BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA -- Privacy concerns at the ballot box, across the Internet by voice or data, and even on behalf of the homeless are among the focus of discussion at the 14th Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here this week.
Just a day before California election officials recommended decertifying an electronic voting system because of security concerns, the technology was derided as a potential "nightmare scenario" by a keynote speaker, Stanford University computer science professor David Dill. In particular, he criticized systems that lack an auditing mechanism.
In a close election, errors in, or deliberate sabotage of, electronic voting booths without a backup could turn the tide of government "and nobody would have any way of knowing that it happened," Dill said.
"You read a lot about total failures of voting machines, but I'm far more worried about the less evident failures," Dill told the audience of computer scientists, philosophers, and government officials.
Prying or Privacy?
Other sessions covered topics ranging from privacy in legal matters or criminal investigations to search engine technology and security.
A diverse group of advocates for victims of domestic violence, victims of housing discrimination, and the homeless led a panel discussing how technology can invade the privacy of those vulnerable groups of people.
For example, some emergency shelters require battered women to divulge an excessive amount of personal information before giving them shelter, said Cindy Southworth, director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
"We asked some of these victims, after the fact, if they would have refused to release this personal information if they knew they had the right to do so, and every woman said no," Southworth said. "They would sign anything you handed them if it meant they could have a safe bed for the night."
In another session, a former FBI agent disclosed previously unknown statistics about FBI wiretaps and pointed to potential future surveillance online.
In 2001, the latest year for which data is available, the FBI conducted 2426 so-called Title III wiretaps, former agent Mike Warren said. Such surveillance, authorized under The Federal Wiretap Act of 1968 (known as Title III) allows police to intercept communications if they can show probable cause that the communications relate to a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed.
The FBI is petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to force ISPs to install devices to help the FBI conduct wiretaps of phone calls placed over the Internet using Voice over IP technology. Current laws don't permit the FBI to wiretap these kinds of phone calls. However, the FBI is seeking new means of surveillance.
Over-Googling Alleged
In the most highly anticipated session of the day, a pair of Harvard researchers and a professor from the University of Leipzig in Germany released their research on Internet users' reliance on a single search engine--Google--and the effect of that habit on the Web sites they find through it.
Excessive reliance on a single search engine takes a toll on the accuracy of searches, suggest the researchers.
Nearly 70 percent of the German Internet users polled use the German version of Google alone for finding sites, said Marcel Machill, the professor. But his research finds that volume of hits does not necessarily reflect accuracy, he said.
For example, Machill's study looked at the first 20 results from a standardized search of the term "back pain" at several major search engines. In the most accurate search, made through the German version of AOL, only about 8 of the first 20 results pointed to sites that legitimately relate to back pain. The rest were so-called spammed sites, whose owner had manipulated keywords or taken other technical means to rank the site higher in search results, even though the site often had nothing to do with back pain.
What's more, different versions of Google restrict the results of searches, said Ben Edelman, a Harvard doctoral candidate researching search technology. Some kinds of sites, particularly those that promote hate speech, are excluded from search results in the German version of Google but appear in the U.S. version, Edelman demonstrated in his presentation.
Also, Google's filtered SafeSearch function, intended to block pornographic and other content from children's eyes, also excludes nonpornographic informational sites like the Library of Congress's search engine.
The Google representative on the panel, Senior Policy Counsel Andrew McLaughlin, acknowledged the problems the researchers reported. The search site is trying to make it clearer to users when and why a site is removed from search results.
"The goal is maximum transparency for removed search results," McLaughlin said.
Recalling Orwell
Privacy International's Big Brother Awards ceremony was the highlight of the day. At the annual event, individuals and corporations declared guilty of grave violations of privacy in the past year are given bronze statuettes of a head with a boot stomping down on it.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration was given the Bureaucratic Limbo Award for its overseeing of the no-fly list used by all U.S. airlines.
Awards ceremony master of ceremonies Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, decried the TSA's lack of a mechanism to remove from the no-fly list innocent people whose names happen to match those of suspected terrorists.
Northwest Airlines was given the Blurring the Boundaries award for providing passenger records to the government in violation of its own stated privacy policy.
The Perversion of Justice award went to a private company called Seisint for its MATRIX data search tool, which is normally used to track people who owe debts. Last year, Seisint gave the federal government access to the tool, which can find, for example, "every address and every known associate of a given person, and the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and sometimes even the photographs of all those associates," Hoofnagle said.
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