REUTERS/Jim Young
Mark Zuckerberg
runs a giant spy machine in Palo Alto*, California. He wasn’t the first
to build one, but his was the best, and every day hundreds of thousands
of people upload the most intimate details of their lives to the
Internet. The real coup wasn’t hoodwinking the public into revealing
their thoughts, closest associates, and exact geographic coordinates at
any given time. Rather, it was getting the public to volunteer that information. Then he turned off** the privacy settings.
[**Editor's note: Facebook disputes the notion that it
has "turned off" its privacy settings. We have provided a statement from
the company at the bottom of this post.]
“People have
really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and
different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” said Zuckerberg
after moving 350 million people into a glass privacy ghetto. “That
social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
If the state had
organized such an information drive, protestors would have burned down
the White House. But the state is the natural beneficiary of this new
“social norm.” Today, that information is regularly used in court
proceedings and law enforcement. There is no need for warrants or
subpoenas. Judges need not be consulted. The Fourth Amendment does not
come into play. Intelligence agencies don't have to worry about
violating laws protecting citizenry from wiretapping and information
gathering. Sharing information “more openly” and with “more people” is a
step backward in civil liberties. And spies, whether foreign or
domestic, are “more people,” too.
Julian Assange,
founder of WikiLeaks, knows better than anyone how to exploit holes in
the secrecy apparatus to the detriment of American security. His raison
d'être is to blast down the walls protecting state secrets and
annihilate the implicit bargain, yet even he is frightened by the brazenness of Facebook and other such social networking sites:
Here
we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their
relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and their
communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the
United States, all accessible to the U.S. intelligence. Facebook,
Google, Yahoo — all these major U.S. organizations have built-in
interfaces for U.S. intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a
subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for U.S.
intelligence to use.
It’s all there,
and the Internet never forgets. But even if the impossible happened and
the Internet did somehow develop selective amnesia, in the case of
microblogging service Twitter, the Library of Congress has acquired
every message ever posted by its two hundred million members. As Jeffrey
Rosen wrote in the New York Times:
We’ve
known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism,
exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to
understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of
what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital
files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening,
at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities;
to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew to
overcome our checkered pasts.
The U.S.
government isn't the only institution to notice. Early in the military
campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers of the social networking
generation uploaded to their MySpace profiles pictures of camp life in
the war zones. Innocuous photos of troops horsing around in front of
tent cities, bunkers, outposts, motor pools, and operations centers
circulated freely on what was then described as “a place for friends.”
The U.S.
military soon realized that foreign intelligence services, sympathetic
to America’s enemies and savvy to the social revolution, could collect
these photographs by the thousands and build detailed, full-color maps
of American military bases. During the Cold War, this would have
required the insertion of first-rate spies, briefcases filled with cash,
and elaborate blackmail schemes. In the age of radical transparency,
all it would take is a MySpace account to know exactly where to fire the
mortar round to inflict maximum damage on the United States.
The Marine Corps
confirmed this in a 2009 directive. “These Internet sites in general
are a proven haven for malicious actors and content are a particularly
high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and
targeting by adversaries.” The directive continued, “The very nature of
[social networking sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation
window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an
easy conduit for information leakage,” putting operational security,
communications security, and U.S. military personnel “at an elevated
risk of compromise.”
This type of
clever thinking on the part of America’s enemies is not unique to this
conflict. During the run-up to the Gulf War, foreign intelligence
services had a pretty good idea that the U.S. war machine was preparing
for its most substantial engagement since Vietnam. The U.S. military
recognized a new kind of threat — one that didn’t require foreign
intelligence to insert an agent onto every base in the Republic. Open
source information could be just as dangerous. Spikes in late-night
orders from pizzerias near key military bases and an exceptionally busy
parking lot at the Pentagon could tell hostile powers everything they
needed to know.
In 2010, the
Department of Defense revised and consolidated its ad hoc policy on
social media. On its official website it declared, “Service members and
[Department of Defense] employees are welcome and encouraged to use new
media to communicate with family and friends — at home stations or
deployed,” but warned, “it’s important to do it safely.”)
*"When the book was actually written, they were still in Palo Alto." - D.B. Grady
In a statement to Business Insider, Facebook notes:
"In reality we spend a lot of time building privacy controls, and working to make them powerful, easy to use, and also educating our users on them. For example:
- Announcing new tools in December: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/547/Better-Controls-for-Managing-Your-Content
- (in the same post) In-product education about privacy that we did in December: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/547/Better-Controls-for-Managing-Your-Content
- Recent flyout in the News Feed ahead of
Graph Search that pointed to the new tools and highlighted how people
could check their stuff: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/660/Expanding-Graph-Search-Beta"
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