October 22nd, 2009

Net neutrality: a faster Internet for all

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:07 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy

Tags: Theory, Content Provider, Comcast Corp., Internet Service Provider, YouTube Inc., Net Neutrality, Hulu, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet, Robin Harris

Want a faster Internet? Then the FCC’s new net neutrality focus is good news for you. Because net neutrality - another name for common carrier - means a faster Internet for all.

This discussion focuses on your local Internet service provider, be it Comcast or AT&T. Content providers already pay to get on the Internet, so the core issue is what your local ISP does.

Gee, that isn’t what ComCast said!
According to Comcast if they can’t charge content providers for priority service they won’t be able to invest to expand capacity. But using game theory we find that offering priority services makes Comcast more profitable while offering you worse service and more expensive for content providers.

Oh, that’s why the telcos doesn’t like net neutrality.

How that works
Let’s say a telco like Comcast strikes a deal with Google to offer 10 Mbit/sec priority service for YouTube. Non-payers, like Hulu, are stuck at 2 Mbit/sec, giving YouTube a 5x advantage.

As YouTube videos are faster, more people watch YouTube, which consumes more network capacity. Hulu slows down along with email, web surfing, video conferencing and all other non-priority apps.

Comcast and YouTube are happy, but all your other services have slowed down. So what does Comcast do when you complain?

Do they invest in more bandwidth so all apps can run at 5 Mbit/sec, reducing YouTube’s advantage to 2x? Or do they simply go to other app providers and sell them “priority” service?

The latter will generate more revenue for Comcast and less performance for the remaining Internet services. Good for Comcast; bad for content providers and bad for you.

How net neutrality works
Under net neutrality your service provider only gets revenue from you, the customer. Your ISP has a clear goal: keep you buying.

Now the ISP is incented to invest in higher quality service or a competitor may come in with a better deal. The free market at work!

In the real world
Game theory is well and good, but does the ISP market really play out this way? In Japan, where net neutrality is the rule, ISP compete fiercely to offer the best service. Japan has had download speeds in excess of 100 Mbit/sec for the last 5 years, with lower prices than we have in the US.

That is only a dream for us in the US, the country that invented the Internet. What’s wrong with this picture?

The Storage Bits take
Aligning private incentives to serve the public good is why we have a government empowered to set rules. When the rules are set wrong or not enforced - as the last 25 years of financial de-regulation has disastrously proved - almost all of us end up worse off.

The few who benefit, be they Wall Street i-bankers, MRI-owning doctors or duopolistic telcos, argue for their “right” to damage the rest of us. But just as our military sacrifices to defend our nation and everyone pays taxes, the privileged can sacrifice some profit potential for the greater good.

As game theory demonstrates, America as a whole will be better off with net neutrality, when ISPs focus on serving customers instead of chiseling money from content providers. Free markets work best when the incentives are aligned to create lasting wealth for us all.

Comments welcome, of course. I’ve drawn heavily from the work of Professors Hsing Kenneth Cheng, Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay and Hong Guo. Here is a brief, non-technical introduction to their work. Serious econ gearheads will like their recent 55 page, algebra-heavy paper The Debate on Net Neutrality: A Policy Perspective.

See also: FCC unanimously approves next steps toward Net Neutrality

August 10th, 2009

Fed's RFIDiocy pwnd at DefCon

Posted by Robin Harris @ 2:17 am

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy, Security

Tags: Federal Reserve Board, RFID, Wireless And Mobility, Security, Biometrics, Robin Harris

NSA spooks gather for a colleague’s retirement party at a bar. What they don’t know is that an RFID scanner is picking them out - and a wireless Bluetooth webcam is taking their picture.

Could that really happen? It already did.

The Feds got a taste of the real world risks of RFID passports and IDs at DefCon, the annual hacker conference. According to Wired:

. . . federal agents at the conference got a scare on Friday when they were told they might have been caught in the sights of an RFID reader.

The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.

RFIDiots
The goal at DefCon was awareness, not crime. But as organized tech mobs grow it won’t be long before crime - or terrorism - exploits the gaping security holes in RFID.

Chris Paget, the researcher who demo’d drive-by scanning early this year

. . . will be releasing a $50 kit at the end of August that will make reading 125-kHz RFID chips — the kind embedded in employee access cards — trivial. It will include open source software for reading, storing and re-transmitting card data and will also include a software tool to decode the RFID encryption used in car keys for Toyota, BMW and Lexus models. This would allow an attacker to scan an unsuspecting car-owner’s key, decrypt the data and open the car.

RFID Bad Day: you get fired because a bunch of office equipment went missing after someone with your ID entered the office at 1 AM. And when you go to your car, it isn’t there.

Cloning on the fly
Adam Laurie, another researcher and author of the RFIDiot (RFID I/O tool), an open source python library, said

It takes a few milliseconds to read [a chip] and, depending on what equipment I’ve got, doing the cloning can take a minute. I could literally do it on the fly.

Mr. Paget even demo’d a wired doorframe that collects RFID data as people walk through it. Handy, eh?

The Storage Bits take
Perhaps now that federal security gurus have been pwnd the RFID threat will get some serious attention. Like, maybe this isn’t such a great idea, attention.

Maybe that will be enough to start the wheels turning, but with hundreds of millions of dollars already spent on this stupidity, I’m afraid that someone, somewhere, will have to die before citizens figure out that this is a real, increasing and unnecessary risk.

The technology for reading, hacking and cloning RFID tags will only get better. The mass production machinery behind the tags can’t keep up with the security threats.

The time to end this nonsense is now. There are perfectly usable non-RF storage technologies - like 3D barcodes - that can safely store data in hard to crack, hard to hack formats.

Comments welcome, of course.

July 19th, 2009

Elvis, your e-passport is ready!

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:42 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy, Security

Tags: E-passport, Passport, Chip, Hacker, E-passport Chip Business, RFID, Wireless And Mobility, Security, Biometrics, Robin Harris

E-passports not only threaten your personal safety traveling, the RFID chips are easy to clone and fake. How easy? Here’s the picture of Elvis Presley’s e-passport:

The photo is taken from a passport scanner at a Dutch airport - no alarms or errors. But let’s look on the bright side: some salesman is making millions and some former bureaucrats have cushy gigs with RFID consultants.

Feel better now?

The Hacker’s Choice, that gen’d up the Elvis passport chip, tells you how to do it. The fake e-passport chip business is just starting: get in on the ground floor!

But wait: it gets better!
In theory the RFID passports improve security - uh-huh - and are faster to process. The first is laughable; the second not much better. Why?

The e-passport still has to be opened to confirm that what the chips says is also what the printed passport says. How is that faster?

What is faster are the new RFID chipped ID cards for border crossings: they broadcast their unencrypted info for 10 meters or more. Wow!

And you know the nifty key Speed Pass that buys gas? They’ve been hacked too.

But for the larcenous nothing beats RFID credit cards. They can be hacked for $8 from a foot or more away.

The Storage Bits take
RFID are great for their original application: tracking goods in a warehouse. But they are horribly insecure for financial and identity applications.

There may be some workarounds. If the immigration agent’s terminal queried a central database that brought up a 2nd photo not on the passport, then we could be fairly certain that it wasn’t a forgery.

Another alternative: optical - not radio - data storage and encryption. A bar code scanner on a microscope could read tiny barcodes embedded in your photo - a concept not unlike the Dataglyphs developed at Xerox PARC.

The larger point is that RFID passports, drivers licenses, credit cards and other identity documents are a Bad Idea. We KNOW that techno-criminals are ripping off people on the web. Why won’t these same people move on to RFID when the economics make sense?

And when there are hundreds of millions RFID documents circulating, we won’t be able to issue a patch and fix the hole in a few weeks. No, these holes will be open for years. Good luck with that.

Comments welcome, of course. Want another view? The Economist magazine offers Why chips in passports and ID cards are a stupid idea. OK, it isn’t so different, but worth a read.

July 4th, 2009

Modern threats to American liberty

Posted by Robin Harris @ 4:55 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy, Security

Tags: Withdrawal, Tender, Transportation Security Administration, ATM, Storage, Internet, Networking, Hardware, Robin Harris

Cash, currency and coins, is a store of value. In the US, “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Carry too much of it though and you are marked for suspicion (per the Wall Street Journal]:

Steven Bierfeldt, treasurer for the Campaign for Liberty, a political organization launched from Ron Paul’s presidential run, was detained at the St. Louis airport because he was carrying $4,700 in a lock box. . . . TSA screeners quizzed him about the cash, . . . then summoned local police and threatened him with arrest because he responded to their questions with a question of his own: What were his rights and could TSA legally require him to answer?

How about former Senator Bob Dole who habitually carried a wad of $100 bills? When federal regulators spotted his large cash withdrawals his bank filed “suspicious activity reports” questioning whether he might have violated federal laws against money laundering.

Multi-millionaire New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s large cash withdrawals led a shadowy anti-corruption unit to his use of a prostitute - and to his resignation. As if a multi-millionaire is a likely candidate for money-laundering or bribery - but he did anger a lot of bankers. Hmm-m.

As money launderers see automated cash-tracking programs follow ever smaller sums, they open more accounts and make even smaller cash transactions. Which brings the breath of suspicion closer to all of us.

Where does it stop?

Not legal tender
Oh, and you know those lines about “legal tender for all debts, public and private” on our currency? Scratch that.

The Denver-area E-470 toll road is going entirely cashless - requiring drivers to use transponders - or pay higher fees when a bill arrives in the mail. That follows the Dallas-area President George Bush Turnpike’s earlier abandonment of a cash lane.

Another thought: divorce lawyers and others are accessing electronic toll road records. It isn’t just the Internet where you have no privacy.

California has anonymous FasTrak accounts. Top it up with cash - oops! you’re toast, buddy! - and away you go.

The Storage Bits take
As we enjoy this 4th of July, where Tom Jefferson once lauded those “. . . for opposing with manly firmness. . . .” invasions on the right of the people, let us remember that many Americans would not sign a petition with the text of the Bill of Rights. Too radical.

Your laptop can be seized for no reason when entering the US and its contents freely searched for - well, anything. Just as carrying a large amount of cash is now suspicious, a 64 GB thumb drive could soon make you a suspect.

Social totalitarians want to control our bodies and our lives, invading doctor’s offices, churches, ATMs and toll booths. Cheap massive storage makes it possible. Only patriotic Americans - liberal and conservative - insisting on their rights stand in the way.

It would be nice if social totalitarians on the Supreme Court would take to heart the original intent of the 9th Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by corporations the people.

In the meantime, for Steven Bierfeldt, who resisted the TSA’s illegal questioning, and the ACLU and others who defended him, 3 cheers.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Update: A reader wrote in to ask why I had included a struck-out word in the 9th Amendment. Was it an accident or ??? My response:

“Corporations - legally, immortal “persons” capable of amassing great wealth and power - were not part of the American landscape in 1776 or in 1789. We as a people have ceded vast powers to corporations with very little debate on their role in American life. That is, in my view, a threat to liberty almost as grave as that presented by an unaccountable government.” End update.

May 25th, 2009

The $17.5 million hard drive

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:03 pm

Categories: Public policy, Security

Tags:

Some employers think they own you when all they’re doing is renting your time. It cost 1 company $17.5 million to learn that stealing an employee’s hard drive is really, really stupid.

It’s about time.

Wha’ happened?
An RV sales manager was hired by an RV manufacturer Forest River, told he was going to get a big raise “later,” and when he realized “later” meant “never” started looking for a new job.

The cheapskate company didn’t even provide a notebook, so the guy used his own to build an 11 state sales network, as well as software for tracking sales. When the company Prez got wind that the guy was looking - and before firing him - the Prez stole his notebook, took the hard drive and erased all the files.

The Prez thought the sales manager was going to steal company secrets and figured that was all the justification he needed. He figured wrong.

In the meantime the RV builder got bought by the v deep-pocketed Berkshire Hathaway holding company for legendary investor Warren Buffet.

Wha’ happened then?
The sales manager was a believable witness - despite popular prejudice, most good salesmen are believable - and the jury awarded him his lost sales commissions, $7 million in punitive damages against the RV company and $8 million in punitive damages against the RV company president and founder.

Ouch!

The Storage Bits take
Most companies aren’t as stupid and cheap as Forest River was. They’ll buy the notebook you use and have you sign a non-disclosure agreement.

When you use a company computer you have NO privacy and NO right to the personal data you store on it. Whether you think your job is secure or not, back up your personal data including pictures, contacts and emails.

Comments welcome, of course. Learn more about this case and employee rights generally at Ellen Simon’s Employee Rights Post blog.

May 14th, 2009

The "erotic services" shell game: hypocrisy online

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:50 am

Categories: Public policy

Tags: Service, Adult Service, Hair, Internet, Web 2.0, Games, Storage, Personal Technology, Hardware, Robin Harris

It is memorialized as the world’s oldest profession. The movie Pretty Woman glamorized it. Congressmen and Governors get in trouble over it.

But what it isn’t, is on craigslist anymore. A group of state attorneys general’s have browbeat craigslist into closing the “erotic services” section.

Web 2.0, meet Hypocrisy 1.0. Online storage, meet online censorship.

Oh, and “erotic services” - meet “adult services”
Yup, craigslist is replacing “erotic services” with “adult services.” Which is completely different because - well - because “erotic” sounds fun and “adult” sounds boring.

Your dentist might advertise cheap root canals in “adult services.” Tax prep software. DUI lawyers. Hair implants. Face lifts. Credit card counseling.

Yuck. Double Yuck.

Adult city, you and me . . . .
But if it makes the nation’s attorneys general happy. . . .

Privacy? Get over it.
If Sun’s McNealy is right, we have no privacy on the Internet. For the first time the whole sordid range of human misbehavior - much first documented in the Bible - will be public. In real time.

Then what?

Sick is the new normal?
We’ll either have to pretend that normal human behavior is sick. Or accept that what consenting adults choose to do in private is none of the state’s business.

For all its promise, the Internet may simply enable a new, global prudery and repression. To paraphrase a keen observer of human behavior: “sinners cast the first stone.”

The Storage Bits take
This is a classic shell game played with fig leaves. The state AG’s get to pretend they’re tough on crime while the only thing that’s really changed is a section name on craigslist.

What about crime? As craigslist notes, the assault rate for cl users is much lower than for print classifieds. Criminal predators will use whatever works.

Craigslist has gone above and beyond duty and the law to reduce illegal offers. The most likely outcome though is that someone else takes advantage of cl’s tougher requirements. Like most efforts to control “vice” the AG’s will simply drive it somewhere harder to police.

Comments welcome, of course. Guys: think it can’t happen to you? Read about Belle Gunness, America’s most prolific female serial killer.

February 12th, 2009

Why Comcast hates - and fears - the Internet

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:02 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy

Tags: Comcast Corp., Internet, Cable, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Network Technology, Telecommunications, Personal Technology, Networking, Robin Harris

Comcast lost corporate credibility last year over Internet bandwidth management: breaking FCC rules; enraging customers; and packing public meetings with Comcast employees. All that over network management?

Nope. Comcast has a much bigger problem - and it isn’t with Torrent users.

Follow the money
How does Comcast make its money? Selling TV programs - and now HDTV programs - to subscribers. Internet access is a profitable addition for current subscribers, but as a stand alone business it stinks: cable costs are too high to be supported by ISP revenue alone.

But what are Internet users doing? The are using the Internet to download TV shows and movies. Comcast can’t sell you the content as “cable TV” when you can get it for free on the web.

VOIP too
Another fast growing business for Comcast is VOIP. But if you use Skype over your Internet connection you won’t buy Comcast’s VOIP service.

It is a conundrum, indeed. If they increase the bandwidth of their system to enable Internet HD video, they slit their own throats. If they don’t the telcos may steal Internet business with DSL or wireless 3G.

What is Comcast to do?
It looks like they’re moving towards a multi-prong strategy:

• Meter Internet bandwidth. This is a winner: less investment in bandwidth; a chance to collect overages from heavy downloaders; entry-level pricing low enough to keep DSL and satellite at bay.
• Push “everything” packages. TV, phone, Internet at a price carefully calculated to be less than the sum of the parts. Grab telco revenue, minimize downloading, lock out ISP competition.
• Kill “net neutrality.” Comcast wants to charge Internet entertainment suppliers to make up for the people canceling cable TV service. Common carrier status (see “Net Neutrality” is stupid) eliminates this revenue, so Comcast is fighting it.

The Storage Bits take
Cable’s had a good run, but it is coming to an end. TV, which used to be concentrated in 3 networks, is now atomized among dozens competing for screen time with video games, DVDs and computers.

Cable’s costly infrastructure, optimized for hundreds of channels, can’t adjust to a world where entertainment is downloaded. They have to tame the Internet to survive.

The telcos have been going through hard times as land line usage craters. Cable is next up.

Gigabit Ethernet to every home should be a national goal. Let people, not companies, decide what they want to see. Let entrepreneurs build new services to use that bandwidth and see what happens. It will be cool.

Comments welcome, of course. I’m their worst nightmare: no cable; no landline; just a wireless ISP and a cell phone. I don’t miss either.

December 16th, 2008

"Net neutrality" is stupid

Posted by Robin Harris @ 6:41 am

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy

Tags: Network, Network Neutrality, Federal Express, Net Neutrality, Carrier, Networking, Robin Harris

Today’s net neutrality tempest - Google: are they or aren’t they? - is a marketing mistake with grave public policy implications. The mistake was law professor Tim Wu’s: creating a new label when a perfectly good one is already there.

“Net neutrality” is another term for “common carrier,” first used for US telecommunications over 150 years ago. If advocates would just use “common carrier” instead of “network neutrality” we could quickly put this debate behind us.

Instead, by making “network neutrality” something new, controversy is created in what should be a settled area: common carrier status for communication infrastructure. Common carrier simply means that carriers handle all comers at a set fee, instead of auctioning access to their network.

Update: Professor Wu kindly sent me a brief note which said, in part: “. . . when I started using the term, CC was a non-starter in the policy world.”

I responded “Your comment makes me very curious about why CC was a non-starter in the policy world. Federalist Society weirdness? Allergic Bushies? Dereg mania? Or something substantive?” If and when I get a response from Professor Wu, I’ll pass it on. End update.

The auction model
If network access is sold through an auction, the wealthy get good service and the rest of us get the leftovers. Carriers put their time and energy into maximizing revenue instead of minimizing costs.

If network access is available to all comers for a fee, then we all have equal opportunity to use the Internet for work or play. Providers can offer different service levels at different prices.

Look at FedEx: overnight costs more than 3-day delivery. But the important thing is that overnight costs everyone the same. Imagine going to a FedEx office with a time-critical legal document and instead of a flat fee they said “we have 1 overnight slot available - you’ll bid against these other people.” Very profitable for FedEx - not so good for you - or the country.

The sad thing
Tim Wu, the law professor who originated the term “network neutrality” in the paper Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination (long, boring PDF) admitted as much:

Over the history of communications regulation, the Government has employed both common carriage requirements (similar to the neutrality regime discussed here) and limits on vertical integration as means of preventing unwanted discrimination. The goal of this section is to further explain how a common carriage or anti-discrimination model might be better developed to address the current Internet environment.

[emphasis added]
Professor Wu is a very bright guy with a technology background who clerked for conservative superstar Richard Posner. Like many techies though, he has no marketing chops whatever.

The Storage Bits take
The carriers, be they telco or cable, would love to be able extort high fees from users, and politicians love getting big campaign contributions for defending the “free market.” BTW, the US Congress is an auction-based service provider - how do you feel about them?

But it is in the national economic interest that we have a high-speed Internet infrastructure that is available to all without discrimination. You know, a national freeway for data.

As I noted in an earlier post (see P4P: faster, smarter P2P) about Comcast, the telecoms want to make their network management problem your problem.

Rather than saying they can’t compete with DSL or fixing the problem through protocol or equipment upgrades, they’ve been fighting the common-carrier law.

That’s just wrong. Common carrier status for telecom is over 160 years old. It has stood the test of time for very good reasons. Comcast needs to get with the program: either get competitive . . . or get out.

It isn’t too late to frame the debate in a term that the public better understands and supports. Google can start by banishing the term “net neutrality” from their vocabulary. Hey, Google! Just do a “search” and replace. Think you can manage that?

Comments welcome, of course. Disclosure: I work on the Internet and live in the boonies. Non-discriminatory Internet access is of intense personal and business interest to me.

October 5th, 2008

Techies choose Obama - by a landslide

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:20 pm

Categories: Public policy

Tags: Landslide, Broadband, Obama, McCain, Telecommunications, Broadband Internet, Network Technology, Telecom & Utilities, Networking, Robin Harris

If techies could choose the next President, Obama would win in a landslide. Checking donors from 10 large tech companies, including Apple, Dell, Google and Microsoft, over 90% of the donations support the senator from Illinois. Why does high-tech love Obama?

First the numbers
The OpenSecrets.org Donor Lookup page supplied the numbers. When you make a political contribution you are required to give your employer’s name.

Just pick the Presidential candidate, put in an employer name, and hit OK. Voila! All the contributors who gave that company as their employer are listed in the records.

The numbers need some cleaning. For example, if 1 person gave 3 donations, that is listed as 3 records. Also, returned donations are another record that don’t indicate another donor.

I cleaned up the Obama numbers by pulling out returned donation numbers, donations from companies with similar names and some of the single donor/multiple donation records, something I didn’t do for McCain because his numbers are so weak.

McCain’s policies
Why are in-the-know techies like Vint Cerf and YouTube founder Chad Hurley supporting Obama? Maybe it has something to do with the policies each promotes.

The most obvious tech difference between the candidates is the Obama supports net-neutrality and McCain is against it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation noted press reports that of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for McCain, 23 have lobbied for telcos.

As Commerce Committee chairman until last year, McCain could have pushed for aggressive broadband policies to keep the US in the forefront of Internet deployment and commerce. Instead the US is falling further behind in both speed and penetration among industrialized nations.

McCain also flip-flopped on retroactive immunity for illegal warrantless wiretapping. He was against it last year and this year offered “unqualified” support. Obama also voted for the bill, but at least he knows the Constitutional problems.

Obama’s policies
Besides consistent support for net-neutrality, Obama also supports a number of tech-friendly initiatives:

• Deploy next generation broadband and ensure access as we did decades ago with electricity and telephones.
• Major expansion of university-based research
• Patent system reform through PTO funding increases and citizen review.
• Scientific integrity “Obama and Biden will restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees.”
• Green energy development through a $150 billion program for biofuels, plug-in hybrids and commercial renewable energy.

The Storage Bits take
Conservative columnist George Will noted McCain’s “. . . impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events . . . .” If Obama loses - and I think he will - (Update: I was wrong!) the computer industry will suffer McCain’s anger for their lop-sided support of Obama.

The telco’s will enjoy free rein in the White House. The world’s most creative and sophisticated tech innovators will be hobbled by a 3rd rate network infrastructure. Who is that good for?

Looking at the numbers, the surprising thing was how few people bothered to donate to either candidate. The 10 companies employ over 500,000 people; just over 3,000 contributed to either campaign. Wake up, people!

Comments welcome, of course. I

October 1st, 2008

How to read your FBI file

Posted by Robin Harris @ 3:12 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy, Security

Tags: FBI, File, Mistakes, Federal Government, Government, Data Management, Robin Harris

As part of the occasional series Life in post-Constitutional America I’m pleased to offer a brief primer on How to read your FBI file. It isn’t as easy as you’d think, since the FBI has failed several times to create a modern data management system - which may not be a bad thing.

You can get your FBI file thanks to the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA, a creation of terrorist-coddling liberals. The Freedom of Governmental Secrecy Act or FOGS will fix this by extending “Executive Privilege” to every agency and operation of the Executive branch. How can the government protect us from millions of crazed jihadists without total secrecy?

I should note that you probably don’t have an FBI file unless you’ve engaged in suspect activities such as petitioning the government for redress of grievances or protesting unreasonable searches. God-fearing patriotic Americans have no worries unless the data entry clerk is hung over or you have a foreign name.

File contents
Most of your file will consist of messages between the Feeb’s HQ in Washington DC and one of the 56 local field offices or the many local Resident Agencies (we should have one on every block!). Aided by the finest communication technology money can buy, these messages may be teletypes or snail mail.

Types of messages

• Administrative - boring, usually.
• Prosecutive summary - you in big trouble now, liberal bed-wetter or criminal mastermind. Hire a defense lawyer or flee to Namibia.
• Investigative report - 50 pages of detail on you, your wife, your mistress, girlfriends, children and other unsavory contacts and activities, that is forwarded to military intelligence, the Attorney General, the White House and carefully vetted journalists and bloggers.
• Miscellaneous - court documents, like divorce papers; credit reports; incorporation documents; military records; surveillance transcripts; and other security agency reports.

Naturally, you can be sure that all of this data is of the absolute highest quality, like the pre-Iraq war WMD intelligence. Mistakes are always corrected, but it may take a few years.

FBI filing system
You’d think that the nation’s leading domestic law enforcement agency would employ sophisticated data management technology - but you’d be wrong. For example, HQ and each field office maintains its own file system - so file #12-3456 at HQ and file #12-3456 in the New York field office may be completely unrelated.

To paper this over the Feeb’s use a 3 part code: an offense code (sample: 332 Media Leak); an office code - and a 3 to 6 digit file number.

The offense code gets created locally, so related files might have different offense codes assigned by different offices. Sounds like an administrative nightmare, but it can help you track the Agency’s thinking about your case as the codes change over time.

Reading the file
As you go through the file, look for other file numbers. Then you can file an FOIA request for those as well. Don’t assume that all the files contain the same information - the FBI doesn’t have a centralized database - so collect them all.

The individual documents in your file are called “serials.” It could be a 2 sentence teletype or a 50 page report. Most are given a serial number that starts at 1, but don’t assume that serial #1 is the earliest document in the file.

Check for missing pages as well. The Feebs redact the files before handing them over so somebody whose wrist is sore from crossing stuff out might start pulling whole pages. One tip: the last page of a serial usually has an asterisk after the page number. If you don’t find one it may have been tossed.

Most serials are also “captioned” with your name and aliases (if any); an abbreviation of the crimes under investigation; and the office of origin code.

The Feebs love forms and have hundreds of them in use. You’ll see references to them that you can decode here. You knew the FBI was a bureaucracy, right?

Redaction
Of course the government needs to protect the few secrets bleeding-heart liberals haven’t already ratted out to Al-Qaeda. So your file may be heavily censored to protect national security or the FBI’s public image.

Edited information must give the exemption type allowed under the FOIA. The exemption codes can help you understand what was cut out, as well as your chances of getting the info if you appeal.

Of course no loyal American would question the FBI. BTW, if you’ve read this far the NSA probably has your number. Just saying.

The Storage Bits take
We can’t expect underpaid and overworked bureaucrats to maintain good intelligence on us, our families and our neighbors, without help. You can help by getting your file and your family member’s files to ensure accuracy.

The Framers designed the Constitution to protect Americans from their government. From long experience they knew the Murphy’s Law of government: if power can be abused it will be abused.

They designed an inefficient government with checks and balances and competing factions to ensure there would be lots of leaks and partisan bickering. The Bill of Rights outlawed warrantless searches, a basic prohibition that has been shredded in the name of homeland security.

The strength of America is not its government, but its Constitution and its people - a people who aren’t afraid to challenge power and fight for change. America was founded by revolutionaries, not bureaucrats, and nurtured by idealists, not ideologues.

May that spirit never die.

Comments welcome, of course. Next, when I get around to it, some words about the acres of spinning disk at the NSA’s Fort Meade.

This article is based on Phil Lapsley’s much longer post “How to Read an FBI File” on his The History of Phone Phreaking site as well as the other links. If you want to know more, Phil is the place to start.