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."

Comments

Is it just me...

[errandum]

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?

Re:Is it just me...

[walkerp1]

You, sir, might have a very promising career in the FBI! Please report to your nearest field office for the deep probe.

Re:Is it just me...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Criminals

[mfh]

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.

Re:Criminals

[Ethanol-fueled]

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.

Re:Criminals

[kent_eh]

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.

Idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Idiot.

[unrtst]

I wanted to mod this up, cause I agree, but there's one point I haven't seen mentioned here or in most of the posts below (that I've read so far)...

If you do provide false information, and they (FBI) ask if it this little log of yours is true and you say "yes", then you can be held for lying to a federal officer (and/or obstruction of justice, etc). All they have to do is find one little line that isn't accurate... and that would probably be trivial. Then, even if your alibi is honest and someone is setting you up, you've just discounted your entire source of "facts" as inadmissible. They don't even need to find a lie to hint at the consequences - "You know... lying to a federal officer is a crime."

True story, I was questioned in relation to an FBI investigation many years ago (I worked at an ISP that had been "hacked" and claimed enormous damages and got the FBI involved). The night of the incident, I was drunk (along with most of my coworkers to boot). I was cooperating, but they found one of the things I said to be in conflict with something someone else said. They called us both in and had the company legal people there too, and he laid out the statements and then said that lying to a federal officer can get you N years in jail, etc etc.

I had told the truth, but with threats like that, I didn't want to talk to them at all anymore. We both fell back on "hey, I already told you I was very very drunk, and this is how I remember it." Nothing happened to us (except that we were soon fired without cause by an overly paranoid always-have-4-sources-of-white-noise-in-his-office owner), but a few people I knew had all their computers confiscated (included blank media, tv's, monitors, keyboards, etc), and they were completely innocent.

They even brought up the drunk thing, I assume trying to make me slip up... I had told them I drove back to the office as soon as I heard about the incident (as did everyone else). He's like, "So if you were supposedly very drunk, how did you drive back to the office?". I just shrugged and told "yep, both those things happened". He was nice enough not to use that as an admission of guilt and hand it over to the local policy to charge me with drunk driving, but he allowed the threat of that to hang in the air, so to speak.

Anyway, point being, whatever info you provide will likely be used against you, even if it's just as a threat to try to get more out of you. And you don't have to be guilty of what they're looking for to end up with some significant negative consequences.

FWIW, I wouldn't change a single thing I did. Getting fired from there was one of the best things that ever could have happened to me in the long run.

Re:dupe

[smallfries]

But by posting this story constantly on slashdot it is as if they have never posted it at all. The paradox ensures that it is fresh and newsworthy every time.

So in other words...

[Jafafa Hots]

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

Wrong.

[Dogun]

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.

He should have politely requested a lawyer

[sco08y]

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."

Re:Go ahead, take advice from a guy

[Rockoon]

Any trivial fact about you that sounds the slightest bit suspicious can be used against you to get an indictment or just a search warrant.

Thats why the only fact you give them is that you want a lawyer.

Anything that you say to the police during an investigation can be used against you, but nothing that you say to the police during an investigation can be used to help you.