kNow Media » cloud

CDT to Obama: advent of “the cloud” makes privacy laws dated

Tyler Knowlton — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:09:44 +0000

By Julian Sanchez | Published: December 11, 2008 – 05:10AM CT

The Center for Democracy and Technology issued a transition agenda for the incoming Obama administration Tuesday, outlining measures president-elect Barack Obama should take—both via immediate executive orders and longer term legislative reform—to restore privacy safeguards that have been eroded over the past eight years and to promote open discourse and innovation online.

During the summer’s lengthy and contentious debate over surveillance policy, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was frequently—and somewhat disingenuously, given the many revisions to the statute over the years—described as the “1978 FISA law.” But if legislation empowering surveillance by intelligence agencies needed to be brought up to date to accommodate technological change, CDT argues, then that surely goes double for the laws protecting online privacy.

The advocacy group is calling for major revision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and the Privacy Act of 1974. The explosion of cloud computing, CDT argues, renders obsolete the traditional distinction between genuinely “private” information stored on a person’s own hard drive and “third party” records, which enjoy diminished protections, on the grounds that citizens lack an “expectation of privacy” in data held by others. ECPA provides only weak protection for e-mail stored on servers, and the Justice Department has sought to exploit ambiguity in the law to avoid the need to seek probable cause warrants for online communications. A similar lacuna has led to conflicting court decisions over the procedure that law enforcement must follow to obtain cell phone location information.

The Privacy Act, CDT argues, is also out-of-date, because it covers only “systems of records” that are primarily indexed by name or other individual identifier—a criterion that exempts many modern data mining programs. In addition to seeking legislative reforms, CDT urges Obama to appoint a Chief Privacy Officer within the White House to act as an advocate for privacy interests and chair a council of agency-level CPOs.

Health care IT in particular, according to CDT, demands strong privacy safeguards, to which end enforcement of federal privacy rules governing health records should be ramped up in order to bolster consumer confidence. But in most areas, CDT argues that a “sectoral” approach to privacy should give way to a comprehensive and “technology-neutral” set of privacy rules that applies across business types and storage media.

Limiting surveillance

In addition to strengthening hoary privacy statutes, CDT hopes to see more stringent limitations on the growing surveillance powers of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. While they ultimately urge another round of amendments to FISA—establishing more robust judicial oversight of programmatic surveillance, barring bulk acquisition of communications, and repealing the controversial provision granting retroactive immunity to telecoms that paticipated in warrantless wiretapping—they also note that Obama can do a great deal unilaterally, via executive order.

The legal battle between civil liberties groups and the justice department over the constitutionality of the retroactive immunity language could be cut short if Obama directs his attorney general to withdraw the Bush administration’s “certification” that defendant telecoms in the long-running lawsuit are entitled to immunity. And until the law itself is changed, Obama can require intelligence agencies to seek full-blown probable-cause FISA warrants for wiretaps, even where the FISA amendments set a lower bar. He can also, crucially, move to disclose redacted versions of legal opinions pertaining to the National Security Agency’s extrajudicial surveillance program, which the Bush Justice Department has fought fiercely to keep under wraps.

In light of the rampant abuse of National Security Letters disclosed in recent years, CDT asks that the use of the investigative tool, which does not require a judge’s approval, be sinficantly curtailed. They recommend that the FBI—and only the FBI—be permitted to continue using NSLs to seek “less sensitive information,” such as a subject’s physical or e-mail address, with judicial orders required when more detailed records are sought.

An open and free internet

The goal of keeping the Internet open and free, CDT suggests, can be served by throwing the weight of the White House behind the nascent Global Network Initiative, exploring technological means to help parents filter online content without censoring the Internet for adults, and blocking efforts to make the owners of Internet fora responsible for illicit content hosted on their servers. And while some of Obama’s tech policy surrogates have suggested that network neutrality can be preserved by the Federal Communications Commission exercising prexisting statutory authority, CDT worries that such an approach could leave the regulator with too much control over the network’s architecture. Instead, they recommend pursuing narrowly tailored legislation—they’ve got an outline of what a sound bill might look like—that would clarify which forms of dicrimiatory routing were out-of-bounds, preempting regulatory overreach by the FCC.

Finally, the online advocacy group is hoping the Obama administration will make good on its campaign’s pledge of an open and wired government. Which means that if they fall short in any of these other areas, Netizens will at least have an easy means of telling them off.

The intersection of social media and the cloud

Tyler Knowlton — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:09:51 +0000

Via Tech Crunch IT

by Steve Gillmor on November 29, 2008

The competition for the next wave of enterprise computing has heated up since Microsoft announced its Windows Azure strategy a month ago. While the jury is out in some quarters about Microsoft’s ability to actually deliver the reliability, security, and even the interoperability that is promised, the timetable has accelerated the plans of competitors and forced some to define themselves in terms of the cloud at a dangerous moment.

Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable ventures in favor of some kind of cloud strategy. CEO Jonathan Schwartz has hinted in recent months of some wood behind what Sun calls its Grid effort, and will this week roll out Sun’s JavaFX 1.0 front end technology to compete with Flash/Air and Silverlight.

JavaFX could be one of the casualties if Sun decides to pare technologies along with the 18% of its employees it’s trimming. Other cuts might include the NetBeans development environment, which has kept pace with or even bettered Eclipse in quality but not in uptake, and OpenOffice, the free Office replacement. Unfortunately for Sun, Google Docs has stolen some of the strategic thunder with an on-demand product from a company that can afford it.

Google is feeling some pressure as well, as its odd messaging around a Gmail Video chat plug-in reveals. Though the company has made a big deal about only supporting open Web technologies, they have much less to say about the use of proprietary technologies in the video plug-in. Coming at the same time that CEO Eric Schmidt attacks Azure as a way “to gain enough share in cloud computing to force other people to use its standards,” the use of Flash and the reluctance to answer direct questions about it seem disingenuous, something Google has steered clear of as it builds out its own standards such as Chrome and Android.

Schmidt’s attack also suggests that Google has assessed Microsoft’s cloud effort and found it substantial enough to warrant a political rather than technical challenge. Yet the video plug-in also implies an attempt to improve the “rich” aspects of its Ajax framework as online versions of Office reach beta in the next year. Ironically, Microsoft’s Live Mesh/Silverlight combo will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux (via Novell’s Moonlight port), while no Linux plug-in has been announced for the video code.

Apple’s cloudish efforts may get a boost when the company releases its Push notification technology, allowing a rumored over the air MobileMe synchup with Notes. Not only would that bring in the rest of the enterprise email world, it would also deliver the necessary infrastructure for iPhone developers to release useful micromessaging clients. Qik.com’s new support for transcoded iPhone-compatible versions of Qik videos would fit nicely in such clients, bypassing Flash and Silverlight in the process and blunting pressure from Android. Without Google’s Web religion and with a burgeoning revenue model, Apple can afford to move to the cloud at its own pace.

At a time when startups are tamped down to survival mode, the cloud seems the province of the wealthy. By betting early and building just ahead of the startup market, Amazon has joined the gorillas at the table. Sun remains a player if only because the various acquisition or breakup scenarios seem more unlikely. And Jonathan Schwartz’ ability to dance with Microsoft when he needs it may come in handy as Azure nears the marketplace. Somebody will provide the big freaking Webtone switch for these cloud data centers, and storage is the new black.

Google and Microsoft are alone at the top of the pyramid. The usual caveats don’t hold much water when looked at objectively. For a company pigeon-holed as making it up as they go along with no cross team coordination, the Google desktop is an organic work in progress with new components and management tools emerging week by week. Building out via XMPP from the Gmail hub is allowing users to orchestrate realtime services into a consumable stream and reliable archives available cross-client.

The rogue video plug-in may violate Google’s messaging, but the first time you nail up a video chat with someone on a PC from your Mac, you’ll know something substantial has occurred. In a world where the console real estate is measured in pixels, I’m still running Skype as a legacy app but switching whenever I see the telltale camera icon in Gchat. With calendar, docs, mail, XMPP, video, and audio all on one screen, the momentum is considerable.

For its part, Microsoft is no longer at war with itself. That may have been the only way to manage the company in the face of no opposition, but for the first time Redmond is competing more with Google and to a lesser extent, Amazon, than between versions of Windows or Office. The Google console may lack persistence and offline aspects, but the video plug-in signals a much more pragmatic approach than many have expected. By the same token, Microsoft is far less encumbered with its response to Google’s attack than we thought before Azure was revealed.

That’s because users don’t perceive Microsoft as the dominant force in computing any more. When I open Gmail, I’m conditioned to expect the latest addition. The more time I spend in the realtime world, the more I look to solutions that will fit into the environment I have chosen. When micromessaging proves too fragmented for XMPP, I add the Twhirl Air client to present a more alert-driven version of the various feeds. In other words, my usage reaches a point where more professional tools are necessary, and I integrate RIA capabilities to finesse the transition.

But what happens next? For now, it’s unlikely I’ll switch off the Gmail desktop. There’s no competitive Ajax client, but I have no special allegiance to Air should a more robust Silverlight client emerge. My iPhone could care less where the back end lives that synchs via the new Push notification engine, so I can choose between Mesh and whatever Google releases to compete with XMPP on the desktop. Google has to compete not only with Microsoft but Apple in that arena; I’d love to integrate GCal and missing features of Gmail on the iPhone, but not until Push is released will it happen, and perhaps not quickly even then.

Micromessaging is not the only area where Microsoft can make inroads, but it’s easily the most significant because of the requirement for open standards. Even though those are still unsettled, Microsoft has carefully mandated open access to its platform and has no wiggle room out of that contract given its Borg baggage. Interestingly, Google has opened a hole into the Gmail console with the ability to add widgets. Imagine Office Online docs available on the Gmail console, or a Twitter feed that interleaves docs and appointments from both stores.

The intersection of social media and the cloud will drive most of this strategic realignment. The argument that cloud computing will fail because we won’t trust our bits outside our direct control ignores two truths: the economics outweigh the potential liabilities, and we have no idea where our data is in any case. The more valuable our cloud data becomes, the less likely we will be to complain about unauthorized access. The more social graph data is baked into these information sharing transactions, the more valuable the shared data will become.