TIA Preview: Here's Lookin' At You

cosmosis points to this interesting glimpse presented on Cryptome at ways in which the proposed "Total Information Awareness" system currently being touted as a way to fight terrorism could be abused. It's also a reminder that there's plenty of possibly sensitive information on you and your neighbors that's floating out there already.

Comments

Re:Its a Tradeoff

[IshanCaspian]

Here's an example:
1. track all purchases by everyone made in the US
2. put it in one big database
3. Compare each person's purchases against certain profiles...sleeper cell terrorist, arsonist, political dissident
3. Generate a report for each law enforcement division across the country which lists the license plates, names, and descriptions of the twenty most suspect people.
4. Start reading their email and monitoring their library activity
5. Find out the word jihad appears in one of their emails, or they make soem joke about shooting someone, and notice they've checked out a copy of "civil disobedience". Check their web browsing activity, notice they've read the anarchist's cookbook.
6. Conduct a raid, which is legal without a search warrant if terrorist activity is suspected.

Mostly computerized. Efficient enough to implement nationwide. Total invasion of privacy. Guilty until proven inneocent. All legal.

i've talked about this

[vsync64]

I've written about this in varying detail on my Web site. Here's an excerpt from one of the more pertinent entries:

I'm hoping to tie this rambling into a coherent conclusion. I've had people tell me that it doesn't matter what data collection is being undertaken by the government; if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. If my slowing down for a stopped vehicle is suspicious enough to warrant following, what happens when they have a list of the books I read, the sites I visit on the Internet, and the people I send mail to (even if I use PGP, you think there aren't honeypot remailers out there?)?

Howard Rheingold pointed out on the radio the other night that once all this data is collected (note that They doesn't have to gather the information, just collect it from private companies), the potential for data mining is enormous. What happens when whatever AI and heuristics they have scanning our lives flags a particular coincidence, and the person writing the report is lazy or is ideologically prejudiced? Remember, once it's typed up in a report with a nice abstract by someone told by the computer that you're "suspicious", things look a lot more airtight than they are.

Do you want the police crashing your door, cursing and beating you, and kicking in your teeth, because of a red-flagged coincidence? Do you want to die in a shootout defending your family based on a misunderstanding, bad spin, or a lie? And don't forget, Bush's Justice Department now wants to be able to force you to incriminate yourself.

Re:Its a Tradeoff

[4of12]

You're right, it's sad how easily people will trade rights and freedoms for some perceived security from the government.

From a larger perspective, over many nations, cultures and over the course of history, the kinds of freedoms enjoyed in modern democratic republics are really the exception and not the rule. The rule has been that the government in control will use any means available to keep themselves in power.

Often overlooked, too, when people sacrifice these freedoms to a seemingly trustworthy government is that there is absolutely no guarantee that later governments will respect the same limits that people implicitly assumed would apply.

Transparency and the Collective Good

[hey!]

I personally think a totally transparent world were everything was known about everyone would be a better one. The problem is that information is power, and nobody who currently enjoys and advantage in power is talking about redistributing that more evenly.

The Bush administration is the most secretive adminstration we've had in years. They believe they should be able to do the business of government outside the public's prying eyes. On the other hand, they are proposing to collect more information on private individuals. If we accept that information is power, then the effect the policies they are pursuing is to take power away from the people and give more power to the government.

I am willing to grant that the administration is doing this will good intentions, but largely because I don't think it matters a rat's ass what their intentions are. However, there's a rather sour irony, if we believe them: conservatives are attacking a program to empower the government at the expense of individuals because it is supposedly in the interest of the common good, while the left attacks it.

Finally, I was uncomfortable about Mr. Smith disclosing Adm Poindexter's address and phone number. Granted, Adm Poindexter will be doing a lot worse soon; however I think in all fairness Mr. Smith should have given out his own address and phone number too. He has no moral standing to criticize TIA otherwise.

Too bad people aren't "fair"

[GuyMannDude]

I personally think a totally transparent world were everything was known about everyone would be a better one.

Either you haven't given this much thought or you've had the remarkably good fortune to have not met any bigoted jerks in your life. A lot of stuff that is (currently) private is private for a good reason. What if you were gay and your boss really disliked homosexuals? Unless he was a remarkably logical and self-aware person, it's quite likely that his disapproval of your private life would taint the professional relationship you have with him/her. Suppose your boss knew that your family has a history of heart disease and s/he found out that your last few health checkups were looking like you might be in for troubles down the road, too. Again, this kind of info could (consciously or subconsciously) influence important decisions when it comes time to lay some people off.

I could go on and on with examples, but I think the message is clear. People want their privacy because they simply don't trust their fellow man. And looking at the history of our species (and even current events!), I certainly don't blame them. I think your comment that a totally transparent society being a better one is really naive.

Just my 0.02

GMD

Re:Its a Tradeoff

[rgmoore]

I know that its disconcerting to know that you may experience an invasion of privacy but most of us are too inconsequential for the government to bother with.

It may be true that you're too inconsequential for the government as a whole to care about, but that doesn't mean that there's no problem with that information being out there. The government for better or worse is made up of individuals, and some of those individuals will have access to that information; in fact it will be more useful to the government if lots of people within the government have access to it. Most of those people may be fine, but there are still people who are going to abuse any power they get.

Take the more limited example of existing police databases. There are plenty of examples of police officers who have abused those systems to harras ex-girlfriends, get even with people who have pissed them off, etc. Extending those databases to include even more kinds of data that could be abused will only make things worse. For one thing, it will make abusing the database more tempting, by making more kinds of mischief possible. For another thing it will make the potential abuses more damaging.

The key thing to me is that such abuse is all but inevitable, while the supposed benefits are largely hypothetical. Every time people have created databases of this general type, that data has been used abusively at least occasionally. There's every reason to think that the TIA database will be abused, too. At the same time, there's no certainty that it will be possible to use that same data to track down potential terrorists. I know for sure that given such a database I would find it much easier to write a script that took somebody's license plate number, dug up their credit card purchases, and emailed ones that were potentially embarrasing to all of their known email contacts that to track down possible terrorist activity.

Re:mismanaged? by the government?!!

[rgmoore]

If you don't think the govermenet is trust worthy, then move.

I have a far more radical idea. If the government is untrustworthy, badly managed, taking the wrong approach, or whatever, how about trying to improve it? The United States is still at least nominally a representative democracy, and one of the underlying principles is that the government is subject to change if the people don't like it. Identifying problems, like TIA being a really bad idea, is the first step in fixing them.

Civillian government

[Wesley Everest]

Think about this one... We are talking about giving the U.S. military the ability to spy on U.S. citizens. It might not seem like a big deal -- sure, there are civil-liberties and privacy issues, but a lot of people don't care about that because they feel they have nothing to hide.

But there is a good reason that the military has specifically not been allowed to spy on U.S. citizens. In fact, this is a fundamental property of all civillian governments.

So, what's the problem? All political candidates in the U.S. are going to be included in this wide net. Let's say you have two candidates in a close race, one who is for a larger military budget and less civillian oversight of the military -- the other is for a smaller military budget and more civillian oversight. What is to prevent this program from being used to find dirt on one candidate and giving it to the other, or otherwise using it to create enough of a scandal to tip the election.

But nobody would ever do that! That would be unethical and illegal. We've only had one president in the past 30 years caught for similar behavior. Just because Poindexter was found guilty of covering up a scheme to sell weapons to our enemy (Iran) to fund terrorists that congress specifically outlawed funding to (the contras in Nicargua), that doesn't mean he'd do something as unethical as influencing an election to get more funding and less oversight. Naaah.

Planes crash all the time, many thousands die every year from all sorts of accidents and violence. Civillian governments removing checks on their military is a rare occurance, and ultimately leads to much more death and destruction than Bin Laden could ever dream of.

Or, to really drive it home for the slashdot crowd -- military dictatorships often outlaw pr0n!