一個特立獨行者如何對抗網路隱私侵犯者並獲得勝利的故事

Online privacy may be reasonably considered to be this decade’s leading oxymoron. An Opera Software study revealed that although 22 percent of people in the United States are concerned about losing their jobs, 25 percent are concerned about a breach of their online privacy. There is ample justification for these concerns. A Carnegie Mellon University study gathered publicly available personal information for thousands of Americans, including social network profiles, and reported that they were able to deduce accurate social security numbers for 8.5% of all citizens. At a time when millions of people post detailed personal information on social media, they are leaving themselves wide open for identity theft and other criminal actions. What may surprise many is that even the government agencies and leading web and telecom businesses that promise to keep personal information secure are actually data colanders. That’s where a hirsute heterodox named Christopher Soghoian has been earning a reputation as the Ralph Nader of online privacy. He champions the rights of citizens while kicking the violators in the shins.

Soghoian first came to national prominence in 2006 when the FBI showed up at his house at 2 am to seize the computers on which he had created a site that allowed anyone to take advantage of an outrageous Transportation Security Administration digital dereliction and generate fake boarding passes on Northwest Airlines, with a default name of Osama Bin Laden. The Feds were not amused but closed the criminal investigation without filing charges – and three years later actually hired Soghoian to work in the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. His freewheeling maverick ways were not the best match for the staid government agency and he was released a year later, but by then his name was synonymous with divulging and publicizing security breaches at the highest levels.

All of these major security lapses and privacy violations were active until Soghoian got through with them. Armed with little more than his blog and his innate sense of outrage, he led a one-man pitched battle with the forces of privacy evil for years until he was given a paid fellowship by the George Soros Open Society Foundation to publicly grade online and telecom privacy practices.

Now that he is properly enabled, Soghoian will continue his initiatives to keep our online and communications privacy safe, but we still have to do our part. Even with all of these revelations of egregious privacy violations and the ease at which our personal data can be accessed, nearly two out of every five internet users in the United States still do not use safe passwords but resort to easily crackable generics such as 123456 or “password.”

Maintaining personal privacy and security is not a lost cause. There are various simple steps anyone can take to strengthen the safety of their online data: