ARTS & FARCES internet

Prepared for the Members of the Jobs, Energy and Community Development Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Technology and Members of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Data Privacy and Information Policy.

Security, growing up spending every summer of my youth in Shoreham, Minnesota, meant a butter knife wedged in the front door jam. It wasn’t there to keep anyone out, but rather so a storm wouldn’t blow the door open and soak the cottage with wind-driven rain. Both doors had skeleton key locks, the keys for which were lost long before I can remember. Grandpa never locked his Buick’s doors—even when he ventured to the city. he said there was never anything in the car anyway and he didn’t want thieves breaking the windows to find that out.

When Grandpa died, Grandma got new locks and keys for all the doors.

It was a dark and stormy night when you returned home to find that your PGP keys no longer worked….

The U.S. government has been relentless in its attempts to keep strong cryptography out of the hands of its citizens. Using arguments including disallowing export, insisting on a back door, and demanding a key escrow system, nothing beats its latest tack: the brute force of prior restraint. Now the Department of Justice insists it needs to be able to secretly break into the homes of presumably innocent citizens in order to disable any cryptographic tools just in case they might be used to launch a terrorist attack, distribute child pornography, or hide illicit drug trade activities.

The Cyberspace Electronic Security Act, as proposed by Justice, would allow law enforcement agents to secretly enter the homes of suspected criminals for the purpose of installing “recovery devices” on their computers. Of course, the intrusion would theoretically require a subpoena. The plan to be presented to Congress for approval would allow investigators to install devices to override your encryption program. Like you wouldn’t notice that suddenly your PGP keys no longer work?

“Those are my personal papers. Don’t go into my desk!”

Chances are that workplace utterance is more common than most of us would like to believe. What made this instance different is that those words constituted the last live broadcast to emanate from Berkeley, California radio station KPFA-FM. On July 13, 1999 KPFA journalist Dennis Bernstein was forcibly removed from the air for airing grievances about the station’s dispute with its corporate parent.

KPFA, America’s first listener-supported, non-commercial radio station—is a Berkeley institution, reaching most of the Northern California region. In celebratory Berkeley fashion, KPFA acknowledged its 50^th anniversary by airing tapes from its vast archive. Highlights included Patty Hearst issuing a polemic rant about her capitalist pig parents, Che Guevara’s rousing calls for rebellion, and some mighty fine Grateful Dead tunes.

Unfortunately, it looks as though KPFA will likely not see its 51^st anniversary because of an unbridled attempt by station management to wrest local community control in order to consolidate its corporate power and make the property appealing to a broader audience. In other words, KPFA’s corporate parent wants to homogenize the product so it can be sold for a healthy profit in a market that thinks Wonder is bread and amazon.com is a bookstore.

In what must have been a surprise to almost no one, Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp has quickly settled the privacy lawsuit brought against it by the Minnesota Attorney General.

On June 30, 1999, Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch and the U.S. Bancorp representatives announced they had settled the lawsuit in which Hatch and his office accused the bank of illegally selling information about bank customers, including Social Security numbers.

While admitting no wrongdoing, U.S. Bank announced it had decided to stop disclosing its customers’ information to third-party nonfinancial marketers. In addition, the bank agreed to donate all the proceeds it realized from disclosing customer information: US$1.5 million to Habitat for Humanity in Minnesota, US$1 million to other charities, and US$500,000 to the State of Minnesota. The bank will also make refunds to disgruntled customers.

In early June 1999, Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch filed a lawsuit against Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, alleging that the bank illegally released private customer information to a telemarketer.

According to Hatch’s complaint, U.S. Bank violated the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, engaged in consumer fraud, and practiced deceptive advertising. Hatch said in a media release that the bank had provided private customer information—including credit card account numbers, checking account numbers, credit insurance status, finance charges, account balances, birth dates, Social Security numbers, transactions, credit limits, marital status, occupation, and homeownership status—to Stamford, Connecticut-based telemarketer MemberWorks, Inc. In exchange, the bank is alleged to have received US$4 million plus a twenty-two percent commission on each sale. About one million people in eighteen states are affected by the bank’s actions.

Hatch alleges that U.S. Bank encouraged MemberWorks to deceive customers during telemarketing sessions. U.S. Bank also, according to Hatch, broke banking laws by allowing MemberWorks to automatically withdraw funds from customer checking accounts via bogus, unauthorized charges.