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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."
at least we know the constitution will prevent the installation of this machine in the US. *shrugs*
Must not make Godwin argument -Siemens, Germany and NA NOOOO! I will not! Owwwwww I wiilll nottt owwwwww
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".
:-)
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).
... that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown-shirt just came in his pants on hearing this development.
It's like fascism-in-a-can.
Now if they can only develop a way of this system generating a data cd, and automatically losing that on a train seat, it will meet all UK requirements.
Julia Child Surveil-a-matic. Many tools in one convenient package. Comes with self-defense kitchen knives, navigational scarves, dog doo radio transmitters...First three thousand customers will also receive a month's supply of shark repellent. No more worries about those nasty lasers.
What?
they
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!!
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
but they're rarely on the ballot.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
We'll win. Because irregular behaviour, if it goes on long enough, becomes classified as regular behaviour... and is then undetected.
So good luck with putting one of these new machines into your super secret intelligence facility.
how many geeks does it take to muster a first-world class military?
That's a divide by zero problem, so it's a trick question.
...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.
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"?
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
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.