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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.
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.
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.
The key to success here is to provide as much real as false data to make ALL data irrelevant. Data is worthless if you cannot tell wheat from chaff.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So he just became a normal user as seen on Facebook, Twitter e.t.c.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
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
Except he's not supplying any false data, just useless, easily filtered out, data.
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.
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.
And this makes it harder to find him out than not supplying any info at all... how?
If the info is false, you might find conflicting facts in it. Data that might be true is certainly better than no data at all, when trying to figure something out.
Also known as Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What happened a few years ago that changed anything? This privacy discussion reminds me of the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft concepts in sociology.
They just don't have enough data. Eventually, they'll cross-reference the fake data with other people's streams and identify the fake.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
We finally started linking all the databases together, and we started carrying tracking devices that make phone calls.
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.
I don't think that several decades ago that anyone could have imagined how overwhelmingly seductive "1984" would be.
"His name was James Damore."
.. 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..)
That's where you have to coordinate your efforts to create fakes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
1984 got one crucial element wrong. It assumed that the mass-surveilance and oppression would be at the hands of a government, rather than commercial interests.
Pedantic correction: Bob Guccione was the publisher of Penthouse; Flynt publishes Hustler.
So, 1984 was one power take-off later than now.
That doesn't make it wrong, just not realized yet.
Rethinking email
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.
....at the hands of a government, rather than commercial interests.
Can we really say that there's a difference these days? The cynical view is that all politicians are bought by big business and pay lip service to the values that will get them elected to further big business's goals.
...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
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) --
So, he got a Facebook account? Everyone has one these days. :P
The scary thing here is that he felt compelled to use this unorthodox strategy to long-term prove his innocence. What happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" How comes everyone is now considered suspect, until he gets a clean bill of innocence by some partially obscure 3 letter agencies? I wouldn't spend as much time discussing "public privacy" than the more urgent fact that we're diving even deeper in this Nineteeneightyfour-ish nightmare we're already in.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
...it's easier to hide in the light than in the darkness.