Shining light on cyber-secrets

Okay. All right.  I've posted my thoughts about moving forward after this election. And yes, with confidence in a future-oriented civilization that may, yet, save the planet and take us to the stars.

Meanwhile - a topic I know a thing or two about... our increasingly (and now it had better be) transparent world.

First off: Here is the video of my recent popular talk on the future of AI at IBM's World of Watson congress in Las Vegas, last month. The place was packed! A punchy tour of big perspectives on Intelligence and - both artificial and human augmentation.

== Are we about to be slammed? ==

Okay then, here's a worrisome note: 

Someone is preparing a BIG attack on the Internet: “Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet,” according to a blog post by security expert Bruce Schneier:

“These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. It feels like a nation’s military cyber-command trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar.”  Who might do this? “The size and scale of these probes — and especially their persistence — point to state actors. … China or Russia would be my first guesses.”

Among my list of Proposals for the new administration, that I'll issue in January, is to tell all citizens that their computers and printers etc may serve as botnet hosts, and that every person will share in tort liability for any major Net Disaster, unless they have at least tried, twice a year, to download a reputable anti-malware program.

This could get critical. One of the largest Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks happened recently and almost nobody noticed, because it was a complete takedown of the internet in Liberia. “...Why attack Liberia? Nobody is quite sure. One security researcher we spoke to, who didn't want to be named for fear of reprisals, said that attacking a little-known about country might be the "best place" to test cyberweapons, like the Mirai botnet, for larger attacks. Beaumont also thinks that the attacks "appear to be [of] a test nature"....”

No, clearly something awful is in the offing.  And we don't need, in the White House, a pal of the guys doing this. Put those two thoughts together and one's darkest thoughts turn to Manchuria...  but more on that, anon.

== Spies everywhere! ==

Salon has been running an interesting series called “Espionage Insiders.” “The biggest benefit of what Edward Snowden did is that it motivated the U.S. Government to set better protocols and to actually follow them,” says Morey Haber, VP of Technology at BeyondTrust.

Like me, Haber is willing for our watchdogs to see, but we believe they need better supervision.  In this interview, Haber interprets that to mean better supervision of employees, so that further leakers like Snowden can be prevented.  My meaning is different. I mean better supervision in that our watch-dogs need always to remember whom they work for.  There are ways to do that without impeding on them doing their jobs.

Where we agree is in this… Snowden’s revelations made us stronger. That is what happens in free societies.  Light tends to be bracing. Often irritating, but almost never truly damaging. In sharp contrast, all our truly deadly enemies — from terrorists and criminals to totalitarian regimes — find light to be dangerously destabilizing and past a certain point, lethal.

That point, in the preceding paragraph, is one I hammer home every time I speak to various agencies “back east.” It is the salient, long-term strategic fact and points to our civilization’s victory condition. A world mostly filled with light may irritate us, especially our leaders, from time to time. 

But enemies of freedom and the enlightenment would find such conditions fatal.  We win. It is the only condition in which - over the long haul - we have any chance of winning at all. (And I don't get tired of winning.)

== The same old intellectual trap ==

In contrast, Amy Webb,  founder of The Future Today Institute, discusses how latter-day seers use lots and lots of data to try penetrating (prediction) future trends and events.  She found Snowden’s revelations unsurprising. Being watched is simply the modern condition.

“For so many people, things like iris scans [for authentication] seem technologically forward and scary,” says Webb. “For me, iris scanning is old hat. I am looking at neuro scanning, and verification based on the way that your body interacts with a WiFi signal.”  She does worry about the accuracy of certain methods of surveillance, such as facial recognition technology.

And yet, her recommendation is the same as Haber’s: to “change your passwords often.” 

How, I keep asking, can smart, forward thinking people simply not get it?  And I mean not get it at the most fundamental levels?

The series also interviews probably the most over-rated “security expert” on the planet, Bruce Schneier, who draws conclusions that are generally either obvious or diametrically wrongheaded. While whingeing about loss of privacy, he never, ever offers a practical suggestion on what to do about the Moore’s Law of Cameras — with the eyes getting smaller, faster, cheaper, better and more mobile at an accelerating pace and into ever-more hands. Or the flood of different biometrics that will render any organic human identifiable, at range, in dozens of ways.

That trend in proliferation of cameras is not necessarily bad — it has empowered the whole Black Lives Matter movement and enabled good cops to do their jobs better, while making life way-harder for the bad ones.  That one example shows a path forward and it is not — as Schneier reliably recommends — to moan about such trends and keep trying to hide.

== And those who rise above the trap ==

Smarter is Dan Patterson, a tech journalist who specializes in matters of cybersecurity, politics, and government, whose Espionage Insiders interview shines a little light upon the so-called Dark Web — “a virtual dark alley filled with bogeymen and unseemly characters ready to trade private information to the highest bidder.”

Patterson agrees with Haber that Snowden’s biggest contribution was to expose weaknesses in government agency procedures. “By failing to follow basic safeguards that would keep our information out of the hands of criminals, he explains, the government made us more vulnerable—in the name of national security.”

In the interview Patterson quasi justifies the Dark Web because it offers the privacy that is essential for whistleblowers. “We need people who live under oppressive regimes to be able to communicate with the outside world.” (Via encryption and anonymity.)  

Yet again, there is an inability to see the forest for the trees. Because must we accept the zero sum thinking here? That in order to gain those benefits, we must put up with parasitical and predatory criminality?

It seems to occur to none of these brainy “experts” that we have a modern civilization that can adapt to changing times with intelligently negotiated law. 

Oh, it’s not entirely their fault, since it has not happened except on rare occasions in this century, because of a concerted campaign to destroy politics in the U.S., as a problem solving tool. But other generations did it.

In fact, that is the reason why we have whistleblower laws and laws on civil disobedience and safe harbor for the revelation of felonies. These could be the basis for new methods and institutions that would systematically give folks like Snowden safe places to go with their complaints. Such systems might encourage henchmen around the world to step up, casting light upon every horridly oppressive conspiracy.  I have long proposed ways that some billionaire could get the ball rolling.  Or some vividly far-seeing president…

But we have to start with our best and brightest and sharpest seers and experts. They must start talking about these problems in something more than the same hoary cliches, over and over again.

The Espionage Insiders series aims to accomplish that, and some of the interviewees have been smarter than others, offering tepidly interesting insights.  But I am deeply hopeful that these aren’t truly representative.

We need much sharper tools than these, in our workshop.

== Transparency news == 

I'm quoted in The Atlantic's latest issue: Even Bugs Will Be Bugged: Exploring the next frontiers in surveillance: A Big Brother society results not from being watched, but from one-way observation. 

Almost any ambient radio system – like WiFi – will be able to eavesdrop and track your movements and much more. “By measuring subtle changes in breathing and heart rhythms, EQ-Radio is 87 percent accurate at detecting if a person is excited, happy, angry or sad — and can do so without on-body sensors… Using wireless signals reflected off people’s bodies, the device measures heartbeats as accurately as an ECG monitor, with a margin of error of approximately 0.3 percent.”

This does not have to mean an end to privacy or freedom. It does mean that the earnest, well-meaning prescriptions offered by most civil liberties paladins – to yell “stop, looking at us, Big Brother!” – are pathetically futile. I have to wonder when they (any of them) will wake up to the fact that cowering and hiding simply will not and cannot work. It never ever has. 

One thing has worked.  It is responsible for what freedom we do have! And it is being played out, right now, on our streets. It is the one and only thing that can work tomorrow.  And it is the one thing that all the privacy mavens, liberty activists and security “experts” absolutely refuse to allow into their minds.

It is happening despite them. The solution is unfolding, as it had to, and as I predicted, 20 years ago in The Transparent Society. The street is making use of technology to look back at power. Bravely, assertively insisting on transparency for those with power.  

Alas, the “leaders” among the anti-orwellians will – apparently – be the last to realize any of this -- that you do not fight Big Brother by hiding from him.  

You stop him from oppressing you by getting in his face.

== I said let's go back to ... ==

...being a real civilization heading for the stars.  Tonight we'll watch the new Star Trek flick.

Hope springs eternal...

Transparency: The battle is far from over

First... I have two political pieces on the hot new site American News X. One is about the most harmful pundit in America, silken-tongued George F. Will, who finally admits that something has gone wrong with a movement that will nominate fellows like Trump or Cruz. Nothing about the warning signs, of course, like a 20 year outright war on science, and every other knowledge profession in American life. Except fact-averse opinionated "commentators." Glory days for that profession!

My second piece on American News X appraises the diagnosis made by Dilbert creator Scott Adams that Americans are so stupid they will all fall for Donald Trump's emotional manipulations and make him president. Half-right, Scott. But fortunately just half.

Veering from the absurd to the sublime, here’s Thomas Jefferson explaining why information is a potential public good: 

 ‘He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space  ... and like the air in which we breathe ... incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.’ 

Yes... well... that's how reasonable citizens do it.  May we start remembering.

== Can we learn to look-back? ==

The Ethics of Intimate Surveillance: An insightful and informative article by John Danaher about how transparency is affecting intimacy, that cites both me and Steve Mann for our work on Sousveillance.  And yet, this article manages to evade the core question: Is it possible to create positive sum conditions, wherein individuals, relationships and society all gain the benefits of light, without many disadvantages?  

Or will we be stuck in zero-sum war-gaming of all against all? Alas, nearly every pundit who attempts to theorize in this field appears to implicitly assume the latter.  Or else the question never occurs to them.

The core point that Steve Mann and I have pushed is to consider the words Reciprocal Accountability.  It may be hopeless (utterly) to deny surveillance powers to the mighty. But their ability to harm us with what they know about us can be limited by sousveillance that keeps their palpable, consequential or real world actions accountable. 

Cell-phone cams have not improved citizen power by blinding the state. They have  improved citizen power by empowering us to look back - at least at power-minions on the street - doing far more good for civil liberties than marches or protests.

Likewise with lateral transparency or co-veillance. The worst and most harmful online behaviors tend to be those wherein the perpetrator can act anonymously. These behaviors moderate when trolls can be "followed home," or when the victims can tell their moms.

Do we then lose the virtues and advantages of anonymity online? The reflex is to assume so, but that is just silly and unimaginative.  One can envision services that rent you pseudonyms, temporary identities that will be used to protect core identity... unless you use the pseudonym to wreak harm on others, in which case back-tracking and accountability can apply. Preservation of reciprocal accountability does not have to mean living under a perpetual glare. If you assume that, it's a sure sign of zero-sum thinking.

This is where "intimacy" comes in. If we are human, we will want some space and leeway. We also want safety from harm and the ability to tell pushy neighbors "MYOB!" Or Mind Your Own Business.

The most difficult quandary I have faced in this issue is not how to stymie would be Big Brothers... for that, transparency and sousveillance are the only things that can possibly work. By comparison, "encryption" is a transcendentalist religion of stunning technological myopia and romanticism.  No, the question I have wrestled with is this: "Suppose transparency does eliminate Big Brothers. Won't we then face a completely legal and open oppression by majority rules? By 51% bullying 'little brothers'? Judgmental gossips and nosy busybodies enforcing conformity?"

It may surprise you -- given my authorship of The Transparent Society -- that I admit a decent future cannot be accomplished by transparency and coveillance, alone!  Transparency and accountability can protect you from most harms, yes even tyrants, but not the harm of nosy busybodies and prurient voyeurs who act within the bounds of law.  And we do not want the law to impede most vision.

This is where we need add one element.  A social element.  A general and rising consensus that people should leave each other alone, when no actual harm is afoot. 

A consensus that eccentricities and embarrassments (teenage photos posted back when you were rash and stupid) are not held against you, over time. That there is a sin worse than any quirk or stupid posting or awkward sex-selfie... the sin of gossipy bullying.

The good news? We are clearly heading in that direction. Every year, young people - and many older ones, too - make clear their intention to live in a society of forgiveness for harmless stupidities... while becoming less tolerant of harmful judgmentalists.

The bad news: this battle is far from won. It struggles uphill against ten thousand years of conformity pressures and zero-sum reflex.  And there are major nations on Earth, today, whose leaders want to leverage those ancient reflexes to enforce conformity and obedience. 

But those millennia are our greatest ally, in this revolution of light. We can look back on their darkness and say: "Not that. We tried that. It's no good."

== (non) Hollywood does transparency ==

* A new, Indie film takes on some ideas I’ve been pushing for quite some time… for example that the proliferation of cameras is unstoppable.  And that public agencies need to get citizen involvement and supervision, or the social contract will collapse.  “FOR ALL EYES ALWAYS” takes these concepts and blends them with “reality television” in interesting directions:

“In a time of widespread distrust of our government, the CIA creates a fully transparent reality tv show to win back the faith of the American public. Audiences go undercover on black ops missions around the globe and see real world effects from the narrative the showrunners create. As the first season unfolds, we wonder – how much is real and how much is propaganda? Our charismatic host “Swamp Fox” leads us down the rabbit hole the showrunners write for him, and it becomes impossible to distinguish fact from fiction as the lines blur between reality, television, and movies in an age when everything is on camera.”

Writer of the film, Rob Bralver comments: “The film takes place in a world in which there is no longer such a thing as secrets. Everyone, from the most secretive of government agencies to the smallest individual, lives transparently — whether deliberately or by being exposed. In such a world, how can we expect our intelligence professionals to operate effectively and influence events as they have in the past?”  Huh. Interesting. At least it seems so from the vivid web site.  I look forward to seeing the film, some time

== We are in the future - tidbits from next week ==

Trying out Virtual Reality at UCSD

* Longtime colleague Kevin Kelly takes us on a detailed tour of the varied (and many) endeavors in Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality that are looming at us from companies like Magic Leap, Occulus, Microsoft, Apple and many others.  Kevin’s fascinating account introduces the innovators who will change everything, as much as they were changed by the arrival of the computer monitor, then the laptop, the web browser and the cell-phone.-

* An interesting study of Wikipedia, whose perfect record of all transactions offers up a cornucopia of data for web anthropology/sociology.

* Using a little play-dough and dental mold, you can clone someone’s fingerprint and fool a modern phone. “As hacks go, it ranks just a little harder than steaming open a letter.” Other methods include 3D printing a fake from just an image.  Which brings home a point I made in The Transparent Society (1997). “unlike a passcode, you can’t change your fingerprint, so a single credential theft creates a lifetime vulnerability. What looks like a security upgrade turns out to be something much more complex.”

* An amazing, almost Kafa-esque story about how one company’s carelessness has created aggravation for scads of innocent people. A service that associates Internet IP addresses with real world locations has a default answer for those IPs it can’t figure out.  A default location in the geographic center of the US… or the center of any state in question.  And hence, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default US coordinate. “If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.” Which leads to one little farmhouse in Kansas and a world of trouble.  Others on the top default list have had police raids, death threats.  A Monty Python-level problem that can only be (and now is) solved by transparency.

Because of good investigative journalism, the company has scurried to fix the problem and shift the default locations to the very middle of large lakes.  And Nessie is getting perturbed by strange calls in the night.

* And now... SkySafe has developed technology that will allow institutional users to disable drones flying in areas that are off-limits, or those in accessible areas that may be flying dangerously. The technology leverages radio waves to override the instructions from a drone owner's remote control unit, thus taking control of the airborne device. And so it begins.  The arms race.

Finally. Some of us have tried hard to portray these future possibilities, going back to 1980s cyberpunks. Vernor Vinge took things to new levels of possibility and plausibility in Rainbows End… as I tried to do, in Existence. We are in for interesting times.

Obfuscation: protect privacy by destroying the Web!

Time for a return to the core issue of our time: how shall we best preserve and extend freedom?  Along with freedom's contingent benefits, like privacy?

In the LA Review of Books, Internet Privacy: Stepping Up Our Self-Defense Game, Evan Selinger reviews a slim book -- Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest, by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum.  

Distilled, the core argument is that defenders of freedom and privacy should poison the Web and Net that we now know, by flooding it with disinformation and false data, so that no one -- including powerful elites -- will be able to tell what's real. In other words -- burn the commons to the ground, so smoke gets in their eyes. That'll show 'em.

Let me avow that I actually quite respect Brunton and Nissenbaum and other members of this weird cult, for one reason.  At least in Obfuscation they are recommending a different solution from the standard offerings, which are “encrypt everything!” and “surrender to despair.”  True, the obfuscation approach was first offered in sci fi thought experiments, like Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End… and Vernor saw the logical reasons why it cannot possibly work.  Still, at least they are trying to envision something assertive.

To be clear, most of us share the same fear – of a return to the obligate pyramids of privilege and power that dominated 99% of human societies for at least the last 6000 years.  George Orwell terrified us by portraying Big Brother’s tyranny becoming far worse even than feudalism, enhanced and locked-in with technological powers that make resistance futile, forever.  I am often accused of shugging off that threat when, in fact, I am as much (or more) motivated to fight it than anyone else alive.  Motivated enough to ask that rarest of questions: 

“How did we get the narrow window of freedom (and some privacy) that we currently enjoy?”

Oh, there is no end to Cassandras issuing jeremiads and hand-wringing denunciations that the window is closing! Declaring that various elites – government agencies, corporations, oligarchs, criminal gangs – are forging Big Brother’s tools and applying them, as we speak. And these complainers are right! As far as they go, that is. Yes, the revolution and renaissance is in danger! It always has been, with odds stacked high in favor of feudalism’s horrible return.  And yet…

…and yet dire warnings are best when accompanied by perspective. But not one of the modern doomcasters – from Snowden and Assange to Fukayama and Schneier to Nissenbaum and Brunton – not one of them ever casts an eye toward the question that I will now reiterate: “How did we get the admittedly imperfect window of freedom (and some privacy) that we currently enjoy?”

The answer is not “obfuscation.” Nor is it a more frequently prescribed version of the same notion – universal encryption of everything. Our ancestors who set the enlightenment revolution in motion held no truck with such cowardly approaches, that boil down to “If you are afraid of looming tyrants, then by all means hide!” (See my earlier critique: Everybody Hide!)

Across twenty years I have asked fans of cowering in shadows to name one time when that approach truly stymied would-be lords, or helped to maintain a free and open and accountable society. The answer I get is always… always… puzzled, blinking stares, as if the question had never once occurred to them. But in fact, if you examine sixty centuries of tyranny – and the methods used by secret police and despots since Hammurabi – only a handful of their tactics would be even slightly inconvenienced by perfectly-encrypted messaging – or by setting the commons on fire. 

(Oh, and fans of encrypted cowering also ignore technological change.  The fact that agencies and corporations can trivially decipher encryption from ten years ago, so why won’t they be able to parse today’s best ciphers, ten years from now? Revelation delayed is still revelation. Oh, you respond that this time it'll work much better than it ever worked before? You’d really and truly entrust everything to such a slender reed?)

Ah, but solutions only have to sound plausible and logical. What? I’m asking for a history of their proposed approach ever, ever, ever having worked?  Call me a spoil-sport.

In fact, only one thing has ever actually worked, thwarting tyranny long enough to let us have this recent – albeit imperfect – stretch of relative freedom and privacy. The method is called reciprocal accountability.  Also Sousveillance (look it up.) A far more demanding, citizen-centered approach that happens to be the way our parents did it, and their parents, and the founders of our revolution.

It is the very same method that is currently being applied on our streets, as citizens -- empowered by new technologies of vision – assert themselves to hold police accountable.  Using new technologies like cell phone cameras to empower citizenship, instead of oppressing it, they are preserving and enhancing freedom as we speak, not by hiding from the Man, but by militantly and courageously aiming tools of light to hold authority accountable. 

And that is the difference between us, friends.  I share with Nissenbaum and Brunton and Selinger a fear and loathing of potential feudal lords and tyrants. Only I care enough to actually get past the indignant reflex and ask what has worked in the past – and what is working right now. 

Ponder this truth: what has worked is not - and never has been - hiding.

== Is hiding even remotely possible? ==

The new techno romantics all proclaim so, demanding the cowardly approach – hiding from the Man – and loudly proclaiming it to be brave.  But physically and pragmatically, can it actually be done?

In the future, elites will have all sorts of tools to defeat obfuscation.  Linguistic-semantic analysis will detect your statements and ID you, even hidden by a pseudonym. Comparison of multi-path inputs will parse truth from fabulation. Governments and criminals and aristocrats will have means to bypass the bits, eavesdropping on the sonic data as your voice vibrates your window, or they’ll tap and log the strokes you type on your keyboard, from the different sounds each letter emits.

Technologies like facial coding, biofeedback and brain imaging have long been used by companies in the hope of pushing the boundaries of marketing and product development. But their use by political parties and governments is a growing phenomenon, evoking futuristic scenes from the movie “Minority Report,” in which eerily well-informed billboards scan commuters’ eyes and call out to them by name.

I have compiled a long list of biometric traits that are useful or effective at distinguishing one human being from another.  These range from fingerprints and retinal or iris scans to face recognition, hand-bone ratios, voiceprints, walking-gait... all the way to the otto-acoustic sound emissions that many of us radiate involuntarily from our eardrums!  We positively fizz with identifiers. And the romantics who think they will ever be able to conceal their movements in such a future are uber-fools.

Now comes news that just sitting in a room you'll leave a unique panoply of bacteria that can be attributed to you. Everywhere you go... you emit your own unique microbial cloud -- a personalized signature of your own micro biome.

"We all continually emit our own microbial cloud into the air and onto nearby—and not so nearby—surfaces. Now, according to a new study in the open-access journal Peerj, scientists can distinguish the make-up of the cloud is uniquely yours—a personal marker that is as particular to you as your fingerprints or your genome. That’s a biological calling card that could have implications for epidemiology, environmental engineering or even, intriguingly, criminal forensics."

Elsewhere, I talk about a posh gym in New York where a $26,000 membership and a retinal scan lets you into a facility where they measure everything about you… in order to guide your workout. Um okay.  So rich people are paying high rates in order to offer up their bodies to be measured in every conceivable way, so that unvetted parties will have every single biometric ... ah, I see you are getting it.  But do they?

Safety-through-concealment is a fool's fantasy -- even for elites.

I do not say this out of despair!  Rather, in order to rouse you to fight for freedom the only way that has ever worked.  The only way that can possibly work.  And the way that the self-appointed mavens of privacy absolutely refuse to consider.  In their relentless preaching for cowardice… that we all should protect ourselves by hiding… they perform the worst possible betrayal of everything that they claim to stand for.

Pardon me for repeating. I'll stop doing it when I see signs that the point is getting through to anyone, anyone at all.  But hiding will not work over any long-run.  

Sure, protect your passwords as a short term, practical matter.  But over the long term only one thing will keep you free.  Aggressively, militantly empowering yourself and your neighbors to see!

== So what’s to be done? ==

This is why the banks will not go all electronic and abandon their branches.  Bank branches will in future do what they do now, verify your credentials and help you do transactions.  Only in 2050 you will walk in... in-person... and be verified via all of your biometrics, including biomeNtrics (I just coined that!) via cranial sensors.

With that verification, you can then, in-person, clean up the last month's messes and prepare the next month's passwords.

== Someone being useful, at least ==

Much more cogent and well-supported – and hence scarier – is: "6 Spooky Ways Local Law Enforcement Is Watching You: A day in the life of the surveillance state," by Elliot Harmon and Nadia Kayyali, posted on the site of the worthy Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which I urge all of you to make one of your two dozen “proxy activism” NGOs.

Just because I disagree with EFF's set of prescriptive solutions, that doesn't mean they aren't completely right to be shouting and hollering and rousing public awareness of the overall dangers!  I send them money.  You should, too.

Harmon and Kayyali summarize, with useful links, half a dozen ways you are being watched, from social media monitoring and automated license plate readers to surveillance cameras, biometrics and imsi catchers.  Alas though, in the end the problem and drawback is the same.

== And finally… Yelp for People? ==

Of course this had to come. Yelp for people: You will soon be able to rate anyone you have interacted with on this new app: with reviews and 1 to 5 star ratings assigned to "your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose."

The good news?  This will light a fire under creating real reputation mediation services, a potential billion dollar business (and I know the secret sauce) – and don’t let anyone tell you that reputation companies already exist.  They are jokes.