Breach Harm: Should Arizona be required to notify?
Over at the Office of Inadequate Security, Pogo was writing about the Lulzsec hacking of Arizona State Police. Her article is “A breach that crosses the line?”
I’ve been blogging for years about the dangers of breaches. I am concerned about dissidents who might be jailed or killed for their political views, abortion doctors whose lives are endangered from fringe elements, women who have tried to escape abusive spouses, porn actors whose families may be harassed by the publication of their names and addresses, confidential informants and law enforcement officers, and immigrants whose personal information was illegally revealed to law enforcement and to media by the actions of Utah state employees. All of those people have been put at risk of physical harm as a result of data breaches.
To date, what we know was taken from Arizona’s (apparently) insufficiently secured systems was names and addresses of people who have good reason to think they’re in danger from the release of that information.
I want to talk about four major risks here: The risk of harm, the risk of attributing all that risk to Lulzsec, the incentive to cover-up, and the risk of believing our analyses are complete.
The first risk, the risk of harm, Pogo covers fairly well. I have a cousin who works in a correctional facility. Their house, their phone, their cable, all these things are listed in the wife’s name, and I understand the fear of knowing that a real criminal thinks you’re at fault and knows where your family lives. I bring this up because it’s my family too, and that’s important because I’m about to discuss the apportionment of blame, and want to be clear that I’m doing so with some skin in the game.
The second risk is the risk of attributing all of the responsibility to Lulzsec. Some of the fault here is that of the State of Arizona Department of Public Safety (AZDPS). AZDPS made a decision to collect information. They had a responsibility to protect it. AZDPS also made a decision to store that information in electronic form. AZDPS made a decision to store that electronic information in an internet accessible fashion. AZDPS made decisions about computer security which, in hindsight, may be being reconsidered. However elite the ninjas of Lulzsec may or may not have been, however many lazer-eyed sharks they might have employed, if the information was only stored on paper in a locked room in Arizona, it would have been far more secure. And if Lulzsec could break in, potentially others have already broken in and stolen the data for purposes far more dangerous than embarrassing AZDPS. AZDPS is not unique in this set of choices. The organization reaps lots of benefits in putting the data online. Many of those benefits, such as speed and efficiency, are probably shared with employees, customers or citizens. All that said, Lulzsec did increase the risk by making the data widely available to anyone. (They also marginally decreased the risk by making people aware it’s out there, but the net risk is still increased.)
The third risk is the risk of cover-up. AZDPS is one of many organizations that collects information today. Like most of those organizations, AZDPS makes some investments in security to protect the data. I suspect that they make more investments than many others, since they know about the sensitivity of it and the many motivated attackers. Interestingly, their policy states that “Security methods and measures have been integrated into the design, implementation and day-to-day practices of the entire Azdps.gov web portal.” (AZDPS Privacy Policy (as of January 4, 2010, via the WayBack Machine)) which strikes me as a mature statement compared to the common “we follow industry-leading best practices in buying a firewall.” Most organizations that are hacked are not hacked by Lulzsec, and so may choose to cover up. AZDPS should investigate what went wrong, and share their analysis so others can learn from them.
The final risk is the risk of believing our analysis is complete. Much like I pointed out in “How the Epsilon Breach Hurts Consumers,” it’s easy to come to an analysis which misses important elements because the investigators have a defined scope. They are more likely to talk to those close to the system, and thus will be influenced by their perspectives and orientation. By sharing information about the breaches, different perspectives can emerge from a chaotic discussion. This is a perspective deeply influenced by Hayek. Unlike markets, information security lacks a pricing mechanism to help us bring all of the perspectives into a single sharp focus. It’s hard to add security to see what people will pay, and we lack good information about the inputs that led to breaches or other outcomes. Without that information, it’s hard to know what security is cost-effective, or appropriate in light of the duties that an information collector takes on by collecting data.
So to bring this together around those risks, the people whose data was exposed (first risk) were exposed in part because most organizations never issue a good report on what went wrong (the third risk) and so the choices made in collecting and storing data are made in an information vacuum (the second risk).
And so the Arizona DPS should take seriously their public safety mission. They should perform a deep investigation of what went wrong, and they should share it with the citizens of Arizona and people around the world. If they do so, and their counterparts do so, we’ll all be able to learn from each other’s mistakes, and we’ll all be able to, in that hated phrase “do more with less.”
That’s how public entities, operating with data about citizens, should be operating, and in my personal opinion, ought to be required to operate.