There's a really lame old joke
that feels like it grew out of Soviet Cold War cynicism but is as American as
paranoia gets: The setup doesn't have to be too specific – just anything that
mentions the CIA, FBI or NSA's tendency to run covert surveillance operations
even within the U.S. (where only the FBI is supposed to). The punchline is
always the same: One character asks another something about how to get ahold of
the spies to report something suspicious. "I don't know where to call
them," the other character replies, "but just talk loudly into the
lamp and they'll hear you." It was probably funny once, but only when J.
Edgar Hoover was still alive and only if you already knew how snoopy he was. If
he were alive now he'd die of jealousy after an announcement from the CIA that
makes it clear how willing both the CIA and its congressional bosses are to
have the agency responsible for foreign intelligence spying on Americans. CIA
Director David Petraeus, like at least one person every geek knows who is
obsessed with the Internet of Things and won't shut up about it, gushed over
the growth in intelligence among
household appliances not because
they would make life simpler or power use more efficient or give consumers
access to the Internet through more and more devices that have no good reason
to connect to the Internet. The universe of wired devices will be "transformational,"
according to Wired's report from a conference at In-Q-Tel, the CIA's
venture-capital firm. Every Internet-of-things geek says it will be
transformational, but usually they're talking about good things. "I do
believe [transformational] applies to these technologies," Petraeus said.
"Particularly their effect on clandestine tradecraft."
The best
thing about adding intelligence
to ordinary devices is that they
can be remotely monitored, controlled and used as pickups for sound, video and
wireless data – capabilities that can be used or abused at will even by spy
agencies wanting to listen in on private citizens without the justification
needed for a warrant or effort needed for an illegal bug. The prevalence of
wireless, powerline, and other non-standard networking connections will also
make it possible for unnamed spy agencies to conduct their surveillance without
leaving any fingerprints to show they were there – because they're not allowed
to do surveillance on Americans in the first place, so their only choice is to
hide it really well. The CIA has more leeway with smart appliances than regular
computers due to changes in the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and
court decisions about the American Patriot Act, both of which make less clear
whether it's actually forbidden for the CIA to collect geolocation data from
devices, collect server-based logs for individual cell phones and other ambient
data.
The CIA isn't allowed to spy on people. It may or may not be
allowed to spy on devices, which it would do to collect a lot of data about the
activity of devices that implicitly say quite a lot about the activity of the
people that own them. Most privacy advocates would flag that immediately as a
very big, pretty complicated problem that has to be addressed by defining more
clearly what right of privacy Americans can expect from devices that happen to
own a semiconductor, just how far the CIA, FBI or other agencies should be
allowed to go in collecting data from devices – spying by proxy – and under
what circumstances. It would also require refinement or restructuring of the
rules for the FBI, CIA , NSA, and Secret Service to make clear to badge
carriers that having the ability to listen in on every device touched by every
citizen is not the same as having the right to do so, let alone having the eggs
to cackle in anticipation when they think about it in public. "Items of
interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled
through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks,
tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters - all connected to the
next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power
computing," the chief covert
guardian of the liberty of Americans gurgled
with joy. "It's going to change our notions of identity and secrecy."
The only question is, after the change, what changes should we allow to our
sense of identity, to our ability to keep even the most private issue secret
and to the ability of David Petraeus to penetrate those secrets by infiltrating
our dishwashers, televisions and garbage disposals.
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