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More Details of the NSA's Social Network Analysis
mrogers writes "USA Today has a story describing how the NSA looks for suspicious calling patterns in the huge volumes of traffic data it collects. "Templates" such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads, which are forwarded to the FBI for investigation. There have been complaints that low-quality leads are drawing agents away from other cases, and similar pattern-matching approaches have been found wanting in the past. Can data mining identify terrorists?"
And don't tell me That's just television because no, sir, It's not TV, it's HBO.
For more info, see here...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
They should formalize this practice and make a palindrome out of the resulting acronym. That way we can be distracted with how cool they are to think of such things instead of worrying about what they're actually doing.
NSA-ASN - NSA's Analysis of Social Networks.
*sigh* I'm very honestly starting to get a sick feeling in my stomach over the direction our (my) country is headed. And yet, I feel like there's nothing I can do about it. Vote? Yeah... right.
A community-oriented lyrics site
From now on, I'm using world of warcraft to plan my activities.
The problem is, this strategy is not only ineffective, it can be counterproductive.
There is plenty out there on the "Strength of weak links", where past associations (old roommates, sleeper cells), with not contact can be very strong service links when reinitiated.
There is also plenty out there on how this is DoSing the FBI.
And the tin foil hat crowd (a very popular piece of headware these days) will point out that this tool is far more useful for targeting individuals than searching for patterns. And what if you are the target?
Test your net with Netalyzr
If this wholesale data mining works, then the government will tout this success as justification for its acts. If it doesn't work, the government will complain that we're not letting them do enough to ensure our safety, and use the failure to justify even more outrageous violations of our privacy.
Whether it works or not, however, is beside the point. The point is: is it legal? Enough people have maintained that it is not to warrant a serious investigation into the matter.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I know that YAhoo has commented on this because they datamine extensively to find surfing habits on their site to better place advertisements. Obviously this is a bit different, but the technology and methodology is similar. I have no problem with computers analyzing calling patterns. There was a distinct pattern of calls that lead up to 911 and other attacks.
http://religiousfreaks.com/The monitered person can distribute the calls through multiple phone lines. With cooperation, a group of individuals can pool phones to use and this system won't detect them. What is detectible is how many phone lines are registered to a person.
However the government has yet to catch up to the real world. I can disitalyl distribute the message through the internet using techniques that would not arouse suspicion, partivularly with al the online gaming of today.
Roger wilco anyone?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Aside from this being patently illegal, what bothers me is the cavalier attitude behind it, and the fact that it is already being abused to track down people who aren't terrorists, but who are merely doing their job to keep government entities like the NSA under some semblance of control - the journalists. There is no end to the manner in which this kind of information could be abused.
She's always getting calls from various places and then making a flurry of more local calls. She uses code phrases like "your cousin's baby was born last night and it's a boy", or "Great Aunt Zelda had a stroke but they say she's going to be okay".
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
"Hey Akbar, just calling to let you know Mohamed and Alimah just had a healthy baby boy!"
"Oh great, I'll let the family over here know!"
*meanwhile, in the basement of a bunker somewhere*
"My God! It's nine eleven times ten thousand! Nine million one hundred and ten thousand!"
Whoever said this was about "terrorists"?
A country of 300 million people cannot have that many actual terrorists in it, even if you count domestic lunies like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the category (or more accurately the next generation of bomb making lunies). Monitoring a sizable fraction of that 300m can't possibly be just about finding "terrorists" - for one thing it's a needle in a haystack, and for another the number of other uses/abuses of such a system are too many to count.
Bet good money that most of the people who are or will be advesely affected by this surveilance have little or no connection with terrorism. Even if there was once some noble intent of protecting people by finding monsters hidden among them, it won't just be used for that. Any time you have a major source of power in polical hands, you can bet on it being abused eventually - and what greater power over a domestic population is there than widespread spying without judicial oversight?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
In terms of catching terrorists, data-mining sucks. It makes no sense to pump enormous amounts of money into unproven technology, when national security is on the line.
If you want to catch terror cells, you'll never beat the 3 I's : intelligence, infiltration and informants.
so if you have a relative who died who lived overseas and get a call and then have to tell your other family membersin the domestic u.s. about the bad news, i guess you're a terrorist!
you really need to get out more
Grandma Ethel in France places a phone call to Granddaughter Becky in Georgia.
Grandma Ethel: Becky, your cousin Pierre and his wife had the baby! It's a healthy boy named George!
Becky: That's great news, Grandma Ethel!
Grandma and Becky talk for a bit. The conversation ends.
Becky calls 10 relatives in the United States to let them know the baby has been born.
Congratulations, Becky! You're now on the terrorist watch list!
Privacy be damned!
"Can data mining identify terrorists?"
No. It can identify people who have calling patterns associated with terrorist activity, regardless of whether they are a terrorist or not.
Note that these calling patterns cannot be used to associate that person with a committed or planned crime in the normal data mining scenario.
Data mining is unreasonable search.
Now, I have no problem if they've got evidence of a crime or plan of a crime, and use known information to deduce who might else be involved. That's investigative work.
Data mining is speculative work, not investigative, so regardless of whether it *can* be used for speculative 'research' into the activity of American citizens, it *shouldn't* be.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Given Reco, and standard, legal wiretaps and bugging, the Feds still cant touch Mr Soprano! The NSA spying program could revitalize and de-criminalize all of NJ!
..ring the relatives overseas, make a three or four national calls to other relatives and then finally top it all off with a couple of calls to local friends. Excellent. I love the idea of wasting the NSA's time; if they are distracted by wasting their time on this, then can't possibly be spending that time fucking over the American public. Think of it as a service I'm providing, courtesy of your friends Over The Pond.
I wrote an article about spooks and social networks a while back when I used to use Orkut... Many thought it was far fetched... Imagine that... Cached Article
Infiltrated dot Net
This approach to finding patterns works well in marketing where getting a 1% rate of sales to contacts is a good response rate. The problem with using this approach for anything in the real world is the 99% of the time you're wrong.
They looked at the history of a few people and found a pattern. Now that the pattern has been disclosed, only historical information is likely to have any merit. If the people controlling the communications know this is a way to be found, after getting a call from a watched country, they'll have the people go somewhere else and send emails or otherwise use a different channel for communication.
Knowing all of the data points isn't enough if you don't know which ones in different databases (phone, email, etc) are related and why.
What ever happened to "Live free or die", "Give me liberty or give me death", or "Those who are willing to sacrifice their basic liberties to assure their security deserve neither."?
Those quotes are not just platitudes... they are *good ideas*.
Keep the canned patriotism, give me my rights, and I'll just take my chances.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
If suddently all the FBI agents are overwhelmed with an incredibly huge list of apparently unrelated suspicious (but ultimately bogus) call sequences to investigate, it might be the sign that the terrorists are on something and don't want any good guy around their sneakernet.
The last question in the post is ill posed: can data mining find terrorists -- the answer is yes. Simply set the threshold low: select anyone who has used a phone at any time and you'll likely get most terrorists. The problem is not sensitivity -- the real problem is specificity. If you have no or low specificity then the FBI will be investigating everyone (even those who "have nothing to fear since they have nothing to hide"). Specificity is where the search process interfaces with the Bill of Rights on right to privacy and protection from unlawful search and seizure. High specificity would allow the courts to work by granting warrants; low specificity degenerates into witch hunting.
I don't even know if there is a color available on the Homeland Security color chart to signify that level of terrorist activity!
Yes there is, it's mauve.
It is easy to spot "distinct patterns" after you know all the players and can put the pieces together in context. As they say, Hindsight is 20/20.
I have a sister over-seas. If/when she calls anyone else in the family with news/updates/etc it will generate this pattern of many domestic calls as we have a large extended family who wants to know how she and her family is doing.
This does not mean we are terrorist, even though we might fit this "pattern" of suspicious calls. I bet calls to 900 numbers are suspicious and need lots of monitoring as well.
Many ways to abuse this.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
What are the chances that the germans won't be monitoring phone calls!
Dismissing the legality and morality of doing this...
Let's look how most Network Intrusion Detection Systems work today, including the OSS favorite Snort.
We start off with a bunch if signatures. These signatures are analyzed against including network traffic. A signature is matched, an alert is sent out (syslog, mysql, whatever) and my little console displays the alert. I analyze, determine it's a "false alert". I try to tune it out, maybe, depending on frequency and annoyance, and continue on to the next (false?) alert. If the alert is deemed true, I determine if we were hacked or if something more serious is going on. Usually, I get other people involved.
Sounds like the NSA's system is very similar to the job of our favorite IDS operator. In fact, it's exactly the same thing. Some softwatre looks for patterns in telephone network traffic. Once these patterns are found, they do a quick check (basic analysis) to confirm the pattern has matched. Then, the alert is passed on to a different team to investigate whether there is a more serious event or not.
Are there false positives? Yes. Are there false negatives? Yes. Does this mean the method is ineffective? No. Does this mean it should be shut down? No. If it did, why am I, and thousands of others, getting paid for everyday?
I mean its obvious.
A band leader gets a call from a booker in Europe who wants them come play.
The band leader calls all the band members to line them up for the tour.
They cancel any local gigs that overlapped.
Those venues or bands call other bands or subs to fill those spots.
Result: The NSA gets to be first in line for tickets.
Squirrel!
How could those calling patterns ever cause false leads? Surely terrorists operate like clocks and do everything by the numbers.
Okay, here's an example of how stupid the example given is (and it's not the example that's stupid, it's the intelligence community): I'm an American I have good friends, or maybe family living overseas. Let's say my brother lives in Germany and he just called me to tell me that his wife had a baby boy. So, what am I going to do? Call everyone in my family and anyone that knows my brother well and say, "Guess what, they had a baby boy."
The fact is that, with calls between friends and family overseas in particular, the calls are not infrequently going to be some sort of major or semi-major news that the person in the States is then going to want to share with other friends and family. If the FBI is getting hit with all this garbage, I'm surprised they find time to do anything else.
I'm not saying this stuff can't be used to find terrorists, but at what expense? I would imagine there are much more effective ways to spend the money.
To bring the example a little closer to home, back in the early 90s when export restrictions on encryption were quite a bit tighter than they are now, I was asked by an uncle of mine (who's a venture capitalist) to do a little research into encryption. He had been approached by a group that had come up with some new encryption algorithm and he wanted me to get some sort of feel for how theirs stacked up.
So, I go onto Usenet and start asking some questions, trying to educate myself on this stuff. A few weeks later, I'm talking to one of my neighbors and she says, "So, did you get that job at the White House?" I said, "What job at the White House?" She said, "Well, there were some agents from the State Department here asking questions about you and they said it was for a job at the White House."
Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but I can do the math. Ask about encryption, agents show up. I suspect the two were related. I'm sure they were probably NSA agents since encryption is really more of their deal, or maybe State Dept. agents tasked by the NSA. But whatever.
Had they even looked at my file, which I'm sure they had since I had a full background check for a security clearance a few years prior, they would have quickly discovered that I'm someone of little consequence and not a likely spy. But no, they had to send out a couple agents to investigate me asking questions that anyone from anywhere around the world could have posted on Usenet. What a complete waste of time and money. And it's not like you couldn't just download regulated encryption algorithms off the net at the time anyway.
But I digress. Spending money to protect us is fine, if it's spent wisely. This is costing time of valuable people and untold amounts fo money for what is sure to be barely usable information. But hey, that should come as no shock to anyone.
Is it a sign that this technique is grasping at straws that I can think of one instance where this calling pattern would pop up that is totally legitimate in the first ten seconds of thinking about it?
The overseas shipping industry.
Why did they make this public?
Since the terrorists already have a network, they will just put more safe-guards on this, i.e. all.
Now the person, instead of making calls from the same line where it recived the intl call, might start calling others using different lines.
or - other safe-gaurds as such.
Obscurity does have its advantages.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
So how many times has this happened. One call to aunt Martha, who then spreads the workd and then gets a visit from the FBI or agents of HS.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
There was a local news story about a terrorism suspect who was picked up locally because of a tip from a flight school. Not from monitoring his phone calls, not by fingerprinting him when he came into the country, not by spy plane, satellite or any other whiz bang technology. Just a clerk at a airport counter in the middle of bf nowhere. And that's the sensor net that offers the best hope we have of combating terrorism. The clerk at the store, the landlord they rent from, the agent at the ticket counter, the hotel clerk, rental car company, bell hops, and neighbors. It's not depending on the government to keep us safe because they can't. Government is too big and too slow to respond to a ever changing threat landscape. Had we not spent the last five years alienating the muslim and mid-eastern communities in this country and abusing the few Arab allies we have in the mid-east, we might have been able to develop a community network that would have been effective and inexpensive (in relative terms).
No one seriously believes oceans can defend us, just like no one can seriously believe all the invasive technology being loosed on the people paying the bills is going to be any more effective.
It's all really quite insane.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Try connecting to a dark net such as AnoNet, to keep your communication secure.
http://anonetnfo.brinkster.net/
The most effective way of stopping terrorists is taking away their cause. Believe it or not, terrorists don't blow up hundreds of people as well as themselves because they "hate freedom" or any of that rubbish.
Says who that the NSA doesn't have something like TRANSLTR?
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
The real question is how many crooks are going to get off the hook because of this? Obtaining phone records without a warrant and then passing them to the FBI is going to get more than a few convictions vacated.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
America's data set on terrorism is in the single digits, and the data they do have is only partially complete. This means the only system that can be programmed is a set of user-created rules that "flag" questionable behavior. The solution is a poor one and will only improve our chances at detection by a fraction of a percent. (Seems a huge price to pay for privacy trampling to me.)
In order to detect terrorism on American soil effectively, we'd need a larger data set. Otherwise we're just attempting to reverse engineer a process that essentially defines itself as dynamic enough to avoid detection. We'd need a frequent source of terrorism that we could derive models and nets off of. The immediate source that comes to mind is Iraq. If I were in charge of the NSA program, I think the best course of action would be to harness the call-traffic (satellite and domestic), email activity and other "data" that precedes suicide bombers (or other known acts of terrorism) in Iraq. Using this data you could train a system to recognize similarities in America. Short of that, anything the NSA is trying is a crap shoot.
No. Freeing up lines of communication, preparing quick and actionable responses to warnings, and better general population awareness are probably more effective than grabbing a billion pieces of data and sifting through it for answers. It's impossible for a human to know what to look for, and until the NSA comes clean in what it's actualy doing, there's no justification for stomping out the few freedoms we still have. There are better alternatives out there that can be done with the help of the community and still preserve the integrity of our privacy.
This is about the US government spying on what it perceives as its biggest threat, its own citizens. The only terrorists they're going to catch with this are the mouth breathers and wannabees, like Moussawi. I can think of several far more secure ways to communicate than the freaking telephone. For one, drop your encrypted/stegged message into some high volume Usenet group in the alt.erotica.* hierarchy for your contact to surf by and pick up.
Pity the poor sod gets the call from his cousin Seamus in Belfast that their ticket in the Sweepstakes is into the final round. He hangs up and calls his six other cousins that are in the pool. Five FBI agents spend the next two months investigating this new IRA cell. 'Course you can't prove a negative, so even though no evidence is found, he might still really be in the IRA, so he gets a flag on his file with all the feds and a free body cavity search every time he tries to fly to Disneyland with his kids.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Shouldn't they first do something like analyze the call patterns of known terrorists to find the call patterns that are associated to terrorism. Oh, so they haven't caught enought terrorists to make reliable statistical analysis? Maybe they should lower the bar of considering someone terrorist.
Don't politicians make lots of phone calls, some of which would be international calls? I knew it! Damn terrorists.
There have been complaints that low-quality leads are drawing agents away from other cases.
Aside from the obvious privacy implications, this is what bothers me most about this program. We had enough information to stop 9/11 before it happened, but that information did not flow to the right people. Now, instead of making info flow the primary concern, they've added more data to the system. The likely result? More gridlock, and more missed opportunities.
"I'm not, like, that smart. I, like, forget stuff all the time." -- Paris Hilton
Templates" such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads, which are forwarded to the FBI for investigation.
Hmmm. So your father/son/sister/mother/brother/cousin/etc had some dramatic event happen overseas. Perhaps he was injured, or mugged, or perhaps everyone was just worried about him and he called to let you know he was safe.
One phone-call to the homeland, a bunch of calls among relatives and friends to pass the information along.
Sounds like it fits the pattern to me. In fact, this pattern would match up for overseas calls in many instances. In other words... useless.
on why they might have sent the tracking patterns out.
Actually, compared to the local calls, a very high fraction of international calls (esp. from the countries mentioned pak, middle east etc) would have the reciever following up the news rxd to other family members in america.
Since the intl call costs are quite high, the caller invariably asks the person to forward the message to everyone. This is going to be a big mess to be sorted out.
Now, the terrorist organisations would be on the lookout for any tracking patterns, and would get this flagged to all sleeper cells here. From now on, the messages sent to sleeper cells would have different behaviour -i.e. the people would use other phones to get the message out, or email or something.
Since NSA already have data for the numbers with the earlier patterns, any change in pattern would be flagged and would have a higher % capture rate.
Others would not care to change the patterns at all.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
I hope that the NSA and other organizations stop this and other similar data mining project now. There will be just as many or more false positives as actual leads to terrorists. We are talking about an endless stream of possibilities to account for and no two scenarios are guaranteed to be the same. We are talking about determinism here. Why do you think weather men are wrong half the time? I can see it now, my wife has a baby in Europe and decides to call the US to tell people. Those people she calls in the US proceed to call all of the family in the US. Is she a terrorist? Better yet, is Grandma a terrorist?
"Templates" such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads, which are forwarded to the FBI for investigation.
So recently my uncle died. He lived in Thailand. My mom (his sister) received a call from overseas, then obviously called every relative here in the U.S. We even called travel agents and airlines trying to arrange last minute travel. So by the FBI's reasoning, we should be investigated for this "suspicious" activity. There are so many more legitimate reasons to receive an international call, then make several domestic calls, than there are suspicious ones. What a waste of resources.
Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks, say current and former intelligence officials who were briefed about the program. (from the USA Today article)
Are they admitting to collecting details on domestic phone calls _before_ 9/11?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
"According to our analysis, that annonymous coward is obviously the mastermind of the cyber-resistance."
heres a big problem with "data mining"
imagine that you wanted to hit #target you would have a number of things you would need
split the list into sections CONTACT USING VARIOUS OTHER MEANS your "group"
then when the time is right make one phone call and say
"its time to run emerge -fu bunnyslippers" or post this to a common website.
can the TLAs connect the dots??? (hmm wasn't that the problem with...)
if you do this right nobody has the complete details the entire group is not connected
and it may only have one phone call
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Can data mining identify terrorists?
No.
But it can identify people with large extended families who have relatives overseas and get an important call about a death in the family, notify all their North American relatives, and then have government agents show up on their door.
Every single pattern-based terrorist screening method I have heard about sounds like something dreamed up in an air-conditioned office by some dork who never gets out very much and thinks all people are basically like him (and anyone who isn't ought to be subject to government investigation.)
Hanging around public buildings taking pictures? Must be a terrorist. As opposed to say, just interested in taking pictures of public buildings because modern-day monumental architecture happens to turn you on.
Want to learn to fly a 747 but don't have any interest in a career as a pilot? Must be a terrorist. Unless you happen to be fascinated by aircraft and think that a few weeks of flight school would give you bragging rights to die for at your local RC club.
Like to pay with cash, even for purchases in the thousands like furniture or maybe a car? Must be a terrorist. Or maybe you don't qualify for a chequing account, or are just a little bit paranoid, or just don't fucking feel like doing anything else.
These sorts of unvalidated, non-empirical, "feels like the right thing to me", ad hoc, imaginary "patterns of suspicious activity" are a major threat to freedom because they demonize and may even criminalize deviancy from the norm. It is a characteristic of unfree societies that deviancy from the norm is not just looked at asscance by the majority of the population, but is viewed as grounds for suspicion of the most heinious acts.
Furthermore, such datamining solutions are not able to identify terrorists reliably even when they have all kinds of intelligence data entered into them. A report on the chilling-named MATRIX system indicates that the system was only able to identify 5 of the original 9/11 hijackers in a retrospective test, a 75% false negative rate, and it further identifed 120,000 other Americans who had a "high terrorism factor." Supposedly "scores of arrests" resulted from that list, although no one knows what the arrests were for or how many of those were sucessfully prosecuted. The odds are most of them were for drug possession charges that were laid as a result of the increased scrutiny certain individuals got by virtue of wholey baseless suspicions of terrorism. But let us grant 60 successful prosecutions for terrorist-related activities. That's a false positive rate of over 99.9%
And that was when the system was loaded with specific intelligence data, which is no longer the case.
Given the complete failure of such systems to detect terrorists in retrospective studies, and the horrifically high false positive rate, and the chilling effect such programs have on the freedom to be different, it is very hard to believe that their real purpose is to spy on Americans and impose a high degree of conformity on American society.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Data mining is unreasonable search.
Data mining isn't a search (in the terms of "unreasonable search and seizure") at all. You aren't being searched.
Mothers' Day
As in:
(Call from somewhere in Europe): Hi Mom, great news, it's a baby boy!
(Multiple calls to relatives in US): Hey [mother/sister/brother/uncle/aunt], Jeff and Jane have just had a baby boy!
(Next day): FBI! We have the place surrounded! Come out with your hands up!
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Just as generals are always fighting the last war, the police are always solving the last crime. Terrorists are crazy but not stupid. High-tech methods are much less valuable than old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground mole-in-their- midst human intelligence.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Just for the record, I thought that this was an interesting story. Is there any way to undo moderation other than by posting?
Pick any one person, follow their social network out to six degrees of seperation, and you'll have terrorists. Lock all of them up. Problem solved.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I don't think the question should be is it legal?
The question should be is it consistent with America's values? Or is it moral? And I think the answer is a resounding NO!
The problem when you ask about legality is that you get legal opinions with obscure analysis that circumvents the broader question of whether America SHOULD do this.
It's alot like the debate surrounding our system of legalized bribery (except we call it lobbying). "Oh, they paid for a plane trip, let's make those illegal." The debates center around the legal technicalities, but largely ignore the larger problem of targeted contributions directly affecting specific votes and the immoral culture of lobbying.
Really? I thought it was maroon.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Living in the US, being British with a Mexican wife I think that we may have international calls to the new grandparents and siblings followed by a flurry of domestic calls to friends.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
After all we already paid a heavy price: all our phonecalls now end up in the NSA's database with the ostensible reason of tracking down potential terrorists. The one and only return would have been to enable the NSA to conduct traffic analysis on this data in order to form a dragnet with which to narrow down suspicion from hundreds of millions of subscribers to (perhaps) more manageable numbers. And now this story tells any would-be terrorist precisely how the NSA might conduct its analysis and what they can do to avoid the dragnet: which is to make sure that their pattern of communication is dissimilar from the one used by their predecessors. In short, this seems to strip the whole operation of the one and only potential benefit for which it was put in place.
Was the public interest really served by releasing this story?
If we assume that the people at the NSA and other spy agencies are smart enough to know this too, then one has to ask what are they really trying to do.
The answer is that monitoring known actors (such as political dissidents) who are members of known groups works well with these techniques.
Here's my little essay on the subject (with some historical examples thrown in): http://robertdfeinman.com/society/surveillance_vs_ liberty.html
The bottom line is that secret police functions rapidly become tools for suppression of domestic dissent.
-- Robert D Feinman Landscapes, Panoramas, Photoshop Tips and Musings on Society
The first thing that came to my mind, and the minds of numerous other posters, are the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have families overseas. Given the thousands of birth, wedding, christmas visit and graduation notifications that will fit this exact pattern, it is questionable as to whether looking for that pattern is very useful in tracking down terrorists.
But to be fair, this begs the question of whether or not this type of pattern might be useful in conjuction with other data. Which leads to the real concern. To be useful to the NSA, they have to store this data long term. They also have to start keeping track of things that look suspicious to them. I can't say that I'm comfortable with the idea of getting a visit by the men in black if (a) I have family overseas and (b) I call a flight school and (c) I call a life insurance company. The amount of information that the NSA can collect is astonishing.
Not that I'm at all happy about the monitoring, but in fairness, would the NSA/FBI report massive success with the data mining? Doing so would inform terrorists (drug dealers, lesbians, Democrats) that the simple pattern of their phone calls can identify them, forcing them to change their methods of communications, undermining the success of the program. It might be sufficient for them to publicly leak stories that the program isn't working while reporting to the government that it's actually quite successful. It certainly wouldn't be the first time disinformation has been used.
An interesting aside: as reported by Bruce Schneier, al Qaeda members avoid Echelon by using shared Hotmail accounts. Rather than sending email, they create drafts and save them, and have a running conversation in the draft before deleting it. Not sending the email means the email doesn't trigger midpoint monitoring. Would they be doing that if they didn't know about Echelon?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Surely real terrorists aren't using telephones to plan their activities? I know if I was a terrorist I wouldn't. I'd be making an "X" on my window with duct tape, or carrying a newspaper rolled up under my left arm (but not my RIGHT arm - that means I was followed), or touching my nose with my forefinger.
I have a feeling that we're only going to catch the really stupid terrorists this way - and they are probably the ones who don't do much damage to anyone but themselves. "Hey, Mohammed! Osama just called and said to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Call me back as soon as you get this message!"
"forwarded to the FBI for investigation"
That dodge is how Bush can appear on TV saying "this NSA program doesn't listen to your calls", because they forward your calls to another program, at the FBI (and probably elsewhere). Feel safer?
--
make install -not war
and, while it can potentially be useful *if properly implemented* , it has been found to be of questionable use as well, in many cases because "profiling" is done with unsound methodology (i.e. people are associating the wrong sets of identifiers/characteristics with what they are trying to find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offender_profiling#Co ntroversies .
Please note I am *not* trying to defend the idea of spying on Americans with what is most certainly data-mining. I'm just pointing out it looks like they're trying to create profiles in the hopes of finding terrorists, to which I say "Assalamu'alaikum."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assalamu_alaikum
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Billing data doesn't even rise to the level of a "pen register" under FISA, so it's not FISA that makes it illegal.
/. crowd doesn't mean it's necessarily illegal.
And every other law I've seen cited only seems to actually deal with the contents of the communication - not the fact or timing of the communication, or the law has a list of exceptions longer than the list of prohibited activities.
Just because it's not liked by the
Hey we have all this data! We can use it to accurately predict future behavior of a large group of autonomous, independent human beings!
*BZZT* Wrong. This is the danger of falling into the social science trap, where you think that because 1 group of individuals has acted a certain way in the past, that another (however similar) group of individuals will act the same way in the future.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Is there any thing we can do about this?
How about creating the worlds largets LAN Party?
I like-a do-the cha-cha.
What's the point of gossiping otherwise...if you don't share juicy gosssips immediately...may be it can be called the "gossip pattern" ...or may be NSA is trying to fight gossiping !
All the best to them....
I'm not shocked that the NSA is reading everyone's phone bill. Outraged, yes, but not shocked. What is shocking to me is that it's USA Today that's lighting a fire under their ass. Fucking USA Today, which I thought stood for everything that was mediocre and un-thought-provoking in news reporting. My respect for them has gone through the roof lately.
The Clinton Administration "Chinese Wall" prevented intelligence operatives from informing domestic law enforcement, however.
I think the Able Danger fiasco PROVES why lily-livered "civil libertarians" should get the h*ll out of the peoples' business.
How many "civil liberties" have you left, when you're dead?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
It may, or may not, be good public policy, but it is not illegal for a telephone company to voluntarily provide call detail records to a government agency.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
A not-unlikely scenario:
1) A Pakistani developer starts an interesting FOSS project.
2) I test a copy and like it. He then calls me or I call him for a phone interview.
3) My next step is to call a bunch of sources in the U.S. and elsewhere, ask what they think of the software.
So with no family or friends in Pakistan, I am suddenly a potential terrorist threat by NSA standards. Uh huh.
It doesn't need to be a story about software, either. One about anti-terrorism activities could generate a similar call pattern.
On the other hand, I suppose that by current U.S. government standards, any journalist who makes a lot of calls to verify a story, instead of being a Good Little Boy and sticking to "official sources," is nearly as dangerous as a terrorist, anyway.
(sigh)
Data mining can be incredibly effective, so I haev no doubt it could be used to turn up good leads. The problem is, just like Google, the whole key is knowing what to ask. Put in the wrong search parameters and you'll get nothing but junk out of your elaborate data mining operation. I highly doubt we have a large enough sample of known terrorists to establish some good baseline parameters we can apply to a general population search. I'm not even convinced good baseline parameters exist. Evil Terrorists are not stupid, no matter what the neocon rah rah America mythmaking would have you believe. I'm sure they practive the equivalent of Google bombing to keep the snr of this kind of "surveillance" extremely poor. I'm not convinced this is the horrible invasion of privacy civil libertarians want to make it out to be (wake me when critics of the administration start quietly disappearing), but I am convinced it's a horrible waste of time and resources. I have a feeling some higher ups got overly-enamored with buzzwords and technical wizardry, and forgot there is just no substitute for good old fashioned feet-on-the-ground, cloak and daggers intelligence.
No doubt that last is the provision the Administration found ... inconvenient ... and it's easy to find sympathy for the initial transgression. I can still do that: cut them a break, ok?
But my sympathy and what they're doing now is exactly why we have a Constitution: the good guys might "need" it to start with, but it never stops there, and the crimes it permits are far worse than the crimes it prevents.
And no, I haven't forgotten. I saw the towers fall too. They're going after people who say things they don't like, and now you can't hide. These are men who'll try to hurt you if you do that. If they can't find a way to wreck your career, they'll go after your family.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
First, might as well mod me down before going any further, because I know how unpopular these views are here... but here goes.
Data mining is unreasonable search... is speculative work, not investigative, so regardless of whether it *can* be used for speculative 'research' into the activity of American citizens, it *shouldn't* be
I am a very strong advocate for privacy, but I still feel that statement is ridiculous. It seems to me (please clarify if I'm mistaken) that this is comparable to the following statements:
Please tell me one way in which you -- or any citizien -- have been affected by the government looking at the calling patterns of 260+million people. Tell me of one way in which your privacy is compromised? Tell me of one constitutional right which is violated.
Unreasonable search and seizure? Hardly. It's not unreasonable for the government to take non intrusive, reasonable precautions to protect the welfare of the nation from outside threats. THat is, after all, one of the few legitimate purposes of a government. This is true regardless of whether or not people (even the citizens who voted the government into office) believe that those threats are real. 9/11 proved that they are real.
I am aware that the potential for abuse is high -- that is what makes me nervous. But if we lived our lives in fear of what might be, we'd never leave our homes.
Let me clarify one other point -- a LOT of the things that we are letting the government do in the name of 'security' are nothing short of ridiculous (disallowing nailclippers and lighters on airplanes comes to mind). However, this seems to me to be one of the few that isn't one of them.
I have no feeling on this either way. What I find strange though is the large number of people that are against this, yet just throw away their phone bills with their regular trash. Everyone wants their information to be private yet they dont practice this. They leave their ATM reciepts sticking out of the machine or crumpled up on the ground. They just throw away bank statements, old checks, utility bills etc. They drive around with bumper stickers "Proud parent of an [insert school] honor roll student." They use EZ-Pass for toll roads. They dont want the anyone to know where they've been yet they leave this huge paper trail behind through credit/debit/check cards. They are on video cameras everyday (grocery stores/ATM's) for security (cover your a$$) against ridiculous lawsuits. Yet when something bad happens they blame the government because they should have known or done something. Everyone wants the government to make them safe yet when the government trys to do those very things we stop them and cry right to privacy. I want the government to make me safe but how dare they pass a law requiring me to wear a seat belt. That should be my choice!
It's amusing to me that this whole program is self-defeating, even if there was any chance that it could work in the first place.
You just can't gather that much data from that many sources and not expect that someone will find out. Once the well organized terrorists know that the data is being gathered then they'll simply change their calling habits. These are smart folks, they'll figure out ways to obfuscate their calling patterns (use internet methods, call from payphones and hotel rooms, make only local calls, route calls through non-cooperating foreign phone networks using e.g. 3-way calling, etc).
But the government will still have the data and the only people left vulnerable to the database will be non-terrorists.
The smart people at the NSA must have known this when they designed the program.
Similarly with blog comments... a lot of it looks like spam, but it could be disguised commands, and it can be seen by people using search engines so there's a disconnect (cutout) between the poster and the recipient. All the reader would have to do would be to search on an innocent phrase agreed between the poster and the recipient and then view the cache of the page that matches that content...
they could be using Slashdot right now to coordinate the next big one...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Tell Great Aunt Zelda that the recover should take 3 months. Once the operation is complete, she should make release another statement about the effectiveness of the operation.
Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
The results that you get from any kind of data mining is just
as good as the model that you apply.
If the model fits the underlying process reasonably well, then it will yield
good results otherwise the results will be close to random.
A good example for this is the classic K-means algorithm which essentially
looks for points (in multidimensional spaces) that cluster together in "blobs".
Regardless of the shape of the actual data, the procedure will always find
blobs, which might be useless for the application at hand.
It seems to me that the fact that they get a lot of false positives (translating into
wasted time for field agents) is an indication that their assumed model
isn't very good or that the gathered information simply doesn't contain what it
takes to identify terrorist networks.
It's 2006, and they've been mining data since 2001 - that's five years! Now, they probably got some of this data after 2001, but that still means they've been doing this for a long time without getting caught - outrageous!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
NO
But it can identify connections, patterns, coincidences and statistics that can be analyzed, interpreted, tortured and twisted.
Its going to take one hell of a PhD thesis to scaffold all that data into information logs that can be erected into knowledge trees of past actionable offenses.
It looks like the data mining is topography, very granular, over which can be laid more sensitive intelligence to contextualize and quatitize risk assessments. I know machines exist that can capture "realtime" data streams of keywords. I suspect other techniques can be used for voicestreams. Overlay those maps onto call call patterns, statistics over time and intelligence data becomes enriched. What it means? Is it knowledge, coincidence or terrorists? It could be anything, but at least they have a method of working the terrorist problem.
If it hurds bad guys it would be the modern equivilent of a roundup.
Known terrorist keywords:
Baby = Bomb
Birthday = Bomb
Family Reunion = Bomb
Business Meeting = Bomb
Death in the family = Bomb
Vacation = Bomb
Party = Bomb
Flight = Bomb
There are too many to list here but I think you get the idea.
With all the suspicion and worries expressed by members of congress and the senate, I have to wonder why the new head of the CIA was confirmed so quickly and easily? And is it just me or has there been WAY too much turn-over in the executive staffing over the past 2-3 years?
My personal state of terror has moved gradually from "yellow" (annoyed) to "orange" (suspicious) and is nearing "red" (outraged). Frankly, I think the press should adopt a similar polling strategy. While approval ratings are all good and closer to accurate and quantifiable, I think it would really get some attention if they used the same measure as "Department of Homeland Security" (Gestapo).
Secret database??? They snatched records from the phone company.
Calls coming into the country from Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Middle East, for example, are flagged by NSA computers if they are followed by a flood of calls from the number that received the call to other U.S. numbers.
So if one of our servicepersons calls his/her worried mother to reassure her that he/she is ok after a particularly hostile engagement and she wants to let the rest of the family know, which one is the terrorist?
The spy agency then checks the numbers against databases of phone numbers linked to terrorism, the officials say. Those include numbers found during searches of computers or cellphones that belonged to terrorists.
If they find something suspicious, they check to see if it's connected to a known terrorist phone number? If they already have a list of known terrorist phone numbers, then just what the hell are they looking for?
Let's take a step back and look at the real problem. Here are the facts as I understand them:
The NSA isn't "data mining against" any U.S. citizen. I'd submit that our privacy hasn't actually been invaded, either. The real problem is that they're using an ineffective technique to generate leads.
Keep in mind, please, that the phone companies also sell these records to marketers. Marketers can know far more about any single individual than the NSA can learn from phone call source, target, time and duration. The real invasion of privacy comes from people trying to sell you something, not from the NSA doing its job (although perhaps poorly).
Data mining techniques are a tool that belongs in the NSA's toolkit. If you're worried about how they use the technique, worry more about the people you vote into office. These people set the agendas, and good people tend to set good agendas.
With regards, SMT
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment... the majority of the comments about this article have been responding to the specific example given in the article. What makes everyone think that the NSA is stupid enough to limit their search to that specific pattern? Whether you like them or not, it's a big agency with a very highly trained and intelligent staff. And security procedures mandate that you don't give out your really important secrets (other than perhaps occasional leaks to the Washington Post or NYTimes, that is). Logically, it seems you can assume they've thought of all these issues, right?
Before you answer, please set aside the "any data mining is wrong" mantra...
To answer my own question, I don't believe for a minute that this specific example is even a small fraction of the number games that they play with the data. That's exactly why you folks complaining about the risk posed by your Aunt Zelda's goiter surgery phone calls have NOT been bothered by the NSA. They're smarter than that.
This question has been posed several times by conservative journalists: if they're doing such a lousy job, don't you find it curious that there has NOT been another successful attack in four and a half years, despite repeated hate-filled threats from Bin Laden and others like him? Either we're just lucky, or DHS has something going right.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
... the would-be terrorists are well assimilated with lots of friends in the US (thus, all the domestic calls) and overseas calls are expensive as all get out (thus, the infrequency of foreign calls). Nah, that would only apply to 99.99% of the people flagged by this profile.
people always nick a cellphone to make dodgy calls
it's well known cells are monitored
some people have really old phones+sims that were only aquired to receive a single call every few months
simple stuff. if drug dealers are used to this kind of thing, terrorists will be old hands at it.
In response to your claim that the program is "patently illegal", many people are going to claim it is "perfectly legal". I see there are already several replies to that effect. It's probably the case that both are overstatements. The truth is that not too much is known about the process by which the calling records were obtained, and it looks like the legality of the program depends a lot on that.
The short story, as I understand it, is this: If the government compelled the phone companies to specifically track calls to and from a phone number (known as a pen "register" and a "trap and trace") without a warrant, that would be illegal (under FISA there's some exception if the person is not a citizen or permanent resident, but there are other requirements). If, however, the phone company voluntarily gave the NSA their normal billing records, then the government officials probably didn't commit a crime, but it seems likely that the phone companies did. A lot of people think that's what happened, and an important point in favor of this was the refusal of QWest to give up records, but the truth is we don't know exactly what happened. Until we know more, it's not entirely clear if the government committed a crime or if they just encouraged/coerced the phone companies to commit crimes. There may even be the possibility that no one committed a crime, though that doesn't look likely to me. Of course, there's a difference between what is legal and what is moral or wise (people often overlook this), so even if it's legal you could still decide it is wrong.
If you want to know more, I suggest you start with this excellent article on Security Focus, which goes into a lot more detail about the issues involved. It says of the author, "Mark D. Rasch, J.D., is a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit, and now serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Security Counsel at Solutionary Inc." So, it sounds like he's pretty well qualified to offer an opinion.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
"Able Danger" identified Atta and three of the other hijackers pre-9/11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger
Instead of the government trying to cover up the success of Able Danger, it should be initiating twenty or so Able Danger-like data mining programs.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Note that these calling patterns cannot be used to associate that person with a committed or planned crime in the normal data mining scenario.
Data mining is unreasonable search.
You've got an interesting point. Did you notice Gen Hayden's fixation on the term "reasonable" wrt to the 4th Amendment before and during his nomination? For reference the 4th amendment says
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The types of records the NSA admits to mining have already been decided to be public records. The act of you punching in a number and sending it to the phone company in the act of making a call is a public act and does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy attached to it (well I disagree, but thats what the SCOTUS said).
That's my devil's advocate analysis of the administration's position. Of course using these records, the NSA can then trivially turn to a private contractor say, Choicepoint* and get further records which may or may not have that same privacy expectation attached to it.
The biggest guiding principle of this administration is expression and expansion of executive power. Cheney has explicitly opined that the power of the president has been in decline since Nixon and he would like to change that trend. To this end, the administration seeks very much to avoid congressional and judicial oversight. Focusing on the reasonable in the 4th amendment makes sure they don't have to address the "but upon probable cause" part.
* -- for bonus points, these are the same guys who cleared the Florida voter rolls of felons
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Read the definition here:
"the term "pen register" means a device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information transmitted by an instrument or facility from which a wire or electronic communication is transmitted, provided, however, that such information shall not include the contents of any communication, but such term does not include any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing, for communications services provided by such provider or any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire communication service for cost accounting or other like purposes in the ordinary course of its business"
In other words, billing data is excluded from the pen register definition.
Things like date and time of call and the phone numbers involved are billing data.
Obviously it does need to be spelled out further so pompous twits like you can be shown just how wrong you are. So STFU.
Also note that the law you quote is "TITLE 18. CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE
PART II--CRIMINAL PROCEDURE"
Investigating and defending against terrorist attacks is a national security and not criminal activity. The NSA is military, not police. So FISA would apply. Except that it doesn't, because as I already noted the NSA's activities don't even meet the defintion of a pen register.
I take issue with part of your argument. Law enforcement agents are allowed to search you based on speculation. It's called probable cause. Probable cause is reasonable speculation. If I'm sitting outside of a gas station at 1:30 am with a ski mask on and a cop pulls up, no crime has been committed but the officer would have probable cause to stop me and search my car because I'm behaving in a suspicious manner and the officer could reasonably speculate that a crime was about to be committed or had been committed.
By the same token if as a result of data mining the NSA is able to tell with reasonable certainty that a particular type of calling pattern is likely to be related to some kind of terrorist activity then they can and should share any intelligence they can gather from it with the FBI as well as other intelligence agencies. That being said, they key term here from the FBI perspective is "likely" and "reasonable". If the NSA keeps turning over names and nothing ever comes of them then the particular pattern or patterns in question are not likely to be related to terrorist activity and therefore the FBI wouldn't and shouldn't have probable cause to investigate any tips that are passed along based on those patterns. That's why oversight is so important here and why I'm outraged about the situation. If I was convinced that the program had the proper judicial and/or Congressional oversight then I wouldn't be so up in arms about it. As it stands now, who decides which patterns are "likely" to indicate terrorist activity? What's the threshold and who decides? How much information is the NSA sharing with the FBI and other intelligence agencies? These are important questions and judicial and/or Congressional oversight needs to occur.
> No. It can identify people who have calling patterns associated with terrorist activity,
I don't think it can even do that. If a terror network really is loose, then the "one international call followed by a flood of local calls" may be completely out to lunch, simply because the head sleeper will just call 2 next important sleepers, each of which would call 2 other next important sleepers, and so on, until they call the cogs actually doing the dirty work. At no point is there any flood, just a cascading trickle that hides the more important sleepers from the cogs.
They could look for that pattern (which is pretty popular, especially with companies that try to create a "buzz"), but they would also miss the case where the announcement of the go-ahead is hiding in plain sight. The sleepers above the cogs could simply say "listen to the radio's request line. When you hear someone request '"The safety dance" for my wife Alice who never plays it safe' we attack." or "watch Slashdot for the following User Name and read every second word for final instructions.".
Go find and read the definition of "pen register".
Whether these means are effective or not is definitely besided the point. The US government is doing everything it can to promote terrorism abroad. At home, in the name of fighting terrorism, it is pressing on all sides to claim privilege over the rights of individuals and the legal mechanisms that guarantee those rights. In other words it is dismantling American democracy. US corporations have already demonstrated that they won't stand in the way. The opposition party can't muster enough opposition even to open a meaningful debate on the blatently illegal and unconstitutional actions of the ruling party. And the public at large is not connecting the dots sufficiently to realize that the relatively elegant political system into which it was born has entered its endgame. We are allowing terrorism to defeat democracy.
This is not about spotting terrorsits, it's about having a detailed record. They find somthing suspicous throught traditional means, and then they can rewind electronic history and get data that would otherwise be gone. Face it, they can't identify terrorists real-time, but it is very helpful to have you own (not the phone companies) call record you can access hassle-free later. I bet this what it was created for, but it is NOT what it will be used for when more corrupt people get power.
I have a friend who is on an expat assignment overseas. Sometimes, I get a call from that friend (from overseas). Then, a flurry of domestic calling takes place as the news from the friend spreads to others in our social circle.
Combine that with the PATRIOT Act, which makes it possible to strip the rights of anybody that is committing a crime (e.g. speeding), and we're all pretty much universally screwed.
As the saying goes, "if you're one in a million, there are 6000 just like you." What does that mean? That probabilities can be funny like that when they involve hideously large numbers of people.
When you say:
"Sure, some of them are a bit contrived, and wouldn't happen that often"
I'll say in a country of hundreds of millions of people, it will happpen hundreds of times per day.
If, say, only 1 in 1000 citizens have relatives overseas, and there's only 1 in 1000 chance in a given day they'll get called about a signifficant family event (grandma died, cousin It got married, etc), then you have exactly the one-in-a-million scenario. It'll happen hundreds of times a day.
And note that the probabilities in the example above were chosen ridiculously low. Family events happening only once every 1000 days, means once in 3 years. In most families _something_ or another happens a lot more often than that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...have been forwarded to the FBI recently, as they seem to have been able to allocate 50 agents to the task of digging for Jimmy Hoffa.
Nice demonstration of why nobody wants to call it what it is.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
The PBX at my office was hacked and used to make long distance calls from outside the office and prepaid cellphones are available to anyone who wants to buy one. Its also possible to change phone numbers or get an account with a fake ID.
What good is a phone number for identifying someone ?
Sounds like another way for Bush to send pork to a campaign contributor.
Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting piece on why data-mining not only doesn't work, but can't work in the context of finding terrorist plots:
t w=wn_story
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70357-0.html?
In a nutshell, his premise is that the underlying assumptions that make data mining work for such things as credit card fraud don't hold when searching for terrorist plots. Also, that trying to apply those models will result in a flurry of false negatives so large as to make the whole effort useless and a waste of resources which could otherwise be better spent. It's hard to argue with...
----- My opinions are my own, etc, etc.
> sadir's uncle
sadir your father just got diagnosed with rare form of cancer and has a month to live
> sadir's boss
okay you can take the week off if you can find someone to replace you
> sadir's coworkers
i will call around to see if someone can take your shift
> ann sadir's best friend
we are all hear for you, i will call angela, todd, and jenn
> jenn
hey you all want to come buy and bake some cokkies to cheer a friend who is
> angela
jamie we should have a fund raiser to try to help sadir's father
have these guys heard of godel's incompleteness theorem ?
Templates such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads
I just got a call from my sister overseas; She just gave birth to a baby boy... I better ring all my local family and friends and pass on the good news!
Guess I'm off to GTMO.
I think that the NSA is using the pattern matching to identify POTENTIAL terrorist activity. They are smart enought to know Bayes theorem, so they know that they are going to have a lot of false positives at this point, but they have eleminated a huge number of boring calls. Then they do some analysis that is too expensive to do for every call. My guess is that after a trigger event, say in international call, that everything else to the same phone number is recorded using the technology in the AT&T secret rooms that are the object of the EFF law suite. There is some voice recognition that might try to automatically act as a second level trigger by keying on some what is said in the call. So far, everything is automatic and quite scalable, at least to an organization that measures server farms in acres. If enough triggers fire on any given call, the NSA will get a person involved. They can go to FISA and use the traffic patterns to establish 'probable cause' - assuming that they care enough about law enforcement to make sure that they can use the data in court. They have to do this within 3 days of the call if they want to be able to present the contents of the call as evidence in a trial. Now, with a FISA court order (or not, maybe they are interested in intelligence and they don't give a damn about 'legally admissible'), they can have a person listen to the data and still be able to use the data in court if they need to. Humans listening to calls is expensive/rare, especially if you are trying to find Arabic speakers with top secret clearance. This system uses cheap computers & cheap fiber optic networks to maximize the utility of the limited human resources.
I think that I sound paranoid, but what else explains the data?
Think global, act loco
can data mining id terrorists? it seems like the answer may be yes...
remember "able-danger"? supposedly it id'd Atta before 9/11. also, i heard on npr the other day, it identified the attack on the cole before it happened.
if there's a viable data-mining security program, sounds like able-danger is it...
Phone numbers are not social security numbers. They identify phones not people. Hence the name phonenumber. If ma bell had wanted numbers to identify people then it would have just used social security numbers...
;-) And then some of the engineer started talking about the people that gave them the algorithms.
I may sound like an ass$%^ explaining this to a little child, but in the US a public prosecutor once actually claimed, in front of a judge, that an IP address is like a social security number! You could laugh at this, but the suspect did walk.
The same goes for a http://www.spamfo.co.uk/component/option,com_conte nt/task,view/id,97/Itemid,2/>huge gang of 419 scammers in Amsterdam. (Some of which actually came from Nigeria). They lived with a lot of people in a very few apartments. So who was sitting behind the PC when the "send" button was pressed? An undercover agent dressed up as a pizza delivery guy could find out. Just ring the doorbell and peek in after a spam salvo is send. The problem certainly wasn't cooperation between the police and the internet provider. This group used stolen cable modems hooked up by crooked installers. So the provider had every reason to work along with whatever the police would ask.
The biggest offender in this area must be the RIAA and its friends. They just keep harassing grannies.
Sure in 99%, hell, lets make that 99.99%, of the cases a phone number identifies a pin protected cell phone that can only be answered by the person who carries it and whose name is on the phone bill and the bank account that pay that phone bill and who owns the house where that cell phone spends its nights....
But people who fear they might be the target of surveillance will work hard, very hard, to be in that 0.01%. Depending on the penalty of getting caught they might go pretty far in this. Would you steal cell phones if it kept you out of GITMO?
So you if you talk about social network analysis then you risk getting people a little to excited about extensive legislation and billion dollar surveillance projects. Its more like mapping a sexual relations network to find STD sources...based on surveys. You would be wise to expect some missing links. Phone traffic network analysis sounds less exciting, but it's accurate.
So how would you stay safe regardless of how high your e-mail identity scores on the statistical Japanese^d^d^dcommunist^d^d^dterrorist detection system?
Well Khalid Shaikh Mohammed used Swiss pre-paid cell phones. A good start and had he seen HBO`s the Wire like others suggested here already then he would have dumped them regularly as well. http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/ch-spy-chip. htm >He didn't. (The register headlined: "Al Qaeda boss confused phone SIM with cloaking device")
Maybe that fact that they used Swiss phones is the result of a western intelligence agency "hinting" that this would be smart. There is no way that someone would mistake banking secrecy and neutrality with communication security after the http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/nsa-sun.htm> crypto AG story. For those who forgot, Crypto AG sold NSA and German intelligence designed crypto systems to every country, but especially those under extra US export rules. That is, until Iran decided to take one of their sales rep`s hostage and started asking questions, after that other customers started asking questions as well
A Pakistani named http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080804Z.shtml>Muha mmad Naeem Noor Khan had a smarter idea. He and his communication partners regularly changed e-mail addresses and used crypto. He may have used his own algorithms though. He got caught and started to work with Pakistani intelligence. He started to arrange for the capture of the people he was in contact with. But then there was a pre-election terror alert in the US. US Intelligence people we
It would be much simpler to turn the problem on its head. Find one honest man -- build a fence around him -- all the bad people are on the outside. I guess you could attempt to repeat the operation, if necessary.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If the NSA isn't collecting it as "incoming" data for a specific phone, it's not a "trap and trace" device either:
"the term "trap and trace device" means a device or process which captures the incoming electronic or other impulses which identify the originating number or other dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information reasonably likely to identify the source of a wire or electronic communication, provided, however, that such information shall not include the contents of any communication"
If the data isn't collected as "incoming" data, it doesn't fall under the "trap and trace" definition.
Assuming what we've read is true, it looks like the NSA went right to the edge of what is legal. But not beyond.
Please note that I've made no statement about the propriety of the program, but I will say that I'm not going to take at face value USA Today's rehashed story that borrows the characterizations of the NY Times. It's all too obvious that the NY Times has an agenda to get Bush.
"It's not unreasonable for the government to take non intrusive, reasonable precautions to protect the welfare of the nation from outside threats."
Outside threats.
And 'reasonable' is a matter of debatable degree -- as has been mentioned numerous times on slashdot, it's a question of relative value of safety (or perceived safety, in most cases) vs. liberty and the potential for misuse.
Your bulleted examples do not corollate with what I'm saying. Individual citizens, monitoring of aggregate data (of debatable utility for the stated purpose) to find potential perps is awkward at best. For your speeding example, the better metaphor would be to monitor Speedpass/EZPass times to then investigate the driving records, bank records, etc of all people who averaged over the speed limit for distance x. Or even more appropriate, to investigate all people who happen to drive at 10 PM, since that is when there are the most egregious speeders on the road (time made up, of course).
As to one way in which anyone has been affected -- how about citizens of Middle Eastern descent who are afraid to call their family overseas? How about the fact that it's always in the back of my mind that big brother could be listening?
"But if we lived our lives in fear of what might be, we'd never leave our homes."
Exactly. Which is exactly why we shouldn't allow the government to take measures with a high risk of abuse -- we're allowing it just because of the fear of what might be.
The fact of the matter is that we're allowing the government a tool that would facilitate trampling of our rights. We CANNOT trust government not to misuse this information -- therefore, they should not be allowed to have it. As all the TJ followers have taken to heart, a "healthy mistrust of government" is a predicate for participatory government like ours. To do otherwise is to be naive, short-sighted, and without understanding of history.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"If I'm sitting outside of a gas station at 1:30 am with a ski mask on and a cop pulls up, no crime has been committed but the officer would have probable cause to stop me and search my car because I'm behaving in a suspicious manner and the officer could reasonably speculate that a crime was about to be committed or had been committed."
Not at all. I think you need to research your rights better. The cop could stop you, he could ask to search your car, but would not be allowed to search it without a warrant unless you gave him permission -- same with your personal effects (like what's in your pockets). If he smelled marijuana or gunpowder residue, or saw blood, then he'd have grounds. But it's absolutely scary to me that people would believe that wearing a ski mask is grounds to be searched.
If you're not even aware of your rights, how do you know when they are taken from you?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Data mining can lead to useful information against future terrorist activities. The question of legality is irrelevant to effectiveness and can actually be counterproductive. According to various leaks from the FBI, investigators using an experimental data mining program called ABLE DANGER suspected some of the 9/11 hijackers. The information could not have been used so it was destroyed. Then 9/11 happened. The entire story could have been pro-espionage propaganda. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of data mining may be great. The question is how much liberty we are willing to trade off for security. Philosophically, we say none, but in truth, we don't want trains and buses exploding every other day.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
So if I find out that my sister in Australia is getting married and I decide to tell my friends, do we have to invite the NSA?
Uhh.. nevermind, it's in the mail.
The problem is that the court precedent for phone call monitoring to be reasonable (no reasonable expectation of privacy) relates to a search where the evidence gathered was part of an investigation in progress, not to develop leads on potential crimes not already under investigation -- that is, the information was not private, but there was specific cause such that the introduction as evidence was not the rsult of just fishing.
Any evidence therefore gathered as a result of data mining, is to me, fruit of a poisonous tree, and unadmissable -- since data mining is fishing, and is an unacceptable means of gathering evidence.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I may sound like an ass$%^ explaining this to a little child, but in the US a public prosecutor once actually claimed, in front of a judge, that an IP address is like a social security number! You could laugh at this, but the suspect did walk.
The same goes for a huge gang of 419 scammers in Amsterdam. (Some of which actually came from Nigeria). They lived with a lot of people in a very few apartments. So who was sitting behind the PC when the "send" button was pressed? An undercover agent dressed up as a pizza delivery guy could find out. Just ring the doorbell and peek in after a spam salvo is send. The problem certainly wasn't cooperation between the police and the internet provider. This group used stolen cable modems hooked up by crooked installers. So the provider had every reason to work along with whatever the police would ask.
The biggest offender in this area must be the RIAA and its friends. They just keep harassing grannies.
Sure in 99%, hell, lets make that 99.99%, of the cases a phone number identifies a pin protected cell phone that can only be answered by the person who carries it and whose name is on the phone bill and the bank account that pay that phone bill and who owns the house where that cell phone spends its nights....
But people who fear they might be the target of surveillance will work hard, very hard, to be in that 0.01%. Depending on the penalty of getting caught they might go pretty far in this. Would you steal cell phones if it kept you out of GITMO?
So you if you talk about social network analysis then you risk getting people a little to excited about extensive legislation and billion dollar surveillance projects. Its more like mapping a sexual relations network to find STD sources...based on surveys. You would be wise to expect some missing links. Phone traffic network analysis sounds less exciting, but it's accurate.
So how would you stay safe regardless of how high your e-mail identity scores on the statistical Japanese^d^d^dcommunist^d^d^dterrorist detection system?
Well Khalid Shaikh Mohammed used Swiss pre-paid cell phones. A good start and had he seen HBO`s the Wire like others suggested here already then he would have dumped them regularly as well. He didn't. (The register headlined: "Al Qaeda boss confused phone SIM with cloaking device")
Maybe that fact that they used Swiss phones is the result of a western intelligence agency "hinting" that this would be smart. There is no way that someone would mistake banking secrecy and neutrality with communication security after the crypto AG story. For those who forgot, Crypto AG sold NSA and German intelligence designed crypto systems to every country, but especially those under extra US export rules. That is, until Iran decided to take one of their sales rep`s hostage and started asking questions, after that other customers started asking questions as well ;-) And then some of the engineer started talking about the people that gave them the algorithms.
A Pakistani named Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan had a smarter idea. He and his communication partners regularly changed e-mail addresses and used crypto. He may have used his own algorithms though. He got caught and started to work with Pakistani intelligence. He started to arrange for the capture of the people he was in contact with. But then there was a pre-election terror alert in the US. US Intelligence people were looking for an explanation for this alert, so someone leaked to the New York Times that Pakistan
"The question of legality is irrelevant to effectiveness and can actually be counterproductive."
Nope. It may be counterproductive, but it is certainly not irrelevant. If evidence is obtained illegally, it cannot be used effectively (in court, for example). Unless you advocate repealing the 4th amendment.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
If some terrorist wants to signal a start of a campaign - he/she wouldnt need to call someone. A posting on some BLOGS like slashdot or some open BBS would do just as well, or a new picture posting on some picture web site also do wonder.
"Dave has a mustache"
"Mary bakes apple pie"
yada yada yada...
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads
Like a parent calling their child, studying overseas, and then subsequently calling everyone they know stateside to brag and share the news?
Or like a business person making overseas contact for a business deal and then calling all of their partners stateside to share the news?
Such bullshit. People who take the time to conceal themselves will not fall into such "patterns". This nonsense is designed only to convolute the issue in the minds of the folks who are the ACTUAL targets of this spying: us.
And now, thanks to GWB's pres. memorandum authorizing Negroponte to waive SEC laws for complying corporations and to the Supreme Court for their successful strike at the First Amendment, they are going to succeed.
How long does it take for the NSA to crack a well designed PGP key, again? Is there even anything we can do to protect ourselves?
We've all got something to hide.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Is their software smart enough to tell the difference between terrorism planning and a Desi wedding announcement?
The question of legality is irrelevant to effectiveness and can actually be counterproductive
You do realise that this exactly the argument that leads to acceptance of 'terrorist' methods by those who perceive themselves as oppressed?
The government of the USA feels threatened, and uses any means necessary to hold on to what it has. War abroad, followed by surveillance at home..
I doubt it's about terrorists - the simplest use of this data is to identify high volume communicators, namely influence peddlers. A politician with this data has a way easier time identifing who to spend time with, what minds to win. Hit the right people and their network votes for you.
Way easier to identify political leaders (ie. network central individuals) than the much more rare terrorist cells.
Here are two actual link maps... one showing an I/T project team @ Fortune 500 and the other showing members of al Qaeda. Which is which?
http://orgnet.com/2nets.pdf
Britain's intended role for Israel in the grander scheme of things was as a provocation - to destabilize the Arab states and prevent pan-Arabism from interfering with the West extracting/buying oil from the oil states. It seems to still fulfill its intended role.
Do note I'm not accusing the population of Israel of anything here. I'm just saying the land was 'given' to them for a reason most Israelis probably never were/are aware of.
Or perhaps it was just because the British wanted to be nice to the Jews after what the Germans did?
Kitty Genovese
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
available anywhere? (preferably online for the obvious reason)
Tech Public Policy stuff
if anyone thinks that all they are data mining is phone records, they have got to be crazy. i would bet that they have a little file for every person in america, or at least as many as they can get. and in this file, it would kind of read like a credit report except that instead of figuring the probability that you'll actually pay your bills, they figure the probability that you are a terrorist.
I remember being at a town hall meeting after 9-11. This lady stood up and through tears started asking who was going to protect her. Right before that another gentleman stood up and volunteered to give up all his privacy and civil rights in order to be safe. I found the whole display somewhat sickening. Instead of asking what they could do to help, they demonstrated the root of the problem.
The 9-11 hijackings may not be the best example, but in general you're absolutely correct and it needs to be said. And not just here. Neither one of us is talking about vigilantism, it's about not being so dependent on the government...for anything. This goes beyond self defense, but includes that, too. How many times have you heard a police spokesman say, "If you're confronted with an armed robber, just cooperate." Well, 40% of robbery victims are injured whether they resist or not. So is that really good advice? How many times does the victim get injured if they mount a sudden and devastating counter attack? I don't know, no statistics on that. But I'll take my chances that I can put a double tap center mass before some shitbag drug addict trying to get enough cash for a rock can get a shot off with a piece of crap gun because criminals are also conditioned to people just cooperating. But that's just me. That might not be right for someone else.
There aren't any easy answers. All I know is we didn't become the country we are by depending on the government. And we're not going to get where we want to be with a gutless bunch of incompetent frat boy Republicans running the country.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I read all these comments on slashdot and wonder what amazing discussions all the intellectuals (both here and around the world) would have had during the Cold War. I'm sure they could have had it all figured out in the early 60's -- and solved by 1970.
Its so easy and obvious sitting at your computer, typing from the comfort of your chair.
Data mining is speculative work, not investigative, so regardless of whether it *can* be used for speculative 'research' into the activity of American citizens, it *shouldn't* be.
The problem is that fighting terrorism seems to be in a shady region between law enforcement and actual warfare.
It's not warfare, because there is usually no identifiable country to attack. (Well, okay, you can attack a country, more or less at random... but it's probably not a good idea.)
But it's not law enforcement either, since until the terrorist act was been committed, there is no crime or evidence of crime to investigate. And if there is any central authority that coordinates attacks, it's probably not located in the country that's under attack, or even in any particularly sympathetic nations.
Most people in the US say that the government should have stopped the 9/11 hijackers. How could this have been done? Intelligence agencies warned the president that Bin Laden was "determined to strike in US"... but how do you go from that warning to finding twenty terrorists in a country of 300 million people -- and how can you even know that the attackers would be living in the US?
And if you do find a group of a few hundred likely suspects, how can you prevent the attack? The only crimes committed by the 9/11 hijackers before the actual deed were to overstay their visas, and to conspire in planning such an attack.
So, some were in the US illegally... but then, about 5 million people are in the US illegally. Can you deport a few hundred people based on who they associate with?
As for conspiracy to murder, that is a clear enough crime. But how do you catch them on it, without wiretaps and other surveillance? And again, how do you know who to tap, when you have only a vague notion that an attack might happen, and what sort of people could be involved?
Basically, we have two options. Either we radically sacrifice privacy and other freedoms in order to try to stop these attacks effectively. Or else we simply accept the occasional terrorist act as a crime like murder, in which the goal is not to prevent the crime so much as punish the perpetrators.
I choose the latter alternative. I would hope that most other people in the US would agree, but I don't think that's likely at all.
Data minning can only find pre-existing objective facts. Terrorist, patriot and agnostic are all subjective categories that exist solely in the minds of humans.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's the old raze the hole town to find the one rat argument that thugs have been making for thousands of years. No the government really has no way of identifying terrorists without putting us all under a microscope, and restricting our society down to a little ordered police state. But the government seems to have no problem creating terrorists by bombing their countries and radicalizing people by killing innocent people, pregnant women and children. Yeah I realize that was recorded and may be processed later to question my patriotism.
>The point is: is it legal? Enough people have maintained that it is not to warrant a serious investigation into the matter.
Mark Rasch, J.D., has written more than you probably want to know about the legality of mass NSA collection of calling records. Read his column and you'll be better informed than almost everyone.
>Up until now, getting phone records does not require a warrant.
Court order or FISA warrant required, according to the pen register statute. Phone companies exempt, of course, since they're not government and they need to collect the data automatically to send out bills. But Title 18 U.S.C. 2702(a)(3) makes it a crime to disclose calling records to the government.
Amen!
>Probable cause is reasonable speculation.
The phrase has "probable" in it for a reason. You might be looking for the term "reasonable suspicion", as laid down in Terry vs. Ohio. Reasonable suspicion, falling short of probable cause, allows the officer to detain you for a "reasonable" time and frisk you enough to protect his/her safety. Even that has to be based on specific facts and emphatically not on hunches or speculation. Probable cause would allow arrest and targeted search.
None of which applies to sifting through every American's phone records in the hopes of finding something.
>That's why oversight is so important here
AMEN! If nothing else, it's lousy systems engineering not to have a feedback loop to monitor and correct the NSA.
Wikipedia has a detailed article.
>The question is how much liberty we are willing to trade off for security.
People who want to take away liberty are eager to ask this question over and over until people think it's relevant. First, liberty *is* security. Danes are safer than Belarussians because they aren't in danger from their government. Second, none of the measures on the agenda would add to security and most would interfere with it.
>Most people in the US say that the government should have stopped the 9/11 hijackers. How could this have been done?
Search them when they (repeatedly) set off the metal detectors?
Launch an emergency program to strengthen cockpit doors as the warnings about hijackings became ever more urgent?
Allow FBI agents to ask for a search warrant for Moussaoi's laptop? (Blocked by FBI supervisors: see the Colleen Rowley memo).
Put air marshalls on as many flights as possible as long as the threat level was extreme?
>The clerk at the store, the landlord they rent from, the agent at the ticket counter, the hotel clerk
The airline passenger.
Think about this well, understand the implications, let it soak into your consciousness:
The ONLY arm of US power that prevented any casualties on 9/11 was the regular citizenry on flight 93. The Oracle sales rep, not the F-16s. The health-care company executive, not the strategic forces that went on alert that day.
>great extortion material
How about "opposition research"?
Note that this makes just wearing the mask a felony. Many other states have similar laws. And your car isn't private property. Searching the driver and area around the driver has a lower standard than searching the entire car or opening a trunk. If you really want to infuriate, lock your glovebox. See also, 'Terry Stop'.
d
And 'reasonable' is a matter of debatable degree -- as has been mentioned numerous times on slashdot, it's a question of relative value of safety (or perceived safety, in most cases) vs. liberty and the potential for misuse.
I wrote and erased about three different replies to this, because they all began meandering into a much broader subject. The gist of it is: For ANY power the government holds over its citizens, there is literally no way for anyone in this country to prevent them from abusing it if they are bent on doing so.
With that in mind, there needs to come a point where one decides that maybe in a case like this -- in which the abuse potential is rather limited (picture examining aggregate data from web logs and identifying IP address that are sending what appear to be hack attempts) -- they're only doing what they claim, and nothing more.
For your speeding example, the better metaphor would be to monitor Speedpass/EZPass times to then investigate the driving records, bank records, etc of all people who averaged over the speed limit for distance x. Or even more appropriate, to investigate all people who happen to drive at 10 PM, since that is when there are the most egregious speeders on the road
Probably the speeding example wasn't the best, but I don't think yours fits any better -- they're both flawed because of the nature of the threat. Speeding might kill a handful of people, but it's not an effective form of attack against the general welfare of the nation as a whole (save for the fact that enforcing arbitrary traffic laws weakens meaningful laws, but that's a whole different discussion).
I do think that something like flyover patrols of the borders are more similar, or even satellite surveillance -- it's a passive, non-invasive means of looking for a potential threat. I see data mining from the same perspective.
As to one way in which anyone has been affected -- how about citizens of Middle Eastern descent who are afraid to call their family overseas? How about the fact that it's always in the back of my mind that big brother could be listening?
But the topic at hand wasn't eavesdropping (which is also a whole different discussion) -- it was the presumably automated examination of call patterns to determine what needs to be followed up by actual humans.
Exactly. Which is exactly why we shouldn't allow the government to take measures with a high risk of abuse -- we're allowing it just because of the fear of what might be. The fact of the matter is that we're allowing the government a tool that would facilitate trampling of our rights. We CANNOT trust government not to misuse this information -- therefore, they should not be allowed to have it. As all the TJ followers have taken to heart, a "healthy mistrust of government" is a predicate for participatory government like ours. To do otherwise is to be naive, short-sighted, and without understanding of history.
I think I gave my perspective on the abuse potential in my first couple of paragraphs (let me know if not -- I really hate when people just ignore the parts of an argument they can't answer, so I try hard not to do that).
It could just be a combination of naivete and fatalism on my part, but on the off chance we can make a difference if there were an administration who truly was in it only for the power, I would rather see that energy focused on thing that impact people in their daily lives.
This is actually a bit frustrating, because I don't seem to be able to quite explain what I want to say here... I see that it makes me come across as someone saying "Big brother knows best", but that's not at all the point I'm trying to make (nor is it a sentiment I subscribe to).
Ah, well. Out of time, so it'll have to do. Work to do, and all that.
Well, then, wearing the mask is itself evidence of a specific crime... the crime of wearing a mask. That still doesn't validate a search of personal property just because you're wearing a mask.
The basic car interior isn't covered by search and seizure law because it is in plain view from outside the vehicle, the same way that illegal activity witnessed through a house window from public or adjoining property is not illegally obtained even if no warrant was gotten.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
but he said they were not data mining ... more no we are not then to find out they are.
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