There are many reasons we’re losing individual privacy in the United States. Many of the reasons have rational explanations. For example, the Supreme Court’s legal standard for privacy is that Americans are only entitled to privacy if they have a reasonable expectation of it. When the government or private parties take away the expectation, then we lose the privacy. In my opinion, this is a self-defeating standard because it inexorably leads to reduced privacy. I don’t like it, but at least I can understand how it’s happening.

However, one of the most perplexing ways we lose privacy is the “I’ve got nothing to hide” argument. The so-called rationale of this argument is that when it comes to a government law or private act that reduces privacy, there’s no privacy lost if a person is hiding nothing illegal or embarrassing. This argument is based on the flawed assumption that privacy is about hiding sensitive information. Not only is this assumption wrong, but it also misses the fact that lost privacy has more ramifications than just the disclosure of personal information.

As an example, let’s take former President George W. Bush’s post-911 decision to allow the National Security Administration (NSA) to conduct—without a warrant—the wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls. Proponents of the nothing-to-hide argument vigorously supported this blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, claiming “I don’t mind people wanting to find out things about me, I’ve got nothing to hide!” and that the “only people opposed to [warrantless wiretaps] would be the ones aiding al-Qaeda…. If you don’t want the government watching what you’re doing, maybe it’s something you shouldn’t be doing in the first place!”

There are two ways to rebut the nothing-to-hide argument. The easy but superficial way is to confront the person making the argument with a series of questions, like:

• “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why do you have curtains?” or
• “Can I see your credit cards?” or
• “So I can take a photo of you showering and post it on the Internet, right?”

This superficial rebuttal is tempting and easy because everybody has intimate information they don’t wish to share. However, while it is easy, the weakness in this rebuttal is that it accepts the false premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. Privacy has nothing to do with hiding a wrong—it’s a constitutionally protected right and inherent in the basic human psyche.

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The more refined rebuttal to the nothing-to-hide argument focuses not on the disclosure of personal information, but rather on the other serious problems caused by NSA monitoring or other intrusive government snooping. Professor Daniel Solove, an expert on privacy, has identified several ramifications of government monitoring for rebutting the nothing-to-hide argument: chilling effect, aggregation, distortion, proving a negative, exclusion, and secondary use.

Chilling Effect

Government monitoring of legal conduct creates a chilling effect on First Amendment rights and restrains people exercising legal conduct. Our society already suffers from the chilling effect, from fewer expressions of viewpoint to reduced political activity.

Aggregation

Aggregation refers to the sum of several discrete pieces of information a person may choose to conceal. When these pieces are combined, or aggregated, the government can put it all together to find out what we didn’t want to disclose. Again, when a person chooses not to disclose something, the person is exercising a right to privacy, not nefariously hiding something.

Distortion

Distortion is related to aggregation in that the government takes discrete pieces of information and puts it together, except with distortion they put it together wrong. For example, if the government observes that you’ve purchased a number of books on manufacturing stills to produce whiskey, it might conclude you want to illegally distill alcohol. But the government doesn’t have all the information and misses the fact that you’ve actually been hired to write a non-fiction book about stills in Kentucky during Prohibition.

Proving a Negative

One of the goals of government monitoring is predicting future behavior. If a person’s disclosed information reveals a particular profile that indicates a likelihood of certain future behavior, it’s difficult for that person to disprove an intent to do something the person hasn’t done yet. Even a person who has nothing to hide can have aggregated information that fits a profile.

Exclusion and Secondary Use

Because the information gathered by government monitoring is often secret, people often have no knowledge of how their information is used. They are excluded from accessing or correcting any errors in the information collected about them. A related problem is the secondary use of information. In other words, information obtained for one purpose is used for another unrelated purpose. Since the government is often silent on secondary use, it’s difficult for people to understand the true impact of their disclosed data.

Conclusion

Americans lose more privacy every year. It’s bad enough that our constitutional standard for privacy inexorably leads to less privacy. But it’s even worse when we give it away with the nothing-to-hide argument.

The new threat to privacy is the ubiquitous ebook reader. Over 40 million have been sold in America, and many Americans have installed ebook reader apps on their tablets and smart phones. Reading is traditionally a quiet, private act between the reader and book. However, the prevalent use of ebook readers allows publishers and the government to know what books we search for and buy, and how we read them. Based on the companies’ privacy policies, the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently revealed the tracking and monitoring practices of several popular ebook readers, including Google Books, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo Touch, and the Sony eReader. The results are disconcerting.

Tracking Book Searches and Purchases

Google, Kobo, and Sony track the books you search for before buying. Amazon also does when you’re logged in with an Amazon account. It’s unclear whether Barnes & Noble does, although the Electronic Frontier Foundation concludes they probably do.

Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo clearly keep track of what books you purchase from them, and Sony likely does as well, although its privacy policy is not clear on this. It’s also not clear what capability these companies have to track books purchased from sources other than their websites, except for Google, which requires you to buy from them if they want to track you. Google and Kobo allows readers to delete their search history, but the other three do not.

Monitoring Your Reading

The most invasive practice is monitoring how and what you are reading. Companies not only track what books you read, but also how fast you read and what text interests you. Google stores the previous five pages you’ve read for each book and may track any notes or annotations made. Amazon keeps a record of the last page read and may store your annotations and highlights. Barnes & Noble probably stores the last page read, but its privacy policy is unclear about other information. Kobo stores the last page you’ve read and possibly keeps track of annotations and highlighting. Sony’s privacy policy is silent on its monitoring practices.

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Sharing Your Information Without Consent

These ebook reader companies can and do share your information with others. Under subpoena, most are required to share reader information with parties to litigation or the federal government. As reported on Off The Grid News earlier, the federal government has made over 12,000 requests for information from Google (for ebook users or other user information).

They also share your information within their other services (e.g., Sony sharing information about readers entertainment preferences with their TV manufacturing business). Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Sony also share your reading information with the publishers of newspapers or magazines you buy through their services. The extent to which readers can opt-out varies, but is generally limited to promotional and marketing purposes.

How This Affects You

Other than the affront to basic notions of personal privacy, the monitoring of ebook readers can have a real impact on your way of life. For example, assume you live off the grid on a small homestead an hour away from major cities. You have an underground bug-out shelter. In case a situation arises where you need to use the shelter for a long period of time, you’ve decided to expand it by adding a small room to grow vegetables to supplement your stored goods. Logging on to Amazon.com, you search for books about growing vegetables indoors, select one, and download it to your Kindle.

Reading the ebook, you highlight some good technical information about lighting requirements, basic ventilation techniques, and humidity.

At the same time, your state’s anti-drug task force is ramping up its marijuana eradication program. They subpoena Amazon and other companies for any information about book searches on growing indoors, and demand the names, contact information, and text of any highlighted portions of these books. The task force gets your name and takes a second look—you fit the profile by living off the grid in a remote location far from the prying eyes of local law enforcement. They see your highlighted information and note you read the text on lighting and ventilation three times, very slowly. They decide to investigate further, tapping your phone, monitoring email messages, tracking credit card purchases, and maybe even sending a surveillance plane (or a drone) for a quick look.

Ignorant of all this, you buy the lighting, fans, and humidity controllers. Coupled with your profile and recent activity, the task force decides they have probable cause to pay you a visit. And it won’t be a polite one.

Bottom Line

If you read ebooks, use the same precautions taken with online usage. Remember that the books searched for, the books read, and the text highlighted are all tracked and possibly reported, so act accordingly.

Professors at Texas A&M University can now monitor their students’ reading of digital textbooks with software from a company called CourseSmart, The New York Times reported. Using CourseSmart, the professors can tell what textbooks the students are reading and how many pages they’ve looked at. That’s bad news for a lot of lazy college students and very bothersome for the rest of us.

Does Homeland Security Know Your Reading List?

If CourseSmart can be used to monitor what college students are reading, it can be used to monitor what everybody else is reading; for example, anybody who downloads any book that is considered to be radical or subversive. Anybody who downloads The Communist Manifesto or anything else by Karl Marx could be labeled a Communist. A person that read a lot of books about the Confederacy could be labeled a racist or white supremacist. Anybody that downloaded the Koran could be placed on a list of Islamic terrorists.

Gun owners in particular should be worried. One potential abuse is that anybody found to be reading radical or extremist literature would be placed on a list of people considered too dangerous to own guns. Another is that lists of people who order gun-related books or books on explosives could be put on a list of suspects for a gun roundup. This means that a mystery writer that downloaded a book on guns to use as a source of material for a novel could turn up on a list of “gun-owning criminals” even if she didn’t own a gun.

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Any book that contains information that could be used in bomb making could also trigger search programs. This would include any chemistry textbook or any book on chemistry. A college student that orders a chemistry book and a history of Nazi Germany for their spring classes could suddenly be pegged as a “Neo Nazi” by the monitoring process.

People that don’t believe this should remember that the Transportation Security Administration has harassed people with Arabic language documents at airports. One suspected terrorist targeted at the Philadelphia airport was studying Arabic in order to apply for a job as an intelligence analyst.

Remember, the Department of Homeland Security sees nothing wrong with searching little old ladies and two year olds. There’s no telling what these people will think if they see your reading list. Anybody that orders any sort of survival related book could be placed on a list of dangerous “right-wing” terrorists or added to the no-fly list.

We need to worry about this because online book sources like Amazon and services like Google Shop gather extensive amounts of information about their customers. It hasn’t hard to imagine the FBI monitoring purchases of certain books. In the future people could be denied security clearances and turned down for certain jobs based solely on their reading list.

Monitoring All Your Reading and Searches

It’s not just the books and videos that you read or download that get monitored. Anybody who uses Google sees advertising related to searches they’ve done pop up. When I researched wheatgrass and juicers for articles, I started seeing a lot of ads for wheatgrass and juicers on the webpages on my browser.

It isn’t hard to imagine the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) monitoring everybody who searches for guns or ammunition for sale. The same goes for anybody looking for survival supplies or camping gear. Even persons that download articles about certain topics could be targeted—for example, a person that downloads a lot of anti-gun-control editorials. And of course, anybody who visits a website considered dangerous or radical can also be labeled as a threat. That information is already stored—it is just a matter of access.

Is Free Access to Information Under Threat?

The worst nightmare scenario is that in China, where the government closely monitors the Internet and blocks certain websites. Such abuses are not likely in the U.S., but monitoring of average citizens’ reading and net use by authorities and others is.

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The potential abuses of this are endless. Employers could monitor employees’ reading habits, and a person that downloaded a lot of books about unions might be noted as a potential union activist and fired or laid off. The same could happen to anybody labeled a racist or a homophobe. Companies might access reading lists of job applicants and not hire anybody that had ordered a lot of books about guns or somebody that plays a lot of violent video games or watches violent movies.

Worst of all, it might be possible for companies or others to purchase this information. Like the information on your credit report, it could stick around forever online and be just as inaccurate. A person who took a history of Nazi Germany course in college could end up on the radical list because he ordered a batch of books about Hitler. He might get turned down for a job ten or fifteen years later—even if he has no Nazi sympathies and was just taking the class because it was the easiest option in rounding out his history minor.

How to Protect Yourself

What average people should realize is that in the digital world Mark Zuckerberg is right: Privacy is dead, so get used to it. Be careful whenever you download anything or order anything online; there is always a digital record of it.

That means it might be a good idea not to order certain things online. If you need to read the Koran or The Communist Manifesto as part of a college course, it might be a good idea to get a paper copy of it from a bookstore and pay cash. There is no digital paper trail associated with used books if you buy them directly for cash.

I would be careful when using Amazon or eBay, because those services keep extensive records of purchases. You should be careful when using a credit or debit card online or in the real world. There is a record of every purchase you make through such contrivances. Checks and online money transfers such as PayPal can be just as bad because there is a record there.

There are some ways to cover your tracks; one would be to download books or videos or place orders through an online device that you purchased for cash. You can buy a cheap tablet with Wi-Fi directly from a retail store with cash. Make sure it uses the Google Chrome operating system so there is no license fee. Never put a record of problematic searches on your computer at home or work or on a device with your name or address associated with it. Then log on through public Wi-Fi and create a separate e-mail account using a fake address and name. You can even set up a PayPal account using a fake ID if you have an email address.

If you want to make purchases, you can buy a gift card or preloaded credit or debit card at a store for cash. Then use that online the way you would use a regular credit card. You can even add money to a PayPal account this way. This method isn’t perfect, of course; the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) have likely already figured out how to monitor it, or will soon. But it is still a step in the right direction.

In addition, if the books you want to read are available at the local library, you can go and read the books there. While you need identifying information to get a library card and check out books, you usually don’t need any credentials to simply walk in and pull a book off the shelf. Read for as long as you like in the building and then simply return the book to the shelf or the front desk. The same thing often works at larger bookstores. I know at my local Barnes and Noble, they actually have chairs scattered around so that customers can sit down and read if they like. There is no time limit, and the hours are actually better than at the library!

Paper = Privacy and Freedom

So at the end of the day, paper books might just be one of the most secure sources of information around, because there is no way for Big Brother to monitor your reading of them. Those of us who value knowledge might be well advised to store up large numbers of paper books, particularly those that bureaucrats might brand as dangerous or radical at some point in the future, and hide them. Paper might be one of the best guarantees of First Amendment rights that we have.

Before 2010 there was some small hope that the massive deployment of domestic drones could be avoided. That hope was lost when President Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act into law in 2012. Once reserved for the battlefields over Iraq and Afghanistan, the FAA opened up drone use for a wide range of domestic functions, both public and private. By 2020 there will be at least 30,000 drones occupying U.S airspace.

The kinds of drones that are popping up in U.S. skies are not the kind one expects after seeing Predators on the news. These are micro-sized craft that can go undetected as they hover above our cities and homes conducting 24/7 surveillance. Some of the kinds of drones becoming prevalent include:

Gorgon Stare Drones: A drone with sensors that can keep track of an area 2.5 miles across from twelve different angles.

Qube Drones: These are capable of hovering for forty minutes at heights of about 400 feet to conduct surveillance on targets as far as half a mile away.

Dragonfly Drones: The U.S. Air Force has “unveiled insect-sized spies ‘as tiny as bumblebees’ that cannot be detected and will be able to fly into buildings to ‘photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.’”

Cyborg Drones: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) for the manipulation of insects into “cyborgs.” Through genetic engineering, they are seeking to control the movement of insects and utilize them for surveillance purposes.

Hummingbird Drones:  Shaped like a bird, the “Nano Hummingbird” drone is slightly larger than an actual hummingbird and can rest in the palm of one’s hand. It flits around effortlessly, blending in with its surroundings.

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Nano Quadrators Drones: These small, four-propellered drones operate based upon the flight dynamics of insects, enabling them to operate as a swarm. Using twenty drones, researchers have demonstrated how, moving compactly as a unit, the drones were able to navigate obstacles, form complex patterns, and even execute a fluid figure eight arrangement.

Black Hornet Drones: Weighing in at roughly half an ounce and four inches long, comparable to a finch, the Black Hornet Nano helicopter drone was designed to capture and relay video and still images to remote users and can fly even in windy conditions.

Samarai Drones: Lockheed Martin’s tiny “Samarai” drone, inspired by the design of a maple seed, is capable of high speeds, low battery consumption, vertical movement, and swift ground deployment.

Spy-Butterfly Drones: Israel unveiled this insect-inspired drone, which they dubbed the “spy-butterfly” because of its two sizable wings. Weighing only twenty grams, this drone was developed for indoor surveillance in public places such as train stations, airport terminals, and office buildings. These virtually noiseless machines make them unnoticeable and therefore ideal for intelligence gathering.

Raven Drones: Weighing four pounds, the RQ-11 Raven drone is not as small nor as agile as its smaller counterparts, but with more than 19,000 out there already, it is the most common. Useful for seeing around corners and sending footage back to its handlers, the Raven resembles a rudimentary model airplane and crumbles like Legos upon landing.

With sixty-three active drone sites across the nation and fifty-six government agencies presently authorized to use drones, including twenty-two law enforcement agencies and twenty-four universities, drones are here to stay. As Singer, author of Wired for War, a book about military robotics, warns: “The debate over drones is like debating the merits of computers in 1979: They are here to stay, and the boom has barely begun. We are at the Wright Brothers Flier stage of this. There’s no stopping this technology. Anybody who thinks they can put this genie back in the box—that’s silliness.”

An Internet of Drones

So what is dronenet anyway? Basically, dronenet would be a large number of small flying drones that would deliver small payloads. We’ve all seen how, with present technology, drones can be programmed to deliver bombs or missiles on the battlefield. Dronenet is the next step; it would deliver small payloads, say tiny packages or letters, to a specific location. A good use for it might be sensitive documents or perhaps very small packages like prescription medicine to homes. The air would be filled with hundreds of tiny helicopter-like drones delivering things.

It would look like this: A network of computers would control small electrically powered drones via Wi-Fi. Since the drones would be lightweight and low powered, they’d be cheap, easy to build, and easy to operate. They wouldn’t fly that high, but they could enter homes and travel through city streets.

This idea may sound farfetched, but one of the top thinkers in preparedness today, Col. John Robb, thinks it is almost here. Remember how nobody talked about the Internet until it suddenly burst upon the scene back in the 1990s? Much the same could happen with the dronenet. Robb even calls it an “Internet of drones.”

Dronenet: the Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly

The potential good of dronenet is that it would allow for fairly cheap, small-scale package delivery. It might make it easier for people to work from home and to receive or send out to small businesses. New businesses could proliferate. Another advantage is that it could reduce the use of delivery trucks and the use of fossil fuels, particularly gasoline.

The downside of dronenet is obvious: It would be a powerful surveillance tool for police, big business, or anybody else. Imagine hundreds of drones buzzing over the city, monitoring everybody and everything. Unlike surveillance cameras, they’d be hard to sabotage. Worse, they could be easily positioned to eavesdrop on conversations, spy on people (even in homes), or monitor communications. Drones could even use technologies such as infrared or deep radar to see through walls.

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Yet dronenet would be far cheaper than surveillance cameras and far easier to deploy. It could be quickly withdrawn if there was public impact and then easily and quietly redeployed later. Authorities would try to present dronenet as a boon to public safety; they might note it could be used to catch drug dealers or bad drivers.

Another big problem is that, unlike traditional surveillance cameras, dronenet could easily be deployed in rural areas. Authorities could drop it out of aircraft at night. It might be posted in a particular region to see which rural families own guns, grow organic gardens, or are homeschooling children. Dronenet could be used to control rural activities such as hunting or use of the national forests.

Easy-to-implement surveillance would only be part of the menace of dronenet. The same drone that could easily be rigged to deliver a package could also be set up to drop a bomb, fire a missile, or carry a small gun. Drones could be deployed to disrupt crowds or to assassinate individuals. The dronenet could also be used to spray chemicals, including chemical weapons.

This may sound farfetched, but how many Americans in 1993 would have thought that U.S. remote-controlled planes would have been assassinating enemies in twenty years? Yet that’s exactly what’s happening.

Who Is Developing the Dronenet and Why?

An interesting question comes up here: Who is developing the dronenet and why? Col. Robb is or was a high-level military strategist—his sympathies are certainly with preppers—but he has a lot of contacts in the military industrial complex. Robb also gives a lot of speeches and talks to big business, the military, etc.

It’s obvious that somebody is putting a lot of thought and some money into the dronenet concept. We have to ask ourselves why and get scared. Is somebody out there developing next generation surveillance technology that seems perfectly geared to use in rural areas or semi-deserted cities?

The military might argue that the dronenet is being developed for the next war as an alternative to deploying large numbers of infantry to places like Afghanistan. Yet the same technologies could be used here in the U.S. to patrol cities in lieu of increasingly expensive policemen or in rural areas.

The Department of Homeland Security might see dronenet as a means of patrolling the border. The DHS is already experimenting with drones for border patrol work according to The New York Times, including along the Canadian border, where there is no real threat. The DHS might also see dronenet as a means of policing rural areas or combating domestic terrorism, particularly if it gets ordered to disarm rural residents or ban certain kinds of hunting (which has already happened in the United Kingdom). After all, hunting is unpopular in some quarters, and most voters don’t hunt.

Dronenet and the Bad Guys

If government abuse of dronenet wasn’t bad enough, what about everybody else? Criminals might use dronenet to distribute drugs or enforce some sort of protection racket. Perverts could use it to spy on people in their homes. Terrorists could use it to deliver bombs or spread chemical or biological weapons.

Just imagine what would happen if hundreds of small drones flew over a big city carrying explosives. The result could be massive amounts of destruction that authorities couldn’t stop. The drones could fly over the streets dropping grenades on pedestrians and cars or simply fly into buildings and explode.

History has shown us that such military technology spreads rapidly. In 1945, America’s leaders said nobody else would have an atomic bomb for decades; the Soviets tested their first nuclear bomb in 1949. Dronenet would be far easier to duplicate and deploy than an atomic bomb. Even a fairly small criminal or terrorist organization could build one.

Dronenet is one example of many new technologies that preppers need to be aware of. In the future, it could be used against average people or make it possible for average people to break free and stay free of big business and big government. We need to be aware of dronenet and start preparing for its effects because it is coming whether we want it to or not.

What’s Threatening About inBloom: Personal Information is No Longer Private

The personal information held in this database includes everything from name and social security number to address and phone number. It also includes photos of the children described within, descriptions of school attendance, records of yearly grades, and even written accounts of each child’s attitudes and interests in school. The reason for all of this is that inBloom plans to use the information for public schools and private companies to tailor educational resources toward children’s overall needs. Needless to say, parents are concerned by this collection of their children’s private data, and tailoring educational resources isn’t a good enough excuse to justify keeping photos, birthdates, and hobbies in a massive, $100 million database.

Clearly, the biggest threat at hand is the possibility that parents will see their children’s privacy compromised and have no recourse. There is no parental consent, or consent on the part of the child, required to be present in the database, so children may have their information made available to private companies without their knowledge.

While the data is still private in the sense that the database isn’t publicly available to anyone who wants it, it’s far from private in the eyes of parents. This information goes out to private companies routinely, and parents have no way to recoil or take their child out of the database, as education officials in school districts are the ones with this ability—not the parent.

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Most worrisome, the documentation within inBloom’s privacy policy states clearly that the company “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored… or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.” While the database is allegedly as secure as such a database can be, it’s always possible that information might be intercepted, and inBloom doesn’t take responsibility for damage that might occur as a result of a child’s personal information being taken illegally from the database. Even a child can be a victim of identity theft, and it’s possible that his or her social security number and childhood address will remain on file long after graduating from the public school district. If this is the case, leaving a child open to identity theft as an adult seems like reason enough to seek out recourse as a parent—but the database is not illegal and consent is not needed, so no recourse exists at this time.

Even if the database itself stays secure, there’s no way to monitor what happens to the data after it leaves the database. When a private company receives data from inBloom, it’s uncertain whether inBloom will continue to monitor the data and make sure that it’s handled appropriately, or even whether it’s possible to keep track of data from a distance. There’s no guarantee that a child’s data will be securely stored or deleted after it’s been used by a private company, and that’s even more problematic with the possibility that a company will go out of business with a child’s data still in possession.

What Do Private Companies Want With Children’s Data?

Education officials on the local level are authorized under federal law to share demographic information from their databases to private companies. In turn, these private companies plan to use the data for informational mining purposes, to extract information about the typical student as market research to create educational products that serve children more effectively. While market research is innocent enough by itself, the distribution of personal information without consent violates a parent’s right to monitor the care and livelihood of their child. Parents should be the only controller of their child’s privacy, and the presence of databases such as inBloom make it impossible for parents to fulfill this part of their parental duty.

Additionally, market research on the part of a major corporate business is very different from the philanthropic cause that they might want education officials and parents to believe. Ultimately, the goal of any private company that collects market research is to mine as much data as possible for information about a population that is profitable. This might mean mining public school data and examining the math weaknesses of 5,000 fifth-grade boys to find that a new division practice game might be an easy sell to parents of these children. If your child’s personal information is profitable to a company, then that company will use it to their benefit. It’s understandable that a business wants to make money, but harvesting the data of children is not the best way to go about profiting when many of these children’s parents don’t even realize that such a database exists, much less that their child is represented there. This is especially true when the children that the company is taking advantage of are the same children of the parents who will buy the educational products resulting from the research. Part of being a respectable company means valuing and respecting the customers, and the companies that will mine data from inBloom aren’t showing much respect.

How Does Such a Database Exist in the First Place?

Of course, the biggest issue is that the database even exists—corporate companies wouldn’t be able to mine this data if the database wasn’t supplying it in the first place. Individual state governments decide whether to provide the data of their students—data that is collected in school application materials early in childhood and records that are updated throughout a child’s school career, but data that ultimately is meant to remain in sight of the teacher, parents, and counselors only. The federal government’s position is that such a database violates no privacy laws because it isn’t truly public, which supports the Department of Education’s stance that schools don’t need parental consent to share student data with any company that has an interest in education, including commercial technology companies.

States can opt out of the database, but it may be more profitable to opt in, with educational funding at a low in many districts. With eight states already planning to use inBloom to share student data with private companies, children from kindergarten to twelfth grade will have their data compiled and shared with companies nationally without consent or knowledge on the part of their parents. Children who are homeschooled, unschooled, or attend private school are not usually considered a part of the public school district, and so will not be typically included in the database, although this varies from area to area. This is a relief to parents who have the means to homeschool, but will continue to be a problem for the millions of parents whose children attend public schools all over the nation. With a voice and continued criticism toward this initiative, perhaps parental rights can become a bigger priority, enabling parents to withdraw their children from the database and protect their data from the start.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing stopping those very same drones from operating on U.S. soil. While traditionally there were thought to be laws that prohibit law enforcement from carrying out a murder on U.S. civilians (especially on our soil), the government isn’t quite so sure about that anymore. In this day and time, it seems those laws are relative and up for reinterpretation depending on what is wanted at the time.

What those drones can do, however, is collect almost unlimited intelligence on the daily lives of any Americans. Our lives and choices are no longer our own, as the government now chooses to invade our privacy and deploy machines that can track our every move. People are outraged by the smallest infringements on their privacy: paparazzi, private detectives, and the like are all viewed negatively and emphatically rejected by those of us who value our privacy. How are we to protect that right as the government begins utilizing drones on our own soil?

The Specs

The drones that the government will likely begin using to track citizens are highly functional machines, capable of recording all of your movements in great detail. While they will not be armed with missiles (yet), these drones do have high quality cameras that can take excellent photos, as well as high quality video, of whatever activity they are observing. One drone can simultaneously track over 60 targets, and can carry the technology to sense movement, read license plates, and attach a GPS signal to whomever is being observed.

Reports noted that “there may be as many as 30,000 unmanned drones operated in the United States by 2020 for uses such as wildfire containment and surveillance, law enforcement, and surveying.” With that many operable drones throughout the country, there is no doubt that the privacy of individuals will continue to be violated, without substantial change in legislation.

The Reality

The government claims that they will be using these drones for crime fighting and law enforcement purposes only, and at first, that may be true. What the use of these drones actually means is that without a warrant or subpoena, a drone can take video surveillance of your home and every action you take throughout the day, feeding that information back to the government.

Video footage is of such high quality that citizens have already been arrested for crimes based on evidence obtained by these drones, and lower appellate courts have upheld these convictions. The court system is, so far, doing little to stop this overreach of federal power. The government is being allowed to trample on our right to privacy in the name of catching a few extra criminals each year.

Get off the road to tyranny and restore liberty in America.

While using the drones for national security purposes like patrolling the border might be a natural (and legal) extension of the federal government’s power, using the drones for unwarranted surveillance of citizens is a violation of both our right to privacy and the restriction of federal power to warranted search and seizure. Unfortunately, there is little we can do to stop it. The Supreme Court will be unable to rule on the issue until a test case is available. The government may start utilizing drones to watch ordinary individuals in the next year, but it will be much longer before the Supreme Court can grant a hearing on the issue. Past Supreme Court rulings have created a precedent that should be enough to bar the federal government from continuing these drone plans, but it appears as if they are more than happy to continue plans to use drones domestically until the Supreme Court specifically applies those rulings to this issue.

Government Oversight Of Drone Use

Perhaps even worse than government use of these drones is the frightening fact that individuals and companies can purchase these drones. They will not, of course, be outfitted with missiles like our military drones, but they will be capable of high quality surveillance. The very near future could hold two major privacy threats: your previously nosy but out of luck neighbors, and the federal government—both invading your personal life and right to privacy.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has been placed in charge of creating standards for the behavior of these intelligence drones and determining what lines they may not cross. As such, groups have begun lobbying for harsh restrictions in terms of what the government should be able to use these drones for. The general public will be guaranteed no security from privacy invasions by drone surveillance unless a significant push is made to hold the government accountable and liable for the way they are using these drones. If these drones are being used to detect wildfires, the government can surely construct a rigid flight path that does not endanger anyone’s private land.

Because the question at hand jeopardizes the lives and daily activities of so many individuals, as well as our constitutional rights, it is of utmost importance that we involve the public, willingly and immediately, in a discussion of drone operation. Should we fail to do so, drones that gather intelligence on U.S. citizens will only be the beginning of more government intrusion into our lives.

We balk now at the idea of the government carrying out murders on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, but the leap may not be a large one to make. President Obama has already shown a willingness to assassinate U.S. citizens, and there is no guarantee that he would be reluctant to take a step further and commit that murder on U.S. soil if he believed there was any situation that might warrant the death of said individual. Imagine a drone secretly watching your every move, reporting to a law enforcement agency, and charges being files, all without a single application for a search warrant. With no court vetting probable cause, the infringement upon our rights by the federal government would have reached a new, and particularly intolerable, level.

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The Federal Aviation Administration has allowed several police departments to use drones across the U.S. They are controlled from a remote location and use infrared sensors and high-resolution cameras. Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas now says his department is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas that can be deployed from its drone. “Those are things,” he said, “that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system on the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle].”

This proliferation of drones has led to an unusual coalition between libertarian and conservatives with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s simply not appropriate to use any kind of force, lethal or non-lethal, on a drone,” Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the ACLU, told CBSDC.

Crump says one of the principal problems with the use of drones is the remote locations where they are operated from. “When the officer is on the scene, they have full access to info about what has transpired there,” Crump explained. “An officer at a remote location far away does not have the same level of access.”

The ACLU has also raised concerns about potential drones malfunctioning and falling from the sky, adding that they are keeping a close eye on the use of these unmanned aircraft by police departments. “We don’t need a situation where Americans feel there is in an invisible eye in the sky,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at ACLU.

Joshua Foust of the American Security Project says domestic drones should not be armed. “I think from a legal perspective, there is nothing problematic about floating a drone over a city.” But Foust also said, “In terms of getting armed drones, I would be very nervous about that happening right now.”

Chief Deputy McDaniel said his community should not be worried about the department using a drone. “We’ve never gone into surveillance for sake of surveillance unless there is criminal activity afoot. Just to see what you’re doing in your backyard pool — we don’t care.”

But for the ACLU, the concern is just too great that an American’s constitutional rights will be trampled with the use of drones. “The prospect of people out in public being tased or targeted by force by flying drones where no officers is physically present on the scene,” Crump says, “raises the prospect of unconstitutional force being used on individuals.”

Questions like this are beginning to concern some members of Congress, which is looking at proposals that would limit the amount of information unrelated to a crime drones could collect. One bill from Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) would require private drone operators to inform the government of any data collected by drones and would require law enforcement to “minimize” the collection of “information and data unrelated to the investigation of a crime.” The draft bill says there “is the potential for unmanned aircraft system technology to enable invasive and pervasive surveillance without adequate privacy protections.”

Best estimates are that by the end of 2012, as many as 30,000 drones and unmanned aerial vehicles will be doing a variety of tasks — border security, disaster relief, search and rescue, counter-terrorism, and looking down on people and streets on behalf of police departments.

But just what will they be looking for, and what sophisticated devices will they carry? And how deeply will they peer into the life of the average American? These questions have yet to be answered, and to this point judges have proven to lean toward permission of such devices by law enforcement in actions against American citizens.

©2012 Off the Grid News

An example of security problems that can arise was brought to light when Mat Honan, a Wired reporter, revealed that he had been the victim of a mobile security breach. That a seasoned reporter for a magazine like Wired could be hacked raises concerns about cell phone privacy for consumers and service providers alike. Honan said that his Google, Twitter, and AppleID accounts were hacked into, compromising his personal information. He took much of the blame for this incident, saying that he had linked his different accounts together, which was probably how the hackers were able to access his information across so many venues.

While Honan admitted his personal security strategy was not ideal, the hacking incident still raises concerns for Apple. The company has since taken steps to put their privacy and security methods under closer scrutiny. According to CNET, Apple recently suspended users’ ability to reset their Apple ID passwords directly on their phones. This action will not be permanent, but will likely remain in place until Apple can resolve the issue and determine if it is necessary to make this function more secure.

“We’ve temporarily suspended the ability to reset Apple ID passwords over the phone,” Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris explained in an email, according to Wired. “We’re asking customers who need to reset their password to continue to use our online iForgot system (iforgot.apple.com). This system can reset a password in one of two ways – either have a password reset sent to an alternate email address already on record or challenge the customer to answer security questions they had previously set up. When we resume over-the-phone password resets, customers will be required to provide even stronger identity verification to reset their password.”

Mobile privacy is a major concern, as a growing number of consumers are using their cell phones to conduct banking and other monetary transactions and access personal information. Most cell phones and smartphones have options to help users protect their information, such as screen lock controls that require a password to gain access to the device. This can help prevent hackers from accessing the phone should it be stolen or lost.

It is also wise to remove any personal information from a device, such as bank account numbers, passwords, addresses and other data that could be used inappropriately by criminals. Even keeping a cell phone linked to an email account is not a good idea, as this could give a thief or a hacker access to other information.

The problem is that what a thief once had to break into someone’s house to steal is often now readily available on their cell phones and tablets. With so much personal information sitting within range on a coffee shop table or in your pocket, you shouldn’t be surprised there are enterprising hackers taking advantage of the situation.

“We’ve noticed a 900 percent increase of malware for mobile devices that run the Android OS” in the past year, said Catalin Cosoi, global research director at Bucharest, Romania, security firm Bitdefender. “Although some of the samples are oriented towards profit, by sending text messages or phoning to premium-rate numbers, the wide majority [are] focused on extracting personal information from the device, such as contacts, text messages, browser history and GPS location.”

Cosoi warns of four common avenues of cell-phone hacker attack:

Baseband Hacking: A sophisticated technique for intercepting cellular calls, baseband hacking exploits vulnerabilities in both iPhones and Android-based smartphones. These attacks use the phone’s baseband processor to turn it into a listening device that allows the intruder to eavesdrop on conversations.

Bluetooth Snooping: Bluetooth device-pairing default passcodes for smartphones are usually “0000″ or “1234.” Many users never change the defaults, and that’s a mistake that can give an attacker access to all your messages, contacts, and passwords.

The One-Minute Attack: Smartphones are always on, which means that a smart hacker can attack quickly and get out before the victim is aware anything is wrong.

Android.Spyware.GoneSixty.Gen: Once installed on a phone, it sends all messages, recent calls, browsing history and other information to a remote location and then uninstalls itself. All this takes place in less than sixty seconds.

©2012 Off the Grid News

But there is one disturbing aspect to all of this. The proliferation of digital and electronic technologies is making it more difficult to protect our privacy, as the surveillance society imagined by George Orwell in his classic dystopian novel 1984 is now becoming a reality.  Internet spyware, hidden cameras in stores and on street corners, scanning and X-rays in airports, the rapid spread of GPS tracking, instantaneous tracing through cell phone or credit card usage, RFID chips that can be implanted beneath the skin, satellites that can zoom in close enough to recognize faces – these are all a part of our evolving reality, and privacy is becoming an increasingly rare commodity as a result.

Given the oaths of fealty our politicians are constantly swearing to the Constitution, one would expect our elected leaders to be raising their voices in protest against this collective threat to our Fourth Amendment rights. But to the contrary, even though technologies that facilitate discrete and pervasive surveillance invite abuse on a potentially massive scale, instead of trying to protect us from this clear and present danger, Congress is actually doing everything they can to make it easier, not more difficult, for government and private institutions alike to monitor our every move.

This was demonstrated recently in a very dramatic way, when the Senate, by a margin of 70 – 25, approved a bill called the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act, which was subsequently signed into law by President Obama on February 14. While the primary purpose of this legislation is to improve air safety by requiring the airline industry to switch from radar to GPS for air traffic control and landing guidance, the new law contains a secondary provision that could have significant privacy-related ramifications. By September of 2015, the FAA will be required to open airspace all across the nation to unmanned aerial vehicles, which are more commonly known as drones. For those who are not familiar with this technology, these remote-controlled flying machines have the potential to be the most efficient and effective surveillance tools that have ever existed on planet earth.

Watch the Skies!

Like so many other revolutionary technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles were first developed by the US military for use in combat missions. Drones that can be guided from a distance by remote control are an effective way to reduce casualty levels among pilots and flight crews, and as these flying machines have become more sophisticated the ideas for how they might be put to use for non-military purposes have been growing. While drones were exclusively airplane-sized in the past, they now come in many shapes and varieties, and some are so small they could easily be mistaken for birds if seen at a distance. Drones are now being outfitted with the most refined surveillance technology available, including night vision, video analytics that can identify and hone in on suspicious behaviors, massive zoom, see-through capacity, and facial recognition software that can allow particular individuals to be spotted and tracked wherever they go. Drones are proving to be ideal platforms for exotic technological developments of the kind usually seen only in science fiction movies, and their potential to be used for the purposes of targeted and refined surveillance is virtually unlimited.

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At the present time, drone use in US airspace is restricted to certain areas, mainly military flight zones and regions of the US-Mexican border, where the Department of Homeland Security has deployed nine surveillance drones to help monitor the illegal trade in narcotics. But the unmanned aerial vehicle industry has been pushing hard to promote the technology for further domestic use, and law enforcement agencies in particular have been showing a great deal of interest. It is important to note, however, that the new FAA regulations will require air space to be made available for privately-owned drones as well as any that are being operated by state, local, or federal government agencies, so the police are clearly not the only ones interested in drone technology.

Backers of domestic drone deployment swear these flying surveillance boxes will mostly be used to supplement traditional security and safety-related activities, such as routine police patrolling or fire detection. But the problem is that drones can be used to monitor just about anything or anyone, and in the end there will be no one there to watch the watchers to make sure they are staying within the bounds of propriety. Law enforcement fishing expeditions are likely to become routine if drone use becomes commonplace, and people could suddenly find themselves receiving tickets or citations right and left for even the slightest offenses. This activity alone could be turned into a moneymaking racket by police departments and court systems everywhere looking for an easy source of funds. In addition, the FBI’s notorious campaigns of harassment against social activists and protestors could be stepped up, as anyone with the courage to show up at a protest march or rally could be photographed and tracked surreptitiously from that point on.

While the drone industry and the law enforcement agencies who want to use them are giving facile assurances that these flying super spies will only be used to supplement existing police practice, because drones guarantee their users complete secrecy the potential for abuse is simply too strong for us to take anyone’s word for anything. And what about the provisions in the new bill that will make airspace available for privately-owned drones – just what exactly will these drones be used for anyway? Will they be used as a more intensive, real-world version of Internet spyware, analyzing our every move and collecting all kinds of personal information so that their owners will be able to target us with their unwanted sales pitches? Or could they be used for even darker purposes such as stalking or harassment by wealthy but unscrupulous individuals with their own sick personal motives?

The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century

When the Bill of Rights was first written, its authors used language that was appropriate for the time and place. But in assessing what a document like this really means, we must be sure to observe not just the letter of its prescriptions, but also the spirit that motivated them. More than 200 years after its words were first put on paper, government and private interests alike have now gained the ability through technology to flaunt the Fourth Amendment and routinely violate our persons, houses, papers, and effects from a safe distance without our consent. So even though the authors of the Bill of Rights could not possibly have foreseen the need to include language in this document that would have prohibited perpetual remote random surveillance of the American people, it is hard to see how any politician worth his or her salt could argue that unleashing domestic drones on the populace does not violate the spirit and the deeper intent of the Fourth Amendment. And yet, they are planning to let the drones loose on us without even so much as a whisper of protest or concern.

Despite claims to the contrary, like the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act before it the new Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act appears to represent nothing more than the continued erosion of our Constitutional rights and protections, hidden beneath facile assurances of good will and good intent. But as many wise people have pointed out, the road to tyranny is paved with good intentions.

©2012 Off the Grid News