Should we all be upset with Obama and cry in our chosen beverage (which is a beer in my case)?
My initial reaction was to be upset. If I understand it correctly the Obama administration wants to collect phone logs for all calls made by Verizon customers in the US. The news stories made it seem as if all call logs were being requested. Given the amount of traffic Verizon handles, it probably is a large percentage of US traffic but not all of it. If I can trust some of the links I read this has been going on since April of this year.
I am still upset, not quite cry in my beer status, but upset. What annoys me about the coverage is that only the privacy issue is being discussed not the ongoing war on terror and the restrictions on activity that the Patriot Act caused. Is there any reason why we need to identify ourselves on domestic flights? The aircraft captain’s cabin has a locked door, they x-ray us before boarding. Why do they need to know who we are?
In our current society privacy is almost dead. Web pages identify us, or at least they identify where our request is coming from. If you allow cookies (and to use most websites one must allow some form of cookie) the site will remember the ip address. That may not give a name but it will give a rough location. If you actually have a transaction with a website that website would not have a difficult time connecting that ip address with a logged in client.
Big businesses are already data mining (and that isn’t so much an invasion of privacy as a way to use intelligence to get around the barriers that privacy provides us). The news story here is about an effort of the government to do a bit of data mining with phone logs. (The only reason one would need these kinds of logs is for data mining.) The various phone companies have been doing research on handling large datasets for quite some time. I worked for AT&T for 20 years and near the end of my tenure there I read an abstract of a paper about data mining with large flat files (and a phone log is a flatfile and so are web logs). This was in 2000 or 2001. So the phone companies themselves have been working on strategies to mine this data, now the Federal government is getting into the act. It doesn’t matter what one is looking for the techniques are identical. Companies like AT&T were always looking for ways to feed at the government trough. They ran Sandia National Laboratories for 45 years.
I would love to know if any former AT&T or Bell Labs people are working for Booz Allen.
In any event privacy is slowly dying in the private realm. If you look at Google maps at place you know, you can recognize cars parked on the street. Unless you use cash almost all of your transactions could be tracked.
I do offer one cheer for Obama. Like Bill Clinton, he has been a better Republican than the Republicans. He did get Osama bin Laden, and he is probably better at prosecuting the current set of wars than W.
Getting back to security. One wonders what they mean to use the phone logs for. The Russians gave our government the names or names of the Chechen terrorists. Even with advance information, a hot tip, the government was either unwilling or unable to stop them. I am sure the data mining is fun and there is lots of good billable business for fancy contracting firms.
Don’t worry none of this data will actually be put to good use.
