Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts

22 October 2017

UK and US Citizens: Please Request Your Personal Data Held By Cambridge Analytica

By now, many people have probably heard about the company Cambridge Analytica.  By its own admission, it played a major role in the success of Donald Trump.  There are also numerous indications that it was involved in the Brexit campaign.

Because Cambridge Analytica is intimately bound up with the London-based company SCL it is possible to make a subject access request in order to find out what information is held about you.  This applies to both UK and US citizens. 

I therefore urge as many people as possible to ask for that data - it only takes a few minutes, and can be done with a simple letter.  Obtaining this information will help us understand what exactly has been happening. Here's what I have sent; please feel free to use and/or modify it:

SCL Group Ltd
c/o Pkf Littlejohn 2nd Floor,
1 Westferry Circus,
Canary Wharf,
London,
United Kingdom, E14 4HD

22.10.17

Dear Sir,

Subject Access Request

I have read numerous reports in the press that you and/or your subsidiaries in the UK or elsewhere hold data on UK/US voters, which may include information about me.

In accordance with the UK Data Protection Act, I am writing to ask you to supply me with a copy of  the information you hold about me, please.

If there is a fee or you require more information in order to fulfil my request, please let me know.

Thank you for your help.

Yours faithfully,

Glyn Moody

You may also wish to make a contribution to this crowdsourced initiative to dig even deeper.  I've given, FWIW.

The stakes here are incredibly high: it is really no exaggeration to say that our democracy and freedom are at play.  I therefore hope you can spare a few minutes to help shed some light on what has happened here.

02 February 2014

Interview: Eben Moglen - "surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything"

(This was original published in The H Open in March 2010.)

Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it.  But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.

Better than almost anyone, Eben Moglen knows what's at stake.  He was General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and helped draft several versions of the GNU GPL.  As well as being Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, he is the Founding Director of Software Freedom Law Center.  And he has an ambitious plan to save us from those seductive but freedom-threatening Web service companies.  He explained what the problem is, and how we can fix it.

GM: So what's the threat you are trying to deal with?

EM:  We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep.  We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage -  machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series of rules which allowed disparate, heterogeneous networks to be networked together around the assumption that everybody's equal. 

In the Web the social harm done by the client-server model arises from the fact that logs of Web servers become the trails left by all of the activities of human beings, and the logs can be centralised in servers under hierarchical control.  Web logs become power.  With the exception of search, which is a service that nobody knows how to decentralise efficiently, most of these services do not actually rely upon a hierarchical model.  They really rely upon the Web  - that is, the non-hierachical peerage model created by Tim Berners-Lee, and which is now the dominant data structure in our world.

The services are centralised for commercial purposes.  The power that the Web log holds is monetisable, because it provides a form of surveillance which is attractive to both commercial and governmental social control.  So the Web with services equipped in a basically client-server architecture becomes a device for surveilling as well as providing additional services.  And surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything we get for free.

The cloud is a vernacular name which we give to a significant improvement in the server-side of the web side - the server, decentralised.  It becomes instead of a lump of iron a digital appliance which can be running anywhere.  This means that for all practical purposes servers cease to be subject to significant legal control.  They no longer operate in a policy-directed manner, because they are no longer iron subject to territorial orientation of law. In a world of virtualised service provision, the server which provides the service, and therefore the log which is the result of the hidden service of surveillance, can be projected into any domain at any moment and can be stripped of any legal obligation pretty much equally freely.

This is a pessimal result.

GM:  Was perhaps another major factor in this the commercialisation of the Internet, which saw power being vested in a company that provided services to the consumer?

EM:  That's exactly right.  Capitalism also has its architectural Bauplan, which it is reluctant to abandon.  In fact, much of what the network is doing to capitalism is forcing it to reconsider its Bauplan via a social process which we call by the crappy name of disintermediation.  Which is really a description of the Net forcing capitalism to change the way it takes.  But there's lots of resistance to that, and what's interesting to all of us I suspect, as we watch the rise of Google to pre-eminence, is the ways in which Google does and does not - and it both does and does not - wind up behaving rather like Microsoft in the course of growing up.  There are sort of gravitational propositions that arise when you're the largest organism in an ecosystem. 

GM:  Do you think free software has been a little slow to address the problems you describe?

EM:  Yes, I think that's correct.  I think it is conceptually difficult, and it is to a large degree difficult because we are having generational change.  After a talk [I gave recently], a young woman came up to me and she said: I'm 23 years old, and none of my friends care about privacy.  And that's another important thing, right?, because we make software now using the brains and hands and energies of people who are growing up in a world which has been already affected by all of this.  Richard or I can sound rather old-fashioned.

GM:  So what's the solution you are proposing?

EM:  If we had a real intellectually-defensible taxonomy of services, we would recognise that a number of the services which are currently highly centralised, and which count for a lot of the surveillance built in to the society that we are moving towards, are services which do not require centralisation in order to be technologically deliverable.  They are really the Web repackaged. 

Social networking applications are the most crucial.  They rely in their basic metaphors of operation on a bilateral relationship called friendship, and its multilateral consequences.  And they are eminently modelled by the existing structures of the Web itself. Facebook is free Web hosting with some PHP doodads and APIs, and spying free inside all the time - not actually a deal we can't do better than. 

My proposal is this: if we could disaggregate the logs, while providing the people all of the same features, we would have a Pareto-superior outcome.  Everybody – well, except Mr Zuckenberg - would be better off, and nobody would be worse off.  And we can do that using existing stuff.

The most attractive hardware is the ultra-small, ARM-based, plug it into the wall, wall-wart server, the SheevaPlug.  An object can be sold to people at a very low one-time price, and brought home and plugged into an electrical outlet and plugged into a wall jack for the Ethernet, or whatever is there, and you're done.  It comes up, it gets configured through your Web browser on whatever machine you want to have in the apartment with it, and it goes and fetches all your social networking data from all the social networking applications, closing all your accounts.  It backs itself up in an encrypted way to your friends' plugs, so that everybody is secure in the way that would be best for them, by having their friends holding the secure version of their data.

And it begins to do all the things that we assume we need in a social networking appliance.  It's the feed, it maintains the wall your friends write on - it does everything that provides feature compatibility with what you're used to. 

But the log is in your apartment, and in my society at least, we still have some vestigial rules about getting into your house: if people want to check the logs they have to get a search warrant. In fact, in every society, a person's home is about as sacred as it gets.

And so, basically, what I am proposing is that we build a social networking stack based around the existing free software we have, which is pretty much the same existing free software the server-side social networking stacks are built on; and we provide ourselves with an appliance which contains a free distribution everybody can make as much of as they want, and cheap hardware of a type which is going to take over the world whether we do it or we don't, because it's so attractive a form factor and function, at the price. 

We take those two elements, we put them together, and we also provide some other things which are very good for the world.  Like automatically VPNing everybody's little home network place with my laptop wherever I am, which provides me with encrypted proxies so my web searching, wherever I am, is not going to be spied on.  It means that we have a zillion computers available to the people who live in China and other places where there's bad behaviour.  So we can massively increase the availability of free browsing to other people in the world.  If we want to offer people the option to run onion routeing, that's where we'll put it, so that there will be a credible possibility that people will actually be able to get decent performance on onion routeing networks.

And we will of course provide convenient encrypted email for people - including putting their email not in a Google box, but in their house, where it is encrypted, backed up to all their friends and other stuff.  Where in the long purpose of time we can begin to return email to a condition - if not being a private mode of communication - at least not being postcards to the secret police every day.

So we would also be striking a blow for electronic civil liberties in a way that is important, which is very difficult to conceive of doing in a non-technical way.

GM:  How will you organise and finance such a project, and who will undertake it?

EM:  Do we need money? Yeah, but tiny amounts.  Do we need organisation? Yes, but it could be self-organisation.  Am I going to talk about this at DEF CON this summer, at Columbia University? Yes.  Could Mr Shuttleworth do it if he wanted to? Yes.  It's not going to be done with clicking heels together, it's going to be done the way we do stuff: somebody's going begin by reeling off a Debian stack or Ubuntu stack or, for all I know, some other stack, and beginning to write some configuration code and some glue and a bunch of Python to hold it all together. From a quasi-capitalist point of view I don't think this is an unmarketable product.  In fact, this is the flagship product, and we ought to all put just a little pro bono time into it until it's done.

GM:  How are you going to overcome the massive network effects that make it hard to persuade people to swap to a new service?

EM:  This is why the continual determination to provide social networking interoperability is so important. 

For the moment, my guess is that while we go about this job, it's going to remain quite obscure for quite a while.  People will discover that they are being given social network portability.  [The social network companies] undermine their own network effect because everybody wants to get ahead of Mr Zuckerberg before his IPO.  And as they do that they will be helping us, because they will be making it easier and easier to do what our box has to do, which is to come online for you, and go and collect all your data and keep all your friends, and do everything that they should have done.

So part of how we're going to get people to use it and undermine the network effect, is that way.  Part of it is, it's cool; part of it is, there are people who want no spying inside; part of it is, there are people who want to do something about the Great Firewall of China but don't know how.  In other words, my guess is that it's going to move in niches just as some other things do.

GM:  With mobile taking off in developing countries, might it not be better to look at handsets to provide these services?

EM:  In the long run there are two places where we can conceivably put your identity: one is where you live, and the other is in your pocket.  And a stack that doesn't deal with both of those is probably not a fully adequate stack.

The thing I want to say directed to your point “why don't we put our identity server in our cellphone?”, is that our cellphones are very vulnerable.  In most parts of the world, you stop a guy on the street, you arrest him on a trumped-up charge of any kind, you get him back to the station house, you clone his phone, you hand it back to him, you've owned him.

When we fully commoditise that [mobile] technology, then we can begin to do the reverse of what the network operators are doing.  The network operators around the world are basically trying to eat the Internet, and excrete proprietary networking.  The network operators have to play the reverse if telephony technology becomes free.  We can eat proprietary networks and excrete the public Internet.  And if we do that then the power game begins to be more interesting.

19 September 2013

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter And Yahoo Refuse To Cooperate With UK's 'Snooper's Charter'

A month ago, we wrote about how the UK's infamous "Snooper's Charter" had been scuppered by Nick Clegg, the UK's Deputy Prime Minister. The Guardian now reveals that top Internet companies may have played a key role in this decision

On Techdirt.

17 May 2013

Why are Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle Backing the Fight *Against* the Blind?


One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read books in formats like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it's more important to preserve copyright "inviolate" than to alleviate the suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

You can read the disgusting details of how publishers have fought against the "proposed international instrument on limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities" for *30* years in an column I wrote back in 2011.

Amazingly, things have got even worse since then, with most of the fault lying at the feet of the US and EU, which are more concerned about placating their publishing industries than helping the poor and disabled around the world. And just when you think it can't get any worse, it does:

In a May 14, 2013 letter signed by Markus Beyrer, a Brussels based corporate lobby group known as Business Europe has sent a letter to Commissioners Michel Barnier and Karel De Gucht opposing the WIPO treaty on copyright exceptions for persons who are blind or have other disabilities. .... Business Europe describes itself as "the main horizontal business organization at the EU level." It represents 41 national business organizations in 35 European countries, claiming to promote "growth and competitiveness in Europe." Below is a list of the 55 member companies on its Corporate Advisory and Support Group, which describes its main constituency.

What readers of this blog may find most of interest are the names of the companies from the computer industry that are supporting this move to deny the blind even the smallest solace. Here are the main ones:

Facebook
IBM
Microsoft
Oracle

These are companies that often like to present themselves as decent and caring organizations whose pursuit of profit is balanced by a deep respect for fundamental human values. But their support here for the Business Europe lobbying group and its attempt to make it even harder for the blind to gain belatedly basic human rights like being able to read books – something that most of us are able to take for granted - is simply unacceptable.

I therefore call on Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to dissociate themselves from the Business Europe group and its attempt to keep blind people in their darkness. If those companies refuse, we will know that their claims to any kind of humanity are shams, and should treat them with the contempt that they deserve.

29 September 2012

UK Prosecutors Finally Acknowledge The Need For A Real Discussion About Free Speech Online

As Tim Cushing rightly noted earlier this week, the UK's "Free Speech" laws are more about the many things you can't say. As if to back up that view, in the last few days, there's been yet another case of somebody being arrested there for "an offensive Facebook page." 

On Techdirt.

10 August 2012

Europe Already Has Draft Standard For Real-Time Government Snooping On Services Like Facebook And Gmail

As the old joke goes, standards are wonderful things, that's why we have so many of them. But who would have thought that ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, has already produced a draft standard on how European governments can snoop on cloud-based services like Facebook and Gmail -- even when encrypted connections are used? 

On Techdirt.

10 June 2012

'Hack The Real World And Share The Results'

Eben Moglen has been battling to defend key digital rights for the last two decades. A lawyer by training, he helped Phil Zimmerman fight off the US government's attack on the use of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption program in the early 1990s, in what became known as the Crypto Wars. That brought him to the attention of Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, and together they produced version 3 of the GNU GPL, finally released after 12 years' work in 2006. 

On Techdirt.

27 April 2012

The Serious Business of Open Source, Inc.

One of open source's great strengths is that it is not a company. This means that traditional methods of nullifying its threat – such as buying it or causing it to go bankrupt – simply don't work. This is one reason why traditional software companies have had such a hard time getting their heads around free software and coming up with a sensible response.

On The H Open.

11 April 2012

Another Billion-Dollar Open Source Company: Instagram

Earlier this week I wrote about the first company based on open source to reach a turnover of one billion dollars. But of course, there are lots of multi-billion dollar turnover companies that are based on open source - Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. - it's just that they don't make money off it directly.

On Open Enterprise blog.

If Piracy Is So Devastating, Why Are We Seeing An Unprecedented Outpouring Of Creativity?

One of the favorite tropes of the anti-piracy crowd is that all this unauthorized sharing is killing culture, pauperizing artists and generally making the world go to hell in a handbasket. The only pieces of evidence adduced in support of that position are the market reports put together for the copyright industries that (a) say the sky is falling and (b) base that analysis on the industries' own unsubstantiated claims. 

On Techdirt.

13 January 2012

Indian Judge Tells Google And Facebook To 'Check And Remove Objectionable Material' Or Be Blocked

A few weeks back, Techdirt reported on an Indian minister asking Internet companies to do the impossible: 

On Techdirt.

12 October 2011

Facebook Says Some of Your Personal Data Is Its 'Trade Secrets or Intellectual Property'

A few weeks back, Techdirt posted a story about a European campaign group called "Europe vs. Facebook", which is trying to find out exactly what information Facebook holds about its users. It is doing this using European data protection laws, thanks to the fact that Facebook' s international headquarters are in Ireland. 

On Techdirt.

What Happens When The Company Backing Up Your Passwords In The Event of Your Death Itself Dies?

The unprecedented public outpouring of grief in the technical community at the death of Steve Jobs seems to go well beyond the fact that he was an undeniably important and powerful figure in that world for several decades. Perhaps it's because the people involved in technology are disproportionately young compared to most other industries: death often seems very far away at that age. The demise of the charismatic Jobs comes as brutal reminder that even leaders of the most successful companies must, one day, die. And hence, by implication, that we too will die. 

On Techdirt.

12 April 2011

Why Openness is Inevitable

As Richard Stallman constantly reminds us, there are strong moral grounds for adopting free software. But whether or not you accept that line of argument, there is another extremely good reason for taking this route: open source is better.

On Open Enterprise blog.

13 December 2010

Netflix Opens up About Open Source

Even though it is generally accepted that open source is used widely throughout the business world, it doesn't hurt having a few high-profile examples to point at when people doubt its suitability for this role. Obvious ones like Google and Amazon have been joined more recently by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. And now here's another well-known name opening up, Netflix:

On Open Enterprise blog.

16 November 2010

Will Mark Zuckerberg Prove He's Open Source's BFF?

Although I don't use it much myself, I've heard that Facebook is quite popular in some quarters. This makes its technological moves important, especially when they impact free software. Yesterday, we had what most have seen as a pretty big announcement from the company that does precisely that:

On Open Enterprise blog.

11 November 2010

A (Digital) Hymn to Eric Whitacre

Eric Whitacre is that remarkable thing: a composer able to write classical music that is at once completely contemporary and totally approachable even at the first hearing.

Just as, er, noteworthy is his total ease with modern technology. His website is undoubtedly one of the most attractive ever created for a composer, and uses the full panoply of the latest Internet technologies to support his music and to interact with his audience, including a blog with embedded YouTube videos, and links to Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Perhaps the best place to get a feel for his music and his amazing facility with technology is the performance of his piece "Lux Aurumque" by a "virtual choir" that he put together on YouTube (there's another video where the composer explains some of the details and how this came about.)

Against that background, it should perhaps be no surprise that on his website he has links to pages about most (maybe all?) of his compositions that include not only fascinating background material but complete embedded recordings of the pieces.

Clearly, Whitacre has no qualms about people being able to hear his music for free, since he knows that this is by far the best way to get the message out about it and to encourage people to perform it for themselves. The countless comments on these pages are testimony to the success of that approach: time and again people speak of being entranced when they heard the music on his web site - and then badgering local choirs to sing the pieces themselves.

It's really good to see a contemporary composer that really gets what digital music is about - seeding live performances - and understands that making it available online can only increase his audience, not diminish it. And so against that background, the story behind one of his very best pieces, and probably my current favourite, "Sleep", is truly dispiriting.

Originally, it was to have been a setting of Robert Frost’s "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening". The composition went well:

I took my time with the piece, crafting it note by note until I felt that it was exactly the way I wanted it. The poem is perfect, truly a gem, and my general approach was to try to get out of the way of the words and let them work their magic.

But then something terrible happened:

And here was my tragic mistake: I never secured permission to use the poem. Robert Frost’s poetry has been under tight control from his estate since his death, and until a few years ago only Randall Thompson (Frostiana) had been given permission to set his poetry. In 1997, out of the blue, the estate released a number of titles, and at least twenty composers set and published Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening for chorus. When I looked online and saw all of these new and different settings, I naturally (and naively) assumed that it was open to anyone. Little did I know that the Robert Frost Estate had shut down ANY use of the poem just months before, ostensibly because of this plethora of new settings.

Thanks to copyright law, this is the prospect that Whitacre faced:

the estate of Robert Frost and their publisher, Henry Holt Inc., sternly and formally forbid me from using the poem for publication or performance until the poem became public domain in 2038.

I was crushed. The piece was dead, and would sit under my bed for the next 37 years because of some ridiculous ruling by heirs and lawyers.

Fortunately for him - and for us - he came up with an ingenious way of rescuing his work:

After many discussions with my wife, I decided that I would ask my friend and brilliant poet Charles Anthony Silvestri (Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, Lux Aurumque, Nox Aurumque, Her Sacred Spirit Soars) to set new words to the music I had already written. This was an enormous task, because I was asking him to not only write a poem that had the exact structure of the Frost, but that would even incorporate key words from “Stopping”, like ‘sleep’. Tony wrote an absolutely exquisite poem, finding a completely different (but equally beautiful) message in the music I had already written. I actually prefer Tony’s poem now…

Not only that:

My setting of Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening no longer exists. And I won’t use that poem ever again, not even when it becomes public domain in 2038.

So, thanks to a disproportionate copyright term, a fine poem will never be married with sublime music that was originally written specially for it. This is the modern-day reality of copyright, originally devised for "the encouragement of learning", but now a real obstacle to the creation of new masterpieces.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

06 July 2010

Open Source: It's all LinkedIn

As I noted in my post “Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?", one of the reasons there are no large pure-play open source companies is that their business model is based on giving back to customers most of the costs the latter have traditionally paid to software houses.

On Open Enterprise blog.

17 May 2010

Diaspora: The Future of Free Software Funding?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Diaspora, a free software project to create a distributed version of Facebook that gives control back to users. Since then, of course, Facebook-bashing and Diaspora-boosting have become somewhat trendy. Indeed, Diaspora has now soared past its initial $10,000 fund-raising target: at the time of writing, it has raised over $170,000, with 15 days to go. That's amazing, but what's more interesting is the way in which Diaspora has done it.

On Open Enterprise blog.

04 February 2010

The New Face of Open Source: Facebook

Without doubt, one of the most extraordinary developments in recent years has been the rise of Facebook - not just as the most popular social network, but increasingly as a force to reckoned with in the world of computing, perhaps soon on the scale of Microsoft and Google. This makes its relationship to free software something of more than passing interest.

On Open Enterprise blog.