Because technical measures don't provide everything you might want to know. Because the government can't see everything. Because it is often easier, cheaper, and more effective to simply ask questions.
The bartender might remember what my favorite beer is. I suppose the bar could invest in computers and data mining software to analyze my past purchases. Or the bartender might take a few seconds to ask me what I'd like. Sometimes human intelligence works better than technical means.
Keep in mind that most interrogation isn't about you. They want to know what you know about someone else. The police might want to know if you saw or heard anything before your neighbor's wife disappeared. How they ask, what they ask, makes a difference in the quality of the data you provide. For example, witnesses should be separated before they can talk to each other, and they should be questioned separately. That's not just to prevent conspiracy, it's mostly because they want to know what *you* saw or heard, not what you remember from talking with the other witnesses. Memory is funny. Our memories of actual events are much dimmer than our memories of discussing those events. If you thought you saw a white Camaro, and Fred thought he saw a silver Mustang, the cops want to know that. They don't want to know that you and Fred talked about it and agreed that it must have been a white Mustang.
You want to know how drug dealers get caught? Usually, it's because somebody talked. Small dealer got a lighter sentence, or got off completely, in return for fingering his supplier. Yeah, sometimes a dog might sniff out drugs. Yeah, sometimes a wiretap might reveal something. But most police work amounts to talking to people, and knowing how to talk to people more effectively is a worthy goal.
If they want to know what you know why don't they just say "Here's $10,000 now tell us what you know?". I don't see why you need interrogation. They could offer a reward for information. There is no shortage of people willing to tell what they know. Interrogation might be cheaper but because it's cheaper its also going to depend on the information the government is asking for. If the government is asking people to give information to them which could get them killed then what good is interrogation?
Why would anyone want to be a witness if it puts their lives at risk and why should the government have the power to force anyone to be a witness? What happened to "you have the right to remain silent"?
Also I know how drug dealers get caught and no I don't think catching drug dealers is a good enough argument to improve interrogation. In fact I'd say catching drug dealers is the best argument against it because drug dealers pay taxes, have families, and are a part of the community in many places and a lot of the time the community members don't want to put them in jail just because the FBI or the police thinks they should. People ought to have a right to remain silent or to not cooperate when national security or lives aren't on the line. If we are talking about a serial killer or an actual terrorist then most of the time if the government can actually let people give them tips in an anonymous way they wont need interrogation.
So interrogation is usually associated with stuff people don't like, and with police who people don't perceive as making them safer. Narcs don't make people feel safer so if communities are going to be interrogated over that then it's definitely a bad idea. If someone is trying to kill people, or if there is a serial rapist then it's a different situation but an investigation isn't the same thing as an interrogation. Getting witnesses is important but interrogation is a bit more than just getting witnesses.
So you're talking about scenarios where there a prisoners of war such as World War 2 and Vietnam.
"On two occasions, Herrington has accepted U.S. Army requests to assess its interrogation operations. After viewing interrogations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, he became a vocal critic of existing U.S. interrogation strate- gies. He remains frustrated by his nation’s failure to develop a dedicated strate- gic interrogator corps and eschew the coercive interrogation methods that he believes run directly counter to U.S. strategic objectives in the GWOT. "
This is exactly what I'm saying. I don't however know if interrogations the way they are being used today are even worthwhile. If you interrogate a terrorist suspect for instance this is not the same as interrogating a prisoner of war. Prisoners of war have rights and have a state which represent them while terrorist suspects have no rights whatsoever.
If we are going to treat terrorist suspects like prisoners of war that probably would be an advance. If we follow the Geneva convention that would be an advance. If we actually stopped keeping all this stuff secret that would be an advance.
The reason people associate interrogation with torture is because the government wants to conduct these interrogations in secret in the cover of night and not explain what for or what the charges are or anything. So in that case of course people are going to be against interrogation when the government has given itself the power to basically interrogate anyone without any public trial. On top of this the President can kill anyone including American citizens without a trial.
So you can understand why people aren't liking the FBI's request for better interrogation techniques at this time. The FBI needs to justify what it's trying to do because right now people either don't agree with what the FBI does or what it does is so secret no one really knows except for the FBI itself.
Whenever wiretapping is not effective because the subject is careful and does not transfer information in unsafe manners?
Careful? So you truly believe anyone can be so careful so as not to leave any trace anywhere? I don't.
Maybe because I live in a city with video cameras, go on an internet which is wiretapped, and know the government is watching everything we do that I don't believe anyone in any city in the USA is going to fly under the radar.
Now if you're talking about some guy in some foreign country in the middle of no where or in some foreign city where they don't have very good counter intelligence then a case could be made. But you know how these things go, they say they are only going to use it on foreigners and then eventually American citizens are under interrogation.
Rather than just accept that the FBI needs new powers shouldn't we ask why they ask for them and allow them to make a case?
How many more times do we have to say it. They are not synonyms. This effort is to improve interrogation so we don't have to let the radicals push us into torture (as happened in the early days of Afghanistan.)
Fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here? Okay tell me the purpose of this "interrogation".
You have too many wild conspiracy theories, and too few facts. Most of what your wrote is nonsense. You should think about spending some time in the library researching militant Islam and the periodic outbursts of Islamist terror over the centuries. If you can't manage that you are likely to earn a reputation as a crank.
And you have facts? You know what goes on in secret prisons? Okay post it for me to review so I can learn the facts.
Here's the FBI trying to do the right thing... Nobody will deny that you need to do interrogations. The objection is to using things like torture in the process.
So, why shouldn't we be looking for good ways to do this that don't violate human rights, etc.?
Hey, if they come up with a "brain scan"(tm) that can read out your memory non-invasively, painlessly and instantaneously, that would be a good thing (assuming that things like a warrant exist, and we somehow deal with fifth amendment issues)
having been through several interrogations, by very skilled interrogators, I will be happy to testify that the "more flies with honey" aphorism has more than a grain of truth. The best interrogators just make you think you're there chatting about inconsequential stuff, and only in retrospect do you realize how much information they have gained.
This hollywood inspired/24 hours medieval thing of "force him to talk" is totally bogus, and anybody who does any kind of investigatory work knows it. It's a blatant rationalization for either mean people to do bad things or for sub rosa extrajudicial punishment.
Okay. Tell us why we need interrogation in the age of technological surveillance?
If the government can see everything why does the government need to interrogate?
"Uh, we know what we want to do isn't legal and isn't morally acceptable in a civilized society,...
Interrogation and intelligence interviews certainly are legal and morally acceptable in a civilized society. Do you think we're supposed to catch bad guys and then say "you sit over there, we aren't going to ask you anything about what your friends are planning because someone told us it wasn't morally acceptable to interview you"? Do you think that other civilized societies don't interrogate anyone?
What isn't legal or acceptable is torture, and if you read the fine article you'd notice that nothing at all was said about coming up with new and better torture methods, only evaluation existing interrogation methods to see how those could be improved.
Classifying this as "department of creepy" displays the author's bias. That it comes from NetworkWorld makes as much sense as the Zimmerman story that appeared in slashdot recently. Neither one has any special relevance to nerds or networks.
You really think with all the drones, spy satellites, wiretapped internet, hidden cameras and informants everywhere that they'd need to sit someone down in a room and interrogate them?
This isn't about good and bad guys. There's good and bad guys on both sides. It's about whether or not interrogations of this sort are still necessary. An overt interrogation is for intimidation. Why do you have to ask anyone what they are doing and try to get anyone to betray their friends when you can use technological means to figure that out and not have to ask?
Why do we build all this technology with all these satellites if at the end of the day we are going to beat them over the head with a phone book in a dark room somewhere? The governments around the world can see what most people are doing most of the time. All of us certainly don't have any secrets.
When you're talking about national security I'm sure the NSA and FBI do a fine job with what they have. When you're talking about crime why do you feel it's okay to interrogate any suspects? The suspect has a right to remain silent. There is no reason to interrogate anyone based on anything other than national security and I'm not convinced interrogation is the key to national security.
Tell me a realistic instance where it is without the good guys vs bad guys mythology or the feigned ignorance of technology. Why do we need to conduct interrogations on suspects even if it's a terrorism investigation when we can simply put an individual under surveillance? What exactly can a suspect say under interrogation that we couldn't see from surveillance?
And it's because we know technology is so advanced that we know torture is so wrong. We know that it's damn near impossible for anyone to keep a secret from the government so why does the government need "interrogations" when they know practically everything about anyone?
Torture, by itself, only makes the victims say whatever they think the torturer wants them to say.
However, if the interrogator already has some information, s/he can teach the victim that lying causes pain in a way that saying the truth doesn't. If victims don't know the exact extent of the interrogator's knowledge, they'll be afraid to lie.
It's also a possibility that the torturer can punish the victim until the victim follows the script of saying and doing what they ask. This might not work in all cases but it can work in some cases. The victim is just going to want to go home and survive the situation while the torturer wants control over the victim.
If it's just about information then there is no need for an elaborate overt FBI interrogation process. There is no need for intimidation, men in suits with badges, and threats. Simply wiretap and surveillance and you can get all the information you need. Simple have the subjects friends question the subject and collect information that way.
There is no need to interrogate in most cases. Can you give me a case where an interrogation would be required?
Quite the opposite. Torture tends to be counter-intuitive. You condition people to tell you what they think you want to hear, which isn't necessarily the truth.
Interrogation however is critical for law enforcement on any level. Questioning how interrogations are handled and looking for better methods to gain information should steer away from torture.
But what you fail to consider is that FBI agent asking questions might have coercive control over the person being questioned.
If this were Nazi Germany and the SS were sitting down with you with their guns and your family was sitting in another room and they started asking you questions wouldn't you tell them whatever they wanted to hear? The same sort of thing can happen when you're talking about FBI agents who have what seems like unlimited power going up against an ordinary citizen who just wants to survive the situation.
It's all about how the questioning takes place and given the FBI's track record when they interrogate people they use all the underhanded tricks they can to gain an advantage. I see no point in even meeting with the FBI in that scenario for an interrogation. Why would you or anyone agree to be interrogated?
So I'm guessing it's a situation where an FBI agent wants to solve a crime and in some cases they may be willing to do anything to solve the crime. This is the problem, the overly aggressive agent. How could interrogations be done better?
The goal is to get information out of people to solve a crime? A wiretap makes more sense than an interrogation don't you think?
I know there must be better FBI Agents out there, but I once knew a couple. They were the most paranoid, scary people I've met. Guy had to have a gun everywhere he went, wouldn't give out his address (even though I was invited to his house) and I was accused of lying to him because,"We're trained to detect that kind of thing."
Family members who are in the military or are police officers warned me to get the hell away from them, which I did.
I don't know, maybe they SHOULD refine their techniques. Jesus, if they had a good way of actually getting information, instead of just insane, paranoid speculation it might help. Then again, maybe they'd just stay insecure and paranoid...
It all depends on the situation. Generally speaking though if they want information out of someone they won't approach in a suit and tie with an FBI badge. One of your best friends will simply ask you about something and then tell the FBI everything you said.
The whole torture controversy is a bind to conceal the fact that the U.S. government has totally mastered the art of brain suck.
They give (relatively safe drugs), plug the subjects brain into the machine and make statements. The machine reads whether the statements are true or false. It is totally painless.
The whole art of interogation is reduced to the game of 20 questions.
With short-term memory supressing drugs given afterwords, the subject does not even remember what happened to him.
The "torture" controversy is ginned up to prevent the other side from trying to plug this hole.
Osama bin Laden was captured at Tora Bora. The US has been "running" him ever since. Every time a recruit talked to Osama they were really talking to the US. Government.That is why they have mostly failed. Osama could have been "run" a bit longer, but Obama wanted the credit. So Osama got "killed".
Yes but explain those torture pictures and the "enhanced interrogation" techniques and all the documents related to that. It's a fact that the US government has mastered torture and coercion. What this means is the US government (or any government) can use coercive techniques and torture to try and create terrorists out of random innocent people in a population. Some people are more vulnerable than others to this, people who don't have families or people who aren't particularly strong willed could be broken with ease and turned into a member of Al Qaeda.
The problem with this is when the war on terrorism is fought this way it's a situation where the government could be creating the enemy it claims to be fighting and merely using this as a way to drum up funding. It could be a similar situation with the war on drugs where the lawmakers pass certain laws and put pressure on certain communities so that there is a sense of desperation and there is an endless supply of boogymen drug dealers to arrest. Why do we pretend there is a war on terror if we use tactics which could actually help to create terrorists? or pretend there is a war on drugs but then pass laws which make an environment so desperate so that drug dealing becomes attractive?
If we use torture on people how do we know that the terrorists weren't created from US government torture programs overseas?
If the government can torture people to get them to do stuff or break them psychological, then they go and blow themselves up or shoot up random people, then we call them terrorists and use it as an excuse to torture even more people. Do you see the problem?
This is no different than witch hunting where you torture a bunch of people to find the witches but you end up creating witches out of innocent people. Or where you torture people to prevent mental illness but you end up creating the illness you are claiming you use torture to treat. Basically torture opens the door to governments forcing certain individuals to do things we'd consider to be terrorism.
For instance if you take a person who was adopted who has no family, and you torture them until they agree to join with Al Qaeda or whoever, then you just created a terrorist. What I'm saying is although human beings have free will, no one is free from government coercion. These techniques will allow governments to gain more coercive control over innocent people who might never have wanted to be terrorists but because of something the government did during an "interrogation", their entire mindset could be permanently changed.
Who is responsible? Will the FBI take responsibility if their interrogation causes people to become terrorists? What happens to people who get interrogated? Will the enemy start using interrogation on us as well and will we have to deal with the same treatment?
The most important question is who is responsible? If someone is interrogated or tortured or coerced into taking an action they never really wanted to take, we typically blame that individual. We don't blame the government that coerced them but we blame them and that's part of the problem. It allows the governments of the world to create monsters and unleash them and then when things go wrong these governments blame the monsters they created rather than the interrogation techniques and their own methods.
It is possible to create a terrorist if that individual is of the right mentality and is under the right kind of coercion. How could people be tortured or coerced? "You do it or we kill your entire family" would work on most people. Or "You do it or we wont stop torturing you" would work on other people. So the problem is a problem of accountability, anyone who has been subjected to this sort of interrogation, the interrogation process should be open and reviewed. If it's secret and no one knows what was done to them, then how are we supposed to know who is accountable for their acitons or even make sense of their actions?
If someone blows themselves up, on the surface we'd say they must have been a member of Al Qaeda. For all we know some foreign government could have promised to give money to their families if they did that.
I'm a US Citizen and I like the US, but US using torture makes them lose a lot of cred as the good guy.
So I wonder if advancing interrogation techniques is "Lets relearn how to torture people more effectively" or if it is "Torture is really bad for PR in a war of winning the hearts and minds of our enemy. Lets find a better way"
I'm sorry to say it is. Interrogation is what the inquisition used to determine who was guilty of witchcraft.
And that is one of the problems with it. If you ask any question in the right way you can get any answer.
So basically it's about the method of interrogation that determines the result. So if they want someone to admit to being a terrorist they could get 99% of people to admit that if they used the right interrogation methods. This is the problem with "enhanced" interrogation. It's asking someone a question while in the backround applying coercion tactics so they answer it the way you want them to.
So the question stands why do we need to have this capability in the first place? Who exactly is it for? Every human is going to break under interrogation, and that break will be psychological, physical, or both, so whats the point?
If the goal is just to break people then why help them advance the science of destroying people?
Torture is a well known technique, shown to be effective many times in history. They're trying to find other ways to interrogate people.
They already have technology and they already can use torture so what other ways are there that they don't have and use?
Who are these "hard" targets that don't already break under torture or the current interrogation methods? My guess is they know torture is harmful to the target of the interrogation and they want to develop some methods which don't physically or psychologically destroy the person being interrogated. This makes sense if they could pull it off but given their track record it will probably be something horrific.
They still have enhanced interrogation techniques and still can do inquisition like activities only now it's something you can't prove they are doing in court because the technology is more sophisticated.
The real question is why does the FBI need this interrogation technology? Who is it for?
If you're the government wanting to spy on all the tin foil hat crazies, wouldn't the best way be to run the privacy/security/encryption/anonymizer yourself. How do you know this ISP is trustworthy?
Even if the ISP is trustworthy, if just one or two undercover government agents work there it's enough to make the ISP compromised.
This sort of ISP is useless if only thousands of well known geeks use it. Basically the sort of people likely to use it are the sort of people the NSA and FBI already have under surveillance.
Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.
It is not without precedent. After the PATRIOT Act made it legal to for the feds to confiscate book borrowing records from libraries without even a warrant, most libraries switched over to lending software that deleted all records once a book was returned. So, at worst, the feds could find out what a patron currently had checked out, but no borrowing history was available to anyone.
As far as I know, the DOJ hasn't tried, at least in court, to make a library use a less privacy-preserving system.
Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.
It is not without precedent. After the PATRIOT Act made it legal to for the feds to confiscate book borrowing records from libraries without even a warrant, most libraries switched over to lending software that deleted all records once a book was returned. So, at worst, the feds could find out what a patron currently had checked out, but no borrowing history was available to anyone.
As far as I know, the DOJ hasn't tried, at least in court, to make a library use a less privacy-preserving system.
What everyone fails to consider is the feds can just take the data they want whether you legally give it to them or not. The feds have all the technological and physical means to take any information from any ISP or entity.
They can do it the legal way and have guys in suits and ties walk in with the Patriot Act or National Security letter or whatever and politely ask for it, or they can send some blackhats in to steal or hack the information. This ISP is simply going to make the feds rely more on extrajudicial means to get what they want.
If he pulls this off, expect tougher laws on data collection requirements for ISPs.
Whether he pulls it off or not it wont stop the FBI from spying on someone. It just makes it more expensive.
The FBI keeps making the mistake of thinking changing the laws is the solution to everything. Technological solutions already solve this problem. These solutions I don't feel like I have to mention but they certainly cost more and they aren't blanket surveillance solutions.
And that's probably what the FBI wanted. The FBI probably wanted blanket surveillance on the cheap and this makes it too costly.
Even if he builds this ISP it's very unlikely he will be able to build it in such a way that there is no FBI surveillance of the ISP itself or backdoors or moles etc. Basically there is nothing he can do if the FBI is determined to wiretap someone.
What this does is it makes it too expensive for the FBI to wiretap and monitor millions of people at a time. It does not prevent the FBI from wiretapping any specific person. If the FBI puts anyone under physical surveillance then none of that fancy encryption or privacy protecting ISP stuff is going to help.
Talking about applications of this is getting so far ahead of anything that its just not worth it for me. I mean, this thing, right now, is purely an exercise in feasibility - trying to extrapolate past that can be interesting, but it's so nebulous that having any firm opinion as to how things would go seems to me kind of ahead of things.
The Nancy Graces of the world don't need this to justify their behavior to themselves, nor do the people who insist smoke == fire, or any of the other sorts of people who would be predicted to abuse this. They don't need any justification because they see it EVERYWHERE. But for people who are actually interested in sorting this stuff out or understanding what's knowable, this could be pretty neat.
Let me out this in a different way - the people getting up in arms over potential abuses of this as yet hypothetical ability by entities who are willing to act amorally based on probably tenuous connections at best are pretty much the same as the people who are opposed to basic research into stem cells because they insist that the logical conclusion is that people will be murdering live born babies to harvest their precious bodily fluids. It entirely skips the steps wherein we rationally explore the space of a problem which is kind of necessary when thinking about potential applications for a technique that may address the problem.
See that is not a fair correlation at all. I'm for stem cell research and I'm for this research. I just think the research has to be done in a better way. For instance this research specifically is biased in that it assumes that sexual predators are male. It specifically says so in this quote:
"The goal of this sub-task is to identify classes of authors, namely online predators. You will be given chat logs involving two (or more) people and have to determine who is the one trying to convince the other participants(s) to provide some sexual favor . You will also need to identify the particular conversation where the person exploits his bad behavior."
This kind of research language is like using the words God and "he" when discussing the physics of the big bang. It should say "where the person exploits THEIR behavior. No good or bad, no male or female, none of that. When you put that language into the experiment itself it already sets a tone for a bias.
Now I'm left wondering whether or not we will even see an equal amount of data from males and females or whether there will be gender bias. I'm not saying this research should not be conducted, of course I want to know what the results are as badly as you do. What I don't want is for the research to be conducted in a way which is flawed.
My prediction is this contest will produce so many false positives that it will show that it's very hard to find a predator from text alone.
"The goal of this sub-task is to identify classes of authors, namely online predators. You will be given chat logs involving two (or more) people and have to determine who is the one trying to convince the other participants(s) to provide some sexual favor . You will also need to identify the particular conversation where the person exploits his bad behavior."
Slashdot Mirror
Because technical measures don't provide everything you might want to know. Because the government can't see everything. Because it is often easier, cheaper, and more effective to simply ask questions.
The bartender might remember what my favorite beer is. I suppose the bar could invest in computers and data mining software to analyze my past purchases. Or the bartender might take a few seconds to ask me what I'd like. Sometimes human intelligence works better than technical means.
Keep in mind that most interrogation isn't about you. They want to know what you know about someone else. The police might want to know if you saw or heard anything before your neighbor's wife disappeared. How they ask, what they ask, makes a difference in the quality of the data you provide. For example, witnesses should be separated before they can talk to each other, and they should be questioned separately. That's not just to prevent conspiracy, it's mostly because they want to know what *you* saw or heard, not what you remember from talking with the other witnesses. Memory is funny. Our memories of actual events are much dimmer than our memories of discussing those events. If you thought you saw a white Camaro, and Fred thought he saw a silver Mustang, the cops want to know that. They don't want to know that you and Fred talked about it and agreed that it must have been a white Mustang.
You want to know how drug dealers get caught? Usually, it's because somebody talked. Small dealer got a lighter sentence, or got off completely, in return for fingering his supplier. Yeah, sometimes a dog might sniff out drugs. Yeah, sometimes a wiretap might reveal something. But most police work amounts to talking to people, and knowing how to talk to people more effectively is a worthy goal.
If they want to know what you know why don't they just say "Here's $10,000 now tell us what you know?". I don't see why you need interrogation. They could offer a reward for information. There is no shortage of people willing to tell what they know. Interrogation might be cheaper but because it's cheaper its also going to depend on the information the government is asking for. If the government is asking people to give information to them which could get them killed then what good is interrogation?
Why would anyone want to be a witness if it puts their lives at risk and why should the government have the power to force anyone to be a witness? What happened to "you have the right to remain silent"?
Also I know how drug dealers get caught and no I don't think catching drug dealers is a good enough argument to improve interrogation. In fact I'd say catching drug dealers is the best argument against it because drug dealers pay taxes, have families, and are a part of the community in many places and a lot of the time the community members don't want to put them in jail just because the FBI or the police thinks they should. People ought to have a right to remain silent or to not cooperate when national security or lives aren't on the line. If we are talking about a serial killer or an actual terrorist then most of the time if the government can actually let people give them tips in an anonymous way they wont need interrogation.
So interrogation is usually associated with stuff people don't like, and with police who people don't perceive as making them safer. Narcs don't make people feel safer so if communities are going to be interrogated over that then it's definitely a bad idea. If someone is trying to kill people, or if there is a serial rapist then it's a different situation but an investigation isn't the same thing as an interrogation. Getting witnesses is important but interrogation is a bit more than just getting witnesses.
So you're talking about scenarios where there a prisoners of war such as World War 2 and Vietnam.
"On two occasions, Herrington has accepted U.S. Army requests to assess
its interrogation operations. After viewing interrogations at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo Bay, he became a vocal critic of existing U.S. interrogation strate-
gies. He remains frustrated by his nation’s failure to develop a dedicated strate-
gic interrogator corps and eschew the coercive interrogation methods that he
believes run directly counter to U.S. strategic objectives in the GWOT. "
This is exactly what I'm saying. I don't however know if interrogations the way they are being used today are even worthwhile. If you interrogate a terrorist suspect for instance this is not the same as interrogating a prisoner of war. Prisoners of war have rights and have a state which represent them while terrorist suspects have no rights whatsoever.
If we are going to treat terrorist suspects like prisoners of war that probably would be an advance. If we follow the Geneva convention that would be an advance. If we actually stopped keeping all this stuff secret that would be an advance.
The reason people associate interrogation with torture is because the government wants to conduct these interrogations in secret in the cover of night and not explain what for or what the charges are or anything. So in that case of course people are going to be against interrogation when the government has given itself the power to basically interrogate anyone without any public trial. On top of this the President can kill anyone including American citizens without a trial.
So you can understand why people aren't liking the FBI's request for better interrogation techniques at this time. The FBI needs to justify what it's trying to do because right now people either don't agree with what the FBI does or what it does is so secret no one really knows except for the FBI itself.
Whenever wiretapping is not effective because the subject is careful and does not transfer information in unsafe manners?
Careful? So you truly believe anyone can be so careful so as not to leave any trace anywhere? I don't.
Maybe because I live in a city with video cameras, go on an internet which is wiretapped, and know the government is watching everything we do that I don't believe anyone in any city in the USA is going to fly under the radar.
Now if you're talking about some guy in some foreign country in the middle of no where or in some foreign city where they don't have very good counter intelligence then a case could be made. But you know how these things go, they say they are only going to use it on foreigners and then eventually American citizens are under interrogation.
Rather than just accept that the FBI needs new powers shouldn't we ask why they ask for them and allow them to make a case?
Interrogation !=torture
Interrogation !=torture
Interrogation !=torture
Interrogation !=torture
How many more times do we have to say it. They are not synonyms. This effort is to improve interrogation so we don't have to let the radicals push us into torture (as happened in the early days of Afghanistan.)
Fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here? Okay tell me the purpose of this "interrogation".
You have too many wild conspiracy theories, and too few facts. Most of what your wrote is nonsense. You should think about spending some time in the library researching militant Islam and the periodic outbursts of Islamist terror over the centuries. If you can't manage that you are likely to earn a reputation as a crank.
And you have facts? You know what goes on in secret prisons? Okay post it for me to review so I can learn the facts.
Here's the FBI trying to do the right thing...
Nobody will deny that you need to do interrogations. The objection is to using things like torture in the process.
So, why shouldn't we be looking for good ways to do this that don't violate human rights, etc.?
Hey, if they come up with a "brain scan"(tm) that can read out your memory non-invasively, painlessly and instantaneously, that would be a good thing (assuming that things like a warrant exist, and we somehow deal with fifth amendment issues)
having been through several interrogations, by very skilled interrogators, I will be happy to testify that the "more flies with honey" aphorism has more than a grain of truth. The best interrogators just make you think you're there chatting about inconsequential stuff, and only in retrospect do you realize how much information they have gained.
This hollywood inspired/24 hours medieval thing of "force him to talk" is totally bogus, and anybody who does any kind of investigatory work knows it. It's a blatant rationalization for either mean people to do bad things or for sub rosa extrajudicial punishment.
Okay. Tell us why we need interrogation in the age of technological surveillance?
If the government can see everything why does the government need to interrogate?
"Uh, we know what we want to do isn't legal and isn't morally acceptable in a civilized society,...
Interrogation and intelligence interviews certainly are legal and morally acceptable in a civilized society. Do you think we're supposed to catch bad guys and then say "you sit over there, we aren't going to ask you anything about what your friends are planning because someone told us it wasn't morally acceptable to interview you"? Do you think that other civilized societies don't interrogate anyone?
What isn't legal or acceptable is torture, and if you read the fine article you'd notice that nothing at all was said about coming up with new and better torture methods, only evaluation existing interrogation methods to see how those could be improved.
Classifying this as "department of creepy" displays the author's bias. That it comes from NetworkWorld makes as much sense as the Zimmerman story that appeared in slashdot recently. Neither one has any special relevance to nerds or networks.
You really think with all the drones, spy satellites, wiretapped internet, hidden cameras and informants everywhere that they'd need to sit someone down in a room and interrogate them?
This isn't about good and bad guys. There's good and bad guys on both sides. It's about whether or not interrogations of this sort are still necessary. An overt interrogation is for intimidation. Why do you have to ask anyone what they are doing and try to get anyone to betray their friends when you can use technological means to figure that out and not have to ask?
Why do we build all this technology with all these satellites if at the end of the day we are going to beat them over the head with a phone book in a dark room somewhere? The governments around the world can see what most people are doing most of the time. All of us certainly don't have any secrets.
When you're talking about national security I'm sure the NSA and FBI do a fine job with what they have. When you're talking about crime why do you feel it's okay to interrogate any suspects? The suspect has a right to remain silent. There is no reason to interrogate anyone based on anything other than national security and I'm not convinced interrogation is the key to national security.
Tell me a realistic instance where it is without the good guys vs bad guys mythology or the feigned ignorance of technology. Why do we need to conduct interrogations on suspects even if it's a terrorism investigation when we can simply put an individual under surveillance? What exactly can a suspect say under interrogation that we couldn't see from surveillance?
And it's because we know technology is so advanced that we know torture is so wrong. We know that it's damn near impossible for anyone to keep a secret from the government so why does the government need "interrogations" when they know practically everything about anyone?
Torture, by itself, only makes the victims say whatever they think the torturer wants them to say.
However, if the interrogator already has some information, s/he can teach the victim that lying causes pain in a way that saying the truth doesn't. If victims don't know the exact extent of the interrogator's knowledge, they'll be afraid to lie.
It's also a possibility that the torturer can punish the victim until the victim follows the script of saying and doing what they ask. This might not work in all cases but it can work in some cases. The victim is just going to want to go home and survive the situation while the torturer wants control over the victim.
If it's just about information then there is no need for an elaborate overt FBI interrogation process. There is no need for intimidation, men in suits with badges, and threats. Simply wiretap and surveillance and you can get all the information you need. Simple have the subjects friends question the subject and collect information that way.
There is no need to interrogate in most cases. Can you give me a case where an interrogation would be required?
Quite the opposite. Torture tends to be counter-intuitive. You condition people to tell you what they think you want to hear, which isn't necessarily the truth.
Interrogation however is critical for law enforcement on any level. Questioning how interrogations are handled and looking for better methods to gain information should steer away from torture.
But what you fail to consider is that FBI agent asking questions might have coercive control over the person being questioned.
If this were Nazi Germany and the SS were sitting down with you with their guns and your family was sitting in another room and they started asking you questions wouldn't you tell them whatever they wanted to hear? The same sort of thing can happen when you're talking about FBI agents who have what seems like unlimited power going up against an ordinary citizen who just wants to survive the situation.
It's all about how the questioning takes place and given the FBI's track record when they interrogate people they use all the underhanded tricks they can to gain an advantage. I see no point in even meeting with the FBI in that scenario for an interrogation. Why would you or anyone agree to be interrogated?
So I'm guessing it's a situation where an FBI agent wants to solve a crime and in some cases they may be willing to do anything to solve the crime. This is the problem, the overly aggressive agent. How could interrogations be done better?
The goal is to get information out of people to solve a crime? A wiretap makes more sense than an interrogation don't you think?
I know there must be better FBI Agents out there, but I once knew a couple. They were the most paranoid, scary people I've met. Guy had to have a gun everywhere he went, wouldn't give out his address (even though I was invited to his house) and I was accused of lying to him because,"We're trained to detect that kind of thing."
Family members who are in the military or are police officers warned me to get the hell away from them, which I did.
I don't know, maybe they SHOULD refine their techniques. Jesus, if they had a good way of actually getting information, instead of just insane, paranoid speculation it might help.
Then again, maybe they'd just stay insecure and paranoid...
It all depends on the situation. Generally speaking though if they want information out of someone they won't approach in a suit and tie with an FBI badge. One of your best friends will simply ask you about something and then tell the FBI everything you said.
The whole torture controversy is a bind to conceal the fact that the U.S. government has totally mastered the art of brain suck.
They give (relatively safe drugs), plug the subjects brain into the machine and make statements. The machine reads whether the statements are true or false. It is totally painless.
The whole art of interogation is reduced to the game of 20 questions.
With short-term memory supressing drugs given afterwords, the subject does not even remember what happened to him.
The "torture" controversy is ginned up to prevent the other side from trying to plug this hole.
Osama bin Laden was captured at Tora Bora. The US has been "running" him ever since. Every time a recruit talked to Osama they were really talking to the US. Government.That is why they have mostly failed. Osama could have been "run" a bit longer, but Obama wanted the credit. So Osama got "killed".
Yes but explain those torture pictures and the "enhanced interrogation" techniques and all the documents related to that. It's a fact that the US government has mastered torture and coercion. What this means is the US government (or any government) can use coercive techniques and torture to try and create terrorists out of random innocent people in a population. Some people are more vulnerable than others to this, people who don't have families or people who aren't particularly strong willed could be broken with ease and turned into a member of Al Qaeda.
The problem with this is when the war on terrorism is fought this way it's a situation where the government could be creating the enemy it claims to be fighting and merely using this as a way to drum up funding. It could be a similar situation with the war on drugs where the lawmakers pass certain laws and put pressure on certain communities so that there is a sense of desperation and there is an endless supply of boogymen drug dealers to arrest. Why do we pretend there is a war on terror if we use tactics which could actually help to create terrorists? or pretend there is a war on drugs but then pass laws which make an environment so desperate so that drug dealing becomes attractive?
If we use torture on people how do we know that the terrorists weren't created from US government torture programs overseas?
If the government can torture people to get them to do stuff or break them psychological, then they go and blow themselves up or shoot up random people, then we call them terrorists and use it as an excuse to torture even more people. Do you see the problem?
This is no different than witch hunting where you torture a bunch of people to find the witches but you end up creating witches out of innocent people. Or where you torture people to prevent mental illness but you end up creating the illness you are claiming you use torture to treat. Basically torture opens the door to governments forcing certain individuals to do things we'd consider to be terrorism.
For instance if you take a person who was adopted who has no family, and you torture them until they agree to join with Al Qaeda or whoever, then you just created a terrorist. What I'm saying is although human beings have free will, no one is free from government coercion. These techniques will allow governments to gain more coercive control over innocent people who might never have wanted to be terrorists but because of something the government did during an "interrogation", their entire mindset could be permanently changed.
Who is responsible? Will the FBI take responsibility if their interrogation causes people to become terrorists? What happens to people who get interrogated? Will the enemy start using interrogation on us as well and will we have to deal with the same treatment?
The most important question is who is responsible? If someone is interrogated or tortured or coerced into taking an action they never really wanted to take, we typically blame that individual. We don't blame the government that coerced them but we blame them and that's part of the problem. It allows the governments of the world to create monsters and unleash them and then when things go wrong these governments blame the monsters they created rather than the interrogation techniques and their own methods.
It is possible to create a terrorist if that individual is of the right mentality and is under the right kind of coercion. How could people be tortured or coerced? "You do it or we kill your entire family" would work on most people. Or "You do it or we wont stop torturing you" would work on other people. So the problem is a problem of accountability, anyone who has been subjected to this sort of interrogation, the interrogation process should be open and reviewed. If it's secret and no one knows what was done to them, then how are we supposed to know who is accountable for their acitons or even make sense of their actions?
If someone blows themselves up, on the surface we'd say they must have been a member of Al Qaeda. For all we know some foreign government could have promised to give money to their families if they did that.
I'm a US Citizen and I like the US, but US using torture makes them lose a lot of cred as the good guy.
So I wonder if advancing interrogation techniques is "Lets relearn how to torture people more effectively" or if it is "Torture is really bad for PR in a war of winning the hearts and minds of our enemy. Lets find a better way"
I'm sorry to say it is. Interrogation is what the inquisition used to determine who was guilty of witchcraft.
And that is one of the problems with it. If you ask any question in the right way you can get any answer.
So basically it's about the method of interrogation that determines the result. So if they want someone to admit to being a terrorist they could get 99% of people to admit that if they used the right interrogation methods. This is the problem with "enhanced" interrogation. It's asking someone a question while in the backround applying coercion tactics so they answer it the way you want them to.
So the question stands why do we need to have this capability in the first place? Who exactly is it for? Every human is going to break under interrogation, and that break will be psychological, physical, or both, so whats the point?
If the goal is just to break people then why help them advance the science of destroying people?
Torture is a well known technique, shown to be effective many times in history. They're trying to find other ways to interrogate people.
They already have technology and they already can use torture so what other ways are there that they don't have and use?
Who are these "hard" targets that don't already break under torture or the current interrogation methods? My guess is they know torture is harmful to the target of the interrogation and they want to develop some methods which don't physically or psychologically destroy the person being interrogated. This makes sense if they could pull it off but given their track record it will probably be something horrific.
They still have enhanced interrogation techniques and still can do inquisition like activities only now it's something you can't prove they are doing in court because the technology is more sophisticated.
The real question is why does the FBI need this interrogation technology? Who is it for?
If you're the government wanting to spy on all the tin foil hat crazies, wouldn't the best way be to run the privacy/security/encryption/anonymizer yourself. How do you know this ISP is trustworthy?
Even if the ISP is trustworthy, if just one or two undercover government agents work there it's enough to make the ISP compromised.
This sort of ISP is useless if only thousands of well known geeks use it. Basically the sort of people likely to use it are the sort of people the NSA and FBI already have under surveillance.
Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.
It is not without precedent. After the PATRIOT Act made it legal to for the feds to confiscate book borrowing records from libraries without even a warrant, most libraries switched over to lending software that deleted all records once a book was returned. So, at worst, the feds could find out what a patron currently had checked out, but no borrowing history was available to anyone.
As far as I know, the DOJ hasn't tried, at least in court, to make a library use a less privacy-preserving system.
Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.
It is not without precedent. After the PATRIOT Act made it legal to for the feds to confiscate book borrowing records from libraries without even a warrant, most libraries switched over to lending software that deleted all records once a book was returned. So, at worst, the feds could find out what a patron currently had checked out, but no borrowing history was available to anyone.
As far as I know, the DOJ hasn't tried, at least in court, to make a library use a less privacy-preserving system.
What everyone fails to consider is the feds can just take the data they want whether you legally give it to them or not. The feds have all the technological and physical means to take any information from any ISP or entity.
They can do it the legal way and have guys in suits and ties walk in with the Patriot Act or National Security letter or whatever and politely ask for it, or they can send some blackhats in to steal or hack the information. This ISP is simply going to make the feds rely more on extrajudicial means to get what they want.
If he pulls this off, expect tougher laws on data collection requirements for ISPs.
Whether he pulls it off or not it wont stop the FBI from spying on someone. It just makes it more expensive.
The FBI keeps making the mistake of thinking changing the laws is the solution to everything. Technological solutions already solve this problem. These solutions I don't feel like I have to mention but they certainly cost more and they aren't blanket surveillance solutions.
And that's probably what the FBI wanted. The FBI probably wanted blanket surveillance on the cheap and this makes it too costly.
Even if he builds this ISP it's very unlikely he will be able to build it in such a way that there is no FBI surveillance of the ISP itself or backdoors or moles etc. Basically there is nothing he can do if the FBI is determined to wiretap someone.
What this does is it makes it too expensive for the FBI to wiretap and monitor millions of people at a time. It does not prevent the FBI from wiretapping any specific person. If the FBI puts anyone under physical surveillance then none of that fancy encryption or privacy protecting ISP stuff is going to help.
And why immigrants always seem to want to go to these schools.
Let's be realistic though, it's not difficult for the FBI or anyone else to recruit on campuses as well and counter spy.
Talking about applications of this is getting so far ahead of anything that its just not worth it for me. I mean, this thing, right now, is purely an exercise in feasibility - trying to extrapolate past that can be interesting, but it's so nebulous that having any firm opinion as to how things would go seems to me kind of ahead of things.
The Nancy Graces of the world don't need this to justify their behavior to themselves, nor do the people who insist smoke == fire, or any of the other sorts of people who would be predicted to abuse this. They don't need any justification because they see it EVERYWHERE. But for people who are actually interested in sorting this stuff out or understanding what's knowable, this could be pretty neat.
Let me out this in a different way - the people getting up in arms over potential abuses of this as yet hypothetical ability by entities who are willing to act amorally based on probably tenuous connections at best are pretty much the same as the people who are opposed to basic research into stem cells because they insist that the logical conclusion is that people will be murdering live born babies to harvest their precious bodily fluids. It entirely skips the steps wherein we rationally explore the space of a problem which is kind of necessary when thinking about potential applications for a technique that may address the problem.
See that is not a fair correlation at all. I'm for stem cell research and I'm for this research. I just think the research has to be done in a better way. For instance this research specifically is biased in that it assumes that sexual predators are male. It specifically says so in this quote:
"The goal of this sub-task is to identify classes of authors, namely online predators. You will be given chat logs involving two (or more) people and have to determine who is the one trying to convince the other participants(s) to provide some sexual favor . You will also need to identify the particular conversation where the person exploits his bad behavior."
This kind of research language is like using the words God and "he" when discussing the physics of the big bang. It should say "where the person exploits THEIR behavior. No good or bad, no male or female, none of that. When you put that language into the experiment itself it already sets a tone for a bias.
Now I'm left wondering whether or not we will even see an equal amount of data from males and females or whether there will be gender bias. I'm not saying this research should not be conducted, of course I want to know what the results are as badly as you do. What I don't want is for the research to be conducted in a way which is flawed.
My prediction is this contest will produce so many false positives that it will show that it's very hard to find a predator from text alone.
"The goal of this sub-task is to identify classes of authors, namely online predators. You will be given chat logs involving two (or more) people and have to determine who is the one trying to convince the other participants(s) to provide some sexual favor . You will also need to identify the particular conversation where the person exploits his bad behavior."
Notice they assume it's a he?