Schneier on Security

Starship Buzzing By • March 19, 2015 7:40 PM

Mr Knee makes an interesting and revealing comment when he states the following:

Mr. Schneier’s use of concrete examples of bad behavior with data will make even skeptics queasy and potentially push the already paranoid over the edge

I believe he is speaking with confidence there on his own viewpoint, which is common: a skeptic, whose reading of the book made him literally wince, and not without paranoia on the possibilities. Note the later statement he made theoretically, the former he stated as a fact. This indicates that he has some level of paranoia.

The majority reaction to such an “omnipotent” and “omnipresent” system is very much like this.

O’Neil states:

Wait, before we move on, who is more pro-democracy, the guy who wants to stop totalitarian social control methods, or the guy who wants to leave it to the opaque authorities

I would suggest there are ‘waves of the future’ involved in these things (and matters not stated) that we can expect three major components of the future global system: 1. No more secrets, relatively speaking. eg, ‘what is whispered in secret will be shouted from the rooftops’. 2. Number one precludes number two, but worth mentioning as a truly separate point: this means opaque governance will be gone. 3. true collective governance (not to be confused with simplistic communist or democratic systems currently existing, but can be seen as shadowed by democratic systems including the very sort making form in modern internet systems)

There is one aspect of the intelligence ‘big data’ systems which is not getting much discussion, and for good reasons. That is on the usefulness for these systems as defensive not just against “terrorism”, but also against destructive, ‘offensive’ intelligence.

I recall Mr Schneier pointing out a few data points early on in the book in these regards, data points I take he obtained from the Snowden documents. They are interesting. For instance, friendly spies on foreign shores are tracked and with them data is collected on handsets around them. This might reveal foreign spies previously undetected. Or, patterns of handsets where batteries are taken out are examined. For instance, are a number of handsets showing their batteries taken out in a movie theater? A pattern there could reveal potentially previously unknown spies.

From Snowden documents or not, that is, of course, some level of “throwaway” information, as Snowden documents generally were such designed for wide, if internal, dissemination. So, for instance, these possibilities probably were already well on foreign spies radars. Though smaller nations would be likely not so able to evade such systems.

My point is: would such a system of intelligence ‘big data’ really not have potentially profound capacities for detecting previously unknown foreign intelligence networks operating underground?

I think they very much would, and I think they very much do.

Schneier kind of goes deeper into this, for instance, pointing out facial recognition technology and how it can be used to build up profiles of people via internet content. What if someone is using disguise? Then, they will not be on the internet much, will they? ‘If you are not on the internet, you do not exist’. And people who ‘do not exist’ are very strong likely people who are very interesting to find.

One might argue that a simple solution to that problem is to utilize disguises that rely on real people. This would be an even more problematic and revealing indicator: a person who exists in two or more places at once at the same time?

More complex systems of legend creation would have to be created, however considering the pace of the delivery of the mass intelligence system against the pace of reactive solutions, there gives little hope there. While it is relatively trivial to create social network and other internet presence, it is a little more difficult to backtrack all of that data in a way which well mimics real data from real people who actually exist.

And the errors from such a system being created too late would be tremendous in giving out entirely new indicators. New indicators which would greatly increase the level of shutting down signal to noise.