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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."
Every time I hear about software that boasts of correlating mass security data and gaining knowledge from those data, I see the big smile on the General Sales Manager's face. Yes, it's "good for the software industry" but imo, it's the classic "bill of goods".
You do realize that, for email traffic, this is exactly what the 'Carnivore' program was in the USA?
Considering the number of scandals in which Siemens has been involved in the last few years, I guess
it would be a good idea to use this to spy on it's own employees
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/75295b46-dcc9-11db-a21d-000b5df10621.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/13/business/siemens.php
http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=97185
We'll win. Because irregular behaviour, if it goes on long enough, becomes classified as regular behaviour... and is then undetected.
Need I remind this government that there has never been a completely crime-free country in the history of the world?
Well, the ones who didn't have any laws didn't have any crime.
Crime is defined not as something good or bad, but defined by the state.
This could be as innocuous as speeding to something very authoritarian where being a particular race or belonging to a particular political party is a crime.
The key is that if you want less crime, you shouldn't forget about moving the goal posts to where certain things aren't a crime anymore. Like the alcohol prohibition.
It never hurts to have laws against douchebagery, but overall when you just have laws to have laws then you make everyone a criminal eventually and that isn't a good way to have a society.
The key problem is that no one else seems to realize this and your best option as an individual is move to more rational countries or just stay low on the radar and don't read the news.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
So good luck with putting one of these new machines into your super secret intelligence facility.
Well - "Shame on anyone.." Maybe but I once developed a statistical system to monitor the terminal users - actually to optimize inputs and outputs, running out of bandwidth! After a while the management realized that it could be used to grade the users (spying has always been easy if you control the system!) No way - took a lot of explanations and fighting to prevent that - you just can't statistically grade users by speed, errors, mistakes, retries, etc - too many other variables which are not known! I got almost fired going against it but later on a lot of thanks for preventing them to make that mistake. And of course we would have had full union fight in our hands or a lot of people would have just left if it would have been implemented. Not a bad idea in itself if it could be done but very shortsighted.
...is that it can only scan that which it has access to. Its up to us th keep private records like "telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records" out of the government's hands until they present the proper warrants.
The risk to privacy will be that, once governments are in possession of such statistical tools, they will make a (valid) claim that they are all but useless without a baseline of 'normal' behavior for comparison.
You know what this means, Slashdotters? Its time for us to get abnormal and screw up their baseline.
Have gnu, will travel.
irregular behaviour, if it goes on long enough, becomes classified as regular behaviour... and is then undetected.
That assumes the system is set to continue learning when in the field. It is common practice in this area to train a system in the lab until it behaves in a desired way, and then remove the portion of the neural net or other NLP that learns, leaving just the classification part.