How do you manage certificates in Firefox?

Originally posted on 04/28/2011 at lubbockonline.com

Yesterday I talked about what website certificates are. Today I'm talking about what you can do to control the certificates in your browser. It's not difficult, but it can take a bit of searching. We'll start with Firefox. If the post is too long Internet Explorer will be tomorrow. Maybe we can hit Safari and Opera after that.

Firefox 4 and Firefox 3 are exactly the same except for the very first step.

Firefox 4

Firefox 3

Go to the Firefox menu - options - options. The Options dialog will pop up.

Click on the 'Advanced' tab, then click on the "View Certificates" button.

Every browser has over a hundred recognized certificate authorities. It's hard to know which ones you really need and which ones you don't, but if you live in the U.S. it's probably safe to remove the certificate from TurkTrust. It's a Turkish certificate authority, and unless you visit Middle Eastern or Turkish websites, you probably won't encounter many sites using it. Once you've selected the certificate you can click on one of the buttons at the bottom of the window to view the details of the certificate, edit the trust level, export the certificate or delete it.

You can look through the certificates in your browser and do a little online research to decide which ones you think you can get rid of. If you want you can search online for certificate authorities to add, although there's not much reason for most people to add certificates unless they need to add one to access the internet through a proxy server. That's something you don't usually have to worry about unless your job requires it.

UN wants to take over internet

The United Nations is considering whether to set up an inter-governmental working group to harmonise global efforts by policy makers to regulate the internet.

So opens an article by John Hilvert at ITNews. I think Mr. Hilvert must moonlight as a lawyer.

The upshot is that the UN is seeking to coordinate the control of the internet. But not to "takeover". Good idea, take control without taking over, if you can figure out how to do it. Not that I believe the UN is actually trying.

Apparently this push is inspired Wikileaks, but it was made possible by a resolution last July:

The resolution invited the UN Secretary-General "to convene open and inclusive consultations involving all Member States and all other stakeholders with a view to assisting the process towards enhanced cooperation in order to enable Governments on an equal footing to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues."

I'm not sure, but I think just about anything governments do to regarding public policy and the internet will impact the day-to-day technical and operational matters. Especially since any UN group will probably support - if not push - many of the provisions of the ACTA treaty (I blogged here). Many of those provisions will directly affect both individual citizen and ISP's.

Fortunately there are people who see beyond the immediate gut reactions and see the wider picture. Defeating Napster actually had the opposite effect the RIAA had hoped for. The MPAA is in the process of learning that lesson, and the UN and other governments will likely learn the same thing. Data Control on the internet is like fighting the hydra. Once the beast is free, cutting one head off sees two more rise from the stump of the old. The time to control data is before it gets out, not after.

Copyright, heritage, audio, preservation, Library of Congress

In Reuters story on Yahoo, Lynn Adler reports that the FBI seized John Lennons fingerprints just before they were auctioned off. There was some confusion on the part of the auction house about why the FBI would be concerned about the fingerprints of a man 30 years dead.

While I understand the confusion, the FBI's concern was that the fingerprints, which were part of John Lennon's citizenship application, might have been taken from his government files. If they were, they shouldn't have been available to be auctioned off.

The story didn't say if the FBI discovered the fingerprints were actually taken from government files, but it started me thinking. Does the government have the right to confiscate fingerprint records, or should it? Today I would say no, in most cases. But technology, law enforcement, and crime are rapidly changing. So will the answer still be no in 10 years? 20? 50? What will be possible in that time frame?

It is surprisingly easy to forge fingerprints. Superglue, a bottlecap, some woodglue and a little care and patience make it possible, and instructions are easy to find on the internet. I'm not sure a fake fingerprint made that way will last very long, but with a little more time and technology it could be possible to have fake fingerprints that last through hours of hard wear.

Looking at how easy it is to fake fingerprints, I can see the FBI not wanting a full set of celebrity fingerprints floating around in the wild. If it were possible to wear fake fingerprints without loosing significant tactile sensitivity I could see a black market built around the fingerprints of dead people. It would be relatively easy for a crooked funeral home to record fingerprints and sell them on the black market. Or perhaps a hospital or city morgue. In that case having fingerprint records of everyone who dies might be an important way to make sure law enforcement makes efficient use of resources. Knowing that the fingerprints you've discovered at a crime scene belong to a dead person would save time that would otherwise be spent looking for a dead person.

I don't actually expect to see that type of forgery becoming widespread in my lifetime. Unless you want to make it look like a particular person it makes a lot more sense to avoid leaving fingerprints. But what about other biometric data. Will it one day be possible to forge rhetina scans? What about genetic data?

Have you seen the movie, Gattaca? It's the story of a world in which most children are genetically tailored to have all the best traits of both parents. Children born the old fashioned way are discriminated against. The protagonist buck's the system by faking his genetic identity. But it's not easy, and the authorities are tipped off when they find an eyelash that does not match anyone who should be working where the hero is working. Gattaca is the story of genetic fingerprinting carried to the extreme as a means of identification and class discrimination.

There are a lot of good reasons to give the authorities more power to gather data and spy on citizens in aggregate. And there are a lot of reasons to limit that power. It is a constant tug of war for control between governmental authority, whether it's local, state, or federal, and citizens. And that tug of war must continue. Anarchy is not a good system of government, but neither is the "Big Brother of Orwell's "1984" or the Huxley's vision of "Brave New World." There is a lot of room between total individual freedom and total government control, and it's up to us to make sure we don't travel too far toward the extremes.