Entries Tagged "surveillance"

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License Plate Cloning

It’s a growing problem in the UK:

“There are different levels of cloning. There is the simple cloning, just stealing a plate to drive into say the Congestion Charge zone or evade a speed camera.

“It ranges up to a higher level which is the car criminal who wants to sell on a stolen car.”

Tony Bullock’s car was cloned even though his plates were not physically stolen, and he was threatened with prosecution after “his” car was repeatedly caught speeding in Leicester.

He said: “It was horrendous. You are guilty until you can prove you’re not. It’s the first time that I’ve thought that English law is on its head.”

Metropolitan Police Federation chairman Glen Smyth said the problem has grown because of the amount of camera-based enforcement of traffic offences, which relies on computer records on who owns which car.

Posted on June 11, 2007 at 1:52 PM • View Comments

Remote Metal Sensors Used to Detect Poachers

Interesting use of the technology, although I’m sure it has more value on the battlefield than to detect poachers.

The system consists of a network of foot-long metal detectors similar to those used in airports. When moving metal objects such as a machete or a rifle trip the sensor, it sends a radio signal to a wireless Internet gateway camouflaged in the tree canopy as far as a kilometer away. This signal is transmitted via satellite to the Internet, where the incident is logged and messages revealing the poachers’ position and direction are sent instantly to park headquarters, where patrols can then be dispatched.

Posted on June 6, 2007 at 11:06 AM • View Comments

Teaching Computers How to Forget

I’ve written about the death of ephemeral conversation, the rise of wholesale surveillance, and the electronic audit trail that now follows us through life. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor in Harvard’s JFK School of Government, has noticed this too, and believes that computers need to forget.

Why would we want our machines to “forget”? Mayer-Schönberger suggests that we are creating a Benthamist panopticon by archiving so many bits of knowledge for so long. The accumulated weight of stored Google searches, thousands of family photographs, millions of books, credit bureau information, air travel reservations, massive government databases, archived e-mail, etc., can actually be a detriment to speech and action, he argues.

“If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves,” he writes in the paper. “Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly.”

In other words, it threatens to make us all politicians.

In contrast to omnibus data protection legislation, Mayer-Schönberger proposes a combination of law and software to ensure that most data is “forgotten” by default. A law would decree that “those who create software that collects and stores data build into their code not only the ability to forget with time, but make such forgetting the default.” Essentially, this means that all collected data is tagged with a new piece of metadata that defines when the information should expire.

In practice, this would mean that iTunes could only store buying data for a limited time, a time defined by law. Should customers explicitly want this time extended, that would be fine, but people must be given a choice. Even data created by users—digital pictures, for example—would be tagged by the cameras that create them to expire in a year or two; pictures that people want to keep could simply be given a date 10,000 years in the future.

Frank Pasquale also comments on the legal implications implicit in this issue. And Paul Ohm wrote a note titled “The Fourth Amendment Right to Delete”:

For years the police have entered homes and offices, hauled away filing cabinets full of records, and searched them back at the police station for evidence. In Fourth Amendment terms, these actions are entry, seizure, and search, respectively, and usually require the police to obtain a warrant. Modern-day police can avoid some of these messy steps with the help of technology: They have tools that duplicate stored records and collect evidence of behavior, all from a distance and without the need for physical entry. These tools generate huge amounts of data that may be searched immediately or stored indefinitely for later analysis. Meanwhile, it is unclear whether the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions apply to these technologies: Are the acts of duplication and collection themselves seizure? Before the data are analyzed, has a search occurred?

EDITED TO ADD (6/14): Interesting presentation earlier this year by Dr. Radia Perlman that represents some work toward this problem. And a counterpoint.

Posted on May 16, 2007 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

Is Big Brother a Big Deal?

Big Brother isn’t what he used to be. George Orwell extrapolated his totalitarian state from the 1940s. Today’s information society looks nothing like Orwell’s world, and watching and intimidating a population today isn’t anything like what Winston Smith experienced.

Data collection in 1984 was deliberate; today’s is inadvertent. In the information society, we generate data naturally. In Orwell’s world, people were naturally anonymous; today, we leave digital footprints everywhere.

1984‘s police state was centralized; today’s is decentralized. Your phone company knows who you talk to, your credit card company knows where you shop and Netflix knows what you watch. Your ISP can read your email, your cell phone can track your movements and your supermarket can monitor your purchasing patterns. There’s no single government entity bringing this together, but there doesn’t have to be. As Neal Stephenson said, the threat is no longer Big Brother, but instead thousands of Little Brothers.

1984‘s Big Brother was run by the state; today’s Big Brother is market driven. Data brokers like ChoicePoint and credit bureaus like Experian aren’t trying to build a police state; they’re just trying to turn a profit. Of course these companies will take advantage of a national ID; they’d be stupid not to. And the correlations, data mining and precise categorizing they can do is why the U.S. government buys commercial data from them.

1984-style police states required lots of people. East Germany employed one informant for every 66 citizens. Today, there’s no reason to have anyone watch anyone else; computers can do the work of people.

1984-style police states were expensive. Today, data storage is constantly getting cheaper. If some data is too expensive to save today, it’ll be affordable in a few years.

And finally, the police state of 1984 was deliberately constructed, while today’s is naturally emergent. There’s no reason to postulate a malicious police force and a government trying to subvert our freedoms. Computerized processes naturally throw off personalized data; companies save it for marketing purposes, and even the most well-intentioned law enforcement agency will make use of it.

Of course, Orwell’s Big Brother had a ruthless efficiency that’s hard to imagine in a government today. But that completely misses the point. A sloppy and inefficient police state is no reason to cheer; watch the movie Brazil and see how scary it can be. You can also see hints of what it might look like in our completely dysfunctional “no-fly” list and useless projects to secretly categorize people according to potential terrorist risk. Police states are inherently inefficient. There’s no reason to assume today’s will be any more effective.

The fear isn’t an Orwellian government deliberately creating the ultimate totalitarian state, although with the U.S.’s programs of phone-record surveillance, illegal wiretapping, massive data mining, a national ID card no one wants and Patriot Act abuses, one can make that case. It’s that we’re doing it ourselves, as a natural byproduct of the information society.We’re building the computer infrastructure that makes it easy for governments, corporations, criminal organizations and even teenage hackers to record everything we do, and—yes—even change our votes. And we will continue to do so unless we pass laws regulating the creation, use, protection, resale and disposal of personal data. It’s precisely the attitude that trivializes the problem that creates it.

This essay appeared in the May issue of Information Security, as the second half of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. Here’s his half.

Posted on May 11, 2007 at 9:19 AM • View Comments

Wiretapping in Italy

Encrypted phones are big business in Italy as a defense against wiretapping:

What has spurred encryption sales is not so much the legal wiretapping authorized by Italian magistrates—though information about those calls is also frequently leaked to the press—but the widespread availability of wiretapping technology over the Internet, which has created a growing pool of amateur eavesdroppers. Those snoops have a ready market in the Italian media for filched celebrity conversations.

Posted on May 2, 2007 at 1:02 PM • View Comments

Cameras "Predict" Crimes

New developments from surveillance-camera-happy England:

The £7,000 device, nicknamed “the Bug”, consists of a ring of eight cameras scanning in all directions. It uses software to detect whether anybody is walking or loitering in a way that marks them out from the crowd. A ninth camera then zooms in to follow them if it thinks they are behaving suspiciously.

[…]

“The camera picks up on unusual movement, zooms in on someone and gathers evidence from a face and clothing, acting as a 24-hour operator without someone having to be there,” said Jason Butler, head of CCTV at Luton borough council. “We have kids with Asbos telling us they hate the thing because it follows them wherever they go.”

This is interesting. It moves us further along the continuum into thoughtcrimes, but near as I can tell, the system just collects evidence on people it thinks suspicious, just in case. Assuming the data is erased immediately after, it’s much less invasive than actually accosting someone for thoughtcrime; the costs for false alarms is minimal.

I doubt it works nearly as well as the article claims, but that’s likely to change in 5 to 10 years. For example, there’s a lot of research being done in the area of microfacial expressions to detect lying and other thoughts. This is the sort of technological advance that we need to be talking about in terms of security, privacy, and liberty.

Posted on April 19, 2007 at 6:20 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.