Ensuring Your Privacy Essay, Research Paper
Ensuring Your Privacy
“Privacy. There seems to be no legal issue today that cuts so wide a swath through conflicts
confronting American society. From AIDS tests to wiretaps, polygraph tests to computerized
data bases, the common denominator has been whether the right to privacy outweighs other
concerns of society…..”
Robert Ellis Smith, the Privacy Journal
Computers have been a very instrumental technology that has greatly advanced the
ways in which we now do things such as; business, daily activities, shopping,
scheduling appointments, and many other things. And with more and more people using
the Internet, more and more information being passed over the Internet, more problems
arise. The Internet has been an advance in technology that has greatly increased the
capacities of a computer. These new capacities have been the cause of some serious
problems though. One very important trouble is the lack of privacy on the Internet.
People pass much important information over the Internet and they expect it to be safe
from others. Information passed over the Internet can in fact be intercepted and read by
other people. For many years, this has been happening, and it has always been a
problem, but with more and more information being passed through, people want
something to ensure their privacy. The government does not want to allow everyday
people the privelage of computer security. Although they have tried to place laws on
the uses of some methods of privacy, they have not been as successful as they had
hoped. Privacy is important to people, governments and businesses, and finding a
method to protect their information is also a concern.
Privacy has been defined as “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to
determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is
communicated to others” (Summers, 22). With the advances in technology, it has
become very hard to ensure your privacy. Collecting, manipulating, and sharing data
has become increasingly easier to do. Peoples personal data is becoming alarmingly
easier to obtain. Our preferences, our addresses, telephone numbers, and Social
Security numbers all are sold routinely. In a 1995 United States survey, 80 percent
agreed that consumers have lost all control over how personal information about them
is circulated and used by companies (Summers, 23). Some of the most powerful
companies and corporations are powerful because of their ability to obtain private
information at anytime. Microsoft, the computer software company, is powerful
because it designs the operating system that millions of people use to organize and
transmit data. The Washington Post is powerful because it screens, sorts, and defines
“the news” for influential readers (Bacard, 33). The average person has little power
because he absorbs data form others rather than transmitting data to others. Computer
companies have been trying to come up with ways in which a person can have some
assemblage of privacy. Privacy is important to people. People do not want others to be
able to get this information. Privacy is about power. Information, in the hands of people
who know how to use it, is power (Bacard, 33). John Fiske argues in Power Plays,
Power Works that people are divided in two distinct groups; the “haves” and the “have
nots.” The “haves” are those with imperializing power, the dominating group.
Localizing power would be the group of the “have nots.” Localizing power refers to the
weaker, resistant group. Privacy relates to Fiske’s theory quite explicitly. The
government, criminals, and businesses would be the “haves,” while everyday citizens
would be the “have nots.” Everyday people do not have the power to ensure their
privacy like the “haves” do. This is mainly because the imperializing powers try to
prohibit the localizing powers from ensuring their privacy. The government has come
up with regulations on the export of cryptography to control the “have nots.”
One method computer companies have come up with to ensure people privacy is
passwords. Passwords are everywhere. People have passwords for phone cards,
credit cards, cash cards, and on the Internet. The idea behind a password is to make it
so someone trying to access your data of hardware is thwarted by inconvenience
(Tiley, 77). The harder you make your password, the harder it is for someone else to
figure it out, and the safer your information is. Deciding on a good and safe password
is the meaningful to privacy. There are many factors in choosing an effective password.
Using numbers and punctuation marks intermingled in your password is a good idea.
Choosing a password that is longer in the number of characters is also efficient. Also,
having your password be case sensitive is important. All of these factors will greatly
increase your rates of security. For example, a password that can contain letters,
numbers, punctuation marks, and is case sensitive allows the user to choose from about
56 different characters. A six character password in this context would have
30,840,979,456 different combinations (Tiley). Increasing your password to seven
characters would have over a trillion possibilities (Tiley, 83). However, a longer
password is optimal, you must choose one that you can easily remember. It will take a
hacker no time to find your sticky note with your password on it in your desk drawer. A
password is easy to remember and hard to guess (Summers, 341). Seeing as how
passwords can have billions and billions of possibilities, one would assume that
passwords are extremely safe in guarding personal information. This not entirely true.
Hackers have computer programs that will try all the words in a standard dictionary, or
every number combination. If you had a simple word or number, your password would
have been found out. Choosing a short word or number is not efficient. An important
date can easily be obtained by a hacker or anyone who simply wants your information.
Experience has shown that more than half the passwords chosen can be easily guessed
or cracked (Tiley, 79). This fact demonstrates the importance of choosing a safe and
efficient password.
Another method of ensuring privacy that is becoming more common and efficient is
cryptography. Cryptography allows users to pass valuable information such as credit
card numbers, Social Security numbers, addresses, and anything else important over
the Internet without being intercepted by eavesdroppers. Cryptography is the art of
transforming information to keep it confidential or to
45). The process of encoding and decoding information is called encryption.
Historically, encryption was used only in the military and for diplomatic reasons.
Reasons that deal with Fiske’s theory of power. The government wanted to
ensure that they ultimately had sole power of the encryption outflow. They have kept
tight reins on the “keys” used to translate coded text into plaintext, prohibiting the
export of secret codes under United States munitions laws and ensuring that the
encryption scheme used by businesses was weak enough that the National Security
Agency’s supercomputers could cut through it like butter (Elmer-Dewitt, 1).
However, this has now changed. Cryptography is now used to authenticate retail
transactions, secure electronic funds transfers, the military, email, to protect the
integrity of software and stored data, and to authenticate the identity of network users
(Summers, 45-46). Although, the export of encryption outflow is still regulated by the
government. By using encryption you can disguise the message so that if it is
intercepted, the contents will not be revealed. The cycle of encryption is easy to
understand. The original message is written in plaintext, the message is then encoded
by a cryptosystem. This text is called ciphertext. The ciphertext message is sent to the
receiver, where it is decoded back to plaintext (Pfleeger, 22). This simple method of
cryptography is very efficient in securing peoples privacy. Hacking an encrypted
message is virtually impossible to achieve. Encryption software due to its highly
mathematical nature, resists giving up its secrets, even to exports, because the output of
the program is entirely dependent on a key value given to the program when it runs
(Tiley, 217). For this very reason, encryption is becoming known as a virtually
foolproof method in ensuring privacy. However, obtaining the privilege of encryption
is difficult. Businesses who are allowed the use of cryptography have to pay a lot of
money to use it. This is the governments way of ensuring their right to control the
amount of privacy people can have. The government explains this use of power as their
way of protecting citizens from terrorist and spies. The government says that in order to
protect citizens from these kinds of dangers that they must control the use of
cryptography. However, a guy by the name of Phil Zimmerman did not find this reason
acceptable.
Phil Zimmerman came up with the idea of PGP or Pretty Good Privacy. PGP is another
method of computer privacy. Zimmerman’s passion for politics, computers, and
privacy led him to the production of Pretty Good Privacy. He essentially believed that
the power of privacy should be shared with the “have nots.” Zimmerman thought that
people needed to be protected from democracy. “PGP empowers people to take their
privacy into their own hands,” Phil Zimmerman (Bacard, 128). After Zimmerman was
finished with PGP, he gave it to a friend to try it out. His friend liked it so much that he
gave PGP to his friends, and they liked it, so they passed it on. Before Zimmerman
knew it, people all over the world were using PGP within months. Bulletin Board
Systems and Internet sites around the world made PGP available to their users
(Bacard, 128). However, when PGP was released, it ran into some political and
governmental troubles. Two legal issues whirled around the original freeware PGP.
First, was the issue of patents. PGP uses the technology of RSA, a public key algorithm
(Bacard, 81). RSA stand for Rivest, Shamir and Adelman, the creators of the algorithm
(Bacard, 81). The second problem with the distribution of PGP was that it spread
outside of the United States and possibly violated United States cryptography export
restrictions. The issue of patents with RSA was dropped because the company that now
distributes PGP bought the rights to RSA. The investigations on the export of PGP were
dropped in 1996. In spite of all this, PGP was a big success with businesses and
Internet users. PGP is a software program that uses encryption to secure the
information. Bob Smart who has written a front-end program for PGP says that, “PGP
does not so much increase privacy as it does restore a balance that has recently been
perpetuated away from privacy,” Bob Smart (Bacard, 138). It is an easy-to-use secure
computer program that encrypts and decrypts messages (Bacard, 128). PGP is
law-abiding despite its brush with the law in the beginning. The government did not
want to allow PGP to be distributed to everyday people because they did not want
people to have the privacy they deserve. The imperializing powers thought that they
could control the encrypted outflow of information that localizing powers had. Phil
Zimmerman distributed PGP for free because he did not want to become part of the
imperializing powers. In the end, PGP was allowed to be used in the United States and
was recognized as a foolproof method of ensuring privacy. Top-rate cryptographers
and computer exports have tried to break the PGP cryptosystem – without luck (Bacard,
137). PGP has been compared with having it take 600 locksmiths several months to
unlock the front door to your house, but you could change the lock in five minutes. So,
in the amount of time and the number of people it would take to decode your PGP
decoded message is a long, long time.
Computer privacy is important to people, and especially the government. With the
society in which we live, privacy is hard to come by, but something everyone desires.
The government has tried to control the amounts of privacy that people can have, and to
their dismay it has not worked. Everyday people have the right to protect their
information as does the government theirs. Just as the government has found a method
to protect their information so have everyday citizens. Passwords, PGP and
cryptography are all methods that both powers can and do use. The technology and
practice of computer security has responded to the rapid changes in context. The
people have also responded to these changes and have demanded privacy. The
imperializing powers will always try to control the amount of privacy people can have
as long as privacy is about power, and the localizing powers will always be under
control of the imperializing powers, unless we keep fighting against the government.
Phil Zimmerman mangaged to distribute PGP to help the localizing powers fight against
the imperializing powers. The imperializing powers will always have control over the
less fortuante, localizing powers as long as we let them.