Living in a surveillance state: Mikko Hypponen at TEDxBrussels

the two most likely largest inventions of our generation are the Internet and the mobile phone they've changed the world however largely to our surprise they also turned out to be the perfect tools for the surveillance state it turned out that the capability to collect data information and connections about basically any of us and all of us is exactly what we've been hearing throughout the summer through revelations and leaks about Western intelligence agencies mostly US intelligence agencies watching over the rest of the world we've heard about these starting the revelations from June 6th Edward Snowden started leaking information top-secret classified information from the US intelligence agencies and we started learning about things like prism and xkeyscore and others and these are examples of the kinds of programs US intelligence agencies are run and are running right now against the whole rest of the world and if we look back about the forecasts and surveillance by George Orwell well it turns out that George oval was an optimist we are right now seeing much larger scale of tracking of individual citizens than he could have ever imagined then this here is the infamous NSA data center in Utah due to be opened very soon it will be both a supercomputing Center and a data storage center you could basically imagine that it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are called and it's a pretty big building how big well I can give you the numbers 140,000 square meters but that doesn't really tell you very much maybe it's better to imagine it has a comparison you think about the largest IKEA store you've ever been this is five times larger how many hard drives can you fit in an IKEA store right it's pretty big we estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center it's going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year and this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever keep it for extended periods of time keep it for years keep it for decades and this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all and what this is is that it is wholesale wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone well not exactly everyone because the US intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners they can monitor foreigners when foreigners data connections end up in United States or pass through United States and monitoring foreigners doesn't sound too bad until you realize that I'm a foreigner and you're a foreigner in fact 96% of the planet are foreigners right so it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us all of us who use telecommunications and the internet but don't get me wrong there are actually types of surveillance that are okay I love freedom but even I agree that some surveillance is fine if the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer or they're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting and they have leads and they have suspects and it's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspects phone and to intercept his internet communications undred arguing that but that's not what programs like frizam are about they are not about doing surveillance on people that they have reason to suspect of some wrongdoings they're about doing surveillance on people they know are innocent so the four main arguments supporting surveillance like this well the first of all is that whenever you start discussing about these revelations there will be naysayers trying to minimize the importance of these revelations saying that you know we knew all this already we knew it was happening there's nothing new here and that's not true don't let anybody tell you that we knew this already because we did not know this already our worst fears might have been something like this but we didn't know this was happening now we know for a fact it's happening we didn't know about this we didn't know about prism we didn't know about xkeyscore we didn't know about cyber trance we didn't about rival double-arrow we did not know about sky rider all these different programs run by US intelligence agencies but now we do and we did not know that US intelligence agencies goes to extremes such as infiltrating standardization bodies to sabotage encryption algorithms on purpose and what that means is that you take something which is secure an encryption algorithm which is so secure that if you use an algorithm to encrypt one file nobody can decrypt that file even if they take every single computer on the planet just to decrypt that one file it's going to take millions of years so that's basically perfectly safe uncrackable you take something which is that good and then you weaken it on purpose making all of us less secure as an end result the real world equivalent would be that intelligence agencies would force some secret pin code into every single house alarm so they could get into every single house because you know bad people might have house alarms but it will also make all of us less secure as an end result backdooring encryption algorithms just boggles the mind but of course these intelligence agencies are doing their job this is what they have been told to do do signals intelligence monitor telecommunications monitor Internet traffic that's what they're trying to do and since most and very big part of the internet traffic today is encrypted they're trying to find ways around the encryption one way is to sabotage encryption algorithms which is a great example about how you as intelligence agencies are running loose they are completely out of control and they should be brought back under control so what do we actually know about the lake's everything is based on the files linked by mr. Snowden the very first prism slides from the beginning of June detail a collection program where the data is collected from service providers and they actually go and name the service providers they have access to they even have a specific date and when the collection of data began for each of the service providers so for example they name the collection from Microsoft started on the 11th of September 2007 for Yahoo on the 12th of March 2008 and then others Google Facebook Skype Apple and so on and every single one of these companies denies they all say that this simply isn't true that they are not giving backdoor access to their data yet we have these files so is one of the parties lying or is there some other alternative explanation and one explanation would be that these parties these service providers are not cooperating instead they've been hacked that would explain it they aren't cooperating they've been hacked in this case they've been hacked by their own government that might sound outlandish but we already have cases where this has happened for example the case of the flame malware which we strongly believe was authored by the US government and which to spread subverted the circuit during of the windows update network meaning here the company was hacked by their own government and there's more evidence supporting this theory as well their Spiegel from Germany leaked more information about the operations run by the elite hacker units operating inside these intelligence agencies inside NSA the unit is called ta o tailored access operations and inside GCHQ which is the UK equivalent it's called NAC network analysis centre and these recent leaks of these three slides detail on operation run by this GCHQ intelligence agency from United Kingdom targeting a telco here in Belgium and what this really means is that an EU countries Intelligence Agency is breaching the security of a telco of a fellow EU country on purpose and they discussed it in their slides completely casually business as usual here's the primary target here's the secondary target here's the teaming they probably have a team building on Thursday evening in a pub they even use cheesy PowerPoint clip are like you know success when they gain access to services like this what the hell then there's the argument that ok yes this might be going on but then again other countries are doing it as well all countries point and maybe that's true many countries private all of them but let's take an example let's take for example Sweden I'm speaking Sweden because Sweden has a little bit similar law to the United States when you're data traffic goes through Sweden their Intelligence Agency has a legal right by the law to intercept that traffic all right how many Swedish decision makers and politicians and business leaders use every day us-based services like you know run Windows or OS X or use Facebook or LinkedIn or store their data in outs like iCloud or SkyDrive or Dropbox or maybe used online services like Amazon Web Services or Salesforce and the answer is every single Swedish business leader does that every single day then we turn it around how many American leaders use Swedish web mails and cloud services and the answer is zero so this is not balanced it's not balanced by any mates not even close and when we do have the occasional European success story even those then typically end up being sold to the United States like Skype used to be secure it used to be end-to-end encrypted then it was sold to the United States today it no longer is secure so once again we take something which is secure and then we make it less secure on purpose making all of us less secure as an outcome and then the argument that the United States is only fighting terrorists it's the war on terror you shouldn't worry about it well it's not the war on terror yes part of it is war on terror and yes there are terrorists and they do kill and maim and we should fight them but we know do these leaks that they've used the same techniques to listen to phone calls of European leaders to tap the email of residents of Mexico and Brazil to read email traffic inside United Nations headquarters and EU Parliament and I don't think they're trying to find terrorists from inside EU Parliament right it's not the war on terror part of it might be and there are terrorists but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we're willing to do anything at all to fight our the America is ready to throw away the Constitution and throw it into trash just because there are terrorists and the same thing with the Bill of Rights and all the amendments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the EU conventions on human rights and fundamental freedoms and the press freedom do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat we are ready to do anything at all but people are cared about terrorists and then they think that maybe that surveillance is ok because you know they have nothing to hide feel free to survey me if that helps and whoever tells you that they have nothing to hide simply haven't thought about this long enough because we have this thing called privacy and if you really think that you have nothing to hide please make sure that's the first thing you tell me because then I know that I should not trust you with any secrets because obviously you can't keep a secret but people are brutally honest with the internet and when these leaks started many people were asking me about this and and I have nothing to hide I'm not doing anything bad or anything illegal yet I have nothing that I would in particular like to share with an intelligence agency especially a foreign intelligence agency and if we indeed need a big brother I would much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign big brother and when the leaks started the very first thing I tweeted about this was a comment about how you know when you've been using search engines you've been potentially taking all that to US intelligence and two minutes later I got a reply by somebody called Kimberly from the United States challenging me like what am I worried about this but what am i sending to worry about this am i sending naked pictures or something and my answer to Kimberly who was that what I'm sending is none of your business and it should be none of your government's business either because that's what it's about it's about privacy privacy is not negotiated it should be built in to all the systems we use and one thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines you show me your search history and I'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there from five in five minutes we are more honest with search and since than we are with our families search engines know more about you than your family members know about you and this is all the kind of information we're giving away we're giving away to the United States and surveillance changes history we know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon imagine if he would have had the kind of surveillance tools that are available today and let me actually quote the president of Britain of Brazil miss Dilma Rousseff she was one of the targets of NSA surveillance her email was read and she spoke at United Nations headquarters and she said if there's no right to privacy there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion and therefore there can be no effective democracy that's what it's about privacy is the building block of our democracies and to quote a fellow security researcher Marcus Ranum he said that the United States is right now treating the Internet as it would be treating one of its colonies so we're back to the age of colonization and we the foreign users of the Internet we should think about Americans as our masters so mr. Snowden he's been blamed for many things some are blaming him for causing problems with the u.s. cloud industry and software companies with these revelations and blaming Snowden for causing problems with the u.s. cloud industry would be the equivalent of blaming Al Gore for causing global warming so what is there to be done should we worry no we shouldn't worry we should be angry because this is wrong and it's rude and it should not be done but that's not going to really change the situation what's going to change the situation for the rest of the world is to try to steer away from systems built in the United States and that's much easier said than done how do you do that a single country any single country in Europe cannot replace and build replacements for the u.s. made operating systems and cloud services but maybe you don't have to do it alone maybe you can do it together with other countries and the solution is open source by building together open free secure systems we can go around such surveillance and then one country doesn't have to solve the problem by itself it only has to solve one little problem and to quote the fellow security researcher our own mayor one country only has to make a small wave those more waves together become a tide and the tide will lift all the boats up at the same time and the tide we will build with secure free open-source systems will become the tide that will lift all of us up and above the surveillance state thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 197,875

Rating: 4.9182563 out of 5

Keywords: ted, TEDx, tedx talk, tedx talks, tedx, ted talk, ted talks, ted x

Id: lHj7jgQpnBM

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/ClearlySick]

Inspiring talk. Wonder what will come from all this.

[u/potverdorie]

Very interesting and inspiring talk. However, I have one question concerning his arguementation. Two very important points of him are the following:

• We currently have little to no privacy from the US spying agencies

• Without freedom of speech or opinion, there can be no effective democracy.

These are very agreeable positions to take. However, he ties the two points together by stating:

• Without privacy, there can be no freedom of expression or opinion

And I'm not sure if I completely follow that line of thinking. Will the lack of privacy on the internet make people any less outspoken than they were before the existence of the internet in the first place? And if governments are not acting on any opinions or expressions unless they are pertaining to wildly illegal acts, is the freedom of expression truly limited? Could it not even be argued that this knowledge of this breach of privacy has made people less outspoken on the internet?

Note that I'm not disagreeing with him, I just think his arguementation could be improved on this particular point.

[u/flyingorange]

Interesting... so how many of you are planning to quit Reddit? In Mikko's words, to "make a small wave"?