Eideard

The FBI plans to step up the monitoring of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and has asked for help building an app to constantly monitor the sites.

Earlier this month the FBI quietly published a request for information looking for companies that might help it build a new social network monitoring system looking at “publicly available” information. Contractors have until 10 February to suggest solutions.

US enforcement agencies have increasingly been using social networks to track crime. Recently over 40 members of two feuding New York gangs were indicted in connection with a series of shootings and killings in Brooklyn after they boasted about their crimes on Twitter…

But the increasing monitoring of social networks has also alarmed privacy advocates. Last year, Twitter disclosed that the justice department had subpoenaed it to get personal records of Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a former WikiLeaks aide.

Lillie Coney, associate director of EPIC, a Washington-based privacy group, called the FBI request “ridiculous.”

“Get a warrant,” she said. “You don’t know half the people you communicate with on Twitter. They are going to launch investigations and start looking at all sorts of people that they have no right to be investigating. There is no accountability, no transparency and no oversight.”

The RFI calls on companies to develop a “secure, light weight web application” for the FBI’s strategic information and operations center. “The application must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.”

The product must allow the FBI to keep hold of cached information as well as real time data, and allow that information to be linked to specific locations and easily shared…

The FBI did not return calls for comment.

I haven’t any beef with the premise of government recording, analyzing public data. In and of itself, that can be productive and useful. The concern is as old as the FBI. That is, what will they do with the information?

Geeks continue to admonish newbies to realize that everything they say online is out there for the world to see. There is no privacy on public parts of the Web. I would add another reminder to my fellow Americans. Since the first time I stood up publicly and opposed racist law and practice — in a demonstration 50 miles from the White House in 1960 — I have had a file on my activities in the FBI. That’s a fact of life for anyone in this land who dissents. It’s a badge of honor.

Here’s hoping former House Speaker John M. Perzel is handed his head – figuratively, of course – when he is sentenced for bilking Pennsylvania taxpayers out of millions to pursue his political ambitions.

Even after pleading guilty Wednesday to eight counts of conspiracy, theft, and conflict of interest, Perzel tried to suggest that any wrongdoing on his part was merely a sin of omission, a result of his not paying sufficient attention to what others were doing.

“The truth is that as the legislative leader of my caucus, I oversaw the spending of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, and I bear the responsibility for the improprieties that occurred in the spending of those dollars,” said Perzel.

That was an apology..?

Perzel knew exactly what was going on because he was the mastermind. He and a cabal of Republican operatives diverted up to $10 million in state funds to pay for expensive computer programs that would give their candidates an advantage in elections.

They used the software to mine vast amounts of data about voters, including their party affiliation, gender, and religion. The database was so extensive that at one point Perzel allegedly sought to sell the information to others.

The Republican scheme, which led to the indictment of 10 people, was the other bookend to a Democratic scam that had earlier resulted in multiple indictments. The Democrats used taxpayer funds to pay bonuses to legislative staffers for political work…

The currency of profit and power from steering the ship of state is what matters most of all to the clown show that is Congress and most state legislatures. The bigoted whine that is the Tea Party only attacks politicians who confront corporate wealth. Lame and halt declarations from the cowards who call themselves liberal are little more than lip service to a once-brave history.

The Congressional Progressive caucuses hold out some hope for structural reform. We actually have a couple of folks here in New Mexico who are capable of reelection in a heartbeat because they have that sort of backbone. But, in general – most folks who want honesty and modern policies – remain hitched to business-as-usual political machines governed by nepotism and country club connections.

The personal data of millions of passengers who fly between the US and Europe, including credit card details, phone numbers and home addresses, may be stored by the US department of homeland security for 15 years, according to a draft agreement between Washington and Brussels leaked to the Guardian.

The “restricted” draft, which emerged from negotiations between the US and EU, opens the way for passenger data provided to airlines on check-in to be analysed by US automated data-mining and profiling programmes in the name of fighting terrorism, crime and illegal migration. The Americans want to require airlines to supply passenger lists as near complete as possible 96 hours before takeoff, so names can be checked against terrorist and immigration watchlists.

The agreement acknowledges that there will be occasions when people are delayed or prevented from flying because they are wrongly identified as a threat, and gives them the right to petition for judicial review in the US federal court. Well, isn’t that special?

The 15-year retention period is likely to prove highly controversial as it is three times the five years allowed for in the EU’s PNR (passenger name record) regime to cover flights into, out of and within Europe. A period of five and a half years has just been negotiated in a similar agreement with Australia. Germany and France raised concerns this week about the agreement and the unproven necessity for the measure.

Britain has already announced its intention to opt in to the European PNR plan, in which the home secretary, Theresa May, played a key role, and is expected to join the US agreement this summer…

The US Senate passed a resolution last week saying it “simply could not accept” any watering down by European ministers of data-sharing, describing it as “an important part of our layered defences against terrorism”. Senators said it was an important tool in the security agencies’ “identifying possible threats before they arrive in our country”.

But the European parliament, which would have to approve it, has demanded proof that such a PNR agreement is necessary, and said it should in no circumstances be used for data-mining or profiling…

This draft agreement appears to give the Americans all they have asked for…

The data to be collected includes 19 separate items relating to each airline passenger, including their billing details, contact numbers, the names of those they are travelling with and how much baggage they have, as well their itinerary.

Well, we certainly are assured our government cares enough about our safety and security that they are willing to keep an eye on us for years and years. I feel safer, now. Don’t you?

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t…”

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

RTFA for the details. The questions asked about job security, employment, acquired skills are interesting, relevant.

Pay fees like that a few times and you run full speed to the nearest software design firm. Now that we’ve achieved the quality of data mining at least capable of performing tasks previously left to graduates from the bottom third of their law class – and took three tries to become admitted to the bar.

IBM has been tapped by NATO to build a new cloud-based computing system designed to help the 28 member nations better use and share data.

Selected for the project by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT), Big Blue will be called upon to design and demonstrate a cloud-computing environment that would help the North Atlantic Treaty Organization plan and implement critical tasks, such as intelligence gathering, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

The goal is to see if NATO members can use a collaborative cloud to access data faster and make decisions more quickly…

The system will also need to be more secure, more scalable, and more cost-effective than the hodgepodge of systems used in the past…

That’s the bit that makes me chuckle over pundits who are heartsick and offended to death over cloud computing – because it may break down or be insecure. You mean like every other system already in use?

IBM will design and manage the system at NATO’s ACT command headquarters in Norfolk, Va. The project is part of NATO’s goal to modernize its technologies for the 21st century…

More than 10 years after she tried without success to have a baby, Marcy Campbell Krinsk is still receiving painful reminders in her mail. The ads and promotions started after she bought fertility drugs at a pharmacy in San Diego.

Marketers got hold of her name, and she found coupons and samples in her mail that shadowed the growth of an imaginary child — at first, for Pampers and baby formula, then for discounts on family photos, and all the way through the years to gifts suitable for an elementary school graduate.

“I had three different in vitro procedures,” said Ms. Krinsk, now 55, a former telecommunications executive who lives with her husband in San Diego. “To just go to the mailbox and get that stuff, time after time after time, it was just awful.”

Like many other people, Ms. Krinsk thought that her prescription information was private. But in fact, prescriptions, and all the information on them — including not only the name and dosage of the drug and the name and address of the doctor, but also the patient’s address and Social Security number — are a commodity bought and sold in a murky marketplace, often without the patients’ knowledge or permission.

That may change if some little-noted protections from the Obama administration are strictly enforced. The federal stimulus law enacted in February prohibits in most cases the sale of personal health information, with a few exceptions for research and public health measures like tracking flu epidemics. It also tightens rules for telling patients when hackers or health care workers have stolen their Social Security numbers or medical information, as happened to Britney Spears, Maria Shriver and Farrah Fawcett before she died in June.

Read the rest of this entry »

Privacy? Har, har, har…
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

An internet privacy law is coming, Congressman Rick Boucher promised, as he steered his committee into the marshes of online behavioral advertising, deep packet inspection and location-tracking services.

Boucher, a Virginia Democrat and longtime ally of digital rights groups, now heads the House subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet. He said wants the committee to write a broad online privacy law this year.

For instance, Boucher made it clear he’s concerned about ISPs using so-called deep packet inspection technology, or DPI, to examine the data packets it delivers to and from its customers. “The thought that a network operator could track a user’s every move on the Internet, record the details of every search and read every email or attached document is alarming.”

But the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Leslie Harris warned the committee not to get too wrapped up with any particular technology, since the privacy threats change quickly — pointing out that current privacy laws are good in some areas — video rental records, for one — and non-existent in others…

It’s not clear how broad a law Boucher has in mind, though it’s likely to be some codification of generally accepted data-privacy practices. Those include telling people when you collect data and why, letting them choose to join in or not, using the data only for the reason you collected it, letting people see and correct the information and destroying it when its not longer needed…

The Free Press’s Ben Scott summed up what he and many consumer advocates would like to see in an overarching privacy bill.

“It needs to cover intentionality, behavior, and outcome,” Scott said. “Why do you want my information? What are you going to do with it? And what does that mean for me?”

I’ll second that.