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NSA Admits Searching "3 Hops" From Suspects
New submitter cpitman writes "In a house hearing Wednesday the NSA admitted that it could query not only a suspect's records, but also perform up to a 'three hop query'. Considering that most people in the world are separated by under 6 degrees of separation, the NSA essentially claims that any single suspect gives them rights to investigate a large chunk of the world's population. With the terror watch list having over 700,000 names, just how many times has Kevin Bacon been investigated?"
At this revelation, it doesn't take a libertarian to point out that this isn't based on probable cause.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Actually, I think that in the "6 degrees of separation" experiment, most of the original messages were lost. Among those that were received, yes there were at most 6 degrees of separation from the sender to the target.
I think whats clear is that despite the apologists claims to the contrary; be they from the NSA, Administration, or Congress there was no effective oversize of these programs. Feel good political firewalls are not a strategy. Its a universal truth just about any information gathered will be turned to unintended ends. All it will ever take is some SOB come along and make the right excuses and justifications, creatively define a few terms and suddenly the laws governing the use of the data are meaningless.
If we don't want our government to abuse this type of data the only solution bar them from getting it in the first place.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
On the internet, it's 4.74 degrees of separation.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
What if the NSA searched the wrong solution set?
If it's true that members of Congress are angry, that's favorable news! Maybe they can be persuaded to get off their butts and do something about this.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
We must overthrow Kevin Bacon to ensure access to his oil
Foreign Policy had a fascinating article last month on how metadata analysis is used in terms of relationships between suspected "evil" people and known "evil" people. (The word "evil" in quotes to signify that for purposes of this topic, the definition of "evil" is unimportant.) The article talks about the challenges of fewer vs. more degrees of separation in link analysis; the new revelation that they go to 3 degrees throws it into even more perspective.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/17/evil_in_a_haystack_nsa_metadata
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
In a house hearing Wednesday the NSA admitted
What cause do we have to believe them? They've been lying to us about surveillance for at least 8 years, probably much, much longer.
Oh, right, we're just supposed to take their word for it, because they've been so goddamn trustworthy up to this point, haven't they?
Fuck these pieces of shit. Disband their organization, and charge every single employee and contractor with high treason. It's the only way to make things right.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Man, if they track Kevin Bacon they'll know the activities of practically everyone in Hollywood (and beyond)!
Only 3 more, and . . . Bacon!
That's a lot of people. And they'll snoop on anyone who's "50% likely to be a foreigner". Given that more than 50% of Facebook's, Microsoft's and everyone else's users are foreigners, all their users automatically satisfy that criterion without any checks.
With the terror watch list having over 700,000 names.....
With that many people on your watch list, you might want to re-examine how your trying to govern them.
*Hint: you're doing it wrong.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I think someone needs to step up to let the voters know what they can do if they disagree with this stuff. The ACLU and EFF might be good candidates.
How can we organize our votes to make this shit stop?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
The entire 6 degrees nonsense is just that, nonsense.
hop all you want, maybe on one leg even.
On one hand it's a somewhat reasonable choice. Once you're four node hops from someone in a social network the coverage explodes to include a significant percentage of the population. It's very unlikely that the connections at that depth are meaningful. On the other hand, this is still probably tens of thousands of people for each investigated person. If this is done for everyone on a terrorism watch list, it basically covers everyone. Keep in mind that by social network I don't necessarily mean something like facebook, but someone's actual social graph: who are they calling, emailing, etc.
Stanley Milgram's "small-world experiment" suggests that people in the United States are connected by three friendship links, on average: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_experiment.
In North Korea, under the, "association system", up to three generations of a persons family can be taken permanently to, "a place to make a good person through reeducation", for that person's crimes.
I.e. if the connection is "read something that a suspect may have posted in a site", we should be all in that list, plus everyone 2 hops away from us.
A friend of mine worked on APANA with Julian Assange, and even had the honour of having his server hacked by the Great Man, so I guess that puts me inside the three hop limit.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The owners of Slashdot once again resort to playing down the extent of NSA surveillance and abuse. So-called '3-hop' mining searches were used to prevent agents being swamped with far more 'connections' than they could ever think of processing. Actual NSA personnel were free to examine the details of ANY individual connected at any 'distance' to a named target, whether that meant '3-hops' or 30.
Here's something you sheeple should consider. You happen to be the neighbour of a target, and even though innocent, you have unwittingly learnt things of interest to the intelligence agencies. If the target becomes aware you have been interrogated or co-operated with the authorities, the mission against the target is compromised.
No problem to Team Obama. If the target is important enough, you will be secretly arrested, subject to 'enhanced' interrogation just in case you aren't quite 'innocent', and then disposed of (as in EXECUTED) so there is zero chance of the fact of your interrogation getting back to the target. You are the cattle, and if putting you down serves the interests of your masters, no-one is going to think twice about doing this.
Now true, dying this way is as unlikely as a major lottery win, but the point you sheeple should b aware of is that your life has no value whatsoever to those that rule over you. What they have done to millions of civilians in the Middle East, they'll do to you and your family just as easily if they deem it 'useful'.
Now the NSA track your vehicle movements almost perfectly with under-surface RFID readers (license plate reading cameras are only used to associate an actual vehicle with the fingerprint of the RFID chips embedded in your tires) - now the NSA tracks the locations of each citizen perfectly via their cell phones - now the NSA tracks your network of friends and associates almost perfectly via the social Internet services you use - now the NSA is focusing on plugging the last few holes in their total surveillance grid.
Google Glass, The Xbox One, and Bill Gates' child database service form a massive three-headed attack by the NSA against traditionally 'difficult' intelligence targets.
-Google Glass is designed to eliminate the idea of a 'private' conversation, and ensure that most people self-censor most of the time. Self-censorship means expressing views that toe-the-line promoted by authority, ensuring that everyone thinks that everyone else is a loyal supporter of the police-state.
-Xbox One gets the world's most sophisticated bugging system into the homes of millions of citizens. A bugging system so 'clever' it knows when people are having sex by tracking signature skeletal movements of the people in the same room as the console.
-Gates' database system that tracks every detail of every child's life in the most intimate detail is the most disturbing NSA project of all. Gates provides high-ranking sex offenders with the best possible intelligence for safely selecting victims. Then there are the pre-crime aspects, and also the ability to search for the most useful sociopaths for recruitment into command and control positions over the sheeple. Not least is the fact that when you control the kids, you control their parents.
Look, to the question "how bad are things in the USA today?", the answer is "as bad as they could possibly be, with the active intention of having the future very much worse if all the political plans of people like Gates pan out".
If you don't want to be treated as cattle, you had better learn how to stop behaving as cattle. Rejecting all propaganda emanating from the mainstream media is a very good start. No one in real power has you best interests at heart. They didn't 20,000 years ago. They didn't 4,000 years ago. They didn't 2000 years ago, or 1000, or 500, or 200. Whoever rules considers those that choose to live as sheep as beneath contempt. It isn't right, it isn't decent, but it is how it is.
You can't fight the NSA at a higher level, but you can fight them in your daily life. Reject all
Even the humble home brewer is under scrutiny now.
I guess I have to be careful what the 5+ Million people I don't know on LinkedIn are up to :)
That 6 dgrees of separation "theory" is a party game, not an actual theory. It is based on the false idea that each person's associates are indepensent of those of their friends and family. By the theory, if you knew 42 people, and each of them knew 42 more people, after 6 iterations, the total number of associates is 6 billion.
Unfortunately people arrange themselves in communities, where the overlap of associations is strong, and the diversity of associations is weak. Pretty much everyone you know knows everyone you know because your associates tend to look like you, vote like you, worship like you, or work like you.
Serve and protect.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Citizen A (is a constituent of) Barak Obama (represents) Citizen B
Viola, all US citizens are within two hops of each other.
Remember it's the government who gets to define what "hops" means.
For protection it's wise to assume they watch everyone that even nudges a phone or even glances at the internet.
Just make all tools properly encrypt by-default from now on. It just makes sense regardless of what NSA/GCHQ/etc does.
The Hopper(R) from Dish(TM) allows you to automatically skip right through those annoying non-watchable terrorist suspects!
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law think I'm the paranoid guy quivering in the basement of my house because I'm concerned about this crap... They are the typical "I've done nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide. If knowing that I called my gynecologist last week turns them on, then have at it. I have nothing to hide ..." sort of people ... I never know how to respond to their fearless proclamations so I try to change the subject and lately, have been just avoiding contact with them completely... Infuriating ... I can always think of plenty of responses when I'm in the car on my way home ...
Let's see you find the killer of the witness in Whitey Bulger's trial! Won't happen.
From the Opinions of the Canadian Defense minister
C'mon guys you gotta see the conspiracy, Obama has a pet alien, the canadians got jelous and leaked it to quickly draw attention away from it they invented Snowden!
Stuck in a russian airport, he's probably really a team of NSA agents tweeting what a committee thinks will distract us
Considering the average distance of any two people on twitter (like the homeless guy outside and NK's Photoshop Kim) is 3-4.5 people depending on the study this means any request basically pulls in a majority of worldwide users.
Terrorist Cell Phone -> Pizza Hut -> Everyone that has dialed pizza hut for X years (sorry tried to pick an example number with low usage =). Hopefully they don't include numbers like 411,311, cell provider's support lines/billing or 0 to satisfy 100% us citizen inclusion.
More journalistic malfeasance bent on maximizing paranoia and minimizing common sense and critical thinking.
No, the hundreds of mathematicians and CS doctorates at NSA didn't design an algorithm that presumes hundreds of millions of people are terrorists.
Use your brains, people, think for yourselves.
just how many times has Kevin Bacon been investigated?"
That's funny. You're very clever.
I get your records. I find out you use the Internet. Therefore I get to search everyone else who uses the Internet. That is just two hops. Three hops is complete overkill!!!!
hoppity hop, hoppity hop, hoppity hop. Peek-a-boo!
This is a joke, right? I mean the obvious joke is right there, they can't have written the obvious joke, right?
"NSA gives suspect the third degree"
Justin Bieber has 42,039,612 followers on twitter. President Obama has 34,295,993 followers. Presuming you're not a Twitter user, if anyone you've ever had electronic contact with is a follower of either then you're only one "hop" from anywhere from 34 to 80 million people (depending on how many folks follow both).
Don't think anyone you've ever had contact with is a Twitter user? If you've simply received an email from the president of your university or company, you're electronically connected to everyone in that organization (zero hops). Is any one of them a follower on Twitter? It's a near certainty. Any one of them follow Bieber, BO, Bill Gates or any of the other Twitter top-100? Bing, you're only one hop from tens of millions.
I think it's safe to say that three electronic hops includes nearly everyone with the possible exception of folks in supermax solitary confinement who have no human contact whatsoever.
It is just me, or does this story sound like a question from a discrete maths exam?
Hop 1: I interned one summer with a guy who's father was a WW2 German rocket scientist.
Hop 2: His father almost certainly met Hitler at some point, and if he didn't, he met Von Braun who definitely met Hitler.
I'm sure they're tracking all us nazis too.
BTW, when Reagan visited our school some of the other kids I knew got to shake his hand. That makes Reagan a nazi too. I guess the punk who came that day with a swastika on his jacket as a form of protest had it nailed. Frickin' genius. Way before his time.
They had direct, specific information regarding those two douchebags who bombed the marathon, AND they are surveying ALL of our communications, sexually assaulting us at airports, and they still didn't put 2+2 together to prevent the bombing? We're not even exchanging essential liberty for security; we are exchanging our essential liberties for security theater.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
look dickhead. ASSOCIATION doesn't require us to remember each other next week. for NSA we're a hop apart. you got nobody on facebook, right? so what. you're on this same bulletin board with me now - so we're linked as far as nsa is concerned if their algos figure out a match to our identities on the db, so if they start from you then your network includes withing two extra hops the entire finnish pirate party(and I'm not even a member) and within the hop limit you still got worlds biggest paper corporation and mobile industry within finland. so if some dude on slashdot is flagged as a terrorist they got "probable cause" to trifle through the entire finnish economic base(though all things fair since they're nsa they could and would do that regardless of there being a terrorist on slashdot).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Two theories:
1) They feel they are limited by law to three.
2) it's a practical limit
As you add more levels, you get diminishing usefulness because of false positives.
Maybe they don't have the computing or investigatory capacity to do more.
It seems more likely to be a practical limit.
The goal of these extreme measures ought to be to find the extreme bad guys without causing collateral trouble for others.
A dragnet with extreme measures for extreme bad guys might be reasonable under the 4th ammendment.
This would require exceptional restraint to do catch and release for most of what the dragnet catches.
This would also require that they reset the bar for wmd and terorism back up to extreme bad.
(Perhaps Boston should qualify for neither, but using these tools to find the bad guys was essential?
Setting the right balance is a tough problem that needs an open and frank discussion about the tradeoffs.)
Implementing such a system with humans is going to be near impossible.
(Which calls to question it's 'reasonableness' under the 4th ammendment.)
It appears clear that an unreasonable thing in this is hiding and the lack of supervision.
Perhaps they need an audit trail not implemented by humans.
It would not eliminate collateral trouble.
But if it was avaliable for defense, it might limit it to catch, release, and make economically more than whole.
Yeah, viola the Constitution.
Thanks for the info.
Studies have shown that the "6" in "Six Degrees" is a myth. In actuality, it's 3 or 4 degrees of separation, due to the role of "superusers" -- people who know everybody (including you). So, I know my university president, he knows Bill Clinton, and Bill knows everyone. It's like that.
It seems like 3 degrees would essentially cover everyone on the planet, with very little difficulty.
So in a simple example, if you live in NYC you might be linked through 1 degree of separation to 100 people who live in NYS, 80% of which are in the Metro NYC area. The second degree introduces 100*100 two-degree linkages, but a lot of these people share social settings, know each other, or know the same people, so your 10,000 links boil down to 1500 unique linkages. Furthermore, these 1500 linkages aren't scattered randomly -- 50% are in the Metro area, 20% elsewhere in NYS, 15% on the East Coast, and 15% throughout the rest of the US. 3rd link, the attenuating FX are greater. The potential 100*100*100 linkages, now 1500*100=150,000, may resolve to 4500 unique 3-degree linkages, because so many people in the 2d-degree linkages share common social networks. Some of the 1st-degree linkages who disappeared at the 2d-degree may now be back as redundant 3d degree contacts. And although the geographic distribution is still smearing, the rate of smearing is likely continuing to decrease -- there's still a noticeable bias toward Metro NYC and a lesser one to NYS. Linkages in Australia, Antarctica, Islamabad, if any, are greatly underrepresented in comparison to what they would be under the assumptions of the random-linkage "six degrees" model.
OK, a complicated example, but I hope you at least get the idea. Three degrees of separation yields a pretty big number of linkages, but not nearly as enormous as one might be led to believe by the popular movie-driven model.
One other point: This isn't necessarily a good thing from a security standpoint, because all this means is that the linkages that are found are already preselected by relevance.
Information is power. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Ergo, access to a near totality of information will eventually prove to be such a temptation that it will lead to a massive abuse of power.
I have thousand of Facebook, Twitter, Media, and other friends.
You're all three hops from me. Every single person reading this.
Millions of American citizens who may or may not agree with me.
Three hops is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, unless you're a bunny.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I am the New Zealand minister of defence and my story is that the Euro was close to collapsing, so they expended a young, naive NSA contractor to create a diversionary media fire. Now, let me tell you how we foiled the Chicom's plan to poison our bodily fluids...
Now you have 250 million email inboxes of ladies at your fingertips. How do you identify the girl you first want to snoop on and then get into bed with ?
Next question: Give and algorithm to determine average, minimum and maximum breast size based on 7000 billion naked photos of said girls.
Senior expert question: How do you determine "sexiness" based on 70000 million voice snippets from said ladies ? We need the top ten Most Sexy Android Victims. Please also give an algorithm to match your location vectors with the ten most sexy voice recordings in your town.
God question: How can you help Sergei und Schmitty to rule the plebs ??
If Milgram was right, that'd save a lot of hassle.