Entries Tagged "surveillance"

Page 72 of 94

Terrorist Fear Mongering Seems to be Working Less Well, Part II

Last week I wrote about a story that indicated that terrorist fear mongering is working less well. Here’s another story, this one from Canada: two pipeline bombings in Northern British Columbia:

Investigators are treating the explosions as acts of vandalism, not terrorism, Shields said.

“Under the Criminal Code, it would be characterized as mischief, which is an intentional vandalism. We don’t want to characterize this as terrorism. They were very isolated locations and there would seem there was no intent to hurt people,” he said.

It’s not all good, though. Here’s a story from Philadelphia, where a subway car is criticized because people can see out the front. Because, um, because terrorist will be able to see out the front, and we all know how dangerous terrorists are:

Marcus Ruef, a national vice president with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, compared a train cab to an airliner cockpit and said a cab should be similarly secure. He invoked post-9/11 security concerns as a reason to provide a full cab that prevents passengers from seeing the rails and signals ahead.

“We don’t think the forward view of the right-of-way should be available to whoever wants to watch … and the conductor and the engineer should be able to talk privately,” Ruef said.

Pat Nowakowski, SEPTA chief of operations, said the smaller cabs pose no security risk. “I have never heard that from a security expert,” he said.

At least there was pushback against that kind of idiocy.

And from the UK:

Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon has said the government is prepared to go “quite a long way” with civil liberties to “stop terrorists killing people”.

He was responding to criticism of plans for a database of mobile and web records, saying it was needed because terrorists used such communications.

By not monitoring this traffic, it would be “giving a licence to terrorists to kill people”, he said.

I hope there will be similar pushback against this “choice.”

EDITED TO ADD (11/13): Seems like the Philadelphia engineers have another agenda—the cabs in the new trains are too small—and they’re just using security as an excuse.

Posted on October 22, 2008 at 6:44 AM • View Comments

NSA's Warrantless Eavesdropping Targets Innocent Americans

Remember when the U.S. government said it was only spying on terrorists? Anyone with any common sense knew it was lying—power without oversight is always abused—but even I didn’t think
it was this bad:

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

Warrants are a security device. They protect us against government abuse of power.

Posted on October 15, 2008 at 12:39 PM • View Comments

Data Mining for Terrorists Doesn't Work

According to a massive report from the National Research Council, data mining for terrorists doesn’t work. Here’s a good summary:

The report was written by a committee whose members include William Perry, a professor at Stanford University; Charles Vest, the former president of MIT; W. Earl Boebert, a retired senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories; Cynthia Dwork of Microsoft Research; R. Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle’s police chief; and Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google.

They admit that far more Americans live their lives online, using everything from VoIP phones to Facebook to RFID tags in automobiles, than a decade ago, and the databases created by those activities are tempting targets for federal agencies. And they draw a distinction between subject-based data mining (starting with one individual and looking for connections) compared with pattern-based data mining (looking for anomalous activities that could show illegal activities).

But the authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do—perhaps inspired by watching too many episodes of the Fox series 24—can’t work. “If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so.”

A summary of the recommendations:

  • U.S. government agencies should be required to follow a systematic process to evaluate the effectiveness, lawfulness, and consistency with U.S. values of every information-based program, whether classified or unclassified, for detecting and countering terrorists before it can be deployed, and periodically thereafter.
  • Periodically after a program has been operationally deployed, and in particular before a program enters a new phase in its life cycle, policy makers should (carefully review) the program before allowing it to continue operations or to proceed to the next phase.
  • To protect the privacy of innocent people, the research and development of any information-based counterterrorism program should be conducted with synthetic population data… At all stages of a phased deployment, data about individuals should be rigorously subjected to the full safeguards of the framework.
  • Any information-based counterterrorism program of the U.S. government should be subjected to robust, independent oversight of the operations of that program, a part of which would entail a practice of using the same data mining technologies to “mine the miners and track the trackers.”
  • Counterterrorism programs should provide meaningful redress to any individuals inappropriately harmed by their operation.
  • The U.S. government should periodically review the nation’s laws, policies, and procedures that protect individuals’ private information for relevance and effectiveness in light of changing technologies and circumstances. In particular, Congress should re-examine existing law to consider how privacy should be protected in the context of information-based programs (e.g., data mining) for counterterrorism.

Here are more news articles on the report. I explained why data mining wouldn’t find terrorists back in 2005.

EDITED TO ADD (10/10): More commentary:

As the NRC report points out, not only is the training data lacking, but the input data that you’d actually be mining has been purposely corrupted by the terrorists themselves. Terrorist plotters actively disguise their activities using operational security measures (opsec) like code words, encryption, and other forms of covert communication. So, even if we had access to a copious and pristine body of training data that we could use to generalize about the “typical terrorist,” the new data that’s coming into the data mining system is suspect.

To return to the credit reporting analogy, credit scores would be worthless to lenders if everyone could manipulate their credit history (e.g., hide past delinquencies) the way that terrorists can manipulate the data trails that they leave as they buy gas, enter buildings, make phone calls, surf the Internet, etc.

So this application of data mining bumps up against the classic GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) problem in computing, with the terrorists deliberately feeding the system garbage. What this means in real-world terms is that the success of our counter-terrorism data mining efforts is completely dependent on the failure of terrorist cells to maintain operational security.

The combination of the GIGO problem and the lack of suitable training data combine to make big investments in automated terrorist identification a futile and wasteful effort. Furthermore, these two problems are structural, so they’re not going away. All legitimate concerns about false positives and corrosive effects on civil liberties aside, data mining will never give authorities the ability to identify terrorists or terrorist networks with any degree of confidence.

Posted on October 10, 2008 at 6:35 AM • View Comments

$20M Cameras at New York's Freedom Tower are Pretty Sophisticated

They’re trying to detect anomalies:

If you have ever wondered how security guards can possibly keep an unfailingly vigilant watch on every single one of dozens of television monitors, each depicting a different scene, the answer seems to be (as you suspected): they can’t.

Instead, they can now rely on computers to constantly analyze the patterns, sizes, speeds, angles and motion picked up by the camera and determine—based on how they have been programmed—whether this constitutes a possible threat. In which case, the computer alerts the security guard whose own eyes may have been momentarily diverted. Or shut.

An alarm can be raised, for instance, if the computer discerns a vehicle that has been standing still for too long (say, a van in the drop-off lane of an airport terminal) or a person who is loitering while everyone else is in motion. By the same token, it will spot the individual who is moving rapidly while everyone else is shuffling along. It can spot a package that has been left behind and identify which figure in the crowd abandoned it. Or pinpoint the individual who is moving the wrong way down a one-way corridor.

Because one person’s “abnormal situation” is another person’s “hot dog vendor attracting a small crowd,” the computers can be programmed to discern between times of the day and days of the week.

Certainly interesting.

Posted on September 25, 2008 at 6:32 AM • View Comments

NSA Snooping on Cell Phone Calls

From CNet:

A recent article in the London Review of Books revealed that a number of private companies now sell off-the-shelf data-mining solutions to government spies interested in analyzing mobile-phone calling records and real-time location information. These companies include ThorpeGlen, VASTech, Kommlabs, and Aqsacom—all of which sell “passive probing” data-mining services to governments around the world.

ThorpeGlen, a U.K.-based firm, offers intelligence analysts a graphical interface to the company’s mobile-phone location and call-record data-mining software. Want to determine a suspect’s “community of interest“? Easy. Want to learn if a single person is swapping SIM cards or throwing away phones (yet still hanging out in the same physical location)? No problem.

In a Web demo (PDF) (mirrored here) to potential customers back in May, ThorpeGlen’s vice president of global sales showed off the company’s tools by mining a dataset of a single week’s worth of call data from 50 million users in Indonesia, which it has crunched in order to try and discover small anti-social groups that only call each other.

Posted on September 17, 2008 at 12:49 PM • View Comments

Secret Military Technology

On 60 Minutes, in an interview with Scott Pelley, reporter Bob Woodward claimed that the U.S. military has a new secret technique that’s so revolutionary, it’s on par with the tank and the airplane:

Woodward: This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target, and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders, that is one of the true breakthroughs.

Pelley: What are we talking about here? Some kind of surveillance, some kind of targeted way of taking out just the people that you’re looking for, the leadership of the enemy?

[…]

Woodward: It is the stuff of which military novels are written.

Pelley: Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the tank and the airplane?

Woodward: Yeah.

It’s here, 7 minutes and 55 seconds in.

Anyone have any ideas?

EDITED TO ADD (9/11): One idea:

I’m going to make a wager about what I think Woodward is talking about, and I’ll be curious to see what Danger Room readers have to say. I believe he is talking about the much ballyhooed (in defense geek circles) "Tagging, Tracking and Locating" program; here’s a briefing on it from Special Operations Command. These are newfangled technologies designed to track people from long distances, without the targeted people realizing they are being tracked. That can theoretically include thermal signatures, or some sort of "taggant" placed on a person. Think Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Well, not so many cameras, maybe.

Posted on September 10, 2008 at 11:35 AM • View Comments

Gait Analysis from Satellite

Ignoring the sensationalist headline, this is interesting:

By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk—a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person’s walking style is very hard to disguise.

Video taken from above shows only people’s heads and shoulders, which makes measuring the characteristic length and rhythm of a person’s stride impossible. That’s not true of shadows, though, Stoica told a security conference in Edinburgh, UK, last month. Shadows, he says, provide enough gait data to deduce a positive ID. To prove it, he has written software that recognises human movement in aerial and satellite video footage. It isolates moving shadows and uses data on the time of day and the camera angle to correct shadows if they are elongated or foreshortened. Regular gait analysis is then applied to identify people. In tests on footage shot from the sixth floor of a building, Stoica says his software was indeed able to extract useful gait data.

The article goes on to say that using satellite images would be harder, but that the basic idea is the same.

Of course, this is less useful for finding individuals and more useful for tracking a population as it moves about its day. But some individuals will have more distinctive gaits than others, and will be easier to track. Soon we may all need to walk with rocks in our shoes.

Posted on September 9, 2008 at 12:22 PM • View Comments

BT, Phorm, and Me

Over the past year I have gotten many requests, both public and private, to comment on the BT and Phorm incident.

I was not involved with BT and Phorm, then or now. Everything I know about Phorm and BT’s relationship with Phorm came from the same news articles you read. I have not gotten involved as an employee of BT. But anything I say is—by definition—said by a BT executive. That’s not good.

So I’m sorry that I can’t write about Phorm. But—honestly—lots of others have been giving their views on the issue.

Posted on September 8, 2008 at 6:23 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.