The government has an increasing number of options for conducting surveillance thanks to household products and portable devices, according to a report published Monday by Harvard University.
“Appliances and products ranging from televisions and toasters to bed sheets, light bulbs, cameras, toothbrushes, door locks, cars, watches and other wearables are being packed with sensors and wireless connectivity,” says the report by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The report suggests that the “going dark” phenomenon, describing the ability of terrorists and other criminal elements to evade detection, is overblown, and that concerns about encrypted communication largely miss the point in light of how technology has evolved.
“The going dark metaphor suggests that communications are becoming steadily out of reach — an aperture is closing, and once closed we are blind,” the report states. “This does not capture the current state and trajectory of technological development.”
“When, say, a television has a microphone and a network connection, and is reprogrammable by its vendor, it could be used to listen in to one side of a telephone conversation taking place in its room — no matter how encrypted the telephone service itself might be. These forces are on a trajectory towards a future with more opportunities for surveillance,” it adds.
The report’s authors pay special attention to concerns about encryption. Encrypted products, examples of which include Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s Whatsapp, protect communication from being accessed, even by the companies that own the products. The authors suggest that because of the increasing amount of surveillance that companies themselves wish to engage in, encryption availability is unlikely to spread widely.
“End-to-end encryption and other technological architectures for obscuring user data are unlikely to be adopted ubiquitously by companies, because the majority of businesses that provide communications services rely on access to user data for revenue streams and product functionality,” they write. “Implementing end-to-end encryption by default for all, or even most, user data streams would conflict with the advertising model and presumably curtail revenues.”
Authors of the report include, among others, two current officials at the National Security Agency. Anne Neuberger is the agency’s chief risk officer, while John DeLong heads its Commercial Solutions Center. Another member of the group, Matthew Olsen, served as a general counsel to the NSA, and as a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
The report acknowledges that encryption technology “certainly impedes” surveillance “under certain circumstances,” but that “technological developments and market forces” are likely to restrict the problem rather than enhance it.
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“Looking forward, the prevalence of network sensors and the Internet of Things raises new and difficult questions about privacy over the long term,” the report adds. “This means we should be thinking now about the responsibilities of companies building new technologies, and about new operational procedures and rules to help the law enforcement and intelligence communities navigate the thicket of issues that will surely accompany these trends.”
