Given all of that, it was interesting to find this piece in the Politico — How Hoyer got the deal done:

In a tense moment during negotiations over the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, Sen. Kit Bond — the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee — said that his side of the aisle could never accept one of the proposals the Democrats were pushing.

According to Democratic insiders, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer abruptly stopped the meeting and said that, if a deal was made, no one would get more grief than he would.

…
According to several Democratic insiders, Hoyer was able to keep the talks going by pointing out that he, more than anyone else in the room, was taking a huge political risk by trying to reach a deal.

Hoyer is the majority leader — is there a chance he’ll lose that position? He also seems safely in his seat — he soundly defeated his last primary challenger.

James Patrick Cusick, Sr.	Steny H. Hoyer(Won)
19,067 (17.4%)	90,513 (82.6%)

Hoyer also soundly won the general election — the Republicans did not enter a candidate and Hoyer defeated the Green Party candidate getting 84% of the vote.

So my question is: What is the “huge political risk” Hoyer was facing?  It actually looks like he had a lot of leeway here. He had a strong position to negotiate from, and true he gave that up, but I don’t think he’s in a position to pay a price for it.

Finally, I do not get this reaction from Politico:

Hoyer knew it was coming, and he persevered anyway. That he did so speaks volumes about who he is: a master of cloakroom politics who can use his friendships across the aisle to strike deals, even if others demand that his party hew closer to the positions that put it in power in 2006.

It does not take “master[y] of cloakroom politics” to be in a safe position and then give in to the other side. I have never engaged in “cloakroom” anything, but sounds like a rookie mistake, rather than “mastery.” Politico goes on:

Hoyer said that if House Democratic leaders failed to reach a FISA deal with the White House and GOP leaders, as many as “30 Blue Dogs and another 20 to 30 members” could have signed onto a Republican discharge petition calling for a floor vote on the Senate version of the FISA bill, which was even more anathema to House Democrats than what eventually passed.

It would take a “master of cloakroom politics” to have kept that from happening. But that is not what Hoyer did.

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Facebook fanatics who have covered their profiles on the popular social networking site with silly games and quirky trivia quizzes may be unknowingly giving a host of strangers an intimate peek at their lives.

Those mini-programs, called widgets or applications, allow users to personalize their pages and connect with friends and acquaintances. But they could pose privacy risks. Some security researchers warn that developers of the software have assembled too much information — home town, schools attended, employment history — and can use the data in ways that could harm or annoy use.

I’ve previously blogged on the privacy issues of Facebook Apps such as the civil liberties problems when law enforcement agencies create Facebook apps.

It’s good to see this issue gaining mainstream attention, because it means that people will start thinking differently about threats to privacy online. EPIC recently testified at a hearing on spyware. The testimony included social networking applications as a possible vector for spyware.

People at the hearing talked about the need to have any legislation in this area not be technology dependent. The bill being discussed, S. 1625, included some language that was focused on PCs, but ignored other threats. The bill had sections making unlawful certain behavior. It used language like “caus[ing] the installation on [a] computer of software that” did several prohibited things, like improperly collect information or display too many popups. But that language is focused on the idea that people keep their data on their computer. With social networking, people are keeping their data online, with social networking services. This data should also be protected from new types of spyware, and we should think of improper data collection from social network services in the same way we think about improper data collection from our home computers.

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Privacy, the application, is a utility that provides insight into what information applications can access just by you or your friends using them.

I’ve previously blogged about the civil liberties implications of law enforcement applications.  Applications see your Facebook Site information, including:

The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your “About Me” section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of “pokes” you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on your Wall™, a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile.

The “privacy” application is another way to communicate to people just how much these thousands of third-party developers have access to.

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Professor Zittrain’s modestly titled “The Future of the Internet — And How To Stop It” elucidates what has made the Internet so successful, so creative, and yet has also placed it in danger. Zittrain finds the solution by isolating ways these key ingredients can be used to solve the rising problems. From the punch card census to Wikipedia; from the Internet worm to massive botnets run by mobsters; from government mainframes to embarrassing user-generated viral videos, Zittrain covers the gamut of the Internet history and experience, tying it under his model of the competition between generative networks and controlled, limited appliances and networks.

As Zittrain explains, the Internet is a generative network — it fosters innovation and disruption — in contradiction to appliancized networks such as the old America Online or Compuserve, which greatly limited innovation in favor of control. This generativity works on several “layers” of the internet — from the basic IP, or Internet Protocol, to devices, operating systems and even the content or social aspects of the Internet. This generativity has allowed the explosion of the Internet and its various uses: any device can be made to connect to the IP protocol; transport protocols such as FTP and HTTP can be made to work on IP; Websites and email services run on those protocols; computer components can run many operating systems; operating systems can run any software; Wikis and other software allow anyone to modify websites without the need to learn HTML. This he calls the “Hourglass structure of the Internet”:

While generativity has brought the Internet’s benefits into existence it has also brought a new breed of problems. Computers that run any code can easily fall victims to viruses, and become sources of annoyance or malfeasance to the rest of the Internet. Compromised computers can launch spam, phishing and denial of service attacks. One answer to these problems is to reduce the generativity, to create more “tethered appliances.” In some ways the next generation does not see the same generativity that the Internet previously had. Youth communicate via instant messaging, texting and social network sites, avoiding e-mail as too filled with spam, viruses and phishing attempts. Zittrain considers these “contingently generative” services — you’re free to do a lot, to create, but this license may be withdrawn.

But centralized, contingently generative devices raise other problems, of control and information collection. An automobile with a navigation device under control of a provider can have that device hijacked for eavesdropping by law enforcement. A digital video recorder that receives updates from its central server can be updated according to a court order, disabling functions that users were expecting.

Zittrain offers a different solution from the tethered appliance model. The answer is to promote solutions that preserve and indeed depend on the generative features. At the technical level, computers can be technically configured to easily recover from user mistakes — undoing virus installations. Or users can share simple statistics about their computers, allowing the creation of systems that decide whether new code is safe or not.

Privacy is the subject of one chapter, with Zittrain proposing that the solution for generative privacy problems lie in the “social layer.” Privacy regulations, based on the 1973 principles of Fair Information Practice (FIPs), are appropriate to “privacy 1.0″ threats of centralized information collection. Privacy 2.0 sees the dangers of ubiquitous sensors, of peer production and reputation systems. Zittrain would promote code-backed norms — so that one can list one’s privacy preferences similar to the way that the Creative Commons facilitates one listing their Copyright licensing preferences. Or users could be enabled to contextualize their data online, or enact “reputation bankruptcies” that would expire some of their older activity. But these ideas are still reminiscent of Fair Information Practices, still focused on the privacy 1.0 principles. Code backed norms are simply another way to talk about user control and consent. Contextualizing one’s data online is similar to the FIP of being able to amend or correct a record. Reputation bankruptcy is akin to deleting a record. And lastly, social networks are not quite distributed — YouTube is a centralized place to take down videos; Facebook and Myspace can both surveil as well exclude the content on it.

Norms and methods for expressing privacy preferences may help, but ultimately privacy 1.0 harms will remain and may indeed grow with the Internet. Privacy 1.0 solutions are still out there, but it looks like we’ll just need new ways of enacting them. Traditional concepts of privacy protection will still be relevant - they just need to be re-thought, engineered in. Perhaps even re-generated.

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We view ourselves as a technology company at our core. We’re the cable company creating the pipes, and what they carry is social information and engagement information about people.

So they carry your social information — your social relationships and identity, contextualized and with that social meaning, not just at the level of Internet packets. Facebook knows the meaning of what it is carrying, unlike your telecommunications company. They think of themselves as carriers that set up the structure that knows that meaning and allows it to be communicated.

CPNI and Content?

This sort of thinking opens of lots of neat new analogies. Lets think about privacy. Per the Telecommunications act, telephone companies have to protect the privacy of your “Customer Proprietary Network Information,” or CPNI. This is basically the information the company needs to provide the service — the numbers you dial, the location you dial from, etc… Importantly, not the content of your communication — that already has intense protection. The legal definition includes:

“information that relates to the quantity, technical configuration, type, destination, location, and amount of use of a telecommunications service subscribed to by any customer of a telecommunications carrier, and that is made available to the carrier by the customer solely by virtue of the carrier-customer relationship”

Telephone companies have a duty to protect this information but can use it in advertising, or sell it to joint venture partners with consent. EPIC has more information on protection for CPNI.

So what is the equivalent in the social networking space? The people you send messages to are going to be protected. So should be your browsing, and just about all of your social actions. But there’s an important leap here. If Facebook thinks of itself as a pipe of social information, then your connections — your social graph — would be more like the content. That’s the change: your connections are your social messages, rather than your connections being who receives your messages. That would give your social graph quite a bit of protection, and disallow Facebook from reading it.

Common Carriers

Utilities are also sometimes viewed as common carriers. Common carriers can’t discriminate in what they carry, and further are absolutely liable. I analogize the first to the idea that Facebook won’t judge my social graph, and thus can’t discriminate based on how I am socially relating. This means I can be free to move data around, and even download my social graph from Facebook. I previously blogged about the potential for privacy enhancement from so called “data portability.” It would be discriminatory, and a violation of common carrier principles, for Facebook to prohibit certain uses of the social graph.

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In this digital age, spyware is used by employers and parents, as well as stalkers and perpetrators of abuse. This workshop will discuss whether anti spyware policy and technology is appropriately tailored to spyware uses in the social context of abuse: misusing power and control. The essence of spyware is to spy, to monitor, to watch someone – all without their knowledge. How do we identify and respond to harmful, inappropriate use? What are the challenges faced by policymakers and antispyware technology providers when dealing with abusive uses of spyware? This workshop will explore the varying opinions on spyware policy and practice as it intersects with privacy and safety.

Other program topics that look interesting include network neutrality, reputation systems, and social networks. The whole program is here.

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This new service, announced as a preview release tonight at Campfire One, lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You’ll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others.

Facebook similarly describes its initiative:

Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.

It adds that key features will be: “Trusted authentication; Real Identity; Friends Access; and Dynamic Privacy.” Myspace’s launch includes some partner sites already:

LOS ANGELES—May 8, 2008—MySpace, the world’s most popular social network, alongside Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, today announced the launch of the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, a ground-breaking offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile data to websites of their choice throughout the Internet. Today’s announcement throws open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and Web identit

Data Portability

These are being referred to as advances in “data portability” (see here, and here, for example). Data portability is the name given to the idea that data a user has generated with one vendor can easily be moved to or manipulated by another vendor, without the need for any pre-existing relationships.

There was some promise that data portability might improve privacy. Timothy Lee at Techdirt blogged on how data portability could mitigate privacy issues. I previously blogged about a position paper from ENISA on social networking security recommendations. They noted (pdf):

Many of the threats . . . in particular those relating to data privacy, have arisen because SNSs [Social Network Sites] are extremely centralized (i.e., high numbers of users with few providers). Where users were previously protected by spreading tehr data over many mutually inaccessible repositories, its now collected in a single place. It is currently very difficult to transfer your social network from one provider to another, or to interact between provers. . . . While there are clear commercial reasons behind these trends, the security and usability implications of a centralized and closed data storage model should not be ignored. A possible solution to this problem is portable social networks, which allows users to control and syndicate their own ’social graph’. . . . At a minimum, it should be possible to export the social graph and its preferences from one providers to another and, ideally, users would have the possibility of complete control over their own social data, syndicating it to providers which created added-value ‘mashup’ applications.

The Promise of Privacy?

So portability holds great promise — users are able to easily move between providers; no one provider is a central point of tracking; and users control where their data goes and presumably who has access to it.

But what is now being billed as “portability” looks quite far from that promise. These systems look like they will allow them to track you as you use several sites, rather than allow you leave existing social networks with your data. That’s not really allowing data to move around — thats just SNSs giving you a long leash. It looks like more, not less decentralization. Instead of you having the security and privacy of having different accounts, different persona, you’ll instead have on single logon for several web services. In fact Facebook seems to tout as an advantage that people will no longer be anonymous, that they’ll be coming in with their entire social graph to new ventures. When privacy activists are telling users to use pseudonyms, to use different logins, this new development is going in a different direction.

I suspect these companies want your entire web experience to be “social.” But more importantly, while logged into them, and while a captive audience to their ads, and all while building up their profiles of personal information so that they can market to you.

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The BBC has written an application that shows how easy data collection can be.

We wrote an evil data mining application called Miner, which, if we wanted, could masquerade as a game, a test, or a joke of the day. It took us less than three hours.

But whatever it looks like, in the background, it is collecting personal details, and those of the users’ friends, and e-mailing them out of Facebook, to our inbox.

When you add an application, unless you say otherwise, it is given access to most of the information in your profile. That includes information you have on your friends even if they think they have tight security settings.

Did you know that you were responsible for other people’s security?

Facebook responded:

Users are strongly encouraged to report any suspected misuse of information to Facebook. Additionally, users can block individual applications from accessing any of their data, block all applications, or block individual types of information.

We have sophisticated technology and a dedicated team to address inappropriate activity by applications. Access by applications to Facebook user data is strictly regulated and if we find that an application is in violation of our terms and policies, we take appropriate action to bring it into compliance or remove it entirely.

I hope this means that Facebook has some automated processes for detecting when applications are accessing too much data, and that this causes them to be reviewed. But overall I don’t see how users can be careful when adding an application. They have no way of knowing what it does.

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The last (and most covert) method for destroying a RFID tag is to hit it with a hammer. Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks. This will destroy the chip, and leave no evidence that the tag has been tampered with. This method is suitable for destroying the tags in passports, because there will be no proof that you intentionally destroyed the chip

However, don’t rush to smash your passport just yet. The E-passport regulations say this about a passport with a defective RFID chip:

Any passport which has been materially changed in physical appearance or composition, or contains a damaged, defective or otherwise nonfunctioning electronic chip, or which includes unauthorized changes, obliterations, entries or photographs, or has observable wear and tear that renders it unfit for further use as a travel document may be invalidated.

So even though your destruction of the RFID chip leaves you with a perfectly normal old-style passport, that’s not how the State Department sees it. You have a mutilated passport which may be invalidated, leaving you without travel papers until they give you a new one. You’d think you had the right to control how electronic your passport will be,  but that’s not quite the case.

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Privacy is the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.

So how does this get expressed in the world of social networking? Two recent publications give a good , though I suspect not exhaustive, overview. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) prepared a position paper on “Security Issues and Recommendations for Online Social Networks” (pdf). The International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications, composed mainly of European privacy officials, has issued a “Report and Guidance on Privacy in Social Network Services” (pdf) A few examples from these highlight the idea that privacy