Monthly Archives: July 2015

To Encrypt or Not to Encrypt

SpyVsSpyWe are seeing a major policy tug-of-war about privacy on the Internet. On one side are law enforcement and national security agencies that want to be able to monitor everything that happens on the web. On the other side are those that value privacy the most. This is not a new debate and has been going on since the 90s.

Encryption has been around for a while, but it’s generally believed that agencies like the NSA have cracked most existing encryption schemes and are able to readily decipher communications between most parties on the web.

Recently, Michael D. Steinbach, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, testified to Congress that the FBI has no problem with encryption as long as the government still has access to the underlying data. He thinks that encryption between people is a good thing to keep personal data from being intercepted by bad guys on the web, but he still thinks that there are law enforcement and national security concerns that are more important than individual privacy concerns. The real concern is that encryption will allow criminals and terrorists to go ‘dark’ and evade detection or monitoring.

But the revelation that the NSA is spying on everybody has really upset the technology community that run the Internet. The  vision of the Internet was to be a place for the free exchange of information and many technologists believe that widespread surveillance squelches that. And very few people like the idea that the government knows your every secret. And so we see companies that are working to find ways to make communications private from snooping—including from the government.

Apple is the largest company to take a stance and they have initiated end-to-end encryption on the iPhone. The way they have done this only the sender and receiver of a communication can unlock a given message and Apple is not maintaining any way to crack the encryption themselves. This means that Apple is unable to reveal what is inside customer communications even if served with a court order. I am guessing that one day this is going to be put to a legal test and I can picture laws being passed that stop companies like Apple from doing this. And I am sure Apple will fight back, so ultimately this might have to be determined by the Supreme Court.

But there are other groups working on a privacy solution that even laws might not be able to touch very easily. One such company is Ethereum. This is a crowd-funded group in Europe who is building upon the early work with bit coins to build a decentralized communications system where there is nobody in charge because there is no centralized network hub – there is no company like Apple at the core of such a network. In such a hubless network it’s much harder for the government, or even companies like Google and Facebook to spy on you.

This requires the establishment of peer-to-peer networks that is a very different way of structuring the web. Today the basic web structure is based upon software sitting at specific servers. Things are routed today because there is a massive database of DNS addresses that list where everything can be found.

But Ethereum is taking a totally different approach. They have built apps that find space on millions of customers’ computers and servers. Thus, they are located everywhere, and yet at no specific place. Ethereum is using this distributed network and building upon the block-chain technology that underlays bit coin trading. The block-chain technology is so decentralized and so secure that nobody but the sender and receiver can know what is inside a communications chain.

Ethereum isn’t really a company, but rather a collective of programmers that intend to disband once they have established the safer communication methods. And they are not the only ones doing this, just one of the more visible groups. This creates a huge dilemma for law enforcement. There is a huge amount of web traffic dedicated to nefarious purposes like drug trafficking and child pornography, without even considering terrorists groups. Governments have had some limited success in shutting down platforms like Silk Road, but the systems Ethereum and others are building don’t have a centralized hub or a place where the system can be stopped.

I have no doubt that the government will find ways to crack into these systems eventually, but for now it seems like the privacy advocates are one step ahead of them, much in the same way that hackers are one step ahead of the web security companies.

I don’t know how I feel about this. Certainly nobody benefits by enabling huge rings of criminals and terrorists. And yet I get angry thinking that the government is tracking everything I am doing online. I’ve read all of the sci-fi books that explore the terrible consequences of government abuse due to surveillance and it’s not pretty. I am sure that I am like most people in that I really have nothing to hide. But it still makes me very uneasy to think that we are all being watched all of the time.

Lifeline Data and the Digital Divide

FCC_New_LogoThe FCC recently approved moving forward with the process of establishing a low-income subsidy for landline data service. The target subsidy they have set is payment of $9.25 per month towards the broadband bill of qualifying households. I’m really not sure how I feel about this.

Certainly we have a digital divide. While there are still many millions of rural homes that have no broadband alternative, there are even more urban households who can’t afford broadband. The numbers bear this out. A Pew Research survey earlier this year reported that the broadband penetration rate for homes that make less than $25,000 per year is 60% while 97% of homes that make more than $150,000 per year have broadband. The overall national average broadband penetration right now is at about 74% of households and it’s clear that poorer homes have a hard time affording broadband.

If you accept the premise that broadband is becoming a necessity to participate in our culture, and even more importantly that broadband is vital at home for school kids, then we do need a way to get broadband to people who need it.

But I wonder if this program is really going to make a difference and if it will get broadband into a whole lot more homes (versus giving payments to some of those 60% of low income homes that already have broadband). The dollar amount, at $9.25 doesn’t feel like a very big discount on broadband bills that are likely to be $40 or higher in most places. If a home is having trouble affording a $40 broadband bill, I wonder if reducing that to $30 is really going to make it affordable? I’m not sure that the policy makers who are deciding this really understand how little disposable income most working poor families have.

And paying for broadband isn’t the whole cost because homes that can’t afford broadband also have a hard time affording computers. It’s not like you can buy a computer once – I know I have rarely had a computer that lasts more than three years, with some of them dying earlier than that.

I know that many cities already have programs that tackle the computer issue. I know of programs that distribute refurbished computers to homes. And there are more and more school systems that are giving school kids an iPad or other computer so that they don’t have to worry about having a computer at home. For this federal program to be really successful is going to require more of those kinds of programs.

I also wonder how the FCC will cap the amount of money this is going to cost. It’s not going to take a whole lot of households to eat up any funds they set aside for this. The current Lifeline telephone subsidy cost $1.6B in 2014 and pays a $9.25 subsidy for a landline or a cellphone for homes that are below 135% of the poverty line established by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The revised plan is going to keep the $9.25 subsidy and somehow use it to cover both telephone and data connections. The exact details aren’t out, but it was said that no household could collect more than one $9.25 subsidy. If a home is already getting the phone subsidy then they wouldn’t get any additional break on their data connection.

I think every school kid ought to somehow have access to a computer and broadband. I just don’t know that this particular program is going to change the current situation a whole lot and I wonder if there ought to be a different approach. The digital divide is real and kids in poor families are the most affected by it. If this program doesn’t make a big difference I hope we are willing to try something else.