Is The NSA Spying On American Citizens?

Just a few days ago, the proverbial feces hit the fan. Wired Magazine, in a stellar piece of investigative reporting, revealed a treasure-trove of information regarding the NSA's new Utah spy center, and the agency's secretive agreements with shadowy firms to spy on US Citizens. Uh-huh. That's right. We should all be concerned.

The story hit hard, and spread. TV News reports from small local stations all the way to national news programs highlighted the story. The US Army General responsible for the NSA felt compelled to go public with a denial. Of course, it didn't hurt that concerned congressional representative started asking direct questions. Read the Wired article. And read the General's denials here. Take note that he says quite specifically: We don't do we have sub-contracted that task out to trusted foreign allies like Israel and Singapore.that here. "Here" is the operative word. I submit that means the agency does not spy on US Citizens from US territory. Thus, the "here." In fact, there is evidence that

There are many who are quite skeptical about the General's denials. After all, it's not like the NSA has a long record of honesty when addressing Congress or the American public. It's a spy thing. So we have to rely on the judgments of others in that regard. Read what ComputerWorld had to say about the denials in this article.

Now, read about how we've outsourced the invasion of our privacy to foreign firms in this BUSINESS INSIDER article.

The Author is connected to this story, in a peripheral sort of way. During the 80's I had a chance to meet and chat with Admiral John Poindexter, the US Governments uber-geek programmer, and the conceptual architect of the TIAA (Total Information Awarness & Analysis) program that was deemed so unconstitutional by Congress that they de-funded it and sent it away. Problem is, it never really disappeared. It just went underground. I first wrote about my conversation with the Admiral years ago in THIS POST.

So you can see that in addition to Israeli firms, Singapore is also involved. Investigations reveal that THIS MAN is part of the Singaporean effort. He's an old associate of Poindexter's by the way. You remember Poindexter's TIAA, well in Singapore it's called RAHS: Risk Assessment Horizon Scanning. Snowden is an integral part of a firm called Cognitive Edge that is the architect of RAHS. From the firm's website, this vague but tantalizing description of the program.

The RAHS system is a strategic risk assessment and analysis tool, which aims to provide early alerts on potential threats to national security by building a network that links various independent government agencies throughout the Singapore government. Through the RAHS project, the government aims to identify early indicators of change, detect signals and analyze potential threat patterns which otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

Finally, here's a video piece from Amy Goodman's Democracy Today covering the story.



Update:  This just in. Stratfor emails reveal secret, widespread TrapWire surveillance system powered by Abraxas technology. Abraxas founder Richard “Hollis” Helms said his signature product“can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” He calls it “a proprietary technology designed to protect critical national infrastructure from a terrorist attack by detecting the pre-attack activities of the terrorist and enabling law enforcement to investigate and engage the terrorist long before an attack is executed,” and that, “The beauty of it is that we can protect an infinite number of facilities just as efficiently as we can one and we push information out to local law authorities automatically.”  The author has nothing against predictive analytics or the notion of horizon-scanning for threat detection. However I personally hold the belief that these kinds of culture-impacting decisions should be taken with full public involvement, discussion and debate. I'm not seeing that happening in this case.

Tim Berners-Lee: Stop Snooping on my Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, is worried. (image: Sir Tim Berners-Lee) As well he should be. The nature of his concern? Pervasive, Internet snooping by commercial interests that definitely don't have your best interests in mind. How pervasive? 24/7/365. Every URL, every keystroke, all your browsing habits and behaviors. Read about it here.

Why is that important? Think about it. Imagine the profile that can be created with that much data. Take a minute and actually contemplate that. Your personal profile is deep, wide, detailed and potentially dangerous in the wrong hands. Companies you've never even heard of know you better than your family and friends. And the upstart is, we just gave this up over a decade ago without even a conversation. There were no town-hall meetings, no forums, very few on-line threads around this issue. Total and complete loss of personal privacy... anonymity gone forever - without so much as a whimper from the peanut gallery. Breathtaking. From the article cited, here are some of Sir Tim's concerns:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, today warned MPs and peers that they should not allow third parties, including commercial companies, to snoop on people's internet browsing.

"We use the internet without a thought that a third party would know what we have just clicked on," Berners-Lee said.

"Yet the URLs [webpages] people use reveal a huge amount about their lives, loves, hates and fears. This is extremely sensitive information.

"People use the web in a crisis, when wondering whether they have a sexually transmitted disease, or cancer, when wondering if they are homosexual and whether to talk about it … to discuss political views."

He said people "use the internet to inform ourselves as voters in a democracy", adding: "We use the internet to decide what is true and what is not.

"We use the internet for healthcare and social interaction."

He said people would consider using the web in a crisis in a different light if they knew they were being monitored and the data would be shared with a third party such as an advertising company.

"There will be a huge commercial pressure to release this data," he said. "The principle should be that it is not to be collected in the first place."

Internet
Privacy
Berners Lee

Database of Red Light Cameras Offered Free to GPS Users

Get it now! This news will be on PRWeb Monday morning. After that, there may be some traffic to contend with on the download site. Bottom line: an extensive database of red-light and speed-trap cameras nationwide is being offered free to GPS users. So if you've got a GPS Nav system that you use in your vehicle, this database will expose all the speed traps and red-light cameras along your chosen route. Sweet. Even more interesting, the company is employing a user-driven, bottom-up approach to data acquisition. So surf on by this site and check it out.

Technorati Tags: speed trap,database,red light camera,GPS,CCTV,news

Happy Halloween & Do Not Track

First, happy halloween - or should I say: All Hallows Eve. A significant day for Druids and followers of the "old ways." In any case, there seems to be less controversery around this fun and historic day than in recent years when hoards of threatened religious zealots (a lot scarier than a few kids dressed as witches mind you) clammored for an end to it all and the substitution of perfectly horrible harvest festivals. Yech, enough already. Back to the fun. (Image source)

I was very pleased, especially on Halloween, to discover that a group of consumer and technology advocacy organizations have come up with a legislative concept around a much-needed, Internet "Do Not Track" list. It's about time. We've got "Do Not Call" lists, we certainly need an enforceable "Do Not Track" list as a complement. So let's see if we can't build some momentum behind this laudable effort. If you're unclear on the issue at hand, just consider this: the profile that can be accurately constructed from tracking your surfing patterns is a very "intimate" one that reveals way more about your thinking and behavior than most all other data mining efforts. That means a marketing (or government) researcher somewhere tracking your Internet activity could know you a lot better than your friends and family. Now that's a scary thought.

Global Warming - Street View & New Software

While the most senior White House aide since Reagan (interesting juxtaposition) is declared a felon and sentenced to 30 months in prison, president Bush is in Europe trying to convince a skeptical public and colleagues in the G8 that he is serious about finally recognizing global warming and doing something about it. He's not, of course. Not this president. He's all about image and PR, sticking to his reactionary guns, and never listening to advice that doesn't come to him from his trusted inner circle of yes-men and yes-women. So his conversion is immediately suspect.

We are well advised to critically examine what Bush is actually doing while he's posturing for the press. One recent revelation puts his conversion in some perspective. While he calls for new "studies" (god forbid we should have actual emission targets), his administration is practically eliminating the country's ability to track global warming with its array of weather satellites. Now that's intuitive, don't you think? Give me a break. Check out James Hrynyshyn's great post on the subject here. This president is all about oil, coal, consumerism and he's more than willing to live with the consequences.

The Germans appear to have him figured out. Der Speigel calls attention to "The Emperor's Green Clothes" here. And speaking about Germany, the same source has a fantastic article about what really is possible. A farming village collects its waste products, converts them to methane for power, then transfers the resulting heat to a variety of local settlements for free or very low cost. Read about it here.

Another controversy appears to be unfolding around Google's new Street View app. I know I'm coming late to this, following posts on Boing Boing and a firestorm of opinions, comments and net conversations. I submit, however, that the focus of these conversations is misplaced. Street View is not the issue, the images are in not in real time and the convenience of having 3-D views of areas mapped is profound. Again, Google is very good at balancing access to data with reasonable privacy concerns. They've built-in flagging capabilities and have a very easy procedure for removing offending images. The real issue here is around privacy in the digital age, the utter loss of anonymity and the ability of large commercial concerns to build deep profiles and share intimate personal data about customers. The National Academy of Science explores the issue here. So let's leave Google alone and take a look at the Pentagon, large corporate data-mining practices and archives, and the kind of "interception" that may be employed to grab our email correspondence, net-surfing patterns and personal data without our knowledge or permission.

Finally, some real competition for Microsoft Office and the new Google online office apps. Robert Scoble's post first attracted my attention to Zoho and their new suite of surprisingly robust office apps. Check out this hot new desi company and their equally hot software.

John Poindexter: The Fed's Uber Geek

Is retired Admiral John Poindexter (AJP) the best software architect alive today? I think he just might be, and I'm not sure whether to feel warm-and-fuzzy about that - or to be very, very afraid. That's because Poindexter, a convicted felon with a criminal record of lying to congress, is the federal government's "Uber-Geek." Nerd in chief. The individual most responsible for the conception, design and execution of the DHS's massive security technology apparatus. At least the data mining and analysis piece, which is the core functionality of the new system. His convictions, I should note, were modified on appeal.

AJP has been working on this stuff for years. And I know that to be a fact. I first met the Admiral in the late 80s - when he was back in civies after Iran-Contra. He was a developer at the time, and worked with DESQview/X, a multi-tasking, windowing environment provided by my employer. He showed up at the annual developer's conference one year, and joined the company's trade-show crew and other developers on the floor of Network World (might have been InterOp) on at least one occasion that I remember. I also remember him hanging with Wayne Ratliff and Bob Byers, of dBASE fame, who shared his passion for software design and database architecture. Even then, there were lots of animated conversations around collecting data from disparate sources on multi-platform networks; buffering and caching that information in novel constructs, while providing multi-layer hooks and handles so that external software agents could organize, optimize and process the aggregated data to achieve certain, pre-defined goals. Heady stuff, at the time. There was a lot going on in the data base developer universe in those days, Brian Russell and Mitch McConnell had finished Clipper 5.0. Ratliff & Byers were collaborating on new stuff, and The Admiral was right in the middle of all the action.

Poindexter was the mind behind the Total Information Access (TIA) system first proposed after 9/11. Congress was so intimidated by the reach and constitutional implications of that model they cut off funding and told the program to go away in 2003. It didn't, of course. Now, TIA has returned on steroids - and has been rebranded as ADVISE - for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement. Parse that. It makes for some interesting disambiguation. The Christian Science Monitor covered the story here.

ADVISE is capable of cross-matching material from websites and blog posts to government records and personal data. Techies, ponder this: The Feds can take ten-terabyte gulps of data and process it in under a minute. As good as that may be for advancing scientific research, it does not bode well for personal privacy.

As I understand it, massively scalable, grid- or blade-based computing architectures based on commodity components connected by 10Gb Ethernet networks and Core XGE Ethernet-based backbone switches are delivering over one terabyte/minute table scanning rates in a variety of available Data Warehouse Appliance configurations. Another model, "share-nothing" architecture, is the key to the MIT Media Lab's new petabyte storage, terabit I/O bandwidth "Human Speechome" project. That is one of the largest and highest performing commercial systems that I am aware of. And you know the Feds are way ahead of that curve.

And now, the feds have a great Beta site for all of their machinations: Singapore. Wired Magazine recently reported on the re-birth of TIA/ADVISE and the work of AJP in rolling-out the tightly controlled country's internal surveillance and data mining program. Dubbed Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (RAHS), the new system is being deployed by Poindexter protegees. Singapore is widely expected to fine-tune the system, work out any bugs, then sell it back to us. It's just so convenient that I can't avoid the conclusion that the old "nod-and-wink" is at work to circumvent the will of the Congress of the United States and the opinions of our citizens. Just peachy.

A worthy data mining and privacy guru, Jeff Jonas of IBM (check out his fine blog here), adds this humorous take: "Data Mining, noun, 1. Torturing data until it confesses ... and if you torture it enough, it will confess to anything." Therein lies the conundrum for privacy advocates. I can guarantee that outsourcing our systems development and beta testing to entities that are beyond our authority and public oversight will only exacerbate that conflict. But then again, that's how AJP and his crew have always worked.