided by education, citizen services, and more.

In 2012, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association commissioned a technical report about the services card from my company, Block G Privacy and Security Consulting. The goal of our report was to contextualize the politics and technology behind the new BC Services Card and, in the process, understand prospective security-and privacy-related issues linked with the initiative. A core aspect of our report consists of a technical survey of the Services Card and its associated infrastructure. As part of our survey we evaluate possible vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a hostile third-party intent on undermining, disrupting, or otherwise compromising Services Cards or the trust BC residents are expected to place in them as technically sophisticated and reliable identity tokens. Given that we lacked direct access to the cards and infrastructure our analyses and critiques were based on limited documentary evidence, expert-level interviews, and secondary sources.

Highlights from the section of the report covering risks and vulnerabilities include:

  •  The importance of ensuring that government actors responsible for issuing the cards are trustworthy; failure to do so could undermine many of the government’s identity assurance processes that underlie the entire card system.
  • Physical security characteristics are positive, though the inclusion of biometric facial images does not necessarily lead to the security enhancements suggested by the government.
  • The near field communication (NFC) chips embedded in the cards are a point of significant vulnerability, insofar as they could be read at a distance, compromised by a malicious actor, or tampered with to intrude into the computers and mobile phones reading the chips.
  • The potential for ‘function creep’, or the expanded use of the Services Card for purposes beyond the current scope of the card. This might include use of the card by private parties or the card ultimately being integrated with the federal government’s planned pan-Canadian identity card.

In light of these risks, we provide the following suggestions to ameliorate potential security dangers:

  • Penetration tests should conducted to ‘attack’ the system, in order to understand where vulnerabilities exist, how they could be exploited, and how to subsequently rectify them. Given the magnitude of the government’s proposed data linking infrastructure associated with the Services Card this kind of analysis is critical. Testers should be given a wide permit in testing the system and not be artificially limited in what they can do to identify vulnerabilities.
  • Public consultations with security experts should occur and consultations findings summarized and subsequently made public. These consultations should attend to how security of the cards and BC residents’ privacy can be maximized.
  • Public audits should be routinely conducted on the systems and infrastructure surrounding the BC Services Card. This should include auditing private vendors who are contracted to provide service.

Our report is available for public download.