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Total Information Awareness, For One
Jason writes "This guy has created his own TIA program for his electronic transactions around DC. He writes, 'Conceptually, I decided to create a personal TIA program to track my own electronic movements... and to document every single electronically-recorded transaction I've made.' A small vignette into what could be done with your electronic droppings."
looks like he just took quicken or MS money or some equivalent application and added addresses and posted the locations on a map. This doesn't seem to be nearly the scope of ashcroft's wet dream come true (TIA).
You seem to be suggesting that perhaps it is wrong for the US Government to operate a repressive and opressive system like the TIA. Well, you are entitled to your opinion. After all this is America. At the same time, this is America, so your implication is treasonous. Please remain seated until federal agents have come to a complete stop and John Ashcroft has arrived at your domicile.
Where everyone knows all your secrets...
When personal data is confidential, only governments and big business will have access to it. When personal data is public, even corrupt officials will be forced to behave.
The genie is out of the bottle, and it seems that only laws to mandate total and full access to all data by anyone who wants it will protect us from those who would seek to use such power against us.
Yes, I know it'd be a nightmare if anyone could monitor my phone records, but the nightmare could become quite fun if it went both ways.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
> a personal TIA program to track my own electronic movements
So is he an Autobot or a Decepticon?
Why does this surprise him? It need not take that much work to figure out that writing checks or using the "card" can get you mapped out, especially if the govt. has the warrant to track you (and with the patriot act, it shouldn't be too hard). Redundant to say the least.
A blog like any other.
I can't help but come to the conclusion that; You don't get out much, do you?
There's more info on LifeLog here and here.
nms
If I were you, I'd watch myself real close, in case I turned out to be a real terrorist.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So, while this is interesting, from an illustrative standpoint (how much info can be retrieved from receipts and such), the site seems superficial and a little voyeuristic. I was hoping for some insight into the problem such as how to fight TIA, or from a CS perspective, even how to deal with disparate data from medical records to dinner transactions.
:-)
However, this site should illustrate to us that one should realize that because of TIA, once these databases are created, they never really go away. They will be mined eventually by corporations looking to expand market share by tracking individuals shopping or lifestyle decisions. In fact, there is already precedence for this in recent history. And they will be used for alternative governmental purposes other than that originally intended. There is again precedence for this as well already.
Finally, perhaps its the medical training but every time I see TIA, I think of transient ischemic attack which conceptually I suppose, total information awareness could induce in some folks.
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I too have been working on this sort of thing out of interest, but to a much larger degree. Since all my emails, chat logs, financial transactions, contact details, photos, etc. are digital and I have a record of them, I am able to place keys between them and come up with all sorts of useless info (which I will not share :P). Such things as:
Can look at a photo, then see how much money I spent on that date, where I spent it and what I said about it to my friends online using regexps.
Can map out (like this article) my location at any one time, with photos if it was since July 2003 (when I got my digital camera)
Can at-a-glance see all communication with any one person, and who that person knows through CC'd emails, group chats, etc.
Can get a calendar style day by day breakdown of time spent online, amount spent and where, amount I spoke to people online that day, etc.
The system is pretty cool but needs a bit more work before I am happy with it, and it is probably going to be just for me since it is a mess of SQL, shell scripts, perl and java.
Needless to say, the amount of data and stuff I can do with it is very scary. I cannot factor in recorded phone calls, precise supermarket purchases, etc. TIA and it's inevitable bigger brother (think patriot act then patriot act2) could store a lot more of my life than I would ever want to give out.
Warhammer forums
I don't think I've seen this mentioned before so here goes...
As an act of civil disobedience, as a group flood TIA, Carnivore, etc with false information. Start referring to your online contacts as "terrorists", make references to "picking up the fertilizer and diesel", instant message each other with false meeting points you never actually go to, and generally throw a wrench into the cogs of the machine by making the signal-to-noise ratio more noise than signal.
Some may call this unpatriotic, others may see it as patriotic, it's a personal judgement call as I see it.
RTFT
As in...read the f*cking title...
I was hoping for some insight into the problem such as how to fight TIA
Umm... just a shot in the dark here - but how about not electing governments interested in implementing a defacto police state and pursuing imperialistic foreign policies to prop up an obsolete oil-based economy?
But, hey, what do I know. No pity for you. My government tried this shit and enough people cared to stop it.
Or.. perhaps you welcome your new overlords.
I don't really think he needs a computer program to do this. Judging from some of my male coworkers, this sort of thing has been going on for years. If anyone wants to know exactly where he is at any given point in time, he should just get married... and then they can call his wife. ;)
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
I pay cash for pretty much everything now, but that's just because I don;t have a credit card yet (i'm too lazy). I'm wondering exactly what else the Total Information Awareness thing will be collecting; if I take out a big chunk of money from a ATM every week (like I do now) and pay in cash for everything that week, how much can they learn? i'm afraid of being a suspected terrorist now; I "hide my tracks" from the government, read slashdot, and am learning chemistry "to make bombs". That, and I've started encrypting some stuff I send
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
The ability to gather the data about you has long been there. Commercial sources have been able to do this for nearly two decades, anyone remember the late and not lamented Lotus Marketplace ?.
The real trick is to turn the raw data into meaningfull information. Its that lack of discrimination thats truly scary in letting the government assume that kind of power.
I have no wish to have storm troopers drilling holes in my ceiling because my name is one letter off from a terrorist, or because I bought a pint of humous at the supermarket. Untill there is sufficient discrimination in the system to be intelligent about who it singles out, and Unless there is further the mandatory requirement for human investigation and discretion before acting this type of technology will be nothing but a loose cannon.
As things currently stand this type of information will just be used to harrass and persecute people that have been flagged by or have annoyed some government beureuacrat. Terry pratchet in his truly insightfull manner summed up the relationship between the populace and the law, "Commander Grimes surveyed the crowd of people and amused himself by trying to figure out what each one was guilty of". Everyone is guilty of something, with the current level of litigation and legality within our society most people are guilty of many things they aren't even aware of.
If TIA raw data is available for call up on any individual, suspicious material will be found, and nominally innocent people will have their lives made a hell. If however it can be predictive and then mediated with severe limits it could actually serve a valuable purpose.
Uh ... and you're not? It is NOT paranoia when they actually are out to get you, you know.
... no significant barriers to misuse.
Besides, I thought it was interesting to see a concrete example of what everyone (paranoids as well as normal sheep) has been worrying about. It's one thing when cops, spooks and other investigators have to spend time and effort to research what their victims, I mean, subjects are doing. It's quite another when detailed historical information about every person in the U.S. can be pulled up on a graphics monitor on an instant's notice, with no more effort than a couple of mouse clicks. No, I don't like that at all
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you live outside the USA, you should take special interest in [former TIA chief] [and felon] John Poindexter's recent open letter in the New York Times.
It's pretty handwavy, but he makes a couple of interesting claims:
responsible for discovering what is possible; other agencies will be
responsible for determining its correct use. I'm all for free exploration,
but this is calculatedly naive. I think this project in particular was
created with use in mind, and I think tax funded research should reflect
what taxpayers feel is in their best interest.
American hotspot, claiming that American financial data isn't analyzed).
I doubt this*, but even if it's true, citizens abroad should be letting their governments know about how they feel about the US accessing their data.
*: DARPA funds a lot of research into how to appease American privacy laws while conducting surveillance.
I did this on myself also, and I found out the following:
- 5 visits to 8-ball's bomb shop in Harwood
- 45 visits to various branches of AmmuNation around the city
- two purchases of rocket launchers from Phil's Army Surplus
I don't see what the big deal is. What could anyone infer from that?
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
From my unreliable, tertiary sources I believe that the UK has 6 months for standard data (eg; if you dont use your blockbuster card for 6 months they delete you from their database), CCTV in towns is removed after 2 days (if you ever need the police to review some, or want to get a copy then you need to be quick or you are out of luck), credit card data I am not sure about, though banking data disappears from my online statement every quarter and credit card data disappears after a year. One cant help but assume that my data is sitting in some offsite backup somewhere though. All this is covered under the UK's Data Protection Act 1998, in which an individual can demand a company or govt agency to give them all the data they want about themselves (for a fee of no more than inflation-adjusted 15 GBP), and if they do not, or are found to be withholding data, they are subject to a fine of something like 30000 GBP per instance.
Warhammer forums
The amount of data thatis available is much to large to even store on a single or any group of machines available to the kind of money that has been allocated to the project.
In fact, I was involved with a project to capture the billing records of AT&T for a 3 month rolling store some years ago. The largest theoretical system at the time was too small to handle the amount of data, by a factor of 1/3.
Scale this up to all transactions by all people. No computer in existance can handle the volume of data, even before the government tries to determine which data is important.
I'm not really worried about this program for that reason. It will never fly.
Bush's essay is really fascinating to read: he envisions a magical desk that could record all a person's thoughts & encounters, and provide the ability to browse that library through a special screen on the device. Keep in mind that this was in 1945, right at the beginning of the computer era, when these machines were the size of buildings, far more complicated to operate, and nowhere near powerful enough. Now, half a century later, Bell feels that the technology is finally at the point where Bush's ideas can be implemented. Think what you will of Microsoft, or of the "big brother" implications of such a machine -- the very fact that this sort of thing is being put into practice is quite impressive.
Anyone working on such omnipresent recording & retrieval systems needs to be aware of this prior art.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Then the data are sent to the bank. OF COURSE they track all this info. THEY HAVE TO! THEY'RE BANKS!!! There is a money trail/information trail that is left behind any time you ever do ANYTHING with electronic banking.
If the FBI or local police get a subpoena, they have access to all this information NOW. STOP THE PRESSES!!!
What blows my fuse is that people think that this is NEW, and it is being put in place by the Dept of Homeland Security. Can you say FUD?
If the data is already out there, and its already retrieveable once they get a warrant/subpoena. What is wrong here?
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
When I first looked at this, I thought (as a lot of people here have commented) that this wasn't much of a big deal: so what? This guy scanned in a few receipts and plotted them on a map, big deal...
However, as I started to look more closely at his patterns, I thought to myself: wow! Based on just this tiny swatch of information, I already know the aproximate area where he lives. If I wanted, I could find the average household income in his neighborhood. I know what he eats and I can tell if he's going to have a party next week based on what he got at the grocery store.
I know what date and time he went to the market, so if I had a few more data points, I could probably predict when he's going to be there.
He got a map of Central America at Borders, perhaps a statistical model shows that people following his patterns are likely to be terrorists who want to commit atacks in Central America? Or perhaps we can market cheap airline tickets to him?
While this may just look like a guys random map, you can piece together a whole lot from this.
Anyone notice the fact that this guy leaves some pretty shitty tips?
----(o)----
Take a look at his purchasing behavior at Safeway - Goya rice, three separate purchases of mangos.
And what's this? Kim-chee? Bean paste, pickled bamboo, and guava? Any connection to North Korea here? Has he purchased any maps of North Korea lately?
Also appears to be an avid news reader, and heavy user of public transportation. Definitely a troublemaker.
Yes, and if you do a whois, you get to find out that 'Sid' is also an alias.
I don't care about that. I don't care that people know that i'm a unix guy who likes playing snooker with his spathyfillum. This is information which I am VOLUNTEERING. There is a difference, and it is great.
You're doing it wrong.
While interesting, I lose no sleep over TIA because it simply won't scale into any sample size big enough to actually be useful for catching terrorists. As with baggage screening, face recognition, and pretty much every other system the US Goverment has been thinking about or implementing, the false positive rate is far too high. If terrorists were 50% of the population and easy to identify, it might be useful. And what does this example prove? If you "game" the system, in other words, actively try to thwart being tracked, you will find it is easy to do. It would be easy to make the system think you are out getting groceries while you are actually off committing a murder in another state. The perfect alibi!
I'm surprised how much hell this dude is catching from you all. First, he's not coding something for a competition, it looks like a project he's done on his spare time just to put a picture to how easy it would be to compile info and track people. He's not claiming anything about its quality. Second, to the bright one who wrote "sounds like a terrorist to me," just because someone buys oriental food, doesn't mean they are from N.Korea. And in case you are still prone to unhealthy non sequitur, if someone is from N. Korea, it doesn't mean they are a terrorist. And third, to those saying he should get a life, you're the ones spending your time conversing through /. He's doing research at a think tank in DC, no doubt an advocate for stuff most slashdotters only complain about.