#snowden #privacy #newera
Edward Snowden is back in the news. Snowden is promoting a new book, Permanent Record. In the book, a memoir, he goes on to provide a more in-depth record of what happened. This is not a book review, rather a look at how things have changed, if at all, since his revelations, back in 2013.
I have been working in technology for a long time, circa 2001. I got my first computer back in the early 90s, during the Prodigy and AOL days. I still remember my first computer, it was an IBM 486sx. The SX part meant it was more a 386dx than 486, but I’m not bitter. I cannot remember the specs on the RAM or Disk, but I think they were 4/128MB respectively. In those early days, our government, the American government, didn’t spy on its citizens, or so they claimed. Encryption algorithms were very resource-intensive and most computers didn’t have the resources to spare.
Internet commerce began to boom in the early 2000s, and I recall SSL certificates became a must-have for completing credit card transactions. I recall teaching my mother about the lock on the browser and how important it was to make sure it was on when purchasing anything online. However, even then, encryption was problematic and expensive (the SSL certificates used to cost thousands of dollars). So companies kept online encryption to necessary pages (shopping mostly).
The world pretty much functioned in this way all the way until 2013, when Snowden’s trove of documents hit the world through various channels and journalists. It was then we realized multiple things which our government had kept secret:
- The government was collecting everything and anything
- The collection was not limited to international actors, as they once claimed
- Large technology companies, one of which I worked for, were secretly providing back-door access to said government
Those were the big take-aways. What up until that point was considered a conspiracy, turned out to be true. In particular, at the company I worked for at the time, I recall two messages from management; 1) denial of the claim of cooperation and 2) an immediate move to encrypt ALL communication.
The latter point, a large project in which I was involved, opened my eyes to how insecure internet connections were and how vulnerable we were to eavesdroppers.
So what has happened since? Many things. As a starter, the default communication protocol we use is now HTTPS. This has become so important, that Google will down-rank your site if it does not use HTTPS. A barrage of communication applications and protocols have flooded us. From apps like Signal, to Whatsapp, to Telegram. The default storage state in our cellphones and computers is encrypted and biometric means have both, been created, and have become ever more accurate. VPNs, something you only used for work, have become a household necessity, as have MFA and password managers. Finally, a whole new way of browsing the internet to return us to the anonymous days is readily available in the form of Tor and the onion protocol.
The world, after Snowden’s revelations, has become more secure and private (through encryption). The tools available to us these days would not be here, or be as easily available to us, had Snowden not blown the lid on the government’s activities.
At the same time, in what feels like a parallel universe, our world has also become less private and secure. While all of the tools and technologies I noted above have emerged to help us remain safer and more anonymous, an equal number of company data-breaches and devices have emerged that in turn have made us just as vulnerable. Experian was hacked in 2017 and in the process leaked actionable financial information which will soon come back to haunt us. We are giving, freely, more of our information to a shrinking number of large corporations. If one of them is hacked, a large portion of the global population will be affected. There are cameras and microphones with us at all times. Alexa, Siri and “Hey Google”, they are always listening. All a thief needs to do is look at your, often public, social media feed to find out if you are home or not.
For those people that say; “Hey, I have nothing to hide…” or “soon there will be too much information for them to make sense of it”. I say; 1) Everyone has something to hide. Humans, by custom, seek privacy. Otherwise we’d all live together without walls. 2) Machine learning has already addressed this issue. If there is one thing machines are good for, is dealing with large amounts of information.
So has the world changed since Snowden’s revelations? As my grandma used to say “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.
