U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet

There's this current story about massive snooping into telephone conversations by the NSA. The NSA and CIA and other spy agencies are supposed to turn their efforts on targets outside the U.S. but under Bush Administration edict they've been working inside the U.S., in opposition to U.S. law. Yes, the President has been breaking the law.

The conduct of the U.S. Administration is that this is not a war on Terror, but instead a war on Personal Freedom.

Consider: US plans massive data sweep Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far? (Christian Science Monitor, February 09, 2006)

The article describes a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio.

The project it describes is very similar to the process of search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Technorati, etc. It's to scoop up a vast amount of data from the Internet and to draw out extra information from it. The technical phrase is "data mining" which is a practice of taking one data source, and putting it to a different use. Data mining is widely performed in businesses.

For example credit card companies perform data mining to detect fraudulent use of credit cards. e.g. they might look for your card being used to make an abnormally large purchase, or a purchase made far from your normal area of activity. And if they see it, they could give you a phone call saying "we noticed suspicious activity, did you make purchase X on date Y".

So long as the ADVISE system is collecting publicly available data, is there a problem?

The difference here between the government activity and what, e.g. Google, would do with it is: The government is looking for "terrorists", and the government has people with guns who are known to use those guns to kill people.

The problem with the government's hunt for terrorists, is they've got a rather loose definition and they make mistakes. For example in the Extraordinary Rendition stories, one was a German tourist who the U.S. agents identified as Al Qaeda linked, they kidnapped him, flew him to Afghanistan, tortured him for months, eventually realized they mistakenly identified him, and dropped him off penniless in Kosovo. And for loose definitions of terrorism, we can think of the people arrested for "ecoterrorism" where they are taking their protests of e.g. logging activities to doing property damage and whatnot. Sure, commiting property damage is illegal and they should be punished, but labeling them as terrorists is going too far.

In other words, I think it's legal to collect data that's publicly available (e.g. published on a web site) and to make secondary uses of it. If it's good enough for Google or Technorati, then it's good enough for the U.S. Government. But there needs to be oversight and measurement to ensure they don't overstep themselves.

For example, what if they made a deal with Google or other search engines to capture some of the private search query data which the search engines have on hand. That is, each time you make a search engine query, the company running your preferred search engine receives your IP address, your web browser, your operating system, etc, along with the query terms. If you've registered with the search engine (e.g. signed into your "mail" account) then the search engine can know exactly who you are.

Now, that's private data which the search engine collects. One way they use it is to further tailor your search results based on past queries you've made. But what if they began handing that data over to the government, which the government would than incorporate into this ADVISE system?

Would you get a knock on the door just because you had a hankering to learn about terrorists and did a lot of google searches about activities done by terrorists? Or you wanted to see for yourself just how easy (or not) it is to get information on making nuclear bombs?

I want to close by reminding the reader of the Total Information Awareness system. TIA is/was a Department of Defense project to that acted as an umbrella over several inter-related projects, some of which would use data mining techniques of the kind described in the CS Monitor article. While a couple minor TIA projects were shut down, it's clear the bulk of them went forward, and that the intent of the Government for several years has been to create a technologically advanced system that can effectively track every action and look for "dangerous" patterns.

The TIA existed before the September 11, 2001 events which "changed everything". The TIA existed before the Bush administration. This is just an ongoing desire by government agencies to vastly step up their capabilities to spy on everyone.

Re: Federal law may make blogging at work illegal

I have in front of me an article with a misleading title, but talking about something with wide ranging consequences. The U.S. Federal Election Commission oversees the conduct of U.S. elections. Over the last year or two they've been mulling the role of blogging in politics, and some bloggers have been really concerned over whether a bungling government agency might accidently strangle blogging.

See, it's clear that some political bloggers are being paid under the covers to promote political agendas. You might think that falls under "free speach", but it's really paid advertising. There's an existing rule that paid political advertising needs to be declared to the FEC and also carry notices as to who placed the advertising. This helps the public in interpreting the message.

Federal law may make blogging at work illegal Law falls under campaign-finance reform (By: Justin Malvin, California Aggie, December 9, 2005)

The article refers to this blog posting: The Reformers' Trojan Horse: Killing the Office Blogger ... and I think it's fair to summarize that blog posting as one mans theory and personal interpretation of a rule proposal being made by the FEC.

The danger proposed is this ... the FEC proposed rule that is cited limits an employee of a company to blogging (on company time, using company equipment) for more than an hour per week. According to a quote in the California Aggie article, this is just an extension of an existing rule about employee use of company time and equipment. And, to my eye this is a very benign rule as one would expect employers to be really concerned about employees blogging while on the clock.

To my eye they're making a mountain out of a molehill, and along the way trying to smear the FEC for some reason.

It's clear that while an employee is "on the clock" and using company equipment, they should be performing their job. What's the big deal?

Especially as one big concern in election law is a corporation using their employees as political activists. Suppose a company wanted to influence an election? One way is to tell your employees "blog supportively of candidate X" and lead them to believe candidate X will be good for their jobs. For example a few years ago when the push to expense stock options was being made, Scott McNealy sent an email to Sun's employees (where I work) exhorting us to support efforts to prevent that rule from being enacted. He claimed it was an important part of how we get paid, but I wonder also just how much his personal interest swayed his opinion (as a huge part of his "salary" is stock options).

I think political blogging does need some attention by the regulators. There is a huge amount of room for political blogging to affect elections. The 2004 election cycle was a prime example with bloggers playing a big role in taking down several big figures, and in general playing a big role in shaping the debate. I think that bloggers who are being paid by a political organization to blog need to declare it both to the FEC and in a banner on their blog, and that doing so would be a simple extension of existing laws.

At the same time there's a vast quantity of blogging which isn't political and doesn't need FEC regulations. So I expect the FEC to be careful in defining just what blogging the rules apply to.

Dennis Hastert, U.S. Speaker of the House, is now a blogger

On the official Speaker of the House web site, Dennis Hastert has started a blog.

So far there's two entries. There's no RSS feed, that I can find, which will limit the impact. But then there's plenty of places where an RSS feed would be fabulous, such as their "newsroom" page, but the RSS feed is lacking.

Corporate blogging & politics

This is an issue that's been rumbling around for awhile - Should bloggers be considered under campaign finance regulations? Should bloggers be regulated?

Hmmm...

With 20 million or more blogs out there it'd be hard to say anything concrete about the field, because the field is so diverse. For example, many blogs are there just to allow communication between family members, and have zero political content. Others deal with various other topics. Clearly most of the bloggers ought not be regulated because what they're doing is unrelated to the conduct of the political system.

Just as clearly there are many politically-oriented bloggers, some of whom are very popular. Should they be regulated?

Beware of the "Halli-bloggers"! If bloggers get the same press freedoms as traditional media, what will prevent corporations like Halliburton from using blogs to pour unregulated money into politics? (By Zachary Roth, July 9, 2005, salon.com)

The Federal Election Commission has been considering this question for awhile, and their deliberations are leading to the above questionable scenario. What if some big corporation (e.g. Halliburton) causes a blog site to be created, and the blog site is given a mission to be Halliburtons mouthpiece. This could be done secretly in a way that makes the blog site appear to be legitimate. But, it would be Halliburton's operation and activisming on whatever cause Halliburon wants to push (e.g. launch another war somewhere, so that Halliburton would get more contracts for reconstruction).

Let me suggest that there are probably already laws which define what a political activist is, and the occasions under which political activists should be regulated. It's merely a matter of extending those laws to cover bloggers.

I say this because there's nothing special about bloggers. All they do is write, and their writing platform exists on a web site. Big deal.

If a political-activist who happens to be a blogger is truly independant, great. If that person is being funded by so-and-so then that should be disclosed.

That might not be enough, however. For example it's relatively easy to put advertising and whatnot on a blog site, and thereby earn an income that way. Done well enough the blogger running the site could be independantly supported, yet they could also be in cahoots with some corporate place, and they wouldn't have to disclose anything.

It's clear though that in politics and political activism that a lot of skulduggery goes on, and it's best for there to be disclosure of support and other connections.

Should you want to blog anonymously ...

Blogging and Running Your Website Anonymously - An Introduction

It's a set of recommendations by someone who says:

I blog everyday. I blog about my company. I enjoy talking about stuff that could get me fired. The hot and sexy stuff that is dangerous is what draws tons of people to my blog everyday. By using the tools listed above (and a lot of common sense), I exercise my freedom to whine and moan and groan and complain. All in the safety of my own blog.

San Francisco to regulate political blogging?

On slashdot we have an article claiming that San Francisco is going to regulate blogging. Namely, that a new ordinance would require bloggers to register with the city Ethics commission. This follows on the heels of a couple reports that the Federal Election Commission wants to regulate blogging. Fortunately in the San Francisco case the claim is overblown.

The source is a posting on the Personal Democracy Forum, San Francisco May Regulate Blogging which refers to an ordinance filing. Apparently Michael Bassik didn't read the ordinance, or else wishes to blow it out of proportion for some ends of his own.

The ordinance says over and over, that the ones who must register with the city ethics commission are those who are either paying, or receiving money, for electioneering communictions.

How this would apply to a blogger is that if the blogger is writing about candidates in an election. Hence, they would be doing electioneering communications. NOTE that the ordinance doesn't mention blogging by name.

But the ordinance applies only when there is an exchange of money meant to pay for that electioneering communication. Which is very fair, because it is only appropriate that payments for electioneering communications be made clear. When a political message goes out, we ought to know who paid for that message, because part of interpreting a message is knowing who it is that's speaking. This applies to blogging as well as handing leaflets out at the train station, putting door hangers on peoples front doors, running television advertising, and more.

Election Commission Urges Finance Rules for Online Politics

Election Commission Urges Finance Rules for Online Politics
(By GLEN JUSTICE ; Published: March 25, 2005, NY Times)

Okay, here it is. The FEC has unveiled their proposal after having talked about it for awhile. Unfortunately the NY Times article doesn't link to anything on the FEC website. But looking at the FEC website, I find (see below) that what happened is an open FEC meeting in which a proposal document was presented.

This is a little reassuring

Other provisions seem to indicate that the panel might be leaning away from heavy regulations on most "bloggers," whose online commentary played a major role in last year's election.

UPDATE: Found an "Open Meeting Agenda" for March 24, 2005 covering this topic. The agenda document is here.

We have 60 days to submit comments. If I count right that is Monday, May 23, 2005. We can email comments to internet@fec.gov. We are supposed to be able to file comments through a website, regulations.gov, but the Federal Elections Commission section doesn't have this listed yet.

UPDATE: C|NET, which did a lot to publicize this originally, has an excellent review of the changes between this document and the prior one. See:

Bloggers narrowly dodge federal crackdown
(Published: March 24, 2005, 8:50 PM PST; By Declan McCullagh,
Staff Writer, CNET News.com)

Chill out?

Previously I noted a C|NET article claiming the Federal Election Commission is planning to shut down political blogging. That article was written by an FEC member who made that claim, that the FEC is considering tagging political blogs as some kind of contribution to political campaigns.

Now, another FEC member has an article on C|NET saying to calm down, the FEC doesn't even have draft rule written yet.

Bloggers, chill out already!
(March 7, 2005, 10:53 AM PT
By Ellen Weintraub, Commissioner, Federal Election Commission)

Now, telling us to chill out just gets my dander up. The freedoms we enjoy in this country include freedom of speach, and those freedoms do not come lightly or for free. We the people, for whom this country was founded, are duty bound to defend the freedoms we have. Being told to chill out as if we're unruly children being put into our place just is not acceptible behavior by our employees (the FEC commissioners, as federal employees, work for US).

It is helpful that Ms. Weintraub has explained the process. This gives us an understanding of what they're going through, and a partial explanation of why there is little cause for concern at this moment. At the same time this is an issue the public needs to track, and then comment on.

The coming crackdown(???) on blogging

Hum, this is very bizarre. Apparently the U.S. Federal Elections Committee is considering tough rules about making links to a campaign website. That it would become semi-illegal to make a link to a campaign website, no matter how much you want to promote that candidate.

The coming crackdown on blogging: (March 3, 2005, 4:00 AM PT By Declan McCullagh Staff Writer, CNET News.com) An interview with Bradley Smith of the FEC.

The theory Bradley Smith describes is this. A link to a website helps the popularity of that web site, and drives traffic to the web site. This much is very true, and I cover this in great detail at "Building and Promoting your own Web Site". What the FEC sees in addition is that for a political campaign, the visitors you send to the campaign web site may turn into donors to the campaign.

I find this very strange. This seems to be the crux:

If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.

The FEC seems to be operating under the theory that the web site operator should have other peoples contributions should count against their campaign donation limits. Why?

But he offers this other point of view:

Corporations aren't allowed to donate to campaigns. Suppose a corporation devotes 20 minutes of a secretary's time and $30 in postage to sending out letters for an executive. As a result, the campaign raises $35,000. Do we value the violation on the amount of corporate resources actually spent, maybe $40, or the $35,000 actually raised? The commission has usually taken the view that we value it by the amount raised. It's still going to be difficult to value the link, but the value of the link will go up very quickly.

In other words, on the one hand it's strange to have others contributions counted against my donation limit. On the other hand it's very easy for to amplify contributions to ones preferred candidate through an action like Smith describes.

The internet-equivalent action to the evil-corporate story proposed is to flood the web with sites linking the desired site. A simple rule of thumb is that the more links there are pointing to a site, the more popular it is, and therefore the higher the search engines will rank that site.

Suppose someone wanted to tilt the search engines in favor of one candidate or another? Now, a campaign could trust that their supporters will naturally build web pages with links to the campaigns web site. That doesn't involve any evil shenanigans to try and tilt the election, and is an organic activity that should be encouraged. It's just like putting campaign signs in your front lawn.

What would be an evil shenanigan would be to robotically create a zillion sites each pointing to a campaign website. It's just a matter of writing some software to do so.

Senators McCain and Feingold have argued that we have to regulate the Internet, that we have to regulate e-mail. They sued us in court over this and they won.

EEK!

Blogging lashback from The Media

There's been a spate recently of people holding positions of power being knocked off by "bloggers". This includes Dan Rather, longtime anchor for the CBS Evening News, Eason Jordan, longtime bigwig at CNN, and some others. It seems there's something like a possee of people roaming about looking for heads to target.

e.g. this NY Times article:

Resignation at CNN Shows the Growing Influence of Blogs
(By KATHERINE Q. SEELYE; Published: February 14, 2005)

It starts with the story of Eason Jordan, a longtime bigwig with CNN as I said. For example, he was part of the team responsible for getting the live reporting from Baghdad during the first Gulf War (Peter Arnett and crew).

Speaking at a panel at the 2005 World Economic Forum (Davos) he was reported, by a blogger attending the conference, to have claimed the U.S. Military was killing journalists.

Mr. Jordan, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, apparently said, according to various witnesses, that he believed the United States military had aimed at journalists and killed 12 of them. There is some uncertainty over his precise language and the forum, which videotaped the conference, has not released the tape. When he quit Friday night, Mr. Jordan said in a statement that, "I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists."

This claim rocketed around the "blogosphere", especially among the "conservatives" who saw it as evidence of the "liberal media bias". They eventually got enough ruckus going that he had to resign.

The NY Times article has a weakness. They are taking the same brush, that bloggers are hunting for heads, and applying this to all blogging. Whoops, that's obviously bogus. Sorry NY Times, try to be more accurate next time.

In any case the more interesting point is the purpose pursued by blogging.

Mr. Abovitz, who started it all, said he hoped bloggers could develop loftier goals than destroying people's careers. "If you're going to do this open-source journalism, it should have a higher purpose," he said. "At times it did seem like an angry mob, and an angry mob using high technology, that's not good."

The MSM (Main Stream Media) has developed one method for having some certainty over truth. That's the use of editors, and the journalistic ethics. It works fairly well, but we also see many instances where this system failed. e.g. that since September 11, 2001 journalists have generally given the Bush administration free reign to lie and cheat the system without putting the full light of impartial examination onto those lies.

If the main stream media had been doing its job, would this ridiculous war in Iraq have happened? This war in Iraq is without proper legal justification, nor was it rationally the best move to have taken (the enemy was in Afghanistan, not Iraq).

They, the main stream media, are supposed to be the fact checkers, but they fell down horribly on the job. Thank goodness that the progress of technology has given the people a tool with which to exercise their voice on the world stage.