All-seeing eye
Electronic surveillance on the guard of freedom - or is it a threat to it?
If a graduate of the Faculty of Chemistry and a Muslim by religion, goes to a low-paying job in a pharmacy, then what can this mean? Does he just need a temporary part-time job or does he want to gain access to potassium nitrate (used as fertilizer and in the manufacture of explosives)? What if some Arabic names make money transfers to him? What if he buys a plane ticket for the same flight with one of these senders, however, they sit in different parts of the cabin and purchase tickets separately, and pay in cash? What if his credit card reports include purchases of devices with a clock mechanism?
')
If the competent authorities had the opportunity to collect such data bit by bit, this would open up new possibilities for frustrating the insidious plans of unsuited terrorists. At the same time, it would turn into a lot of suspected innocent citizens who would have the negligence to show not quite standard behavior.
In November 2002, there was news that the Pentagon was developing a secret program called Total Information Awareness. The purpose of this program was to identify suspicious patterns of behavior using data mining technology, also known as pattern recognition technology, which involves computer processing of large amounts of electronic information. After the public raised a frustrated squeal, the name had to be changed to Anti-Terrorism Information Control (TIA). However, this did not help to stop the squall of protests and in September 2003 Congress stopped funding the program.
Nevertheless, six of the seven constituent parts of the TIA program continued to exist as separate secret projects with secret funding. The February report of the US Department of National Security mentions three programs aimed at identifying suspicious patterns of movement of goods. Such projects are booming, among other countries in China, Britain, France, Israel and Germany.
American human rights activists are fighting hard against datamining, which the FBI has made its main tool for spying on citizens. They report that in recent months, the administration has been trying to legalize such programs, which are conducted under the exclusive leadership of the White House, bypassing Congress. If the law is passed, the special services of the federal and local levels will receive more authority to exchange operational data. On September 20, the US Attorney General filed a petition to federal court to grant judicial immunity to telecommunications companies that provide international phone call data to special services.
A month ago, after a meeting of the Department of Justice, about a secret FBI plans for using data timing technology, a group of American congressmen sent a complaint to the Minister of Justice, claiming that holding such programs would allow the FBI to monitor citizens "without any reason for suspicion." The project in question may be announced in the coming weeks.
In Europe, at the moment, such programs are not conducted, at least openly. However, according to the agreement concluded in July last year, airlines operating flights from the European Union to the United States must provide information to the American special services about the tickets booked, as well as data obtained by the airport security. This may include the racial and religious affiliation of the passenger, occupation, family ties, hotel room booked and credit card details. Internet service providers and telephone operators in the EU are now obliged to save for two years (not yet transmitting automatically where necessary) the data on which websites their customers visited, as well as the data of telephone calls that they made or received (but not the content of the conversations themselves).
Private business does not miss the opportunity to be welded to total surveillance
The Norwegian company FAST, which Microsoft bought this year for $ 1.3 billion, collects data from more than 300 sources (including the Internet) for national datamining programs commissioned by many countries in Asia, Europe and North America. In April, members of the British Parliament learned that almost a year earlier, the country's interior minister secretly allowed to provide foreign intelligence services with license plate data obtained using roadside surveillance cameras. In June, the Swedish parliament voted to adopt a law on a national data-mining program, which the Minister of Defense strenuously promoted. Starting from the first of January of next year, this will provide wide powers for monitoring international electronic messages and phone calls.
The rapid development of data processing capabilities based on the technology of datamining allows to expand the interpretation of the suspicious. In June, the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security together with a group of police chiefs published the Suspicious Activity Report - a Support and Implementation Project. This document requires law enforcement officers to explain citizens who, among other things, use binoculars, measure the number of steps, make notes in a notebook, draw plans and schemes, change the appearance, enter into conversations with security officers and photograph objects “not having significant aesthetic value. "
Companies, and in particular the companies that provide credit reports, usually enjoy greater freedom than state authorities regarding the provision of customer personal information to third parties. They treat special services as the most appreciative customers. The head of Visual Analytics from the state of Maryland, which services data-mining software commissioned by various intelligence agencies, reports that the amount of data that such companies supply is “very significant.” An expert from UNIMAS University in Malaysia says that companies are selling security services to access their databases "at a level that you never dreamed of."
Legal issues regarding the use of government data stored in various companies are raised in the courts of many countries, including the US Supreme Court. However, judicial decisions, for the most part, are hardly able to seriously protect the integrity of personal data. A former legal adviser in the Senate and the Committee of Intelligence Structures Representatives reports that, thanks to improvements in datamining technology, the secret services find it possible, while remaining within court rulings, to extract as much data from it as was not envisaged by the court. For example, such lawsuits are usually associated with permission to use data from a particular source, such as bills for telephone company services. However, if you study several different databases at the same time, the value of this information will rapidly increase.
Internet surveillance is unfolding at a rapid pace. A datamining expert from the University of the German Armed Forces in Munich reports that many systems remotely analyze the content of web pages visited by citizens. A person who has ever visited the city of Peshawar, a stronghold of Islamic extremism in Pakistan, is considered more dangerous if he also has the imprudence to read the blog of a radical-minded Muslim priest. Well, if this priest also lives in Peshawar, then the personal level of suspicion of such a citizen increases dramatically. Through datamining, each citizen is assigned a personal level of suspicion, taking into account all the pages that are visited from this computer. For example, visiting a site on philatelicism reduces the overall level of suspicion.
Such profiles are built to a large extent using “emotional analysis”. The head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Arizona reports that emotional analysis by American and international intelligence agencies is one of the most advanced and promising technologies. Its purpose is to identify changes in the behavior and language of Internet users, determining when an aggressive young man begins to turn into a suicide bomber. For example, a citizen who has a noticeable interest in various Islamist sites, as well as entering into relevant discussions in forums, can be “flagged” by an emotional analysis program, if he begins to show signs of discontent and call for violence, spreading links to videos related to military topics. The head of the Laboratory also reports that the intelligence services of the United States, Canada, and China. Germany, Israel, Singapore and Taiwan are regular users of this technology.
Is there any real benefit?
Public Relations Director of the non-profit organization In-Q-Tel, which helps the CIA to keep abreast of the latest computer technology, believes that datamining now "plays a key role in our national security." However, privacy advocates are quite alarmed. One of the fears that is particularly strong in the UK, after the incident with the loss of the security services of a huge amount of sensitive personal information, is that the state can be even more irresponsible when dealing with important data than private companies. Another fear is that innocent people fall under the distribution, with subsequent investigation, or adding to the “list of observables”, which can be an obstacle for air travel, banking operations and getting work in places that use radioactive materials, for example , in the hospital. According to the United States Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is actively fighting surveillance, the list of people monitored at the FBI’s Terrorism Detection Center now contains more than 900,000 names, and the list is updated by 20,000 new ones every month. Removing a name from the list is extremely difficult.
At the same time, datamining can do a disservice not only with respect to civil liberties, but also with respect to national security. Such programs are often developed by the type of applications designed to track frauds that are used by financial institutions. However, terrorism is more cunning. Identifying hot spots online that could spill over into terrorist attacks is far more difficult. A former FBI agent, and now an ACLU consultant, reports that intelligence agencies rely excessively on the “magic elixir” of total informational surveillance, dragging over resources that could be directed to more productive activities, like working with informants and secret agents.
A former representative of the Chief Intelligence Agency of Jordan reports that in some extremist forums, various tricks are discussed in detail to help deceive the data mining system. For example, a phone call to a sex-to-phone service significantly reduces the level of suspicion of its owner. “The new generation of Alkaeda is actively using such tricks,” the former intelligence officer said.
Last year, two patterns detection programs, ADVISE and TALON, which were conducted by the US Department of State Security and the Pentagon, respectively, were stopped due to privacy issues. Nevertheless, fighters for the integrity of personal data, claim that other programs are still ongoing - and many are under the direction of the National Security Agency (NSA), with very limited outside control. The NSA states that everything happens with the knowledge of Congress. The NSA readily defends datamining, arguing that if current systems were used before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, much could have been prevented.
In July, after renewing the expired Foreign Intelligence Act (FISA), which was issued at the request of President Bush after September 11, the Congress, after intense verbal battles, set new limits for the security forces to eavesdrop on citizens. This is the main law governing the use of data mining, and which provides the authorities with extensive rights associated with electronic surveillance. However, civil liberty activists like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch claim that the updated law does not affect a number of secret and comprehensive NSA programs that collect data on a huge number of people, including millions of Americans. Much of this data comes from the ministry of finance.
Mr. Bush says FISA helps protect civil liberties "by carrying out the necessary intelligence activities." A few hours later, after the president signed the bill, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on the grounds that the additional powers in the area of ​​wiretapping, which is vested in the executive branch, are contrary to the constitution.
In 2001, pro-American forces expelled the Taliban from Afghanistan, destroying Alkaeda training camps. An adviser to the German armed forces on terrorism issues reports that during the retreat, the Islamists left out valuable data related to their communications on the Internet and other important plans in electronic form. These findings suggest that datamining and other pattern analysis systems can, and should, be applied. The German adviser believes that such techniques are “the only answers” ​​to jihadist extremism. It is this argument that is a formidable obstacle to the tireless fighters for civil liberties.
On this topic:
Skype: say we are not heard
Translation from English:
Roman Ravve
If a graduate of the Faculty of Chemistry and a Muslim by religion, goes to a low-paying job in a pharmacy, then what can this mean? Does he just need a temporary part-time job or does he want to gain access to potassium nitrate (used as fertilizer and in the manufacture of explosives)? What if some Arabic names make money transfers to him? What if he buys a plane ticket for the same flight with one of these senders, however, they sit in different parts of the cabin and purchase tickets separately, and pay in cash? What if his credit card reports include purchases of devices with a clock mechanism?
')
If the competent authorities had the opportunity to collect such data bit by bit, this would open up new possibilities for frustrating the insidious plans of unsuited terrorists. At the same time, it would turn into a lot of suspected innocent citizens who would have the negligence to show not quite standard behavior.
In November 2002, there was news that the Pentagon was developing a secret program called Total Information Awareness. The purpose of this program was to identify suspicious patterns of behavior using data mining technology, also known as pattern recognition technology, which involves computer processing of large amounts of electronic information. After the public raised a frustrated squeal, the name had to be changed to Anti-Terrorism Information Control (TIA). However, this did not help to stop the squall of protests and in September 2003 Congress stopped funding the program.
Nevertheless, six of the seven constituent parts of the TIA program continued to exist as separate secret projects with secret funding. The February report of the US Department of National Security mentions three programs aimed at identifying suspicious patterns of movement of goods. Such projects are booming, among other countries in China, Britain, France, Israel and Germany.
American human rights activists are fighting hard against datamining, which the FBI has made its main tool for spying on citizens. They report that in recent months, the administration has been trying to legalize such programs, which are conducted under the exclusive leadership of the White House, bypassing Congress. If the law is passed, the special services of the federal and local levels will receive more authority to exchange operational data. On September 20, the US Attorney General filed a petition to federal court to grant judicial immunity to telecommunications companies that provide international phone call data to special services.
A month ago, after a meeting of the Department of Justice, about a secret FBI plans for using data timing technology, a group of American congressmen sent a complaint to the Minister of Justice, claiming that holding such programs would allow the FBI to monitor citizens "without any reason for suspicion." The project in question may be announced in the coming weeks.
In Europe, at the moment, such programs are not conducted, at least openly. However, according to the agreement concluded in July last year, airlines operating flights from the European Union to the United States must provide information to the American special services about the tickets booked, as well as data obtained by the airport security. This may include the racial and religious affiliation of the passenger, occupation, family ties, hotel room booked and credit card details. Internet service providers and telephone operators in the EU are now obliged to save for two years (not yet transmitting automatically where necessary) the data on which websites their customers visited, as well as the data of telephone calls that they made or received (but not the content of the conversations themselves).
Private business does not miss the opportunity to be welded to total surveillance
The Norwegian company FAST, which Microsoft bought this year for $ 1.3 billion, collects data from more than 300 sources (including the Internet) for national datamining programs commissioned by many countries in Asia, Europe and North America. In April, members of the British Parliament learned that almost a year earlier, the country's interior minister secretly allowed to provide foreign intelligence services with license plate data obtained using roadside surveillance cameras. In June, the Swedish parliament voted to adopt a law on a national data-mining program, which the Minister of Defense strenuously promoted. Starting from the first of January of next year, this will provide wide powers for monitoring international electronic messages and phone calls.
The rapid development of data processing capabilities based on the technology of datamining allows to expand the interpretation of the suspicious. In June, the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security together with a group of police chiefs published the Suspicious Activity Report - a Support and Implementation Project. This document requires law enforcement officers to explain citizens who, among other things, use binoculars, measure the number of steps, make notes in a notebook, draw plans and schemes, change the appearance, enter into conversations with security officers and photograph objects “not having significant aesthetic value. "
Companies, and in particular the companies that provide credit reports, usually enjoy greater freedom than state authorities regarding the provision of customer personal information to third parties. They treat special services as the most appreciative customers. The head of Visual Analytics from the state of Maryland, which services data-mining software commissioned by various intelligence agencies, reports that the amount of data that such companies supply is “very significant.” An expert from UNIMAS University in Malaysia says that companies are selling security services to access their databases "at a level that you never dreamed of."
Legal issues regarding the use of government data stored in various companies are raised in the courts of many countries, including the US Supreme Court. However, judicial decisions, for the most part, are hardly able to seriously protect the integrity of personal data. A former legal adviser in the Senate and the Committee of Intelligence Structures Representatives reports that, thanks to improvements in datamining technology, the secret services find it possible, while remaining within court rulings, to extract as much data from it as was not envisaged by the court. For example, such lawsuits are usually associated with permission to use data from a particular source, such as bills for telephone company services. However, if you study several different databases at the same time, the value of this information will rapidly increase.
Internet surveillance is unfolding at a rapid pace. A datamining expert from the University of the German Armed Forces in Munich reports that many systems remotely analyze the content of web pages visited by citizens. A person who has ever visited the city of Peshawar, a stronghold of Islamic extremism in Pakistan, is considered more dangerous if he also has the imprudence to read the blog of a radical-minded Muslim priest. Well, if this priest also lives in Peshawar, then the personal level of suspicion of such a citizen increases dramatically. Through datamining, each citizen is assigned a personal level of suspicion, taking into account all the pages that are visited from this computer. For example, visiting a site on philatelicism reduces the overall level of suspicion.
Such profiles are built to a large extent using “emotional analysis”. The head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Arizona reports that emotional analysis by American and international intelligence agencies is one of the most advanced and promising technologies. Its purpose is to identify changes in the behavior and language of Internet users, determining when an aggressive young man begins to turn into a suicide bomber. For example, a citizen who has a noticeable interest in various Islamist sites, as well as entering into relevant discussions in forums, can be “flagged” by an emotional analysis program, if he begins to show signs of discontent and call for violence, spreading links to videos related to military topics. The head of the Laboratory also reports that the intelligence services of the United States, Canada, and China. Germany, Israel, Singapore and Taiwan are regular users of this technology.
Is there any real benefit?
Public Relations Director of the non-profit organization In-Q-Tel, which helps the CIA to keep abreast of the latest computer technology, believes that datamining now "plays a key role in our national security." However, privacy advocates are quite alarmed. One of the fears that is particularly strong in the UK, after the incident with the loss of the security services of a huge amount of sensitive personal information, is that the state can be even more irresponsible when dealing with important data than private companies. Another fear is that innocent people fall under the distribution, with subsequent investigation, or adding to the “list of observables”, which can be an obstacle for air travel, banking operations and getting work in places that use radioactive materials, for example , in the hospital. According to the United States Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is actively fighting surveillance, the list of people monitored at the FBI’s Terrorism Detection Center now contains more than 900,000 names, and the list is updated by 20,000 new ones every month. Removing a name from the list is extremely difficult.
At the same time, datamining can do a disservice not only with respect to civil liberties, but also with respect to national security. Such programs are often developed by the type of applications designed to track frauds that are used by financial institutions. However, terrorism is more cunning. Identifying hot spots online that could spill over into terrorist attacks is far more difficult. A former FBI agent, and now an ACLU consultant, reports that intelligence agencies rely excessively on the “magic elixir” of total informational surveillance, dragging over resources that could be directed to more productive activities, like working with informants and secret agents.
A former representative of the Chief Intelligence Agency of Jordan reports that in some extremist forums, various tricks are discussed in detail to help deceive the data mining system. For example, a phone call to a sex-to-phone service significantly reduces the level of suspicion of its owner. “The new generation of Alkaeda is actively using such tricks,” the former intelligence officer said.
Last year, two patterns detection programs, ADVISE and TALON, which were conducted by the US Department of State Security and the Pentagon, respectively, were stopped due to privacy issues. Nevertheless, fighters for the integrity of personal data, claim that other programs are still ongoing - and many are under the direction of the National Security Agency (NSA), with very limited outside control. The NSA states that everything happens with the knowledge of Congress. The NSA readily defends datamining, arguing that if current systems were used before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, much could have been prevented.
In July, after renewing the expired Foreign Intelligence Act (FISA), which was issued at the request of President Bush after September 11, the Congress, after intense verbal battles, set new limits for the security forces to eavesdrop on citizens. This is the main law governing the use of data mining, and which provides the authorities with extensive rights associated with electronic surveillance. However, civil liberty activists like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch claim that the updated law does not affect a number of secret and comprehensive NSA programs that collect data on a huge number of people, including millions of Americans. Much of this data comes from the ministry of finance.
Mr. Bush says FISA helps protect civil liberties "by carrying out the necessary intelligence activities." A few hours later, after the president signed the bill, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on the grounds that the additional powers in the area of ​​wiretapping, which is vested in the executive branch, are contrary to the constitution.
In 2001, pro-American forces expelled the Taliban from Afghanistan, destroying Alkaeda training camps. An adviser to the German armed forces on terrorism issues reports that during the retreat, the Islamists left out valuable data related to their communications on the Internet and other important plans in electronic form. These findings suggest that datamining and other pattern analysis systems can, and should, be applied. The German adviser believes that such techniques are “the only answers” ​​to jihadist extremism. It is this argument that is a formidable obstacle to the tireless fighters for civil liberties.
On this topic:
Skype: say we are not heard
Translation from English:
Roman Ravve
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/41980/
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