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The Beast of Brussels
'No nickname' Ian writes "If you live in Europe you should definitely read this story about a government supercomputer. It's written by Andy McCue from silicon.com and entitled: IT Myths: Does the 'Beast of Brussels' know everything about us?
Basically, in Europe there are rumours of an EU-owned super-computer which stores and process information on every European citizen.
The piece debunks the rumour and finds out its roots are actually in a work of fiction - but there is some interesting comment from privacy activists who suggest it may not be too wide of the mark. Simon Davis of Privacy International goes so far as to suggest such computer may have existed - if perhaps not on the same 'three storey-high' magnitude."
In what respect would static data regarding the citizens of Europe be processed continuously? Why would a supercomputer be needed? Is there that much data? How much data would be kept on citizens if the rumour were true? How come it hasn't been exposed? And so on and so forth. The rumour is so vague I'm surprised that anybody would have genuinely believed it on its own 'merit'. It's quite obviously wrong from even a cursory thought about some of its implications; the EU would never get away with such rampant privacy violations.
Bash script for FP whores
They should get Echelon and the Beast of Brussels networked together.
You know, kinda like this.
I thought it said the *breast* of Brussels... how disappointing...
I downloaded a movie about a "beast" of Brussels---oh, wait... it was Amsterdam. Never mind...
Invisible barcodes tattoed on our foreheads? Beeing read by lasers as we shop groceries? And on every single citizen of the world / europe?
It don't take much to debunk a myth like that, it falls flat on it's face from the sheer impossiblity of a) managing to register and tattoing everyone without someone noticing, b) actually correlating all the data, and c) getting usefull information out. In short, the computer - espesially if it was based on the avilable technology in the early 70's - wouldn't been able to coope with the sheer amount of raw data.
I'm sure it's a bureaucrats wet dream to know everything about everyone, but it is beyond the realm of the possible. In order to believe this myth in the first place, you probaly has to be among those who wear tinfoilhats to stop the goverment from spying on you with rays... and if you are, nothing can change your mind on this, or convince you that man has walked on the moon.
News for nerds? Not really. Stuff that matters? Not to me at any rate. Something that made me smile a sunday morning? Sure did, and I needed that.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
I've done a lot of work with the EC over the last 10 years or so... the existence of the "beast of Brussels" would be a surprise for many reasons, not least of which several people would have had to have reached consensus to build the thing.
Totally impossible.
If you read the related article about the series (IT Myths Update), check out the last paragraph.
Now, I find it more than a little disapointing that they say they 'have a feeling it might be true'. What person writing IT articles doesn't even know basic computer history?
Surely at least SOMEONE at a tech-based news site has heard of Grace Hopper?!? Although most people might remember her for Cobol, almost any book or show on computer history mentions her famous conversation with Howard Aiken after finding a moth stuck in a relay of the Mark II.
Sheesh, either that or they are really strapped for ideas. Mentioning what should be known as one of the most fateful incidents, by one of the most famous people working on one of the most famous computers, as a 'possible truth' is a really bad way to hype a series, IMHO.
and most people - including me - think nothing of it. in Belgium it is mandatory for us to carry an official ID card (no library card or drivers license. a real ID card).
we need to show that to open a bank account, a library card, a rent-a-video store,... well basically everywhere.
for health care we have a unique number in a national database, and since a few months everyone who has a mortgage is in another database.
We don't care. i mean why should't the governement know where you live, or which bank accounts i have.
the only reason i can come up with is if you are a fraudster.
for example tracking people with a mortgage on a national level is done so that not-so-bright people do not get a second mortgage if they already are at their financial limit with the first one.
the most important reason i don't mind is that we have a law that applies to any place where personal information is stored about you.
basically the law says that you have to get total access to all information about you, and that if it is incorrect the keeper of that information needs to change it.
i know from several examples that this law is used and that is works ok.
at least we can review and cghange information about ourselves.
kind regards,
Interfacer.
Nah, way off base. I mean, a good conspiracy theory has to have at least an element of the believable.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
You ask why the government shouldn't have access to this info. I ask why they should.
When designing a secure system, you try to minimize priviledges - if someone doesn't need access, then it is denied to them.
Likewise we need to be ever vigilant in protecting our freedom. If someone (e.g. the government) doesn't need knowledge or power, then we shouldn't let them have it.
In your example, you mention that the government now can decide when someone has exceed their financial limits. Why is that a good thing? Let the lenders sort it out and take the hit if a borrower defaults.
The more information others have about you, the more subtly they can manipulate you. Detailed information is usually used to take advantage of someone. That's why stalking is illegal in many countries. You'd find it creepy if your neighbor knew this information; why doesn't it bother you that hundreds of government beaurocrats know this for an entire country?
Oh, shut up. You're so full of it... Those little Belgian War Heroes managed to keep the German army (from a country 10 times bigger) from capturing all of Belgium in the first World War, and in the second World War, they managed to resist the German Blitzkrieg for all of 18 days, where the Germans had expected to be at the North-Sea coast in only two or three days...
In both cases, you 'mericans only showed up a couple of years later...
By the way, have they found any WMD's yet in Iraq? Didn't think so...
Not as disappointed as me. I thought this thread was going to be about Jean Claude Van Damme's latest effort!
This sounds like great material for every conspiracy theorist to work with..
/.
It's perfectly possible, and concievable, but the question is, does it really exist?
I saw a few comments on here. So what if someone sees your license plate? Lets go through an easy path for the feds to follow. I'm basing this off of the US. I'm sure similiar stuff applies in Europe.
Your car is spotted in a particular area..
1) Run the plate. Now they have your name, address, SS#, age, height, weight, hair and eye color, and your history of driving.
2) Check the credit bureau's and Chex Systems. Now they know all your bank accounts, credit cards, etc, etc.. Even if your bank doesn't exactly report that you have an account, you'll show up when they checked your credit (or with Chex).
3) Have you ever bought groceries or gas with your ATM/Debit card or credit cards? Do you use the grocery store's "discount" cards? Even if you bought your groceries with cash, if you used your discount card it's easy enough to track your purchases.
So, was the driver of the car you? Sure. You bought gas a few miles away on your credit card.
*IF* (that's a big if) they have a tracking system put together to keep all this information in the same place, it'd be easy to track any single person. Even if the police were interested in tracking an individual, it wouldn't be very hard.
Think about what you did today. Using the simple outline I gave today, they know just about everything you did.
I'm out of town. So, they know when I bought my plane tickets online from what IP, which is tracable back to my home. My home Internet provider would give up my info in a heart beat, including what checking account I pay my bill with. They know when I got on the plane, who I was with, and were I got off. Checking either with the rental car places at the airport or my credit cards, they know what car I'm driving. They know I went to a department store and bought kid toys and party supplies(for a kids birthday), a grocery store and bought a good bit of beer (for myself).
Based on that, they could easily know where I am. I didn't get a hotel, and I haven't purchased gas yet, I'm probably still in the area, so who do I know in the area (phone records, previous contacts). They could go as far as to ask my cell phone provider what tower is my closest contact. That'll narrow me down to 4 miles.
Based on that, they probably know what house or apartment I'm in, and it wouldn't take much creativity to figure out what's here (phones, Internet).
So (oh my goodness), the big brother system knows what house I'm in, that I'm drinking beer and reading/writing on Slashdot. If they're really good, they can see two SSH connections back to one of my servers too.
4:30am, he's drinking beer, working on servers, and on
But you have to ask yourself, why would they track me? They wouldn't. I'm rather boring. No warrants, not a suspect in anything (right now).
If the big brother system was this good, it may actually be a good thing. Got someone with a warrant? Wait til they show up anywhere, and voila, send the cops to pick them up. *AND* if say something happens in my home city (where I'm not at right now), it would be obvious that it wasn't me.
Ybor City, in Tampa Florida, put together a more difficult system. It was facial recognition, where it would check against NCIC and try to guess pedestrians with warrants. From what I've read in the press, it failed miserably. Why hope that someone will walk past a camera and hope to get a cop there before he gets away? You could wait for him to go grocery shopping, and have a patrol car show up while he's still loading the car.
Would a big brother system be good? Probably not. The detectives now are overworked, underpaid, and don't have the time to make a few phone calls (outlines in the first few steps) to track dow
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
. . . but it was built by some hyperintelligent pandimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own pandimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own). Downside, is it's busy calculating 'The Answer', whatever that is . .
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
In Denmark we've had a civil registration system for hundreds of years, and in the 1960's it became centralized. A wide range of information about births, deaths, marriages, divorces, jobs, education, and other information that the government collects is referenced by the CPR number, which is a national ID number for all Danish residents.
These databases are controlled by a fairly strong Data Protection Act which prohibits cross-referencing different databases using the CPR number, except in special circumstances, and any such special permit is always made public.
There is, however, one exception: the Statistical Bureau. They have access to most public databases and are allowed to cross-reference them in order to compile statistics. We don't have a census in Denmark because all the information is already available.
This is a very powerful tool for researchers. They can ask a question like "How many males who graduated from this particular primary school subsequently went on to be convicted of a serious crime?", and have it answered by the Statistical Bureau within a couple of weeks. They simply have to type in an SQL query. It's also much easier to find relationships between schools, workplaces and illnesses like cancer. They can also ask questions such as "How many people whose parents were divorced will go on to have a divorce?" with a simple SQL query, instead of the extensive surveys that are required in other countries.
The RISKS, on the other hand, are obvious.
Well, with today's technology the government/EU certainly could collect a lot of information about it's citizens.
;-)
I had a funny experience with a Dutch central government agency that is supposed to do all wiretapping for the police. They contacted me because they wanted to tap one of our customer's e-mail domains on tax fraud suspicions.
It took them two weeks to figure out who was handling the mail for the suspicious company's domain (us). Then they wanted us to forward all mail to a mailbox at a free mail provider. This mailbox almost immediately filled up and started sending 'mailbox full' messages to the original senders.
Big brother has a lot to learn...
X.
(BTW: I changed the sender addresses as a precaution
Some countries, like New Zealand, have very strict rules about what information government departments can share. As far as I know, the EU does not have such rules. Nonetheless, I know many people who work in the EU, including in the IT departments, and the idea of a "supercomputer" of some kind is so laughable...
Firstly, the different sections of the EU are so jealous about gaining and holding power that they barely collaborate, and would never allow such a centralization of information (and thus power).
Secondly, the state of the art of IT in the EU is amazingly poor. Actually, it's quite normal, given the huge amounts of money thrown at it. One of the laws of IT systems is that lots of money means shitty systems.
Thirdly, no-one in the EU administration really cares about such things. Seriously: the idea of acting as a Big Brother is a joke... all the Eurocrats want is their perk, their rules, their little niche in the United States of Europe.
Not so different from any large civilian government...
If there is a risk of a 'supernational database' one should look at law enforcement. Until 11/9, there was a definite 'not my problem' attritude to cross-border crime inside Europe. Since 11/9, police have started sharing information, and since most European countries hold full records of all their citizens (the UK is one of the few exceptions), it is a short step from sharing databases on criminals to sharing databases on everyone possible.
Finally, to answer the poster who mentioned the East German Stasi, one has to really understand the motives of any government. The DDR was obsessed with controlling its people. The EU is obsessed with straight bananas and olive oil quotas. There is a real difference, and it's not accidental.
Vive l'Europe... never have so many useless mid-level managers been happily occupied with useless works.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I really could't resist to think about some guy who's name's ASCII codes add to the number of of the Beast:
BILLGATESIII
66 + 73 + 76 + 76 + 71 + 65 + 84 + 69 + 83 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 666
If you want more examples go here.
And if you take it too seriously visit this site.
The myth about the "Beast of Brussels" is not of European origin AFAIK. It builds heavily on religious drivel about Satan. Such religious myths are not very common in Europe. I am a European, and I have never heard it over here. I would not be surprised if it turned out that this story originated in the USA, where conspiracy tales with a religious undertone are far more common. The article says this:
'The Beast' is actually the invention of Christian fiction writer Joe Musser, who included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse in 1970. In the book a gigantic three-storey computer is located in the administrative headquarters of the then Common Market.
Bingo!
In the US it is now common to use bank account cards to purchase everything. If you assume that the government could capture the feeds from all the banks and credit card information, then, storage requirements for such an animal would break out conservatively as:
300 million citizens x 5 purchases per day x 4 bytes fk into SSN table x 4 bytes for long id of item purchased x 365 days x 60 years = 262.8 Tbytes which is A LOT, but doable.
To track everything for just a rolling 5 years, rather than 60, then your storage requirements drop down to 21TB, and then further if you actually assumed only 2 purchases per day (on average), you could knock it down to 8TB, and finally, if you assumed that 150 million citizens were actually buying stuff as the other were children, then, you could knock it down to 4TB. Given today's hard drive prices, this would almost be within the range of affordability for a small business or even a determined hobbyist.
So, the real issue is not, will the government be tracking everything, because, since it so cheap to do it it probably already does, but, the real issue will be, when will we use Kazaa to collect all the purchases everyone made simply for our own entertainment!
This is my sig.
> Said machine was supposed to track all world trade through
:-\
:r g/irp/program/process/echelon.htm
...biometric technology
m ay03_re port.pdf
i asyste mdescription.pdf
x ter.html
> monitoring the buying and selling of every citizen on the planet...
> These could be seen by infrared scanners at 'special verification
> counters' (cash tills, to you and us).
so, now we can finally all rest assured,
since it was all just a fiction... OR CAN WE...!?
>> ECHELON
http://www.echelonwatch.org/
http://www.fas.o
ECHELON attempts to capture staggering volumes of satellite,
microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic... This massive
surveillance system apparently operates with little oversight.
>> TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/
The goal is to track individuals through collecting as much
information about them as possible...
The project calls for the development of ultra-large all-source
information repositories, which would contain information from
multiple sources to create a 'virtual, centralized, grand
database.' This database would be populated by transaction
data contained in current databases such as financial records,
medical records, communication records, and travel records as
well as new sources of information.
to enable the identification and tracking of individuals.
DARPA has already funded its 'Human ID at a Distance' program,
which aims to positively identify people from a distance
through technologies such as face recognition or gait recognition.
A nationwide identificationsystem would be of great assistance
to such a project by providing aneasy means to track individuals
across multiple information sources.
TIA Report to Congress May 2003.
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/
Congress Report Executive Summary and FAQ May 2003:
http://www.darpa.mil/body/tia/TIA%20ES.pdf
TIA System Description (PDF, 4.5 MB):
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/t
Poindexter's August 2002 Speech:
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/poinde
???
I have never heard this particular urban myth before. That might be my own ignorance, but I like to think I'm kinda plugged in...which leads me to believe this rumour isn't circulating as widely in Europe as the article would lead us to believe.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?