This reality of the information age might be particularly stark for the president, but it's no less true for all of us. Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed.

This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations -- with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet -- are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails.

We know this intellectually, but we haven't truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later.

Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. Someone in George W. Bush's administration learned this, and millions of e-mails went mysteriously and conveniently missing.

Ephemeral conversation is dying.

Cardinal Richelieu famously said, :If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a Blackberry, are not official pronouncements. Discussions in a meeting, whether held in a boardroom or a chat room, are not the same as answers at a press conference. And privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our basic humanity.

We can't turn back technology; electronic communications are here to stay and even our voice conversations are threatened. But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation. We need a comprehensive data privacy law, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed. Laws requiring ISPs to store e-mails and other personal communications are exactly what we don't need.

Rules pertaining to government need to be different, because of the power differential. Subjecting the president's communications to eventual public review increases liberty because it reduces the government's power with respect to the people. Subjecting our communications to government review decreases liberty because it reduces our power with respect to the government. The president, as well as other members of government, need some ability to converse ephemerally -- just as they're allowed to have unrecorded meetings and phone calls -- but more of their actions need to be subject to public scrutiny.

But laws can only go so far. Law or no law, when something is made public it's too late. And many of us like having complete records of all our e-mail at our fingertips; it's like our offline brains.

In the end, this is cultural.

The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We're now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren't fully an information age society.

When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he's operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society's tolerance for digital ephemera changes.

This essay previously appeared on The Wall Street Journal website (not the print newspaper), and is an update of something I wrote previously.

Good Day To You My Friend. 

It is understandable that you might be a little bit apprehensive because you do not know me but I have a lucrative business proposal of mutual interest to share with you. I got your reference in my search for someone who suits my proposed business relationship. 

I am 54 years old and happily married with children, and I have an obscured business suggestion for you. I will need you to assist me in executing a business project from Hong Kong to your country. It involves the transfer of a large sum of money. Everything concerning this transaction shall be legally done without hitch. Please endeavor to observe utmost discretion in all matters concerning this issue. 

Once the funds have been successfully transferred into your account, we shall share in the ratio to be agreed by both of us. 

I will prefer you reach me on my private email address below (xxxxxxxxx@yahoo.com.hk) and finally after that I shall furnish you with more information's about this operation. Should you be interested, please forward the following to me urgently: 

1. Full names 
2. Occupation 
3. Private phone number 
4. Current contact address 

Please if you are not interested delete this email and do not hunt me because I am putting my career and the life of my family at stake with this venture. Although nothing ventured is nothing gained. 

Your earliest response to this letter will be appreciated. 

Kind Regards, 

Ben S. Bernanke

1. The Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale accidentally republishes a six-year-old news story about the bankruptcy of UAL. It wasn't on the home page, but instead buried somewhere inside the web site.
2. Google's news crawler (an automated thing, remember) finds the story and incorporates it as part of its news feed.
3. Investors see the story, and immediately react. When UAL's stock plunged 76% to a low of $3, Nasdaq shut down trading. Eventually trading resumed, and the stock closed at just under $11, losing about 11%.
4. United blamed Tribune Company (the owner of the Sun-Sentinel) for "irresponsibly" changing the date on the story and demanded a retraction.
5. Tribune Company blamed Google, claiming they've had issues with Google's crawler "for months."

Who will blame be shifted to next?

Look -- if people haven't realized by now that the Internet pretty much lacks a delete function, then (IMNSHO) it becomes the requirement of each and every one of us to pay close attention to what we're reading, to use our own big brains and fine-tuned bullshit detectors to suss out whether something makes sense.

Since this is my blog, I'm going to parcel out blame the way I see it:

• United: 0%. If the concept of "negative blame" made any sense, then I'd actually write −∞ (that's a negative infinity, in case your character set is different than mine).
• Google: 5%. How can an automated crawler know that a newly-dated story isn't really new? Well, those folks over there at Google are smart. Certainly it shouldn't be that difficult to compare a "new" article against existing ones. Content hashes won't work as a comparison tool, because the date would be included in the hash computation, thus making the hashes different anyway. Full-text comparisons? Sure, it would take a lot of horsepower. Perhaps not every "new" story needs comparison, but at least the crawler could submit to the comparator any stories that ought to be verified (say those with the word "bankruptcy" in them).
• Tribune Company: 30%. Hey guys, you changed the date on the article. Don't go blaming someone else for your screw-up.
• Investors: 65%. If you're using an automated news aggregator (remember, an aggregator is not a source of news) to make major financial decisions -- decisions that affect the livelihoods of thousands (maybe millions) of people -- well, you're a moron. You should know that incorrect information can be just as instantly available as correct information. Verify potentially damaging claims before engaging in reckless behavior.

What's this got to do with security? I don't know, maybe nothing directly related. But it certainly raises the question -- what if someone intentionally wanted to cause nearly permanent damage to a person or a corporation? Malicious content, disguised as "news," certainly seems to have become a potentially successful attack vector this week.

Worried about a social engineering attack on a massive scale? I suspect that what happened Monday (8 September) was the largest social engineering attack in history -- although I wouldn't classify it as intentionally malicious. Just you wait until the idea spreads.

http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/archive/2008/06/25/directly-connect-to-your-corpnet-with-ipsec-and-ipv6.aspx#3122377

Hey Steve you and your montize buddy Scott will soon have your hands full after the federal officers come down on your data scams and as for your educational acts i'm not buying it and if others are willing to trade your data for their profits guess there are fools born everyday tunnels oh I see drug dealers right Stevo

Normally I delete spam from my comments, and have occasionally deleted mindless ranting criticism (I encourage vigorous discussion of ideas, but won't allow personal attacks). However, this guy's comment is just...weird.

• What's a "montize buddy Scott"? I know lots of Scotts, and once even admired a particular "Montgomery Scot." But "montize"? Maybe it's a new kind of malt.
• I don't believe I'm perpetuating any data scams, none that I know of, anyway. If any of you, my readers, feel that I'm scamming your data, I guess I haven't concealed that fact well enough. Oops, sorry! We'll have to add another item to the constantly-growing list of data breaches.
• While it's true that some of my conference appearances aren't free, no one is certainly forced to buy any of my "educational acts." A lot of my presentations you can download for free!
• I never look in tunnels for my supplies, they're too dark and you can never be totally certain of what you're getting.

Thanks, dodacrazy, for a good Thursday morning laugh!

A gulf exists between California consumers' understanding of online rules and common business practices. For instance, Californians who shop online believe that privacy policies prohibit third-party information sharing. A majority of Californians believes that privacy policies create the right to require a website to delete personal information upon request, a general right to sue for damages, a right to be informed of security breaches, a right to assistance if identity theft occurs, and a right to access and correct data.

These findings show that California consumers overvalue the mere fact that a website has a privacy policy, and assume that websites carrying the label have strong, default rules to protect personal data. In a way, consumers interpret "privacy policy" as a quality seal that denotes adherence to some set of standards. Website operators have little incentive to correct this misperception, thus limiting the ability of the market to produce outcomes consistent with consumers' expectations. Drawing upon earlier work, we conclude that because the term "privacy policy" has taken on a specific meaning in the minds of consumers, its use should be limited to contexts where businesses provide a set of protections that meet consumers' expectations.

The Anchorage Daily News reports back in September 2004:

Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator. Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich’s computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.

The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

The technician “said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff,” Palin said in an interview. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was there.”

And this is how Salon reports the same incident:

“In a neat symbolic fit, the agent responsible for Alaska’s current moment of reform and modernization is a woman, a breed once nearly as rare in far Northwest politics as a Democrat. Sarah Palin, a libertarian and hockey mom from the fast-growing suburbs of Anchorage, began her political career — as an appointed member of the state’s Oil and Gas Commission — by hacking into the computer of another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, chairman of the Alaska Republican Party. Palin was seeking the evidence that she would eventually use to charge him with an improper relationship with lobbyists. (Ruedrich would later settle state ethics charges against him by paying a $12,000 fine.)”

Is this where the McCain administration is going to get their computer security expertise? She’s not a security expert but it is nice to see someone at the level of state govenor who knows their way around a computer.