A Terrible Two-Edged Sword

Would you be in favor of giving a loaded shotgun to a toddler? Certainly he could figure out how to pull the trigger. Just as certainly, he would have no understanding of the consequences. This post begins a series (I hope) that deals with the danger of handing internet access to people who do not understand the consequences of going on-line.

Once upon a time there were people who exchanged information over the back fence. They spoke face-to-face. If one of them made an utterance, and the other repeated it to a third party, the original utterer could claim plausible deniability in that the repeater could have made some change to the information in the transfer. In any event, the passage of the information, in either its true form or as mutated, was slow. Nevertheless, the saying, "The cat is out of the bag," reflected the fact that once someone said something, it could never be rescinded. At least the cat had to jump from person to person in small leaps.

The telephone made a huge impact on information transmission. Not too many people remember the party line. In the United States, it gradually faded away during my teen years, but most modern teenagers would be horrified to learn that, in those days, anything you told your friend over the telephone could possibly be heard by the neighbor listening in. Teens back then were a bit more circumspect in what they said on the phone, because Dad and Mom just might be informed by Nosy Neighbor. Private lines, and laws governing wiretapping and recording, gave people a sense of privacy.

In the analog age, that sense of privacy had some basis, since the ability to store information was physically limited. You could write stuff on paper, you could record it on tape, but you still had to have a large library to store it in and a means of cataloguing it to make it of any use.

Times have changed. We live in a digital age. Terabyte sized storage is cheap and common; even larger media is available and larger yet is being designed. I have referred in a previous post to the fact that every email that I have ever sent (and I was on-line via Delphi and the FreeNets over 20 years ago, when most people had no idea what I was talking about when I said "email") is stored on a server somewhere. The internet has become an accepted facet of modern life, but familiarity, while not necessarily breeding contempt, does tend to breed carelessness.

When you log into an email system, or go online with a web browser, the mechanics of the system are hidden from the user. The internet began as a means of sharing UNIX files over closed server systems. Today, the systems are open ("world wide web") and cosmetically enhanced ("user-friendly graphic interface", "web browser") but the underlying mechanism is unchanged except for the size of the data "words" (ah, for the days when we hackers dreamed of being able to expand from 8-bit to 16-bit "words"; the 64-bit "word" is here and we await machines that will handle the 128-bit word!!). And, as noted above, the storage is no longer in the realm of Kilobytes, Megabytes, or Gigabytes, but Terabytes, and Google is said to be handling over 20 Petabytes (10 to the 15th) of data per day. It is all being stored, and Google has plans for its future use. Exabyte and Yottabyte (10 to the 18th and 10 to the 24th) will become as common in the not-too-distant future as GB. Unfortunately, the people logging into their internet accounts are as clueless as people unknowingly using a party line.

Do you use a cell phone? The message packets are digital, they pass through servers (although not necessarily on the internet, per se), and any intelligence agency that can access the carrier's records can obtain a complete copy of your conversation.

Do you use instant messaging? Or texting? Or internet phone service? All of those are transmitted across the internet in file packets, bounced from node to node and from server to server, and stored in memory somewhere. If a cell phone conversation passes through one of those nodes, it also goes out of the sole control of the carrier.

Do you use an analog land-line to call someone who uses a cell phone or internet phone service? Did you know that your conversation has also been recorded and saved? Do you know which servers it passed through? Did it get bounced through India, China, South Africa, or Europe, on the way from Akron to Cleveland? Did you even know that such a thing was possible? Are you in the same kind of situation as the toddler with the loaded shotgun?

So, now, what did you talk about in your last phone conversation? What did you send in your last email? What did you post on your blog? What did you upload to Facebook? Did you really intend for the whole wide world to be able to see that? Would you have discussed your very private life details over a party line with a dozen other neighbors able to listen in?

Lord willing, I intend to expand on this in future posts. I have had some previous problems with identity theft, I have had a very recent refusal by a bank holding company to buy!!! stock on-line because they had me confused with someone else via public records (in that case the State BMV!!), and I have some serious concerns about the privacy of data submitted to large information companies by people who obviously do not understand how that data will be used in the future.

If you think I am paranoid -- wait until I get done with YOU.