For any aspiring technology enterprise or university, there is one surefire route to get funding at this time, despite the recession: There seems to be unlimited interest in the U.S. and Europe to own the “Web 2.0 ultimate online surveillance system” and to be ready for the emerging “semantic Web.”
In other words, there’s funding for those seeking to mine Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, fanzines, news aggregators, and other social networking sites in order to build up information on individuals, organizations, and their relationships.
From one perspective, this would appear to be a competitive virtual arms race between various U.S. governmental agencies and Europe. The main contender appears to be the U.S. National Security Agency, which is operating and developing domestic surveillance programs in conjunction with intelligence contractors.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, primarily via its investment arm, In-Q-Tel , is heavily engaged in funding companies in the digital identity and security arena. This in conjunction with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which is funding the maintenance of an Open Source Center to sift through Web 2.0 sites.
For the Europeans, who are playing catchup but are not far behind, we have the example of the EU-wide INDECT Consortium, the "Intelligent Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment." This project is a mix of universities, tech companies, and law enforcement agencies. It is funded by the European Union for €15 million (US$22 million).
Also, major European commercial entities, including Nokia Siemens Networks , Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), and Verint Systems Inc. , have joined together to likewise develop domestic surveillance programs primarily aimed at data mining of cellphone activity and social networking information.
However, it would be wrong to think of surveillance efforts as competitive between the U.S. and Europe; there is collaboration and overlap. In May of this year, for example, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K. equivalent and data sharing partner for NSA, awarded Lockheed Martin a $200 million contract for Internet data mining systems. And one of the main contractors for NSA is BAE (British Aerospace Systems).
Many more examples have come to light, but perhaps we should examine the big question: What is this all for?
Let’s take the INDECT project as an example (and most of the projects mentioned are very similar). This project’s proponents state on their Website: “The INDECT project is out to develop new tools and techniques that will help the potential end users in improving their methods for crime detection and prevention thereby offering more security to the citizens of the European Union.”
Ostensibly, this appears a noble goal; but on reviewing current working papers, an alternative, darker interpretation emerges.
There are discussions of a making a complete dump of Wikipedia to extract the identification details of every person, organization, and geo-political entity. Other participants talk of extracting more than 100 million ratings from 480,000 comments from sports forums and fanzines associated with movie rental site Netflix. Plans call for using this input for data mining to associate personal attributes, such as relationship status, birth date, credit rating, cellphone images, videos, and so on.
Conceivably, it is easy see how a Netflix customer who gives good reviews to antiwar movies and also chats in a forum about how a current government administration is garbage, could wind up with a dossier showing them as unpatriotic and a potential threat to the state.
INDECT as a group acknowledges the ethical issues of its plans on its Website: “This [project] will be done by integrating various lawful and pre-existing sources of information, which are already available to public protection agencies throughout the European Union.”
What this essentially means is that any information about you, me, or anyone else, if it’s somewhere on the Web, is fair game to be extracted and interpreted.
Think it can’t happen? This current wave to develop the ultimate surveillance system for the Web is aimed at creating “automatic dossiers” on any domestic, European, or foreign Internet user.
That includes you!
— Jart Armin, Editor of RBNexploit.com, a watch blog on the infamous RBN (Russian Business Network), and HostExploit.com
Speaking of fiction and data-mining, check out William Gibson's "Colin Laney" character. In one of the books, I think Idoru, Laney has access to a lot of data--he's watching the data of one particular young woman. Studying her purchases carefully he predicts she's going to kill herself, breaks into her apartment and tries to stop her.
I'm with you, debergman. We will have to put trust in our system of controls with our private technology system.
In reality. The ability to put together significant information and dossiers on each citizen is built into the capability now with market psychographics and the use of GIS combined with information from multiple sources about buying, how we live, census data, etc. The reason it has not essentially proved harmful is that it is disseminated throughout the private system. As long as that is the case, I think we will be OK.
If the system were to change and be organized by the government, that would be another story.
Well, certainly if what you are saying is true....wow. Uncle Sam and Aunt Francoise are up to some serious business and I am not sure people are ok with that. However, this does have a hint of conspiracy theory to it. Not that it isn't happening, but I am not sure I buy that big brother is gonna download all the data from every site in the world that maintains any significant information about people and data mine it. Now, that being said, the IRS pretty much has whatever it wants on all us tax payers, I am sure they've peeked here and there in that data. And I assume France and every other First World Country has similar entities and similar access. I guess we have to put some faith in our industry leaders in the tech world to stand firm and hold their ground in the security arena. As we saw with China and Google, they do bend, uh oh.
Finally... RobJ you have hit the nail on the proveribal/virtual head.
Jart, I'm surprised you're drinking the EFF Kool-Aid here, it's bad stuff!!
Thanks. But I think this is why the Kool-Aid, so to speak, is so easy to drink. There *is* a "there" there. The government *is* engaged in intrusive and unconstitutional (IMO, obviously) activity, and watchdogs like EFF (and I wish EPIC was better at this, too) are not only necessary, but represent the most vital, and even critical element of citizenship that I can think of right now.
Still, I can see where people see themselves in their living rooms, dens, even bedrooms, and that provides them with a feeling of intimacy, of privacy. But that's not where their comments stay, are they? Not when they hit those "SEND" and "SUBMIT" buttons, and send their words out onto that digital Broadway called The Internet. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, they aren't about privacy. If anything, they are about the opposite: about sharing. About getting ourselves "out there." And if we put it out there, we have no reason to be shocked if "out there" includes people we'd rather not know what we said.
Finally... RobJ you have hit the nail on the proveribal/virtual head.
Jart, I'm surprised you're drinking the EFF Kool-Aid here, it's bad stuff!!
Like the bit they do every Sunday morning on the ESPN NFL Preview I gotta say, "C'mon Man!!" No one's building a humongous "automated dossier" on every presence on the Internet. No way, no how, no chance not in a 100 milleniums...
They've got known entities that they're interested in and they're looking to collaborate all their information effectively to improve their efficiencies and that should be not only expected, but applauded...
I'll say it again, "The EFF needs to Go Away on this Mindless Pursuit"
Like I said over in Nicole's post, let's remember that surveillance of someone walking down the street, in public, that's not intrusive. It's public. Likewise, these SOCIAL networking sites are all about open pronouncement.
If you open up your Facebook page, and then confess to a crime, you're doing that out in the open. Like grabbing the karaoke mike and admitting that you killed JFK. You might not be believed, but you certainly are not protected by privacy rights.
I love the EFF, but this (monitoring social networking sites) isn't the problem. Not the real one.
You are right, knowing is half the battle here. Nichole has also followed up and expanded on this important EFF action.
I have to admit I originally started off being neutral on EFF, but over last couple of years I have become one of their most fervent supporters. As should any user of the Internet, if only for self interest.
Thanks for posting this follow-up. Knowing is half the battle! Questioning data usage NOW is a good move. I'm glad EFF is asking the big question for us.
Just so we know at least there is some co-ordinated effort to question what is going on see "Lawsuit Demands Answers About Social-Networking Surveillance" by EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) the actual full complaint is here in PDF format - released today.
So there is at least something that can be done -
"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."
So if you do not like the way its going, contact your man or woman in Congress.
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Fatal System Error, the book just released by West-coast-based journalist Joseph Menn, is really a public policy statement written as a thriller for a wider reading public. UPDATED 2:45 PM
If you were a criminal looking to hide money-laundering operations, anonymously rent swaths of Web infrastructure for Internet badness, or create a financial base to threaten national security, where would you look? Panama? Liechtenstein? Offshore islands?
Most users have become accustomed to providing social-networking Websites with extensive personal details, information about friends, pictures, and connections. But new hacks out in the wild -- and already in the hands of the bad guys -- demonstrate that any thought of privacy or anonymity is a myth. Sites like Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Orkut are leaking personal information like an open faucet.
The open-source whistleblower site, Wikileaks, which according to The National has “produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years,” has temporarily and voluntarily suspended its own service.
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Data mining of social networks means people might face unforeseen consequences as a result of their seemingly innocuous personal choices and associations.
What can users today do to protect their online privacy? The simplest and most obvious option is to not use the Internet – at all. However, once all digital information is consolidated over the Internet, trying to protect digital identity by simply unplugging from the Internet becomes impossible – a fact that has manifest implications for civil liberties, Saunders says.
By 2011 the number of Internet-connected sensors will exceed 1 trillion, making your chances of doing anything or going anywhere unnoticed pretty much zero. Saunders talks about how the 'sensortization' of the Internet is eliminating the traditional divide between online and offline populations.
The 20th Century Internet was characterized by the ability to interact with other people and information on the Internet largely without anyone knowing who you were. The Internet of this century, conversely, will be defined by identity. Saunders explains how Internet users are unwittingly contributing to the demise of the anonymous Internet.
Both the federal intelligence agencies and the metropolitan police forces are likely monitoring your social networks. So should you lay low, or make it worth their while?
The city of San Francisco is on the leading edge of using the Internet to provide government transparency. It is providing WiFi for its have-nots, and its DataSF.org initiative is putting the city's valuable data back in the hands of its citizens, with innovative results.
In the final episode of this series about the death of Internet anonymity, Saunders describes how the Internet of the future will start to attain a level of intelligence that requires no human intervention. Scary.
How do you recognize an Internet bubble when you see one? Saunders explains how all bubbles have four symptoms in common – and takes a swipe at Google and Twitter into the bargain.
It is 20 years since the invention of the World Wide Web, and the Internet has changed beyond recognition since then. Steve Saunders peers into the future to predict what the Web will look like in another 20 years time – and he doesn’t like what he sees.
Research shows that the youth of today like Facebook – but not blogging or Twitter. Does that mean Facebook has won, or just that it's not yet out of favor? Will all the services we see today fade into Ovaltine-or-Wheaties status in just a few years?
What kinds of companies are doing the most innovation in the data center? Turns out it's midtier enterprises that are taking the "Just Right" approach.
Ray Kurzweil's Blio and Apple's iPad tablet will make it easier than ever to have books "read" to us, says Dr. Kim, who believes that talking tablets will become interwoven into our consciousness as we "merge" with the increasingly elegant machines we hold in our hands.
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