A Wednesday Dose of Irony: New Plugin Allows Sites to Track Federal IPs

In late April, Ajit Pai, head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), suspended rules that prevented ISPs like Comcast and Verizon from selling information mined from consumer data (read: selling consumer data). Pai’s office justified such action in light of the fact that it would ostensibly support “consumer choice” and “free markets.” Behind the scenes, ISPs quietly donated hundreds of thousands to legislative campaign coffers in an effort to secure their ability to monetize such data. Consumers were understandably outraged. Democrats in Congress were particularly outraged that the rules were suspended under the provisions of the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Since the review was initiated under the CRA, Democrats could not initiate a filibuster.

The immediate response of angered members of the public was to suggest the purchase of legislative browser histories as a sort of retaliatory protest. However, given the illegal nature of sharing customer information that identifies individual persons and not simply the habits of person x, it became apparent that was out of the question, which is where the new plugin developed by Matt Feld at Speak Together, a non-profit dedicated to internet transparency, comes in.

The plugin goes by the name CongressWebHistory. It works by associating IP addresses linked to private congressional Wi-Fi networks with page traffic. In so doing, it is able to differentiate between a federal employee searching a site and someone simply using public/guest Wi-Fi networks - one step beyond similar tools like congress-edits. In a hypothetical world wherein a relatively large number of sites use the plugin, the public would be able to gage, for instance, what news sources legislators and their staffs read. Not only would that sort of information be potentially valuable from a research perspective, it would also be the type of protest imagined by those who originally suggested purchasing legislative browser histories under the new FCC rules. Most importantly, it would also be legal. The plugin only tracks traffic to websites visited.

Supposing that the tool, which was only made available rather recently, reaches a significant number of websites, one question that remains is whether or not it will deter traffic from government IP addresses to those sites that use the plugin. Implementation, therefore, is likely to be a serious issue. Incomplete or partial usage by sites could create a channeling problem by funneling traffic to sites that do not use the plugin. Thus, not only would partial saturation of sites yield an incomplete, muddled picture of legislative surfing tendencies, if installation also operates as a sort of visitation disincentive, sites may well be discouraged from installation of the plugin in the first place thereby exacerbating the problems of partial saturation and compounding the cycle.

So the real efficacy of the plugin is likely to be through its existence as a symbolic protest. It seems to suggest the classic eye-for-an-eye principle. If you can see ours, we (i.e. John Q. Public) should be able to see yours. Contained in such a notion is an admirable commitment to transparency and the public good. Certainly, as a matter of general principle, it seems prudent to allow constituencies to be as informed as possible as to the behavior of their elected officials. Yet, the extent to which providing the surfing behavior of elected officials and their staffs actually serves that purpose is a debatable matter. Is the fact that a congressional aide enjoys FiveThirtyEight actually relevant to allowing constituencies to understand and evaluate behaviors so as to make informed election decisions? Maybe, though also maybe not, which raises the question, is a marginal increase in meaningful transparency worth the obvious hypocrisy of abridging the very types of privacy rights that the developers of the plugin mean to defend from ISPs? Again the answer is likely maybe, maybe not.

At the heart of these questions are larger ones. The question, whose privacy do we, as a society, value, if we value it at all, is particularly pressing as is the related question, as