Digital+Privacy

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toc =Introduction= In todays day and age, we live in a society where everyone is connected to one thing: the internet. With the advancements of technology and their capabilities of using internet, everyone is now able to post more pictures, tweet more messages, and download more stuff from anywhere. People's lives are becoming less and less private, because of all the stuff that leave out there for people to view and look through. Of course, when someone tweets or puts of picture of something on the internet, they only expect their followers or people they are close with to view it, but how true does that stand? What lots of people did not know before the exposure of wiki leaks and other programs, was that the government could seize and view whatever anyone posted at any given time from any given location. It is scary to think about, but it is true. The government can do what it wants whenever they want with our information. Some questions people might have are "what can we do to protect our information?" "why can the government do something like this?" These are questions of concerned people who are just trying to get protection in the digital sphere. This wiki page will help the readers to get a better understanding of Digital Privacy, the history of digital privacy, who ones information can be collected by the government, what is the NSA and the Snowden/wiki leaks scenario, court cases that helped expand digital privacy, and finally, how we can protect our digital information.

=**What is Digital Privacy?**= Digital privacy is a growing concern for privacy to the many people to use the Internet. Of course, the amount of Personal Data directly affects the level of privacy. Usually, when users using some Internet resources, they provide certain personal information. Sometimes among of these data are "sensitive" data, and very easily can identify the person or user of these resources. Either way, the amount of personal information given, at the example registering to a web service or an Internet resource, it is inversely proportional to the level of privacy. For example, if a Web service requires from users only an email address, it is not the same as when requiring name, surname, address, or ID number.

=History of Digital Privacy = Since technology is a new phenomenon, digital privacy is becoming more prevalent as the years later progressed, which means i t has only been on the hot button for 2 to 3 decades now . In the beginning of the founding of the United States, the main way the government gathered data was by asking questions on a census, but that would change. In the next few decades to come, the census was getting more in depth asking more questions than the years before.  This of course lead to laws being passed with stricter restrictions to come for census privacy, but soon all these things will change. the world is getting smaller, which we mean by that is with everything going digital, people are more connected with other people faster and able to get more information from them. All this would lead to the 20th century where the digital sphere stared to grow.  The "right to privacy" in general is considered a human right, and is not a legal right under the U.S Constitution.As the government became more integrated and emerged in technology, institutions and bureaucracies grew. the first real government intrusion came from the very famous, and well liked, social security program. This program gave the government much information about oneself and how much he made. all of these agencies and how they used data collection would give rise to laws that would be passed to start to protect privacy rights.  In 1968, the United States passed “the Wiretap Act”, which was the first actually protection for US citizens against the government. This act is the first real protection against the government; it protects the government from intentional interception, use, or disclosure of information that was gathered by a wire or any type of way. This means the government cannot wiretap phones and use "sniffers" to gather stuff on the Internet that you or someone recently used.  In 1978, the Carter administration passed what is known as FISA, or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA was one of the very first programs that were used to do domestic spying on foreign powers, or even citizens of the United States that are suspected of terrorism like acts. This act allows for the physical and electronic surveillance of the groups, which pretty much is the beginning of the government controlling what they want to control by watching over us. This was the first real spying on people in the United States. This is the beginning of the loss of digital privacy, which puts pressure on the government to regulate spying, but that never happened.

=How Is Your Information Collected =  According to internetsociety.org, every time you visit a webpage, send a text message, click on an email, send a tweet, update your Facebook status, your digital footprint is being collected. Your information can be collected by giving consent to a website, for example stating your age to get into a website, or give consent for an app to collect. Companies can then in turn sell your "information" such as gender, phone number, email address, age, race, religion, geographic info, etc. to other companies for a profit. A program called "Prism" allows officials to access this information from websites such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and other huge internet companies according to top secret documents that were obtained by whistle-blowers. The leaked document claims that the citizens information is collected solely thorough the servers of these websites. Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the Prism program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US". "FISA was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them," the presentation claimed. "It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek FISA'S for all." There are other was to gather information.

=National Security Agency (NSA) = =media type="youtube" key="GoM4jIZbTtQ" width="456" height="280"=  The National Security Agency, otherwise known as the N.S.A., serves to protect citizens from foreign attacks and such by monitoring, collecting, and processing of data for counter-intelligence purposes. NSA was established in 1952 by harry Truman. In coordination with the central Security Service, the NSA is now becoming a more established agency working with the military.  There are two main missions of the program: signals intelligence and information assurance. Signals intelligence gathers information from America’s adversaries. Information assurance is there to protect the national security of America from getting stolen or damage by such groups that are performing terroristic acts. In coordination with each other, NSA/CSS protects the lives of Americans, defends the nation’s vital information from getting into the wrong hands, advances the goals of our nation, whatever they may be, all while protecting the privacy rights of the citizens of the United States within the means of the constitution. For a timeline of NSA spying, click link below <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;"> https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline

=Snowden and The WikiLeaks Affair= <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;">Edward Snowden worked for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, who released thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists, subsequently which were released to The Guardian and The Washington Post, later to be picked up by news outlets all over the world.In the articles that were published by The Guardian, they discussed a lot of information about the NSA and the operations they were doing, such as spying on domestic and foreign people, which also included intercepting phone calls and such. A few days later The Guardian reported their source of the information and that is when Snowden's name popped up. Snowden’s actions have drawn both praise and criticism. Praise for being a whistleblower and a patriot, and criticism for being a traitor. It is safe to say that the Snowden affair has furthered the debates about government surveillance and information privacy. <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;"> The Guardian’s chief editor was quoted saying that Snowden had performed a public service. Many of the documents released by Snowden explained in detail how the government went about monitoring its citizens. Since the United States have taken no action to protect digital privacy, states have taken the issue into their own hands. “Congress is obviously not interested in updating those things or protecting privacy,” said Jonathan Stickland, a Republican state representative in Texas. “If they’re not going to do it, states have to do it.” <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;"> Wikileaks is a nonprofit organization started in 2007 that provides a information to the public anonymously by people who choose to provide and leak the information to journalists via an electronic dropbox on their website. Since its conception, Wikileaks has survived numerous legal and political attacks to silence the organization from publishing private information. The basis of their existence stems from their belief in freedom of speech, improvement of common historical record, and the support of all the rights of the people to create new historical records.

=<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Court Cases dealing with Digital Privacy =

Riley v. California
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;">The court case, Riley v. California, was a very monumental court case for the protection of people’s privacy from the cops and little of our government. This court case protects citizens from cops seizing texts and other stuff on cellphones without a warrant. Some people view this case as a battle won for privacy protection rights. This will protects the phones from illegal searches, because a search without a warrant, in certain circumstances, is considered illegal and is not acceptable to do. This case is precedent for what some states are trying to do by enacting laws: protect the digital information of citizens in their states. To conclude on Riley, Chief Justice Roberts said it best in the case to describe how he feels about privacy rights: <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;">“The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.” <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;"> —U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in Riley v. California (2014)

**Jones v. The United States**
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;">In January 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that Americans have constitutional protections against GPS surveillance by law enforcement, holding that GPS tracking is a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. In United States v. Jones (at times known as United States v. Maynard), FBI agents planted a GPS device on a car while it was on private property and then used it to track the position of the automobile every ten seconds for a full month, all without securing a search warrant. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and the Center for Democracy and Technology filed an amicus brief arguing that GPS tracking is fundamentally different from and more invasive than other surveillance technologies the court has allowed before, and that law enforcement use of GPS without a warrant violates Americans' reasonable expectations of privacy. The amicus brief was joined by Roger L. Easton, considered the father of GPS, and other technologists.

**Wurie v. The United States**
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;">Can the police search your phone records, under the Fourth Amendment, without obtaining a warrant on a person who has been placed under arrest?The Boston police officers arrested Brima Wurie in 2007 for distributing crack cocaine. Among the items confiscated from Wurie was his cell phone, which rang repeatedly while he was detained. Without obtaining a warrant, officers looked through the phone’s call log, and with that information, determined the address of a residence where they found drugs, a firearm, and ammunition. At his criminal trial, the federal district court denied Wurie’s motion to suppress the evidence obtained as a result of the police’s warrantless search of his cellular phone. The court found Wurie guilty of possession of narcotics with intent to distribute, distributing cocaine base, and being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition. The First Circuit reversed the district court’s denial and vacated Wurie’s conviction, holding that the Fourth Amendment requires the police to obtain a warrant before searching an arrestee’s cell phone. The Supreme Court’s ruling in this case will help shape the contours of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures in light of new technologies

Smith v. Maryland
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;">The government used a pen register, a device that records all phone numbers called from a certain phone, without a warrant. The court declared that using a pen register is not a legal search because "the petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company". The court ruled that the defendant did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, citing the Katz v. United States ruling which established the reasonable expectation of privacy test. This decision made pen registers outside of constitutional protection within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment so that a warrant was not required.

ECPA vs CalECPA
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;">California recently passed new Privacy Law in October of 2015. The legislature states "The landmark Electronic Communications Privacy Act bars any state law enforcement agency or other investigative entity from compelling a business to turn over any metadata or digital communications—including emails, texts, documents stored in the cloud—without a warrant." The foundation for this comes from privacy in non digital communications. For example why should the government be able to read and collect all of your metadata (without a warrant), when they are not legally allowed to come into your home and break into your desk to read a letter you wrote. The same concepts should apply. This bill had unprecedented bi-partisan support as many of the worlds tech companies call California "home" (Dropbox, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google.) California law enforcement would basically need a warrant to gather your metadata; however, they don't need a warrant in every situation. It’s not required, for example, in emergencies when accessing the data could prevent loss of life or physical injury. <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px; line-height: 1.5;"> California is not the only state to take a stance on digital privacy: Maine, Texas, and Utah have also passed similar legislation in recent years. After the recent passing of the California Electronic Communications Act, it is expected that more states follow suite. In delivering the court’s unanimous opinion in Riley, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted that for many Americans, today’s smartphones hold the “privacies of life,” adding that the American Revolution itself was predicated on opposition to illegal searches

=**How You Can Protect Your Digital Information**= <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;">In reality, we have established that there is no good way to 100% to protect our digital information or a very way to secure privacy, but there are certain measures you cant take to prevent such an occurrence. <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;"> When you are surfing the web, one person can download and use the TOR project as the default browser. Using this as the default browser will ensure that all your communications remain to your view only and so it wont show that you are the one doing it, pretty much anonymous. " Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location." <span style="color: #262626; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;"> Also, if one would want, they could purchase a VPN, Virtual Private Network. This system your connections while you are communicating with other services, weather this is on your laptop or cellphone. <span style="color: #1d1d1d; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.5px;"> In an article by the guardian, they contacted numerous hackers to determine the best ways an average computer user can protect them on the Internet. The hackers said that the best way to protect oneself is to hide your network, encrypt your communications, assuming your computer can be compromised, but that it would take time and carry a lot of risk by the NSA, being suspicious of large commercial encryption software, and, finally, Trying to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. From the best of hackers, this is the best way one can protect themselves, but the government can still find ways to get your information.