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Canadian Social Media Surveillance: Today and Tomorrow

/ Christopher Parsons / 8 Comments

Image by Maureen Flynn-Burhoe

After disappearing for an extended period of time – to the point that the Globe and Mail reported that the legislation was dead – the federal government’s lawful access legislation is back on the agenda. In response to the Globe and Mail’s piece, the Public Safety Minister stated that the government was not shelving the legislation and, in response to the Minister’s statements, Open Media renewed the campaign against the bill. What remains to be seen is just how ‘lively’ this agenda item really is; it’s unclear whether the legislation remains on a back burner or if the government is truly taking it up.

While the politics of lawful access have been taken up by other parties, I’ve been pouring through articles and ATIP requests related to existing and future policing powers in Canada. In this post I first (quickly) outline communications penetration in Canada, with a focus on how social media services are used. This will underscore just how widely Canadians use digitally-mediated communications systems and, by extension, how many Canadians may be affected by lawful access powers. I then draw from publicly accessible sources to outline how authorities presently monitor social media. Next, I turn to documents that have been released through federal access to information laws to explicate how the government envisions the ‘nuts and bolts’ of their lawful access legislation. This post concludes with a brief discussion of the kind of oversight that is most appropriate for the powers that the government is seeking.

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Vancouver’s Human Flesh Search Engine

/ Christopher Parsons / 20 Comments

Photo by Richard Eriksson

I don’t like violence, vandalism, or other actions that generally cause destruction. Certainly there are cases where violent social dissent is a sad but important final step to fulfil a much needed social change (e.g. overthrowing a ruinous dictator, tipping the scale to defend or secure essential civil rights) but riotous behaviour following a hockey game lacks any legitimating force. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of game seven between the Vancouver Canucks and Boston Bruins a riot erupted in downtown Vancouver that caused significant harm to individuals and damage to the urban environment.

The riot itself is a sad event. What is similarly depressing is the subsequent mob mentally that has been cheered on by the social media community. Shortly after the riot, prominent local bloggers including Rebecca Bollwitt linked to social media websites and encouraged readers/visitors to upload their recordings and identify those caught on camera. In effect, Canadians were, and still are, being encouraged by their peers and social media ‘experts’ to use social media to locally instantiate a human flesh search engine (I will note that Bollwitt herself has since struck through her earliest endorsement of mob-championing). Its manifestation is seemingly being perceived by many (most?) social media users as a victory of the citizenry and inhabitants of Vancouver over individuals alleged to have committed crimes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have significant issues with this particular search engine. In this post, I’m going to first provide a brief recap of the recent events in Vancouver and then I’ll quickly explain the human flesh search engine (HFSE), both how it works and the harms it can cause. I’m going to conclude by doing two things: first, I’m going to suggest that Vancouver is presently driving a local HFSE and note the prospective harms that may befall those unfortunate enough to get caught within its maw. Second, I’m going to suggest why citizens are ill-suited to carry out investigations that depend on social media-based images and reports.

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Recording of ‘Traffic Analysis, Privacy, and Social Media’

/ Christopher Parsons

The abstract for my presentation, as well as references, have already been made available. I wasn’t aware (or had forgotten) that all the presentations from Social Media Camp Victoria were going to be recorded and put on the web, but thought that others visiting this space might be interested in my talk. The camera is zoomed in on me, which means you miss some of the context provided by slides and references to people in the audience as I was talking. (Having quickly looked/listened to some of what I say, I feel as though I’m adopting a presentation style similar to a few people I watch a lot. Not sure how I think about that…The inability to actually walk around – being tethered to the mic and laptop – was particularly uncomfortable, which comes across in my body language, I think.)

Immediately after my presentation, Kris Constable of PrivaSecTech gives a privacy talk on social media that focuses on the inability to control personal information dissemination. Following his presentation, the two of us take questions from the audience for twenty or thirty minutes.

http://bchannelnews.tv/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/mediaplayer/player.swf

Forthcoming Talk at Social Media Club Vancouver

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

Head-On-VancouverI’ve been invited to talk to Vancouver’s vibrant Social Media Club on October 7! I’m thrilled to be presenting, and will be giving a related (though very different) talk from the one a few days earlier at Social Media Camp Victoria. Instead of making traffic analysis a focus, I’ll be speaking more broadly of what I’ll be referring to as a ‘malaise of privacy’. This general discomfort of moving around online is (I will suggest) significantly related to the opaque privacy laws and protections that supposedly secure individuals’ privacy online as contrasted against the daily reality of identity theft, data breaches, and so forth. The thrust will be to provide those in attendance with the theoretical background to develop their own ethic(s) of privacy to make legal privacy statements more accessible and understandable.

See below for the full abstract:

Supplementing Privacy Policies with a Privacy Ethic

Social media platforms are increasingly common (and often cognitively invisible) facets of Western citizens’ lives; we post photos to Facebook and Flickr, engage in conversations on Orkut and Twitter, and relax by playing games on Zynga and Blizzard infrastructures. The shift to the Internet as a platform for mass real-time socialization and service provision demands a tremendous amount of trust on the part of citizens, and research indicates that citizens are increasingly concerned about whether their trust is well placed. Analytics, behavioural advertising, identity theft, and data mismanagements strain the public’s belief that digital systems are ‘privacy neutral’ whilst remaining worried about technological determinisms purported to drive socialized infrastructures.

For this presentation, I begin by briefly reviewing the continuum of the social web, touching on the movement from Web 1.0 to 2.0, and the future as ‘Web Squared’. Next, I address the development of various data policy instruments intended to protect citizens’ privacy online and that facilitate citizens’ trust towards social media environments requiring personal information as the ‘cost of entry’. Drawing on academic and popular literature, I suggest that individuals participating in social media environments care deeply about their privacy and distrust (and dislike) the ubiquity of online surveillance, especially in the spaces they communicate and play. Daily experiences with data protection – often manifest in the form of privacy statements and policies – are seen as unapproachable, awkward, and obtuse by most social media users. Privacy statements and their oft-associated surveillance infrastructures contributes to a broader social malaise surrounding the effectiveness of formal data protection and privacy laws.

Given the presence of this malaise, and potential inability of contemporary data protection laws to secure individuals’ privacy, what can be done? I suggest that those involved in social media are well advised to develop an ethic of privacy to supplement legally required privacy statements. By adopting clear statements of ethics, supplemented with legal language and opt-in data disclosures of personal information, operators of social media environments can be part of the solution to society’s privacy malaise. Rather than outlining an ethic myself, I provide the building blocks for those attending to establish their own ethic. I do this by identifying dominant theoretical approaches to privacy: privacy as a matter of control, as an individual vs community vs hybrid issue, as an issue of knowledge and agency, and as a question of contextual data flows. With an understanding of these concepts, those attending will be well suited to supplement their privacy statements and policies with a nuanced and substantive ethics of privacy.

Forthcoming Talk at Social Media Camp Victoria

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

Social-Media-LandscapeOn October 3 I’ll be presenting at Social Media Camp Victoria with Kris Constable about a few risks to privacy associated with social media. Kris is a leading Canadian privacy advocate and expert in information security and the operator of PrivaSecTec.

I’ll be talking about the use of traffic analysis and data mining practices that can be used to engage in massive surveillance of social networking environments and the value of drawing links between users rather than investigating the content of communications. The argumentative ‘thrust’ is that freedoms of expression and association may offer a approach to secure privacy in the face of weakened search laws. The full abstract can be read below.

Abstract:

Citizens are increasingly moving their communications and forms of expression onto social media environments that encourage both public and private collaborative efforts. Through social media, individuals can reaffirm existing relationships, give birth to new and novel communities and community-types, and establish the classical political advocacy groups that impact government decisions and processes. In coming together online for their various reasons, citizens expect that their capacity to engage with one another should, and in some respect does, parallel their expectations of privacy in the analogue world.

In this presentation, I first outline expectations and realities of privacy on and offline, with an emphasis on data traffic (i.e. non-content) analysis born from Signal Intelligence (SIGINT), and SIGINT’s use in civilian governmental practices. I then proceed to outline, in brief, how social media generally can be used to identify associations and a few reasons why such associations can undermine the communicative privacy expected and needed for the long-term survival of vibrant constitutional democracies. Rather than ending on a note of doom and gloom, however, I suggest a novel way of approaching privacy-related problems stemming from massive traffic data analysis in social media networks. While the language of freedom from unjustified searches is often used to resist traffic analysis, I draw from recent privacy scholarship to suggest that freedom of expression and association offers a novel (and possibly superior) approach to defending privacy interests in social media from SIGINT-based surveillance.

On a Social Networking Bill of Rights

/ Christopher Parsons

I attended this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference and spent time in sessions on privacy in large data sets, deep packet inspection and network neutrality, the role of privacy in venture capital pitches, and what businesses are doing to secure privacy. In addition, a collection of us worked for some time to produce a rough draft of the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights that was subsequently discussed and ratified by the conference participants. In this post, I want to speak to the motivations of the Bill of Rights, characteristics of social networking and Bill proper, a few hopeful outcomes resulting from the Bill’s instantiation and conclude by denoting a concerns around the Bill’s creation and consequent challenges for moving it forward.

First, let me speak to the motivation behind the Bill. Social networking environments are increasingly becoming the places where individuals store key information – contact information, photos, thoughts and reflections, video – and genuinely becoming integrated into the political. This integration was particularly poignantly demonstrated last year when the American State Department asked Twitter to delay upgrades that would disrupt service and stem the information flowing out of Iran following the illegitimate election of President Ahmadinejad. Social networks have already been tied into the economic and social landscapes in profound ways: we see infrastructure costs for maintaining core business functionality approaching zero and the labor that was historically required for initiating conversations and meetings, to say nothing of shared authorship, have been integrated into social networking platforms themselves. Social networking, under this rubric, extends beyond sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and encapsulate companies like Google and Yahoo!, WordPress, and Digg, and their associated product offerings. Social networking extends well beyond social media; we can turn to Mashable’s collection of twenty characteristics included in the term ‘social networking’ for guidance as to what the term captures:

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