Entries Tagged "databases"

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Find Out if You're on the "No Fly List"

I’m not. Are you?

Soundex works, generally, by removing vowels from names and then assigning numerical values to the remaining consonants.

This has been the basis for the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPPS) and it is horrendously inadequate and matches far too many names. To see just how poorly Soundex performs, visit nofly.s3.com and type in your name to assess your chances of being on the No Fly or Watch List. This is the only known publicly available site for checking your name against potential terrorist identities and databases. It was developed by S3 Matching Technologies of Austin, Texas. The company’s database technicians merged the best known data on terrorists with the Soundex system to create the site.

Posted on March 14, 2007 at 7:51 AM • View Comments

OneDOJ

Yet another massive U.S. government database—OneDOJ:

The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies, according to Justice officials.

The system, known as “OneDOJ,” already holds approximately 1 million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

The database is billed by its supporters as a much-needed step toward better information-sharing with local law enforcement agencies, which have long complained about a lack of cooperation from the federal government.

But civil-liberties and privacy advocates say the scale and contents of such a database raise immediate privacy and civil rights concerns, in part because tens of thousands of local police officers could gain access to personal details about people who have not been arrested or charged with crimes.

The little-noticed program has been coming together over the past year and a half. It already is in use in pilot projects with local police in Seattle, San Diego and a handful of other areas, officials said. About 150 separate police agencies have access, officials said.

But in a memorandum sent last week to the FBI, U.S. attorneys and other senior Justice officials, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty announced that the program will be expanded immediately to 15 additional regions and that federal authorities will “accelerate . . . efforts to share information from both open and closed cases.”

Eventually, the department hopes, the database will be a central mechanism for sharing federal law enforcement information with local and state investigators, who now run checks individually, and often manually, with Justice’s five main law enforcement agencies: the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Within three years, officials said, about 750 law enforcement agencies nationwide will have access.

Computerizing this stuff is a good idea, but any new systems need privacy safeguards built-in. We need to ensure that:

  • Inaccurate data can be corrected.
  • Data is deleted when it is no longer needed, especially investigative data on people who have turned out to be innocent.
  • Protections are in place to prevent abuse of the data, both by people in their official capacity and people acting unofficially or fraudulently.

ln our rush to computerize these records, we’re ignoring these safeguards and building systems that will make us all less secure.

Posted on January 2, 2007 at 11:55 AM • View Comments

CATO Report on Data Mining and Terrorism

Definitely worth reading:

Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem. It would be unfortunate if data mining for terrorism discovery had currency within national security, law enforcement, and technology circles because pursuing this use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community.

Posted on December 13, 2006 at 1:38 PM • View Comments

Major Privacy Breach at UCLA

Hackers have gained access to a database containing personal information on 800,000 current and former UCLA students.

This is barely worth writing about: yet another database attack exposing personal information. My guess is that everyone in the U.S. has been the victim of at least one of these already. But there was a particular section of the article that caught my eye:

Jim Davis, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor for information technology, described the attack as sophisticated, saying it used a program designed to exploit a flaw in a single software application among the many hundreds used throughout the Westwood campus.

“An attacker found one small vulnerability and was able to exploit it, and then cover their tracks,” Davis said.

It worries me that the associate vice chancellor for information technology doesn’t understand that all attacks work like that.

Posted on December 13, 2006 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

The Square Root of Terrorist Intent

I’ve already written about the DHS’s database of top terrorist targets and how dumb it is. Important sites are not on the list, and unimportant ones are. The reason is pork, of course; states get security money based on this list, so every state wants to make sure they have enough sites on it. And over the past five years, states with Republican congressmen got more money than states without.

Here’s another article on this general topic, centering around an obscure quantity: the square root of terrorist intent:

The Department of Homeland Security is the home of many mysteries. There is, of course, the color-coded system for gauging the threat of an attack. And there is the department database of national assets to protect against a terrorist threat, which includes Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo in Woodville, Ala., and the Apple and Pork Festival in Clinton, Ill.

And now Jim O’Brien, the director of the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security in Clark County, Nev., has discovered another hard-to-fathom DHS notion: a mathematical value purporting to represent the square root of terrorist intent. The figure appears deep in the mind-numbingly complex risk-assessment formulas that the department used in 2006 to decide the likelihood that a place is or will become a terrorist target—an all-important estimate outside the Beltway, because greater slices of the federal anti-terrorism pie go to the locations with the highest scores. Overall, the department awarded $711 million in high-risk urban counterterrorism grants last year.

[…]

As O’Brien reviewed the risk-assessment formulas—a series of calculations that runs into the billions—he found himself unable to account for several factors, the terrorist-intent notion principal among them. “I have a Ph.D. I think I understand formulas,” he says. “Take the square root of terrorist intent? Now, give me a break.” The whole notion, O’Brien says, is a contradiction in terms: “How can you quantify what somebody is thinking?”

Other designations for variables in the formula are almost befuddling, O’Brien says, such as the “attractiveness factor,” which seeks to establish how terrorists might prefer one sort of target over another, and the “chatter factor,” which tries to gauge the intent of potential terror plotters based on communication intercepts.

“One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure,” he says. “So I don’t know how you measure attractiveness.” The chatter factor, meanwhile, leaves O’Brien entirely in the dark: “I’m not sure what that means.”

What I said last time still applies:

We’re never going to get security right if we continue to make it a parody of itself.

Posted on December 11, 2006 at 12:18 PM • View Comments

New U.S. Customs Database on Trucks and Travellers

It’s yet another massive government surveillance program:

US Customs and Border Protection issued a notice in the Federal Register yesterday which detailed the agency’s massive database that keeps risk assessments on every traveler entering or leaving the country. Citizens who are concerned that their information is inaccurate are all but out of luck: the system “may not be accessed under the Privacy Act for the purpose of contesting the content of the record.”

The system in question is the Automated Targeting System, which is associated with the previously-existing Treasury Enforcement Communications System. TECS was built to screen people and assets that moved in and out of the US, and its database contains more than one billion records that are accessible by more than 30,000 users at 1,800 sites around the country. Customs has adapted parts of the TECS system to its own use and now plans to screen all passengers, inbound and outbound cargo, and ships.

The system creates a risk assessment for each person or item in the database. The assessment is generated from information gleaned from federal and commercial databases, provided by people themselves as they cross the border, and the Passenger Name Record information recorded by airlines. This risk assessment will be maintained for up to 40 years and can be pulled up by agents at a moment’s notice in order to evaluate potential threats against the US.

If you leave the country, the government will suddenly know a lot about you. The Passenger Name Record alone contains names, addresses, telephone numbers, itineraries, frequent-flier information, e-mail addresses—even the name of your travel agent. And this information can be shared with plenty of people:

  • Federal, state, local, tribal, or foreign governments
  • A court, magistrate, or administrative tribunal
  • Third parties during the course of a law enforcement investigation
  • Congressional office in response to an inquiry
  • Contractors, grantees, experts, consultants, students, and others performing or working on a contract, service, or grant
  • Any organization or person who might be a target of terrorist activity or conspiracy
  • The United States Department of Justice
  • The National Archives and Records Administration
  • Federal or foreign government intelligence or counterterrorism agencies
  • Agencies or people when it appears that the security or confidentiality of their information has been compromised.

That’s a lot of people who could be looking at your information and your government-designed risk assessment. The one person who won’t be looking at that information is you. The entire system is exempt from inspection and correction under provision 552a (j)(2) and (k)(2) of US Code Title 5, which allows such exemptions when the data in question involves law enforcement or intelligence information.

This means you can’t review your data for accuracy, and you can’t correct any errors.

But the system can be used to give you a risk assessment score, which presumably will affect how you’re treated when you return to the U.S.

I’ve already explained why data mining does not find terrorists or terrorist plots. So have actual math professors. And we’ve seen this kind of “risk assessment score” idea and the problems it causes with Secure Flight.

This needs some mainstream press attention.

EDITED TO ADD (11/4): More commentary here, here, and here.

EDITED TO ADD (11/5): It’s buried in the back pages, but at least The Washington Post wrote about it.

Posted on November 4, 2006 at 9:19 AM • View Comments

Faulty Data and the Arar Case

Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian citizen. On September 26, 2002, he tried to fly from Switzerland to Toronto. Changing planes in New York, he was detained by the U.S. authorities, and eventually shipped to Syria where he was tortured. He’s 100% innocent. (Background here.)

The Canadian government has completed its “Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar,” the results of which are public. From their press release:

On Maher Arar, the Commissioner comes to one important conclusion: “I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada.”

Certainly something that everyone who supports the U.S.’s right to detain and torture people without having to demonstrate their guilt should think about. But what’s more interesting to readers of this blog is the role that inaccurate data played in the deportation and ultimately torture of an innocent man.

Privacy International summarizes the report. These are among their bullet points:

  • The RCMP provided the U.S. with an entire database of information relating to a terrorism investigation (three CDs of information), in a way that did not comply with RCMP policies that require screening for relevance, reliability, and personal information. In fact, this action was without precedent.
  • The RCMP provided the U.S. with inaccurate information about Arar that portrayed him in an infairly negative fashion and overstated his importance to a RCMP investigation. They included some “erroneous notes.”
  • While he was detained in the U.S., the RCMP provided information regarding him to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), “some of which portrayed him in an inaccurate and unfair way.” The RCMP provided inaccurate information to the U.S. authorities that tended to link Arar to other terrorist suspects; and told the U.S. authorities that Arar had previously refused to be interviewed, which was also incorrect; and the RCMP also said that soon after refusing the interview he suddenly left Canada for Tunisia. “The statement about the refusal to be interviewed had the potential to arouse suspicion, especially among law enforcement officers, that Mr. Arar had something to hide.” The RCMP’s information to the U.S. authorities also placed Arar in the vicinity of Washington DC on September 11, 2001 when he was instead in California.

Judicial oversight is a security mechanism. It prevents the police from incarcerating the wrong person. The point of habeas corpus is that the police need to present their evidence in front of a neutral third party, and not indefinitely detain or torture people just because they believe they’re guilty. We are all less secure if we water down these security measures.

Posted on September 29, 2006 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Malware Distribution Project

In case you needed a comprehensive database of malware.

Malware Distribution Project (MD:Pro) offers developers of security systems and anti-malware products a vast collection of downloadable malware from a secure and reliable source, exclusively for the purposes of analysis, testing, research and development.

Bringing together for the first time a large back-catalogue of malware, computer underground related information and IT security resources under one project, this major new system also contains a large selection of undetected malware, along with an open, collaborative platform, where malware samples can be shared among its members. The database is constantly updated with new files, and maintained to keep it running at an optimum.

There are currently 271712 files in the system.

This isn’t free. You can subscribe at 1,250 euros for a month, or 13,500 euros a year. (There are cheaper packages with less comprehensive access.)

They claim to have a stringent vetting process, ensuring that only legitimate researchers have access to this database:

It should be noted that we are not a malware/VX distribution site, nor do we condone the public spreading and/or distribution of such information, hence we will be vetting our registrants stringently. We do appreciate that this puts a severe restriction on private (individual) malware researchers and enthusiasts with limited or no budget, but we do feel that providing free malware for public research is out of the scope of this project.

EDITED TO ADD (8/8): The hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow also has a malware repository, free and with looser access restrictions.

Posted on August 8, 2006 at 7:56 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.