Data and Goliath

Bruce Schneier 2015

A fact-strewn mind dump by Schneier, describing the problem and suggesting political principles and action.

I'm not political or persuasive. I am inventive and clever. I read books like this hoping for clues for the design of spying-resistant architectures, protocols, and software. The facts are useful for that, I will encourage but not actively pursue the politics, though I encourage less-geeky/more-political fellow citizens to do so.

Factoids

p18: 2015 76 exabyte/year - Cisco

p18: storing every US phone call reqiures 300 petabytes, ($30M) per year. Brewster Kahle 2013 Cost to store all US phonecalls made in a year so it could be datamined

p18: Lifelogging US population 2 exabytes ($200M) per year. NSA Bluffdale Utah $1.4B 12 exabytes, third largest.

p18: Xkcd:{!?) Google 15 exabytes 8 exabytes built 2013

p19: Facebook saves everything, Max Schrems Austrian Law Student

p21: Phone metadata very revealing

p26: License plate scanners for repo, Vigilant Solutions Livermore CA, 2.5 billion records, 70M scans/month

p29: Ford surveillance in every car, 2014

p33: Target baby coupons

p37: 117,675 active surveillance targets one day in 2013. 2014 Obama authorized NSA two hop surveillance on phone metadata

p39: Datafencing - who's near a business to deliver an ad

p44: 87% of US can be uniquely identified with ZIP, gender, and D.O.B.

p46: BrightestFlashlightFree for Android - collects location information and sells to advertizers

p48: Dictionary.com 200 tracking cookies - there are browser plugins that monitor cookies (Mozilla's Lightbeam Firefox tool)

p65: Reagan 1981 Executive Order 12333 / USA PATRIOT 2001, Section 215 / Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 2008 Section 702

p69: UK GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters

p70: China/Microsoft TOM-Skype

p70: India gets decrypts of individual blackberry

p85: NSA TAO Targeted Access Operation Modifies CISCO servers

p91: Government surveilance $72B per year

p94: Drone strikes

p94: China Golden Shield

p113: Google is paid to insert URLs into search results, not just advertising

p129: Algorithmic surveillance "not surveillance until a human being looks at the data", and "dog analogy"