7 ms·

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

177 points by Libertatea 12y ago

Sambdala 12y ago
"Stop being so paranoid. Nobody's interested in reading your emails. Besides, they're only collecting metadata."
msandford 12y ago
Okay so why can't we get any reporting with any numeric literacy? How many people does the average person make contact with in a 5 year time span? Let's call this number X for hop 1. How many people does each of the people in X then make contact with in the same 5 years? If we assume that on the whole people know ABOUT as many people as others, we can also call that number X for hop 2. Now of course there's going to be overlap, out of X people somewhere between 0% and probably 70% might overlap between any one person of interest, hop 1 and hop 2. Let's say that on average there's a 40% overlap. And let's call the Sweep(X) the number of people that get caught up in surveillance as a result of a single suspected terrorist. Sweep(X) = 0.4 * X (first hop) x 0.4 * X (second hop) Sweep(X) = 0.16 * X ^ 2 That's quadratic and as anyone who knows math, and especially people who know about Big-Oh notation, it's bad because Sweep(X) grows much faster than X does. But how big is X? Well we can look to Dunbar's number to give us somewhere to start. Wikipedia says that it's between 100 and 250 but most people use 150 as a reasonable approximation. Of course that's STABLE relationships, not acquaintances, friends-of-friends, or anything like that. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the 150 number and then assume that you probably make contact with one random person every week. Over 5 years, that's another 250. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number So if we assume that X is 150 + 250 = 400 what do we get? Sweep(400) = 0.16 * 400 * 400 = 25,600 let's just say 25k for short. Now there are around 300 million people in the US. 300mm / 25k = 12000. That means that the NSA need only find 12,000 people (on average) to get all the call records for everyone in the US for the last 5 years. It gets worse, though. What happens if you make contact with TWO random people every week? Then X = 150 + 500 = 650 Sweep(650) = 0.16 * 650 * 650 = 67,600. 300mm / 67k = 4477 people suspected of nefarious deeds in order to gain all call records. As you can see this gets really out of hand really fast. And that's why I'm a bit upset that nobody's doing the math around the "two hops" argument because I assure you that the folks at the NSA aren't rolling over and giving up. This is something that SOUNDS reasonable but in actuality means little/no reform whatsoever. EDIT: wikipedia link
- k2enemy 12y ago
  It is actually much worse than that. You're assuming a uniform distribution over the numbers that people call, but there are some numbers that a significant fraction of the population call. For example, how many people are three hops away from a "target" through Comcast, Time Warner, Dell, etc? Of course the NSA would probably ignore these spurious connections to generate leads for an actual investigation. But I assume that they would use them to create the largest possible list of people that they are "allowed" to collect and store information on.
  - msandford 12y ago
    Yes I was being conservative so that few reasonable people could challenge the assumptions I made. But you're completely correct. I bet Amazon gets you the second hop to at least 20% of the whole country. Once you add in all the 800, 866, etc phone numbers I'd imagine that two hops gets you to very nearly every person in the US with a starting pool of perhaps only a few dozen people. I could easily see someone's job being to figure out which (presumably innocent) people to "target" for the sake of ensuring a full or nearly full data collection. You know, to make things more efficient. "So we don't always have to go crawling to judges and the phone companies every single time we think something bad might be going down." This two hops thing really is a scam.
    - sbirchall 12y ago
      "I could easily see someone's job being to figure out which (presumably innocent) people to "target" for the sake of ensuring a full or nearly full data collection." Twitter makes that job damn easy, don't you think? [EDIT: s/Twitter/Facebook/WhatsApp/SnapChat/etc.]
- j2kun 12y ago
  It could be because the only people who want to read an article that defines functions and expects them to be familiar with Big-O notation can reach these conclusions without reading the article in the first place. That being said, it's generally believed to be (or measured) that the social network of the world is a sparse graph. So the fact that the sweep function is quadratic in the degree of a vertex is irrelevant. Using your notation, X is bounded by a constant for all intents and purposes. In other words, there's nothing inherently bad about the quadratic behavior, and "knowing math" doesn't give you much except perhaps a false sense of intuition. The arithmetic (and your ad-hoc estimates) just works out in favor of your argument. Which is not all that surprising conditioned on the fact that you posted an argument :)
mturmon 12y ago
The N.Y. Review has been very strong in reporting in depth and critically on the post-9/11 security state, and (before the mainstream media caught on) on the thoughtless run-up to the Iraq invasion. Mark Danner has been writing a series of articles there re-examining the Cheney legacy (two recent ones are here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/06/darkness-dick-cheney/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/06/darknes... and http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/dick-cheney-he-remade-our-world/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/dick-ch...). They have been just brutal.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Metadata has turned into such a slimy word. Metadata isn't a type of data, it is a description of the relationship between two sets of data.
- ska 12y ago
  That is far to narrow: metadata is literally "data about data", be it structural or descriptive. It's also worth remembering that this is not categorical, particularly for descriptive metadata. In one context a piece of information may be metadata, in another data.
unclebucknasty 12y ago
It's odd that in all of what is essentially the fallout from 9/11--two wars, subversion of American rights, spying on Americans, torture, rendition, massive security/surveillance state, etc.--no one seems to have ever seriously asked "why do these people want to kill us". Beyond the quotable but facile "they hate us for our freedom" line, there hasn't been much real discussion of this sort. And, here, as we parse the latest round of bills, legal interpretations, infringed freedoms, etc., there is still no such earnest discussion about why we find ourselves in this position in the first place. It's just assumed that this is somehow where we "should" find ourselves, and the only question is how much further we should go in our response to our inevitable position. EDIT: At this point, I would go beyond the question of why these people want to kill us and ask who and how many are there who actually do want to kill us?
- mpyne 12y ago
  > no one seems to have ever seriously asked "why do these people want to kill us". Plenty of people have asked that question. That the answer isn't what you expect doesn't mean the question wasn't asked. It turns out that the goal is to establish (or rather, re-establish) the Caliphate, or at least some twisted takfiri version of it. In order to establish the Caliphate you need somewhere to put it -- namely, the Muslim countries of the Middle East. But the countries already have states running the show. In AQ's viewpoint, they are "the near enemy". The near enemies have supporters too, including the U.S. (which was "the far enemy"). Other enemies include the United Nations (both since the UN Charter is incompatible with takfiri Sharia extremism, but also because the UN recognizes Israel), Shi'a Muslims, etc. In one of the key decision points for OBL post-Gulf War, he decided to focus on the far enemy first instead of the near enemies. At this point, the "crime" of the U.S. wasn't drones or bombing brown babies or anything so snide. The U.S.'s only crime was putting infidel soldiers on Arab soil to evict Iraq from Kuwait, and for maintaining regional stability for what I'm sure were completely self-serving reasons that provided no benefit whatsoever to the rest of the world. Accordingly AQ attacked the U.S.: The 1993 World Trade Center bombings... the 1995 "Bojinka" airline bombing plots (yes, plural) that was only discovered by accident at the last second by an alert Philippine policewoman... the 1998 embassy bombings... the 2000 attack on USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. The U.S. response was remarkably restrained throughout this entire period. Despite hundreds of Kenyans alone being killed by AQ in the 1998 bombings, the U.S. response was limited to dropping cruise missiles on known AQ training camps in Afghanistan and a chemical production facility in Sudan that showed evidence of working with AQ to produce nerve gas. The evidence was not ironclad, mind, but that was it: No boots on the ground, no roving drone patrols, no NSA massive surveillance efforts. The problem for AQ wasn't what the U.S. was doing to the rest of the world by 2000, the problem was that the U.S. wasn't doing enough. AQ had somehow failed to get America's serious attention, and had failed to evict America completely from the Middle East, so they decided that they had to go bigger. And they did. So while the facile "they hate us for our freedom" line is not the answer, it's not far off: They attack because Muslims still live in either approximately free societies, or tyrannies under the wrong dictator (i.e. apostate regimes). There will be no end unless they establish the Caliphate, and even that doesn't necessarily represent the end, since the stated goal of this new caliphate by Ayman al-Zawahiri is to extend jihad against the U.S. and the West. If you want to research yourself the motives of the various and many insurgent/terrorist groups out there then there's certainly no lack of material, from the very many people who have asked the same question you say has never been asked. I'd recommend going through some of it. Articles asking (and trying to answer) this question have been published since long before 9/11. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" article dates to Bosnia.
sakopov 12y ago
I find this totally hilarious. The NSA can come out and say whatever the hell they want and everyone just buys it because they don't have a choice. What are we going to do, go look at their data logs to make sure they're not lying? Oh no we don't record the contents of your calls. What a bunch of bullshit. You think any spying has stopped since Snowden revealed that NSA is looking up your ass when you're dropping one? This is hilarious because it's so absurd.
- dan_bk 12y ago
  > You think any spying has stopped since Snowden I remember that "internal" NSA memo which tried to reassure the employees, basically saying "don't worry, we'll just winter the storm, it will pass...". And that's exactly what they're doing: Wait. And it's all that's necessary, because everybody has already shut up and is anxious about the next iPhone.

177 points by Libertatea 12y ago

"Stop being so paranoid. Nobody's interested in reading your emails. Besides, they're only collecting metadata."

Okay so why can't we get any reporting with any numeric literacy? How many people does the average person make contact with in a 5 year time span? Let's call this number X for hop 1. How many people does each of the people in X then make contact with in the same 5 years? If we assume that on the whole people know ABOUT as many people as others, we can also call that number X for hop 2. Now of course there's going to be overlap, out of X people somewhere between 0% and probably 70% might overlap between any one person of interest, hop 1 and hop 2. Let's say that on average there's a 40% overlap. And let's call the Sweep(X) the number of people that get caught up in surveillance as a result of a single suspected terrorist. Sweep(X) = 0.4 * X (first hop) x 0.4 * X (second hop) Sweep(X) = 0.16 * X ^ 2 That's quadratic and as anyone who knows math, and especially people who know about Big-Oh notation, it's bad because Sweep(X) grows much faster than X does. But how big is X? Well we can look to Dunbar's number to give us somewhere to start. Wikipedia says that it's between 100 and 250 but most people use 150 as a reasonable approximation. Of course that's STABLE relationships, not acquaintances, friends-of-friends, or anything like that. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the 150 number and then assume that you probably make contact with one random person every week. Over 5 years, that's another 250. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number So if we assume that X is 150 + 250 = 400 what do we get? Sweep(400) = 0.16 * 400 * 400 = 25,600 let's just say 25k for short. Now there are around 300 million people in the US. 300mm / 25k = 12000. That means that the NSA need only find 12,000 people (on average) to get all the call records for everyone in the US for the last 5 years. It gets worse, though. What happens if you make contact with TWO random people every week? Then X = 150 + 500 = 650 Sweep(650) = 0.16 * 650 * 650 = 67,600. 300mm / 67k = 4477 people suspected of nefarious deeds in order to gain all call records. As you can see this gets really out of hand really fast. And that's why I'm a bit upset that nobody's doing the math around the "two hops" argument because I assure you that the folks at the NSA aren't rolling over and giving up. This is something that SOUNDS reasonable but in actuality means little/no reform whatsoever. EDIT: wikipedia link

k2enemy 12y ago
It is actually much worse than that. You're assuming a uniform distribution over the numbers that people call, but there are some numbers that a significant fraction of the population call. For example, how many people are three hops away from a "target" through Comcast, Time Warner, Dell, etc? Of course the NSA would probably ignore these spurious connections to generate leads for an actual investigation. But I assume that they would use them to create the largest possible list of people that they are "allowed" to collect and store information on.
- msandford 12y ago
  Yes I was being conservative so that few reasonable people could challenge the assumptions I made. But you're completely correct. I bet Amazon gets you the second hop to at least 20% of the whole country. Once you add in all the 800, 866, etc phone numbers I'd imagine that two hops gets you to very nearly every person in the US with a starting pool of perhaps only a few dozen people. I could easily see someone's job being to figure out which (presumably innocent) people to "target" for the sake of ensuring a full or nearly full data collection. You know, to make things more efficient. "So we don't always have to go crawling to judges and the phone companies every single time we think something bad might be going down." This two hops thing really is a scam.
  - sbirchall 12y ago
    "I could easily see someone's job being to figure out which (presumably innocent) people to "target" for the sake of ensuring a full or nearly full data collection." Twitter makes that job damn easy, don't you think? [EDIT: s/Twitter/Facebook/WhatsApp/SnapChat/etc.]
j2kun 12y ago
It could be because the only people who want to read an article that defines functions and expects them to be familiar with Big-O notation can reach these conclusions without reading the article in the first place. That being said, it's generally believed to be (or measured) that the social network of the world is a sparse graph. So the fact that the sweep function is quadratic in the degree of a vertex is irrelevant. Using your notation, X is bounded by a constant for all intents and purposes. In other words, there's nothing inherently bad about the quadratic behavior, and "knowing math" doesn't give you much except perhaps a false sense of intuition. The arithmetic (and your ad-hoc estimates) just works out in favor of your argument. Which is not all that surprising conditioned on the fact that you posted an argument :)

mturmon 12y ago

The N.Y. Review has been very strong in reporting in depth and critically on the post-9/11 security state, and (before the mainstream media caught on) on the thoughtless run-up to the Iraq invasion. Mark Danner has been writing a series of articles there re-examining the Cheney legacy (two recent ones are here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/06/darkness-dick-cheney/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/06/darknes... and http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/dick-cheney-he-remade-our-world/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/dick-ch...). They have been just brutal.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

Metadata has turned into such a slimy word. Metadata isn't a type of data, it is a description of the relationship between two sets of data.

ska 12y ago
That is far to narrow: metadata is literally "data about data", be it structural or descriptive. It's also worth remembering that this is not categorical, particularly for descriptive metadata. In one context a piece of information may be metadata, in another data.

unclebucknasty 12y ago

It's odd that in all of what is essentially the fallout from 9/11--two wars, subversion of American rights, spying on Americans, torture, rendition, massive security/surveillance state, etc.--no one seems to have ever seriously asked "why do these people want to kill us". Beyond the quotable but facile "they hate us for our freedom" line, there hasn't been much real discussion of this sort. And, here, as we parse the latest round of bills, legal interpretations, infringed freedoms, etc., there is still no such earnest discussion about why we find ourselves in this position in the first place. It's just assumed that this is somehow where we "should" find ourselves, and the only question is how much further we should go in our response to our inevitable position. EDIT: At this point, I would go beyond the question of why these people want to kill us and ask who and how many are there who actually do want to kill us?

mpyne 12y ago
> no one seems to have ever seriously asked "why do these people want to kill us". Plenty of people have asked that question. That the answer isn't what you expect doesn't mean the question wasn't asked. It turns out that the goal is to establish (or rather, re-establish) the Caliphate, or at least some twisted takfiri version of it. In order to establish the Caliphate you need somewhere to put it -- namely, the Muslim countries of the Middle East. But the countries already have states running the show. In AQ's viewpoint, they are "the near enemy". The near enemies have supporters too, including the U.S. (which was "the far enemy"). Other enemies include the United Nations (both since the UN Charter is incompatible with takfiri Sharia extremism, but also because the UN recognizes Israel), Shi'a Muslims, etc. In one of the key decision points for OBL post-Gulf War, he decided to focus on the far enemy first instead of the near enemies. At this point, the "crime" of the U.S. wasn't drones or bombing brown babies or anything so snide. The U.S.'s only crime was putting infidel soldiers on Arab soil to evict Iraq from Kuwait, and for maintaining regional stability for what I'm sure were completely self-serving reasons that provided no benefit whatsoever to the rest of the world. Accordingly AQ attacked the U.S.: The 1993 World Trade Center bombings... the 1995 "Bojinka" airline bombing plots (yes, plural) that was only discovered by accident at the last second by an alert Philippine policewoman... the 1998 embassy bombings... the 2000 attack on USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. The U.S. response was remarkably restrained throughout this entire period. Despite hundreds of Kenyans alone being killed by AQ in the 1998 bombings, the U.S. response was limited to dropping cruise missiles on known AQ training camps in Afghanistan and a chemical production facility in Sudan that showed evidence of working with AQ to produce nerve gas. The evidence was not ironclad, mind, but that was it: No boots on the ground, no roving drone patrols, no NSA massive surveillance efforts. The problem for AQ wasn't what the U.S. was doing to the rest of the world by 2000, the problem was that the U.S. wasn't doing enough. AQ had somehow failed to get America's serious attention, and had failed to evict America completely from the Middle East, so they decided that they had to go bigger. And they did. So while the facile "they hate us for our freedom" line is not the answer, it's not far off: They attack because Muslims still live in either approximately free societies, or tyrannies under the wrong dictator (i.e. apostate regimes). There will be no end unless they establish the Caliphate, and even that doesn't necessarily represent the end, since the stated goal of this new caliphate by Ayman al-Zawahiri is to extend jihad against the U.S. and the West. If you want to research yourself the motives of the various and many insurgent/terrorist groups out there then there's certainly no lack of material, from the very many people who have asked the same question you say has never been asked. I'd recommend going through some of it. Articles asking (and trying to answer) this question have been published since long before 9/11. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" article dates to Bosnia.

sakopov 12y ago

I find this totally hilarious. The NSA can come out and say whatever the hell they want and everyone just buys it because they don't have a choice. What are we going to do, go look at their data logs to make sure they're not lying? Oh no we don't record the contents of your calls. What a bunch of bullshit. You think any spying has stopped since Snowden revealed that NSA is looking up your ass when you're dropping one? This is hilarious because it's so absurd.

dan_bk 12y ago
> You think any spying has stopped since Snowden I remember that "internal" NSA memo which tried to reassure the employees, basically saying "don't worry, we'll just winter the storm, it will pass...". And that's exactly what they're doing: Wait. And it's all that's necessary, because everybody has already shut up and is anxious about the next iPhone.