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Siemens Develops Multi-Purpose Surveillance System
ekesis tips a story up at NewScientist about the development of a new surveillance system by German engineering conglomerate Siemens. The system is notable for its integration of many different types of automated data-gathering. It can scan "telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records." It uses advanced pattern-recognition software to pick out unusual activities and important pieces of data. So far, the system has been sold to 60 countries.
"According to a document obtained by New Scientist, the system integrates tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines... This software is trained on a large number of sample documents to pick out items such as names, phone numbers and places from generic text. This means it can spot names or numbers that crop up alongside anyone already of interest to the authorities, and then catalogue any documents that contain such associates."
Countries don't matter right now. People still remember that the telephone existed before Total Information Awareness, so the party has yet to claim responsiblity for that. As #2 famously said, "there are no nations anymore, just corporations." Total information awareness eliminates the "stove pipes" and ties it all together. It is not surprising that a company claims to have produced TIA in a single box. The purpose is to track and suppress political dissent, so any old duopoly produced hack should work well enough. If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot treading on a human face forever. If you want to change the future, vote for someone who's not part of the giant corporate fuck fest.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
:-)
Seriously, funding for work in statistical NLP has often come from governments and intel agencies (an example is, I think, is Clear Forest before it was purchased).
Entity extraction and correlation between documents is difficult to do well so it is not surprising that funding comes from governments and large corporations (yeah, not much difference between the two anymore).
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Yupe who cares if it is effective. It makes us believe that we are effective...
What gets me about this terrorism thing is that the only real combative way to deal with it is to change the public perception.
Look at Northern Ireland, intelligence, cops, and armies to the hilt! Did it stop anything? Nope! What stopped Northern Ireland and the violence? Peace agreements, discussions compromises!
Oh, but I suppose corporations can't sell "peace agreements..."
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Every single government on Earth is convinced that, in one way or another, it can stop crime.
Need I remind this government that there has never been a completely crime-free country in the history of the world?
That's not to say you can't reduce the level of crime, but only at the expense of individual freedoms. This also depends on what you consider a crime -- locking people up for murder might work, but throwing someone in jail because they stared at a CC camera for too long...not so much.
I understand where the government is coming from here. This would be an invaluable tool in busting those who are suspected drug lords, crime lords, time lords, whatever. But the key here, and consistently, is "suspected".
Siemens sure isn't going to take a moral high ground here -- they're a business, and businesses should not be expected to have to make moral choices. They aren't people, despite how they're treated tax-wise in the US. They should be able to do what they can within the limits of the law, but be kept in check by the law. This isn't cynicism, this is realism. Simply assuming a company is going to do good is far more dangerous than making sure it does good.
Therefore, it's up to individual governments and those representing the people to take the high ground here. This sort of technology is going to rapidly advance to the point where every person on the planet can be observed from a couple of jerk's computers in an enclosed office, and the free ride of being completely "lost" is slowly vanishing. It comes down, then, to the power of the state and the beliefs of those representatives of the people to curtail and selectively use this technology for the embetterment of all people.
What that ultimately means is still completely up for grabs.
To quote Gypsy in response to "johnny long torso":
"You are evil! EEEVILLL! AAAAAHHH!".
Seriously, there's nothing "multi-purpose" about it.
It is a system designed solely for blanket stasi/gstapo style surveillance of wide swaths of people. Try to change your routine for any purpose (99.99% are legitimate), and you'll end up with the secret police beating you around.
Shame on anyone for producing this software, because there is no mistaking its intent.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
In the early nineties thru the mid nought-ies I worked for Siemens at their North America electronics manufacturing facility. Through a stunning piece of managerial naïvety, we inherited a particularly inappropriate defect data collection hardware/software package already in use in Germany at at least one plant (over the course of several absolutely brutal years we ended up rewriting first the back-end, then the middle-tier and, just before the plant was sold to some modern-day Saxons for prompt pillaging and burning, the front-end...but I digress.) This software had originally been written with the express inability to trace a defect (or a more disturbing pattern of defects) back to a particular individual but could only indicate the line or workgroup that included the individual responsible (we were always told that "German law precluded tracing mistakes to a particular individual", that they preferred to "train/retrain as a group when they saw the need arise, and allow peer-pressure to solve the problem of getting 'the message' to the errant individual." Most ironic that, given such a "legal environment", a German company would come up with a system with such abilities. (of course, we are talking about Siemens here; anyone who has any experience with the company knows that the most honest part of their brochures/ads is that it's for a Siemens product -- and then sometimes even that must be taken with a grain of salt.)
btw, has anyone else noticed that "SIEMENS" is an anagram for "NEMESIS"?
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