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Re: [xmca] internet and surveillance



I'm not a frequent contributor though, like many, I hang around.  Thank you
all for so many great things to think about.  This issue of surveillance and
"packets" is interesting to me.  This comment, from Michael, caught my
attention:

It seems like social media has a much more basic packet switching system
> than say e-mail or longer postings.


The way I understand packet switching technology, everything on the internet
works on top of the same underlying system.  This means that whether it is
the back and forth between your web browser and your bank, or Facebook, or
Youtube, the same kinds of packets encode the information flowing in both
directions.  I understood the article to be saying that the company in
question has developed technology to snoop into the flow of information at
this level, the bottom most.  This means that it is not social media
specific, though of course the packets in which that information is encoded
might be of special interest.

There is a question the article left unaddressed.  If it is possible for
this company to snoop on *any* packet whatsoever, this means that they have
broken the various encryption protocols used on a daily basis to log in
securely to your bank, or even simply to send email from Gmail (the latter
encrypts email communication by default).  If this were true, the headline
"Egypt Shuts Down Internet" would look like a mild headache in comparison.

I assume plenty of information floats around that is unencrypted, and
snoopable, and this may lead worried power-centers to take a hammer to the
whole machine rather than let out even a tiny trickle of potentially
dangerous information.  But the snooping and the shutting down of the
packet-switching technologies are not directly related (the one cannot
"cause" the other), you need a higher level of order (in this case the
Egyptian status-quo) to connect the two.  Like Michael wrote, they "can only
shut down the end servers that most Egyptians use".

Ivan

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu>wrote:

> This is interesting.  The spying really isn't done through the Internet but
> through closed information social media systems such as Facebook and
> Twitter.   It raises some really interesting issues about the difference
> between open information systems and closed information systems - really a
> contrast that has always been with us I think, but the Internet as an
> information system is really changing all that.  There has been a great deal
> of discussion of course of Facebook selling information, but I really hadn't
> given much thought to differences in how the information itself is
> translated.  It seems like social media has a much more basic packet
> switching system than say e-mail or longer postings.  This would make sense
> for Twitter which is limited I believe to 140 characters (don't use twitter
> so I'm not sure).  It makes one wonder about the degree to which traditional
> media is pushing social media as a phenomenon, but not so much other forms
> of Internet communication.  Maybe because it is easier to control.
>
> Relatedly, Egypt can't such down the Internet, they can only shut down the
> end servers that most Egyptians use, which is basically the last routing
> point for Egyptians.  One of the big issues in Net Neutrality is the idea
> that companies which own specific netowrks, such as Verizon, have complete
> control over the end point routers for cell phones and their progeny.  That
> means they can control information in much the same way that Egypt is now
> controlling information, but instead of letting no information through, they
> would only let the information they wanted thorugh.  I think for more
> complex information where the end user has a choice of networks, this isn't
> anywhere near as much of a problem.  And as Andy suggests, hackers can find
> other end point servers (I am sure by this point Egyptians have hacked into
> servers from nearby countries.  Hackers in China have become amazingly good
> at this and it is one of the reasons I think that the government has gone
> from trying to control the Internet itself to trying to control search
> engines (I'm not sure how they do this, perhaps by having the search engines
> not automatically translate to and from Chinese.  Maybe somebody else
> knows).
>
> This raises so many questions about information and how we treat
> information.
>
> Michael
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Andy Blunden
> Sent: Sat 2/5/2011 10:59 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] internet and surveillance
>
>
>
> I think there must be some law, a corollary of the law about offensive
> and defensive military technology (that the technology of bullets is
> always one step ahead of the advance of the technology of armour) to the
> effect that the hacker is always one step ahead of the internet security
> expert.
>
> Andy
>
> mike cole wrote:
> > This story might be worth thinking about.
> > mike
> >
> >
> http://internetsgovernance.blogspot.com/2011/02/egypt-crisis-egypt-is-burning-and.html
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