It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also important to recognize that this is conjecture.
From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this.
I know this will make me unpopular amongst this crowd, but The truth is, I'm far more afraid of data like this getting into the wrong hands because it's being stored improperly or insecurely, than I am of government being malicious with it. Heck, I'm more afraid of my insurance adjuster than I am a malicious cop.
Part of the issue with government is that you ultimately have much less recourse against the government than against anyone else. This exacerbates the potential damage the government could do with any given technology.
I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police. Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how this sort of data can be misused by making them the victims first. As a bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for ordinary citizens.
Still, it's completely crazy. These types of system are a direct threat to democracy and need to be shut down. In fact it's worse than that. At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.
>At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.
Even if government isn't capable of building things out, they will eventually be able to buy them from third parties, likely venture-backed ones like Palantir.
Third parties have little to risk by targeting this kind of market because private companies are just as interested in exploiting customer data.
One day, we'll all be able to pore over our anyone's emails from the last 10 years from an NSA data leak posted on Piratebay. Employers, insurance companies, and ex/potential lovers will have a great time with that.
Would you stop wasting time on the internets and just take out the trash ? While at it, can you bring upstairs the mirror in the garage ? I may have a cookie for you.
>It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also important to recognize that this is conjecture. From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this.
That's not really the point. Even 1/10 as sophisticated technology can be equally potent, especially if they are concentrating on a person (if the data is there, they can even do the correlations manually, say in Excel. It will just take more time).
Furthermore, the creation of the technology (and even the operation) can be outsourced to private entities. Or just bought wholesale.
I fully agree. Private industry, as well as fraudsters and criminals who were somehow armed with all of this data could probably end up being far more nefarious than anything the NSA is actually doing right now.
Imagine if a Russian cybercrime gang gained access to NSA's Quantum Insert method, for example.
I mean, obviously a criminal organization having this data would be much more of issue than the government having it...
But, I don't see how that justifies the US government having the information in the first place. That's obviously not the point that you're making or agreeing with, but I feel like it's almost being implied.
"Oh well, at least it wasn't Russian cybercrime that completely and pervasively destroyed the worlds trust in our entire nations technological infrastructure", seems to be a tangential point at best to the conversation at hand.
If anything, it's another reason the US government shouldn't have it ... any insecurity they create / encourage, or data trove they maintain becomes a target for the criminals (or other nations' spies) and therefore makes us all less safe.
It doesn't justify it. The NSA should be barred from further operations like this. I can think it's wrong, while still not personally fearing the NSA looking at my personal data.
Sure. If an analyst was directly looking at web traffic and behavioral patterns of mine, I'd certainly be a bit creeped out. But in reality it's fairly unlikely to occur.
I still don't think anyone should be suspect to that (without a formal warrant), but it's just not a concern for me.
This article attempts to show what a local government could do, but does anyone have access to the sort of location dataset that could give one an intuition about how likely it would be that individuals would be singled out using the data shown?
These cops appear to arrest 23 people per month for driving under the influence, and hand out about 1750 other traffic citations (not linking directly to the PDF to save their server but you can find it under crime stats).
The article implies that there would be more traffic stops due to increased DUI suspicion, and it certainly seems that it could happen, but given these population, police, and police activity numbers, and given that the article itself gives a false-positive example, how likely would that be? Is it reasonable to think that these cops currently have a lighter load and have time to be dispatched to investigate a potential DUI?
I am not suggesting that it is of no concern for the government to have unfettered access to data, and I can imagine a vast number of possible scenarios in which the data could be misused, but possibly we can better quantify that concern.
The capacity to do selective enforcement is a huge issue in itself.
Let's say you bring corruption charges to light, or advocate for something people in power don't like, or even just cut off someone's angry nephew in traffic.
In a country with a rule of law, that's okay --- you're safe. You can't just be arbitrarily punished.
But with this? No problem. They just tell the NSA to flag you, and as soon as you do _anything_, they'll get you. Better still if the data's retroactive --- if they can track everyone, and figure out that three years ago you caught a fish and transported it across state lines or whatever.
If you have a legal system that classes a majority of people as technically a criminal, and the capacity to selectively enforce that, then congratulations, you've got despotism.
You're assuming that individuals would have to be singled out for analysis in the first place. They wouldn't. With enough computing power, it'd be trivial to run this sort of analysis in near real-time for everyone. A few years down the line, this is even less of a concern: increased power, improved analysis tools, and greater efficiencies will all come together to empower just such a system at costs manageable by many local governments (particularly if they start working together to manage costs).
This means you've got a practical means of confidently predicting potential crime. Even better, the same mechanisms that help you predict potential criminal acts also help you close active cases more efficiently. That inevitably results in significant boosts to police productivity.
So armed, you now get to deploy your existing resources more effectively. Instead of parking a patrol car at a "pretty good spot" to nail violators for a few hours, you'll reposition yourself continuously to the location offering the greatest probability of an arrest/citation at that specific moment in time. Instead of passively waiting for violators to happen across your location, you're actively positioning yourself to nail them directly. The specific individual doesn't matter.
But you won't be dispatching patrollers in the current manner. Since you'll also be tracking your own patrol cars, you can correlate the two and dispatch each car to the highest probability incident nearest to them where they're likely to catch a potential perpetrator. By having everyone under effective surveillance, for every minute of every day, each of your resources will always be deployed in the most efficient manner possible.
Where it really gets wild is when you start to consider traffic enforcement automation along with the push for local government drone coverage. Along with the existing red light and speed cameras, you'll have mobile platforms capable of filling in for any holes in your patrol car coverage while also benefitting from the same efficiency gains described earlier. And they'll be gathering additional data (movements, facial recognition, automatic number plate recognition, etc.) to send back to base while they're doing it.
It won't be like The Machine from Person of Interest, but all things considered, it'll be closer to it than anything else to date.
Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes
>Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed
This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law.
The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from the FISA court.
Stuff that has come out of these leaks have ranged from banal (oh, we listen to the German Chancelor's cell phone? What else is new) to absolutely damning (forcing companies to hand over SSL keys). But even in the most damning cases, all of these happened within the legal frameworks given to them (such as the National Security Letters) and maybe some overzealous law enforcement agents. The illegal incidents can be explained more by incidents outside of how things are "supposed" to work (LOVEINT is probably not sanctioned by the NSA), and a lack of strong implementation of the framework given by the courts.
The narrative has always seemed to be "check out how the NSA is going crazy over here!". But the reality is "check out how all these politicians are voting in these new laws allowing this to take place!"
From the leaks you can even see how the courts are constantly reeling things in, the system is actually working. We hear about old NSA programs that got shut down because of the FISA court's rulings. This is how rule of law works! We vote laws, and people follow them.
To actually come to this, given all we've seen from how courts rule on this issue in general, and the FISA court's rulings, this sort of data sharing would absolutely definitely not be allowed to exist. No judge would agree to this being allowed to be set in place, as it so obviously goes against 4th ammendement in such a program's intent.
Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell the contents of your e-mails to somebody.
This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws.
Lots of people have picked up on your thesis statement : This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law.
We aren't talking about 'law' here, we're talking about 'people.' That gets lost some times.
Someone with access to these tools might decide the shake down Jack with a bit of blackmail. They might decide to sell union organizing 'alerts' to business. These are not legal but there are many people who work in an organization with these tools available who could justify abusing them.
Consider another hotbed subject which gets argued the other way all the time, gun ownership.
Now we can all agree that someone owning a gun who follows all of the safety precautions, and doesn't wave it about irresponsibly Etc is no threat to society. And yet the argument is put forward that the capability is the threat and people other than the owner may exploit that capability (a thief steals the gun, a spouse grabs it in a fit of rage, Etc.) and that it is "better" to not allow the person to own a gun because the risk of that gun falling into the wrong hands and doing something bad are non-zero enough.
This is the same argument we should make on surveillance technology, which is that the potential for its abuse and damaging the lives of innocent civilians, out weighs the 'benefit' the law enforcement agency gets from having it. There are other ways for the agency to do its job, just as there are other ways for our homeowner to protect their property, that don't require this capability.
Exactly. Consider how often cases of police officers (or even spooks; remember that they coined the term "LOVEINT" for cases of people doing exactly this) abusing their authority to spy on, stalk, and harass the objects of their a̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ obsession have come to light.
Now contemplate how many happen, but don't come to light.
As much as I want to decry TFA for fear-mongering, slippery-sloping, and straw-manning, extant — even rampant — abuses of authority give it ever so slightly too much "plausible" to dismiss out of hand.
>Someone with access to these tools might decide the shake down Jack with a bit of blackmail. They might decide to sell union organizing 'alerts' to business. These are not legal but there are many people who work in an organization with these tools available who could justify abusing them.
The situation described in the article would require coordinating a lot of data together. I have a hard time seeing how individuals could do that properly without the institution noticing (especially considering how "Big Data" it is). It's not just cell data that you need, but also license plate scans, court records, etc. These are all fairly independent things, unlikely to be stored in the same place.
Individuals will try to exploit systems, and we should work hard to avoid things like LOVEINT happening (which shouldn't be hard in itself, but given that Snowden walked off with all those documents, the NSA doesn't seem very skilled in secure storage of documents).
If institutions work hard enough to make sure they're following the rules on document access, then it'll be harder for people to abuse, since each individual block of data is useless in itself. It would be the information equivalent of N keys to launch the nukes. Abuse would be much,much harder if somebody sat down and chmod'd some folders properly (nobody should have access to everything in any system). A plus side (for gov'ts at least), would be that Snowden-class events would be a lot harder to pull off.
Institutions can be built to be a lot harder to corrupt.
>The situation described in the article would require coordinating a lot of data together.
Do you think the federal government cares more about protecting your personal data, or their own top secret data?
Edward Snowden was able to single-handedly pull together reams and reams of data on a cornucopia of the most highly classified top secret projects of our government. He wasn't noticed at all, except for the fact that he outed himself.
Had Edward Snowden actually been a spy working for a foreign government, he probably wouldn't have been caught at all, and would still be working for the government.
>It's not just cell data that you need, but also license plate scans, court records, etc. These are all fairly independent things, unlikely to be stored in the same place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion is the process of unifying disparate data sources in order to glean information not readily apparent by looking at the sources individually. Guess who is leading the charge in this budding field?
>Institutions can be built to be a lot harder to corrupt.
Once all this information is stored, its value is essentially incalculable. Almost no expense at all will be too high for a foreign government or a multinational corporation to pay for access to it - it is too profound a leg up on Bob the competitor, Joe the union organizer, and Sally the investigative reporter. The act of collecting and storing the information is, itself, opening Pandora's box.
This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law.
A lack of faith pretty well justified at this point.
I appreciate the annoyance at "oh noes teh NSA!", but this article exactly points out the problem: local, not state or federal, authorities are where this will be an issue.
Everyone is busy hopping on the "fuck the NSA" bus, and that conveniently draws fire from the numerous local police departments that are expanding their own reach.
Don't get distracted--the same data is just as dangerous (if not more dangerous) in the hands of local officials than some folks at an alphabet-soup agency.
do local police have access to this data though? Maybe I've missed something, but the cell phone data has been through PRISM, and that local police doesn't have access to this sort of information.
The issue is that the local Police are aggregating the same types of data E.G. Auto scanning tags of cars within sight of a police car and it's only a matter of time before the links are made to pool the data. All that needs to happen for this to become a reality is one piece of legislation be snuck into a spending bill or farm bill etc.. and bam - all police forces are required to send their data to the national data pool that all other police forces can access for the "greater good".
Not being involved in this myself I don't know the extent or the checks in place but police do have access to cell phone location data since about ten years ago? (if you call 911 on a cell phone they use it to find you)
You can do a lot of tracking without cell phone data.
Local police have access to license plate scanners (both at fixed locations and mounted on police vehicles). The data is not as fine-grained as GPS data from a person's phone, but it can also yield information about the patterns of a person's movements over time (e.g., they pass these ten intersections every weekend night between 2:30 and 3:00am). Of course, this can only track people with cars (but in some cities, that's pretty much everyone).
Facial recognition software can track people who walk, but I don't know how widely deployed it is at this time. As soon as it gets attached to all of the millions of surveillance cameras that are out there (some of which are operated by police departments, like in NYC), tracking pedestrians will become easier.
And, of course, the local police can get a warrant to attach a GPS device to somebody's car or to pull cell tower data if they have probable cause.
>do local police have access to this data though? Maybe I've missed something, but the cell phone data has been through PRISM, and that local police doesn't have access to this sort of information.
That's hardly an argument. For one, they collaborate frequently with the FBI. As for local police, well, give it time.
> "This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law.
The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from the FISA court."
The article title includes "What the Government Could Do With All That Location Data". The emphasis is on what is technically possible, not on what is legal. Given the vast expansion of legal authority to collect and use data on American citizens over the past decade, the article rightly looks at what is possible tomorrow based on the data of today, because what is legal tomorrow cannot be predicted accurately.
I entirely agree that the anger over the Snowden revelations should be first directed at the US congressmen responsible for authorizing these programs in the first place. However, much of what they authorized wasn't even public information until Snowden came along, so your argument that we should not worry much about the infrastructure of the surveillance state because the laws of that state prohibit such surveillance is undermined by the enormous secrecy with which it operates. We don't even know how some intelligence agencies interpret the laws that have been written. In an environment filled with so much legal uncertainty, knowing what is technologically possible, and knowing what the incentives surrounding that technology are, is extremely valuable.
> Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell the contents of your e-mails to somebody.
I am not sure you are listening, what is happening around you.
> This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws.
It's working for whom? Presumably these laws require a little bit less privacy for a more secure country. I didn't see Boston bombings avoided. If the answer to this is please give us more privacy, to avoid this in the future, I'd say no.
>It's working for whom? Presumably these laws require a little bit less privacy for a more secure country.
The fisa court is an example of laws working in our favor. Before the fisa court, the executive could basically do what it wanted wrt "terrorist/spy" suspects. It's only after Congress intervened that we got something that tries to strike a balance between the need to investigate sensitive subjects and the need to have somebody check executive privelege.
>I didn't see Boston bombings avoided.
A patient at a hospital goes in for surgery and dies on the operating table. Is medicine useless?
You have absolutely no way of measuring how much security a set of laws has given us, short of going back in time and replaying the same universe without the laws. And even then, these events are so dependent on singular events that it's hard to say what would work.
A related argument is how only X people died in Boston, while 100X people died in car crashes in the past week. Except that the Boston bombings are a singular event, and it only takes one/two arrests to stop X people from dying. 100X car deaths is probably 50X different accidents, each due to varying causes. Of course we'll want to go after the "small big wins". It seems easier to tackle.
If you think that, as a society, we can stop a somewhat constant N bad things from happening, then it's only normal for us to run after the biggest bad things and try to stop that, even if there's X tiny problems, with X much larger than N, that are easier to deal with.
> You have absolutely no way of measuring how much security a set of laws has given us.
Sure we do. Do you really think they wouldn't plaster the news of a thwarted terrorist attack everywhere? Whenever verifiable potential incidents are stopped, there is always breaking news about them, in great detail.
With every new revelation, I'm less and less confident in the rule of law. I'm starting to believe that the NSA thinks that the law doesn't apply to them. So when you speak about faith in the rule of law - until this year, I might have been on your side. But lately, I'm not sure I have any faith in the rule of law anymore when it comes to government agencies.
> The narrative has always seemed to be "check out how the NSA is going crazy over here!". But the reality is "check out how all these politicians are voting in these new laws allowing this to take place!"
I'd like to beg your pardon, because I'm not from the US. I'm British, so I'm sure there are large contextual elements of this situation I'm not understanding. But can anyone explain to me how this can happen?
I mean, I've grown up being told that there are two types of legal framework for a country: ones with a constitution and ones without. In countries without a constitution, like Britain, the politicians can do whatever they like. In fact, it's always a big principle in the UK that parliament cannot bind its successors:
But in a country with a constitution, I always thought that wasn't correct. If a politician wants to change the law they can, except where that conflicts with the constitution.
Now, my understanding of America is that it has strong constitutional safeguards in place for such things as free speech and unreasonable searches.
Isn't there some constitutional court that people can take this kind of thing, to find out if it all really is legal? Because if politicians really can make any law they want, surely you don't actually have a constitution in the US at all?
I understand the importance of focusing on the government, but I think use of this sort of data should be restricted for everyone, not just the government. What happens when employers realize that you can filter out less desirable employees by correlating the movements of their social groups and cross-referencing it against credit history databases? We fear what the government can do with the data, but as a practical matter its corporate America that's more likely to actually screw over large numbers of people with this sort of data.
This is what bothers me about most of America's large tech companies' recent opposition to various NSA programs. They pioneered many of the techniques (albeit independently...usually) yet now point their fingers at the government.
Am I the only one for whom the article had the opposite than intended effect? I was expecting some real life horror story of a false positive or deliberate framing, but instead I was given examples of how this data could be used constructively to try and evaluate where there might be a high likelihood of crime occurring, and trying to prevent it. In my eyes, using tax dollars to prevent crime rather than punishing it a HUGE win!
The system only provides leads for further inspection, not evidence. When a metal detector has a positive, false or not, you inspect the bag, you don't arrest the person.
This is fear mongering. You could have some person out in the field tailing you and get the same info (maybe even more). You can also put up a camera and tag people as potential DUIs based on how close to the middle of the lane they are driving. So what?
What's important to ask is what can the government do with the data. And NSA or not, what they are can do is limited by the law. No database changes that.
It's not the same goddamn thing. The article describes programmatic policing.
THEY CAN APPLY THESE TECHNOLOGIES TO THE ENTIRE POPULATION AT ONCE AS THEY ARE NO LONGER LIMITED BY NUMBER OF OFFICERS AVAILABLE.
This carries new, complex risks for society at large. How hard is that to understand? Relying solely on unclear "policy" and "access controls" to protect us from these risks is extremely foolish. Now, I'm not saying this is happening now, or will happen tomorrow. But these thought exercises are very useful and informative.
You're not really explaining what's "foolish" or a "complex risk to society"...
Why is it okay to do it to several thousand people (selected in some non-systematic/statistical process more akin to voodoo than science), but not okay to do to the whole population?
Shouldn't everyone be treated equal? Seems like the way we have it now, if you get on some officials bad side you will get harassed by the TSA and maybe audited (there aren't that many tools at the disposal of the gov't to make your life difficult) And most likely no one will notice or care.
Doesn't that illustrate a more fundamental problem with our laws? And shouldn't we be addressing that?
It's not a serious risk, because people would hate it. If people in your community don't hate this kind of policing and continue to support it with their votes, you can move somewhere else.
Look at the fun local police departments have had trying to install "mere" red light cameras.
In case you don't know German: "Orpnhfr bs guvf fbhepr pbqr, V'z abg tbvat gb urnira." (ROT13 for fellow non-native German speakers who want to think about the meaning for a moment.)
Setting aside all of the other existing information, the crux of many of the arguments in the article depend on the government knowing the use of particular addresses. That's data most city/county/state governments already have laws that they should know (for tax assessments, occupancy limits, health inspections, census, etc.) and yet they frequently have incorrect or incomplete information on this.
While pervasive tracking is indeed a problematic state, I still find it humorous at how competent we truly believe the government to be in retaining accuracy in all this data given how often our interactions with government and private businesses revolve around them FIXING their data about us.
This indirectly makes a great point. While everyone's been talking about the danger of a turn-key totalitarian state -- the danger of intentional totalitarianism -- much less has been made of the danger of an unintentional totalitarian state arising from overzealous use of these systems by law enforcement. I think that's a much greater immediate risk.
Replace "DUI pattern detected" with "likely child predator." Just the insinuation that a person is a pedophile can destroy a person's life.
This is why its important for people to get their respective states to start writing laws which protect people's privacy and usurp the Federal Preemption of states rights in regards to people's private information.
This is a great paper which addresses this in regards to environmental laws. This kind of argument can also be made in protection of people's private information. It's about restraining and balancing the federal laws with state laws and not allowing the feds to overstep state laws.
Could? The government may know you better than you know yourself; and perhaps the only reaction to be had upstairs is when you change a habit; i.e. quite unexpectedly break the prediction model for your life.
I don't know why everyone is paranoid about unseen location data being collected. They often blame proprietary software like iOS/Android collect location data and send Apple/Google servers. That sort of transfer would be evident by tracing traffic and there are tons of reverse engineers out there intentionally keeping an eye on transferred packages that might contain sensitive private data. That would be a huge breakthrough if it would exist and be revealed.
Besides, the issue is also location data from cell tower triangulation. That data is available to your cell carrier whenever you connect to their network.
I would think a system like that being public would cause a great deal of interpersonal problems until ways to circumvent the data collection were found (even if it meant tearing GPS receivers out of mobile phones).
I remember reading a meta-analysis of lie detection and deception studies in humans, and there was one social psychology experiment where the participants were asked not to lie for the duration of the experiment. They couldn't even use the tactic of "white lying."
Overwhelmingly the participants said it was extremely difficult not to lie and when they couldn't lie, it ended up causing their stress levels to rise and their relationships suffered. Lying, or much more fundamentally - concealing, is a necessary process for maintaining social relationships. [You don't want to tell Mary what you really think about her new dress, and in the same way, you don't want to tell your boyfriend that you're throwing him a surprise party, even if he asks you directly.] As technology becomes increasingly woven into our social fabric, it's going to have to conform with our pre-established patterns.
Trying to remove location tracking from a cell phone is essentially impossible; they're capable of using a system called Assisted GPS which when GPS isn't available, can use things like WiFi signals to help determine where you are; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS#Description
Even if you were to build your own cell phone or dig out an old brickphone without this capability (thanks to the FCC's efforts, basically no cell phone made after 2005 is without it), you can still be triangulated by the network with fair accuracy.
At this point, The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play.
Right, this was a requirement so if you dialed 911 the emergency responders know where to find you even if you didn't know where you are. It is called e911 or enhanced 911.
Or just generally knowing where everyone is at all times. I know you're out of your home currently, so I could go rob it. But then you'd see I was in your home without permission, so I'd be easily caught. But then I guess I wouldn't have to lock my door, because everyone is accountable.
Besides, those kids are operating under the false assumption that privacy still exists. Once you know you're being watched, you behave differently.
Think of this: face recognition is only as good as the pool of identities you're checking against. If the police car scans the plate of a car being trailed, it knows the owners identity. From there, the police mounted camera (you know that's coming) can check the drivers identity against the owner as well as the owner's social graph, and with a high degree of certainty have the identity of everybody in the car, within seconds of stopping the car. If you couple this with broad camera coverage, where you can track anybody backwards in time just long enough to get a shot of that person getting out of its car (it's easy to follow a body across cameras, much easier than identifying a face against 350 million possible persons), or from a public transport where you've used an identifiable rfid card, you now have a small pool to check against, and because you have a selection of headshots from every angle, you can confirm the identity.
Now just do that with everyone with every data's ounce you can get your hands on, and you've got yourself The Machine from Person of Interest, without the silly "identify crime before it happens" angle, but with enough information to also flesh out everybody's social graph independently of the attack surface you might have online. This is how A Scanner Darkly becomes true.
I remember watching PoI to you and thinking, "this is silly, it's impossible to do this, without human operators and secret access to private feeds". Now, it feels like the screen writers I was underestimating after years of silly "electrical outlet viruses" and the like in movies were much more forward thinking and acurate than I was.
What exactly would a self driving car have to do with this? This is talking about tracking by cell phone data and license plate, not car data. A self driving car would be the same as a regular car, just with extra sensors, the ones they have now are at least. Who is to say that it would have extra tracking?
Your car has a computer and needs to know both where it is precisely and if the roads have changed since it was last there. This is always on and possibly worse than a cellphone for tracking given how hard it would be to "throwaway".
But a self-driving car would be the perfect antidote to DUI offences!
Interesting that you would place overblown and misleading fears over Government tracking before the increased personal safety a self-driving car could potential bring (eliminating DUI being a great example)!
Also, you seem to suggest the government tracking is vehicle related. A mobile phone would be a much easier method of determining whether you're in a vehicle or not.
I was using the existing car-focused example. And I'd point out that I can travel with my phone off but it's signifacntly harder to travel when I need to turn off a car's computer ;-)
Stewart Baker, who was quoted extensively for that article, had some interesting words regarding it[1]:
When one of the authors, Ryan Grim, called me for comment, he said that while Glenn Greenwald was transitioning to his new Omidyar-funded venture he was temporarily publishing his Snowden leaks with HuffPo. So when he asked for my take on the NSA story, pretty much the first words out of my mouth were, “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?” The story quotes practically everything I said to Grim except that remark, even though I returned to the point a couple of times and emphasized that it summed up my view.
I don’t think HuffPo cut the quote because they ran out of electrons. The article itself is so tediously long that I defy anyone to read every word in a single go.
Nor because my remark was inaccurate. It turns out that Glenn Greenwald has written an entire book devoted to exposing the contradiction between Republicans’ ideology and their private lives. In Greenwald’s words, “While the right wing endlessly exploits claims of moral superiority … virtually its entire top leadership have lives characterized by the most decadent, hedonistic, and morally unrestrained behavior imaginable …[including] a string of shattered marriages, active out-of-wedlock sex lives, and highly ‘untraditional’ and ‘un-Christian’ personal lives [endless detail omitted].” His book certainly makes the NSA memo sound restrained and cautious, but both are motivated by the same idea.
Grim and Greenwald very likely cut the quote because it would have undermined the narrative of the piece, which combines solicitude for the poor Islamists whose sexual and financial hypocrisy might be exposed with outrage at the NSA for even considering such a tactic. The quote would have made them look like, well, hypocrites.
The incident makes me wonder what else Greenwald leaves out of his stories. And why we should continue to trust snippets of documents selected by someone who thinks that the difference between Islamist extremists and Republicans is that one is an enemy that deserves no quarter and the other is sort of like Martin Luther King, except for the part about wanting to kill us.
> “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?”
I think this is disingenuous. Of course the US should do to extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans. I don't think anyone is saying exposing hypocrites is a bad thing, and it's certainly good jounalistic practice.
What people are upset about is the US spying on the whole internet to do it.
In addition, there's the slippery-slope argument that once this mechanism of surveillance is in place, they'll use it to modify everyone's behaviour, not just "the bad guys."
But it's hardly controversial that journalists reveal hypocrisy, is it?
Sorry, I wish I had seen your comment two days ago when you posted...
I don't think Mr. Barker's argument was based solely on whether or not the US should be doing it, but also touched upon the journalistic standards behind the reporting. As an analogy:
Headline: Hacker News commentors unfazed by NSA controversy
Discussion repeatedly turned in favor of the NSA's targeting of Islamic extremists on Hacker News, a web forum frequented by many of the internet's technical elite. Summerdown2, a respected contributor, even went so far as to say that "of course the US should do to extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans." Though also mentioning vague concerns regarding NSA surveillance, he stressed that "it's hardly controversial that journalists reveal hypocrisy" and even went so far as to say that it was "certainly good journalistic practice."
You and I (and anyone else reading this thread) can easily look at the source comments and tell that my hypothetical news blurb is complete bullshit and the crux of your argument was left out entirely. So if the authors are willing to selectively quote from their expert source to avoid having their argument look bad, what else are they selectively quoting to make their arguments? This isn't like Reuters, AP, ITAR-TASS, Kyodo and half a dozen other major news agencies are on the ground writing about what they see as events unfold - Snowden chose which documents to gather, then chose Greenwald and Poitras specifically to give these documents to. These guys have the ultimate control over which documents get reported, what parts of the documents get shared with the public, and which documents get shared with which news agencies. The guy I quoted is stating that he feels Greenwald and the people he is working with had no qualms about selectively quoting from an expert source in order to keep their argument from looking weak. There's little risk to the authors in misquoting Stewart Baker - how many people read his blog? How many people here on HN know about the blog post before I linked to it? There's almost no risk whatsoever in selectively quoting a document from Snowden to make their point - no one has access to it except for the NSA and whoever Greenwald has allowed access.
From the NSA porno article, they pull out a few paragraphs to make their point - what's in the rest of the report? If the information regarding the inconsistency in the public/private lives of those 6 individuals was documented in a "previous SIGINT assessment report", why are they showing us this report instead of that one? Was that other report sent to the Departments of Justice, Commerce and the Drug Enforcement Agency, too? If the information in that other report wasn't sent to them, what information on those 6 individuals was in this report that would have been of interest? Better yet, why can't Greenwald just redact the identifying information and let us read the whole damn report for ourselves?
And it's not just that one. Here's a paragraph from a recent Washington Post article[1]:
One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.
I have no idea who is saying what in that paragraph, beyond the fact that an anonymous collection manager said "we are getting vast volumes".
Why were the specific encryption systems that the NSA had compromised and the countries targeted redacted from the source documents that we were shown[2] in the BULLRUN leak? Everyone's up in arms about Dual EC PRNG, but that might not even be what that document was refering to. It would be trivial for the media to reveal it and end all doubt, but keeping it hidden and instead writing about how the NSA is betraying our trust and compromising the security of the same crypto systems that we all use makes a better headline.
Or one could ask why we only got a limited subset of the PRISM slides. What else is in there? Why can't we see it? Would that information invalidate their argument?
I see it a little differently, though I agree with your basic point about not being able to work out the whole truth from only partial information.
The reasons I'm happy to give Greenwald's NSA reporting a (qualified) pass on this are:
1) He (and a few others) are the only source of information we have on the level of surveillance we're all exposed to. Greenwald is a commentator speaking up to power, and the justification I see is that there is a basic asymmetry in that power. Without these stories, no-one would be challenging the surveillance.
Note that I'm not giving him a pass because the stories are unsupported. I'm giving him a (temporary) pass because so many have later been confirmed to be true. In essence, we need a debate on the level of surveillance a democracy will have, and without this as a catalyst, it would not be happening.
2) I suspect that a lot of these documents are highly sensitive. As much as I'd like a debate, I don't want to risk people's lives. Hence, if Greenwald produces the minimum documentation that still sparks reform, I think he's done us all a service.
Thanks for continuing the conversation - I don't think I've ever seen a thread continue on for a week here on HN. :)
I suspect that ultimately the truth lies somewhere in between the media's portrayal of the NSA and the administration's own description - there are likely privacy and/or oversight issues at play, but I don't buy the prevailing attitude that the NSA is a rogue agency that is sweeping up everything it can simply for the purpose of sweeping up everything it can.
As a journalist, any time Greenwald wants to release information he needs to evaluate what effect his reporting will have on his journalistic reputation alongside the profitability of his reporting. I think he's unlikely to ever write an article that states that the NSA is doing something beneficial to national interests - it won't bring in nearly as many readers as a story on overzealous infringing of privacy, and it could potentially call into question his previous reporting.
That's not to say that you can't have reporting that's both balanced and worth reading. I've found some of the NY Times' reporting on the NSA to be fairly interesting. In particular, "No Morsel Too Miniscule for Consuming NSA"[1], despite the sensational title, was fairly balanced; definitely not propaganda, but at the same time not falling into the trap of saying "the NSA is likely watching you, your friends and your family 24/7". They go on for 7 pages describing the NSA's problems and successes, inefficiencies, bureaucracy, etc. They manage to ask the reader to call into question privacy issues and ask whether we're getting our tax dollar's worth in terms of foreign intelligence delivered - and they managed to do it without whipping their readers into fear-driven frenzy. It astounds me that two different news agencies can look at the documents that Snowden leaked and get such different interpretations.
Why are you putting discredit radicalizer in scare quotes? The released NSA document shows that the act to discredit radicalizers is used in a very specific context. I feel as if you're trying to twist it and make it ambiguous.
Interesting... There are 535 high-profile Americans the NSA could check, many of whom have fascinating porn-search histories and radical (often anti-porn) public agendas.
I believe that the number of politicians being extorted by various secret services based on such information to act/vote in a particular way (in the US and abroad) to be much higher. In particular, many politicians in the EU seem to be aligned with US policies (those unpopular in the EU) a bit too much. They've probably got a lot to hide..
From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this.
I know this will make me unpopular amongst this crowd, but The truth is, I'm far more afraid of data like this getting into the wrong hands because it's being stored improperly or insecurely, than I am of government being malicious with it. Heck, I'm more afraid of my insurance adjuster than I am a malicious cop.