In light of new revelations about government warrantless wiretapping and electronic surveillance what role do librarians have in educating our patrons about digital privacy and security issues? Given that digital privacy is further complicated by for-profit Internet companies services, such as those provided by Facebook and Google, are our users savvy enough to understand threats to their information in this increasingly complex digital landscape? This presentation will explore issues related to current events and information security with an eye towards the implications for information literacy standards; brief examination of tools used to enhance information privacy; and discuss how librarians might play a role in helping users become more information aware.

1. Online Northwest, 2014
Information Literacy,
Privacy, & Risk
{
What Are the Implications of Mass Surveillance
for Libraries?

2. Outline

Framing questions

Implications for information literacy

Overview of recent revelations about NSA and
other data collection

Tools & Advocacy (what can we do about it)

Questions
This presentation is for educational purposes only – this is NOT legal advice

3. Framing questions

When it comes to modern
technology, does the public have the
necessary skills and literacies to
effectively manage their information?

4. Framing questions

If digital privacy, security, and risks are
information literacy issues, who should
be teaching these skills and how?

5. Framing questions

What is the role of the librarian?
Should we take more steps to support our
patrons in developing a better understanding
of how to manage their information?

6. Info lit standards
ACRL standards currently distinguishes
between information literacy and information
technology fluency, while acknowledging an
overlap between the two:

‚Information literacy initiates, sustains, and extends
lifelong learning through abilities which may use
technologies but are ultimately independent of them.‛

7. Info lit standards
Standard 5: ‚The information literate student
understands many of the economic, legal, and social
issues surrounding the use of information and accesses
and uses information ethically and legally.‛
The first learning outcome for the standard: ‚Identifies
and discusses issues related to privacy and security in
both the print and electronic environments‛

8. Recent
Revelations:
{
Government and
Corporate Surveillance

10. "It's now a matter of public record that the NSA collects and
stores the calling records of domestic phone calls, tracks the
location of millions of mobile devices worldwide, infiltrates
the data links between the data centers of tech companies
used by millions of Americans, piggybacks onto commercial
tracking mechanisms, collected potentially sensitive online
metadata for years and actively worked to undermine the
privacy and security measures that underpin the Internet.
And considering the purported size of the Snowden cache,
that could be the tip of the metaphorical iceberg."

11. ‚On its website, the NSA presents its vision of how it
wants to manage information: the Global Information
Grid. More of a concept than an actual technical plan,
the GIG is a "net-centric system operating in a global
context to provide processing, storage, management,
and transport of information.‛‛

12. "Getting the data has always been easier than making sense of it. So the NSA
developed its own tools to tap the vast pools of information.
In 2008, agency engineers created Accumulo, a data storage and retrieval system
based on Google's Big Table system. Sqrrl Data, a start-up company in
Cambridge, Mass., this month began a commercial version of Accumulo for realtime data mining. Most of the founders of Sqrrl Data are former NSA employees.
Accumulo allowed the NSA to examine disparate data sets and find connections,
said a former NSA operator who worked with it.‛

13. Ingest
"With assistance from private communications firms, the
NSA had learned to capture enormous flows of data at the
speed of light from fiber-optic cables that carried Internet
and telephone traffic over continents and under seas.
According to one document in Snowden’s cache,
the agency’s Special Source Operations group,
which as early as 2006 was said to be ingesting
‚one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds‛

14. Ingest
"The alleged surveillance may be conducted through third party advertising
networks used by millions of commercial web sites and mobile applications
across all industries. If advertising networks are indeed targeted, it would
appear that no internet-enabled device that visits ad-enabled websites or uses
ad-enabled applications is immune to such surveillance."

15. Secure/Index?
‚once they obtain the information, they process it ... it goes through these various
processes and then ends up in the database, where it can be retrieved later.‛

16. Query
‚According to the NSA’s director of compliance, the
agency queries its databases about 20 million times
each month‚ (at 6)
‚In the process, information has been folded into a
‚Threat Matrix,‛ an itemized catalogue of all the ‚threats‛—
or more accurately ‚leads‛— needing to be followed up.
As Garrett Graff explains, the government pursues
‚upwards of 5,000 threats per day.‛‛ (at 10)

17. ‚Explains Walter Pincus, if operatives at NSA, sorting through their 215
metadata collection or other sources, uncover ‚a questionable pattern‛
such as ‚calls to other suspect phones,‛ they send a report to the FBI for
investigation.
In NSA this process has sometimes been called ‚We Track ‘Em, You Whack
‘Em.‛ The FBI, then, is routinely supplied with what Graff calls ‚endless
lists of ‘suspect’ telephone numbers.‛
When followed up, these ‚leads‛ virtually never go anywhere: of 5000
numbers passed along, only 10—two-tenths of one percent—‚panned out
enough for the bureau to bother‛ to get court permission to follow them up.
At the FBI, the NSA tips are often called “Pizza Hut” leads because,
following them up, FBI agents ‚inevitably end up investigating the local
pizza delivery guy.‛
There is, in other words, nothing to ‚whack.‛ At one point, the generally
diplomatic Robert Mueller bluntly told NSA director Alexander, ‚You act
like this is some treasure trove; it’s a useless time suck.‛‛ (at 13)

18. Why Ingest, Secure, Index & Query?
"Multiple databases consolidated and
cross–referenced, with incidental details
linking previously disconnected bodies of
information, produce a far more significant
whole than any one part would suggest:
identities, tendencies, groups and patterns
with both historically revelatory and
predictive power"

19. Historical Trends
‚In Uncharted, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste
Michel tell the story of how they tapped
into this sea of information to create a new
kind of telescope: a tool that, instead of
uncovering the motions of distant
stars, charts
trends in human
history across the centuries. By teaming
up with Google, they were able to analyze
the text of millions of books. The result was
a new field of research and a scientific
tool, the Google Ngram Viewer‛

20. Predictive Power
"The company is continuing to try to
learn more about individual users so
that it can provide personalized
services such as Google Now, which
tries to provide information to
people before they even search
for it, such as alerting them to traffic
updates before their scheduled
meetings."
"As a general theme we’re
trying to move beyond just
searching to actually knowing
about things.
We think this is essential
because we want to understand
what you’re trying to do and
give you some help.
Google Now is an example of a
product that is trying to figure
out the state that you’re in and
make a suggestion to you."

21. ‚If you have something
that you don’t want
anyone to know, maybe
you shouldn’t be doing it
in the first place‛
- Google CEO Eric Schmidt

22. ‚U.S. agencies collected and shared the personal information of thousands
of Americans in an attempt to root out untrustworthy federal workers that
ended up scrutinizing people who had no direct ties to the U.S. government
and simply had purchased certain books.‛

23. What can we do?

"I live in a world where using my own name on github and IRC
was a specific conscious choice that required actual bravery from
me, because I know that I am statistically exposing myself to
retribution for doing so.‚

"Let’s say that again: I live in a world where being myself in public,
talking about things I care about under my own name in public, is
a specific choice which requires both courage and a backup plan.‚

‚by clarifying the threats, by publicly affirming the decency of the
bystanders, we create a world where you don’t have to be quite so
brave to speak up."

24. What can we do?

Advocate and educate



At our libraries, in our communities, and as a profession
Feb 11, https://thedaywefightback.org/
EFF & ACLU

Find opportunities to address the issues in instruction

Help patrons think through their personal threat model

25. Tools

Be vigilant about info use on the tools we provide

Tor Browser: https://www.torproject.org

Ghostery: https://www.ghostery.com

More at http://prism-break.org

26. Back to the questions

In light of the NSA revelations, are our patrons’ information
literacy skills sufficient to ensure privacy?

If not, how do we educate the public on these issues?

What is the role of the librarian?

27. Thanks!

Gabe: @gabe_gossett, gabe.gossett@wwu.edu

Rebecca: wilderr2@students.wwu.edu

Brian: @davidsoneducate
Research materials available at
http://www.zotero.org/groups/225433
This presentation is for educational purposes only – this is NOT legal advice