Slashdot Mirror
FBI Data Mining For More Than Just Terrorists
jcatcw writes "Computerworld reports that the FBI is using data mining programs to track more than just terrorists. The program's original focus was to identify potential terrorists, but additional patterns have been developed for identity theft rings, fraudulent housing transactions, Internet pharmacy fraud, automobile insurance fraud, and health-care-related fraud. From the article: 'In a statement, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the report [on the data mining] was four months late and raised more questions than it answered. The report "demonstrates just how dramatically the Bush administration has expanded the use of [data mining] technology, often in secret, to collect and sift through Americans' most sensitive personal information," he said. At the same time, the report provides an "important and all-too-rare ray of sunshine on the department's data mining activities," Leahy said. It would give Congress a way to conduct "meaningful oversight" he said.'"
Nothing to see here. This story was on the front page less than 24 hours ago3 24211
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/11/2
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
Ha. Tomorrow the FBI will tell us that they're using that data to find pedophiles online, so it'll all be OK.
I mean, if they don't think of the children, who will?
Computerworld reports that the FBI is using data mining programs to track more than just terrorists.
Is this really a shock to anyone?
This was just on SlashDot yesterday: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/11/23 24211
Do you even bother to look at the site, you know, just to check that the story hasn't been posted already?
I mean, c'mon... it's not like you're doing any real work.
I for one welcome our Democratic identity theft rings-supporting, fraudulent housing transactions-endorcing, Internet pharmacy fraud-protecting, automobile insurance fraud-defending, and health-care-related fraud-enabling Overloards? On behalf of all the criminals concerned with their privacy, a Big Thank You to Patrick Leahy!
In all seriousness, is the Senator aware that none of that info collected could be used to convict anyone, or that you cannot even use it to get a warrant, and all it does is tell the officers where to focus their limited resources for legal evidence collection? First Stevens with his internet tubes, now Leahy with his Criminal Privacy protections.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Government conducting "meaningful oversight" over government? Oh boy, I feel safe now.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
"Surprise, surprise surprise!"
I mean seriously, did anyone think otherwise? Let's see... You've got at your disposal a giant database of every person in the country, their financial activities, their social security numbers, their purchases, their personal tastes, their locations, their income, their interests, their criminal records, their political leanings, their emails, IMs, personal communications, and most importantly their RELATIONSHIPS-- who they call, who their family is, where they travel, etc.
Amazon and lastfm use this kind of thing to figure what kind of music you're likely to like and/or what items you're gonna be most interested in. Do you really think with all this tasty information the government isn't going to use it for ALL KINDS of purposes?
They'll be able to do searches using probability and relationships to identify all kinds of commonalities between "undesirables"... who knows what it might be that puts you on the wrong list... maybe you share the same taste in "music PLUS shoes size PLUS income PLUS you leave too close to a mosque" and BAM, you light up as a 97% potential political dissident. Oh, and look, you're having an affair too. How convenient.
This shit is scary. I'm not surprised they're using this information for domestic crimes (which of course they're not allowed to do, not that it could possibly be admissible. How could a court accept evidence from a nationally secretive/illegal spying program? That is, unless they're getting tips from anonymous gov't sources that never show up in a courtroom...).
I AM worried about what else they're using it for (breaking up political adversaries, busting government bids, economic manipulations, blackmail, etc.) that we won't find out about for 50 years, if at all.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
We should also outlaw axes. Because if you ever turned into a homicidal axe murderer, how long do you think it would be before you kill someone?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Who wants to bet that political dissident groups are being monitored through this program? I mean, it kind of goes without saying, since their primary domestic target is environmental activists. The FBI and the US government in general has a long history of using ostensibly crime-focused programs to infiltrate and neutralize political enemies (see the American Indian Movement [and Leonard Peltier], Martin Luther King Jr., United Slaves, the Black Panthers [and Mark Clark, Fred Hampton, Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, Alex Rackley, H Rap Brown, Geronimo Pratt], the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Liberation Army, groups struggling for Puerto Rican independence, Students for a Democratic Society, Earth First! [and Judi Bari], various militia groups, even church peace groups and smaller political parties like the various socialists. Not to mention nonaligned activists like individual environmentalists who've been set up or entrapped in recent years.
For those who don't know, COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) was an FBI initiative targeting American citizens engaged in "objectionable" political activity. Instead of arresting and prosecuting criminals, this secret and illegal program sought to neutralize targets by:
- creating a culture of fear and paranoia (psychological warfare) through whispering campaigns, surveillance, illegal search, seizure and entry;
- infiltration, provocation and entrapment;
- legal harassment (such as repeatedly arresting leaders of targeted organizations for minor infractions, keeping them behind bars while they awaited a hearing or scrambled to make bail; also including falsified show trials such as the "tennis court murders", where Pratt was convicted of murders that were committed while he was, according the FBI's own surveillance records, 400 miles away);
- violence and murder (notably the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark).
While the COINTELPRO moniker has been disbanded, its methods extend into FBI practices to this day.
I hope that your FBI has better success with Data Mining than junk mailers. How may credit card offers have you had this week? Responded to any?
These companies are big-time users of Data Mining and your name was no doubt picked as a 'likely to respond'.
I work for a bank that is a heavy user of 'Data Mining'. Often the best we can do is 2 or 3 percent better than 'no mail' (lift over control for those of you in the industry).
If you can build a model that results in five percent response above 'no mail' you are looking at a 'Great Success' to quote Borat.
I think the best approach to finding potential terrorists is ground-level intelligence myself. Just my two cents . .
"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" - John Lydon, San Francisco 1978
But really, javaman235, your world isn't really more dangerous unless you've taken up smoking tobacco or driving while intoxicated. America was secure before 9/11 and it continues to be secure after 9/11. The chances of you getting killed by a terrorist are pretty much non-existent and have not changed measurably in the last 7 years unless you're a soldier in Iraq. However, the chances of you losing your home to foreclosure or being forced into bankruptcy by a serious illness have jumped quite a bit. That's what's known as "keeping you safe".
The fact that the Secretary of Homeland Security's "gut" is telling him that we're going to get hit by a terrorist attack larger than 9/11 does concern me. I have to wonder about people whose hold on power is predicated on there being a continuing threat of terrorism. People do like to keep power, after all.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, only homophobes, and/or people with a militant 'gay' agenda, should be prohibited from owning an axe. All others will merely be required to 'register' all their axes.
And if you're a female stupid enough to wear a skirt, guys should be able to look right up it, yes? Because it is easy? Even if the female in question has something tucked up there she'd rather guys not see? Wait, you think she has some kind of right to privacy? Why? What if she's got some shoplifted stuff in there? Doesn't that give us the right to look up everybody's skirt?
Invasion of privacy is the crossing of socially defined boundaries, not just hardened boundaries like those that incorporate walls, encryption, or locks. Those hardening implementations are just the same boundary, with less trust. In other words, if I don't encrypt my hard drive, I'm not inviting you onto it. The boundary is still there. If I do encrypt the hard drive, I'm still not inviting you onto it, but I've taken the step that if you are such an ass-choad that you go there anyway, I've made it more difficult. This is because some people have made it somewhat prudent to drop the trust thing that goes along with social boundaries.
In some small towns, people don't find it necessary to lock doors - cars, houses - because they know that their neighbors won't cross the social boundary. In LA, on the other hand, they know the neighbors will cross it, and so trust is sundered, and locks go in and are used. This is not a good thing and robbery of an unlocked home is not a consequence of stupidity on the part of the homeowner, it is a consequence of social retardation on the part of the thief.
When you say it is OK for the feds to jump onto people's information that they in no way intended to share with anyone, you are explicitly sanctioning the lack of a social boundary that protects those things you do not intend to share. You might as well lie down in the gutter right now and commence staring up the ladies skirts. After all, if they didn't want you to look, they'd have worn pants, right?
Privacy, liberty, honor, grace - look into all these things. They actually have good, solid reasons to exist, and it is a terrible thing when the government - or anyone else - erodes them. When it is done as a matter of course, it is not only terrible, it is despicable.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But which title in the referenced postings makes it more clear as to what is going on?
1) "Data on Americans mined for terror risk" - Yahoo (AT&T, SBC...etc)
or
2) "FBI data mining programs target more than just terrorists, DOJ says" - ComputerWorld
Which headline attracts your attention and makes you want to read it?
Would suppliers of government information (AT&T running to give our phone records to government), have any interest in "burying" minor details from the phone information they regularly "give" (Sell -- may not be money, but they get payback, believe it) to the FBI? Would such an information provider have a vested interest in having Americans not probe too deeply at the lies that were told about the information "only being used to fight the War on Terror"? Did anyone really believed it would stop at that? Welcome to the evolving police state. Will we fall as low as the citizens in the USSR before the wall came down. We going to be like East Germany where 1 in 7 were "spies" for their secret police (isn't that sorta how the FBI is operating)? How low will Americans sink before they stand up and retake the government?
Any "ill-gotten" information gotten by the FBI (or any government agency) should invalidate any evidence obtained as a result of that information. Victims and their property should be held harmless from from government retaliation, enforcement or confiscation.
Anything short of these protections will entice the FBI to hold onto the info to use in future investigations when they need some more easy arrests or property to confiscate.
New police overlord-wanna-be's motto: "To Punish and Enslave" (via arbitrary and increasingly severe law prosecution with long sentences where the prisoners must perform work for private companies or the government). Oh, prisoners don't have rights? Isn't that convenient.
Congratulations. You have entirely missed the point. Of course it makes sense to harden, especially in the face of a known threat, and the more substantial the threat, the harder you want to go. But the point is that the OP's "not having a problem" with the government's crossing an unhardened boundary is shortsighted in the extreme; fine, lock your door, encrypt your drive and so forth, but in the meantime, there is no need to be saying "if your door is unlocked, it's OK for robbers to come in." Just because I send an email in the clear, I'm in no way saying that it is OK for people to read the content therein; just because my hard drive isn't encrypted, I'm not saying you can come in and examine the content of the drive. It isn't OK at all.
Frankly, the government has no legitimate tasking to be looking at any communication or data of a US citizen unless they have probable cause a crime has been committed by the specific person or person(s) they are looking at. The 4th amendment is very, very clear on this, and the government is flat out wrong to invade citizen's communications. They're supposed to be working for us. We're not their subjects; we're not their slaves; we're not suspects unless something very specific happens. Does the following seem familiar?
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.
There's no clause there that says "unless George Bush thinks its a good idea" or "unless J Edgar Hoover found you were of a political persuasion he didn't like" or "as long as you encipher you writings" or "except if if you don't lock your door" or "if we can scare the public sufficiently about A-rabs" and so on and so forth. No searching without probable cause and a warrant. That's clear as a bell. And what are they doing? What is data, email, hard drive mining, after all? It's searching your info that you did not give permission to search, that's what it is — and furthermore, it has been understood for literally hundreds of years in this very country that your personal papers and communications are private unless you say otherwise.
The government is out of hand here. They are criminal; they are breaking the law, literally the highest law in the land. These are high crimes indeed. These boundaries are well established and any serious attempt to argue them away — I'm not talking about debate here, but intent or action(s) to destroy the boundaries themselves — just establishes the person or persons making the argument as a sophist and an enemy of liberty. A toxic citizen, or worse. There is only one legitimate way to approach this, and that is by changing the constitution; and they've not done that, so they have absolutely nowhere legitimate to stand.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you're interested in reading about some of their current practices, read Craig Rosebraugh's "Burning Rage of a Dying Planet". Rosebraugh was the de facto "spokesman" for the ELF (back before 9/11, when they still existed), but committed no actual crimes. He discusses at length the tactics the FBI/ATF/NSA used to try to get him to snitch... it's a decent read.