【clover】106G ECO debate by 九天揽月

九天揽月UID: 2737667

Economist Debate Analysis
Privacy and security
http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/124
About this debate
Background reading
Technology and government: Identity parade
Data protection in Germany: tap dancing
China: The long march to privacy
Leaders: The end of privacy
Opening statements
The moderator's opening remarks
The proposer's opening remarks
The opposition's opening remarks
Featured guest
Rebuttal statements
The moderator's rebuttal remarks
The proposer's rebuttal remarks
The opposition's rebuttal remarks
Featured guest
Featured guest
Closing statements
The moderator's rebuttal remarks
The proposer's rebuttal remarks
The opposition's rebuttal remarks
Featured guest
Winner announcement
Comments from the floor

About this debate

As data mining systems（数据挖掘） sophisticate, the protective walls guarding personal information privacy are becoming progressively more porous. Often, this is done in the name of security. One position states that assuring the security of a citizenry requires the loss of some personal privacy. Critics argue that the two are not inexorably（紧密地） linked but rather governments and corporations are excusing security as a means to gain greater degrees of personal information.

九天揽月UID: 2737667

Background reading

1.Technology and government: Identity parade
Identity parade（认人手续）Download Identity parade
It’s best for governments not to know too much
The internet, argues Kim Cameron, who works as “Identity Architect” at Microsoft, “was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to”. That is bad enough in the private sector, where the only thing at stake is money. For dealing with government, it is potentially catastrophic. Technology can—just about—tell how an internet user got online. It can check the authenticity of passwords and logins, and validate（使生效） smart cards or biometric（生物统计学） checks. But such data, even if encrypted（加密）, can be stolen, borrowed, guessed or intercepted（拦截）.

Internet users have become used to providing personal information to any convincing-looking box that appears on a screen. They have little idea of either the technology that helps to provide electronic security in practice or the theoretical principles that determine whether it will work. According to Mr Cameron, “there is no consistent and comprehensible framework allowing them to evaluate the authenticity of the sites they visit, and they don't have a reliable way of knowing when they are disclosing private information to illegitimate parties. At the same time they lack a framework for controlling or even remembering the many different aspects of their digital existence.”
So financial institutions and their customers are routinely defrauded（欺骗） by cybergangsters（网络歹徒）, and there is little legal basis for dealing with cybercrime. Identities are valuable, allowing
crooks（使弯曲） to empty bank accounts or buy things online. Cybercriminals have been targeting individual internet users with “spyware” (which records keystrokes) and “phishing” (bogus e-mails that trick users into providing personal information online). But the huge databases held by governments would be a much bigger prize. If you know someone's name, address, date of birth, mother's maiden（first） name and bank-account details, you are well placed to steal from them. Medical histories could prove equally valuable.

E-government looks like a potential crock（罐） of gold for fraudsters, with huge databases compiled by law, most of them only lightly and incompetently protected, and ambitious plans for even more. The biggest e-government contract anywhere is Britain's £12.4 billion scheme for centralised medical records, which will be held on a database accessible by perhaps 1m NHS staff. Other grandiose(堂皇的) plans in Britain include a national identity-card scheme; ContactPoint, a national register of all children in England, which will be accessible by 300,000 people; and a pensioners' bus-pass scheme containing the ages and addresses of 17m people.

Why worry?
Officials and politicians insist that these schemes are safe. Encryption（加密） will be strong, they say, and access controlled. Any attempt to get into a patient's medical records will leave an electronic fingerprint, which will help to protect confidentiality. Maybe. But the history of big databases so far is not encouraging. Critics worry that it will take only one person with the right access to any of the planned databases who is careless or corrupt, and the whole country's records become vulnerable.

Ross Anderson, professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge and one of the government's most vehement（热烈的） critics, argues that local systems are far more secure than national ones. Patient data held at a GP practice may be vulnerable to a security lapse on the premises, but the damage will be limited. “You can have security, or functionality, or scale—you can even have any two of these. But you can't have all three, and the government will eventually be forced to admit this. In the meantime, billions of pounds are being wasted on gigantic systems projects that usually don't work, and that place citizens' privacy and safety at risk when they do.” Richard Clayton, a fellow-campaigner, says that personal information should be treated like plutonium（钚(放射性元素)） pellets（小球）: “Kept in secure containers, handled as seldom as possible and escorted（护卫） whenever it has to travel. Should it get out into the environment, it will be a danger for years to come. Putting it into one huge pile is really asking for trouble.”

Public paranoia（偏执狂） about government databases may well be justified, but it sits oddly with the complacency, verging on carelessness, that people display when convenience is on offer. Ask the average traveller from a developed country whether he would like to be fingerprinted by an authoritarian regime and have the results stored indefinitely in its computer, and he will probably say no. But when such procedures save time, scruples（顾虑） go out of the window.

Travellers standing in the lengthy visa and immigration queues at Dubai airport face a phalanx（密集队） of bored and sullen（愠怒的） officials who communicate by hand gestures and grunts（嘟哝）, with nary（not any） a “please” or “thank you”. But passengers with an “e-card” fare much better. They go straight to the “e-gate” where they swipe（刷） their card, press a finger on the glass panel and smile at the camera. The partition opens and they walk into the outside world, an hour richer. It is the sort of treatment that at most airports is reserved for first-class travellers and VIPs. But the e-card costs only a few dollars, takes a few minutes to apply for and is available to anyone. All the traveller needs is his passport and a willingness to trust the country's feudal rulers.

The voluntary principle
The hard lesson for governments is that citizens will adopt technology when it is both optional and beneficial to them, but resist it strenuously(费力地) when it is compulsory, no matter how sensible it may seem. To take another example, if users of public transport in London were told that in future all their trips would be logged by the authorities, they would revolt（反抗）. But offered lower fares if they use an Oyster card, issued by a branch of government called Transport for London, they have few objections. Nor do they seem to mind much that the same body photographs their car every time they visit central London on a working day to enforce the capital's congestion（拥挤） charge.

Oddly, people seem to mind even less about how much information the private sector holds about them. Supermarket loyalty cards record all their purchases, however revealing, and search engines note everything they have been looking for on the internet. People who would strongly resist giving any personal information to the government are quite happy for Google to know that they have been searching for “hot Asian babes”. The result, says Microsoft's Mr Cameron, is pernicious（致命的）. “Hundreds of millions of people have been trained to accept anything any site wants to throw at them as being the 'normal way' to conduct business online.”

Cybercrime discredits the use of the internet not only by business but by government too. Mr Cameron suggests rethinking the whole issue, starting from the principle that users may be identified only with their explicit consent. That sounds commonsensical（合情合理的）, but many big government databases do things differently. Britain's planned central records for the NHS, for example, will assume consent as it combines all the medical records held in local practice databases.

The second principle, says Mr Cameron, should be to keep down the risk of a breach by using as little information as possible to achieve the task in hand. This approach, which he calls “information minimalism”, rules out keeping information “just in case”. For example, if a government agency needs to check if someone falls into a certain age group, it is far better to acquire and store this information temporarily as a “yes” or “no” than to record the actual date of birth permanently, which would be much more personal and therefore more damaging if leaked.

Third, identity systems must be able to check who is asking for the information, not just hand it over. How easy it is for the outside world to access such information should depend on whose identity it is. Public bodies, Mr Cameron suggests, should make themselves accessible to all comers. Private individuals, by contrast, should be protected so that they have to identify themselves only temporarily and by choice.

Some existing technologies are not capable of making such distinctions. Examples include Bluetooth technology (in which gadgets such as mobile phones constantly broadcast their availability) and RFID (radio frequency identity) chips. These tiny, remotely readable devices have already been incorporated in many countries'passports, despite plentiful evidence that they can be remotely read, deciphered（破解） and even cloned with easily obtained equipment and software.

The final principle is a thorough understanding of the human factor. As Mr Cameron notes, “we have done a pretty good job of securing the channel between server and browser through the use of cryptography（密码）—a channel that might extend for thousands of miles. But we have failed adequately to protect the two- or three-foot channel between the browser's display and the brain of the human who uses it. This immeasurably shorter channel is the one under attack.” When it comes to government data, a loosely guarded password can cause untold damage. Officialdom and the public alike have yet to that take on board.

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2.Data protection in Germany: tap dancing(踢踏舞)

The Economist

Political fallout from a telecom scandal

电信丑闻带来的政治影响

Even in a season of corporate misbehaviour Deutsche Telekom's wrongdoing stands out. Irked（使烦恼） when confidential forecasts surfaced in a financial magazine in early 2005, somebody at Telekom hired a consultant to trawl（搜罗） through the telephone records of journalists, managers and members of its supervisory（管理） board. The practice continued into 2006 and came to light（显露） in Der Spiegel last month. The revelation that Telekom spied on its own customers, breaking several laws, has fuelled two of Germany's fiercest current controversies: over inequality and the trade-off（交换） between security and privacy.

It would be hard for Germans to be more cynical about their bosses. When they draw public notice, it is for their enormous salaries or for leading companies such as Siemens and Volkswagen into disgrace. Klaus Zumwinkel, chairman of Telekom's supervisory board when the snooping（窥探） began, was ousted（罢免） as head of Deutsche Post in February after being accused of tax evasion. Opinion polls suggest that 85% of Germans think managers are overpaid and only 9% have “substantial trust” in bosses of large companies. Meanwhile, the middle class has shrunk（萎缩）, welfare benefits have been cut and ordinary Germans are feeling insecure.

Germany has taken seriously the duty to protect privacy ever since the end of the Gestapo（盖世太保）.

It has stringent（严厉的）laws, a watchful constitutional court and a network of data-protection agencies at both federal and state level. But these defences are under pressure. Wolfgang Schäuble, the steely（沉着的） interior minister, wants to fight crime, especially terrorism, by expanding the powers of the police and intelligence agencies. In January Germany implemented a European Union directive requiring telecoms companies to hold their customers' technical records for six months in case investigators needed them. Under a draft law, the federal criminal police could plant spyware on suspects' computers and video cameras in their apartments.

Germans have little reason to trust that such powers will not be abused. In April the foreign-intelligence agency was caught snooping on a journalist. Eavesdropping（窃听） by private businesses seems epidemic. Lidl, a discount supermarket, was recently caught spying and compiling dossiers（档案） on its employees. Other discounters use hidden cameras. The newspaper FT Deutschland has reported that as early as 2000 Deutsche Telekom spied on one of its journalists with the help of former agents of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police.

Public resistance to the erosion of privacy is sporadic（零星的）. The opposition Free Democrats and Greens have joined some Social Democrats in objecting to the new laws. On May 31st protesters demanding “freedom, not fear” demonstrated in some 30 German cities. Mr Schäuble is fending off（躲避） pressure to tighten data-protection laws and to forgo greater powers for the police. The Telekom scandal is no reason “to make the state blind”, he insisted. Yet it may increase popular demand for better enforcement of existing laws. If so, Telekom will have done Germany a favour.