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Siemens Develops Multi-Purpose Surveillance System

Posted by Soulskill on from the guilty-until-proven-boring dept.

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."

6 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. invasion of privacy? by __aamnbm3774 · · Score: 5, Funny

    at least we know the constitution will prevent the installation of this machine in the US. *shrugs*

    1. Re:invasion of privacy? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You do realize that, for email traffic, this is exactly what the 'Carnivore' program was in the USA?

  2. Hammering my fingersss nowww by BitterOldGUy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Must not make Godwin argument -Siemens, Germany and NA NOOOO! I will not! Owwwwww I wiilll nottt owwwwww

  3. Open Source version? by MarkWatson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    :-)

    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).

  4. I think.. by owlnation · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... 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.

  5. Employees by Frankie70 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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