Social Issues

8.10 Social Issues

The Internet and its security technology is an area where social issues, public policy, and technology meet head on, often with huge consequences. Below we will just briefly examine three areas: privacy, freedom of speech, and copyright. Needless to say, we can only scratch the surface here. For additional reading, see (Anderson, 2001; Garfinkel with Spafford, 2002; and Schneier, 2000). The Internet is also full of material. Just type words such as ''privacy,'' ''censorship,'' and ''copyright'' into any search engine. Also, see this book's Web site for some links.

8.10.1 Privacy

Do people have a right to privacy? Good question. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from searching people's houses, papers, and effects without good reason, and goes on to restrict the circumstances under which search warrants shall be issued. Thus, privacy has been on the public agenda for over 200 years, at least in the U.S.

What has changed in the past decade is both the ease with which governments can spy on their citizens and the ease with which the citizens can prevent such spying. In the 18th century, for the government to search a citizen's papers, it had to send out a policeman on a horse to go to the citizen's farm demanding to see certain documents. It was a cumbersome procedure. Nowadays, telephone companies and Internet providers readily provide wiretaps when presented with search warrants. It makes life much easier for the policeman and there is no danger of falling off the horse.

Cryptography changes all that. Anybody who goes to the trouble of downloading and installing PGP and who uses a well-guarded alien-strength key can be fairly sure that nobody in the known universe can read his e-mail, search warrant or no search warrant. Governments well understand this and do not like it. Real privacy means it is much harder for them to spy on criminals of all stripes, but it is also much harder to spy on journalists and political opponents. Consequently, some governments restrict or forbid the use or export of cryptography. In France, for example, prior to 1999, all cryptography was banned unless the government was given the keys.

France was not alone. In April 1993, the U.S. Government announced its intention to make a hardware cryptoprocessor, the clipper chip, the standard for all networked communication. In this way, it was said, citizens' privacy would be guaranteed. It also mentioned that the chip provided the government with the ability to decrypt all traffic via a scheme called key escrow, which allowed the government access to all the keys. However, it promised only to snoop when it had a valid search warrant. Needless to say, a huge furor ensued, with privacy advocates denouncing the whole plan and law enforcement officials praising it. Eventually, the government backed down and dropped the idea.

A large amount of information about electronic privacy is available at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Web site, www.eff.org.

Anonymous Remailers

PGP, SSL, and other technologies make it possible for two parties to establish secure, authenticated communication, free from third-party surveillance and interference. However, sometimes privacy is best served by not having authentication, in fact by making communication anonymous. The anonymity may be desired for point-to-point messages, newsgroups, or both.

Let us consider some examples. First, political dissidents living under authoritarian regimes often wish to communicate anonymously to escape being jailed or killed. Second, wrongdoing in many corporate, educational, governmental, and other organizations has often been exposed by whistleblowers, who frequently prefer to remain anonymously to avoid retribution. Third, people with unpopular social, political, or religious views may wish to communicate with each other via e-mail or newsgroups without exposing themselves. Fourth, people may wish to discuss alcoholism, mental illness, sexual harassment, child abuse, or being a member of a persecuted minority in a newsgroup without having to go public. Numerous other examples exist, of course.

Let us consider a specific example. In the 1990s, some critics of a nontraditional religious group posted their views to a USENET newsgroup via an anonymous remailer. This server allowed users to create pseudonyms and send e-mail to the server, which then re-mailed or re-posted them using the pseudonym, so no one could tell where the message really came from. Some postings revealed what the religious group claimed were trade secrets and copyrighted documents. The religious group responded by telling local authorities that its trade secrets had been disclosed and its copyright infringed, both of which were crimes where the server was located. A court case followed and the server operator was compelled to turn over the mapping information which revealed the true identities of the persons who had made the postings. (Incidentally, this was not the first time that a religion was unhappy when someone leaked its secrets: William Tyndale was burned at the stake in 1536 for translating the Bible into English).

A substantial segment of the Internet community was outraged by this breach of confidentiality. The conclusion that everyone drew is that an anonymous remailer that stores a mapping between real e-mail addresses and pseudonyms (called a type 1 remailer) is not worth much. This case stimulated various people into designing anonymous remailers that could withstand subpoena attacks.

These new remailers, often called cypherpunk remailers, work as follows. The user produces an e-mail message, complete with RFC 822 headers (except From:, of course), encrypts it with the remailer's public key, and sends it to the remailer. There the outer RFC 822 headers are stripped off, the content is decrypted and the message is remailed. The remailer has no accounts and maintains no logs, so even if the server is later confiscated, it retains no trace of messages that have passed through it.

Many users who wish anonymity chain their requests through multiple anonymous remailers, as shown in Fig. 8-54. Here, Alice wants to send Bob a really, really, really anonymous Valentine's Day card, so she uses three remailers. She composes the message, M, and puts a header on it containing Bob's e-mail address. Then she encrypts the whole thing with remailer 3's public key, E₃. (indicated by horizontal hatching). To this she prepends a header with remailer 3's e-mail address in plaintext. This is the message shown between remailers 2 and 3 in the figure.

Figure 8-54. How Alice uses 3 remailers to send Bob a message.

Then she encrypts this message with remailer 2's public key, E₂ (indicated by vertical hatching) and prepends a plaintext header containing remailer 2's e-mail address. This message is shown between 1 and 2 in Fig. 8-54. Finally, she encrypts the entire message with remailer 1's public key, E₁, and prepends a plaintext header with remailer 1's e-mail address. This is the message shown to the right of Alice in the figure and this is the message she actually transmits.

When the message hits remailer 1, the outer header is stripped off. The body is decrypted and then e-mailed to remailer 2. Similar steps occur at the other two remailers.

Although it is extremely difficult for anyone to trace the final message back to Alice, many remailers take additional safety precautions. For example, they may hold messages for a random time, add or remove junk at the end of a message, and reorder messages, all to make it harder for anyone to tell which message output by a remailer corresponds to which input, in order to thwart traffic analysis. For a description of a system that represents the state of the art in anonymous e-mail, see (Mazières and Kaashoek, 1998).

Anonymity is not restricted to e-mail. Services also exist that allow anonymous Web surfing. The user configures his browser to use the anonymizer as a proxy. Henceforth, all HTTP requests go to the anonymizer, which requests the page and sends it back. The Web site sees the anonymizer as the source of the request, not the user. As long as the anonymizer refrains from keeping a log, after the fact no one can determine who requested which page.

8.10.2 Freedom of Speech

Privacy relates to individuals wanting to restrict what other people can see about them. A second key social issue is freedom of speech, and its opposite, censorship, which is about governments wanting to restrict what individuals can read and publish. With the Web containing millions and millions of pages, it has become a censor's paradise. Depending on the nature and ideology of the regime, banned material may include Web sites containing any of the following:

1.      Material inappropriate for children or teenagers.

2.      Hate aimed at various ethnic, religious, sexual or other groups.

3.      Information about democracy and democratic values.

4.      Accounts of historical events contradicting the government's version.

5.      Manuals for picking locks, building weapons, encrypting messages, etc.

The usual response is to ban the bad sites.

Sometimes the results are unexpected. For example, some public libraries have installed Web filters on their computers to make them child friendly by blocking pornography sites. The filters veto sites on their blacklists but also check pages for dirty words before displaying them. In one case in Loudoun County, Virginia, the filter blocked a patron's search for information on breast cancer because the filter saw the word ''breast.'' The library patron sued Loudoun county. However, in Livermore, California, a parent sued the public library for not installing a filter after her 12-year-old son was caught viewing pornography there. What's a library to do?

It has escaped many people that the World Wide Web is a Worldwide Web. It covers the whole world. Not all countries agree on what should be allowed on the Web. For example, in November 2000, a French court ordered Yahoo, a California Corporation, to block French users from viewing auctions of Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo's Web site because owning such material violates French law. Yahoo appealed to a U.S. court, which sided with it, but the issue of whose laws apply where is far from settled.

Just imagine. What would happen if some court in Utah instructed France to block Web sites dealing with wine because they do not comply with Utah's much stricter laws about alcohol? Suppose that China demanded that all Web sites dealing with democracy be banned as not in the interest of the State. Do Iranian laws on religion apply to more liberal Sweden? Can Saudi Arabia block Web sites dealing with women's rights? The whole issue is a veritable Pandora's box.

A relevant comment from John Gilmore is: ''The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.'' For a concrete implementation, consider the eternity service (Anderson, 1996). Its goal is make sure published information cannot be depublished or rewritten, as was common in the Soviet Union during Josef Stalin's reign. To use the eternity service, the user specifies how long the material is to be preserved, pays a fee proportional to its duration and size, and uploads it. Thereafter, no one can remove or edit it, not even the uploader.

How could such a service be implemented? The simplest model is to use a peer-to-peer system in which stored documents would be placed on dozens of participating servers, each of which gets a fraction of the fee, and thus an incentive to join the system. The servers should be spread over many legal jurisdictions for maximum resilience. Lists of 10 randomly-selected servers would be stored securely in multiple places, so that if some were compromised, others would still exist. An authority bent on destroying the document could never be sure it had found all copies. The system could also be made self-repairing in the sense that if it became known that some copies had been destroyed, the remaining sites would attempt to find new repositories to replace them.

The eternity service was the first proposal for a censorship-resistant system. Since then, others have been proposed and, in some cases, implemented. Various new features have been added, such as encryption, anonymity, and fault tolerance. Often the files to be stored are broken up into multiple fragments, with each fragment stored on many servers. Some of these systems are Freenet (Clarke et al., 2002), PASIS (Wylie et al., 2000), and Publius (Waldman et al., 2000). Other work is reported in (Serjantov, 2002).

Increasingly, many countries are now trying to regulate the export of intangibles, which often include Web sites, software, scientific papers, e-mail, telephone helpdesks, and more. Even the U.K., which has a centuries-long tradition of freedom of speech, is now seriously considering highly restrictive laws, which would, for example, define technical discussions between a British professor and his foreign student at the University of Cambridge as regulated export needing a government license (Anderson, 2002). Needless to say, such policies are controversial.

Steganography

In countries where censorship abounds, dissidents often try to use technology to evade it. Cryptography allows secret messages to be sent (although possibly not lawfully), but if the government thinks that Alice is a Bad Person, the mere fact that she is communicating with Bob may get him put in this category, too, as repressive governments understand the concept of transitive closure, even if they are short on mathematicians. Anonymous remailers can help, but if they are banned domestically and messages to foreign ones require a government export license, they cannot help much. But the Web can.

People who want to communicate secretly often try to hide the fact that any communication at all is taking place. The science of hiding messages is called steganography, from the Greek words for ''covered writing.'' In fact, the ancient Greeks used it themselves. Herodotus wrote of a general who shaved the head of a messenger, tattooed a message to his scalp, and let the hair grow back before sending him off. Modern techniques are conceptually the same, only they have a higher bandwidth and lower latency.

As a case in point, consider Fig. 8-55(a). This photograph, taken by the author in Kenya, contains three zebras contemplating an acacia tree. Fig. 8-55(b) appears to be the same three zebras and acacia tree, but it has an extra added attraction. It contains the complete, unabridged text of five of Shakespeare's plays embedded in it: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and Julius Caesar. Together, these plays total over 700 KB of text.

Figure 8-55. (a) Three zebras and a tree. (b) Three zebras, a tree, and the complete text of five plays by William Shakespeare.

How does this steganographic channel work? The original color image is 1024 x 768 pixels. Each pixel consists of three 8-bit numbers, one each for the red, green, and blue intensity of that pixel. The pixel's color is formed by the linear superposition of the three colors. The steganographic encoding method uses the low-order bit of each RGB color value as a covert channel. Thus, each pixel has room for 3 bits of secret information, one in the red value, one in the green value, and one in the blue value. With an image of this size, up to 1024 x 768 x 3 bits or 294,912 bytes of secret information can be stored in it.

The full text of the five plays and a short notice add up to 734,891 bytes. This text was first compressed to about 274 KB using a standard compression algorithm. The compressed output was then encrypted using IDEA and inserted into the low-order bits of each color value. As can be seen (or actually, cannot be seen), the existence of the information is completely invisible. It is equally invisible in the large, full-color version of the photo. The eye cannot easily distinguish 21-bit color from 24-bit color.

Viewing the two images in black and white with low resolution does not do justice to how powerful the technique is. To get a better feel for how steganography works, the author has prepared a demonstration, including the full-color high-resolution image of Fig. 8-55(b) with the five plays embedded in it. The demonstration, including tools for inserting and extracting text into images, can be found at the book's Web site.

To use steganography for undetected communication, dissidents could create a Web site bursting with politically-correct pictures, such as photographs of the Great Leader, local sports, movie, and television stars, etc. Of course, the pictures would be riddled with steganographic messages. If the messages were first compressed and then encrypted, even someone who suspected their presence would have immense difficulty in distinguishing the messages from white noise. Of course, the images should be fresh scans; copying a picture from the Internet and changing some of the bits is a dead giveaway.

Images are by no means the only carrier for steganographic messages. Audio files also work fine. Video files have a huge steganographic bandwidth. Even the layout and ordering of tags in an HTML file can carry information.

Although we have examined steganography in the context of free speech, it has numerous other uses. One common use is for the owners of images to encode secret messages in them stating their ownership rights. If such an image is stolen and placed on a Web site, the lawful owner can reveal the steganographic message in court to prove whose image it is. This technique is called watermarking. It is discussed in (Piva et al., 2002).

For more on steganography, see (Artz, 2001; Johnson and Jajoda, 1998; Katzenbeisser and Petitcolas, 2000; and Wayner, 2002).

8.10.3 Copyright

Privacy and censorship are just two areas where technology meets public policy. A third one is copyright. Copyright is the granting to the creators of IP (Intellectual Property), including writers, artists, composers, musicians, photographers, cinematographers, choreographers, and others, the exclusive right to exploit their IP for some period of time, typically the life of the author plus 50 years or 75 years in the case of corporate ownership. After the copyright of a work expires, it passes into the public domain and anyone can use or sell it as they wish. The Gutenberg Project (www.promo.net/pg), for example, has placed thousands of public domain works (e.g., by Shakespeare, Twain, Dickens) on the Web. In 1998, the U.S. Congress extended copyright in the U.S. by another 20 years at the request of Hollywood, which claimed that without an extension nobody would create anything anymore. By way of contrast, patents last for only 20 years and people still invent things.

Copyright came to the forefront when Napster, a music-swapping service, had 50 million members. Although Napster did not actually copy any music, the courts held that its holding a central database of who had which song was contributory infringement, that is, they helped other people infringe. While nobody seriously claims copyright is a bad idea (although many claim that the term is far too long, favoring big corporations over the public), the next generation of music sharing is already raising major ethical issues.

For example, consider a peer-to-peer network in which people share legal files (public domain music, home videos, religious tracts that are not trade secrets, etc.) and perhaps a few that are copyrighted. Assume that everyone is on-line all the time via ADSL or cable. Each machine has an index of what is on the hard disk, plus a list of other members. Someone looking for a specific item can pick a random member and see if he has it. If not, he can check out all the members in that person's list, and all the members in their lists, and so on. Computers are very good at this kind of work. Having found the item, the requester just copies it.

If the work is copyrighted, chances are the requester is infringing (although for international transfers, the question of whose law applies is unclear). But what about the supplier? Is it a crime to keep music you have paid for and legally downloaded on your hard disk where others might find it? If you have an unlocked cabin in the country and a IP thief sneaks in carrying a notebook computer and scanner, copies a copyrighted book, and sneaks out, are you guilty of the crime of failing to protect someone else's copyright?

But there is more trouble brewing on the copyright front. There is a huge battle going on now between Hollywood and the computer industry. The former wants stringent protection of all intellectual property and the latter does not want to be Hollywood's policeman. In October 1998, Congress passed the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which makes it a crime to circumvent any protection mechanism present in a copyrighted work or to tell others how to circumvent it. Similar legislation is being set in place in the European Union. While virtually no one thinks that pirates in the Far East should be allowed to duplicate copyrighted works, many people think that the DMCA completely shifts the balance between the copyright owner's interest and the public interest.

A case in point. In September 2000, a music industry consortium charged with building an unbreakable system for selling music on-line sponsored a contest inviting people to try to break the system (which is precisely the right thing to do with any new security system). A team of security researchers from several universities, led by Prof. Edward Felten of Princeton, took up the challenge and broke the system. They then wrote a paper about their findings and submitted it to a USENIX security conference, where it underwent peer review and was accepted. Before the paper was to be presented, Felten received a letter from the Recording Industry Association of America which threatened to sue the authors under the DMCA if they published the paper.

Their response was to file suit asking a federal court to rule on whether publishing scientific papers on security research was still legal. Fearing a definitive court ruling against them, the industry withdrew its threat and the court dismissed Felten's suit. No doubt the industry was motivated by the weakness of its case: they had invited people to try to break their system and then threatened to sue some of them for accepting their challenge. With the threat withdrawn, the paper was published (Craver et al., 2001). A new confrontation is virtually certain.

A related issue is the extent of the fair use doctrine, which has been established by court rulings in various countries. This doctrine says that purchasers of a copyrighted work have certain limited rights to copy the work, including the right to quote parts of it for scientific purposes, use it as teaching material in schools or colleges, and in some cases make backup copies for personal use in case the original medium fails. The tests for what constitutes fair use include (1) whether the use is commercial, (2) what percentage of the whole is being copied, and (3) the effect of the copying on sales of the work. Since the DMCA and similar laws within the European Union prohibit circumvention of copy protection schemes, these laws also prohibit legal fair use. In effect, the DMCA takes away historical rights from users to give content sellers more power. A major show-down is inevitable.

Another development in the works that dwarfs even the DMCA in its shifting of the balance between copyright owners and users is the TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance) led by Intel and Microsoft. The idea is to have the CPU chip and operating system carefully monitor user behavior in various ways (e.g., playing pirated music) and prohibit unwanted behavior. The system even allows content owners to remotely manipulate user PCs to change the rules when that is deemed necessary. Needless to say, the social consequences of this scheme are immense. It is nice that the industry is finally paying attention to security, but it is lamentable that it is entirely aimed at enforcing copyright law rather than dealing with viruses, crackers, intruders, and other security issues that most people are concerned about.

In short, the lawmakers and lawyers will be busy balancing the economic interests of copyright owners with the public interest for years to come. Cyberspace is no different from meatspace: it constantly pits one group against another, resulting in power struggles, litigation, and (hopefully) eventually some kind of resolution, at least until some new disruptive technology comes along.