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Algorithms Claimed To Hunt Terrorists While Protecting the Privacy of Others (vice.com)
An anonymous reader sends this report from Motherboard:
Computer scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have developed an algorithmic framework for conducting targeted surveillance of individuals within social networks while protecting the privacy of untargeted digital bystanders. ... The algorithms are based on a few basic ideas. The first is that every member of a network (a graph) comes with a sequence of bits indicating their membership in a targeted group. If say, the number two bit was set in your personal privacy register, then you might be part of the “terrorist” target population. For an algorithm searching a network for targets, it doesn’t just get to ask to reveal every network member’s bits. It has a budget of sorts, where it can only reveal so many bits and no more. The algorithms work to optimize this scenario such that as many bits-of-interest are revealed as possible. It does this optimization via a notion known as a statistic of proximity (SOP), which is a quantification of how close a given graph node is to a targeted group of nodes. This is what guides the search algorithms.
When signing up for Facebook, everyone needs to either check or uncheck the "I am a terrorist" box. That way the Government can do detailed searches on terrorsts only, and not invade the privacy of non-terrorists.
And i thought it was just a cool fun show.
Meaning, guilt by association. Yeah, that should work....
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
requires something that so far the gov't has shown no interest in...not invading peoples privacy.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Meaning, guilt by association. Yeah, that should work....
Not guilt, but suspicion by association, and yes it has worked. A while ago the FBI got phone bill type information ("metadata", both phone numbers, date/time, duration) for known organized crime members and built a graph of all the connections these phone calls revealed. The FBI knew most of the nodes in the graph would be innocents; even criminals make restaurant reservations, see if dry cleaning is ready, etc. However analysis of the graph helped discover people actively involved in organized crime who had been completely unknown. This graph analysis was not simply looking at proximity as you suggest, I believe it looked at the number of unique connections from known organized crime members and various other factors.
Everyone will be profiled and rated in a method completely hidden from them.
Just like the FBI, DOJ, TSA, DHS, etc.. do now in fact. The difference here is that it leaves open the "we outsourced that to Facebook and Google, we didn't have anything to do with their bad decisions." plausible deniability option. Those people can say "We took the algorithm from some professor at some college", so they get the same benefit.
Yup, I am extremely cynical and have become so after being proven correct way too many times.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc35...
I'd fully expect the "algorithmic framework" has commercial uses too, particularly in advertising. And no doubt it could also be used to track networks of assorted "anti-socials". I guess that lacks the public appeal of the spin they actually used: "counterterrorism and the containment of infectious disease".
You joke, but this is actually a question on the customs declaration and entry form given to everyone arriving in the United States.
Of course, they don't actually expect anyone to say 'yes' - the idea (as I understand it) is to give the authorities one more thing to charge an actual terrorist with.
If you're a US Citizen they don't make you sign that on entry, at least not normally. I don't know offhand for foreigners of if you're bringing in a lot of goods. They *do* have that on security clearance applications.
And you're right, the idea isn't that you'll answer yes, it's that if you answer no and turn out to be a terrorist or have supported terrorism, etc..., then you've committed a felony by having lied to a federal officer. (YES. Lying to feds is a crime. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from that.) So they can arrest you and throw away the key, at least for a while.
requires something that so far the gov't has shown no interest in...not invading peoples privacy.
Yes. I remember hearing someone had basically developer very similar, very careful tech for the NSA that did one of the surveillance routines they wanted but was *very* careful about user privacy... and they couldn't care less and decided to completely go a different direction. i.e. the one that didn't care about that. Maybe there was a slashdot article on it a few years ago?
Reading the article (gasp!) didn't elucidate things much beyond the summary, although it mentions infectious disease spreading as a possible application while maintaining privacy for unrelated health issues.
In essence the idea is to use artificial scarcity via technological means to create a 'bit budget', where those who access a database of personal info are only allowed a certain amount of flags to search for; this encourages more efficient searching and thus less retrieval of extraneous data. This could be used so that private entities could try to find suitable targets for medical research or advertising, while revealing as little info about as few people as possible; and it might work in that situation. However, there are two big problems with this idea:
1) It assumes the data is only accessible through this one database and can't be accessed in another, more privacy-invading way. If any analysts even suspect that the full dataset will be more useful, then they will use the full dataset if they can and this scheme will be useless. "More data better" seems to be the motto of Big Data despite the well-known haystack problem.
2) Governments are always saying that barriers need to be broken down for their investigators, that they need more/new powers, so there's no way they'll stick to their bit budget. They're gonna ask for more, enough that they have effectively full access to the full dataset, and that's in the unlikely event that they're somehow limited to this access scheme. They're one private 'request', subpoena, or NSL away from full access, anyhow, and political pressure or tax/import/regulatory pressure would make most for-profit entities like Facebook cave in. If this database were maintained by some international nonprofit then it might stand a chance of resisting this.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The algorithm for finding criminals while protecting privacy was disclosed in an ancient process called "getting a warrant."
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