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Homeland Security’s New Database to Include Faces, DNA, and Relationships
- karlkatzke 8y agoIt didn’t before? I remember crossing the border from Canada to the US after 9/11 but before you had to have a passport (a driver’s license and birth certificate were sufficient) and I was asked a series of questions. The questions included a lot of family stuff, like “where does your father work?” but they also included “what is your girlfriend’s birthday,” which I found odd because I was dating a lot and didn’t have a steady girlfriend at the time. I’m not bragging here, but it took me three name/birthday combinations to guess the one the border agent had on his terminal screen.
- ams6110 8y agoThose kinds of questions can also be used just to let the border agent evaluate how you answer them. If they sense evasiveness, they may think you are worthy of further screening or searches.
- tonto 8y agoThis is the most likely scenario I think. Border agents will ask very probing questions to try and uncover contradictions in your story
- GordonS 8y agoI remember going through the border at Houston airport several years ago, travelling with some work colleagues, one of which was an 18 year old girl who had never been on a plane before. The border guy was one of the 'little Hitler' types, and gave her a series of rapid fire personal questions about her relationship with her boyfriend back home - his overbearing demeanour and personal nature of the question were completely inappropriate, and my colleague ended up confused, scared and in tears. I travelled to the US several times afterwards, landing in either Houston or Atlanta, and the border crossing was always a horrible experience. Thankfully I haven't had to go for years now. Worth noting that I've travelled to many countries, spread over every continent, and never experienced border guards as nasty and vicious as they are in the US - if anything, they are generally friendly elsewhere!
- mirimir 8y agoThe girlfriend’s birthday question surprises me. Did they first ask if you had a girlfriend? Otherwise, how would they know? It's hard to imagine that they'd have such detailed profiles for most Americans, let alone Canadians.
- mandelbrotwurst 8y agoWhile I certainly wouldn't make a bet at even odds on border agents having that information immediately readily available at time.now(), it doesn't sound particularly difficult to imagine how they COULD do it. Cell phone location data comes to mind.
- mirimir 8y agoSure, but I got from the comment that this was some years ago. I agree that it's not hard to imagine how. I'm just surprised. I guess that I'm just not paranoid enough. Hard to believe, I know.
- mandelbrotwurst 8y agoHaha, fair enough, I was probably taking your wording a bit too literally.
- saagarjha 8y agoHow would they even know you had a girlfriend? That's not something publicly available like a marriage record would be.
- sgwae 8y agoCouldn't uber tell if you had one night stands? Wasn't there a telecom tracking service that was until recently open to the public, where you could get locations of phones just by the number? If there was some geolocation between two devices registered to accounts owned by opposite sexes of similar age spending time together, overnight & with time, then you have the data you need?
- mandelbrotwurst 8y agoYes.
- karlkatzke 8y agoThis was in the early 2000s. I’m not sure how effective pervasive cell phone data gathering was yet for people who weren’t customarily targets of surveillance. Maybe I was a test case since I was doing a lot of match.com type dating.
- user5994461 8y agoWhat if we don't know her birthday?
- salawat 8y agoWhat. The. Hell. This is getting out of hand. Bad enough bloody Facebook has entire continents of social graphs. Governments DEFINITELY DO NOT NEED THIS. This is how you erode or work around legal protections for your citizenry. Once one country starts, others will implement the same, then the information sharing starts. NO. Just NO. The cat is probably already well out of the bag, but the world really doesn't need this.
- siruncledrew 8y agoThis is already stuff the Department of Homeland Security is doing - this is like an action plan for "future releases". The government (and the people who are involved in it) willfully want to do this and have decided they will start doing it. It makes me think of the teenager who gets caught smoking by their parents, is told to stop because it's bad, then sneaks out at night and smokes anyways because they wanted to and came up with some reason to justify it. On another note, I can only imagine what some of the less-accountable governments would to do with this information if they looked at the DHS as an example. Any authoritarian government wanting to maintain their position above the public would love to have complex PII available at the execution of a query.
- stevew20 8y agoLess accountable governments? You mean governments that are significantly less armed than their populace? Only way I know to keep a government accountable...
- UncleEntity 8y agoNo reason to imagine, just look at what the soviet states got up to and adjust for modern data theory. Been rewatching Person of Interest lately and kind of think that's Homeland Security's wet dream...
- bodi 8y agoThis is a direct attack on basic free will and it is way past time that we stand up to our traitorous enemies.
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- dvdhnt 8y agoFaces, DNA, and relationships aren’t particularly new data points. The government has my passport photo, DNA (military record), and can check out my tax returns, Facebook, Twitter, etc to see who my wife, children, business partners, coworkers, and other family are. The fundamental issue with their new database is that some analysis will be done on all of that data, along with criminal and public records, to characterize someone and store the result in the database. At that point, you’ve been classified and good luck getting out of whatever box they put you in (just see no fly lists for an example). Now that you’re on some list, it snowballs. Every encounter with agents, every flight, every new relationship, any odd transaction will just make it worse and solidify how much of a threat/person of interest/terrorist/extremist you are. Source: I’m a former intelligence analyst.
- pera 8y agoDNA records would be new for the vast majority of Americans (i.e. non-veteran civilians).
- dvdhnt 8y agoTrue, but the actual percentage of “vast” is debatable. There are many ways that your DNA can be collected including when being arrested, for medical treatment, military or civil service, or just at birth [1]. 1. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/04/baby.dna.government/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/04/baby.dna.government/ind...
- djmips 8y agoOr volunteered to an online genetic testing service.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoOr a blood relative.
- dtornabene 8y ago
- TACIXAT 8y agoI realize this is a silly idea, but would forming a religion around privacy ever provide protection from this sort of thing?
- jliptzin 8y agoIt would be easier to vote out the asswipes who promote this kind of agenda.
- transfire 8y agoLOL. You actually think voting isn't gerrymandered in every way, shape and form possible?
- cmurf 8y agoNext is the census.
- m_fayer 8y agoYeah every 10 years our system will become more twisted and polarized as whoever's in power at the time uses the last decade worth of technological development to draw ever more bulletproof maps. If the Republicans control the majority of the states for the second round in a row, this round of gerrymandering may be the last straw for our beleaguered system.
- wu-ikkyu 8y agoThat's one of the reasons many people voted for Obama. It didnt work.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- transfire 8y agoAnd yet national ID cards are still out of the question.
- chirau 8y agoWhat's the argument against national IDs?
- mirimir 8y agoThere's this fantasy in America that, in some existential crisis, one can just go somewhere and start a new life. It's like an understood aspect of the Bill of Rights.
- cat199 8y agothis is somewhat of a gross oversimplificiation. Agreed disappearing is not really possible these days, but there are also philosophical underpinnings about the federal govt being a 'federation of independent states' rather than a distinct authority over-and-above the states, which factors in here, among other things.
- mirimir 8y agoTrue. But that's the states' rights thing. This is the individual rights thing. The stand that the nation is a federation of individuals. There were diverse individual autarchic influences. From the French (as we all know) and the Russians (blending individualism with collective effort). Similarly, the Religious Society of Friends (albeit involving Christ). And ironically, the Iroquois League. Plus the settler vibe.
- transfire 8y agoEvery time it comes up in Congress it is shelved or voted down with the same bullshit mantras of how our congressmen are protecting our right to privacy.
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- Bucephalus355 8y agoIf the US has this, can you imagine what the Chinese database has? It’s very probable that the Chinese have a database on every person in the world. Everything you ever posted, and who knows what else, all sitting on some server, lying in wait. It wouldn’t take much more than an Oracle DB on a single Dell server. The purpose of this would be something akin to the Soviet “sexpionage” of the 60’s and the 70’s. It’s incredible blackmail material. It doesn’t need to be used now, but as people grow older and move up the ranks of organizations, all of the naked photos that were swiped from their iCloud account 17 years before can prove incredibly damaging. EDIT: Singled out China as an example, but should have said most governments.
- LMYahooTFY 8y agoI agree with you, except in your singling out of China. Can you point to anything in China and say with reasonable confidence that it's not happening elsewhere?
- mcny 8y agoI want to say not with the same brazenness, if that's a word. https://mobile.twitter.com/gaoyu200812/status/996333062882344961 https://mobile.twitter.com/gaoyu200812/status/99633306288234... However, I know this isn't true. Just watched a documentary by Al Jazeera about sheriffs in the US who are in charge of running county jails. This is why we need to protect the rights of whistleblowers. The funny thing is that here in the US we have somehow placated must people into thinking they're a-ok if they're white. In hindsight, this is the main coup of the civil war and how the South actually won the civil war even after losing the war. Just reframe the question and make it about whites versus blacks. My favorite story is a young white woman who moved to Overland Park, Kansas is greeted by her full legal name by a neighbor who works for the police. The most likely way he knew her middle name was through a search on their database (afair, she said she usually omitted her middle name). It sounds like nothing but this is a demonstration of power and that he's watching her. We know all we need to know from the Stanford prison experiments. The guards in the experiment didn't just act rude based on race. I think more people need to be aware that this isn't about the color of someone's skin. This will be a very rude awakening for a lot of people when they get caught up.
- wpdev_63 8y agoI post it a million times but I will post it again. Please visit decidethefuture.org and/or fightforthefuture.org and see what your local politicians stance on data privacy, surveillance, and privacy/data policy. The best way to protect your privacy and your constitutional rights is to vote for privacy advocates.
- makewavesnotwar 8y agoI don't want to make this political as I'm unaffiliated with any political party, but I notice a trend and have a theory. When Republicans are shaping policy, they tend to target air travel. The article states that the system gets false denials as much as 1 out of 25 times... 4% is a very high error rate. For DIA alone that would average out to almost ~6,700 false denials a day. And that's not accounting for people who have been miscategorized in the system by the threat detection algorithm. It's another level of worry and potential headache associated with air travel. Before 9/11, you could arrive at an airport 20 minutes before your flight was supposed to take off and still make it. After 9/11, to get on a plane you had to let the government take a nude picture of you, get a dose of radiation, and expect security lines to take 2 hours or more. The hassle of flying made the comparative cost of driving places less because there was so much hassle associated with it. And that's the basis my theory, the government is trying to dissuade people from flying in favor of burning through oil by artificially increasing its cost. Not to mention, like always, lining the pockets of the contractors in what is likely another no-bid scenario. When 9/11 happened, public resources were poured into buying a bunch of nude body scanners that nobody wanted, were unvetted for long-term safety, and were literally useless for many types of weapons. But the measures were successful at making flying a nightmare. Now the goal is to pour public resources into broadening the scope of no-fly list and implement a broken computer vision system to figure out who to ground? And for what? Has there been an upswing in terrorists hijacking planes domestically lately that we're responding to? To my knowledge there have been 0 incidents of air travel terrorism in the US since 9/11. It seems like the Republicans just like to make air travel as miserable as possible to convince the average American to choose to road trip in the face of cheap and quick air travel to justify their oil interests. And with people as irresponsible as the ones who put in the Rapiscan machines in charge of evaluating threat levels it seem like a recipe for disaster (unless you are a private prison owner). Not to mention that with 2012's National Defense Authorization act, America was qualified as a war zone to justify its indefinite detention clause. I don't think anyone what's to live in an America where groups of politically active people could be hauled off as terrorist threats because they didn't want an oil pipeline polluting the waterways of the natives. Go to the airport for vacation and end up indefinitely detained as a terrorist? That would frighten many people out of flying I'd imagine. DHS is a bad joke that needs to go away.
- gonzo41 8y agoDon't kid yourselves America. You live in a police state.
- Dowwie 8y agoIs there a DHS scorecard? How well has it succeeded at its mandates?
- mLuby 8y agoI'm sure they can't divulge that information because "national security" —__—
- chiefalchemist 8y agoThis should be of no surprise. Any data available from data brokers is available to gov agencies. It's being obtained via legal means, and therefore (afaik) is not covered by privacy law and other legal protections.
- cat199 8y ago> therefore (afaik) is not covered by privacy law and other legal protections. if it goes beyond legal mandate and the framework for that agencies legitimacy, collection method is somewhat irrelevant.
- sjg007 8y agoI dunno, either the data will be too noisy to make any inferences OR they will focus on people who have no connections. But the big risk will be the false positive rate and those who get put on lists and denied travel, entry or jobs.
- makecheck 8y agoMuch like bills in government sessions, naming is everything: bad bills can have happy-sounding names and receive endless support, and so can government agencies. “Homeland Security” is genius naming because you can justify almost anything with that name. They can always need more money “for security”. They can always be granted new powers “for security”. Hell, these ridiculous tariffs are “for national security” because literally nothing else justifies them. And let’s not forget this is a relatively new government entity: it did not exist 20 years ago. It was created opportunistically (“never waste a crisis”) with full knowledge that it would be very hard to eliminate.