Entries Tagged "secrecy"

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American Authorities Secretly Give International Travellers Terrorist "Risk" Score

From the Associated Press:

Without notifying the public, federal agents for the past four years have assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans, computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.

The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

The program’s existence was quietly disclosed earlier in November when the government put an announcement detailing the Automated Targeting System, or ATS, for the first time in the Federal Register, a fine-print compendium of federal rules. Privacy and civil liberties lawyers, congressional aides and even law enforcement officers said they thought this system had been applied only to cargo.

Like all these systems, we are all judged in secret, by a computer algorithm, with no way to see or even challenge our score. Kafka would be proud.

“If this catches one potential terrorist, this is a success,” Ahern said.

That’s just too idiotic a statement to even rebut.

EDITED TO ADD (12/3): More commentary.

Posted on December 1, 2006 at 12:12 PM • View Comments

A Classified Wikipedia

A good idea:

The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government’s classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the World Wide Web.

A “top secret” Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17. Less restrictive versions exist for “secret” and “sensitive but unclassified” material.

Posted on November 15, 2006 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

The Zotob Worm and the DHS

On August 18 of last year, the Zotob worm badly infected computers at the Department of Homeland Security, particularly the 1,300 workstations running the US-VISIT application at border crossings. Wired News filed a Freedom of Information Act request for details, which was denied.

After we sued, CBP released three internal documents, totaling five pages, and a copy of Microsoft’s security bulletin on the plug-and-play vulnerability. Though heavily redacted, the documents were enough to establish that Zotob had infiltrated US-VISIT after CBP made the strategic decision to leave the workstations unpatched. Virtually every other detail was blacked out. In the ensuing court proceedings, CBP claimed the redactions were necessary to protect the security of its computers, and acknowledged it had an additional 12 documents, totaling hundreds of pages, which it withheld entirely on the same grounds.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston reviewed all the documents in chambers, and ordered an additional four documents to be released last month. The court also directed DHS to reveal much of what it had previously hidden beneath thick black pen strokes in the original five pages.

“Although defendant repeatedly asserts that this information would render the CBP computer system vulnerable, defendant has not articulated how this general information would do so,” Illston wrote in her ruling (emphasis is lllston’s).

The details say nothing about the technical details of the computer systems, and only point to the incompetence of the DHS in handling the incident.

Details are in the Wired News article.

Posted on November 6, 2006 at 12:11 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

Total Information Awareness Is Back

Remember Total Information Awareness?

In November 2002, the New York Times reported that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was developing a tracking system called “Total Information Awareness” (TIA), which was intended to detect terrorists through analyzing troves of information. The system, developed under the direction of John Poindexter, then-director of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office, was envisioned to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant.

TIA purported to capture the “information signature” of people so that the government could track potential terrorists and criminals involved in “low-intensity/low-density” forms of warfare and crime. The goal was to track individuals through collecting as much information about them as possible and using computer algorithms and human analysis to detect potential activity.

The project called for the development of “revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories,” which would contain information from multiple sources to create a “virtual, centralized, grand database.” This database would be populated by transaction data contained in current databases such as financial records, medical records, communication records, and travel records as well as new sources of information. Also fed into the database would be intelligence data.

The public found it so abhorrent, and objected so forcefully, that Congress killed funding for the program in September 2003.

None of us thought that meant the end of TIA, only that it would turn into a classified program and be renamed. Well, the program is now called Tangram, and it is classified:

The government’s top intelligence agency is building a computerized system to search very large stores of information for patterns of activity that look like terrorist planning. The system, which is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the country.

It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create “suspicion scores” for suspected terrorists by analyzing very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals’ private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.

The information about Tangram comes from a government document looking for contractors to help design and build the system.

DefenseTech writes:

The document, which is a description of the Tangram program for potential contractors, describes other, existing profiling and detection systems that haven’t moved beyond so-called “guilt-by-association models,” which link suspected terrorists to potential associates, but apparently don’t tell analysts much about why those links are significant. Tangram wants to improve upon these methods, as well as investigate the effectiveness of other detection links such as “collective inferencing,” which attempt to create suspicion scores of entire networks of people simultaneously.

Data mining for terrorists has always been a dumb idea. And the existence of Tangram illustrates the problem with Congress trying to stop a program by killing its funding; it just comes back under a different name.

Posted on October 31, 2006 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

Fukuyama on Secrecy

From the New York Times:

All new threats entail huge uncertainties. Then, as now, there was a pronounced tendency to assume the worst, and for the government to claim enormous discretion in protecting the American public. The Bush administration has consistently argued that it needs to be protected from Congressional oversight and media scrutiny. An example is the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of telephone traffic into and out of the United States. Rather than going to Congress and trying to negotiate changes to the law that regulates such activities, the administration simply grabbed that authority for itself, saying, in effect, “Trust us: if you knew what we know about the threat, you’d be perfectly happy to have us do what we’re doing.” In other areas, like the holding of prisoners in Guantanamo and interrogation methods used there and in the Middle East, one can only quote Moynihan on an earlier era: “As fears of Communist conspiracies and German subversion mounted, it was the U.S. government’s conduct that approached the illegal.”

Even if we do not at this juncture know the full scope of the threat we face from jihadist terrorism, it is certainly large enough to justify many changes in the way we conduct our lives, both at home and abroad. But the American government does have a track record in dealing with similar problems in the past, one suggesting that all American institutions—Congress, the courts, the news media—need to do their jobs in scrutinizing official behavior, and not take the easy way out of deferring to the executive. Past experience also suggests that the government would do far better to make public what it knows, as well as the limits of that knowledge, if we are to arrive at a balanced view of the challenges we face today.

Posted on October 12, 2006 at 6:54 AM • View Comments

Bureau of Industry and Security Hacked

The BIS is the part of the U.S. Department of Commerce responsible for export control. If you have a dual-use technology that you need special approval in order to export outside the U.S., or to export it to specific countries, BIS is what you submit the paperwork to.

It’s been hacked by “hackers working through Chinese servers,” and has been shut down. This may very well have been a targeted attack.

Manufacturers of hardware crypto devices—mass-market software is exempted—must submit detailed design information to BIS in order to get an export license. There’s a lot of detailed information on crypto products in the BIS computers.

Of course, I have no way of knowing if this information was breached or if that’s what the hackers were after, but it is interesting. On the other hand, any crypto product that relied on this information being secret doesn’t deserve to be on the market anyway.

Posted on October 11, 2006 at 7:16 AM • View Comments

No-Fly List

60 Minutes has a copy:

60 Minutes, in collaboration with the National Security News Service, has obtained the secret list used to screen airline passengers for terrorists and discovered it includes names of people not likely to cause terror, including the president of Bolivia, people who are dead and names so common, they are shared by thousands of innocent fliers.

[…]

The “data dump” of names from the files of several government agencies, including the CIA, fed into the computer compiling the list contained many unlikely terrorists. These include Saddam Hussein, who is under arrest, Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker, and Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia. It also includes the names of 14 of the 19 dead 9/11 hijackers.

But the names of some of the most dangerous living terrorists or suspects are kept off the list.

The 11 British suspects recently charged with plotting to blow up airliners with liquid explosives were not on it, despite the fact they were under surveillance for more than a year.

The name of David Belfield who now goes by Dawud Sallahuddin, is not on the list, even though he assassinated someone in Washington, D.C., for former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini. This is because the accuracy of the list meant to uphold security takes a back seat to overarching security needs: it could get into the wrong hands. “The government doesn’t want that information outside the government,” says Cathy Berrick, director of Homeland Security investigations for the General Accounting Office.

When are we going to realize that this list simply isn’t effective?

Posted on October 6, 2006 at 6:07 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.