txtmob gets subpoenaed - data retention in the surveillance era
Tad’s TxtMob has been subpoenaed by the new york police department demanding the records of everybody using the service during the RNC protests in 2004. I got to know Tad through our collaboration on various projects related to activism and emerging telephony. I even poked around and did a little work on the txtmob code.
All that is to say, i know a thing or two about the background, how txtmob works, and issues of data retention and privacy. Nothing i’m saying here is based on privileged information you can’t get from reading the source.
The reality is today, we live in a world where much more information about our daily lives are collected than ever before. There is this scary nightmare scenario, the corporations / state know where everybody is all the time, what they are doing, who they talk to, etc… Most of the time this information is being used for marketing sell more stuff. While it’s slimy, it’s not really evil. What happens when the state starts to use the same information to suppress free speech and dissent, things get much more serious.
This is nothing new, things evolve, but it’s a world we’ve been dealing with for a while. Years ago there was one phone company, they had records of everything, you couldn’t know if somebody accessed your records because the phone company wouldn’t tell you. With the internet, and now emerging voip / open source telephony, the ability to run your own telecommunications infrastructure has emerged.
The work of the anarchist geek community for the last decade or so has been to build this autonomous infrastructure. Indymedia’s been a big part of this task, to create a privacy enhanced participatory media network. Another has been blasterisk an asterisk based phone system with dial in numbers around world for activists to use to make phone calls and do international coordination. For email there is riseup which provides email hosting and mailinglists for hundreds of thousands of activists. Social networking tools for collaboration and organizing, crabgrass. My own, protest.net, a calendaring service, etc… While txtmob has been compared to twitter, txtmob predates twitter and was very explicitly talked about as a model to be copied / learned from in the creation of twitter.
What all of these services have in common is they are providing critical infrastructure to social movements and they take privacy seriously. New tools have been build to allow for making privacy easy.
Txtmob is included in those sites because it does things right. First when you delete your account, remove your phone number, etc… it really does remove it. No record left of your messages, your login, your phone number. Secondly txtmob does not use a short code, nor is there a legal agreement between txtmob and the carriers. Rather txtmob uses the path of least resistance to deliver messages, finding holes and cracks in the sms system to let messages pour through. Tracking txtmob messages is more like tracking p2p traffic than the american idol voting via sms. This not following the rules is probably why the NYPD went to txtmob instead of the carriers. The data is many places, but txtmob is the easy place to get it, if it’s there.
The task of going to the carriers or the NSA to get the txtmob data is much harder than getting it directly from the source. First it’s a HUGE data mining task. It’d involve using something like hadoop or google’s map/reduce to load up the data, and then tracking down a few thousand sms’s out of a stream of trillions. Most of the time operators are lazy, it’s easy to get them to comply with even questionably legal orders for data, my employer is a great example. Service providers tend to log MUCH more data than they need, in the name of security, potential datamining, etc. If we don’t have that data, then we are both able to follow the law, and protect our users.
() It’s worth noting, that there are new EU rules / laws which require extensive data retention. It’s much worse than the situation in the US. So much for the EU being concerned about privacy.
Fire Eagle talk at the Emerging Communications 2008 Conference
I gave a talk on Thursday to the Emerging Communications conference. It was my first chance to speak publicly about Fire Eagle.
| ViewIt's Danger Day, Fire Eagle Flies
Today we let loose the developer’s launch of fire eagle a location broker platform from yahoo brickhouse. It’s what i’ve been working on for the last 6 months and is the first publicly facing rails app to launch at Yahoo!
I’m really excited by Fire Eagle. It’s a system which lets you collect your location from any number of sources, such as your cellphone, and then provide that back out to other applications. Fire Eagle then lets you fuzz your location and control who is using it. Share the city you’re in with dopplr, the neighborhood with facebook, but let the taxi locator see your exact location.
I’m proud of the work i’ve done fire eagle and to have worked with a great team, including Tom, Seth, Jeannie, Skylar, Schuyler, Ayman, Kevin, Marc, Phil, Salim, Mor, and Sam.
We’ve got an irc channel, #fireeagle on irc.freenode.net, wiki, twitter bot, and mailinglist. Come join us and play.
Launching a ruby on rails app at yahoo has been an incredible experience. We’ve had to figure out how to marry a stable mature platform with the agile, test driven, DRY model of development which Rails has popularized. I’m particularly excited that we were able to adopt oauth and open standards like georss and geojson.
Ruby-Debug (rdebug) Documentation!
I’ve been a big fan of ruby-debug since it’s first release. All the fun of the console’s breakpointer, explore and code at any point in your code, and also be able to step through the app. But the documentation has always been weak. There are a few tutorials, and the developer’s blog but the real way i’ve always learned how it worked and discovered new features was by wading through the source.
Finally i’ve found out that there is good documentation, Debugging with ruby-debug. It’s really great, not rails focused, but covers lots of details which i’d miss.
Yahoo?!
So within a day my boss is leaving yahoo, and my boss’s boss is leaving too. Needless to say I’m not to happy about this. Working for a big multinational company is kafkaesque. I feel like don’t really even understand the rules, much less know how to play by them. Salim’s position is being taken over by Chad Dickerson who i really respect and has done great work in the past.
At the moment we are pushing to launch FireEagle, it would be a lot easier if it weren’t for all the layoff / merge distractions.
I'm in next.yahoo
My essaylet post about my hopes for technology in 2008 was written for GIgaom’s year end essay contest. Turns out my quick little write up got runner up. Havi who runs next.yahoo noticed the post. She cleaned it up a little, let me add a bit about thrudb, and posted it.
The Iowa primary and two parties vs four
Much has been written about the Iowa caucuses, the results, the horse race. I’m not sure i have much to add from half a world away.
One thing i did thing was interesting was Huckabee. From the perspective of urban, professional class, coastal america, he comes across as being a religious zealot. A crazy preacher. But looking a little further i saw that he’s a social conservative and economic liberal, other republicans even say socialist.
“Mike Huckabee is a Christian socialist. He is a good man, but with a Big Government heart. He is the most liberal of all the Republican presidential candidates on economic issues.”— said Ricard Viguerie a conservative strategist.
The conception of a socialist republican, right wing social values and progressive economic values kind of makes sense. It’s a republicanism which would attract a majority of Latino, currently %14 of the US population. Pro-church, Pro-Family, and Pro-Worker. Anti-gay, anti-urban, anti-abortion, anti-corporate power.
It’s not the republican party which is in power today, nor the one of Reagan. But it is exactly the social movements which Zack is describing in Revolution in Jesusland. It’s an evangelical version of Liberation Theology.
In a system which allowed fair elections, proportional representation, and more than two parties, the Republican party would divide in to two separate parties. Social conservatives, like Huckabee, and economic conservatives like the neo-con’s including Giuliani, McCain, Reagan, etc… Right now the two groups don’t really see eye to eye, but they are in the same party. The Republicans also have libertarians, who are far-right economic conservatives who are social liberals.
On the Democratic party side there is a similar divide. Clinton represents the DLC, conservative democrats, or centrists as they call themselves. They advocate a conservative economic agenda over all, free trade, lower taxes, smaller government. The same agenda as the economic conservatives on the republican side! On social issues they support the agenda and values of urban professional costal NPR listening america. Don’t rock the boat, but slowly support civil unions, keeping abortion accessible to people who live in ‘blue states’, fund the arts, fund universities, increase fuel economy standards and slowly address global warming.
Then there are the economic progressives, the democrats who work with Unions and Black America. In general working class democrats are concerned about economics, jobs, minimum wage, anti-free trade, etc.. John Edwards is the democratic candidate who most represents the economic progressive branch of the democratic party. You can see this by the endorsement of Michael Moore who correctly sees Edwards as truly caring about the poor and working class. Edwards is the union candidate. The social issues which are valued by this branch of the democratic party are ignored by the party as a whole. Church going and married, the issues which drive the social agenda of working class democrats are ignored by liberal urban professionals who bankroll the party. The unions keep supporting the democrats because the republican economic conservatives want to abolish them, but the Democrats never DO anything for the unions at all.
Obama is an interesting case. I don’t think he winning based on his politics. He’s winning because he’s amazingly charismatic. He’s a great speaker, and a great campaigner. People like his story, the multiethnic boy raised by white Christians from Kansas. It goes without saying that clearly Obama is super smart. All of this lets the democrats vote for him because they like the person. He’s seen as a bridge who can reach out to different parts of the democratic party, and to independents.
Interestingly, i assumed Obama’s politics were like the Clintons. Centrist democrats. And if you look, he did run against a former black radical for the Illinois state senate. But looking at his voting record, he’s actually pretty damned progressive. I was surprised. Who knows if he’d be a progressive president or not. But if he gets elected president, Americans will get a much more progressive administration than they were expecting.
What the elections in Iowa, and presidential primaries, say to me is that the structure of the party system is broken in the US. We’ve got social conservatives with progressive economic policies, and we’ve got economic conservatives with liberal cultural values (secular, pro-gay, pro-abortion).* Those two groups are split evenly within the two parties, who are supposed to hate each other. This crazy setup is a large part of why US elections are so non-competitive. Less than %2 of members of congress lose a seat if they run for reelection!
A sane system, given these political and social values would be to the evangelicals with their party, the economic conservatives (centrists) with their party, and the economic progressives with their party. It’s not as simple as i laid out, but the two party system means that the economic centrists from both parties dominate fundraising and the power structures of BOTH parties. That’s a large part of why there is no political debate in the US. The leaders in power of both parties agree MOST of the time.
- There are also the libertarians on the right and greens on the left, who don’t fit so cleanly in to this spectrum. Not to mention crazy anarchists like myself.