Surveillance State

Editors' note: Correction, March 3, 12:46 p.m. PST: This post, which originally carried the headline "White House ditches YouTube after privacy complaints," significantly misconstrued the White House's policy on and use of YouTube. In the interests of disclosure and transparency, we are leaving the contents as originally posted, with two subsequent update notes and with the exception of the headline change. See also our follow-up story, "No, the White House hasn't ditched YouTube."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * Original story follows * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Updated at 5:50 p.m. PST March 2: The New York Times is reporting that the White House has denied any change in online video policy. While the White House spokesperson admitted to using an in-house flash based solution for the latest of the president's weekly video messages, he said the White House is just "experimenting" with different solutions.

Updated at 2:59 a.m. PST March 3: Late Monday, Google posted on its Public Policy Blog a rebuttal to this report: "White House videos on YouTube."

Responding to complaints by privacy activists, the White House has quietly abandoned YouTube as the provider of the embedded videos on the president's official home page.

With the release of the latest weekly video address, the White House has shifted to a Flash-based video solution using Akamai's content delivery network.

The White House's decision to move away from the Google-owned video-sharing site will likely be met with praise by privacy activists and could mark the beginning of a real backlash in response to Google's insatiable thirst for detailed data on the browsing habits of Web surfers.

Ironically, the decision by the White House comes days after YouTube began to roll out new policies to better protect the privacy of visitors who view videos embedded into federal government Web sites. The move by YouTube may prove to be too little, too late.

This is the new embedded video tool used by the White House.

(Credit: Whitehouse.gov)

The White House's decision to embed YouTube videos in the president's official home page drew instant criticism from privacy activists. In addition to several critical posts on my blog, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (here and here), the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Center for Digital Democracy blasted the choice of video providers.

The focus of the criticism was on the use of long-term tracking cookies by the Google-owned video-sharing site. When the new White House site first went live in January, every visitor to the president's blog would be issued a tracking cookie, even those who did not click the "play" button to watch the video.

The White House acted quickly, and soon deployed a technical fix to the cookie issue, which protected Web surfers who did not click the play button. However, the tens of thousand of people who clicked play were still issued a cookie, and thus tracked by YouTube.

In an unannounced change over the weekend, the White House appears to have solved the remaining cookie privacy issue for those Web site visitors who wish to watch the president's weekly video message.

Out with YouTube, in with Akamai
As of Saturday, the White House seems to have ditched YouTube as its video provider. Visitors to the White House blog can now click play to view a Flash-based video that loads directly from the White House's own Web servers. This solution, which appears to use Akamai's content delivery network, does not make use of tracking cookies.

The president's tech team seems to have finally hit on an optimal solution--one which protects the privacy of the visitors to the White House site, while still permitting the president to spread his message.

The White House is still posting copies of the videos to its official YouTube channel. However, the president no longer provides free advertising to YouTube by embedding those videos on a taxpayer-funded site.

Furthermore, the White House has copied one of the coolest of YouTube's social features: the ability for users to easily share and embed videos on their own sites. Each of the White House-hosted videos includes an "embed" link under it that can be copied and pasted onto any other Web site or blog.

It is unclear whether this switch away from YouTube marks a permanent shift in policy for the White House, or whether the Oval Office geek squad is merely testing an alternate video provider. While the latest video is served using Akamai's servers, the older videos remain as embedded YouTube files.

YouTube's new cookie rules
The timing of the White House's decision to switch to Akamai is rather strange, given the recent moves by YouTube to offer a more privacy-preserving solution for videos used on federal government sites.

Within the last couple weeks, YouTube has silently rolled out its own updates in response to the cookie-related criticism. People wishing to embed a YouTube video can now select a delayed cookies option when copying the embed URL.

This is the new delayed cookies option for YouTube embeds.

(Credit: Screenshot of YouTube)

That choice will cause the embedded videos to be served from an alternate domain, www.youtube-nocookie.com, which registrar records reveal was first registered on January 23 2009, just one day after this blog first mentioned the White House/YouTube cookie issue.

New documentation on the YouTube site reveals:

Enabling delayed cookies means that the YouTube video player will not set any non-session cookies on the computer of a visitor (viewing the page on which the YouTube video is embedded). The YouTube video player may set non-session cookies on the visitor's computer once the visitor clicks on the YouTube video player.

This option is rather similar (yet still inferior) to the technical fix that was previously used (and since disabled) by the White House, as well as the open source MyTube tool developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A prominent privacy policy
In another new move by YouTube, the site now appears to be directly embedding a link to its privacy policy in all videos that are played from government sites.

This is the new privacy policy link in .gov-hosted YouTube videos.

(Credit: Whitehouse.gov)

When those same videos are viewed at YouTube.com, or when embedded in a blog or other non-.gov site, the clickable link to the privacy policy is gone.

Webmasters for various state agencies seemed to notice the new policy last week and initially complained to YouTube, thinking that the new youtube-nocookie.com was a phishing site.

A representative from YouTube told the Webmasters:

The privacy policy link you see on your embed player is in response to federal regulations regarding privacy on embed players. We're working to remove it from state and local .gov sites as soon as possible.

Still not perfect
While the decision by the White House to ditch YouTube is a good one, unresolved issues remain.

First, as previously noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the White House Web site makes use of an "invisible pixel" style Web bug/tracker on every page on the site, hosted by WebTrends.com.

Ideally, the White House should take its Web analytics technology in-house and abandon the use of this third party tracking technology. Otherwise, at the very least, the White House privacy policy should be updated to note the tracking cookies used by WebTrends.

Second, the White House still has not published the waivers it issued to YouTube (and potentially other third parties), which permitted the sites to use long-term tracking cookies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has repeatedly asked for these documents-- requests that the White House has ignored.

Given the president's much-publicized commitment to transparency, it is time that the White House publishes these documents.

Third, in its recent move to include privacy policy links in videos embedded at .gov Web sites, YouTube has clearly demonstrated that it has the ability to modify the services it provides depending on the referrer information associated with incoming requests. YouTube should build on this and adopt a policy of not logging any data associated with .gov-referred requests.

That is, the site would be free to keep logs on the videos viewed by visitors to its own site as well as those embedded on blogs, but it would opt to immediately forget all identifying information associated with requests from government sites.

While the White House seems to understand the cookie privacy issue, it is unlikely that members of the House and Senate are equally as tech savvy. After all, some of them can barely figure out Twitter.

YouTube videos are heavily used on the Web sites of those in the House and Senate. YouTube should adopt sane logging policies for visitors who view these videos, so that we don't have to wait for the House and Senate to fix the problem themselves.

YouTube did not return a request for comment, while a representative for the White House Web team declined to speak on the record.

When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama's "victory" in keeping his BlackBerry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the U.S. president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers.

The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama's location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location.

President Obama and his BlackBerry at the White House in late January.

(Credit: UPI Photo/Ron Sachs/Pool)

Serial numbers
Before we dive in, let's take a moment to note that each mobile phone has a unique serial number, known as an IMEI, or MEID. This unique number is transmitted in clear text, every time the phone communicates with a nearby cell tower. Thus, while the contents of a phone call or the data session (for e-mail) are usually encrypted, anyone with the right equipment can home in on a particular IMEI and identify the location of the source of that signal.

The most common device used to locate a phone by its IMEI is a "Triggerfish", a piece of equipment that is routinely used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This kind of device tricks nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers and other information by impersonating a cell tower.

The devices, which are actually fairly low-tech, were used to hunt down famed hacker Kevin Mitnick back in the 1990s. Most interesting of all, according to Department of Justice documents, Triggerfish can be used to reveal a suspect's location "without the user knowing about it and without involving the cell phone provider."

The expensive brand-name Triggerfish devices, made by the Harris Corp., are sold only to government agencies. However, it is almost certain that foreign governments have similar technology. Furthermore, someone with a low budget could likely use the open-source GNU Radio platform, which can already decipher GSM signals, to roll their own phone sniffer.

Finding Obama
We know that the president has been given a White House-issued BlackBerry phone. As a result, Obama's smartphone is broadcasting its IMEI serial number for anyone with the right equipment to detect.

Of course, the president is never alone, and so it is likely that anyone sniffing the wireless spectrum near the president would pick up hundreds of different BlackBerrys in the area.

However, Obama's aides do have to go home at some point, whereas Obama sleeps at the White House. This means that over the course of several days or weeks, it should be possible for a patient adversary to determine which IMEI belongs to the president's phone, and which IMEIs are associated with the phones of aides, simply by following the president (at a distance) and monitoring the spectrum at all hours.

As staffers go home for the evening, and Secret Service agents rotate out of duty, an adversary can strike their IMEI numbers off of the list. Within days, that initial list of 100 BlackBerrys can be reduced down to a single IMEI identifying the president's phone

Were someone to learn the president's IMEI, they could use it to gain valuable (and dangerous) information. For example, by pointing an antenna at the White House, it'd be possible to instantly determine if the president was inside. With a sophisticated-enough antenna, it might even be possible to determine which vehicle the president is sitting in while traveling in a motorcade, or to determine if the Secret Service is driving an empty limousine along a high-profile route to draw attention, while the president travels to a venue in an unmarked vehicle. The digital trail left by the president's BlackBerry would soon announce his presence to those keeping an eye out for his IMEI.

I am sure that others could come up with even more nefarious uses for real-time access to the president's physical location. I will leave that task to the blogosphere.

Burners
The simple solution to this problem, of course, is for the President to regularly change his IMEI serial number by getting a new phone. However, this presents another problem: that of the odd man out.

Imagine that foreign spies point a directional antenna at the White House and are thus able to capture the IMEI numbers of Obama and his team, as they leave and return to the White House from various events.

If a new IMEI number were to suddenly appear, be used for one week, disappear, and then be replaced by a new IMEI, which was also used for a week, before also disappearing, it would soon be obvious that a single person was changing phones. This pattern would be even more obvious, if everyone else in the president's entourage kept using their own phone--and thus broadcast the same IMEI, week after week.

Simply put, the only way that President Obama can gain some level of anonymity with regard to his IMEI number is if everyone in his team also changes their IMEI numbers with the same regularity.

Fans of the HBO TV show The Wire (a group that includes Obama) will no doubt remember the use of cheap prepaid "burner" phones by the fictional drug dealers. In order to avoid being wiretapped by the police, the entire criminal gang would dispose of their phones at once and switch to brand-new devices.

Essentially, the White House needs to start using burners.

Cost-effective protection
It would be extremely expensive (and wasteful) for the president and his staff to get a new BlackBerry each week. Luckily, there are two options available to the White House tech staff that allow them to protect the president's location privacy in a cost-effective (and environmentally friendly) way:

First, the White House geek team can simply shuffle the BlackBerrys used by the President's staff. That is, take away everyone's phone, mix them up, restore the software to the factory default, then issue a "new" phone to each staffer.

Within minutes, the phones would synchronize with the White House e-mail servers, and thus the "new" devices would have instant access to the e-mails and information that had been on the previous device.

The inconvenience factor of such a solution could also be significantly reduced by having twice as many phones as employees--that way, staff would not have to go without their phone for more than a minute or two, as they were swapped each week.

As long as this shuffling of phones were done randomly, the IMEI numbers would be sufficiently anonymized. Sure, a potential attacker would know that the device belonged to a member of the White House staff, but they would not know whether if belonged to a lowly intern, the press secretary, or the president.

A slightly more laborious method would be to hack the software running on the BlackBerrys and flash the devices with a new serial number. While this is quite possibly a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which prohibits most forms of phone hacking), it is unlikely that Research In Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) would sue the White House for engaging in such reverse engineering.

Of course, the downside of giving each phone a new serial number is that these phones would then need to be re-registered with the wireless communication company, which would otherwise refuse to provide the devices with service. However, this additional burden for the White House techies would yield significant security benefits, as each phone would be given a clean IMEI number not associated with the White House.

Insiders
In this article, I've focused solely on the scenario of a bad guy with an antenna. There is also the very real (and significant) risk of an insider working for the phone company.

Insiders are a notoriously difficult security problem to fix, something Obama has likely already learned, after his passport file was read by a contractor working for the State Department.

Even if every person working for the White House's telecommunications carrier were honest, it could also be possible to social-engineer the information out of a customer service representative (otherwise known as "pretexting").

Alternatively, an adversary could simply hack into the computer systems used by the phone company in order to get information on Obama's phone. Is was this latter approach that was followed by an unknown attacker who was able to spy on the phone calls of more than 100 Greek government officials during the 2004 Olympics.

Foreign trips
President Obama is likely to go on many foreign trips during his four (or more) years in office. In addition to burdening taxpayers with the obscene international roaming rates associated with his foreign BlackBerry usage, there are new and more serious security concerns to consider.

The federal government can most likely trust AT&T and the other wireless carriers. After all, they did join forces with the National Security Agency to spy on millions of American's phone calls without a warrant. The telecommunication companies in foreign countries are far less likely to be pro-United States, and in some cases, they are likely to be working closely with foreign intelligence agencies.

Thus, as long as President Obama keeps his BlackBerry turned on while he is in China, it is likely that the Chinese government will be closely monitoring his location, as reported by the president's phone to the Chinese government-owned phone company. The same sort of security issues will likely arise in many other countries.

Due to these security concerns, this blogger would be extremely surprised if the Secret Service permitted the President to use his BlackBerry when on foreign trips.

As you can see, the use of a BlackBerry by the president creates a number of very real security headaches that are no doubt keeping several people at the Secret Service awake at night. While the initial focus of the press was on the e-mail and smartphone technology in the president's phone, the real threats and risks are actually associated with more boring functions of the device.

Further reading: M. Jakobsson and S. Wetzel. "Security Weaknesses in Bluetooth" (PDF) describes some very similar location privacy attacks against mobile phones using Bluetooth-based sniffers.

Someone at the White House appears to be listening to those of us in the privacy community.

For the third time in just six days, the Obama administration has modified the White House Web site privacy policy in response to criticism from the blogosphere.

When the site launched on January 20, it exempted YouTube from federal anticookie tracking rules that would have otherwise cast a legal shadow over the use of embedded videos on the White House blog.

Reacting to criticism from the blogosphere, the White House first modified its Web site on Friday to limit the cookie exposure to only those users who clicked on videos. Then, on Sunday, the White House again tinkered with its privacy policy to scrub YouTube's name from the cookie exemption.

The original YouTube-specific exemption stated:

For videos that are visible on WhiteHouse.gov, a "persistent cookie" is set by third-party providers when you click to play the video.

This persistent cookie is used by YouTube to help maintain the integrity of video statistics. A waiver has been issued by the White House Counsel's office to allow for the use of this persistent cookie.

However, by Sunday evening, the exemption had been edited to remove all mention of YouTube:

For videos that are visible on WhiteHouse.gov, a "persistent cookie" is set by third-party providers when you click to play the video.

This persistent cookie is used by some third-party providers to help maintain the integrity of video statistics. A waiver has been issued by the White House Counsel's office to allow for the use of this persistent cookie.

The decision by the White House to revisit the cookie exemption does not come as a complete shock. The YouTube rule had in just a few short days generated both bad press and direct criticism from several public-interest groups.

It should be noted that this change is, for the most part, cosmetic. YouTube continues to be the only company whose video content is embedded within the White House Web site. Furthermore, the Google-owned video-sharing site is the only one that has received both official legal clearance from the White House Counsel and direct assistance by the White House tech staff (who embed the YouTube content) in planting tracking cookies within the Web browsers of millions of Americans.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has advised President Obama and who personally donated $25,000 to the president's inauguration celebration (out of a total of $150,000 by six Google executives) must be rather pleased.

Still no transparency
In spite of Obama's much-publicized commitment to transparency, the White House has yet to actually provide a copy of the waiver (something this blogger has requested from White House officials informally, as well as via the Freedom of Information Act).

The text of the original privacy policy implied that a specific waiver had been issued for the cookies forced upon end users who intentionally viewed YouTube videos embedded within the White House Web site. The text now implies a far broader waiver for multiple video-sharing Web sites. However, it remains unclear if a new waiver has been issued, or if the old waiver was broad enough to cover multiple sites.

When I first wrote about the privacy policy text last week, I criticized the White House for providing YouTube with a specific exemption. At the time, I noted that no other company had received such special treatment.

The motivation of my criticism was to try to shame the White House staff into doing away with the exemption--as cookies are in no way required in order to serve online video. Instead of recognizing the need to protect consumer privacy, White House officials reacted by expanding the exemption to other companies.

In many ways, the current policy is actually worse than before: non-tech-savvy consumers now have no idea how many companies might be forcing their Web browser to accept tracking cookies. At least up until last week, visitors could take some comfort in the knowledge that only one company might be invading their privacy when they visited the White House Web site (and then only by a firm that had pledged to "do no evil"). Now, at least according to the White House's wide exemption, there could be many.

Last week, I said we should be reasonable and give the White House Web team a bit of time--after all, it is in a brand-new office, managing a new computer network, and scrambling to meet the demands of a very busy boss. However, if the team has had enough time to tinker with the privacy policy at least three times in the past six days, then it has more than enough time to post a copy of the waiver.

Just 12 hours after this blog highlighted the privacy problems associated with the White House's use of embedded YouTube videos, the Obama team rushed to deploy a technical fix that significantly protects the privacy of many (but not all) of the site's visitors.

Since its launch three days ago, President Obama's White House Web site has included several embedded YouTube videos. While this certainly demonstrates that the 44th president is Web 2.0 savvy, the decision to embed YouTube videos has also enabled the Google-owned video-sharing site to sneakily collect data on the millions of people who visit Whitehouse.gov--even those users who never click the "play" button to actually watch one of the videos.

Change.gov, the Web site for the Obama/Biden transition team, also made extensive use of YouTube videos. This practice was something that I sharply criticized back in November, citing the cookie-related privacy risks as well as the decade-old rules prohibiting the use of long-term tracking cookies on federal agency Web sites.

Unfortunately, when the new White House Web site launched, rather than fix the privacy issues that had plagued the transition team's Web site, Obama's legal team instead opted to provide YouTube with an exemption to those pesky federal regulations, letting it use long-term cookies to track visitors to the White House Web site. No other company was singled out and granted such a waiver.

It seems that someone in the White House read my blog post yesterday--as within 12 hours of the story going live, Obama's Web team rolled out a technical fix that severely limits YouTube's ability to track most visitors to the White House Web site.

By late Thursday evening, each embedded YouTube video had been replaced with an image of a video player, which a user must click on before the real YouTube player will be loaded. The result of this change is that YouTube is now only able to use cookies to track users who click on the "play" button on an embedded YouTube video--the majority of people who scroll through a page without clicking play will not be tracked.

This is clearly a step in the right direction--and it is particularly interesting to see that the White House has essentially rolled their own version of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's MyTube privacy tool.

While this is great news (especially after just a few hours), it is by no means a comprehensive solution, but a Band-Aid. Those users who do click the "play" button will be secretly tracked as they navigate the White House Web site--and if those users have visited YouTube or any other Google-run Web site in the past, the fact that they watched an Obama video will be added to the existing massive pile of data the company has compiled on each of them.

Simply put, there is no good reason for Google to be able to data mine a citizen's interaction with the president--especially when watching a video that was produced and uploaded by the White House at the taxpayers' expense.

The White House is already making use of Akamai's commercial edge caching services, and the transition team made full use of Amazon's Simple Storage Service for the download-friendly version of Obama's weekly address. Rather than using YouTube, the State Department has for some time opted to pay for a commercial, flash-based video streaming solution provided by Brightcove for its propaganda information site America.gov.

If the Obama team is willing to pay for some of its Web 2.0 technology, why can't they also follow the State Department's lead and cough up a few bucks for a streaming video service that doesn't cross-subsidize its offerings by tracking the Web habits of users.

Finally, if the White House lawyers are going to waive long-standing federal privacy rules for YouTube, merely mentioning the existence of that waiver is not enough. Given Obama's much publicized commitment to transparency, I think it's quite reasonable to ask that the team post the text of each and every waiver to the federal cookie policy to its Web site. Members of the public have a right to know the reasons that were used to justify exempting YouTube's cookies from these otherwise strict rules. If the YouTube waiver cannot withstand the analysis of legal experts and the ridicule of tech bloggers, it probably shouldn't have been authorized.

The White House Web site has been live for just three days, and in just the past day, Obama's administration has given us some reason to believe that it takes Web privacy seriously. Over the next few weeks, it'll have a chance to prove it.

Update: 12 hours after posting this story, the White House (partially) reversed itself. The rather dubious YouTube-only waiver from federal Web privacy rules has been maintained, but the White House Web site has been updated to limit the exposure of visitors to YouTube's tracking efforts to only those people who actually click the "play" button on a YouTube video. For more details on the new changes, read this blog post.

The new Web site for Obama's White House is already drawing attention from privacy activists and tech bloggers. While the initial focus has been on the site's policies relating to search engine robots, a far more interesting tidbit has so far escaped the public eye: the White House has quietly exempted YouTube from strict rules relating to the use of cookies on federal agency Web sites.

The new White House Web site privacy policy promises that the site will not use long-term tracking cookies, complying with a decade-old rule prohibiting such user tracking by federal agencies. However, the privacy policy then reveals that Obama's legal team has exempted YouTube from this rule (YouTube videos are embedded at various places around the White House Web site).

While the White House might not be tracking visitors, the Google-owned video sharing site is free to use persistent cookies to track the browsing behavior of millions of visitors to Obama's home in cyberspace.

No other company has been singled out and rewarded with such a waiver.

In a blog post back in November, I criticized the Obama transition team's Change.gov Web site for its use of embedded YouTube videos. At the time, I stated that the practice might violate long-standing federal rules that forbid federal agencies from using persistent tracking cookies on their Web sites. It turns out that I was wrong: the transition team was technically not a federal agency and thus not bound by the anti-cookie rules.

Now that Obama is president, his official Web site is required to abide by the cookie regulations. Furthermore, as of Wednesday afternoon, several YouTube videos have been embedded on the White House blog. As soon as a visitor surfs to one of the blog pages that contain a YouTube video, a long-term tracking cookie is automatically set in the user's browser--even for those users who do not click the "play" button.

Someone on the Obama legal team seems to have read my previous blog post, as they've modified the White House privacy policy to specifically exclude YouTube's tracking cookies from federal rules that would otherwise prohibit their use:

"For videos that are visible on WhiteHouse.gov, a 'persistent cookie' is set by third party providers when you click to play the video.

This persistent cookie is used by YouTube to help maintain the integrity of video statistics. A waiver has been issued by the White House Counsel's office to allow for the use of this persistent cookie."

YouTube and cookies
Each time a new user visits YouTube, a unique permanent tracking cookie is issued by the Web site to the user's browser, which it stores. Whenever the user later revisits YouTube, that cookie is transmitted to the video-sharing site, allowing it to identify users and monitor their video viewing habits.

YouTube is also able to set and access a user's tracking cookie when she visits a third-party Web page that has embedded a video stored on the YouTube site (such as a blog or other Web site), even if the user never clicks the play button.

The moment that the flash file containing the video player is downloaded from YouTube's servers and displayed in the user's browser as part of another Web page, the cookie is transmitted to YouTube's servers. Considering how widespread the practice of embedding YouTube videos has become, this gives Google an amazing amount of data on the Web-browsing activities of hundreds of millions of Internet users--many of whom may not realize that such tracking data is being collected.

The White House policy is not being followed
The YouTube-related text in the new White House privacy policy implies that not all users will be tracked by YouTube. The policy notes that:

"If you would like to view a video without the use of persistent cookies, a link to download the video file is typically provided just below the video."

As of Thursday morning, this statement is false.

In multiple tests by this blogger with both Internet Explorer and Firefox, merely visiting pages on the White House blog causes YouTube to set a long-term tracking cookie in the browser--even if the user does not press the play button to start the video. After eight months, this cookie will be automatically deleted by the user's browser--unless, of course, the user visits another Web page somewhere else on the Internet containing a YouTube-embedded video, in which case, the eight-month cookie clock is reset. Given how widespread YouTube video embeds have become, this cookie essentially lasts forever.

While it is obvious that I am rather critical of this entire affair, I am willing to give the Obama Web team the benefit of the doubt in one area: the fact that their current Web infrastructure does not deliver on the promises made by their privacy policy.

The Obama White House Web site is only two days old, and so it is certainly possible that the team simply hasn't gotten around to deploying a more privacy-preserving system for YouTube video embeds. Protecting users who do not click "play" from automatically receiving a cookie is certainly possible; the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2008 released a wrapper script for YouTube videos that provided this very feature. Let us hope that the Obama team deploys such a technology in due course.

Can YouTube be justified as a "compelling need"?
For the past 10 years, federal agencies have been prohibited from using tracking cookies on their Web sites, except in a few special cases. The Office of Management and Budget rule M-03-22 states that:

"Agencies are prohibited from using persistent cookies or any other means (e.g., web beacons) to track visitors' activity on the Internet except .... [when there is] a compelling need."

The question we must now focus on is this: Is the need for Obama to use embedded videos hosted by YouTube (and not, say, another company's video-streaming platform that does not force cookies upon its users) a use that can be reasonably described as compelling?

Presumably, this has been justified on the basis that YouTube forces cookies on the visitors of any Web site that embeds one of its videos. However, while Joe or Jane blogger has no bargaining power with YouTube/Google, the federal government certainly does.

In just the past couple weeks, YouTube has launched dedicated pages for both the House and Senate to show off their own videos, and the site also recently started allowing users to directly download copies of some videos. This latter feature has not yet been widely deployed across the site, and is seems to be limited to videos posted by Obama's team.

Given the famously close connections between Obama and Google, you'd think his tech team could negotiate for a cookie-less way to embed videos. At a technical level, this would be an easy enough change, even if it would deny Google the ability to collect even more information on millions of Americans.

Cookies and other federal agencies
Finally, the new White House YouTube rule may have a far broader impact on the way that federal agencies use Web 2.0 content. Simply put, if another federal agency embeds a YouTube video in its Web site without first having the agency's legal team issue a waiver, have federal rules been violated?

Up until this week, federal agencies have been free to embed Web 2.0 content in their own sites without any real need to consider the privacy risks posed to end users. The fact that the White House Counsel has felt it necessary to issue such a waiver for YouTube videos appearing on the White House Web page could be reasonably interpreted to mean that such a waiver is now required for all embedded Web 2.0 content that might force cookies upon end users. This is certainly new legal ground.

Consider, for example, the Transportation Security Administration, which has posted YouTube videos to its blog numerous times over the past year. Its privacy policy makes no mention of YouTube cookies. Could this lead to issues for the TSA Web team, or perhaps even congressional investigations? Given my own history with TSA, I certainly hope so.

It's that time of year again: predictions for the next 12 months, most of which are likely to be wrong, and a few that, if right, will further cement Surveillance State's status as a top tier tech blog...maybe.

• President Obama will break the heart of Net neutrality activists by picking pro-telecom industry people for the FCC. On the other hand, Obama will pick someone great for the position of privacy czar, and then castrate him/her by not giving the position any power.
• Comcast, AT&T and other ISPs will begin the mass deployment of monthly download caps. However, they will strike profit sharing deals with Google/YouTube and Apple to exempt such traffic from customers' monthly bandwidth limits. Customers who go over the cap will have to pay extra--thus also conveniently killing off much of the P2P market (since no one will pay for BitTorrent), without having to resort to Deep Packet Inspection.
• Google and Yahoo will win the war to define the terms of the privacy vs. data logging debate: The search engines will settle on storing search log data for three to six months, but Microsoft will (unfortunately) fail to define the debate on how the data is anonymized, rather than after how many months. Google and Yahoo will continue to engage in privacy theater by not effectively anonymizing their logs.
• We will not see the passage of any comprehensive overhaul of privacy law in 2009. Efforts to restore privacy to searches of laptops at the border will fail. If legislation does pass, it'll be toothless.
• Bruce Schneier will be the next cybersecurity czar for the federal government.
• The Transportation Security Administration will reverse the liquid ban, but will continue to engage in pointless security theater. The replacement for head honcho Kip Hawley will not shake things up.
• The RIAA will suffer its first major loss in the courts, and will be forced to pay more than $100,000 in damages (in addition to legal costs). Likewise, attempts by the RIAA and MPAA to institute "three strikes" rules in the U.S. will fail.
• The copyright office will reject most of the applications for new DMCA exemptions. It will likely extend the Sony rootkit exemption (although expanding it to downloads/DVDs), and will also likely approve the exemption expansion request for academics to use DVD ripping software for classroom use. All of the other requests will be turned down.
• The transition to digital TV will be a giant trainwreck. Politicians from all sides will rush to point the finger and blame the FCC, and in particular, (by then) former Commissioner Kevin Martin.
• Senator Herb Kohl's investigation into text message pricing will go nowhere, the carriers will not drop prices, and the class action lawsuits will be thrown out of court.

How far does President-elect Barack Obama take his commitment to transparency? Is it a serious pledge to shake up Washington, to apply sunlight to the often shadowy depths of the executive branch, or is it merely a very good marketing campaign?

In the past few days, the public has received some seriously mixed signals on the issue--his decision to use YouTube to speak to the American people, and then press reports indicating that he may give up e-mail as president to avoid oversight.

On Saturday morning, Obama's first video address to the people was posted to YouTube. A copy of the video was embedded into the Change.gov blog, and has since received over 650,000 views. In describing the new YouTube effort, an Obama spokesperson told The Washington Post that:

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent."

Contrast that bit of hype to the news that the president-elect will likely be giving up his prized Blackberry, and like previous presidents, giving up e-mail the moment he takes office, due to the fact that e-mails can be subpoenaed by Congress, or later end up in the presidential library. As The New York Times reported:

In addition to concerns about e-mail security, [Obama] faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

The real issue here is not one of keeping the president's in-box safe from Chinese hackers, but keeping it safe from Congressional investigators.

If the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and a number of other spy agencies can provide e-mail access to their tens of thousands of employees, then the president's e-mail can be kept safe and secure. The U.S. government has classified networks, over which classified data flows, and for obvious reasons, these are not connected to the general purpose Internet. And for the spy on the go who needs real-time access to top secret information? The NSA has its own smartphones made for handling classified data.

It is important to note that no one from the Obama administration has gone on record to speak about this issue yet, and so while it is certainly worth discussing, it is still too early to pass judgment upon President-elect Obama's e-mail policy.

In the meantime, the press has reached out to members of past administrations to share their thoughts on the clash between Obama's stated commitment to transparency and a natural desire for privacy. On this issue, former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan told the Associated Press:

"While he has pledged an open and transparent government, I doubt the president-elect is interested in subjecting his own personal communications to that standard." He added, "He will have to think very hard about whether he wants to make his own words that subject to open records by having his own e-mail and his own BlackBerry."

If the next president opts to use e-mail, it will almost certainly become part of the public record at some point. However, that lack of e-mail privacy is far more a feature than a bug.

Without being able to follow the paper trails, and see what is being said by whom in the White House, how can real oversight be achieved? The willingness of the next president to use e-mail (and even a smartphone), even with the knowledge that his messages might later be subpoenaed by Congress, will be the best way for him to demonstrate his belief in the importance of sunlight.

As for the issue of Obama's right to privacy--remember that we are not talking about the president's personal Hotmail account, but his ability to use e-mail for work purposes. Americans generally have little to no legal rights to privacy relating to their use of Internet at work--at least with regard to their employer. Bosses have the right to install Web filters, monitoring software, and to read through specific e-mails.

With that in mind, consider that Obama is a public servant who works for us. We, the public, are his collective boss, and so why should he have any privacy rights over the e-mails he sends on our time? If the White House is the People's House, then its e-mail servers are the People's Servers, and we have a right to see every bit of text that gets sent through them at our expense.

Finally, if the president is serious about transparent government, perhaps he'll pledge to not allow his staff to hide behind executive privilege once Congressional investigators come calling (as I am sure they eventually will). Sure, this will be more unpleasant and potentially embarrassing than merely throwing a few carefully scripted videos up on YouTube. However, such a commitment would actually be transparency we can believe in.

Updated:This post originally contained incorrect information about Sentinel's products. That has been corrected (see below).

Attorneys general from a number of states have given their support to a collection of weak and ineffective age verification technologies, all of which aim to protect children on the Internet. At a meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard University on Tuesday, the consensus seemed to be that while none of the technologies actually work, doing anything at all was better than nothing. Simply put, no one wants to be blamed for inaction against online child predators.

Kicking off the meeting, Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, summed up the general expectation of the other 48 state attorneys general involved in the effort: "If we can put a man on the moon, we can make the Internet safe (for children)." Unfortunately, while the federal government sunk billions of R&D dollars into NASA's space efforts, the AGs have yet to cough up any research funds, and seem to expect industry to come up with their own solutions.

Won't someone think of the children?
Given the intense political pressure to do something about child safety online, and a complete lack of proven, peer-reviewed, and abuse-resistant technologies available on the market, a number of private companies have stepped in to fill the void--with products that can at best be described as ineffective, and at worst as snake oil.

Several age verification solutions were presented at the task force meeting, from companies that included Aristotle, IDology and Sentry. All of the companies seem to do pretty much the same thing--collecting information from public records, and then prompting users to enter some of this info when they wish to log in to an "age restricted" Web site. One example of this is the rated R movie trailers of many Hollywood movie studios, which require a user to enter in his or her name, ZIP, and date of birth before playing the trailer.

This form of verification has been repeatedly criticized as "laughable" by security experts. As a test, I was able to successfully view the trailer for Sony's new thriller movie, Quarantine, by giving the name, date of birth, and ZIP code of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, all of which were available on the politician's Wikipedia page. Sony Pictures uses an age verification service from Sentinel (another company which presented at the task force meeting), which seems to only protect the fragile eyeballs of technologically unsavvy youngsters who have not yet learned how to use a search engine.

During the question and answer sessions following their presentations, each of the age verification and other child safety technology vendors admitted that their products are neither bullet proof nor even that difficult to evade. However, they all generally preached a belief in the security benefits of "raising the bar" and providing a "bump in the road."

Speak softly and carry a big stick
With companies and politicians falling over themselves to prove how much they are doing to keep children safe, it is worth taking a look at the incentives and motivations of this industry.

First, the politicians: Attorneys general from 49 states have been focusing on this issue for some time, culminating in an agreement signed with MySpace back in February of this year--the only state to reject the deal was Texas, whose AG felt that the deal didn't go far enough. This is an issue that carries a lot of weight with voters, and as New York AG Andrew Cuomo's recent strong-arming of ISPs over their Usenet news feeds has demonstrated, easy political wins can be gained with little to no pushback from the tech industry.

Second, the social-networking sites: Facebook and MySpace, the 500-pound gorillas of the industry don't seem to be too keen to adopt any of the existing solutions pitched by vendors--primarily because the technology doesn't do much, won't stop abuse, and will cost the companies money. While News Corp's MySpace certainly has deep pockets and could easily pay a couple million for age verification software, the company appears to be resisting calls to do so primarily out of an urge to avoid a slippery slope. That is, if the social-networking site can be pressured into forcing its user base to jump through one level of inconvenient and burdensome verification, other demands will soon follow.

Third, the "solution" vendors: This collection of companies rely upon fear to sell their products--not so much fear of the abuse of children by predators, but the fears of companies and politicians that they will be accused of not doing anything. These firms are not selling complete solutions to the problem of age verification (since one does not exist)--but are selling excuses. That is, if social-networking sites purchase their products, and children are later groomed or abused online, the companies will at least be able to claim that "we've purchased and used the best age verification products that industry offers. Don't blame us--we've at least tried to do something."

The not so thinly veiled threat aired at the event was that if the industry didn't police itself, the various state AGs might have to push for regulation. The fact that the technology isn't effective doesn't seem to be a major cause for concern. All that really seems to matter, at least for the policy makers, is that the industry do something, which can then be sold to voters back home as a success in protecting little Jane or Johnny.

The offshore problem
The elephant in the room in this debate is the issue of foreign Internet companies. That is, if American social-networking sites are forced to implement oppressive and burdensome age verification rules, teens may ditch MySpace and head to a Chinese, Brazilian, or Indian Web company, where a user's age is not verified.

Internet users are a fickle bunch--that is, they are not particularly loyal to brands, and if a company's product ceases to be cool, users will leave in droves. As an example, just look to Friendster, which was at one point the most popular social-networking site on the Internet. Once MySpace offered a better, more enjoyable experience, Friendster turned into a cyber-ghost town. While the network effect is indeed a powerful and sticky force, a lame user experience will be more than enough to make users leave for greener pastures.

Now, as another example, consider the case of Napster, the first peer-to-peer file-sharing company. Remember that for a time, Napster was the most popular file-sharing tool on the Internet, with tens of millions of users. As an American company, once Congress got wind of the file-sharing phenomenon, it was able to hold hearings, and force the CEO of Napster to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Fast forward a couple years: Napster had been sued into financial oblivion, and America's teens had moved on to a significantly more legislation-resistant file-sharing platform--Kazaa. This file-sharing company, designed by three men from Sweden, developed by programmers in Estonia, headquartered in Australia, and incorporated in the south pacific island nation of Vanuatu, was global in scale, and for the most part, completely beyond the reach of America's laws.

Whatever you think of file-sharing, there is one thing that is beyond debate: Due to a change in the legal environment, Americans abandoned, en-masse, an American company's P2P offerings, and instead signed up for the services offered by a foreign company whose CEO could never be hauled before the U.S. Congress. Furthermore, while Napster was primarily a service offering free music downloads, the Kazaa platform offered easy access to music, movies, pirated software, and pornography (of both legal and illegal varieties)--all from the same easy to use graphical interface. That is, by chasing file-sharing underground, we completely gave up any possibility of lightly regulating it.

No one present at Tuesday's Task Force meeting had any solutions to this problem, nor were they too keen to discuss it. It would be cruelly ironic if in an effort to protect America's youth online, those same children were chased into the hands of unscrupulous foreign firms with little incentive to protect their users from predators and other forms of harm.

Update: The original version of this blog post included Sentinel in the list of companies who push weak age verification software to social networks. In fact, Sentinel has voluntary withdrawn its age verification products from the social networking market, although it continues to supply the easy-to-evade product to Hollywood movie studios.

Disclosure: I am a paid student fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard University, which participates in and hosted the meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. In particular, professor John Palfrey, the chair of the Task Force, is also the Faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, where I work. I have neither consulted with Palfrey, nor any of my other colleagues at Harvard with regard to this blog post. It reflects my own opinions, and certainly not those of Harvard or any of the other people associated with the Berkman Center.

Google announced on Monday that the company will be reducing the amount of time that it will keep sensitive, identifying log data on its search engine customers. To the naive reader, the announcement seems like a clear win for privacy. However, with a bit of careful analysis, it's possible to see that this is little more than snake oil, designed to look good for the newspapers, without delivering real benefits to end users.

In a post to the company blog on Monday, the company announced that it will be significantly reducing the amount of time that it hangs onto identifying user data in its Web server logs:

Today, we're announcing a new logs retention policy: we'll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.

Hidden further down in the blog post, were a few more details:

We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work.

Google's announcement was extremely light on details, specifically, how the company planned to anonymize the records after 9 months. I contacted Google to find out more, and received an extremely interesting reply:

After nine months, we will change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs; after 18 months we remove the last eight bits in the IP address and change the cookie information. We're still developing the precise technical methods and approach to this, but we believe these changes will be a significant addition to protecting user privacy.... It is difficult to guarantee complete anonymization, but we believe these changes will make it very unlikely users could be identified.... We hope to be able to add the 9-month anonymization process to our existing 18-month process by early 2009, or even earlier.

To understand what this means (and how useless the new privacy "enhancements" are), consider the following:

When a user conducts a search using Google's search engine, the company stores three main types of information in a log file: the user's IP address (which is a unique network address given to her computer by her Internet service provider), the words that she searched for, and her cookie identifier (a unique value given to every Web-browser that visits a Google Web-property).

As per Google's existing policy, after 18 months Google "anonymizes" the IP address and cookie information from its logfiles. While the company hasn't said how it de-identifies the cookies, it has revealed in public statements that its IP anonymization technique consists of chopping off the last 8 bits of a user's IP address.

As an example, an IP address of a home user could be 173.192.103.121. After 18 months, Google chops this down to 173.192.103.XXX.

Since each octet (the numbers between each period of an IP) can contain values from 1-255, Google's anonymization technique allows a user, at most, to hide among 254 other computers. In comparison, Microsoft deletes the cookies, the full IP address and any other identifiable user information from its search logs after 18 months.

Google has now revealed that it will change "some" of the bits of the IP address after 9 months, but less than the eight bits that it masks after the full 18 months. Thus, instead of Google's customers being able to hide among 254 other Internet users, perhaps they'll be able to hide among 64, or 127 other possible IP addresses.

By itself, this is a laughable level of anonymity. However, it gets worse.

First, remember that Google will not delete or anonymize user cookies from the logs when it slightly smudges IP addresses after nine months. Second, remember that as long as you use a Google Web property at least once every two years, the company will maintain a unique identifiable cookie value within your Web browser.

Thus, consider the following scenario:

In June 2008, a user from 173.192.103.121 with cookie value 12345 conducts a search for "breast cancer risks." Nine months later, in March 2009, the company scrubs some portion of the IP address, perhaps to 173.192.103.1XX. However, the cookie remains in the log.

In April 2009, that same user returns to Google, and conducts a search for "stephen colbert youtube videos," again from the same IP and the same cookie value 12345.

Even though the 9-month-old search logs have been "anonymized", because the cookie values remain, it is trivial to match the newer search results to the older searches, and thus completely reverse the anonymization process.

The simple truth is that any IP anonymization technique, no matter how strong or weak, is simply a waste of time, if cookie values are not also anonymized.

Unfortunately, Google is relying on the fact that the mainstream media (I'm looking at you New York Times and Washington Post) are clueless on these issues, as well as seemingly most of the technology press. Google's new anonymization policy is totally worthless, and the company deserves to be called out for its deception.

Disclaimer: I interned at Google during the summer of 2006 and received a $5,000 Google fellowship in both 2006 and 2007. I have also interned or worked for both the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, public interest groups that have been extremely critical of Google's privacy policies.