10 ms·

Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

278 points by G5ANDY 13y ago

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
A related experiment: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/ http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/
- nswanberg 13y ago
  Nice. I was looking for that yesterday for the Google Location history discussion. Digging through this site's javascript I found this comment: "Für diesen Quellcode komme ich nicht in den Himmel."
  - schoen 13y ago
    In case you don't know German: "Orpnhfr bs guvf fbhepr pbqr, V'z abg tbvat gb urnira." (ROT13 for fellow non-native German speakers who want to think about the meaning for a moment.)
    - rrattoo 13y ago
      In case you don't have time to waste: "Because of this source code, I'm not going to heaven." (English for fellow grownups.)
rtpg 13y ago
Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes >Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from the FISA court. Stuff that has come out of these leaks have ranged from banal (oh, we listen to the German Chancelor's cell phone? What else is new) to absolutely damning (forcing companies to hand over SSL keys). But even in the most damning cases, all of these happened within the legal frameworks given to them (such as the National Security Letters) and maybe some overzealous law enforcement agents. The illegal incidents can be explained more by incidents outside of how things are "supposed" to work (LOVEINT is probably not sanctioned by the NSA), and a lack of strong implementation of the framework given by the courts. The narrative has always seemed to be "check out how the NSA is going crazy over here!". But the reality is "check out how all these politicians are voting in these new laws allowing this to take place!" From the leaks you can even see how the courts are constantly reeling things in, the system is actually working. We hear about old NSA programs that got shut down because of the FISA court's rulings. This is how rule of law works! We vote laws, and people follow them. To actually come to this, given all we've seen from how courts rule on this issue in general, and the FISA court's rulings, this sort of data sharing would absolutely definitely not be allowed to exist. No judge would agree to this being allowed to be set in place, as it so obviously goes against 4th ammendement in such a program's intent. Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell the contents of your e-mails to somebody. This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws.
- atmosx 13y ago
  > Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell the contents of your e-mails to somebody. I am not sure you are listening, what is happening around you. > This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws. It's working for whom? Presumably these laws require a little bit less privacy for a more secure country. I didn't see Boston bombings avoided. If the answer to this is please give us more privacy, to avoid this in the future, I'd say no.
  - rtpg 13y ago
    >It's working for whom? Presumably these laws require a little bit less privacy for a more secure country. The fisa court is an example of laws working in our favor. Before the fisa court, the executive could basically do what it wanted wrt "terrorist/spy" suspects. It's only after Congress intervened that we got something that tries to strike a balance between the need to investigate sensitive subjects and the need to have somebody check executive privelege. >I didn't see Boston bombings avoided. A patient at a hospital goes in for surgery and dies on the operating table. Is medicine useless? You have absolutely no way of measuring how much security a set of laws has given us, short of going back in time and replaying the same universe without the laws. And even then, these events are so dependent on singular events that it's hard to say what would work. A related argument is how only X people died in Boston, while 100X people died in car crashes in the past week. Except that the Boston bombings are a singular event, and it only takes one/two arrests to stop X people from dying. 100X car deaths is probably 50X different accidents, each due to varying causes. Of course we'll want to go after the "small big wins". It seems easier to tackle. If you think that, as a society, we can stop a somewhat constant N bad things from happening, then it's only normal for us to run after the biggest bad things and try to stop that, even if there's X tiny problems, with X much larger than N, that are easier to deal with.
    - 13y ago
rayiner 13y ago
I understand the importance of focusing on the government, but I think use of this sort of data should be restricted for everyone, not just the government. What happens when employers realize that you can filter out less desirable employees by correlating the movements of their social groups and cross-referencing it against credit history databases? We fear what the government can do with the data, but as a practical matter its corporate America that's more likely to actually screw over large numbers of people with this sort of data.
- john_b 13y ago
  This is what bothers me about most of America's large tech companies' recent opposition to various NSA programs. They pioneered many of the techniques (albeit independently...usually) yet now point their fingers at the government.
- ninjac0der 13y ago
  History indicates to me that they're one and the same and will work together for the common goal of fleecing the masses.
diminoten 13y ago
Setting aside morality for a moment, that's a pretty cool little system there. What havoc would be wrought if such a system were public? Heh, the mind reels.
- CodeMage 13y ago
  Really? You want to know what havoc can be wrought by misuse of information sharing? Here: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sexting-shame-and-suicide-20130917 http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sexting-shame-and-s...
  - diminoten 13y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of a per-county twitter feed: SUSPECTED DRUNK DRIVER HEADING EASTBOUND I-29 LICENSE WVY-3455 Or just generally knowing where everyone is at all times. I know you're out of your home currently, so I could go rob it. But then you'd see I was in your home without permission, so I'd be easily caught. But then I guess I wouldn't have to lock my door, because everyone is accountable. Besides, those kids are operating under the false assumption that privacy still exists. Once you know you're being watched, you behave differently.
- KrisAndrew 13y ago
  I would think a system like that being public would cause a great deal of interpersonal problems until ways to circumvent the data collection were found (even if it meant tearing GPS receivers out of mobile phones). I remember reading a meta-analysis of lie detection and deception studies in humans, and there was one social psychology experiment where the participants were asked not to lie for the duration of the experiment. They couldn't even use the tactic of "white lying." Overwhelmingly the participants said it was extremely difficult not to lie and when they couldn't lie, it ended up causing their stress levels to rise and their relationships suffered. Lying, or much more fundamentally - concealing, is a necessary process for maintaining social relationships. [You don't want to tell Mary what you really think about her new dress, and in the same way, you don't want to tell your boyfriend that you're throwing him a surprise party, even if he asks you directly.] As technology becomes increasingly woven into our social fabric, it's going to have to conform with our pre-established patterns.
bazzargh 13y ago
It feels like there's a game in here. The Sims meets Uplink.
- rtpg 13y ago
  six degrees of sabotage (http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six), made for a gaming hackathon, feels a bit like what this would be.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tedunangst 13y ago
So was Jack arrested or not?
- 2jgi7 13y ago
  You'll notice they prefer the term "interdicted" now. "Arrested" implies rights.
  - KrisAndrew 13y ago
    They stopped his vehicle and summoned him an Uber (charging him stewed prune surge pricing).
inspectahdeck 13y ago
Hey, that's not what the Palantir UI looks like!
etanazir 13y ago
Could? The government may know you better than you know yourself; and perhaps the only reaction to be had upstairs is when you change a habit; i.e. quite unexpectedly break the prediction model for your life.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
This is why its important for people to get their respective states to start writing laws which protect people's privacy and usurp the Federal Preemption of states rights in regards to people's private information. This is a great paper which addresses this in regards to environmental laws. This kind of argument can also be made in protection of people's private information. It's about restraining and balancing the federal laws with state laws and not allowing the feds to overstep state laws. http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v102/n2/649/LR102n2Learner.pdf http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v102/n2/649/LR102n...
Aaronneyer 13y ago
Maybe I'm just a huge data nerd, but this article made me really excited.
nl 13y ago
Nice of the ACLU to spec how the NSA's software work and what it should look like.
lanaius 13y ago
Setting aside all of the other existing information, the crux of many of the arguments in the article depend on the government knowing the use of particular addresses. That's data most city/county/state governments already have laws that they should know (for tax assessments, occupancy limits, health inspections, census, etc.) and yet they frequently have incorrect or incomplete information on this. While pervasive tracking is indeed a problematic state, I still find it humorous at how competent we truly believe the government to be in retaining accuracy in all this data given how often our interactions with government and private businesses revolve around them FIXING their data about us.
rurounijones 13y ago
For those thinking this is so far down the slippery slope as to be ridiculous: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/new-documents-show-how-the-nsa-infers-relationships-based-on-mobile-location-data/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10...
wissler 13y ago
Yet another example of how the government can use this information to "discredit radicalizers": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_...
- judk 13y ago
  Interesting... There are 535 high-profile Americans the NSA could check, many of whom have fascinating porn-search histories and radical (often anti-porn) public agendas.
  - lazyjones 13y ago
    I believe that the number of politicians being extorted by various secret services based on such information to act/vote in a particular way (in the US and abroad) to be much higher. In particular, many politicians in the EU seem to be aligned with US policies (those unpopular in the EU) a bit too much. They've probably got a lot to hide..
    - zymhan 13y ago
      Just to clarify, you think the FBI/CIA/NSA/whatever is spying on politicians in order to extort them?
- csandreasen 13y ago
  Stewart Baker, who was quoted extensively for that article, had some interesting words regarding it[1]: When one of the authors, Ryan Grim, called me for comment, he said that while Glenn Greenwald was transitioning to his new Omidyar-funded venture he was temporarily publishing his Snowden leaks with HuffPo. So when he asked for my take on the NSA story, pretty much the first words out of my mouth were, “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?” The story quotes practically everything I said to Grim except that remark, even though I returned to the point a couple of times and emphasized that it summed up my view. I don’t think HuffPo cut the quote because they ran out of electrons. The article itself is so tediously long that I defy anyone to read every word in a single go. Nor because my remark was inaccurate. It turns out that Glenn Greenwald has written an entire book devoted to exposing the contradiction between Republicans’ ideology and their private lives. In Greenwald’s words, “While the right wing endlessly exploits claims of moral superiority … virtually its entire top leadership have lives characterized by the most decadent, hedonistic, and morally unrestrained behavior imaginable …[including] a string of shattered marriages, active out-of-wedlock sex lives, and highly ‘untraditional’ and ‘un-Christian’ personal lives [endless detail omitted].” His book certainly makes the NSA memo sound restrained and cautious, but both are motivated by the same idea. Grim and Greenwald very likely cut the quote because it would have undermined the narrative of the piece, which combines solicitude for the poor Islamists whose sexual and financial hypocrisy might be exposed with outrage at the NSA for even considering such a tactic. The quote would have made them look like, well, hypocrites. The incident makes me wonder what else Greenwald leaves out of his stories. And why we should continue to trust snippets of documents selected by someone who thinks that the difference between Islamist extremists and Republicans is that one is an enemy that deserves no quarter and the other is sort of like Martin Luther King, except for the part about wanting to kill us. [1] http://www.volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/
api 13y ago
This indirectly makes a great point. While everyone's been talking about the danger of a turn-key totalitarian state -- the danger of intentional totalitarianism -- much less has been made of the danger of an unintentional totalitarian state arising from overzealous use of these systems by law enforcement. I think that's a much greater immediate risk. Replace "DUI pattern detected" with "likely child predator." Just the insinuation that a person is a pedophile can destroy a person's life.
cjoh 13y ago
It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also important to recognize that this is conjecture. From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this. I know this will make me unpopular amongst this crowd, but The truth is, I'm far more afraid of data like this getting into the wrong hands because it's being stored improperly or insecurely, than I am of government being malicious with it. Heck, I'm more afraid of my insurance adjuster than I am a malicious cop.
- tikhonj 13y ago
  Part of the issue with government is that you ultimately have much less recourse against the government than against anyone else. This exacerbates the potential damage the government could do with any given technology.
  - antimagic 13y ago
    I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police. Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how this sort of data can be misused by making them the victims first. As a bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for ordinary citizens. Still, it's completely crazy. These types of system are a direct threat to democracy and need to be shut down. In fact it's worse than that. At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.
    - _mulder_ 13y ago
      >At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law. The year 1990 called and wants it's comment back!
nswanberg 13y ago
This article attempts to show what a local government could do, but does anyone have access to the sort of location dataset that could give one an intuition about how likely it would be that individuals would be singled out using the data shown? The article uses maps of Peoria, IL, so let's assume we're dealing with Peoria. There appear to be roughly 115K people between 18-64 in its metro area (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+peoria+il+metro+area+demographics http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+peoria+il...), and 11 traffic cops. (http://www.peoriagov.org/peoria-police-department/police-divisions-units/ http://www.peoriagov.org/peoria-police-department/police-div...) These cops appear to arrest 23 people per month for driving under the influence, and hand out about 1750 other traffic citations (not linking directly to the PDF to save their server but you can find it under crime stats). The article implies that there would be more traffic stops due to increased DUI suspicion, and it certainly seems that it could happen, but given these population, police, and police activity numbers, and given that the article itself gives a false-positive example, how likely would that be? Is it reasonable to think that these cops currently have a lighter load and have time to be dispatched to investigate a potential DUI? I am not suggesting that it is of no concern for the government to have unfettered access to data, and I can imagine a vast number of possible scenarios in which the data could be misused, but possibly we can better quantify that concern.
- Bluestrike2 13y ago
  You're assuming that individuals would have to be singled out for analysis in the first place. They wouldn't. With enough computing power, it'd be trivial to run this sort of analysis in near real-time for everyone. A few years down the line, this is even less of a concern: increased power, improved analysis tools, and greater efficiencies will all come together to empower just such a system at costs manageable by many local governments (particularly if they start working together to manage costs). This means you've got a practical means of confidently predicting potential crime. Even better, the same mechanisms that help you predict potential criminal acts also help you close active cases more efficiently. That inevitably results in significant boosts to police productivity. So armed, you now get to deploy your existing resources more effectively. Instead of parking a patrol car at a "pretty good spot" to nail violators for a few hours, you'll reposition yourself continuously to the location offering the greatest probability of an arrest/citation at that specific moment in time. Instead of passively waiting for violators to happen across your location, you're actively positioning yourself to nail them directly. The specific individual doesn't matter. But you won't be dispatching patrollers in the current manner. Since you'll also be tracking your own patrol cars, you can correlate the two and dispatch each car to the highest probability incident nearest to them where they're likely to catch a potential perpetrator. By having everyone under effective surveillance, for every minute of every day, each of your resources will always be deployed in the most efficient manner possible. Where it really gets wild is when you start to consider traffic enforcement automation along with the push for local government drone coverage. Along with the existing red light and speed cameras, you'll have mobile platforms capable of filling in for any holes in your patrol car coverage while also benefitting from the same efficiency gains described earlier. And they'll be gathering additional data (movements, facial recognition, automatic number plate recognition, etc.) to send back to base while they're doing it. It won't be like The Machine from Person of Interest, but all things considered, it'll be closer to it than anything else to date.
dredwerker 13y ago
The police go to Jack's house and educate him on not drinking and driving and give him a free taxi token.
bane 13y ago
Now imagine similar data in the hands of a private company, "I see you like to go to a bar regularly, would you like to see this beer advertisement?"
neil_s 13y ago
Am I the only one for whom the article had the opposite than intended effect? I was expecting some real life horror story of a false positive or deliberate framing, but instead I was given examples of how this data could be used constructively to try and evaluate where there might be a high likelihood of crime occurring, and trying to prevent it. In my eyes, using tax dollars to prevent crime rather than punishing it a HUGE win!
- aestra 13y ago
  There was a false positive in there. There was a "probable criminal activity" that turned out to be a real estate agent.
  - msellout 13y ago
    Are we not willing to accept a certain number of false positives if the net effect is good?
  - neil_s 13y ago
    The system only provides leads for further inspection, not evidence. When a metal detector has a positive, false or not, you inspect the bag, you don't arrest the person.
blah32497 13y ago
This is fear mongering. You could have some person out in the field tailing you and get the same info (maybe even more). You can also put up a camera and tag people as potential DUIs based on how close to the middle of the lane they are driving. So what? What's important to ask is what can the government do with the data. And NSA or not, what they are can do is limited by the law. No database changes that.
- dwaltrip 13y ago
  It's not the same goddamn thing. The article describes programmatic policing. THEY CAN APPLY THESE TECHNOLOGIES TO THE ENTIRE POPULATION AT ONCE AS THEY ARE NO LONGER LIMITED BY NUMBER OF OFFICERS AVAILABLE. This carries new, complex risks for society at large. How hard is that to understand? Relying solely on unclear "policy" and "access controls" to protect us from these risks is extremely foolish. Now, I'm not saying this is happening now, or will happen tomorrow. But these thought exercises are very useful and informative.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    It's not a serious risk, because people would hate it. If people in your community don't hate this kind of policing and continue to support it with their votes, you can move somewhere else. Look at the fun local police departments have had trying to install "mere" red light cameras.
  - blah32497 13y ago
    You're not really explaining what's "foolish" or a "complex risk to society"... Why is it okay to do it to several thousand people (selected in some non-systematic/statistical process more akin to voodoo than science), but not okay to do to the whole population? Shouldn't everyone be treated equal? Seems like the way we have it now, if you get on some officials bad side you will get harassed by the TSA and maybe audited (there aren't that many tools at the disposal of the gov't to make your life difficult) And most likely no one will notice or care. Doesn't that illustrate a more fundamental problem with our laws? And shouldn't we be addressing that?
lstamour 13y ago
Suddenly I'm not as sure I want a self-driving car. Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in it? (Wishful thinking, I'm sure...) Of course a self-driving car would defeat the need to catch someone after a party perhaps, so bad example? :)
- estebank 13y ago
  Think of this: face recognition is only as good as the pool of identities you're checking against. If the police car scans the plate of a car being trailed, it knows the owners identity. From there, the police mounted camera (you know that's coming) can check the drivers identity against the owner as well as the owner's social graph, and with a high degree of certainty have the identity of everybody in the car, within seconds of stopping the car. If you couple this with broad camera coverage, where you can track anybody backwards in time just long enough to get a shot of that person getting out of its car (it's easy to follow a body across cameras, much easier than identifying a face against 350 million possible persons), or from a public transport where you've used an identifiable rfid card, you now have a small pool to check against, and because you have a selection of headshots from every angle, you can confirm the identity. Now just do that with everyone with every data's ounce you can get your hands on, and you've got yourself The Machine from Person of Interest, without the silly "identify crime before it happens" angle, but with enough information to also flesh out everybody's social graph independently of the attack surface you might have online. This is how A Scanner Darkly becomes true. I remember watching PoI to you and thinking, "this is silly, it's impossible to do this, without human operators and secret access to private feeds". Now, it feels like the screen writers I was underestimating after years of silly "electrical outlet viruses" and the like in movies were much more forward thinking and acurate than I was.
- _mulder_ 13y ago
  But a self-driving car would be the perfect antidote to DUI offences! Interesting that you would place overblown and misleading fears over Government tracking before the increased personal safety a self-driving car could potential bring (eliminating DUI being a great example)! Also, you seem to suggest the government tracking is vehicle related. A mobile phone would be a much easier method of determining whether you're in a vehicle or not.
aabalkan 13y ago
I don't know why everyone is paranoid about unseen location data being collected. They often blame proprietary software like iOS/Android collect location data and send Apple/Google servers. That sort of transfer would be evident by tracing traffic and there are tons of reverse engineers out there intentionally keeping an eye on transferred packages that might contain sensitive private data. That would be a huge breakthrough if it would exist and be revealed.
- eurleif 13y ago
  >That sort of transfer would be evident It is evident: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/ https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/ Besides, the issue is also location data from cell tower triangulation. That data is available to your cell carrier whenever you connect to their network.
shurcooL 13y ago
Is Jack a celebrity? Why does anyone (other than a data mining algorithm) care about him.
- estebank 13y ago
  Is Bill Montgomery the cop performing the queries?
beardfu 13y ago
Reminds me of the Big Brother pizza shop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zh9fibMaEk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zh9fibMaEk
sharemywin 13y ago
Couldn't google or apple build this?
puppetmaster3 13y ago
That is not how this task is done by programmers, here's a newsflash: We use Bayes! A lot of it. (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network#Inference_and_learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network#Inference_and_... ) Translated for 'non programmers: computers don't think the way we do, they look at (big) data, there is no causality. (ref: for example, if human brain can't diagnose disease, since we are limited in thinking to causality, we use computers: http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/opre.46.4.491?journalCode=opre http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/opre.46.4.491?... ) Please don't talk about how computers detect something in big data, if you don't know some math, ex(' causal calculus') Item to discuss: Getting pulled over and being told, we don't know why we pulled you over, but there's a 85% chance you are non-compliant.

278 points by G5ANDY 13y ago

A related experiment: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/ http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/

nswanberg 13y ago
Nice. I was looking for that yesterday for the Google Location history discussion. Digging through this site's javascript I found this comment: "Für diesen Quellcode komme ich nicht in den Himmel."
- schoen 13y ago
  In case you don't know German: "Orpnhfr bs guvf fbhepr pbqr, V'z abg tbvat gb urnira." (ROT13 for fellow non-native German speakers who want to think about the meaning for a moment.)
  - rrattoo 13y ago
    In case you don't have time to waste: "Because of this source code, I'm not going to heaven." (English for fellow grownups.)

rtpg 13y ago

Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes >Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from the FISA court. Stuff that has come out of these leaks have ranged from banal (oh, we listen to the German Chancelor's cell phone? What else is new) to absolutely damning (forcing companies to hand over SSL keys). But even in the most damning cases, all of these happened within the legal frameworks given to them (such as the National Security Letters) and maybe some overzealous law enforcement agents. The illegal incidents can be explained more by incidents outside of how things are "supposed" to work (LOVEINT is probably not sanctioned by the NSA), and a lack of strong implementation of the framework given by the courts. The narrative has always seemed to be "check out how the NSA is going crazy over here!". But the reality is "check out how all these politicians are voting in these new laws allowing this to take place!" From the leaks you can even see how the courts are constantly reeling things in, the system is actually working. We hear about old NSA programs that got shut down because of the FISA court's rulings. This is how rule of law works! We vote laws, and people follow them. To actually come to this, given all we've seen from how courts rule on this issue in general, and the FISA court's rulings, this sort of data sharing would absolutely definitely not be allowed to exist. No judge would agree to this being allowed to be set in place, as it so obviously goes against 4th ammendement in such a program's intent. Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell the contents of your e-mails to somebody. This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws.

atmosx 13y ago
> Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell the contents of your e-mails to somebody. I am not sure you are listening, what is happening around you. > This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws. It's working for whom? Presumably these laws require a little bit less privacy for a more secure country. I didn't see Boston bombings avoided. If the answer to this is please give us more privacy, to avoid this in the future, I'd say no.
- rtpg 13y ago
  >It's working for whom? Presumably these laws require a little bit less privacy for a more secure country. The fisa court is an example of laws working in our favor. Before the fisa court, the executive could basically do what it wanted wrt "terrorist/spy" suspects. It's only after Congress intervened that we got something that tries to strike a balance between the need to investigate sensitive subjects and the need to have somebody check executive privelege. >I didn't see Boston bombings avoided. A patient at a hospital goes in for surgery and dies on the operating table. Is medicine useless? You have absolutely no way of measuring how much security a set of laws has given us, short of going back in time and replaying the same universe without the laws. And even then, these events are so dependent on singular events that it's hard to say what would work. A related argument is how only X people died in Boston, while 100X people died in car crashes in the past week. Except that the Boston bombings are a singular event, and it only takes one/two arrests to stop X people from dying. 100X car deaths is probably 50X different accidents, each due to varying causes. Of course we'll want to go after the "small big wins". It seems easier to tackle. If you think that, as a society, we can stop a somewhat constant N bad things from happening, then it's only normal for us to run after the biggest bad things and try to stop that, even if there's X tiny problems, with X much larger than N, that are easier to deal with.
  - 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

I understand the importance of focusing on the government, but I think use of this sort of data should be restricted for everyone, not just the government. What happens when employers realize that you can filter out less desirable employees by correlating the movements of their social groups and cross-referencing it against credit history databases? We fear what the government can do with the data, but as a practical matter its corporate America that's more likely to actually screw over large numbers of people with this sort of data.

john_b 13y ago
This is what bothers me about most of America's large tech companies' recent opposition to various NSA programs. They pioneered many of the techniques (albeit independently...usually) yet now point their fingers at the government.
ninjac0der 13y ago
History indicates to me that they're one and the same and will work together for the common goal of fleecing the masses.

diminoten 13y ago

Setting aside morality for a moment, that's a pretty cool little system there. What havoc would be wrought if such a system were public? Heh, the mind reels.

CodeMage 13y ago
Really? You want to know what havoc can be wrought by misuse of information sharing? Here: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sexting-shame-and-suicide-20130917 http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sexting-shame-and-s...
- diminoten 13y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of a per-county twitter feed: SUSPECTED DRUNK DRIVER HEADING EASTBOUND I-29 LICENSE WVY-3455 Or just generally knowing where everyone is at all times. I know you're out of your home currently, so I could go rob it. But then you'd see I was in your home without permission, so I'd be easily caught. But then I guess I wouldn't have to lock my door, because everyone is accountable. Besides, those kids are operating under the false assumption that privacy still exists. Once you know you're being watched, you behave differently.
KrisAndrew 13y ago
I would think a system like that being public would cause a great deal of interpersonal problems until ways to circumvent the data collection were found (even if it meant tearing GPS receivers out of mobile phones). I remember reading a meta-analysis of lie detection and deception studies in humans, and there was one social psychology experiment where the participants were asked not to lie for the duration of the experiment. They couldn't even use the tactic of "white lying." Overwhelmingly the participants said it was extremely difficult not to lie and when they couldn't lie, it ended up causing their stress levels to rise and their relationships suffered. Lying, or much more fundamentally - concealing, is a necessary process for maintaining social relationships. [You don't want to tell Mary what you really think about her new dress, and in the same way, you don't want to tell your boyfriend that you're throwing him a surprise party, even if he asks you directly.] As technology becomes increasingly woven into our social fabric, it's going to have to conform with our pre-established patterns.

bazzargh 13y ago

It feels like there's a game in here. The Sims meets Uplink.

rtpg 13y ago
six degrees of sabotage (http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six), made for a gaming hackathon, feels a bit like what this would be.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tedunangst 13y ago

So was Jack arrested or not?

2jgi7 13y ago
You'll notice they prefer the term "interdicted" now. "Arrested" implies rights.
- KrisAndrew 13y ago
  They stopped his vehicle and summoned him an Uber (charging him stewed prune surge pricing).

inspectahdeck 13y ago

Hey, that's not what the Palantir UI looks like!

etanazir 13y ago

Could? The government may know you better than you know yourself; and perhaps the only reaction to be had upstairs is when you change a habit; i.e. quite unexpectedly break the prediction model for your life.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

This is why its important for people to get their respective states to start writing laws which protect people's privacy and usurp the Federal Preemption of states rights in regards to people's private information. This is a great paper which addresses this in regards to environmental laws. This kind of argument can also be made in protection of people's private information. It's about restraining and balancing the federal laws with state laws and not allowing the feds to overstep state laws. http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v102/n2/649/LR102n2Learner.pdf http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v102/n2/649/LR102n...

Aaronneyer 13y ago

Maybe I'm just a huge data nerd, but this article made me really excited.

nl 13y ago

Nice of the ACLU to spec how the NSA's software work and what it should look like.

lanaius 13y ago

Setting aside all of the other existing information, the crux of many of the arguments in the article depend on the government knowing the use of particular addresses. That's data most city/county/state governments already have laws that they should know (for tax assessments, occupancy limits, health inspections, census, etc.) and yet they frequently have incorrect or incomplete information on this. While pervasive tracking is indeed a problematic state, I still find it humorous at how competent we truly believe the government to be in retaining accuracy in all this data given how often our interactions with government and private businesses revolve around them FIXING their data about us.

rurounijones 13y ago

For those thinking this is so far down the slippery slope as to be ridiculous: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/new-documents-show-how-the-nsa-infers-relationships-based-on-mobile-location-data/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10...

wissler 13y ago

Yet another example of how the government can use this information to "discredit radicalizers": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_...

judk 13y ago
Interesting... There are 535 high-profile Americans the NSA could check, many of whom have fascinating porn-search histories and radical (often anti-porn) public agendas.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  I believe that the number of politicians being extorted by various secret services based on such information to act/vote in a particular way (in the US and abroad) to be much higher. In particular, many politicians in the EU seem to be aligned with US policies (those unpopular in the EU) a bit too much. They've probably got a lot to hide..
  - zymhan 13y ago
    Just to clarify, you think the FBI/CIA/NSA/whatever is spying on politicians in order to extort them?
csandreasen 13y ago
Stewart Baker, who was quoted extensively for that article, had some interesting words regarding it[1]: When one of the authors, Ryan Grim, called me for comment, he said that while Glenn Greenwald was transitioning to his new Omidyar-funded venture he was temporarily publishing his Snowden leaks with HuffPo. So when he asked for my take on the NSA story, pretty much the first words out of my mouth were, “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?” The story quotes practically everything I said to Grim except that remark, even though I returned to the point a couple of times and emphasized that it summed up my view. I don’t think HuffPo cut the quote because they ran out of electrons. The article itself is so tediously long that I defy anyone to read every word in a single go. Nor because my remark was inaccurate. It turns out that Glenn Greenwald has written an entire book devoted to exposing the contradiction between Republicans’ ideology and their private lives. In Greenwald’s words, “While the right wing endlessly exploits claims of moral superiority … virtually its entire top leadership have lives characterized by the most decadent, hedonistic, and morally unrestrained behavior imaginable …[including] a string of shattered marriages, active out-of-wedlock sex lives, and highly ‘untraditional’ and ‘un-Christian’ personal lives [endless detail omitted].” His book certainly makes the NSA memo sound restrained and cautious, but both are motivated by the same idea. Grim and Greenwald very likely cut the quote because it would have undermined the narrative of the piece, which combines solicitude for the poor Islamists whose sexual and financial hypocrisy might be exposed with outrage at the NSA for even considering such a tactic. The quote would have made them look like, well, hypocrites. The incident makes me wonder what else Greenwald leaves out of his stories. And why we should continue to trust snippets of documents selected by someone who thinks that the difference between Islamist extremists and Republicans is that one is an enemy that deserves no quarter and the other is sort of like Martin Luther King, except for the part about wanting to kill us. [1] http://www.volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/

api 13y ago

This indirectly makes a great point. While everyone's been talking about the danger of a turn-key totalitarian state -- the danger of intentional totalitarianism -- much less has been made of the danger of an unintentional totalitarian state arising from overzealous use of these systems by law enforcement. I think that's a much greater immediate risk. Replace "DUI pattern detected" with "likely child predator." Just the insinuation that a person is a pedophile can destroy a person's life.

cjoh 13y ago

It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also important to recognize that this is conjecture. From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this. I know this will make me unpopular amongst this crowd, but The truth is, I'm far more afraid of data like this getting into the wrong hands because it's being stored improperly or insecurely, than I am of government being malicious with it. Heck, I'm more afraid of my insurance adjuster than I am a malicious cop.

tikhonj 13y ago
Part of the issue with government is that you ultimately have much less recourse against the government than against anyone else. This exacerbates the potential damage the government could do with any given technology.
- antimagic 13y ago
  I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police. Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how this sort of data can be misused by making them the victims first. As a bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for ordinary citizens. Still, it's completely crazy. These types of system are a direct threat to democracy and need to be shut down. In fact it's worse than that. At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.
  - _mulder_ 13y ago
    >At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law. The year 1990 called and wants it's comment back!

nswanberg 13y ago

This article attempts to show what a local government could do, but does anyone have access to the sort of location dataset that could give one an intuition about how likely it would be that individuals would be singled out using the data shown? The article uses maps of Peoria, IL, so let's assume we're dealing with Peoria. There appear to be roughly 115K people between 18-64 in its metro area (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+peoria+il+metro+area+demographics http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+peoria+il...), and 11 traffic cops. (http://www.peoriagov.org/peoria-police-department/police-divisions-units/ http://www.peoriagov.org/peoria-police-department/police-div...) These cops appear to arrest 23 people per month for driving under the influence, and hand out about 1750 other traffic citations (not linking directly to the PDF to save their server but you can find it under crime stats). The article implies that there would be more traffic stops due to increased DUI suspicion, and it certainly seems that it could happen, but given these population, police, and police activity numbers, and given that the article itself gives a false-positive example, how likely would that be? Is it reasonable to think that these cops currently have a lighter load and have time to be dispatched to investigate a potential DUI? I am not suggesting that it is of no concern for the government to have unfettered access to data, and I can imagine a vast number of possible scenarios in which the data could be misused, but possibly we can better quantify that concern.

Bluestrike2 13y ago
You're assuming that individuals would have to be singled out for analysis in the first place. They wouldn't. With enough computing power, it'd be trivial to run this sort of analysis in near real-time for everyone. A few years down the line, this is even less of a concern: increased power, improved analysis tools, and greater efficiencies will all come together to empower just such a system at costs manageable by many local governments (particularly if they start working together to manage costs). This means you've got a practical means of confidently predicting potential crime. Even better, the same mechanisms that help you predict potential criminal acts also help you close active cases more efficiently. That inevitably results in significant boosts to police productivity. So armed, you now get to deploy your existing resources more effectively. Instead of parking a patrol car at a "pretty good spot" to nail violators for a few hours, you'll reposition yourself continuously to the location offering the greatest probability of an arrest/citation at that specific moment in time. Instead of passively waiting for violators to happen across your location, you're actively positioning yourself to nail them directly. The specific individual doesn't matter. But you won't be dispatching patrollers in the current manner. Since you'll also be tracking your own patrol cars, you can correlate the two and dispatch each car to the highest probability incident nearest to them where they're likely to catch a potential perpetrator. By having everyone under effective surveillance, for every minute of every day, each of your resources will always be deployed in the most efficient manner possible. Where it really gets wild is when you start to consider traffic enforcement automation along with the push for local government drone coverage. Along with the existing red light and speed cameras, you'll have mobile platforms capable of filling in for any holes in your patrol car coverage while also benefitting from the same efficiency gains described earlier. And they'll be gathering additional data (movements, facial recognition, automatic number plate recognition, etc.) to send back to base while they're doing it. It won't be like The Machine from Person of Interest, but all things considered, it'll be closer to it than anything else to date.

dredwerker 13y ago

The police go to Jack's house and educate him on not drinking and driving and give him a free taxi token.

bane 13y ago

Now imagine similar data in the hands of a private company, "I see you like to go to a bar regularly, would you like to see this beer advertisement?"

neil_s 13y ago

Am I the only one for whom the article had the opposite than intended effect? I was expecting some real life horror story of a false positive or deliberate framing, but instead I was given examples of how this data could be used constructively to try and evaluate where there might be a high likelihood of crime occurring, and trying to prevent it. In my eyes, using tax dollars to prevent crime rather than punishing it a HUGE win!

aestra 13y ago
There was a false positive in there. There was a "probable criminal activity" that turned out to be a real estate agent.
- msellout 13y ago
  Are we not willing to accept a certain number of false positives if the net effect is good?
- neil_s 13y ago
  The system only provides leads for further inspection, not evidence. When a metal detector has a positive, false or not, you inspect the bag, you don't arrest the person.

blah32497 13y ago

This is fear mongering. You could have some person out in the field tailing you and get the same info (maybe even more). You can also put up a camera and tag people as potential DUIs based on how close to the middle of the lane they are driving. So what? What's important to ask is what can the government do with the data. And NSA or not, what they are can do is limited by the law. No database changes that.

dwaltrip 13y ago
It's not the same goddamn thing. The article describes programmatic policing. THEY CAN APPLY THESE TECHNOLOGIES TO THE ENTIRE POPULATION AT ONCE AS THEY ARE NO LONGER LIMITED BY NUMBER OF OFFICERS AVAILABLE. This carries new, complex risks for society at large. How hard is that to understand? Relying solely on unclear "policy" and "access controls" to protect us from these risks is extremely foolish. Now, I'm not saying this is happening now, or will happen tomorrow. But these thought exercises are very useful and informative.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  It's not a serious risk, because people would hate it. If people in your community don't hate this kind of policing and continue to support it with their votes, you can move somewhere else. Look at the fun local police departments have had trying to install "mere" red light cameras.
- blah32497 13y ago
  You're not really explaining what's "foolish" or a "complex risk to society"... Why is it okay to do it to several thousand people (selected in some non-systematic/statistical process more akin to voodoo than science), but not okay to do to the whole population? Shouldn't everyone be treated equal? Seems like the way we have it now, if you get on some officials bad side you will get harassed by the TSA and maybe audited (there aren't that many tools at the disposal of the gov't to make your life difficult) And most likely no one will notice or care. Doesn't that illustrate a more fundamental problem with our laws? And shouldn't we be addressing that?

lstamour 13y ago

Suddenly I'm not as sure I want a self-driving car. Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in it? (Wishful thinking, I'm sure...) Of course a self-driving car would defeat the need to catch someone after a party perhaps, so bad example? :)

estebank 13y ago
Think of this: face recognition is only as good as the pool of identities you're checking against. If the police car scans the plate of a car being trailed, it knows the owners identity. From there, the police mounted camera (you know that's coming) can check the drivers identity against the owner as well as the owner's social graph, and with a high degree of certainty have the identity of everybody in the car, within seconds of stopping the car. If you couple this with broad camera coverage, where you can track anybody backwards in time just long enough to get a shot of that person getting out of its car (it's easy to follow a body across cameras, much easier than identifying a face against 350 million possible persons), or from a public transport where you've used an identifiable rfid card, you now have a small pool to check against, and because you have a selection of headshots from every angle, you can confirm the identity. Now just do that with everyone with every data's ounce you can get your hands on, and you've got yourself The Machine from Person of Interest, without the silly "identify crime before it happens" angle, but with enough information to also flesh out everybody's social graph independently of the attack surface you might have online. This is how A Scanner Darkly becomes true. I remember watching PoI to you and thinking, "this is silly, it's impossible to do this, without human operators and secret access to private feeds". Now, it feels like the screen writers I was underestimating after years of silly "electrical outlet viruses" and the like in movies were much more forward thinking and acurate than I was.
_mulder_ 13y ago
But a self-driving car would be the perfect antidote to DUI offences! Interesting that you would place overblown and misleading fears over Government tracking before the increased personal safety a self-driving car could potential bring (eliminating DUI being a great example)! Also, you seem to suggest the government tracking is vehicle related. A mobile phone would be a much easier method of determining whether you're in a vehicle or not.

aabalkan 13y ago

I don't know why everyone is paranoid about unseen location data being collected. They often blame proprietary software like iOS/Android collect location data and send Apple/Google servers. That sort of transfer would be evident by tracing traffic and there are tons of reverse engineers out there intentionally keeping an eye on transferred packages that might contain sensitive private data. That would be a huge breakthrough if it would exist and be revealed.

eurleif 13y ago
>That sort of transfer would be evident It is evident: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/ https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/ Besides, the issue is also location data from cell tower triangulation. That data is available to your cell carrier whenever you connect to their network.

shurcooL 13y ago

Is Jack a celebrity? Why does anyone (other than a data mining algorithm) care about him.

estebank 13y ago
Is Bill Montgomery the cop performing the queries?

beardfu 13y ago

Reminds me of the Big Brother pizza shop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zh9fibMaEk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zh9fibMaEk

sharemywin 13y ago

Couldn't google or apple build this?

puppetmaster3 13y ago

That is not how this task is done by programmers, here's a newsflash: We use Bayes! A lot of it. (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network#Inference_and_learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network#Inference_and_... ) Translated for 'non programmers: computers don't think the way we do, they look at (big) data, there is no causality. (ref: for example, if human brain can't diagnose disease, since we are limited in thinking to causality, we use computers: http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/opre.46.4.491?journalCode=opre http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/opre.46.4.491?... ) Please don't talk about how computers detect something in big data, if you don't know some math, ex(' causal calculus') Item to discuss: Getting pulled over and being told, we don't know why we pulled you over, but there's a 85% chance you are non-compliant.