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Helping the FBI Track You

Posted by Soulskill on from the here-is-a-list-of-my-favorite-socks dept.

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."

8 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Is it just me... by errandum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Is it just me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

      It's just you.

      That said Mr.Elahi should not confuse lack of interest with privacy. It is a fallacy to believe that flooding information about yourself into the system makes it impossible to analyze in a timely fashion or to identify the things you don't willingly share. I'm not a huge privacy freak and in general don't care what you know about me as long as basic civil rights are still enforced by law (something that is starting to fail) but I'm also not stupid enough to believe that you can't figure out what I'm doing if you have almost everything. I just don't care that you know what I'm doing under the current system with my current lack of nefarious activity (this lack of interest will undoubtedly hurt me someday in some way though it will likely be minor and related to employment or income rather than incarceration).

      Mr. Elahi seems to confuse the fact that the FBI may no longer care about his daily whereabouts with the fact that they can't sort through the data should every one do what he's doing. Will it be more difficult? yes, but it's not impossible. Google searches the web in near real-time using sophisticated indexing strategies and there is no reason to believe that the FBI couldn't do the same with people and publicly available information to obtain statistically meaningful deviations from normal behavior on your part which could then be referred for human followup. Defeating that type of strategy will take more than sharing almost everthing and hiding the little you you want. It will require a sophisticated disinformation algorithm to produce a statistically nominal profile with original media content while you perform nefarious activities in secret (or just have a beer, smoke, and watch porn in private after they've finished outlawing the last of our vices).

  2. Criminals by mfh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
    1. Re:Criminals by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Especially because the FBI makes extensive use of well-paid criminal snitches to gather intelligence. If the snitches have no real leads, then they can manufacture them by saying that ol' Abu down the street is up to no good. The FBI then stalk and browbeat Abu until he admits that he is up to activity that may be considered support of terrorism in the loosest sense.

      The FBI then busts Abu and all the mainstream media hail the "operation" as thwarting another terrorist attack. Another "terrorist" is jailed, the snitch is paid anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year(I'm not joking, Google it), all while your family is eating ramen noodles for dinner.

      Also keep in mind that all of these "terror plots" are manufactured in their entirety by the FBI. All they do is find a moron who is dumb enough to attempt to enact them, then they goad end entrap the poor fool.

    2. Re:Criminals by kent_eh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Facebook is probably more of an issue that what this guy is doing, because he's aware of how much info he has put out there.
      90% of the people who do the same VIA Facebook don't realise how much aggregated info there is about them out there for sale.

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      "I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
  3. Idiot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. So in other words... by Jafafa+Hots · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...he's doing exactly the same thing as every Facebook user. and twitter user. and foursquare user. etc.

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    This space available.
  5. Wrong. by Dogun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.