Slashdot Mirror
Helping the FBI Track You
Hasan M. Elahi writes in the NY Times about his run-in with the FBI several months after September 11th, 2001. They'd received an erroneous report that he had explosives and had fled the country, so they were surprised when he showed up at an airport and was flagged by watch-list software. Elahi chose not to fight the investigation, and provided the FBI with enough detail about his life to convince them that he was a lawful citizen. But then, he kept going, providing more and more information about his life, documenting his every move and making it available online. His experience has been that providing too much information affords almost the same privacy blanket as too little. Quoting:
"On my Web site, I compiled various databases that show the airports I’ve been in, food I’ve eaten at home, food I’ve eaten on the road, random hotel beds I’ve slept in, various parking lots off Interstate 80 that I parked in, empty train stations I saw, as well as very specific information like photos of the tacos I ate in Mexico City between July 5 and 7, and the toilets I used. ... A lot of work is required to thread together the thousands of available points of information. By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life. Despite the barrage of information about me that is publicly available, I live a surprisingly private and anonymous life."
But if a suspect fellow is giving them access to everything he's supposedly doing I'd be trying real hard to find what he was trying to hide?
The problem is if you're a criminal and you want to pin something on a sucker, if you have a dude with his life posted online then you can set the poor guy up. I wouldn't ever recommend posting every move you make to the internet because at some point someone will use it against you. This world is predatory in nature.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
A lot of work is required to thread together the thousands of available points of information.
No, it is not. Data-mining is real and getting better every day. Huge amounts of data are no hindrance. It is certainly not harder to find a specific piece of information about you just because you put much more online.
This just in! Privacy died a few years ago. All you have now is the illusion of privacy. The real truth is that, unless someone specifically notices you, (regardless of it is for a reason your own fault, or totally coincidence,) no body cares. No one cares what hotel a random person slept in. No one cares what his taco looked like.
If any real information is provided it can be get by a simple search. Policemen won't go through all the data, they will just query things like what did you do at a given time.
Interesting thought, but I don't think it's a good idea. Volunteering everything might work as long as there are very few people doing it -- but if everyone starts doing it, it then (i) the feds will focus on improving software that automatically filters out suspicious traits from the online data, and (ii) not sharing everything will be deemed suspicious.
This is like the 4th time this story has been on slashdot.
does he really think the police don't have enough resources to analyze all that?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who thinks it's better to answer all their questions and take a poligraph rather than saying "I'll speak to you when I have a lawyer present".
...he's doing exactly the same thing as every Facebook user. and twitter user. and foursquare user. etc.
This space available.
I didn't read TFA but when I read summaries like this I get the feeling many people still grossly underestimate the power of data mining and machine learning.
It's not like there is an FBI agent looking through Elahi's data trying to make sense of it, so I'm not convinced flooding them with information is an effective way of hiding relevant (in the sense of that they care about it and/or you might rather keep private) information.
Is that his website does not provide the same context, the same meta-data as social networking. The whole place-time-people check-in on Facebook is surprisingly well-thought-out from a data mining perspective, because it formats the information in a way that is extremely easy to extract on a large scale: it standardizes it.
What this guy is doing demonstrates simply that most PEOPLE don't care what you're up to on a day-to-day basis, and most organizations would prefer to get their information elsewhere.
God says...
Shine snare revelations Way 'that request momentous blush
between dryness discussed garb abundant dissentings petty
subdued chewing lived anxious Midnight unkindled pressed
racked forethink descend Amidst citizen back incumbrances
So he just became a normal user as seen on Facebook, Twitter e.t.c.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
While it is true, that physically following 300 million people requires at least 600 million people, most of the spying today is done automagically using bots.
So giving up your privacy won't work. They will just better computers.
If you generate a constant stream of bad data, the cost of separating good data from bad will rise. This in turn will encourage law enforcement, who get rewarded for convictions in the least amount of time and have other cases they can pursue, to move on to the next case.
Futurist Traditionalism
What I want to know is how he knows that he lives a private life?
And why he thinks it is so hard for anyone to find out anything about him simply because they is more then average out there.
Even if all the data is in untaged pictures there more then a few ways to process it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This guy is pretty ignorant about what is possible with computers. If everyone made every detail of their lives available in a digital format, the FBI would be thrilled and could probably cut jobs instead of needing to hire more employees.
The only way this would be an idea even worth entertaining would be if you treat it like you're writing a book based upon your life. Include the least amount of verifiable information as possible to make it seem accurate and then fill the rest with the most outlandish things you thing some one would believe.
What you are saying is based on outdated assumptions. Today's analytical models can very easily tune out noise data and get to exactly the data you want.
So basically this guy is trying to slashdot the FBI's resources through overloading them with his diary. Huh.
Funny, I thought just like you when I was in that age (which would be 5 years ago). Perhaps I didn't think of the "most of us are sheep" part because I find this to be rather childish... But I thought that I didn't want to join, I didn't want to support Microsoft - which had recently bought something like 2% of FB - and I just didn't think that it'd be very useful to me.
Then, college happened. Constant stream of new social relations (the type that you wouldn't quite call "friend" but whose name you should remember from having seen them around a lot), constant stream of new social events (different types of parties at different locations every other week or so), etc... and I realized that FB is actually rather useful tool for staying up to date about all that.
I understand that people who haven't gotten to that phase in life yet or who are already way beyond it don't have much benefit from FB. However... "Right tool for the right job". Just because it isn't useful to you yet doesn't mean that it isn't useful for a lot of people. And if a lot of people use an useful tool, they aren't sheep just because there is a lot of them.
It is easy to be anonymous when nobody cares who you are. If he were a celebrity with public interest, a very different result would occur.
Um, no. He simply chooses to believe that dumping all that information allows him to lead a relatively private and anonymous life. Just because you want something to be so, doesn't mean that it actually is. But self-delusion is a coping mechanism, and sometimes a surprisingly effective one.
I was confused, I just left a comment in a topic that is so similar to this one, for a moment I thought /. is repeating the same story on the front page again within minutes from each other.
Then I realized it wasn't the same story.
Then I realized it was.
You can't handle the truth.
If the idea is to post a bunch of useless information about yourself, then I suppose it has some effect (bores anyone who is just poking around in your info for no reason). But obviously, anyone who really wants to know stuff about you can either wade through the cruft or else employ datamining tools (as already mentioned) to get what they're after. Now, *maybe* the idea is to create the illusion of transparency while actually carefully omitting some stuff that you really don't want online. In that case, fine... but for most, doing it this way seems harder than just not posting much stuff online in the first place. I guess if the government is already after you, like they were after this guy, then it makes sense.
As someone who knows Mr. Hasan M. Elahi personally, let me say this: he is a HUGE attention whore, and he lives for this shit. Is he a terrorist? Absolutely not. But goddamn if he isn't annoying as fuck.
Also known as Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You think they gave up investigating you because there was "too much information"? Hardly, they just investigate longer if they had found anything suspicious. More likely, they just made an error in the flag and quietly gave up the case. Data mining alot of information is actually really easy. Sure a human may not know all your information but giving so much in recorded form also means it's just that easy to look up anything they want. Thinking you have the same level of privacy as you would if you didn't give out any info is just stupid. Most issues of privacy does not revolve around knowing a person's life but specific points of interest (in which case excess data only increases the chances that they will find that point of interest). Employee wants to know what party you support. Stalker wants to know your daily work schedule. Advertiser wants to know if you ever bought a car. All these can be EASILY found through data mining that looks for specifics.
...that he hasn't been nicked for taking the piss. The police I've met have a low tolerance threshold for sarcasm.
His assumptions about the nature of information sharing and privacy are dangerously wrong.
The problem of information sharing is inequity; if it turns out that he documents his presence at a laundromat on some random dull October day, and later it turns out that some terrorists used to meet up there, his documentation of that random laundromat appearance will put him under scrutiny all over again - without any concrete reason. Meanwhile, some other fellow who rode his bike and paid with cash and didn't document his life on the web will probably never be scrutinized.
There is a fundamental issue with all mass intelligence/data collection: Humans don't understand conditional probabilities.
When we start to use large databases of essentially random data to inform investigations, we greatly increase the likelihood that investigations impact random people.
FTFA:
"I COULD have contested the legality of the investigation and gotten a lawyer. But I thought that would make things messier. It was clear who had the power in this situation."
No, American police, whether FBI or state or local, have no power unless you let them interrogate you without a lawyer. This isn't Europe where police investigations start with a beating: you just have to ask, politely, for a lawyer, and you hold all the cards.
He gave them all the power. Was he justifiably scared? Sure, I can completely understand that. He probably wasn't prepared to be grilled.
But this is all the preparation anyone needs: just remember to say, "I'd be happy to help you, officer, but to answer any questions I'll need a lawyer."
Why would any information on a blog be taken as 100% truth? Since you can edit photo meta-data there is no way to prove when a photo was taken, where it was taken, by whom it was taken, or what camera it was taken with; all of this data can be spoofed. Combine falsified photos with an elaborate story about your whereabouts and make a post on your blog through a vpn from your phone so it looks like you were at home when you posted it. If you're doing this on a regular basis then it wouldn't be hard to create a semi-automatic system to do most of this work for you.
Are we to believe that an investigative authority such as the FBI is going to simply take someones electronic word for it?
Only because three letter agencies do not have optimized there Hadoop instances yet does not mean your data will not get analyzed soon. There is only on reliant way of protecting your privacy and that is to not leave too many trails. Period.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
The most valuable information on Facebook to anyone who wants to screw with you is your social network. Back in the 1950s you could be blacklisted out of your career if you were observed associating with a politically suspect person, but the FBI would have to do a fair amount of work to establish that. Now, it's as easy as a click of the mouse. You might be turned down for a job or promotion because of someone on your friends list, but you'll never know what the real reason was.
And just how much of his day does he waste compiling and posting all of this information? Doesn't he have anything useful to do instead?
.. that the days of technology being an obstacle to invasion of privacy are over.
Like it or not, technical/technological solutions to protecting privacy are already ineffective, both against direct invasion of privacy and indirect approaches involving analytical data mining of large amounts of seemingly trivial data to draw aggregate conclusions. Even if there are still tech-based solutions that are still moderately effective, it's still a white hat/black hat arms race, and no solution will be effective forever, and the rate at which the systems on both sides evolve, the window of advantage will get narrower with each game-changing development.
The only true solution is one that involves promoting, and enforcing, the ethical use of personal information, with the enforcement aspect under the charge of trustworthy entities. (And the unsettling aspect of this is that many of the entities whose responsibility this will ultimately become have, repeatedly, proven themselves both untrustworthy and beholden to partisan agendas..)
Has anyone actually looked over his data to see how easily mined it could be, by average folk or dedicated institutions? We can't begin to fully judge his claims of privacy through difficulty decoding until we've seen his technique.
I've glimpsed at his data, his photos, and it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to build a system to suck it up and index it. I'm kind of surprised Google hasn't made it trivial to search already. E.g., "september 23 site:trackingtransience.net". Or, putatively, "february site:trackingtransience.net xref-image-search:eiffel tower".
So right now it might seem like a lot of effort for a single person to "decode" his data, but I'd expect not all that much. And such a retrieval/indexing system could probably be made extensible, to handle more variety than could easily be built into another, different data blat by a second person.
I think the asymmetry here has the efficiency on the side of decoding, once a general decoding effort is underway. And that's exactly the purview of the "all-seeing eye" government institutions. More vaguely and intuitively, the commenters here are right -- transmitting your information, however obscured, results in you being more visible, not less.
The technique he's using for dealing with the three-letter entity is called "core dump", and it can be quite effective in getting the three-letter entity off your back if - and only if - you are convinced that you aren't doing anything that they'd be interested in.
You get the frame the story in your words, as opposed to what someone else has to say; and when bits and pieces correlate to what they already know (but you don't know what they know) the more credible you become.
It's not a good idea if you have something to hide; nor if you want to keep the illusion of privacy.
Pedantic correction: Bob Guccione was the publisher of Penthouse; Flynt publishes Hustler.
I can see the real terrorists as the ones that want to erode the Constitution from within, not necessarily the FBI but all the so-called people that are recommending documenting their lives. Identity theft everywhere, and assassinations are a result.
The FBI facilitates this to test the Citizenship of the people subject to them, as though they expect true Americans to be the loud-mouthed ones that hate their guts. There is a Blue List, a White List, and a Red List: I don't know which one I'm on.
Does anybody here not remember all the civil cases brought against the govt dismissed because the govt claimed their evidence was 'secret'? Evidence that people ALREADY knew about? By making all of his information public this dude is actually BUILDING a defense for himself if anything was ever to happen. It's EXACTLY like saving your receipts for expenses on a business trip.
Every single person posting here about how this was a bad idea is also forgetting Occam's Razor. The man was ALREADY under suspicion. FBI gonna spend more time on the suspects who DON'T immaculately document every aspect of their life. The FBI was ALREADY combing through the details of his life to 'discover' data which they could INTERPRET to be incriminating. Suspicion is fueled by ignorance - something seems scary when it is only half-visible. This man's strategy was, in part, to illuminate that previously invisible half. Also his public record serves as a defense, despite the silly idea of 'terrorists were at the laundromat too,' the overall PATTERN of his public record would counter such an occurence.
hire him as their new marketing vice president.
and I'll find enough to hang him.
Cardinal Richelieu
If some zealous agent is convinced that you're a terrorist then they're just going to dig harder when you hand them information proving that you're innocent.
...The hell?
Btw, the link is fine, doesn't go to goatse or any of the other shock images. Likewise, the link in the image goes to some Russian website.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
They are simply ignoring the content on the site.
...in Soviet Russia, YOU track FBI !! Oh, wait...
I thought "core dump" was what Unix people do when they spend a bit longer on the toilet, but OK.
I'd call it building a bigger haystack, which, ironically, is a continuation of what the TSA and NSA have been doing all along (the latter by taking feeds from Facebook and Google).
He's right: they won't find anything. Even if he was doing something really bad, he's hit on another reason why the desire for so much data exists: it only ever serves to prove bad intentions AFTER the crime. Sifting through a deluge of crap (hello again, core dump) means precious time gets wasted, as opposed to live intelligence which gives you at least a chance in prevention.
It's more or less the same approach the UK police follow with the blanket CCTV coverage: it will solve plenty of crime cases. But it will do squat to prevent it, which is what their real goal ought to be..
Insert
It is not worth my time to document every minutia of my life for the government. Do your own damn policework - it's supposed to be difficult, to prevent you from fucking it up and getting the wrong person at an airport and making him record his whole life just to prove his innocence - something he shouldn't have to do.
Privacy is the right not to disclose any information of any kind. I get enraged when people say "well if you are innocent, you have nothing to hide". It is my RIGHT to keep my life private, without explaining anything.
The idea of flooding the data collectors with valid but irrelevant information is clever and good, but it may backfire. Any gaps will be painfully obvious and if you have one at the exact time something goes down, it makes you even more of a suspect because - if you document everything EXCEPT at this particular time... well, then you probably were doing something you shouldn't...
The classic information flood is the inclusion of certain words in phonecalls, emails and so on - just mess with Echelon and similar automated bugging and surveillance systems. They will waste a lot of resources analyzing countless of innocent calls and emails, thus seriously hampering the usefulness of the system.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Doublespeak! Less is more, JudeoChristian, "We're here to save you money", and now, public privacy! this isn't news, it's propaganda...
So, he got a Facebook account? Everyone has one these days. :P
...it's easier to hide in the light than in the darkness.
They'd received an erroneous report that he had explosives and had fled the country, so they were surprised when he showed up at an airport and was flagged by watch-list software.
The FBI gets a report that he has explosive and fled the country. In the article he admits the was stopped and questioned when he was attempting to re-enter the US.
This is surprising somehow??? I'd be more concerned about who reported me.
new speak
privacy means sharing everything.