Thursday, January 19, 2012
Homeland Security Given Permission to Monitor (a.k.a. spy on) American Journalists
Freedom of the Press is a nice principle that isn't really encoded in any laws. It's not like Freedom of Speech that's so important it was the first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Freedom of the Press should mean that those of us who self-identify as Press can go about our business without government interference. There are plenty of examples from around the world, both modern and in the past, of governments afraid of the stories reported by journalists, and they used all sorts of legal leverage against journalists, and in some cases unfairly imprisoning for supposed anti-government sentiments or whatnot, not to mention all the journalists killed under mysterious circumstances. Freedom of the press is meant to counter that tendency of governments and other powerful people to try to stop certain stories from being published.
RT News is somewhat disingenuously reporting on an effort by the U.S. Homeland Security Department to gather publicly visible information about 'news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”'
This is a really broad definition of people because those who keep an audience "situationally aware and informed" includes anybody who routinely posts links to articles on social media networks. Posting links to those networks is a highly common activity and is undertaken by anybody seriously interested in building an audience.
The project scours the social networks for information, but the DHS claims it is not collecting "Personally Identifiable Information" (PII) .. "While this Initiative is not designed to actively collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII), OPS is conducting this update to the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) because this initiative may now collect and disseminate PII for certain narrowly tailored categories." While they aren't collecting PII they can collect it if necessary such as: "For example, in the event of an in extremis situation involving potential life and death, OPS will share certain PII with the responding authority in order for them to take the necessary actions to save a life, such as name and location of a person calling for help buried under rubble, or hiding in a hotel room when the hotel is under attack by terrorists."
The authority cited is Section 515 of the Homeland Security Act (6 U.S.C. § 321d(b)(1)
Where the RT News report becomes disingenuous is when they say this:- "The department says that they will only scour publically-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn’t help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses."
In other words, RT News is demonstrating a belief that this is somehow new behavior on the part of the U.S. Government. In truth the Government has been working on what they call "open source intelligence" for years. Namely, collecting publicly available information for intelligence gathering purposes. The social media networks make this easy because many of us actively want to be found on those networks which is great if we want to build an audience, but that audience may include Big Brother government agents snooping on our every tweet.
I've written about this plenty of times before:-
- Total Information Awareness project spawns big brother system to read and translate twitter traffic
- Twitter Tapping - government agents tracking public information
- Massive privacy violation by U.S. government
- Re: Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.
- Federal Reserve looking to launch "sentiment analysis and social media monitoring" program
However it is troublesome. For a reason why ponder a factoid about the Jewish Holocaust. The Nazi government contracted with the IBM subsidiary in Germany to develop machines to assist with gathering and tracking information about the ethnicity of the population. This was the 1930's and the technology were simple punch cards and automated machines for processing the punch cards, but there's no way in heck you could call these machines "Computers" because those didn't start to come into existence until the 1950's. In any case no matter how rudimentary the machines IBM could supply at that time, it did enable the German government to efficiently find Jewish people to send to the Concentration camps.
Fast forward to the marvelous computers we have today ..
Some supporting documents:-
http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/supporting-documentation-for-homeland.html
http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/april-2010-bp-oil-spill-response-social.html
http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/2010-winter-olympics-social-media-event.html
http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/haiti-social-media-disaster-monitoring.html
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS - Government's over-reaching surveillance system
When Judges around the country cite the novel, 1984, as legal precedent maybe that's a sign that Big Brother is alive and well and quietly monitoring everything we do. The issue is the GPS features in cell phones, and the Fourth Ammendment's promise of protection against Government invasion of our privacy. A recent NY Times article gives a litany of court cases involving GPS devices, GPS features of cell phones, and the repeated invocation of a novel, 1984, as legal precedent.
http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=rss_sho&shofile=10-1473_002.pdf: Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote about GPS-based surveillance saying “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.”
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08-30385.pdf: Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.”
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/08/cellsite.pdf: Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn denied a government request for over 3 months of "location data from cellphone towers" calling it an “Orwellian intrusion” and asking whether the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.”
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org: In November the Supreme Court will hear United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259 which will "will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?"
Today we routinely carry devices that track our every move (cell phones, cars, toll collection passes, etc) and those devices give us valuable information we use in our lives. For example I frequently whip out my iPhone or iPad and use the Map feature to figure out where i am and how to get to a location. That Map feature determines my location using both GPS circuits and interpolated location information from cellphone towers.
The Supreme Court case is itself an appeal of an earlier decision by a 3 judge Appeals Court panel ruling that the government is seeking too much information. http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1046181.html
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The UK's Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system is big brother?
This is a fairly old but highly important piece of information about ubiquitous spying being conducted by the United Kingdom upon their residents. It is a system of cameras on the roads connected to computers to automatically recognize license numbers on number plates (what in the U.S.A. we'd call license plates). Of course every car has a visible number where one use is for police to identify vehicles for various reasons. What's new is nifty computer technology advancements have included in improved image recognition capability, in this case automated image recognition is being used to automatically read out the license plate (number plate) numbers of cars passing by. With enough cameras on enough streets the system can track every bit of movement by every vehicle, enabling the government to track movements of everyone.
A pair of reports on The Register web site detail two phases of the system rollout in the UK. Described is a "24x7 national vehicle movement database" to log every trip on the UK's road system. They were building a control center in Hendon capable of processing 50 million number plates PER DAY. In 2005 they already had cameras in strategic locations on every motorway in the UK and intended to have a camera every 400 yards. The initial purpose was traffic speed enforcement, but would be expanded to other crimes later such as the use of untaxed vehicles, stolen vehicles, and generally denying criminals the use of the roads.
Eek! Every 400 yards? Just think of the budget required to build maintain this system.
Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey -- The Independent
Sunday, October 4, 2009
"I want to opt out of Google's Sattelite View"
The other night a friend said that. She wants to be in her back yard in any state of (un-)dress and not worry about peeping googlebots in the sky or for that matter the neighbors. It's clearly an invasion of expected privacy when satellite services take pictures of every square inch of the planet. So let's ponder this for a moment..
The times, they are a changing.. eh? New advances of technology come routinely enough. Some of them dramatically challenge the preconceived notions we have. For example cell phones have made it routine to talk to apparently no-one whereas in earlier times we'd have thought someone nuts if they were carrying on a conversation with the air around them.
Taking pictures from satellites has been going on for decades and has only been getting better and better. What's new here is that Google and other services have made the images available on a massive scale to everybody. That's all.
There's an interesting principle about the right to photograph things. As I understand it (in the U.S.) the right to photograph is that if you are able to stand on public property and see something then you have the right to photograph it. In essence I think satellite imagery is taking that to an extreme. Satellites are clearly on public property (outer space) and they are taking pictures of things people could plausibly see if they were in outer space. That isn't too much of a stretch is it?
At issue isn't just satellite imagery, there is also airplane based imagery. In a few years we can expect unmanned air vehicles to be approved for use in the U.S. and perhaps there will be services flying UAV's around the country for the same purpose that satellites are used today.
Which isn't to say that my friend isn't out of line. She is having a very perfectly normal reaction. While I share her concern I'm simply being a realist about it. Technology has created this airborne photography service which serves many purposes and one of them is a massive invasion of privacy.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Traffic mapping for more efficient cities
While looking at A look at the Waze crowdsourced traffic mapping service turned up some other services with similar purposes. Let's take a look at a few of them.
As mentioned in the prior article Google Maps has traffic conditions reported on their maps. However this is only available for major highways, and only in selected cities.
The Maryland Department of Transportation publishes a list of highways and traffic speeds, traffic incidents, live traffic cameras for several roads, and more. The data is part of their CHART system (Coordinated Highways Action Response Team).
Clearly governments have an incentive to collect traffic information for their own needs and have the access to embed sensor devices in roads. That data can be provided to the public and there are many interested in open government, and specifically opening the data collected by government agencies for the benefit of all citizens. However there doesn't appear to be a comprehensive list of the API and data provided by governments.
Current City is a project of the Senseable City Laboratory MIT and several European researchers. They are working on applications covering these questions. They're leveraging the data collected by cell phone carriers and notice they are servicing other questions than simply traffic conditions.
- How many people are there in that area? (crowd management)
- Where is traffic piling up? (mobility analysis and forecasting)
- What percentage of people has left that area? (evacuation support, event management)
- What is the current demand for public transportation? (public transport management)
- How many people will look at that billboard?( marketing and city advertisement)
- What is the pattern of inflow and outflow of people from the city? (urban planning)
- What’s the hottest spot in town right now? (entertainment)
Another Senseable City Laboratory project is the Copenhagen Wheel. The project aims to transform bicycle use in Denmark’s largest city through promoting urban sustainability and building new connections between the city’s cyclists. The components of the system are an electric bicycle hub motor (converts the bicycle into an electric bicycle) along with a telemetry device reporting bicycle rider activity to a central computer system.