Quick! Hit delete. ….
p2p news / p2pnet: Britain’s New Scientist says the Pentagon’s National Security Agency is funding research into information people post about themselves on social networks, an alarming prospect given the US government’s persistent attempts to plunder personal and private data without having to bother about getting warrants to do so.
Remember the DARPA Information Awareness Office Total Information Awareness computer systems? They were, “envisioned to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant”.
A second Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) program would, among other things, “extend its capabilities to the extraction of data from multiple sources (eg, text messages and web pages)”.
Genoa, a third intelligence mining and information gathering application, was meant to poke around in large computer databases, and 10 further DARPA data gathering and analysis projects, including Genisys, were being developed to enable, “ultra-large, all-source information repositories” because “Current database technology is clearly insufficient to address this need”.
Working for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) was convicted felon John Poindexter.
This new project, “could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming ’semantic web’ championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals,” says New Scientist.
Four years on, “the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope,” it states. “They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone’s contact network, a process sometimes called ‘connecting the dots’. Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or ‘degrees’ separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.
Data mining is at present difficult because so much is available. But, ” Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag.”
It will also make, “prying into people’s lives a breeze,” says the article, going on, “No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA,” but a footnote to Semantic Analytics on Social Networks research paper said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA – Advanced Research Development Activity.
“According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA’s role is to spend NSA money on research that can ’solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community’. Chief among ARDA’s aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects – some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month.”
Research funded by ARDA, “was designed to see if the semantic web could be easily used to connect people,” the story states, continuing, “So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers.”
Back to Total Information Awareness, “The NSA recently changed ARDA’s name to the Disruptive Technology Office,” says New Scientist. “The DTO’s interest in online social network analysis echoes the Pentagon’s controversial post 9/11 Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative. That programme, designed to collect, track and analyse online data trails, was suspended after a public furore over privacy in 2002. But elements of the TIA were incorporated into the Pentagon’s classified programme in the September 2003 Defense Appropriations Act.”
The story has PGP chief security officer Jon Callas, “noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop’s dream”.
And, concludes New Sientist, Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites.
“It may sound obvious, he says,” adds New Scientist, “but being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy. Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button.
Also See:
New Scientist – Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites, June 9, 2006
access to private data – Hacker Supreme’s Dream Machine, November 18, 2002
convicted felon – Poindexter Rides Again – Part III, December 16, 2002
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June 9th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
so now the government is building a database of 13 year old girls and their friends…….still don’t see how this stops terrorism since somebody planning an attack probably wouldn’t be a myspace member.
June 12th, 2006 at 1:09 am
One way to deal with this situation is fairly simple, and can be fun as well: Take advantage of the old computing adage: GIGO.
Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The idea is to sufficiently contaminate the data repository with enough disinformation and false data that it can no longer be considered reliable.
The basic flaw in the architecture of these massive data mining schemes is that they use the vucuum cleaner approach to amassing data. No attempt is made to verify that any of the data it is ingesting is verifiably accurate. Just like a vacuum cleaner, it will suck up anything that comes in its path. This would include dirt, lint, pet hair, potato chips crumbs, cigarette butts, etc. It will also suck up things you don’t want sucked up like coins, the contact lens you lost on the carpet last week, a small screw whose absence preventing reassembly of your wristwatch, the cat’s tail, and it’s own power cord. The aim is to get the data mining system to do the latter, which is tantamount to having it commit suicide.
There have already been isolated cases of this happening with marketing and market research data bases based on so-called supermarket shopper ‘Club’ cards, whereby you get a discount on certain items if you consent to having all of your purchases recorded, sifted, analyzed, digitized, catagorized, demographicized, etc. Group opposed to such schemes have done things like organize ‘card trading’ groups where every two weeks persons of considerably dissimilar demographics trade cards among themselves, so the elderly couple with four cats where Mrs has bladder control issues and Mr has false teeth trade cards with the 30-something Gay Male couple with two large dogs and a penchant for fresh pasta and premium deli, who trade cards with the young straight couple with 3 small children, one of whom is teething and has diaper rash, and the toddler has a gluten allergy, etc. Within a few weeks, all of the data that’s been collected on these people is totally worthless when any kind of market sector analysis algorithm is applied to their purchases.
Catalina Marketing is the company who is the main purveyors of these club plans and provides sophisticated analyses to the makers of the various national and regional brand products found in the local supermarket. There are certain specific markets they have just given up on because of such countermeasures being employed. In other locales people have just simply boycotted the chain forcing those to pay a premium who chose not to participate in their snoopy scheme, in favor of a chain that trumpets that they do no such thing. This also skews their data and makes it far less valuable because it eliminates an entire class of people for their data collection window and thus is no longer an accurate cross section of the market in that area.
There are something that you can’t screw sround with too much, like credit data, but ‘marketing’ information is fair game. Take out a trial subscription to a magazine on a topic you totally loathe or know absolutely nothing about. Take the 4 free issues and then write cancel on this bill, just like the ad says. You’re name is still duly recorded as being interested in Architecture of 13th Century Antarctica, or whatever the publication was about. Take the blow-in cards that fall out of any magazine in an annoying manner, fill them out with an imaginary name, but a real address and drop it in the mailbox. No postage required. Oops, another small amount of ‘dirt’ in the database.
Make hotel reservations in some distant location and cancel them a few days later. Same with rental cars or a U-haul. All of that stuff gets saved away in a database somewhere.
Sign up for Myspace and pretend you are a 24 year old woman, even if you are a 45 year old man or vice versa. Create your own set of ‘friends’. Create you own network of phantom ‘friends’. Connect networks of ersatz networks.
If enough people do this to the data sources used for the data mining, the statistical probablility of accuracy will drop far enough where the whole system can no longer be considered ‘reliable’, certainly not reliable enough for ‘probable cause’ or for any law enforcement action to be initiated (such as an investigation) based only on the results from a questionable system.
Don’t worry though. Filling out your coffee pot warranty card with false information is not a crime. In fact, the Government is doing an end run around the requirement they get a subpoena to access certain information by simply purchasing it as the product of a data broker.
The key is to have a sufficient number of angry people with a subversive vein participate in the scheme to make it effective.