Vol. 23, No. 2 Spring 1996
Text, Spies and Cyberspace
How the new Information Age can affect our daily livesInterview with Glen Roberts
by Vicki Quade Glen Roberts is publisher of Full Disclosure, a newsletter focusing on privacy and technology issues. Now in its 10th year, the newsletter is published on an irregular basis, and mailed to 2,300 subscribers.
In the world of Glen Roberts, having a newsletter printed on actual paper is almost quaint. He and his wife, Margaret, live in the small town of Oil City, Pennsylvania, where she owns and operates a printing company. When he isn't fielding calls about cyberspace and privacy rights, he's taking deliveries of bulk paper.
When you think about it, Roberts is like many of us--right in the middle of an information explosion, except he's thriving as he moves into the paperless transfer of that information.
He hosts a one-hour, weekly, call-in radio show, Full Disclosure Live, buying time on shortwave, which gives him a worldwide audience. The show is also on the Internet in real audio, which means you have to access Roberts's web page (http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~glr/glr.html), click on the icon that says "Listen to this show," then follow instructions on how to listen in.
The radio show also airs on the local AM station in Oil City, WOYL (AM 13.40), plus it's on the Tech Talk radio network, which is a satellite network available to anyone with a home satellite dish.
In addition, Roberts publishes about 25 different booklets on privacy and cyberspace issues--the old-fashioned, printed way. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Roberts, 31, is the father of three stepchildren.
This interview, recorded from his home, was conducted by Human Rights Editor Vicki Quade.
What are the hot issues for your public?
Cordless phone privacy comes up a lot, and I tell people, get a police scanner and listen to your own cordless phone calls. See how far away you can pick them up. That's going to open your eyes.
When you think that just because your cordless phone doesn't work past the middle of your front yard, that nobody outside your yard is listening, take a police scanner. When you get three blocks away and you can hear your call, that's going to add a different perspective to it.
A lot of people say, yeah, of course you can do that if you have the right equipment. They don't realize that the right equipment is something you buy at a garage sale for $10 or brand new at Radio Shack for $100. They protect themselves by presuming that there's something special or unique about the technology.
I focus on getting people to understand the technology out there, and how, as a society, we try to apply a development.
Is technology creating a second-class status for those who don't have the ability to access all of this information?
That's absolutely true, that we're getting to be the haves and the have-nots, but we're not talking about money, we're talking about information. Or access to information.
It doesn't do us any good if we have a huge library in our house but we don't know how to find what we want. There's a tremendous amount of information available in cyberspace, and if you know how to get it, you can benefit. If you don't understand cyberspace, you're at a loss.
I moved to Oil City, Pennsylvania, from the Chicago area in 1995. John D. Rockefeller started some of his operations here. Quaker State Corporation moved its corporate headquarters from Oil City to Dallas.
There used to be a lot of steel, and active oil wells. The country's earliest oil well is 10 miles away. It was a very rich, very affluent, very industrialized place, but over the past 20 years, it's gone downhill because all of the big companies, all of the oil and all of the steel have gone somewhere else.
And that's why I moved here, because the real estate prices are low. In my business, where I do everything by mail, being able to buy a house for $8,500 makes a big difference. The only negative thing is that was no local Internet available, so it was all long distance calling, which gets expensive.
Right around the time I moved here, the chamber of commerce and various governmental bodies were exploring how to bring the Internet here. They talked and talked, and I couldn't wait.
What happened is a couple of people, one of them a high school student, just sat down and did it. And they're online. The city's not online, but we are. Full Internet access. I use a slip connection, and it's as good. Meanwhile, the people in this area are spending thousands of dollars researching how to bring the Internet here. They don't understand the whole concept of it yet because they haven't been exposed to it.
I heard about this community development program, where if a corporation invested up to $250,000 in the area, the state would give a matching grant to the city.
So I talked with the mayor of Oil City and said I can put something on the Internet about it and maybe there are some people with corporations in Pennsylvania that would be interested.
On Sunday morning, I put a posting up on the Internet. On Monday I was reading my E-mail to the mayor. There was a response from somebody.
The mayor said, "I'm surprised you got a response so soon." Because he doesn't understand that when I put a posting on the Internet, it's not like sending out a mailing, it's not like putting an ad in a monthly newspaper. It's instantaneous. Somebody in Japan, five minutes after I posted that, might well have read that message.
What the Internet can do for an area like this is tremendous because it gives a lot of people exposure to the rest of the world. On the Internet, you're as good as in New York City.
What kind of ethical and legal standards do you think are needed in cyberspace?
That's a tough question. Some of it is a matter of control because it's not like the conventional organizations that we have. There are no shareholders, there's no board of directors, no president, no pyramid that you'd have in a normal organization.
Some people might call it anarchy or an information free- for-all. We're starting to see some of the answers with programs like Surfwatch and Netmanning, where you can set standards and limit access to material on your own computer, whether it's because you don't want to see that stuff or you don't want your kids to see it.
When we talk about people using the Internet for criminal activity as opposed to controversial information, I tell people consider what's done now to catch criminals who do business by phone.
Law enforcement agencies have figured out through wiretaps and other means how to investigate and handle those criminal activities. At no point have we seen law enforcement agencies say drug dealers are doing business by phone, so let's prosecute the board of directors of AT&T for participating in drug dealing.
And yet we see proposals that say we should hold the Internet providers liable for the information there.
What that means is that the providers will run scared and try to stop information that isn't criminal in nature, just because they don't want any problems.
In time, as law enforcement becomes familiar with the technology, we'll see new ways of investigating criminals online, which won't have anything to do with prosecuting the third party that's simply providing the service equally to everyone.
We have to go after the perpetrators, not after somebody providing a service.
You're interested in monitoring government surveillance equipment. What is the latest super secret stuff?
If you want to electronically surveil, you're supposed to get a warrant. Very few warrants are issued every year. Under 2,000. Meanwhile, there is a tremendous body of surveillance equipment being sold.
One example is cellular phone monitoring. You can use a police scanner to listen to cellular phone calls, but if I want to listen to your phone calls, good luck. I have to go through 800 channels until I happen to recognize your voice.
With one of these automatic devices, all I have to do is key in your phone number. Any time you place or receive a call, I'm going to hear it. I have to be within the geographic range of the radio waves, that's all.
Of course, to use such a device legally you have to go to a court, and you have to get the same warrant that you would to tap a phone. But across the United States at all levels of government, there are about 1,500 warrants issued a year for wiretapping. Only a few of those are for cellular phones.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of those devices being sold. Some of them sell in the $20,000 to $30,000 range. But some, like a device made in Canada, can get hooked up to your computer and scanner for about $500.
What we have is a lot of surveillance being done that isn't authorized by a court.
How safe is the material we're sending, either by fax or over the Internet?
There are two broad categories of people out there looking for information. People just having fun, who listen to cordless phone calls in the neighborhood because it's more exciting than the soap operas. Or they search on the Internet through people's E-mail just because it's fun. It's certainly an invasion of privacy, but there's no outstanding danger to it.
Then you have another group of people who are actively looking for some piece of information--they want something of value for nothing or they want personal information about you, either because it's a corporate competition or it's someone stalking you.
If someone really has targeted you, there are a lot of ways they can tap into your different communications, from doing a tap on your phone or fax machine to getting a job with the information provider that you have your Internet account with, so that they can view your E-mail. About all you can do is to encrypt your information.
But that's become an issue itself, with the government wanting access to encryption codes. You've been touting an encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy.
We publish a book on how to use it. It's pretty much a shareware program, so you can download it off of the Internet or CompuServe.
Who would want the information most people have online?
If we're putting credit card numbers out, people want it. Let's say you signed up with a dating service and you met somebody who turned out to be a stalker. That person can sit outside your house with a police scanner and listen to your phone calls. And now they know a whole lot more about you than you would tell them or that they should know.
So when we put information out, it might not seem to be a big deal, but think about all of your phone calls.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there looking to commit some type of fraud. If you walk into a bank with a gun, you're probably going to get caught. What if you break into the bank's computer? It's a lot easier to steal.
Now look at software. How many people will copy a diskette of a commercial program for a friend? Will most of those same people go into a store and shoplift something? Once it becomes intangible, people play by different rules.
It doesn't seem like stealing when you copy a disk, so once you've crossed that line, the idea that you can commit a crime silently and anonymously can be appealing.
That makes encryption more important. Believe it or not, there's more security in writing a letter and mailing it the old-fashioned way. Very few people have access to that envelope. Of those people who have access, very few are going to be inclined to open it, read it, and try to put it back together.
So the U.S. mail is safer than the Internet?
I would say so. On the Internet people can search for strings of numbers that look like credit card numbers. Or they could look for particular words or particular names or combinations.
Or medical information?
There's a black market for work histories. Not long ago, about 20 people were arrested for basically stealing personal information and selling it, and quite a few of them were private investigators. Some of them worked for the Social Security Administration, some for local police departments.
If you're an insurance company, or a corporation, and someone either files a workers' comp claim or applies for a job, you might want more information about that person's work history. And who has that information?
The companies that person worked for?
Yes, but you don't know which companies somebody worked at unless they tell you, and if they don't tell you straight, then you don't have that.
So how do you find out?
The Social Security Administration. Every company reports wages paid. If you call them and ask, How much did Joe Blow make, they won't tell you. But if you hire a private investigator who pays somebody there $50 to run a report for you, that information is free flowing.
You can often find somebody in a company who will give out information for a fee--even if it's one person in 3,000. All you need is one.
So as information gets computerized and more easily accessible, the more we have to worry about how that information will be used.
So what needs to be done to protect that?
That's a tough question. There has to be more awareness of the vulnerabilities of a system, and less free access to all the information.
It really means having less centralized collection of information. Do we need a big database out there?
If I have a particular disease and it's between me and my doctor, it's going to stay there in all likelihood. But if it's between me and my doctor and an insurance company database, then the potential for you and the rest of the world to find out is greatly increased.
What's the answer?
We need to operate our lives in way so our dependence is more on ourselves than on these monolithic institutions that want to collect information.
So you're saying, don't give out information?
Unless it's necessary, don't give it out. You know, very few people ever check to make sure the information that's already out there is correct. What happens if someone inputs the wrong dates, or facts, or figures? Now the database has that information about you, and it's wrong.
We've lost control of our own information. The way to get it back is to keep it as private as possible. You get marketing surveys all the time in the mail. How much money do you make, how many kids do you have, how much is your house worth?
The people asking the questions aren't doing it just for fun, they're trying to make some money off of it. Your answers are going into a database and it's going to be sold.
Is there any way to correct the information out there, or retrieve it so it isn't used?
The only information you have any control over is in regards to your credit history. There are laws that regulate your right to look at your credit history and dispute items there.
When you ask to look at a company's databases, most won't open their records for you.
You have to be careful even about the information you give to the Census Bureau. They assure you that this information is confidential. And they're telling the truth, to a point. What they do is take your census block and report that everyone in that block has an average income of $56,000, a house value of $250,000, and so on.
What's the value of that information?
You can buy a program on a CD/ROM, where you type in a zip code and you get the demographics of that area, how much the houses are valued at, what the average income is. A lot of that comes from the census material.
You type in the zip code for Oil City, where I live. If you're a company looking for some big money people, you see that the average income here is $20,000...you say, forget it.
Say you're the IRS and you look at someone's income in Oil City and you see that they're making $500,000 a year. What are they doing? Selling drugs? So you investigate a little about that person.
Or you put in the zip code of Lindenhurst, Illinois, where I used to live. You tell the IRS you're making $3,000 a year. And the databases say the average in that community is $80,000. That raises some red flags that you might be underreporting.
See what I'm getting at. Simple information can be used in a lot of different ways.
So where do you see the whole cyberspace phenomenon going?
We're becoming more dependent on intangible, anonymous, monolithic databases.
We're moving into a world where, in a sense, nothing is real. It doesn't matter who we are or what we are, it matters what information we can present.
And either we're going to be caught up in it or we can use it to our advantage, and a lot of that is learning it and trying to use the technologies that are beneficial for good purposes, as opposed to just sitting back and letting the technology steamroll us over.
--Interviewed by Vicki Quade