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Secure Flight Mothballed

February 10, 2006 by

Secure Flight, the planned next-generation system for screening airline passengers, has been mothballed by the Transportation Security Administration, according to an AP story by Leslie Miller. TSA chief Kip Hawley cited security concerns and questions about the program’s overall direction.

Last year I served on the Secure Flight Working Group, a committee of outside technology and privacy experts asked by the TSA to give feedback on Secure Flight. After hearing about plans for Secure Flight, I was convinced that TSA didn’t have a clear idea of what the program was supposed to be doing or how it would work. This is essentially what later government studies of the program found. Here’s the AP story:

Nearly four years and $200 million after the program was put into operation, Hawley said last month that the agency hadn’t yet determined precisely how it would work.

Government auditors gave the project failing grades – twice – and rebuked its authors for secretly obtaining personal information about airline passengers.

The sad part of this is that Secure Flight seems to have started out as a simpler program that would have made sense to deploy.

Today, airlines are given a no-fly list and a watch-list, which they are asked to check against their passenger lists. There are obvious security drawbacks to distributing the lists to airlines – a malicious airline employee with access to the lists could leak them to the bad guys. The 9/11 Commission recommended keeping the lists within the government, and having the government check passengers’ names against the lists.

A program designed to do just that would have been a good idea. There would still be design issues to work out. For example, false matches are now handled by airline ticket agents, but that function would probably have to moved into the government too, which would raise some logistical issues. There would be privacy worries, but they could be handled with good design and oversight.

Instead of sticking to this more modest plan, Secure Flight became a vehicle for pie-in-the-sky plans about data mining and automatic identification of terrorists from consumer databases. As the program’s goals grew more ambitious and collided with practical design and deployment challenges, the program lost focus and seemed to have a different rationale and plan from one month to the next.

What happens now is predictable. The program will officially die but will actually be reincarnated with a new name. Congress has directed TSA to implement a program of this general type, so TSA really has no choice but to try again. Let’s hope that this time they make the hard choices they avoided last time, and end up with a simpler program that solves the easier problems first.

(Fellow Working Group member Lauren Gelman offers has a similar take on this story. Another member, Bruce Schneier, has also blogged extensively about Secure Flight.)

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Analog Hole Bill Would Impose a Secret Law

January 23, 2006 by

If you’ve been reading here lately, you know that I’m no fan of the Sensenbrenner/Conyers analog hole bill. The bill would require almost all analog video devices to implement two technologies called CGMS-A and VEIL. CGMS-A is reasonably well known, but the VEIL content protection technology is relatively new. I wanted to learn more about it.

So I emailed the company that sells VEIL and asked for a copy of the specification. I figured I would be able to get it. After all, the bill would make compliance with the VEIL spec mandatory – the spec would in effect be part of the law. Surely, I thought, they’re not proposing passing a secret law. Surely they’re not going to say that the citizenry isn’t allowed to know what’s in the law that Congress is considering. We’re talking about television here, not national security.

After some discussion, the company helpfully explained that I could get the spec, if I first signed their license agreement. The agreement requires me (a) to pay them $10,000, and (b) to promise not to talk to anybody about what is in the spec. In other words, I can know the contents of the bill Congress is debating, but only if I pay $10k to a private party, and only if I promise not to tell anybody what is in the bill or engage in public debate about it.

Worse yet, this license covers only half of the technology: the VEIL decoder, which detects VEIL signals. There is no way you or I can find out about the encoder technology that puts VEIL signals into video.

The details of this technology are important for evaluating this bill. How much would the proposed law increase the cost of televisions? How much would it limit the future development of TV technology? How likely is the technology to mistakenly block authorized copying? How adaptable is the technology to the future? All of these questions are important in debating the bill. And none of them can be answered if the technology part of the bill is secret.

Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it?

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Breathalyzers and Open Source

October 21, 2005 by

Lawyers for 150 Floridians accused of drunk driving have asked a court to order the disclosure of the source code for software running in the breathalyzer machines used by police to analyze their blood alcohol level, according to a Tom Sanders story on vunet.

The defendants say they have the right to examine the machines that accused them, and that a meaningful examination requires access to the machines’ software. Prosecutors say the code is a trade secret.

The accused are right that one needs the code to understand fully how the machines work. The machines consist of sensors, a user interface, and control software. The software is the “brain” of the machine, and it is almost certainly involved in the calculations that derive a blood alcohol value from the sensor readings, as well as the display of the calculated value. If the accused have the right to fully examine the machines – and the article says that they do under Florida law – then they should see the source code.

Contrary to the article and some other commentators, this is not a dispute over whether the software should be open source. The accused aren’t seeking to open the software to everybody; they only want it opened to their legal teams.

There are standard practices for handling trade-secret information that must be turned over in court cases. A court will typically establish a protective order, which is a kind of nondisclosure agreement covering secret material that is turned over by one side to the other. The protective order will require parties to keep the information secret and to use it only for purposes related to the court proceedings. Typically the information can be turned over to a limited number of expert analysts who have also signed the protective order. Documents containing secret information are filed under seal, and testimony about secret matters may take place in a closed courtroom.

So this issue is not about open source, but about ensuring fairness for the accused. If they’re going to be accused based on what some machine says, then they ought to be allowed to challenge the accuracy of the machine. And they can’t do that unless they’re allowed to know how the machine works.

You might argue that the machine’s technical manuals convey enough information. Having read many manuals and examined the innards of many software systems, I’m skeptical of such claims. Often, knowing how the maker says a machine works is a poor substitute for knowing how it actually works. If a machine is flawed, it’s likely the maker will either (a) not know about the flaw or (b) be unwilling to admit it exists.

If the article’s description of Florida law is correct, this seems like a pretty easy decision for the court.

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Google Print, Damages and Incentives

September 23, 2005 by

There’s been lots of discussion online of this week’s lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from four large libraries, indexing the books’ contents, and letting people do Google-style searches on the books’ contents. Search results show short snippets from the books, but won’t let users extract long portions. Google will withdraw any book from the program at the request of the copyright holder. As I understand it, scanning was already underway when the suit was filed.

The authors claim that scanning the books violates their copyright. Google claims the project is fair use. Everybody agrees that Google Print is a cool project that will benefit the public – but it might be illegal anyway.

Expert commentators disagree about the merits of the case. Jonathan Band thinks Google should win. William Patry thinks the authors should win. Who am I to argue with either of them? The bottom line is that nobody knows what will happen.

So Google was taking a risk by starting the project. The risk is larger than you might think, because if Google loses, it won’t just have to reimburse the authors for the economic harm they have suffered. Instead, Google will have to pay statutory damages of up to $30,000 for every book that has been scanned. That adds up quickly! (I don’t know how many books Google has scanned so far, but I assume it’s a nontrivial numer.)

You might wonder why copyright law imposes such a high penalty for an act – scanning one book – that causes relatively little harm. It’s a good question. If Google loses, it makes economic sense to make Google pay for the harm it has caused (and to impose an injunction against future scanning). This gives Google the right incentive, to weigh the expected cost of harm to the authors against the project’s overall value.

Imposing statutory damages makes technologists like Google too cautious. Even if a new technology creates great value while doing little harm, and the technologist has a strong (but not slam-dunk) fair use case, the risk of statutory damages may deter the technology’s release. That’s inefficient.

Some iffy technologies should be deterred, if they create relatively little value for the harm they do, or if the technologist has a weak fair use case. But statutory damages deter too many new technologies.

[Law and economics mavens may object that under some conditions it is efficient to impose higher damages. That’s true, but I don’t think those conditions apply here. I don’t have space to address this point further, but please feel free to discuss it in the comments.]

In light of the risk Google is facing, it’s surprising that Google went ahead with the project. Maybe Google will decide now that discretion is the better part of valor, and will settle the case, stopping Google Print in exchange for the withdrawal of the lawsuit.

The good news, in the long run at least, is that this case will remind policymakers of the value of a robust fair use privilege.

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Who Is An ISP?

September 21, 2005 by

There’s talk in Washington about a major new telecommunications bill, to update the Telecom Act of 1996. A discussion draft of the bill is floating around.

The bill defines three types of services: Internet service (called “Broadband Internet Transmission Service” or BITS for short); VoIP; and broadband television. It lays down specific regulations for each type of service, and delegates regulatory power to the FCC.

In bills like this, much of the action is in the definitions. How you’re regulated depends on which of the definitions you satisfy, if any. The definitions essentially define the markets in which companies can compete.

Here’s how the Internet service market is defined:

The term “BITS” or “broadband Internet transmission service” –
(A) means a packet-switched service that is offered to the public, or [effectively offered to the public], with or without a fee, and that, regardless of the facilities used –
(i) is transmitted in a packed-based protocol, including TCP/IP or a successor protocol; and
(ii) provides to subscribers the capability to send and receive packetized information; …

The term “BITS provider” means any person who provides or offers to provide BITS, either directly or through an affiliate.

…

The term “packet-switched service” means a service that routes or forwards packets, frames, cells, or other data units based on the identification, address, or other routing information contained in the packets, frames, cells, or other data units.

The definition of BITS includes ordinary Internet Service Providers, as we would expect. But that’s not all. It seems to include public chat servers, which deliver discrete messages to specified destination users. It seems to include overlay networks like Tor, which provide anonymous communication over the Internet using a packet-based protocol. As Susan Crawford observes, it seems to cover nodes in ad hoc mesh networks. It even seems to include anybody running an open WiFi access point.

What happens to you if you’re a BITS provider? You have to register with the FCC and hope your registration is approved; you have to comply with consumer protection requirements (“including service appointments and responses to service interruptions and outages”); and you have to comply with privacy regulation which, ironically, require you to keep track of who your users are so you can send them annual notices telling them that you are not storing personal information about them.

I doubt the bill’s drafters meant to include chat or Tor as BITS providers. The definition can probably be rewritten to exclude cases like these.

A more interesting question is whether they meant to include open access points. It’s hard to justify applying heavyweight regulation to the individuals or small businesses who run access points. And it seems likely that many would ignore the regulations anyway, just as most consumers seem ignore the existing rules that require an FCC license to use the neighborhood-range walkie-talkies sold at Wal-Mart.

The root of the problem is the assumption that Internet connectivity will be provided only by large institutions that can amortize regulatory compliance costs over a large subscriber base. If this bill passes, that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy – only large institutions will be able to offer Internet service.

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