Security expert Bruce Schneier on the Public-Private Surveillance Partnership

[eridani]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-31/the-public-private-surveillance-partnership.html

The simple answer is to blame consumers, who shouldn’t use mobile phones, credit cards, banks or the Internet if they don’t want to be tracked. But that argument deliberately ignores the reality of today’s world. Everything we do involves computers, even if we’re not using them directly. And by their nature, computers produce tracking data. We can’t go back to a world where we don’t use computers, the Internet or social networking. We have no choice but to share our personal information with these corporations, because that’s how our world works today.

Curbing the power of the corporate-private surveillance partnership requires limitations on both what corporations can do with the data we choose to give them and restrictions on how and when the government can demand access to that data. Because both of these changes go against the interests of corporations and the government, we have to demand them as citizens and voters. We can lobby our government to operate more transparently -- disclosing the opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would be a good start -- and hold our lawmakers accountable when it doesn’t. But it’s not going to be easy. There are strong interests doing their best to ensure that the steady stream of data keeps flowing.

(Bruce Schneier is a computer security technologist. He is the author of several books, including his latest, “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Thrive.”)