Twitter Tapping - government agents tracking public information

An NY TImes editorial Twitter Tapping discusses a Freedom of Information Act suit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. There is widespread understanding that government agents are snooping around social networking sites looking for clues of nefarious activities.

The issue seems to be that various government agencies are hoovering around public social networks like twitter looking for clues. However it's not just public social networks as the editorial mentions Facebook specifically, and most of the social data on Facebook is supposedly under the control of privacy settings.

The editorial explains: The suit seeks to uncover what guidelines these agencies have about this activity, including information about whether agents are permitted to use fake identities or to engage in subterfuge, such as tricking people into accepting Facebook friend requests. For example there's some data on Facebook visible only to "friends" and a fake friend request could give some agency access to otherwise private information.

Something to think about is the distinction between publicly disclosed and privately disclosed information. Twitter is a public site, and every tweet is public. Facebook however is largely private with the information only visible to friends (depending on each users privacy settings). Obviously publicly disclosed information can be freely read by anyone, right? What kind of privacy expectations could one have for tweets or other publicly disclosed postings? Facebook goes to great length to create an illusion of privacy but maybe the government has a special arrangement with Facebook?

The EFF press release (below) has this to say: "Millions of people use social networking sites like Facebook every day, disclosing lots of information about their private lives," said James Tucker, a student working with EFF through the Samuelson Clinic. "As Congress debates new privacy laws covering sites like Facebook, lawmakers and voters alike need to know how the government is already using this data and what is at stake."

The U.S. government has been, for a long time, increasing its ubiquitous surveillance capabilities. It's worthwhile for more to be known about this since Americans have a huge expectation of privacy and belief that "Big Brother" will never happen in America. (see Big Brother is watching us all)

During this decade the "war on terror" has of course been a major concern and it seems some privacy intrusions have been instituted under the guise of finding and stopping terrorism. But does this supposed war on terror justify the government in destroying core qualities of America?

Some of the intrusions are "link analysis" where the FBI is looking at "envelope" information in emails and telephone calls of pretty much everybody. (see: F.B.I. Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets and Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York Times)

Satellite images are an example of public information being consulted by spy agencies. I say "public" because something visible from an orbiting satellite can be seen by any number of commercial or government owned cameras. (see An example of likely legal U.S. spying inside U.S.)

This sort of effort is very similar to the programs under the umbrella Total Information Awareness (TIA) project formerly run by DARPA and (supposedly) canceled. However various elements of the TIA have obviously lived on. The TIA was publicly disclosed 2001, a time before widespread use of social networking websites, but clearly this kind of information hoovering is exactly what the TIA would have developed. (see DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate)

Lawsuit Demands Answers About Social-Networking Surveillance

Government Agencies Withholding Information on Data-Gathering from Facebook, Twitter, and Other Online Communities

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), working with the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Samuelson Clinic), filed suit today against a half-dozen government agencies for refusing to disclose their policies for using social networking sites for investigations, data-collection, and surveillance.

Recent news reports have publicized the government's use of social networking data as evidence in various investigations, and Congress is currently considering several pieces of legislation that may increase protections for consumers who use social-networking websites and other online tools. In response, the Samuelson Clinic made over a dozen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on behalf of EFF to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies, asking for information about how the government collects and uses this sensitive information.

"Millions of people use social networking sites like Facebook every day, disclosing lots of information about their private lives," said James Tucker, a student working with EFF through the Samuelson Clinic. "As Congress debates new privacy laws covering sites like Facebook, lawmakers and voters alike need to know how the government is already using this data and what is at stake."

When several agencies did not respond to the FOIA requests, the Samuelson Clinic filed suit on behalf of EFF. The lawsuit demands immediate processing and release of all records concerning policies for the use of social networking sites in government investigations.

"Internet users deserve to know what information is collected, under what circumstances, and who has access to it," said Shane Witnov, a law student also working on the case. "These agencies need to abide by the law and release their records on social networking surveillance."

For the full complaint:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/social_network/social_networking_FOIA_complaint_final.pdf

Total Information Awareness lives on...

The Total Information Awareness system is a truly scary program which existed for some time inside DARPA, the U.S.A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's general attributes were to create an ubiquitous spying program that could track and data mine vast swaths of information and supposedly through intelligent data mining techniques detect terrorist threats before they become real threats. To do so requires pulling together a wide range of data such as phone calls, emails, credit cards, etc, and looking for patterns you define as dangerous.

e.g. If the intelligence people had known to look for 20 cash purchases of one way airline tickets to people with middle eastern names, then the 9/11 attacks could have been avoided. I heard that observation in October 2001 but since then we've learned the government knew about the 9/11 plans and failed to do anything with that knowledge.

It's obviously threatening us individual citizens with living under a big brother police state where the government knows everything we're doing all in the name of heading off supposed threats before they happen. In 2002 when the program became public there was a big uproar and the congress passed some resolution banning parts of the TIA project. But parts of the project have lived on, in secrecy, under different names.

There had been a string of disclosures over the years since. Unfortunately the revelation of this story has been spread out enough to keep most from connecting the dots. Since the Obama inauguration in Jan 20, 2009 a former NSA intelligence analyst, Russell Tice, has been in the news whistleblowing about the program.

TIA Lives On and Total Information Awareness Lives On Inside the National Security Agency and Massive privacy violation by U.S. government are articles from 2006 going over revelations of a massive NSA program to track phone calls and at the time they promised they were only tracking people with terrorist connections.

Department of Homeland Security Wants to Spy on Americans (May 2008) goes over a proposed expansion of information sharing between military intelligence services and state and local law enforcement agencies. There have historically been barriers blocking routine information sharing between military and police. I believe one reason for such a block is the risk of forming a police state. The military's job is to protect the country against enemies whereas the role of police agencies is to keep the peace. The two have different agendas and methods and mind-sets, and if you focus the military on the citizens there is a risk that the citizens become the enemy. The proposed expansion of information sharing is said, by this article, to be illegal and unconstitutional. It was proposed during the Bush Administration.

NSA Whistleblower: Wiretaps Were Combined with Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens NSA whistleblower Russell Tice was on Keith Olbermann's Countdown (MSNBC) program with revelations that the National Security Agency spied on individual U.S. journalists, entire U.S. news agencies as well as "tens of thousands" of other Americans. This revelation claimed the illegal wiretap program was greatly expanded from the claims made when it was first revealed back in 2005-6. Back then it was claimed they only wiretapped international calls and only when there were connections with terrorists. Tice is claiming there was no such limit, that they wiretapped a much broader set of people including a wide ranging set of journalists.

Countdown: Whistleblower exposes spying on Americans

.msnbcLinks {font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 425px;} .msnbcLinks a {text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px;} .msnbcLinks a:link, .msnbcLinks a:visited {color: #5799db !important;} .msnbcLinks a:hover, .msnbcLinks a:active {color:#CC0000 !important;}

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Ars technica: NSA whistleblower says journos were targeted

examiner.com: Did the credit card companies provide transaction records of Americans?

Alternet.org: Whistleblower Levels Shocking Allegations at Bush's Spying Programs

Article Reference: 

TIA Lives On

Total Information Awareness Lives On Inside the National Security Agency

Department of Homeland Security Wants to Spy on Americans

NSA Whistleblower: Wiretaps Were Combined with Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens

extvideo: 

Big Brother is watching us all

The governments want to watch everything we are doing, and this isn't frenzied crackpot conspiracy theories, it is the truth. Big Brother is watching us all is a BBC report going over some plans which is more than remniscient of: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

Gait DNA, for example, is creating an individual code for the way I walk. Their goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are. In the Total Information Awareness project these elements were covered by the Human ID at a Distance (HumanID) sub-project. The idea is to recognize people even in a crowded place, and to: "As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challapa. "These are all things that don't need the cooperation of the individual." And there was, a couple years ago, an attempt to use this sort of technology at a pro football game in Florida, ostensibly there was a "terrorist threat" which gave them a reason to deploy this technology to test how well it recognizes people.

The issue may be that facial recognition may not be enough to robustly identify someone. It seems likely they could estimate height and weight through image analysis, and by analyzing enough corroborating factors you should be able to make a good identification.

"Unless we're going to train every American citizen and soldier in 16 different languages we have to develop a technology that allows them to understand - whatever country they are in - what's going on around them. I hope in the future we'll be able to have conversations, if say you're speaking in French and I'm speaking in English, and it will be natural." .. "And the computer will do the translation?" In the Total Information Awareness project this was covered by the Babylon, Communicator, and Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text (EARS) subprojects. Many of the TIA subprojects involved language translation no doubt due to the plethora of human languages.

"And this idea about a total surveillance society," I asked. "Is that science fiction?"..."No, that's not science fiction. We're developing an unmanned airplane - a UAV - which may be able to stay up five years with cameras on it, constantly being cued to look here and there. This is done today to a limited amount in Baghdad. But it's the way to go." This wasn't covered by a TIA project however there has been increasing use of these unmanned aircraft, especially in the Iraq war. As I have covered before: UAV's coming to the U.S. for more spying on U.S. Citizens it is planned that UAV's will be used inside the United States.

The last item mentioned does border on science fiction, but is actual science. Oceanit has developed Sense Through The Wall (STTW) which detects minute radio signals emitted by human beings. It is able to detect these signals through walls, and they believe in the future that the technology will determine heart rate, breathing, etc. In other words, they'll have the makings of a tricorder, literally.

Article Reference:

Big Brother is watching us all

DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

Oceanit

extvideo: 

Son of TIA Will Mine Asian Data

The Total Information Awareness system was an overarching plan for ubiquitous spying upon U.S. citizens and essentially upon "all" commerce and other activity which the U.S. spies might think to call a threat. It was later named the Terrorism Information Awareness system, because Terrorism became a big thing. Either way TIA promised to become the worst of our Big Brother fears. In 2003 the public became aware of the system and a bruhahahaha happened in Congress with a public shutdown of the project, including Admiral Poindexter having to resign from working for DARPA on the project.

The Wired article discusses a version of TIA developed by Singapore. The unveiling ceremony was led by, er, Admiral Poindexter. One of the project leaders had worked in DARPA on the TIA project. Hmm...

The article talks about adjustment to the plan based on the reaction seen in the U.S.A. The Singapore version is concentrating on "open source" intelligence data, which would be all the information published in the open. This would include news articles, blog postings, etc.

U.S. program for monitoring "open source intelligence": Re: Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.

My original TIA coverage is here: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

Article Reference: 

Son of TIA Will Mine Asian Data

Defense Department funds massive speech recognition and translation program

Defense Department funds massive speech recognition and translation program describes U.S. government research spookily like the The Total Information Awareness System. TIA was a research program bent on developing a wide range of technologies that would be put together to vastly upgrade the U.S. Intelligence gathering abilities. The TIA system was noticed by the public, a hue and cry was raised, some Congress people harrumphed and caused DARPA to make some changes that appeared like they shut TIA down, but most of the projects that TIA was made of continued on.

Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) is simply the continuation of that research, under a different name. I am surprised arsTechnica missed the connection.

They describe it as automatic speech recognition of any spoken language, and automatic language translation of written text into English. The third component is a "distillation" engine which can answer questions and summarize information.

The stated goal is to capture all the public communications like TV broadcasts, newspaper articles, blog postings, etc, and sift them through a giant computerized mixmaster. The software would automatically sift through the massive quantities of information and they supposedly hope to find terrorists or other threats more easily. All communications have to be translated to English because of the lack of linguists to manually translate these communications.

It's a three step process. Stage one is to capture all capturable communications, and translate it into written text. Stage two is to translate the written text to English. Stage three is to sift through the massive piles of data and make sense of it.

If they only apply this program to public communications there isn't much to quibble about. Public communications are, well, public. And there is a lot of valuable intelligence that can be gathered by reading foreign newspapers and the like.

But are they likely to stop at public communications? This is the government that launched illegal wiretapping of U.S. Citizens in direct violation of federal law, and then lied to Congress.

It's well known the U.S. government has been tapping e-mail and other forms of "signals" intelligence for a long time. Supposedly these taps have to be associated with court orders and have to be targeted at specific individuals. But those legalisms assume the government agents are going to act with integrity and do only what the law allows them to do. Again, our current government administration has proven over and over they have no qualms about ignoring and violating U.S. law.

Re: Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.

Four and a half years ago I wrote about: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate. The Total Information Awareness (TIA) project had just been revealed, and this was before the harumphing that later drove the program underground. The goal of the TIA was to bring together a variety of technologies such as datamining, language translation, sparse data analysis, and use those technologies to drastically increase the ability of U.S. Government spooks to know what's going on. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks "they" claimed to want better ability to predict and prevent the next terrorist attack. But at the same time the whole program just seemed like the reincarnation of Big Brother.

In Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S. the NY Times is publicising a research program that smacks of the TIA. If you follow the above link you'll see the list of programs that was publicised on the TIA web site in early 2002. This NY Times article discusses a research effort to track news articles, these are said to be foreign news articles, and automatically detect statements which might help the spooks figure out terror threats. Looking at the list of TIA projects you can easily identify several that apply to this project.

Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES): covers automatic translation of crucial information from foreign languages to English.

Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE): Involves detecting patterns indicating terroristical actions.

Genisys: Covers a different effort to track terroristical actions, involving identification of people and groups.

There's several considerations at play with this. First it is clearly a priority of government officials to protect their citizens. That means the U.S. Intelligence agencies clearly have a role to detect and prevent threats to the U.S. Clearly there are groups who would use terror or geurilla tactics to attack the U.S. Clearly modern technology gives the spooks a lot of capabilities along the lines of tracking information and making sense of widely scattered information.

An example of that technology when placed in the hands of average people is the cooperative research website. That website's primary purpose is to construct detailed timelines and connections between people and the actions they're taking in the world. It's well understood that a lot of data is published in the "public record" such as newspapers, but the snippets of information are widely spread from one story to the next. Only by drawing together dozens of threads spread over many news reports can you begin to get the whole picture.

That's what the U.S. Government research described in the NY Times article is meaning to do. But presumably the goal is to do this at a larger scale, and use automatic language translation and natural language processing to more rapidly tie together the pieces.

Where one begins to call this Big Brother is the fact that the technology doesn't know anything about morals. You can just as easily program those computers to track U.S. news media as it can foreign news media. And it is against U.S. law for the U.S. government agencies to spy on U.S. citizens or organizations.

And of course the software doesn't have to stop with news stories printed in the media. The software can just as easily be spidering the whole of the Internet just as Google and the other search engines are doing so. If the search engines can let us "search the Internet" then why couldn't the government set up their own server farm(s) to scoope up the Internet and do a similar analysis of the content?

And of course the software doesn't have to stop with national borders. The software can just as easily scoop up the whole of the Internet as it can to limit itself to foreign web sites.

Therefore when we have a U.S. Government who has been brazenly violating U.S. laws against spying on U.S. citizens, can we trust their assurances that this program will only be trained on foreign news sources?

Car license plate cameras may be illegal

Number plate cameras may be illegal and Police number plate cameras may breach RIPA ... this covers a program in Britain where cameras are ubiquitously installed "everywhere" through which the police can read car license plates and record them into computers. Through collecting this data, the computers can track movement of every car on a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, basis.

It seems that Sir Andrew Leggatt, Chief Surveillance Commissioner, is concerned that the program violates human rights law. Specifically Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, or RIPA.

It seems the program basically treats everybody in Britain as a suspect. Their movements by car can be tracked in the computer database, and later used against them in a court of law. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

What is Sir Andrew Leggatt's preferred solution? Well, it's to amend the law to allow the program to collect the data it is collecting, and also to ensure the data can be introduced into court as evidence.

Hmmm.. This sounds vaguely similar to the ubiquitous spying being conducted in the U.S. where it's been shown to be illegal, but the government is suggesting to change the law so that the program becomes legal. But, what of the desires of the people? Do the people really want to be spied upon all day long every day?

BTW, the Office of Surveillance Commissioners looks to be an errily Big Brother sort of institution.

Re: Fascism: Are we there yet?

At antiwar.com is the question Fascism: Are We There Yet? Hmmm... I suppose if I'd taken more political science courses in college I might have an understanding of the meaning for fascism and totalitarianism but, like Democrat and Republican and Liberal and Conservative, these are just words which, to me, seem more like the name of a team rather than an ideological anything. I'd written before from the quest to understand what fascism is. There's a lot of people who'll declare Bush is a Fascist, but it doesn't seem to me they understand the meaning any better than I do. The Nazi party in Germany was Fascist, but what does that mean?

All that aside, the article linked above does make for an interesting (and alarming) case. There's clearly a growing capability within the U.S. Government to establish ubiquitous screening of all activities. Their justification is to find terrorists, and to find terrorists they'll capture records of all our activities and then deploy a zillion computers to sift through that data to find suspicious patterns.

When the plan was more public it was called Total Information Awareness ... while that project name was canceled and closed by the DoD, the individual projects were continued to be developed. For example document analysis, tracking telephone calls and more. Again the article linked above has other examples of TIA projects continuing onwards.

As he points out - the administration officials promised us they weren't spying on us. They've also said that revealing the existance of surveillance programs would give "the terrorists" too much information. And they promised the wiretapping that was revealed in 2005 was "it", and that the surveillance they were doing was targeted carefully and did not track domestic phone calls. But the most recent program revelation showed those were all lies. The most recently revealed program is tracking all phone calls, even domestic. Why are we not surprised they lied to us again?

The most interesting thing I found through the above linked article is a discussion of totalitarianism: Lecture 10, The Age of Totalitarianism: Stalin and Hitler ... this is part of a series of lectures about history, so it's mostly about events that happened in Eastern Europe and other European countries in the 1900's. There were many regimes during that period with brutal governments, brutal supression of the people, and which are called totalitarian.

What I gather is totalitarianism is a government practice of having total control over the people that are being governed.

Several times in the article it said totalitarianism required sufficiently fancy technology to make total control effective.

As I've discussed in other blog entries, what is enabling a vision like Total Information Awareness is the increasing capability of computer systems.

So, it's worth pondering how it could be that a database of phone calls leads to totalitarianism? The Fascism article makes a claim it does, but to understand what he's getting at lets try and reason it through.

It's clear that by itself a database of phone calls doesn't tell very much. Especially as, supposedly, the database doesn't have peoples names in it, just phone calls. The most you can do with just a list of phone calls is to build up a map of connections between phone numbers based on who is calling whom.

Building up a map of connections between phone numbers is interesting, but without a connection to people it's not terribly useful. You know phone A called phone B, but that carries little information. If you can add to that the names of the caller and callee, that adds a lot of information. If you can record the phone call, that adds even more, especially if you can automatically translate the voices to text.

By the way, one of the projects in the TIA was specifically to automatically translate any voice into text.

With that in hand you have information. Information about connections between people based on the phone calls between them. There are databases showing the owner name for a given telephone number, and since the phone companies are apparently willing to cooperate with the government to give them access to the phone calls being placed, it's not too far a leap to think they might also share with the government the owner names for each phone number.

But, where is the totalitarian control?

I think it gets to the stereotype of the totalitarian regime. That "spies are everywhere", and that there's a file of your activities being kept by the secret police. Except, in this case the ubiquitous spies are being built into the computer equipment that's running our society, and the files are being kept in a database.

I'm pondering away and keep coming back to this: Collecting data is one step. The totalitarian control comes when the government acts on that data.

An example of likely legal U.S. spying inside U.S.

With the recent hubbub over domestic syping by U.S. spy agencies, here's an example that's probably legal.

Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space

The article is about the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Their work is described this way:

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

...

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up — and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

In other words their job is similar to the Google Earth service. But it's likely that, because they're the military, the resolution on their images is much better.

The images available through commercial services are, by law, limited to a resolution of 1 meter. Meaning the smallest object that can be identified is 1 meter in size. So we wonder what their resolution is. For example if you have a habit of having sex in the back yard, the commercial images won't recognize what you're doing, but what about theirs?

The article raises a big question. Just what are they doing spending most of their effort looking inside the U.S. territory? What are they looking for? An obvious use leaps to mind, that this service could help locate marijuana fields and the like. It might also help locate illicit airfields, such as used by drug smugglers.

I expect one strategic service they provide is finding new construction. This would require some fancy image analysis, but with a whole world full of images detecting new construction would be very labor intensive. However a computer, with fancy image analysis, might be able to identify changes between pictures taken at different times. The tricky part of course is the pictures will never be at the same angle or lighting conditions, hence the required fancy image analysis.

My thought is that if "change" is detected in a series of pictures, then a flag could be raised to send those pictures to an analyst for further study. It may be benign, but it may be an illicit nuclear weapons construction facility.

In any case the current hubbub is over domestic spying. Earlier in this I suggested this is probably legal. My reasoning is pictures taken of the outdoors are, by definition, public spaces. A warrant is not required for anybody to take a picture of the outside of a building, nor is one required to take a picture from above. That's all they're doing.

Where it becomes a little tricky is they have made arrangements with building owners to incorporate video from surveillance cameras. Where are those surveillance cameras pointing? Inside or outside buildings? Are they pointing into private spaces or only public ones?

Massive privacy violation by U.S. government

The revelations of privacy violation by the U.S. Government keeps going on. The latest is news that the NSA has a huge database recording the "envelopes" of most telephone calls made in the U.S. This is following the wiretapping scandal from last year, and I see a lot of hubbub in the news.

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls USA Today, May 11, 2006

Anger grows over NSA surveillance report C|NET News, May 11, 2006

NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says, DefenseTech.org May 12, 2006

"Every Call Ever Made" in NSA Database DefenseTech.org, May 12, 2006

NSA's data mining explained, CNET News, May 12, 2006

The system in the latest revelation relies on cooperation from the telephone carriers. The telephone carriers worked with the NSA to install equipment in their switching systems, and the equipment extracted certain information from the telephone switching systems, and transmitted that information back to NSA headquarters.

The claim is the data is simply the telephone numbers involved with every phone call. This is known as "envelope" information, as it is akin to the addressing on the outside of an envelope sent through postal mail.

The way I understand this, each individual telephone call doesn't give much information. But by collecting a huge number of phone calls one can build a map of associations between telephone numbers. That is, if person A at phone number N regularly calls person B at phone number Z, that's an association.

Each call sets up a relation between the phone numbers involved in the call.

If, by other means, the spooks have determined that phone number T is used by nefarious individuals, then any phone call to/from that phone number should be of interest to the spooks. Calls to/from that phone number associates the other phone number with those nefarious activities done by the owner of phone number T.

Since the system only records the envelope (supposedly) all phone calls have equal significance. Suppose the nefarious people at phone number T decide to make an innocent phone call? For example someone might come to their door saying "my car broke down, can I call my brother". Now the brother of this innocent bystander has now become associated with the nefarious people. Who knows what method the spooks have for detecting innocent bystanders and weeding them out.

This system is obviously a followon to the Total Information Awareness system. I recorded the status of the TIA back in 2002: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

It's important to point out that the discovery by the public of the TIA caused a privacy hubbub, which then caused the Congress people to make enough hubbub that the Department of Defense "cancel" the program. What they actually did was cancel a couple of the programs, and then migrate the rest of the programs to other directors.

Among the TIA projects existant in 2002, there are two which are obviously related to this.

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) involved detection of interesting correlations and connections between specific elements in large sets of data. The discussion I wrote above about the relations between telephone numbers by tracking the calls between phone numbers would fit very well with EELD.

Genisys describes a data collection and storage system that would be very useful to EELD.

I think it's very important to interpret this relevation within the larger context. It's clear that the U.S. Government wants a very intrusive system that watches everything that we do. The revelations last year of wiretapping, and the current revelations of collecting the phone numbers of every phone call, these are not isolated incidents.

The prior existence of the Total Information Awareness system tells us what they are interested in. They will not have lost interest in their goal, instead they will have moved the projects around putting them behind cloaks of secrecy and more.

Again I find myself thinking -- is this the world we want to create? Does this match the core values of America? Or is this representing a government that has diverged itself from American values?

I think this is divergent from American values. If this is true, then why are we, Americans, sitting on our hands and not doing anything about this?

UPDATE: William Arkin with the Washington Post just posted Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg which gives more details of the existing programs being developed by the government. Included in this posting is a list of 500 software tools that have been developed by government agencies for intelligence data gathering and mining.

Of course it makes sense for the government to be employing advanced software tools. As technology advances, shouldn't the government make use of it?

Well, okay. But, the issue is how often are they going to make mistakes, and whether the systems are intrusive or not.

UAV's coming to the U.S. for more spying on U.S. Citizens

Okay, that's possibly the most alarmist title I could have chosen. But this is what the government is moving to doing.

What's a UAV? Unmanned Air Vehicle, a.k.a. Drone. They are being used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan against "the terrorists". There's pointers to various articles at the end of this. This has been a long time coming, and it clearly fits into the general government strategy to install broad surveillance.

My first thought is -- the C|NET and AOPA articles (linked below) are only looking at regulatory issues. One example is a tiny surveillance aircraft, that weighs all of 14 pounds, and was used to buzz a couple biker rallies in North Carolina. A point in one of the articles is that an airplane hitting a bird causes a lot of damage to the aircraft (and kills the bird), so what would this thing, at 14 lbs weighing much more than the typical bird, do to an aircraft? These things don't carry transponders, so how are pilots going to detect them and avoid running into them? They are unmanned, and so won't have an in-built ability to avoid other aircraft.

So, yeah, there's some clear air safety considerations. The AOPA is doing their job in raising those concerns.

But, that's as far as they're going. I get the impression that if the FAA enforces some set of rules against UAV's the AOPA will be happy. But what about the rest of us, the ones who are going to be spied upon?

On the one hand the government and industry representatives are portraying this as being used for border security. Again, the danger of terrorists lurking in every corner ready to kill us if we don't deploy eternal vigilance. But on the other hand these were used to monitor a biker rally. It was used to watch for "unruly behavior". Yeah, you can expect "unruly" behavior at a biker rally alright, but does that warrant spying on the people?

It seems that yet again I'm coming up with the same question that's turned up before.

Technology is giving us more and more capabilities. But is the world that's being created around us the one we want to live in?

Is the technology getting away from us and creating a monster that will be difficult to reign in?

Resources and articles

Drone aircraft may prowl U.S. skies discusses regulatory concerns about the depoloyment of UAV's in the U.S. for border surveillance, detection of marijuana crops, and buzzing biker rallies.

AOPA acts to keep unregulated UAV operation out of navigable airspace and AOPA questions FAA's 'stealthy' UAV TFR on Mexican border discussing actions by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association to cause the FAA to review UAV usage for safety considerations.

Electric airplane (UAV) stays aloft for 48 hours and High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) - 'Eternal Planes' to watch over us and Aerovironment tests a hydrogen powered airplane -- my previous UAV coverage.

Revenge of the Return of the Son of TIA, Part LXVII

arsTechnica has an interesting overview of government spying on U.S. Citizens. Revenge of the Return of the Son of TIA, Part LXVII It refers to a Christian Science Monitor article I discussed here: U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet as well as other information.

The overall context for this story is the Total Information Awareness system which had been under development by the DoD, been exposed to the public, which caused a stink, resulting in the supposed cancelation of the project.

What actually happened is one sub-project was canceled, and the remnants has continued on. As the arsTechnica article says:

When Total Information Awareness (TIA) was shot down by Congress amid a storm of public controversy, it seem pretty clear that the government would keep trying, and trying, and trying until it got something that was very much like TIA. The promise of the Big Database in the Sky, the database that knows everything about everyone and can tell who's been naughty and who's been nice, is just too tempting for The Powers That Be to pass up. As it turns out, there's more than one program going on at the moment that's designed to implement such a database,

They discuss two (known) projects that are obviously implementing the same goal. The first, Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), is discussed by the Christian Science Monitor article. The other is Topsail, which is the actual successor to the TIA project (minus the futures market).

Topsail is discussed in this Newsweek article: Wanted: Competent Big Brothers As the Senate frets over whether the NSA has violated the outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, no one is paying attention to the real issue: proficiency. by Michael Hirsh

There's an interesting question here between the different views in these articles.

On the one hand we, Americans anyway, are very opposed to massive government surveillance. I say this because of the nearly universal abhorent reaction to 1984 (the book). Just say Big Brother and watch the heebie jeebies crawl up peoples spine.

On the other hand Michael Hirsh makes some interesting points. His article is very positive to these developments. His article claims the NSA is stuck in old technology, and old ways of conducting its business of watching communications. His article repeats the claim that the spy agencies had enough facts about the terrorist attack, but didn't have the technology required to connect the dots.

As Hirsh says "data mining", when used well, can connect facts together to let one see the bigger picture. Given that there are, clearly, some people out there who want to cause damage to society, it makes some sense to use advanced technology to try and find their tracks.

A part of this story is that the capabilities of technology are advancing. As we make more powerful computers, the spooks can do more stuff.

The spooks clearly want to create a system that can track a large portion of the transactions that happen every day. By connecting together disparate transactions, they might detect an attack before it happens.

For example ... take the Oklohoma City bombing. The story is the bomb was made from fertilizer and kerosene, and they used a rental truck as a "car bomb". This means the conspirators will have bought certain supplies before making their attack. Since the area has a lot of farming, a large fertilizer sale wouldn't be too strange by itself, but when connected by data mining to other purchases that together could create a bomb. Well, that's tantalizing the spooks, I'm sure.

But, I think, what about when they make mistakes? As the arsTechnica article alludes, they don't know what patterns to look for.

In the Newsweek article, Hirsh relies on perfect hindsight. It's easy to say the attackers used some specific weapon, and if only we'd known what to look for ahead of time we could have stopped the attack. But, in truth how can one know what to look for ahead of time? That is, until someone makes a weapon how do you know what form their attack will take?

Search engines cooperating with the police

Microsoft Confirms Turning Over Search Data to Feds: This covers not just Microsoft but the other search engines as well. The story is there's an obscure court proceeding going on, under which the Department of Justice (DoJ) has subpoenad records from the search engines as to search terms. MSN, Yahoo and AOL have apparently cooperated with the request, while Google has refused to cooperate.

Let me bring into the conversation this: Re: Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression ? In that case some organization is organizing a move to require "Internet Companies" to impede cooperation with repressive regimes who want to surveil what their citizens are doing. But with this request from the DoJ, I wonder just how you want to define "repressive regime"?

And then we have Microsoft's side: Privacy and MSN Search posted by the MSN Web Search general manager.

As the eWeek article suggests, this is a very worrisome privacy issue. Suppose the government surveillance system were to know about every search query you were to make? It's easy to think you're just searching around the Internet, and the search results are very ephemeral and disappear very quickly. But when you're Googling or MSN'ing or Yahoo'ing, the search engine is able to make a record of your searches. The search engine might even remember searches you did before, the items you clicked on before, and helpfully rank the results based on what you searched for previously. This is information the search engines already collect.

It's important to note that the search engines are unable to identify YOU. Instead they know specific IP addresses, and are able to track which IP address did what. Or, in some cases the search engine installs a long-lived cookie, and with data in the cookie is able to correlate activity you do from day to day even if your ISP gives you a different IP address each day.

The MSN general manager says all they turned over was IP addresses and search queries. No personal identifying data.

It would be up to the government surveillance system to correlate IP addresses with people. This isn't easy, but is doable. For example my ISP assigns me a fixed IP address, and therefore the governmnet surveillance system might have an arrangement to query my ISP to retrieve the identity of people to which specific IP addresses are assigned.

Police store DNA records of 24,000 innocent kids

Police store DNA records of 24,000 innocent kids provides an alarming overview of police surveillance activity in the UK. As the article says "Britain already has the largest network of CCTV cameras in the world", and they intend to go further. The main issue in the article is DNA profiling, where it's known the police have DNA records of 24,000 young people who have never been even accused of anything. Where there's great room for concern, the article claims "most people are already resigned to the whole population having its DNA held in police and government databases". SIGH

The article details several projects which, taken together, amount to the same end goal as the Total Information Awareness System (TIA). Since that's in the UK, this would be the British equivalent to TIA. And perhaps since some aspects of British and American government are joined at the hip, maybe MI5/6 and the NSA/CIA/DOD are working together to implement TIA?

You, the reader, may have believed the TIA project was shut down. What happened is that one of the sub-projects in TIA (it was either FutureMap or Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment) was unveiled to the public, and it offended officialdom, and enough of them went on a harumphing storm that the DoD made a show of shutting down TIA. But it's obvious that most of the subprojects to TIA continued on being funded, as they would be very useful to a surveillance system.

Now, let's go through the projects reported by The Register and align them with the TIA projects which I recorded back in 2002.

DNA Profiling: There isn't a direct analogue to a TIA project. One problem with DNA profiling, however, is the expense of doing DNA testing. Doing a full sequencing of the DNA in a tissue sample currently costs many thousands of dollars. Perhaps forensic DNA testing doesn't do full sequencing, but it still isn't going to be cheap. Be aware, though, that the government is funding research to decrease the cost of DNA testing.

The currently understood methods of DNA testing involve tissue culturing steps. For example, they take a tissue sample, grow a tissue culture in a laboratory, then kill the tissue sample, and study it under microscopes. That means identifying someone from DNA in a tissue sample will take several days.

The Bio-Surveillance project in TIA is very different from any DNA profiling system.

CCTV cameras on the roads and streets: Associated with this is number plate recognition, and face recognition. This is clearly associated with Human ID at a Distance with the addition of number plate recognition.

Implementation involves installing closed-circuit TV cameras (CCTV) in desired areas. The more cameras, the more intrusive and comprehensive is the monitoring system. You might think "oh, monitoring TV is manual, there's going to be a human looking at every video feed". No, if you have a city full of video cameras, there's no way a staff of humans can effectively scan them all. The cameras might be ignored most of the time, and only used when a call arives in the neighborhood of a given camera.

But what's possible is for the video feeds from these cameras to be analyzed by computers. That's what the Human ID at a Distance project is intended to be doing. And face recognition systems have been under test for several years. For example a public test was performed at a Super Bowl game a couple years ago, but apparently the test results were very disappointing.

The technique is to use image analysis to look for patterns that let the computer software zero in on the information of interest. The problem is computers are rather dumb. Human bodies have zillions of years of evolution to our image recognition hardware, and we recognize such things very readily. But computers have only 60 years of development (or so) behind them, and all they can deal with are numbers. It may look like they deal with words, and pictures, and sounds, and movies, and whatnot, but the software developers have to invent ways to turn all that into streams of numbers, because computers only know how to deal with numbers. This makes image analysis tricky.

Take face recognition. There's probably some pattern of pixels that usually indicate a human face. There's a small range of skin pigmentations, and then the shape of a face is generally the same with two eyes, nose, mouth, etc. It's made tricky because faces have a lot of variability, even when there's a lot of similarity. Recognizing license plates (number plates, as the British call them) would be simpler. There's a fairly well known set of colors to look for, and you know ahead of time what shape the license plate will have, and its location on a car.

Once you've got software that can reliably recognize what you're looking for ... car license plates ... you connect a fleet of computers to the CCTV cameras. They'd constantly be looking for motion, when they see motion the software looks for a license plate, and records whatever it sees. Assuming reliable software the computers can register all cars that pass by a CCTV camera.

The next step is to install multiple cameras throughout the city. Each camera gets connected to the computers. The computers register each car that passes by each camera. Or, if reliable face recognition software exists, the computers can also register each pedestrian as they pass by each camera. Hence, these computers could easily track the movement of every car or every pedestrian where-ever they (we) go in the city.

Public meeting on Iraq, Iraq policy, Rep. Murtha, and the possibilities to impeach the President

I just watched a 2 1/2 hour long meeeting recorded from C-SPAN, which I learned about from here: American Foreign Policy, Part Deux. It was an opportunity for Representative Murtha to explain and discuss a proposal he's made to withdraw from Iraq. The Republicans and Neocons have been jumping all over him, calling him a coward, unpatriotic, etc (note: he served in two wars, in the Marines, and has a ream of medals to show for his service). The action towards Rep. Murtha is just following the prior pattern when anybody dares to say the slightest thing against the Administration, that out of the woodwork comes various kinds of attacks and most especially to question the patriotism of the person who made the criticism.

Are so insecure that they can't stand a little scrutiny and criticism ...??

Anyway, here is what Karen Kwiatkowski has to say about the C-SPAN show:

A lot of Americans are waking up to this Part One, as the recent standing room only town meeting co-hosted by Virginia Democrat Jim Moran and Pennsylvania Republican Jack Murtha. Watch the video. It is shock television at its best, courtesy C-span. Murtha and Moran say they want troops out soonest, and both insist we are not building permanent military bases in Iraq. Like I say, it's shock TV - see for yourself!

(The video is linked above -- you will need the Real Video player to view it)

They held a "town hall" meeting that was jam-packed, where they turned away more people than could actually attend the event, etc. It was a very spirited event from what I can tell via the recording.

Rep. Murtha's suggestion is that we should withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq NOW. That we should let the Iraq government take over. That we should keep U.S. troops in the vicinity (e.g. Kuwait), I suppose so that troops are easily redeployed if the situation were to flare up.

I'm not so sure that's a good idea. Much as I am angry over the war in the first place, at how unnecessary it is, how it is a distraction from the real problem, how the administration lied to the world and the American people in order to launch the war, that withdrawing would leave a power vacuum that would simply result in a civil war as the different factions compete with each other to grab all the power. At least, that's what I am afraid of. Which just leaves me highly conflicted because we have no ethical, legal, or moral right to be in Iraq doing what we are doing.

Rep. Murtha also talked at length on the corruption (e.g. "no-bid" contracts which simply means the U.S. is being ripped off by defense contractors) and the horribly underfunded Veterans Administration (paid for by the tax cuts).

Many times the questions were "When are we going to Impeach the President". It was enlightening to hear both Rep. Murtha and Morin basically agree with the sentiment. It's basically been proved that the President and all the Presidents People lied us into this war, that it was premeditated back to 1992 (at least), that it has been horribly mismanaged, that the insurgency that is killing so many U.S. and Iraq people is directly attributable to the mismanagement, that the administration is criminally culpable in this, and that it is a reprehensible situation. Both of the Representatives basically agreed with this, but they kept saying how Impeachment was basically impossible.

They pointed to an investigatory hearing held by Rep. Conyers meant to explore the same issue. He just barely got approval to hold that hearing, in the first place, and the space he was given to hold it was in the basement. Relegated to the basement. See, the practical fact is that the Administrations party controls the Congress, and so long as the leadership is as it is, there is practically zero chance of Impeachment.

What Rep. Morin kept returning to is that we, the people, the ones for whom this most perfect union of a government exists, it is we who need to organize. The solution is in the ballot box, and it is in organizing the democracy for which we stand to stand up and take back the reins of government.

Guardian Unlimited | Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons

What is the reason for the Iraq war? Was it an altruistic exercise in helping a poor oppressed people join the community of enlightened Democacry countries? Naw, because if it were then why doesn't the U.S. launch similar wars on other oppressive countries? There's a bigger picture going on and it's more than a coincidence that the plan by the Project for a New American Century to reshape the world begins in the heart of the Middle East, where the oil is. And, at the same time, there is a game afoot to bring oil from Central Asia to market, with the chosen U.S. path being a pipeline built through Afghanistan. And why did we go to war in Afghanistan? If it was about Osama, then why have we let Osama and the other leaders get away?

That's what is implied from this article: Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons Iraq has shown the hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military and technological power (Richard Drayton, Wednesday December 28, 2005, The Guardian)

He starts out with an observation about technology.

Ex-hippies talked of a wired age of Aquarius. The fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the internet, we were told, had ushered in Adam Smith's dream of overflowing abundance, expanding liberty and perpetual peace. Fukuyama speculated that history was over, leaving us just to hoard and spend. Technology meant a new paradigm of constant growth without inflation or recession.

I remember that was the dream floating about during the .COM bubble in the late 90's. But, this kind of thinking is in denial of a real problem. The driving force of the expansion of technology is not technology, it is oil and natural gas. The energy used to drive the technological marvels are these fossil fuels whose use is destroying our environment and which are becoming scarcer by the day.

The public has been misled to believe the technology will keep flowing forever. But that promise is based (today) on fossil fuels.

The problem with that picture is it appears the oil is running out. There is a model put together decades ago which describes the availability of oil. The model shows an unnavoidable fact, that at some point in the future the production capacity of oil will "peak" and after that oil will inexorably decline. There are many indications we are at or near the peak, today.

The rest of the article goes into describing megalomaniacs who have the capabilities to act out their megalomania. The writings of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) show them to be megalomaniacs. The PNAC is a think-tank whose founding members are today holding positions of high power in Washington DC (that is, Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Jeb Bush, etc). In the mid-90's the PNAC published a series of position papers describing the need of America to assert global dominance, ensuring a Pax Americana. The justification was that "we" are the worlds sole remaining superpower, and that we had to use our strength to take the moral high ground and that it was our duty to reshape the world in our image.

According to this article these people learned certain strategies from the classics of literature:

or the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, learned from Leo Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise. They read Le Bon and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they loved Hobbes's Leviathan. While Hobbes saw authority as free men's chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to submission. And technology would make it possible and beautiful.

The technology that is supposed to free us all, is also these peoples weapon used to dominate us all.

The vision they've had, and which Rumsfield has been busily implementing in the Defense Department, is that high technology weaponry can be used to create battlefields with few soldiers. Hence we have unmanned aircraft doing both surveillance and firing weapons, we have a rise in robotic tanks, we have a global satellite system delivering GPS positioning coordinates and others spying on everybody's activities. The next time you're in the back yard making love with your sweetie, think about the Pentagon watching you.

But their vision missed something which Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated. Satellites in the sky can't stop the acts of individuals. In Afghanistan the leaders made their escape so they could make new plots in the future. In Iraq the U.S. forces have been hobbled by the improvised explosive device (IED) in ways that satellites cannot see or prevent.

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York Times

Here's some more on wiretapping issue. This NY Times article gives an overview of the depth of the program. The program is about what they call "data mining". In case you don't know, "data mining" is a common technique in IT organizations. Essentially data mining about processing one set of data to create a second set of data.

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report (By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN, NYTimes.com, Published: December 24, 2005)

This might help understand what this is

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This is what they call the "envelope" information. This would be like the post office writing down the addresses on the outside of envelopes they handle. By tracking just the sources and destinations of physical mail you learn a lot. And it's the telecommunications equivalent to this, such as the source and destination phone numbers of all phone calls, that the article talks about.

It's not just this envelope information, but they're looking for "patterns" of contacts. This kind of analysis is not about listening to the actual phone calls, but who is calling whom, and how often.

The article discusses how the government has made special arrangements with the telecommunication companies. The NSA has a secret "backdoor" letting them directly tap into the core of the telecommunication infrastructure.

This says that what's happened has had widespread agreement from a broad spectrum of government and business entities. This took a long time and had to involve a lot of people to implement.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

One final interesting piece is whether U.S. laws govern privacy of telephone calls that just pass through equipment which happens to be located in the U.S. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the way telecommunications is installed in the world it is sometimes cheaper or easier for transmissions from one country to another country to pass through equipment in the U.S.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

... The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey -- The Independent

Apparently in England the government is very open about wanting to track every citizens every movement. For example they're planning a national ID card that presumably will be required everywhere. But the article in question, Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored (By Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Independant) concerns automatically monitoring cars and other vehicles driving down the road. They'll be using TV cameras monitoring the roads, connecting them to computers which can identify and read license plates. Hence, all cars driving the roads will be identified and tracked.

Hmm... I guess Big Brother is arriving a little later than predicted.

For that matter, this capability is one of the ones to be developed under the Total Information Awareness system. Under TIA it's not just license plates which would be recognized and tracked, but faces. For example if you have a crowd of people going into a sports arena, it would be "helpful" to do face capture and recognition of everybody entering the arena. Well, "helpful" so long as you can clearly identify culprits.

What occurs to me of why this is disturbing, is this makes a broad presumption that everybody is a criminal. Until now the only time Police would stop and identify you is if they had reasonable cause to believe you were some kind of criminal. For example if your driving is weaving all over the road, they might think you're drunk, pull you over, and in the process identify you.

But under this system, the police is going to be identifying everyone regardless of any determination of whether they're a criminal. Every car driving the road, or everybody walking down the sidewalk, everybody will be inspected by a computer and identified.

In the Independant article they talk about caravaning. Criminals will sometimes steal a car, then the stolen car plus several others (a.k.a. caravan) elsewhere to commit a crime using the stolen car as some kind of subterfuge to hide their tracks. A caravan is several cars driving together, so one pattern they could program into their BigBrotherPro software is "has this group of cars been together for more than 'n' miles of driving". But, isn't it possible to accidentally caravan with someone? And if you accidentally caravan with the 'wrong' people, ones who later commit a crime, might you not be accidentally caught up in their crime?

Think the police don't make mistakes?

Just last month it was revealed a German tourist was mistakenly identified as an al Qaeda operative. He was kidnapped by U.S. agents, illegally renditioned to Afghanistan, where he was tortured for several months. Once they realized their mistake they flew him to Kosovo and dumped him on the street with no money. And that's just one mistake that happened to get into the mainstream news.

The potential for grave mistake is very high here.

Travel security scam? Airport security as a way to create a boondoggle?

It's important to remember that public statements of purpose aren't always the real reason that something happens. For example the public statement of why the U.S. defied International law to invade Iraq was the threat posed by the supposed Weapons of Mass Descruction still owned by Iraq. It's clear in hindsight that even the U.S. administration knew they were lying up a storm (so why haven't they been impeached yet?) and that something else was the reason. (Probably Iraq's oil)

In any case, today there's an announcement of a program allowing people, who pay a fee, to bypass airport security.

A $79.95 opportunity to breeze through security (Published: September 13, 2005, 10:22 AM PDT, By Joe Sharkey, The New York Times, published by C|NET News)

The deal is this new company is offering, for $79.95, to provide a high quality and hopefully unforgeable identity card that embeds all sorts of personal data. Thumbprints, iris scans, etc.

The stick is the pain airport travellers have to "endure" in going through airport security checks. If you've traveled by air you know the stupid rigamarole ... take off your shoes (because one idiot supposed terrorist made a halfway decent attempt using shoe based bombs) ... take off your belt, jewelry, cell phone, other metal object (but, I can't take the rods out of my legs, and tend to end up being checked anyway) ... take your laptop out of its case (as if that's a real problem?) ... and wait through a line.

That carrot is the being able to bypass that pain. But, by offering a way past the pain for some that's probably gonna delay the time when the system has to be fixed. But the system itself needs to be fixed.

Isn't it stupid to have to take off your shoes? This stems from the attempt by "the shoe bomber" to blow up an airplane by lighting his shoes on fire. One person, one time, makes a half assed attempt that failed, and now we all have to take our shoes off? I say this is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

But let's stay with the topic here. What's really happening is that because of the stick held by the TSA, those who agree to the carrot are having to turn over personal biometric data. Hence, the TSA is pushing us all along a path towards a day when we are all tracked everywhere we go. Today it's airport travellers, tomorrow who knows what?

The other day when I renewed my drivers license, they took a biometric scan of my thumbprint. Why? What are they gonna use it for?

I do agree that an identity card that isn't secure and doesn't do a good job of identification is practically worthless. e.g. how easy is it to get a forged drivers license?

For this airport card they're requiring a social security number and two forms of government ID. Uh, wait, the social security number is not supposed to be used for identification. In any case, how easy is it to obtain falsified social security numbers or government ID cards?

And, is total tracking of our every move what we want???

Another brick to building the Total Information Awareness system

The Total Information Awareness system was so obviously a plan to create Big Brother. While the project ran into some political difficulties and was "canceled", the individual pieces have obviously continued to be developed. I am tracking those on this thread in my blog.

Forging an anti-terrorism search tool (Published: June 2, 2005, 5:52 PM PDT, By Stefanie Olsen, Staff Writer, CNET News.com)

This article discusses a project that obviously fills in part of the Total Information Awareness system picture.

The technology, released as a prototype in recent weeks, is designed to mine a corpus of documents for associated ideas or connections--connections between two unrelated concepts, for example, that would otherwise go unseen or would take countless hours of investigative work to discover. The project was specifically funded for anti-terrorism efforts and initially was used for searching over data within the 9/11 Commission report and public Web pages related to the suicide bombings carried out by terrorists who hijacked three U.S. commercial planes.

"Say you have the kind of question that connects these two people that we don't know about. You could start reading through all those documents. But our system is designed to look specifically for those evidence trails" that connect those two people, said Rohini Srihari, UB professor of computer science and engineering.

The research is being conducted at The Center for Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition.

CEDAR Overview

A wide variety of documents are encountered by each of us everyday. They cover all spheres of our lives including commerce, education, law, health, religion, music and entertainment. Some of these documents have a simple and predictable structure such as a page in a printed book. Others have much more complex structure such as those involving figures, tables, logos, signatures, handwriting, etc. Discovering methods and algorithms for analyzing the structure and content of complex documents, and their generalization to related domains, is the focus of research at CEDAR.

From a computer science research and education perspective the work spans the areas of pattern recognition, machine learning, information retrieval and computational linguistics. There is a continuum from the analysis of scanned document images to areas such as text mining and information retrieval. There is also a continuum from analyzing documents for forensic purposes to the analysis of fingerprint images and other areas of biometrics.

Having received sustained funding from the United States Postal Service (USPS) since 1984 CEDAR was designated the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) by the USPS in 1991. Today, while postal-related document analysis problems continue to be of interest at CEDAR, a number of projects have emerged with other sponsors.

CEDAR has been a conduit for scholarly collaboration as well as individual accomplishment for many scientists and students. Over a period of 20 years faculty, students and research scientists at CEDAR have published more than a thousand scientific papers. CEDAR has supported more than 500 students, resulting in the award of several hundred master's degrees and more than 40 doctoral degrees.

They've already developed and fielded a few technologies:

• Name and Address Block Reader
• Handwritten Address Interpretation
• Handwriting Verification and Recognition

All of which would be useful in the automated Big Brother picture that the TIA team put together.

Remember that the Total Information Awareness system was the original name, and that they renamed it to Terrorism Information Awareness system after the September 11, 2001 attacks made anti-Terrorism of interest. However, just because they say they're focusing on "terrorism" doesn't mean that it can't be used for other purposes. Information is information, and when you have this kind of data mining system you can use it to search for any information.

e.g. I see this trend in the public discussion that says "Fundamental Christianity is the only valid spiritual path". That idea is fine until that idea becomes enshrined in the Government, and the Government starts enforcing it. Given that the government leaders are tending towards speaking that idea more and more frequently, it's rather possible they'll begin using the Government agencies to enforce that idea. So, would we find this system employed towards finding connections among people in the "new age" movement?