“The core of our American democracy is the right to vote. Implicit in that right is the notion that that vote be private, that vote be secure, and that vote be counted as it was intended when it was cast by the voter. And I think what we’re encountering is a pivotal moment in our democracy where all of that is being called into question.”
Verified Voting Foundation
There are three areas in our lives where, with government connivance, we reluctantly accept intrusion on our privacy. One is unsolicited phone calls, the second is bulk mail and the third is spam.
Phone Solicitor
The first came about because of collusion by phone companies which creatively sought a money maker in screening telephone solicitors by charging extra for caller ID. So now a fair number of Americans pay what I consider to be an unnecessary fee because the government and phone companies won’t regulate intrusions on our domestic life.
After a fair number of years and much pressure they finally instituted the infamous do not call list, but it has the notorious “previous business relationship” clause that allows anyone you have bought something from some time in your life to call you. So unfortunately I regularly receive calls from a certain auto glass repair company that some years ago fixed a crack in my windshield because a dump truck carrying gravel without a cover — and also breaking the law — left enough of that gravel on my car that I might as well have been in a hailstorm. No, I did not get his license number.
Junk Mail
As for bulk mail it also exacts a fee from us just like telephone solicitors, that fee coming in increased postal rates because bulk rate mail is essentially subsidized by regular mail. So every day our mailbox is full of catalogs, credit card offers, driveway black topping and roofing circulars, and everything else that falls under the category of junk mail.
In my feisty younger years I used to write “return to sender” on all junk mail but over time as the amount of bulk mail has increased I began to feel like the proverbial person with a finger in the dike. Because magazines and nonprofits use bulk mail there has been much pressure to not raise its cost, because these organizations claim adding even a penny to the bulk mail rate would jeopardize their existence.
As a result, along with Newsweek we get the L L. Bean catalog, our former college news magazine and various small publications full of coupons for local businesses. That government could correct the cost imbalance between bulk and regular mail seems obvious, but in these tough economic times raising the cost of bulk mail would put government in the unenviable position of increasing the cost of doing business.
Lately my state to government was even found to be selling off information from drivers’ license applications to phone solicitors and bulk mail senders. Its excuse was that it helped to balance the budget. That this constituted a tax on the rest of us seem to escape no new taxes politicians.
Spam
Which brings us to the third area — spam. Just as with unsolicited phone calls lack of ISP policing and government action forces all of us to invest in anti-spam programs that unfortunately fail to keep my e-mail box from overflowing. Like many people I keep separate GMail and Yahoo accounts for those times when firms want my e-mail address. I call them my spam accounts.
Spam has now grown into a multimillion dollar industry, but it has also grown into a nightmare because through the door opened by spam come viruses, malware, and scams. As a result, like many users I now have anti-spyware, anti-spam, antivirus, and anti-malware programs. Like having to subscribe to caller ID, this software adds to the cost of owning a computer, plus all of them hog memory because they are running in the background waiting to nab some threat to my files like a guard dog watching my house one program–Win Patrol, which I would recommend– even uses a dog as its symbol, barking a warning each time it catches something.
Like some old man reminding the grandkids of the old days, I’ve been building and programming computers long enough to remember a time when there was little or no spam, you didn’t need an antivirus program and no one had even heard of spyware. Of course, back then installing memory chips was not for the fainthearted, hard drives held less than those stamp-sized memory cards and it took an hour to spell check a simple document, usually imperfectly
Spyware, malware and viruses should put people in prison just as if they burglarized your home, but government penalties for this are a mere slap on the wrist, plus trying to keep up with these jerks is like swatting mosquitoes. What is more, as well all know, a good number operate well outside the three-mile limit. Meanwhile ISPs, which charge you to police this crap, sound as innocent as phone companies claiming they can’t regulate telephone solicitors. All this would probably just be an unwelcome nuisance were it not for those aspects of malware that take it far beyond the problems we face of with bulk mail and telephone intrusions.
Invasion of Privacy
Our Internet wanderings have now become a huge source of revenue for companies that gather these data and sell it to market research firms. If you think Google has become rich just because it is a pretty good search engine, I have some real estate I’d like to sell you. The holy grail of Internet marketing is targeted advertising. The idea is I get on my screen ads for things that are directed at my tastes. It sounds good in principle, but it has become annoying — and disconcerting — to see searches with businesses in my hometown turn up every time I use Google.
The long voiced fear by many has been what could be done with these data. To me gathering any data on me without my permission is a flat out invasion of privacy. In addition the data that is gathered about me is mine. I should decide who can access it and how it is used.
Yet today many Americans accept invasions of Internet privacy as they do some of the provisions of the Patriot Act. Curiously the Patriot Act is one regulation that prevents you from guarding your privacy. There are programs that will make your online activities totally anonymous, but the government discourages them or requires that they be less than perfect in hiding your activities because they also might cloak the activities of so-called terrorists.
To me the gathering of Internet data whether by spyware, cookies or other means is like having a permanent wiretap on my phone. However the electronic frontier types who oppose any Internet regulation and misguided souls who believe it is the price we have to pay to protect our democracy, make regulating these activities difficult.
Abuses
While the companies who gather these data claim to keep it under lock and key, there have been enough cases of hackers accessing these databases to lend support for the idea that anything you do on the net is as open as if you are house were bugged.
Let’s just start with the well-known fact that many of us work in cubicles where our Internet activities are closely monitored. If you work in a large office with a network you can assume that everything you do on the Internet is known by your employer. The media are full of cases of employees fired because they used the company computer to order from Lands End or play Internet Texas Hold’em.
Several futurists have proposed that the time will come when coporations will monitor your computer activity to keep track of your productivity. With spyware that can literally record keystrokes as you peck them, companies will be able to compare how much you do in a day against how much I accomplish. It will be like the old days when miners were paid by the amo9unt of coal they shoveled.
As for surfing the net at home, the very nature of the way the Internet works operates against privacy. As we all know, each time we log on to the net we receive a unique IP address. Although that address is not tagged to our names, even the most elementary hacker can begin to connect the two. Look up your own IP at Who Is or one of the other IP tracking services and you will see what I mean. ISPs are supposed to keep IP addresses private, but my guess is that few people have ever read their ISP’s privacy notice.
Then there is email. Most of us believe that it is illegal for someone to read or disclose the contents of an electronic communication, but this actually has dozens of loopholes, as the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse points out:
- The ISP may view private e-mail if it suspects the sender is attempting to damage the system or harm another user. However, random monitoring of e-mail is generally prohibited.
- The ISP may legally view and disclose private e-mail if either the sender or the recipient of the message consents to the inspection or disclosure. Many ISPs require a consent agreement from new members when signing up for the service.
- If the e-mail system is owned by an employer, the employer may inspect the contents of employee e-mail on the system. Therefore, any e-mail sent from a business location is probably not private. Several court cases have determined that employers have a right to monitor e-mail messages of their employees. (See PRC Fact Sheet 7 on employee monitoring, www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs7-work.htm .)
- Services may be required to disclose personal information in response to a court order or subpoena. A subpoena may be obtained by law enforcement or as part of a civil lawsuit. The government can only get basic subscriber information with a subpoena. The government needs a search warrant to get further records. A subpoena as part of a private civil lawsuit may disclose more personal information.
- The USA PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and amended in 2006, makes it easier for the government to access records about online activity.
Even with these safeguards, there have far too many notorious cases of information leaks from online databases. Last August, the New Hampshire Attorney General announced a significant number of unauthorized transactions had been made using Well Fargo’s access codes. The report stated:
The information currently available indicates that personal information including name, address, and date of birth, social security number, and driver’s license number and, in some cases, credit account information was accessed by an unauthorized person or persons. About 7,000 individuals are affected by this incident.
Then there was the much-publicized case of the hacker who broke into Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s private email account when she was running for Vice President and posted the information on the Internet. The New York Times reported that in 2008 a so- called “glitch” allowed the F.B.I to view hundreds of email accounts instead of just the one it had permission to investigate.
The Real Worry
Where this gets especially disconcerting is its impact on that often tenuous intersection between democracy and privacy, particularly as it concerns voting rights. Internet data is a serious threat to democracy, especially now that we are switching over to electronic voting. I have written before about the perils of electronic voting, so just a brief recital of some of the abuses and scandals will suffice.
- In 1999, officials of the Sequoia voting machines company were indicted for bribing Louisiana elections commissioner Jerry Fowler with $8 million. In 2005, Sequoia raised a few eyebrows when it was acquired by the Venezuelan company Smartmatic.
- In 2002, Bev Harris, who would write Black Box Voting–one of the classics of electronic voting literature–first began writing about electronic voting fraud after she discovered that U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel had ownership in and had been CEO of the company that built the machines which counted his own votes. (The company: Election Systems & Software).
- In 2003, Harris, whom Salon.com referred to as the “Erin Brockovich of elections” (Salon.com), just weeks after a stunning electoral upset in Georgia that tipped control of the U.S. Senate, discovered 40,000 secret voting machine files — including a set of files called “rob-Georgia” containing instructions to replace Georgia’s computerized voting files before the election. The files she found contained databases with votes in them and the voting machine programs themselves. She downloaded the files on Jan. 23, 2003 and set them free on the Internet a few months later, where they were studied by scientists and security experts.
Like marketers who pay dearly for information on your Internet wanderings, political consultants covet any information about voters. The sophistication of analyzing voters has increased geometrically in the last decade. The use of micro-targeting allows politicians to tailor their messages to areas as small as a city block.
It also allows them to construct voting districts that protect incumbents. The true reason people are frustrated with politics has less to do with the bogeyman of corporate influence than it has to do with the fact that a majority of congressional seats are now safe.
Some Frightening Scenarios
The next stage of targeting voters is on the horizon and represents the most serious threat to voting rights since the framers wrote the Constitution. It involves using Internet data along with micro-targeting with a few hacks thrown in for good measure. In short, the day is fast approaching where your vote is no longer private and Big Brother will watch over you.
The anonymous ballot is one of the most precious principles of any democratic society. In this country we no longer fear that a negative vote will bring arrests, beatings or even death. We do not fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night instead my political refugee family.
But there are many other potential forms of reprisal at the disposal of people who know your voting record. Start with the feared tax audit. Add to that applications for government benefits or jobs, applications for private-sector jobs, home loans, or anything else you might apply for or need.
This may all seem fanciful but we are not far from being able to put in place voter recognition technology. As the old rule goes — I believe it was Arthur Clarke who claimed this 1 — we’re a technology exists it will be abused. That is why the examples of junk mail, telephone solicitors and spam become germane. We have grown to accept them and with an intrusion on our privacy government has sided with the abusers and not with its citizens.
By allowing this, they have stuck the proverbial camel’s nose into the tent and the camel that threatens to walk in and lay waste to democracy is named voting privacy. And lest we can rein in other abuses of our privacy is only a small step to abusing voter privacy.
Let me posit how it could be done. All it would involve is linking voting records, marketing data and census information. Put those three together along with hacking into computerized voting data and someone will be able to predict with surprising accuracy how you will vote.
The scary thing about voter privacy abuse is that because it will be private we will never know when it takes place. We don’t get that job we applied for. We fail a building inspection. Our car insurance increases. We pay more and we don’t know why.
From this the next step is to open the intimidation and voter coercion. Once voting is no longer anonymous you maintain power by openly intimidating voters. You no longer need to beat them or jail them, all you have to do is make their lives miserable.
This is the nightmare in the attic of the house we have permitted government and business to build around us the time is long overdue to put a stop to these current abuses of privacy. The camel’s nose may be in the tent, but we can still keep it from getting in any further.
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