8 ms·

On the freedom to speak

141 points by espeed 13y ago

javajosh 13y ago
What a remarkable response. Lessig reacts to the substance, rather than the emotion of the criticism, making distinctions that need to be made, and answers the criticisms in language that's easy to understand. He'd make a great lawyer.
- espeed 13y ago
  Well, he is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law (http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10519/Lessig http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10519/Lessig, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig :-).
  - javajosh 13y ago
    Yes, I know. I was making a funny!
- Derander 13y ago
  For those who are unaware, Lessig is a professor of law and ethics at Harvard, and has been a professor of law at Stanford and the University of Chicago in the past.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  Now if only our lawmakers could follow suit. Just one example of the namecalling and emotional backlashing. The ironic thing is that 6 months ago Harry Reid was called an "idiot", and afaik Reid has returned the favor to House Republicans recently. http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/07/louisiana-sen-david-vitter-calls-harry-reid-an-idiot-for-insulting-katrina-victims/ http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/07/louisiana-sen-david-vitter...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- larrys 13y ago
  "rather than the emotion of the criticism" If one of his goals though is to gather support for what he did among regular people though he does have to deal with emotion as well. Think of people sitting on juries and the care that goes into selecting those people.
- jaekwon 13y ago
  No, he's reacting to allegations about direct ties to Palintir, and failing to respond to the criticism of such a surveillance program.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    He's making the point that he has no reason to respond to such criticism, since he's neither involved nor advocates it.
    - jaekwon 13y ago
      He advocates Palantir's surveillance program for the purpose of copyright protection, using its technological aspects of "immutable auditability" to ensure that the program is used for its intended purpose. The problem is, he assumes that such a thing is possible, when in fact it's more like flimsy DRM that the NSA can quite easily, secretly, bypass.
jtchang 13y ago
What type of technology would allow us to be absolutely certain that a piece of information was only used for an explicit purpose? My first thought was a chain of custody with public/private key encryption for viewing the information. Perhaps file systems that record access?
- espeed 13y ago
  Not specifically for general data tracking, but when I read this the first technology that sprang to mind was Ben Adida's (http://ben.adida.net/ http://ben.adida.net/) Helios Voiting system (http://heliosvoting.org/ http://heliosvoting.org/): "When you cast a vote with Helios, you get a smart tracker to track your vote all the way to the tally. No one knows how you voted, but you can track your vote and everyone can check the tally. "
- jbert 13y ago
  It's analagous to media DRM. Nothing "works" if the user has admin access on the viewing device. And the only way to ensure that is a "trusted computing" chain all the way from processor boot. Which is possible, but you have to lock out any viewers who can't demonstrate a secure chain from boot to viewing app (so you can trust the viewing app is "yours" rather than the device owners). And there's always the analog hole. Unless you can rely on a 'Eurion' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)-like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)-like mark to stop recording, people can always capture data at the point of display-to-retina. The only other approach is the after-the-fact blamethrower, where you tag each copy steganographically so that you know who was the original source of any leaked or circulated copies. That wouldn't stop a Snowden though.
  - jaekwon 13y ago
    Yes, and probably the biggest hole is simply mod'ing the surveillance software with backdoor unauditable access to the data, such that higher ups with "special secret privileges" can bypass the logs. Who audits the software? etc.
  - whatusername 13y ago
kevinpet 13y ago
This is a good example of why I don't have the enthusiasm most of this community has for Lessig. His single issue lately is money in politics, to the extent that he seems to be blind to anything else. The criticism which he linked to primarily pointed out that he was speaking well of a company that exists primarily to enable the surveillance state. My reading of the mention of contributions to politicians in the last paragraph was to point out that this company is contributing to people who Lessig almost certainly does not agree with politically. But Lessig's response is entirely focussed on not being tainted by any contributions. He seems to get it what the root of the criticism is: " The essence of the criticism is that Palantir is a bad company, or that it has done bad things, or that it has been funded by bad people." But his response is "I am completely in favor of questions being raised of anyone like me (meaning people trying to push a particular public policy) about whether mentioning a company or their product is done in exchange for money." No one ever raised this question. It's not a suspicion. I think what we'd like to know from Lessig is: 1. Do you think it's okay to engage in wholesale spying on Americans, as long as it's subject to what you consider the appropriate oversight? 2. If you don't like spying, are you speaking well of Palantir because you don't think they are involved in it, or are you just interested in the one aspect of their technology and not trying to promote the company as a whole?
- InAnEmergency 13y ago
  Isn't this his response to #2? > In both cases above, I was pointing to a type of technology. The truth or falsity of what I was saying doesn’t depend upon whether Palantir is a good or bad company. About that question, I am not, and don’t purport to be an expert.
- npsimons 13y ago
  Not that I'm defending Lessig or Palantir (I'm definitely not a fan of Palantir), but I think the point Lessig was making is that of all the options, having one that is accountable and traceable is probably the least bad. That is to say, agencies (both public and private) are going to (and have!) use data gathering technologies; we may not be able to prevent it. The best we may be able to do is ensure that the chain of custody is unbroken, and evidence isn't manufactured, manipulated or otherwise called into doubt. That and start enforcing warrant requirements again.
rayiner 13y ago
The whole Lessig/Palantir issue is so illustrative of the tech community's bizarre insistence on ideological purity on political issues, and consequently illustrative of why tech as an industry has so little political influence despite having money and people.
- larrys 13y ago
  Agree. Some people (perhaps tech people are more so in this direction? [1]) see things as black and white and not shades of gray. God forbid you identify yourself as a fanboy of [insert idol] and go against or issue criticism of that idol. You almost certainly, in any forum, will have a hard time doing that. And lose favor. With respect to all this snowdengate more people seem to have just decided that whatever the government is doing it's wrong, has no benefit and that's that. End of discussion right there. No devil in the details at all. [1] Simplistically tech people, programmers, math people and the like are binary and deal in exact 1's and 0's. Tech people would be more likely to jump on this particular comment that I made if it didn't fit with their particular world view.
- jivatmanx 13y ago
  I love Lessig, and completely it's stupid to attack him over this, or believe he's part of some conspiracy. He was primarily trying to bring up the incredibly fascinating, and important issue of: "Can, in the long run, purely technological means protect privacy?" It is, however, entirely reasonable to question if a corporation that took part in "Team Themis" could/would actually develop such technology.
  - jaekwon 13y ago
    No, purely technological means cannot protect privacy!
    - mpyne 13y ago
      The point is that technology has already usurped privacy. Even if the government doesn't, everyone else is. (And let's face it, the government does too, even if the NSA doesn't). The genie is not going back in the bottle, but perhaps we can use technology to add some arc chutes and at least try to constrain where the pixie dust is going. In the end it will be the technological means help the people protect their privacy (who are after all, the only ones who can demand and truly enforce that). Or as my father always said, "Locks don't keep bad people from breaking into your things; locks just keep honest people honest".
dram 13y ago
Sounds like great news for Glenn Greenwald. Can we see the audit trail for Team Themis and understand more about how Palantir was contracted to be paid $3.6MM for malicious datamining to attack a US journalist?
aortega 13y ago
I have the sensation that palantir and prism must be related in some way.
- wmf 13y ago
  Given that "Palantir Intelligence integrates disparate data from disconnected data silos at massive scale for low-friction interaction with intelligence officers." I think it's very likely that government analysts are using Palantir to analyze data gathered with PRISM. But whether they use Palantir or a corkboard, I don't see how that makes much difference about the legality of PRISM itself.
- gregors 13y ago
  It's because the CIA is a major backer of Palantir. Palantir put out the site https://analyzethe.us/ https://analyzethe.us/ Tracking and analyzing is what they do. The CIA is also a major backer of mongodb and they aren't getting called out. http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/mongodb-maker-10gen-closes-undisclosed-round-from-u-s-intelligence-investors/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/mongodb-maker-10gen-closes-...
  - mpyne 13y ago
    "Next in the WUO news: Department of Defense a major backer in corn foodstuff development programs. Corn farmers remain suspiciously silent about the whole thing. Do the corn farmers realize how their corn is being used???"
    - moham 13y ago
      there's prototypical government subsidy and research through universities and then slowly out to private sector, and then there's direct capital injection for start-up from "private" venture capital firm run by the CIA.
jaekwon 13y ago
Lessig (or something) is deleting my comment on Disqus. Here it is: ---- The the government's claims of transparency and audibility of the NSA's PRISM program is analogous (if not directly related) to the claims of Palantir's. Search for "immutable auditing" below: http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2009/07/Privacy-and-Civil-Liberties-are-in-Palantirs-DNA.pdf http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2... But even with such an audit trail to the core, it is known that it isn't sufficient: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09.pdf http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09.... I wager that for any given system that touts immutable audibility, there is a way to hack around it. Privacy through automated means is impossible. At best it is a kind of DRM that the NSA can easily work around secretly if it wanted it. What we should be advocating instead is Perfect Forward Secrecy in our internet architecture, and the dismantling of PRISM and related data centers. Prof Lessig, in your book "Code", you are using the issue of copyright to condone the current direction of the surveillance state and offering red herrings as "balancing" compromises. Such a balance is impossible in the face of concentrated storage of (even encrypted) storage data by intelligence agencies. As long as the NSA can tap the wires and record information in vast databases for cold storage, we are absolutely in risk. More technical discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966942 P.S., FTFY: "I have not, AND would not ever, accept money from Palantir..."
espeed 13y ago
Jeff Jonas (https://twitter.com/JeffJonas https://twitter.com/JeffJonas) has been working on a similar immutable audit system at IBM. It's part of his G2 Sensemaking system that started as a skunk works project in 2011... Sensemaking on Streams – My G2 Skunk Works Project: Privacy by Design (PbD) (2011) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2011/02/sensemaking-on-streams-my-g2-skunk-works-project-privacy-by-design-pbd.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2011/02/sensemaking-... Found: An Immutable Audit Log (2007) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2007/11/found-an-immuta.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2007/11/found-an-imm... Immutable Audit Logs (IAL’s) (2006) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/02/immutable_audit.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/02/immutable_au... Yesterday’s Technology Review Story: Blinding Big Brother, Sort of (2006) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/01/yesterdays_tech.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/01/yesterdays_t... Also see... G2 | Sensemaking Two Years Old Today (2013) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2013/01/g2-sensemaking-two-years-old-today.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2013/01/g2-sensemaki... G2 | Sensemaking – One Year Birthday Today. Cognitive Basics Emerging (2012) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2012/01/g2-sensemaking-1-year-birthday-today-cognitive-basics-emerging.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2012/01/g2-sensemaki...

141 points by espeed 13y ago

What a remarkable response. Lessig reacts to the substance, rather than the emotion of the criticism, making distinctions that need to be made, and answers the criticisms in language that's easy to understand. He'd make a great lawyer.

espeed 13y ago
Well, he is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law (http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10519/Lessig http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10519/Lessig, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig :-).
- javajosh 13y ago
  Yes, I know. I was making a funny!
Derander 13y ago
For those who are unaware, Lessig is a professor of law and ethics at Harvard, and has been a professor of law at Stanford and the University of Chicago in the past.
hkmurakami 13y ago
Now if only our lawmakers could follow suit. Just one example of the namecalling and emotional backlashing. The ironic thing is that 6 months ago Harry Reid was called an "idiot", and afaik Reid has returned the favor to House Republicans recently. http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/07/louisiana-sen-david-vitter-calls-harry-reid-an-idiot-for-insulting-katrina-victims/ http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/07/louisiana-sen-david-vitter...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
larrys 13y ago
"rather than the emotion of the criticism" If one of his goals though is to gather support for what he did among regular people though he does have to deal with emotion as well. Think of people sitting on juries and the care that goes into selecting those people.
jaekwon 13y ago
No, he's reacting to allegations about direct ties to Palintir, and failing to respond to the criticism of such a surveillance program.
- icebraining 13y ago
  He's making the point that he has no reason to respond to such criticism, since he's neither involved nor advocates it.
  - jaekwon 13y ago
    He advocates Palantir's surveillance program for the purpose of copyright protection, using its technological aspects of "immutable auditability" to ensure that the program is used for its intended purpose. The problem is, he assumes that such a thing is possible, when in fact it's more like flimsy DRM that the NSA can quite easily, secretly, bypass.

jtchang 13y ago

What type of technology would allow us to be absolutely certain that a piece of information was only used for an explicit purpose? My first thought was a chain of custody with public/private key encryption for viewing the information. Perhaps file systems that record access?

espeed 13y ago
Not specifically for general data tracking, but when I read this the first technology that sprang to mind was Ben Adida's (http://ben.adida.net/ http://ben.adida.net/) Helios Voiting system (http://heliosvoting.org/ http://heliosvoting.org/): "When you cast a vote with Helios, you get a smart tracker to track your vote all the way to the tally. No one knows how you voted, but you can track your vote and everyone can check the tally. "
jbert 13y ago
It's analagous to media DRM. Nothing "works" if the user has admin access on the viewing device. And the only way to ensure that is a "trusted computing" chain all the way from processor boot. Which is possible, but you have to lock out any viewers who can't demonstrate a secure chain from boot to viewing app (so you can trust the viewing app is "yours" rather than the device owners). And there's always the analog hole. Unless you can rely on a 'Eurion' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)-like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)-like mark to stop recording, people can always capture data at the point of display-to-retina. The only other approach is the after-the-fact blamethrower, where you tag each copy steganographically so that you know who was the original source of any leaked or circulated copies. That wouldn't stop a Snowden though.
- jaekwon 13y ago
  Yes, and probably the biggest hole is simply mod'ing the surveillance software with backdoor unauditable access to the data, such that higher ups with "special secret privileges" can bypass the logs. Who audits the software? etc.
- whatusername 13y ago

kevinpet 13y ago

This is a good example of why I don't have the enthusiasm most of this community has for Lessig. His single issue lately is money in politics, to the extent that he seems to be blind to anything else. The criticism which he linked to primarily pointed out that he was speaking well of a company that exists primarily to enable the surveillance state. My reading of the mention of contributions to politicians in the last paragraph was to point out that this company is contributing to people who Lessig almost certainly does not agree with politically. But Lessig's response is entirely focussed on not being tainted by any contributions. He seems to get it what the root of the criticism is: " The essence of the criticism is that Palantir is a bad company, or that it has done bad things, or that it has been funded by bad people." But his response is "I am completely in favor of questions being raised of anyone like me (meaning people trying to push a particular public policy) about whether mentioning a company or their product is done in exchange for money." No one ever raised this question. It's not a suspicion. I think what we'd like to know from Lessig is: 1. Do you think it's okay to engage in wholesale spying on Americans, as long as it's subject to what you consider the appropriate oversight? 2. If you don't like spying, are you speaking well of Palantir because you don't think they are involved in it, or are you just interested in the one aspect of their technology and not trying to promote the company as a whole?

InAnEmergency 13y ago
Isn't this his response to #2? > In both cases above, I was pointing to a type of technology. The truth or falsity of what I was saying doesn’t depend upon whether Palantir is a good or bad company. About that question, I am not, and don’t purport to be an expert.
npsimons 13y ago
Not that I'm defending Lessig or Palantir (I'm definitely not a fan of Palantir), but I think the point Lessig was making is that of all the options, having one that is accountable and traceable is probably the least bad. That is to say, agencies (both public and private) are going to (and have!) use data gathering technologies; we may not be able to prevent it. The best we may be able to do is ensure that the chain of custody is unbroken, and evidence isn't manufactured, manipulated or otherwise called into doubt. That and start enforcing warrant requirements again.

rayiner 13y ago

The whole Lessig/Palantir issue is so illustrative of the tech community's bizarre insistence on ideological purity on political issues, and consequently illustrative of why tech as an industry has so little political influence despite having money and people.

larrys 13y ago
Agree. Some people (perhaps tech people are more so in this direction? [1]) see things as black and white and not shades of gray. God forbid you identify yourself as a fanboy of [insert idol] and go against or issue criticism of that idol. You almost certainly, in any forum, will have a hard time doing that. And lose favor. With respect to all this snowdengate more people seem to have just decided that whatever the government is doing it's wrong, has no benefit and that's that. End of discussion right there. No devil in the details at all. [1] Simplistically tech people, programmers, math people and the like are binary and deal in exact 1's and 0's. Tech people would be more likely to jump on this particular comment that I made if it didn't fit with their particular world view.
jivatmanx 13y ago
I love Lessig, and completely it's stupid to attack him over this, or believe he's part of some conspiracy. He was primarily trying to bring up the incredibly fascinating, and important issue of: "Can, in the long run, purely technological means protect privacy?" It is, however, entirely reasonable to question if a corporation that took part in "Team Themis" could/would actually develop such technology.
- jaekwon 13y ago
  No, purely technological means cannot protect privacy!
  - mpyne 13y ago
    The point is that technology has already usurped privacy. Even if the government doesn't, everyone else is. (And let's face it, the government does too, even if the NSA doesn't). The genie is not going back in the bottle, but perhaps we can use technology to add some arc chutes and at least try to constrain where the pixie dust is going. In the end it will be the technological means help the people protect their privacy (who are after all, the only ones who can demand and truly enforce that). Or as my father always said, "Locks don't keep bad people from breaking into your things; locks just keep honest people honest".

dram 13y ago

Sounds like great news for Glenn Greenwald. Can we see the audit trail for Team Themis and understand more about how Palantir was contracted to be paid $3.6MM for malicious datamining to attack a US journalist?

aortega 13y ago

I have the sensation that palantir and prism must be related in some way.

wmf 13y ago
Given that "Palantir Intelligence integrates disparate data from disconnected data silos at massive scale for low-friction interaction with intelligence officers." I think it's very likely that government analysts are using Palantir to analyze data gathered with PRISM. But whether they use Palantir or a corkboard, I don't see how that makes much difference about the legality of PRISM itself.
gregors 13y ago
It's because the CIA is a major backer of Palantir. Palantir put out the site https://analyzethe.us/ https://analyzethe.us/ Tracking and analyzing is what they do. The CIA is also a major backer of mongodb and they aren't getting called out. http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/mongodb-maker-10gen-closes-undisclosed-round-from-u-s-intelligence-investors/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/18/mongodb-maker-10gen-closes-...
- mpyne 13y ago
  "Next in the WUO news: Department of Defense a major backer in corn foodstuff development programs. Corn farmers remain suspiciously silent about the whole thing. Do the corn farmers realize how their corn is being used???"
  - moham 13y ago
    there's prototypical government subsidy and research through universities and then slowly out to private sector, and then there's direct capital injection for start-up from "private" venture capital firm run by the CIA.

jaekwon 13y ago

Lessig (or something) is deleting my comment on Disqus. Here it is: ---- The the government's claims of transparency and audibility of the NSA's PRISM program is analogous (if not directly related) to the claims of Palantir's. Search for "immutable auditing" below: http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2009/07/Privacy-and-Civil-Liberties-are-in-Palantirs-DNA.pdf http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2... But even with such an audit trail to the core, it is known that it isn't sufficient: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09.pdf http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09.... I wager that for any given system that touts immutable audibility, there is a way to hack around it. Privacy through automated means is impossible. At best it is a kind of DRM that the NSA can easily work around secretly if it wanted it. What we should be advocating instead is Perfect Forward Secrecy in our internet architecture, and the dismantling of PRISM and related data centers. Prof Lessig, in your book "Code", you are using the issue of copyright to condone the current direction of the surveillance state and offering red herrings as "balancing" compromises. Such a balance is impossible in the face of concentrated storage of (even encrypted) storage data by intelligence agencies. As long as the NSA can tap the wires and record information in vast databases for cold storage, we are absolutely in risk. More technical discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966942 P.S., FTFY: "I have not, AND would not ever, accept money from Palantir..."

espeed 13y ago

Jeff Jonas (https://twitter.com/JeffJonas https://twitter.com/JeffJonas) has been working on a similar immutable audit system at IBM. It's part of his G2 Sensemaking system that started as a skunk works project in 2011... Sensemaking on Streams – My G2 Skunk Works Project: Privacy by Design (PbD) (2011) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2011/02/sensemaking-on-streams-my-g2-skunk-works-project-privacy-by-design-pbd.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2011/02/sensemaking-... Found: An Immutable Audit Log (2007) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2007/11/found-an-immuta.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2007/11/found-an-imm... Immutable Audit Logs (IAL’s) (2006) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/02/immutable_audit.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/02/immutable_au... Yesterday’s Technology Review Story: Blinding Big Brother, Sort of (2006) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/01/yesterdays_tech.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/01/yesterdays_t... Also see... G2 | Sensemaking Two Years Old Today (2013) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2013/01/g2-sensemaking-two-years-old-today.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2013/01/g2-sensemaki... G2 | Sensemaking – One Year Birthday Today. Cognitive Basics Emerging (2012) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2012/01/g2-sensemaking-1-year-birthday-today-cognitive-basics-emerging.html http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2012/01/g2-sensemaki...