Entries Tagged "surveillance"

Page 69 of 95

Computer Card Counter Detects Human Card Counters

All it takes is a computer that can track every card:

The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual “count” of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in the action. If a player is betting big when the count is indeed favorable, and keeping his chips to himself when it’s not, he’s fingered by the computer… and, in the real world, he’d probably receive a visit from a burly dude in a bad suit, too.

The system reportedly works even if the gambler intentionally attempts to mislead it with high bets at unfavorable times.

Of course it does; it’s just a signal-to-noise problem.

I have long been impressed with the casino industry’s ability to, in the case of blackjack, convince the gambling public that using strategy equals cheating.

Posted on October 20, 2009 at 6:16 AM • View Comments

Wi-fi Blocking Paint

I wrote about this in 2004. This is an improved product:

While paints blocking lower frequencies have been available for some time, Mr Ohkoshi’s technology is the first to absorb frequencies transmitting at 100GHz (gigahertz). Signals carrying a larger amount of data—such as wireless internet—travel at a higher frequency than, for example, FM radio.

Posted on October 12, 2009 at 1:47 PM • View Comments

Inferring Friendship from Location Data

Interesting:

For nine months, Eagle’s team recorded data from the phones of 94 students and staff at MIT. By using blue-tooth technology and phone masts, they could monitor the movements of the participants, as well as their phone calls. Their main goal with this preliminary study was to compare data collected from the phones with subjective self-report data collected through traditional survey methodology.

The participants were asked to estimate their average spatial proximity to the other participants, whether they were close friends, and to indicate how satisfied they were at work.

Some intriguing findings emerged. For example, the researchers could predict with around 95 per cent accuracy who was friends with whom by looking at how much time participants spent with each other during key periods, such as Saturday nights.

According to the abstract:

Data collected from mobile phones have the potential to provide insight into the relational dynamics of individuals. This paper compares observational data from mobile phones with standard self-report survey data. We find that the information from these two data sources is overlapping but distinct. For example, self-reports of physical proximity deviate from mobile phone records depending on the recency and salience of the interactions. We also demonstrate that it is possible to accurately infer 95% of friendships based on the observational data alone, where friend dyads demonstrate distinctive temporal and spatial patterns in their physical proximity and calling patterns. These behavioral patterns, in turn, allow the prediction of individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.

We all leave data shadows everywhere we go, and maintaining privacy is very hard. Here’s the EFF writing about locational privacy.

EDITED TO ADD (10/12): More information.

Posted on September 21, 2009 at 1:41 PM • View Comments

Eighth Anniversary of 9/11

On September 30, 2001, I published a special issue of Crypto-Gram discussing the terrorist attacks. I wrote about the novelty of the attacks, airplane security, diagnosing intelligence failures, the potential of regulating cryptography—because it could be used by the terrorists—and protecting privacy and liberty. Much of what I wrote is still relevant today:

Appalled by the recent hijackings, many Americans have declared themselves willing to give up civil liberties in the name of security. They’ve declared it so loudly that this trade-off seems to be a fait accompli. Article after article talks about the balance between privacy and security, discussing whether various increases of security are worth the privacy and civil-liberty losses. Rarely do I see a discussion about whether this linkage is a valid one.

Security and privacy are not two sides of a teeter-totter. This association is simplistic and largely fallacious. It’s easy and fast, but less effective, to increase security by taking away liberty. However, the best ways to increase security are not at the expense of privacy and liberty.

It’s easy to refute the notion that all security comes at the expense of liberty. Arming pilots, reinforcing cockpit doors, and teaching flight attendants karate are all examples of security measures that have no effect on individual privacy or liberties. So are better authentication of airport maintenance workers, or dead-man switches that force planes to automatically land at the closest airport, or armed air marshals traveling on flights.

Liberty-depriving security measures are most often found when system designers failed to take security into account from the beginning. They’re Band-aids, and evidence of bad security planning. When security is designed into a system, it can work without forcing people to give up their freedoms.

[…]

There are copycat criminals and terrorists, who do what they’ve seen done before. To a large extent, this is what the hastily implemented security measures have tried to prevent. And there are the clever attackers, who invent new ways to attack people. This is what we saw on September 11. It’s expensive, but we can build security to protect against yesterday’s attacks. But we can’t guarantee protection against tomorrow’s attacks: the hacker attack that hasn’t been invented, or the terrorist attack yet to be conceived.

Demands for even more surveillance miss the point. The problem is not obtaining data, it’s deciding which data is worth analyzing and then interpreting it. Everyone already leaves a wide audit trail as we go through life, and law enforcement can already access those records with search warrants. The FBI quickly pieced together the terrorists’ identities and the last few months of their lives, once they knew where to look. If they had thrown up their hands and said that they couldn’t figure out who did it or how, they might have a case for needing more surveillance data. But they didn’t, and they don’t.

More data can even be counterproductive. The NSA and the CIA have been criticized for relying too much on signals intelligence, and not enough on human intelligence. The East German police collected data on four million East Germans, roughly a quarter of their population. Yet they did not foresee the peaceful overthrow of the Communist government because they invested heavily in data collection instead of data interpretation. We need more intelligence agents squatting on the ground in the Middle East arguing the Koran, not sitting in Washington arguing about wiretapping laws.

People are willing to give up liberties for vague promises of security because they think they have no choice. What they’re not being told is that they can have both. It would require people to say no to the FBI’s power grab. It would require us to discard the easy answers in favor of thoughtful answers. It would require structuring incentives to improve overall security rather than simply decreasing its costs. Designing security into systems from the beginning, instead of tacking it on at the end, would give us the security we need, while preserving the civil liberties we hold dear.

Some broad surveillance, in limited circumstances, might be warranted as a temporary measure. But we need to be careful that it remain temporary, and that we do not design surveillance into our electronic infrastructure. Thomas Jefferson once said: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Historically, liberties have always been a casualty of war, but a temporary casualty. This war—a war without a clear enemy or end condition—has the potential to turn into a permanent state of society. We need to design our security accordingly.

Posted on September 11, 2009 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

NSA Intercepts Used to Convict Liquid Bombers

Three of the UK liquid bombers were convicted Monday. NSA-intercepted e-mail was introduced as evidence in the trial:

The e-mails, several of which have been reprinted by the BBC and other publications, contained coded messages, according to prosecutors. They were intercepted by the NSA in 2006 but were not included in evidence introduced in a first trial against the three last year.

That trial resulted in the men being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder; but a jury was not convinced that they had planned to use soft drink bottles filled with liquid explosives to blow up seven trans-Atlantic planes—the charge for which they were convicted this week in a second trial.

According to Channel 4, the NSA had previously shown the e-mails to their British counterparts, but refused to let prosecutors use the evidence in the first trial, because the agency didn’t want to tip off an alleged accomplice in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf that his e-mail was being monitored. U.S. intelligence agents said Rauf was al Qaeda’s director of European operations at the time and that the bomb plot was being directed by Rauf and others in Pakistan.

The NSA later changed its mind and allowed the evidence to be introduced in the second trial, which was crucial to getting the jury conviction. Channel 4 suggests the NSA’s change of mind occurred after Rauf, a Briton born of Pakistani parents, was reportedly killed last year by a U.S. drone missile that struck a house where he was staying in northern Pakistan.

Although British prosecutors were eager to use the e-mails in their second trial against the three plotters, British courts prohibit the use of evidence obtained through interception. So last January, a U.S. court issued warrants directly to Yahoo to hand over the same correspondence.

It’s unclear if the NSA intercepted the messages as they passed through internet nodes based in the U.S. or intercepted them overseas.

EDITED TO ADD (9/9): Just to be sure, this has nothing to do with any illegal warrantless wiretapping the NSA has done over the years; the wiretap used to intercept these e-mails was obtained with a FISA warrant.

Posted on September 9, 2009 at 10:10 AM • View Comments

On London's Surveillance Cameras

A recent report has concluded that the London’s surveillance cameras have solved one crime per thousand cameras per year.

David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: “It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.”

He added: “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness.

“It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.

Also:

Earlier this year separate research commissioned by the Home Office suggested that the cameras had done virtually nothing to cut crime, but were most effective in preventing vehicle crimes in car parks.

A report by a House of Lords committee also said that £500 million was spent on new cameras in the 10 years to 2006, money which could have been spent on street lighting or neighbourhood crime prevention initiatives.

A large proportion of the cash has been In London, where an estimated £200 million so far has been spent on the cameras. This suggests that each crime has cost £20,000 to detect.

I haven’t seen the report, but I know it’s hard to figure out when a crime has been “solved” by a surveillance camera. To me, the crime has to have been unsolvable without the cameras. Repeatedly I see pro-camera lobbyists pointing to the surveillance-camera images that identified the 7/7 London Transport bombers, but it is obvious that they would have been identified even without the cameras.

And it would really help my understanding of that £20,000 figure (I assume it is calculated from £200 million for the cameras times 1 in 1000 cameras used to solve a crime per year divided by ten years) if I knew what sorts of crimes the cameras “solved.” If the £200 million solved 10,000 murders, it might very well be a good security trade-off. But my guess is that most of the crimes were of a much lower level.

Cameras are largely security theater:

A Home Office spokeswoman said CCTVs “help communities feel safer”.

Posted on August 31, 2009 at 5:59 AM • View Comments

EFF on Locational Privacy

Excellent paper: “On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever.”

Some threats to locational privacy are overt: it’s evident how cameras backed by face-recognition software could be misused to track people and record their movements. In this document, we’re primarily concerned with threats to locational privacy that arise as a hidden side-effect of clearly useful location-based services.

We can’t stop the cascade of new location-based digital services. Nor would we want to—the benefits they offer are impressive. What urgently needs to change is that these systems need to be built with privacy as part of their original design. We can’t afford to have pervasive surveillance technology built into our electronic civic infrastructure by accident. We have the opportunity now to ensure that these dangers are averted.

Our contention is that the easiest and best solution to the locational privacy problem is to build systems which don’t collect the data in the first place. This sounds like an impossible requirement (how do we tell you when your friends are nearby without knowing where you and your friends are?) but in fact as we discuss below it is a reasonable objective that can be achieved with modern cryptographic techniques.

Modern cryptography actually allows civic data processing systems to be designed with a whole spectrum of privacy policies: ranging from complete anonymity to limited anonymity to support law enforcement. But we need to ensure that systems aren’t being built right at the zero-privacy, everything-is-recorded end of that spectrum, simply because that’s the path of easiest implementation.

I’ve already written about wholesale surveillance.

Posted on August 14, 2009 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

An Ethical Code for Intelligence Officers

August’s Communications of the ACM has an interesting article: “An Ethics Code for U.S. Intelligence Officers,” by former NSAers Brian Snow and Clint Brooks. The article is behind a paywall, but here’s the code:

Draft Statement of Ethics for the Intelligence Community

Preamble: Intelligence work may present exceptional or unusual ethical dilemmas beyond those of ordinary life. Ethical thinking and review should be a part of our day to day efforts; it can protect our nation’s and our agency’s integrity, improve the chances of mission success, protect us from the consequences of bad choices, and preserve our alliances. Therefore, we adhere to the following standards of professional ethics and behavior:

  1. First, do no harm to U.S. citizens or their rights under the Constitution.
  2. We uphold the Constitution and the Rule of Law; we are constrained by both the spirit and the letter of the laws of the United States.
  3. We will comply with all international human rights agreements that our nation has ratified.
  4. We will insist on clarification of ambiguities that arise between directives or law and the principles of this code. We will protect those within our institutions who call reasonable attention to wrongdoing.
  5. Expediency is not an excuse for misconduct.
  6. We are accountable for our decisions and actions. We support timely, rigorous processes that fix accountability to the responsible person.
  7. Statements we make to our clients, colleagues, overseers and the U.S. public will be true, and structured not to unnecessarily mislead or conceal.
  8. We will resolve difficult ethical choices in favor of constitutional requirements, the truth, and our fellow citizens.
  9. We will address the potential consequences of our actions in advance, especially the consequences of failure, discovery, and unintended or collateral consequences of success.
  10. We will not impose unnecessary risk on innocents.
  11. Although we may work in secrecy, we will work so that when our efforts become known, our fellow citizens will be proud of us and of our efforts.

It’s supposed to be for U.S. intelligence officers, but with one inconsequential modification it could be made international.

Posted on August 11, 2009 at 12:29 PM • View Comments

1 … 67 68 69 70 71 … 95

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.