Slashdot Mirror
US Intelligence Mining Your Social Network Data
bs0d3 writes "U.S. Intelligence has hired social scientists to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones. They intend to use this info to track sociological laws of human behavior — enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability. Privacy advocates are deeply skeptical of the project, saying it reminds them of Total Information Awareness, a 9/11 Pentagon program that proposed hunting for potential attackers by identifying patterns in vast collections of public and private data: telephone calling records, e-mail, travel data, visa and passport information, and credit card transactions. In a recent budget proposal, the defense agency argues that its analysis can expose terrorist cells and other groups by tracking their meetings, rehearsals and sharing of material and money transfers."
So I purposely write posts knowing that they're doing it and designed to further any agenda *I* might have.
Occupy Wall Street everywhere in America!! :D
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
This didn't go well in Eagle Eye
We're talking about a country that puts people like George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the White House.
I don't think we'll find any US Intelligence.
Big Brother is in your phone stealing your text messages! ...well, I hope it was worth all that money to find out what time and place I'm hooking up this week.
He who mines my social network date mines garbage.
except my slashdot journals, which are pure gold as to the utter stinker I am
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I am shocked, SHOCKED that this is happening! Who would have thought that the same people behind CARNIVORE and ECHELON would make such dastardly use of the vast quantities of publicly available information!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Hasn't this already been happening in Hollywood for like ever? Surprised? Don't be.
Does it really count as "news" if anyone with two brain cells says "well, duh" when they hear about it? It would absolutely shock me (and I wouldn't believe it anyways) if I found out ther weren't doing this. And "privacy concerns"? If it's on the Internet, by definition it isn't private.
Also, no one in the government gives a shit what most /.'ers are doing (at least individually: collectively is a little different), sorry tinfoil hatters.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
The DHS/TSA bar for accomplishing this sets the achievement bar pretty low.
and other groups
Like detractors of the O...bummer administration or proponent of a sane patent and copyright laws who require the dispatch of SWAT teams to their residence.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
occupy wal-mart
...before the next economic disaster begins and society freaks.
Oh, wait.
Some people are aware of this and are genuinely concerned. I'm probably going to get down-modded for this but as a concerned programmer, I made a website called truefriender specifically for this reason. I just have no idea how to tell everyone about it without sounding like a spam-bot. It is worthwhile to check out if you're concerned.
Who would have though. oh wait RMS.
No, really, is there anyone out there who really believes that GOOGLE was not created for this single and only purpose!!!!
Even in the movies, like "Abduction", you could see how the CIA agent was informed of the exact location and place and search result of the key words, once our good guy tried to......what, google it.
the defense agency argues that its analysis can expose terrorist
It also conveniently justifies the spending of billions of tax dollars. Am I the only one who recognizes that the more money passing through the hands of the elite who run the business of government, the better positioned they are to exploit that cash flow for personal gain?
I understand that mining all the vast quantities of data is wrong ethically, but it can't be illegal, or?
"...enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability."
Unless it's predicting this stuff years in advance, what's the point in a glacial political system that mistrusts facts? Social scientists predict the future, and then what?
publicly available information being incorporated into intelligence analysis? Only America could be so bold
I have mentioned this in multiple post, all you are doing when you join Facebook or any other social site it to activate and grow a psych profile available to everyone, that in the end, will only be used against you.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
They're coming to take you away! Personally I'm watching government procurement for large orders of brown coats.
So now I am not allowed to say "bomb" online? Bomb bomb bomb...bomb bomb bomb bomb!!
Remember Smokey the bear, the adorable bear who became the public face of anti-forest-fire programs?
Well, I think we need a new bear, for a new time, to prevent terror by reading lots and lots of facebook accounts: Pedobear, of course!
Will this be the database which fuels the Singularity and/or future robot intuition on human behavior? Google Brain versus Govt Brain. Awesome.
Pretty soon, they'll be monitoring our online blog posts. Now excuse me, there's someone knocking at my door *really* loud.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I guess I'll start using TOR all the time now.
I wonder how fast software like that would get outlawed if a large number of people start using it... Should we try to find out??
giggity
Posting anonymously because I work for, or used to work for, or otherwise know a lot about RIM. (Yeah, let's be intentionally vague. But honestly, there's nothing really secret here so I don't know why I bother.)
My guess is that this outage ultimately stems from the way the browser on all the older devices works. It used to be that mobile data was expensive and slow, so RIM designed the browser to use a special service called MDS to prepackage and compress web surfing data. This was referred to as "BIS Browsing," part of the BlackBerry Internet Services. On the slow networks of yesteryear, BIS Browsing felt sluggish, but it was actually not that bad compared to other devices, and RIM's solution probably made it faster than other devices due to the compression. The only caveat was that all your web traffic had to go through the relay, RIM's central hub for its encrypted traffic. But web traffic was rather small then, and the number of devices RIM had to support was also small.
With the smartphone explosion of the past few years, RIM found itself supporting a lot more devices surfing the web, and I suspect the web traffic added up. With 3G data plans, suddenly competing phones could browse the web much faster than the BlackBerry could, so RIM (eventually) introduced BB OS 6 with a real Webkit browser that did not require, but still could use, the BIS Browsing service. And the browser is much better! But as haters love to point out, they didn't execute as quickly as they should have, I'd imagine they still have a lot of heavy traffic from those older devices that have to touch the relay for everything. Plus, the new BB Messenger is more traffic intensive as well since it's not just text messages anymore. All this data makes crashes hard to recover from. RIM does have redundant services and datacenters, but it looks like some sort of networking snafu, or database snafu, or whatever, has prevented their failover plan from working right.
I bet they really wish they killed BIS Browsing earlier.
People post information with public access on the internet and expect intelligence agencies to not use that information?
Last one to the Time Vault is a rotten robot!
What else are you gonna do with access to those several tens of Petabytes of data?
Aside from that, as commented in an earlier post, how long is the vast array of Darket toolage going to survive if more and more people start using it? I'm referring of course, to things like Tor, Freenet and to get to real basics, file transfer via Skype or to go to the other extreme, Collab software such as CovEn.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
a lot of interesting social behavior will be revealed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are they as ethically challenged as the psychologists used in "enhanced interrogation".
Jeez - what has happened to the 'Light Unto Nations'?
I'm too busy laughing hysterically at the very aspect that anyone thought this was "new" news in any way. What exactly do you think our intelligence agencies have been doing for a very long time now. I find it rather pathetic they had to hire "social scientists" to do this though...you would think they've had enough practice at data mining by now.
OK, now I'm laughing at the concept of a few million being handed to this group of "social scientists" who are busy right now watching YouTube videos on how to extract information from Facebook accounts...Oh, look! I think one of them just found the UK privacy law "loophole"...shortcut!
Yawn...Who profits the most? The contractor doing the work, I think.
at the horizon. We all already knew, didn't we?
I mean, I would think that any terrorist group that can do serious damage to the U.S. would do some research on how NOT to get caught like this.
The stupid, prideful, and arrogant ones might get through due to equal amounts of stupidity, pride, and arrogance on the agency's side (think 9/11) but all they do is piss the other half a billion Americans off. Starting major conflicts -- sometime not declaring war-- and getting the U.S. into massive debts so perhaps it did work in a going-down-in-flames way.
Makes me wonder what a really smart bunch of terrorists could do... not that most planes are unlikely to become targets. (Given that American passengers are NOT likely to co-operate with 'do nothing and you'll all get through this alive' anymore.) Given the financial state of the U.S. I'd think taking out big money makers for U.S. would become targets to make matters worse. Like, say, motion picture studios.
We don't live in that world any more, do we. ~but words can never hurt me, 'unless they are my own..'
>:-D
Hell, as a side note, I do everything as if someone is watching me.. and I am right about that..
obviously this is completely unconstitutional, not authorized to the federal government of USA under the Constitution, violates all sorts of rights, from freedom of speech to illegal searches and presumption of innocence just to throw in there as well.
That's why government needs to be cut.
Ron Paul 2012.
You can't handle the truth.
I wonder what their Prime Radiant looks like.
It reminds me of Asimov's foundation trilogy: Seldon's law of psychohistory .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Seldon. Or minority report scenarios.
Everyone is mining your social network data.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
State of the Web, Summer 2011
obviously this is completely unconstitutional, not authorized to the federal government of USA under the Constitution, violates all sorts of rights, from freedom of speech to illegal searches and presumption of innocence just to throw in there as well.
That's why government needs to be cut.
Ron Paul 2012.
Yes, doing web searches, looking at your Twitter posts, Facebook updates, and blog posts... all that public data! How dare they look at publicly available data and put computers to use sorting it!
In other news, /. readers shocked to find out that the technology, known as a web crawler, has been around since the early 1990's and nobody told them.
I8-D
The things you put on the internet are there for the whole world to see.
There is only one appropriate response to this:
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Of course, these are the actions not of a government that loves its people, it's the actions of one afraid of its people, but determined not to allow anything like an "American Spring" to take place by nipping it in the bud before any momentum can gather.
It could almost be useful if they were smart enough to get to Hari Seldon's equations from the data (evidently that's the stated goal), but they aren't.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I have to admit I find these attempts to predict behavior and find patterns in social data to be kind of interesting. Teaching machines to scan faces and detect various types of intent... neat. Might never work well, but the attempt attracts my curiosity.
Yeah, I'm evil and wiping myself with the Constitution and burning the flag and whatnot. So be it. Doesn't matter. I'm a misanthrope to the point where I'd sell the entire lot of you out to aliens at the first opportunity.
D'aawww! Pinkie Pie can watch me all she wants, especially if she brings cupcakes!
I just hope there is one Hari Seldon among all those social scientists...
And "privacy concerns"? If it's on the Internet, by definition it isn't private.
I get what you're saying. And yet, my public business is not necessarily any of theirs. An example: say I drop by my local jeweler and purchase a dazzling tennis bracelet for my lovely wife. Someone sees me in person or on the security cameras and tells all their friends and some of mine. Yes, this was a public act and blah blah blah expectation of privacy, but if my wife hears and it ruins my surprise, it's going to come to blows.
I don't mind so much if data is being aggregated for the good of the people, but deliberately targeting my online persona is akin to stalking. I really don't care if it allows you to tailor your widget ad campaign or make an applicant first cut.
I remember a famous series about a world system that was based on the "predictions" of a master scientist, and how it all fell apart when the unaccountable was entered into the equation. For those with the grandiose idea that they can "prevent" changes that they don't approve of by this current effort, reminds me of the story of an ant standing on a railroad, holding up his hand to stop the train.
The Pentagon has budgeted $42M for the expressed purposes of monitoring and influencing social media for the following:
"1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and
(b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social mediasites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations."
I posted this back in August.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
While this data collection is intrusive, perhaps we can use it to someday calculate our future history through mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29
Also sounds like a great thing for an incumbent president seeking a second term to exploit. wont' be long till we're financing political campaign strategies. you know, because of the terrorists.
They're looking for intelligence on Facebook? That should keep them searching for a while :-)
Content "creation" and being able to validate whatever information is said to have been collected by "authorities" when you face any kind of inquiry is critically important. Can you prove it was me, can you prove it wasn't cracked credentials, can you prove this data wasn't fabricate, etc. There are all kinds of concerns here. No, the controls on all of this data is quite loose at best.
One man's terrorist cell is another man's smoke-filled room. Screw the 4th. Try to get a bank to verify a check over the phone any more, though.
rgb
Who is the "Us" and who is the "Them"?
We get handed a box with two choices. Liberals or conservatives. Most of us choose a side and fight vehemently. We get all worked up. We call the other side evil and stupid.
But maybe we should question the box we're handed? Think beyond it?
"Fear the government that fears it's citizens."
Intelligence put YOU in mine.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Stop crimes before they happen.
They'll learn as much about my ideas by reading my blog of googling my name as they will digging through my social media posts. That's a lot easier and would cost a lot less.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Every intelligence gather/mine these data. From the beginning. As you know that, you can contribute to the required quality/quantity of that data! You can participate! ...
& this socio/psycho bullshit comes from Statistics. You are either "with" or possibly "not".
Create your data! Create your profile! Give them "eons" of data...
Smiling
Seriously, when you speak and do things in public, people are going to analyze you.
A friend of mine wrote an IRC bot to monitor channels and then derive information from it.
Later, I rewrote it with lessons learned included from the previous version.
By the time it was done, pretty much no one was capable of fooling the bot regardless of how you tried, it could identify any user any the channel based on about 20 to 30 sentences minimum of conversation with them, regardless of how they tried to fake their identity, (nick/host/server changes meant essentially nothing to the bot, and it was trained fairly well on detecting based on conversation after we got around 10 million lines of conversation or so recorded.
It was SIMPLE by any standard, and it was fun as shit to see new ways to pick out patterns in conversations, made it easy to find sleeper agents as well (bots or relays to others used for nefarious purposes). Sometimes lurking gives more information than talking ;)
Anyway, this isn't new, its just on a larger scale due to being able to computerize the process. People, ALL PEOPLE, do this very thing naturally all the time subconsciously, like it or not. We've evolved to constantly analyze events in our lives, especially people. Slashdot's Friend/Foe system? Same thing, except you give it direct feedback.
If you don't like people knowing something, don't tell them about, which you know, is kind of THE FUCKING POINT BEHIND SOCIAL NETWORKING. The whole damn concept behind these sites, and THEY TELL YOU WHEN YOU SIGN UP is to associate yourself and your actions with others like you and your associates. How do you think Facebook, MySpace and Google+ come up with 'new friends' ... ITS THE SAME DAMN THING.
The POINT of social networking is so that YOU and OTHERS can do this sort of thing SPECIFICALLY.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I'm just thinking of the response when the N.Y.Times requests a Freedom of Information Act on the public comings and goings of Michelle Bachmann. I can almost see the N.Y.Times reporters eyes crossing when they try to make sense of it; it could almost be construed as "Cruel and Unusual."
Let's see the gov try and figure that one out.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
My guess is that they have a hope of finding where are the chemical, biological and nuculear weapons hiden in Iraq. For as long as they do not conclude those weapons are in my cupboard.....
let me get this straight - now the government is actually paying people whose job description is to sit around on Facebook all day? And we're still trying to cut programs that benefit society...
Subject line says it all.
"We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms of civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become" and "The needs of society must come before the needs of the individual" -- Benito Mussolini
When you see people in the street being able to organize, chant slogans, use wireless communications devices, stay calm, listen, and maybe do a little bit. When you see a disheveled mob in the street screaming for food you supposedly should have acted at least 10 days ago.
You would think they know this without expensive studies.
Je me souviens.
Its fist conditional
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
U.S. Intelligence has hired social scientists to mine the vast resources of the Internet
Just a point, stop calling them "social scientists", they are not scientists, and it degrades the value of hard science of myself and others here that went to university for.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Al Queda did none of those things. So why? To track unruly citizens, of course. Not the flow of cash to the Caymans, either - no one is interested in that.
How hard would it be to build out a social network platform that was all about protecting your right to (selective) privacy? I'd pay $20 a month for that.
You might consider InQtel http://www.iqt.org/ and Visible Technologies http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm/, both which fit this article's description, and have had tons of CIA seed money put into them. We know the pentagon has a sock-puppet program, and whatever law prevent them from operating in the US can be bypassed through private contractors hence (perhaps) Fusion Centers. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fusion_center Both the FBI and DHS are quite busy here too. I frequently observe FBI, .mil, dhs.gov, DoD, and other government IPs visiting my website and subscribing to comments. Do a whois on my latest visitor: 153.31.113.26 ~~ And yeah, go right ahead and mod this as "troll" too. Bloody snobs!
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made. - Otto von Bismarck
I know we are all saying "Duh!" here, but take a moment to ask "Why are they doing this?"
Sure they think they may be able to see trends and predict civil unrest, but what then? Why do they need that capability? To what use will this be put?
Is it wrong for civilians to be restless? What if the majority want to revolt against the government - wouldn't it be wrong to try to stop them? What is the ultimate purpose of these govenment agencies, to support the current government whatever they do? To keep the country stable? To maximise the happiness of the citizens?
And if the reason for this work is to increase the happiness of the citizens and reduce the chance of unrest, why doesn't the govenment just listen to the people in the first place?
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
I don't have any issue with this, provided there is a signed court order. Without that, they are over stepping their constitutional mandate, IMHO.
It is bad enough that facebook, twitter, google, opendns, and other non-federated services are so popular.
Imagine what they'd do if all our email were centralized. Scary. I just got a chill.
On one hand, I'd like to say: Well that's fine - I mean, who wouldn't think it's fair for the US federal government to engage in behaviors effectively equating to broad-based online stalking.
On the other hand, I'd like to respond: Well, but you know what, how is so far different than what any large-scale web-monitoring houses would do, in the pretense of developing "metrics" for purpose of selling that data to various sales-oriented firms?
----
Peace sells, but who's buying?
- Megadeth
Don Rumsfeld explicitly stated that he was giving up the name but not the program: Total Information Awareness was renamed Terrorism Information Awareness. When Congress defunded it, the project was moved to NSA and it is now a "black budget" project in the same category as secret spy planes and the like. Members of the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence may be allowed to know (whether it) still exists today, under threat of Federal prosecution if they reveal the information to any 3rd parties.
While the scientific nature of some methodologies may be debatable, and one would no doubt be able to glean any number of examples of "scientifically unprofessional" conduct (such as, mistaking agenda for hard data) by social scientists practicing in their stated field of expertise, but the scientific validity of social science studies overall is - at worst - debatable.
On a more personal level: I, for one, would honestly welcome if you would like to contribute to the debate as such.Personally, I plan on studying at the university, with a minor in cultural anthropology, some few months from now. Perhaps a simple debate as to the scientific validity of the field could be frankly edifying.
Cheers.
It's about time we started subjecting the complexities of society to science and computing on a massive scale. For the younger geeks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
If they didn't know how important /. is they're about to.
Facebook is "Tesco economical" ECHELON. The jews are too smart to waste 137 quintillion dollars on creating an exact equivalent of the NSA for their own use. On Facebook the faceless masses divulge all their secrets for free and even turn a profit for the zucker sanhedrin.
The next step in total scrutiny will be isolated identification, which means that cameras placed saturating all public areas will identify and isolate individuals who are not tracked and flag them as suspicious. If you are not carrying RFID ID card, cellphone or other remotely identifying hardware you will be flagged for observation.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
that some Americans believe in private property, protection of contracts, freedom, and a government that works for the betterment of the American people.
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
I'm guessing you were just average in your class standing -- arrogance is a trait found more often in those who didn't quite make the cut. The truly gifted don't need to say a word.
I'd say you are APK in disguise posting as "BitzTream".