Entries Tagged "databases"

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National Academies Report on Bulk Intelligence Collection

In January, the National Academies of Science (NAS) released a report on the bulk collection of signals intelligence. Basically, a year previously President Obama tasked the Director of National Intelligence with assessing “the feasibility of creating software that would allow the Intelligence Community more easily to conduct target information acquisition rather than bulk collection.” The DNI asked the NAS to answer the question, and the result is this report.

The conclusion is about what you’d expect. From the NAS press release:

No software-based technique can fully replace the bulk collection of signals intelligence, but methods can be developed to more effectively conduct targeted collection and to control the usage of collected data, says a new report from the National Research Council. Automated systems for isolating collected data, restricting queries that can be made against those data, and auditing usage of the data can help to enforce privacy protections and allay some civil liberty concerns, the unclassified report says.

[…]

A key value of bulk collection is its record of past signals intelligence that may be relevant to subsequent investigations, the report notes. The committee was not asked to and did not consider whether the loss of effectiveness from reducing bulk collection would be too great, or whether the potential gain in privacy from adopting an alternative collection method is worth the potential loss of intelligence information. It did observe that other sources of information—for example, data held by third parties such as communications providers—might provide a partial substitute for bulk collection in some circumstances.

Right. The singular value of spying on everyone and saving all the data is that you can go back in time and use individual pieces of that data. There’s nothing that can substitute for that.

And what the report committee didn’t look at is very important. Here’s Herb Lin, cyber policy and security researcher and a staffer on this report:

…perhaps the most important point of the report is what it does not say. It concludes that giving up bulk surveillance entirely will entail some costs to national security, but it does not say that we should keep or abandon bulk surveillance. National security is an important national priority and so are civil liberties. We don’t do EVERYTHING we could do for national security—we accept some national security risks. And we don’t do everything we could do for civil liberties—we accept some reductions in civil liberties. Where, when, and under what circumstances we accept either—that’s the most important policy choice that the American people can make.

Just because something can be done does not mean that 1) it is effective, or 2) it should be done. There’s a lot of evidence that bulk collection is not valuable.

Here’s an overview of the report. And a news article. And the DNI press release.

Posted on February 9, 2015 at 6:16 AM • View Comments

Corporations Misusing Our Data

In the Internet age, we have no choice but to entrust our data with private companies: e-mail providers, service providers, retailers, and so on.

We realize that this data is at risk from hackers. But there’s another risk as well: the employees of the companies who are holding our data for us.

In the early years of Facebook, employees had a master password that enabled them to view anything they wanted in any account. NSA employees occasionally snoop on their friends and partners. The agency even has a name for it: LOVEINT. And well before the Internet, people with access to police or medical records occasionally used that power to look up either famous people or people they knew.

The latest company accused of allowing this sort of thing is Uber, the Internet car-ride service. The company is under investigation for spying on riders without their permission. Called the “god view,” some Uber employees are able to see who is using the service and where they’re going—and used this at least once in 2011 as a party trick to show off the service. A senior executive also suggested the company should hire people to dig up dirt on their critics, making their database of people’s rides even more “useful.”

None of us wants to be stalked—whether it’s from looking at our location data, our medical data, our emails and texts, or anything else—by friends or strangers who have access due to their jobs. Unfortunately, there are few rules protecting us.

Government employees are prohibited from looking at our data, although none of the NSA LOVEINT creeps were ever prosecuted. The HIPAA law protects the privacy of our medical records, but we have nothing to protect most of our other information.

Your Facebook and Uber data are only protected by company culture. There’s nothing in their license agreements that you clicked “agree” to but didn’t read that prevents those companies from violating your privacy.

This needs to change. Corporate databases containing our data should be secured from everyone who doesn’t need access for their work. Voyeurs who peek at our data without a legitimate reason should be punished.

There are audit technologies that can detect this sort of thing, and they should be required. As long as we have to give our data to companies and government agencies, we need assurances that our privacy will be protected.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.

Posted on December 5, 2014 at 6:45 AM • View Comments

The Concerted Effort to Remove Data Collection Restrictions

Since the beginning, data privacy regulation has focused on collection, storage, and use. You can see it in the OECD Privacy Framework from 1980 (see also this proposed update).

Recently, there has been concerted effort to focus all potential regulation on data use, completely ignoring data collection. Microsoft’s Craig Mundie argues this. So does the PCAST report. And the World Economic Forum. This is lobbying effort by US business. My guess is that the companies are much more worried about collection restrictions than use restrictions. They believe that they can slowly change use restrictions once they have the data, but that it’s harder to change collection restrictions and get the data in the first place.

We need to regulate collection as well as use. In a new essay, Chris Hoofnagle explains why.

Posted on September 12, 2014 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

Hackers Steal Personal Information of US Security-Clearance Holders

The article says they were Chinese but offers no evidence:

The intrusion at the Office of Personnel Management was particularly disturbing because it oversees a system called e-QIP, in which federal employees applying for security clearances enter their most personal information, including financial data. Federal employees who have had security clearances for some time are often required to update their personal information through the website.

This is a big deal. If I were a government, trying to figure out who to target for blackmail, bribery, and other coercive tactics, this would be a nice database to have.

Posted on July 17, 2014 at 6:09 AM • View Comments

More Details on NSA Tapping the Internet Backbone

Two new stories: one from Der Spiegel in Germany (also reported in the Intercept) and the other from Dagbladet Information in Denmark (again, also reported in the Intercept). Lots of good information in both stories.

EDITED TO ADD (6/20): Der Spiegel has two other stories, as well as a large trove of source documents. The Dagbladet Information source documents are here.

And in related news, the US House of Representatives voted to ban NSA backdoor searches, as well as it weakening commercial products and protocols. There’s no chance it’ll become a law, but the 293-123 vote is a big deal nonetheless.

The current authority for the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata expires today. A bunch of organizations have tried to urge the president not to renew it. I don’t think that’ll happen, either.

It’s a measure of the popular interest in this issue that the German/Danish story isn’t being reported by the US press, and I had to search to find the Congressional vote on the New York Times and Washington Post sites. Only the Guardian had it as a home page headline. No one is reporting today’s renewal of the telephone metadata program.

EDITED TO ADD (6/21): The bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone call records program has been renewed. And Der Spiegel published an editorial explaining why it broke the story and released the secret NSA documents.

EDITED TO ADD (6/23): Marcy Wheeler noticed at the FISC order renewing the bulk surveillance order came with some sort of memorandum opinion.

EDITED TO ADD (7/14): Good commentary from the comments.

Posted on June 20, 2014 at 9:43 AM • View Comments

An Open Letter to IBM's Open Letter

Last week, IBM published an “open letter” about “government access to data,” where it tried to assure its customers that it’s not handing everything over to the NSA. Unfortunately, the letter (quoted in part below) leaves open more questions than it answers.

At the outset, we think it is important for IBM to clearly state some simple facts:

  • IBM has not provided client data to the National Security Agency (NSA) or any other government agency under the program known as PRISM.
  • IBM has not provided client data to the NSA or any other government agency under any surveillance program involving the bulk collection of content or metadata.
  • IBM has not provided client data stored outside the United States to the U.S. government under a national security order, such as a FISA order or a National Security Letter.
  • IBM does not put “backdoors” in its products for the NSA or any other government agency, nor does IBM provide software source code or encryption keys to the NSA or any other government agency for the purpose of accessing client data.
  • IBM has and will continue to comply with the local laws, including data privacy laws, in all countries in which it operates.

To which I ask:

  • We know you haven’t provided data to the NSA under PRISM. It didn’t use that name with you. Even the NSA General Counsel said: “PRISM was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term.” What program did you provide data to the NSA under?
  • It seems rather obvious that you haven’t provided the NSA with any data under a bulk collection surveillance program. You’re not Google; you don’t have bulk data to that extent. So why the caveat? And again, under what program did you provide data to the NSA?
  • Okay, so you say that you haven’t provided any data stored outside the US to the NSA under a national security order. Since those national security orders prohibit you from disclosing their existence, would you say anything different if you did receive them? And even if we believe this statement, it implies two questions. Why did you specifically not talk about data stored inside the US? And why did you specifically not talk about providing data under another sort of order?
  • Of course you don’t provide your source code to the NSA for the purpose of accessing client data. The NSA isn’t going to tell you that’s why it wants your source code. So, for what purposes did you provide your source code to the government? To get a contract? For audit purposes? For what?
  • Yes, we know you need to comply with all local laws, including US laws. That’s why we don’t trust you—the current secret interpretations of US law requires you to screw your customers. I’d really rather you simply said that, and worked to change those laws, than pretend that you can convince us otherwise.

EDITED TO ADD (3/25): One more thing. This article says that you are “spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government.” Do you not know that National Security Letters require you to turn over requested data, regardless of where in the world it is stored? Or do you just hope that your customers don’t realize that?

Posted on March 24, 2014 at 6:58 AM • View Comments

MYSTIC: The NSA's Telephone Call Collection Program

The Washington Post is reporting on an NSA program called MYSTIC, which collects all—that’s 100%—of a country’s telephone calls. Those calls are stored in a database codenamed NUCLEON, and can be retrieved at a later date using a tool codenamed RETRO. This is voice, not metadata.

What’s interesting here is not the particular country whose data is being collected; that information was withheld from the article. It’s not even that the voice data is stored for a month, and then deleted. All of that can change, either at the whim of the NSA or as storage capabilities get larger. What’s interesting is that the capability exists to collect 100% of a country’s telephone calls, and the analysis tools are in place to search them.

Posted on March 18, 2014 at 3:19 PM • View Comments

CSEC Surveillance Analysis of IP and User Data

The most recent story from the Snowden documents is from Canada: it claims the CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada) used airport Wi-Fi information to track travelers. That’s not really true. What the top-secret presentation shows is a proof-of-concept project to identify different IP networks, using a database of user IDs found on those networks over time, and then potentially using that data to identify individual users. This is actually far more interesting than simply eavesdropping on airport Wi-Fi sessions. Between Boingo and the cell phone carriers, that’s pretty easy.

The researcher, with the cool-sounding job-title of “tradecraft developer,” started with two weeks’ worth of ID data from a redacted “Canadian Special Source.” (The presentation doesn’t say if they compelled some Internet company to give them the data, or if they eavesdropped on some Internet service and got it surreptitiously.) This was a list of userids seen on those networks at particular times, presumably things like Facebook logins. (Facebook, Google, Yahoo and many others are finally using SSL by default, so this data is now harder to come by.) They also had a database of geographic locations for IP addresses from Quova (now Neustar). The basic question is whether they could determine what sorts of wireless hotspots the IP addresses were.

You’d expect airports to look different from hotels, and those to look different from offices. And, in fact, that’s what the data showed. At an airport network, individual IDs are seen once, and briefly. At hotels, individual IDs are seen over a few days. At an office, IDs are generally seen from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday. And so on.

Pretty basic so far. Where it gets interesting his how this kind of dataset can be used. The presentation suggests two applications. The first is the obvious one. If you know the ID of some surveillance target, you can set an alarm when that target visits an airport or a hotel. The presentation points out that “targets/enemies still target air travel and hotels”; but more realistically, this can be used to know when a target is traveling.

The second application suggested is to identify a particular person whom you know visited a particular geographical area on a series of dates/times. The example in the presentation is a kidnapper. He is based in a rural area, so he can’t risk making his ransom calls from that area. Instead, he drives to an urban area to make those calls. He either uses a burner phone or a pay phone, so he can’t be identified that way. But if you assume that he has some sort of smart phone in his pocket that identifies itself over the Internet, you might be able to find him in that dataset. That is, he might be the only ID that appears in that geographical location around the same time as the ransom calls and at no other times.

The results from testing that second application were successful, but slow. The presentation sounds encouraging, stating that something called Collaborative Analysis Research Environment (CARE) is being trialed “with NSA launch assist”: presumably technology, money, or both. CARE reduces the run-time “from 2+ hours to several seconds.” This was in May 2012, so it’s probably all up and running by now. We don’t know if this particular research project was ever turned into an operational program, but the CSEC, the NSA, and the rest of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies have a lot of interesting uses for this kind of data.

Since the Snowden documents have been reported on last June, the primary focus of the stories has been the collection of data. There has been very little reporting about how this data is analyzed and used. The exception is the story on the cell phone location database, which has some pretty fascinating analytical programs attached to it. I think the types of analysis done on this data are at least as important as its collection, and likely more disturbing to the average person. These sorts of analysis are being done with all of the data collected. Different databases are being correlated for all sorts of purposes. When I get back to the source documents, these are exactly the sorts of things I will be looking for. And when we think of the harms to society of ubiquitous surveillance, this is what we should be thinking about.

EDITED TO ADD (2/3): Microsoft has done the same research.

EDITED TO ADD (2/4): And Microsoft patented it.

Posted on February 3, 2014 at 5:09 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.