Saturday, March 8, 2008

Walls?!? We don't need no stinking walls...

Three decades ago, Congress imposed limits on the collection and sharing of domestic information between classic intelligence gathering agencies and civilian law enforcement. Seems like, if you can imagine, large quantities of information were being gathered on law abiding citizens for strictly political reasons.

From a facinating Washington Post article:
"A guy that's got a flat tire outside a nuclear facility in one location means nothing," said Thomas E. Bush III, the FBI's assistant director of the criminal justice information services division. "Run the guy and he's had a flat tire outside of five nuclear facilities and you have a clue."
I will get to the article shortly, but this little quip is quite interesting for several reasons. Initially I wonder what the rational for gathering the volume of low grade information suggested in this. The inference here is that if you get enough stuff piled together that it is possible to infer patterns which provide some sort of high grade end product. This is, I believe, total bullshit.

And what is this all about?
Several thousand law enforcement agencies are creating the foundation of a domestic intelligence system through computer networks that analyze vast amounts of police information to fight crime and root out terror plots.
What a marvelous slippery slope of information gathering possibilities. Rules were put into place for misconduct that happened when it was difficult to gather information on people. Real paper folders and whatnot changing hands. Imagine what can be done now. With this system in place, non-governmental companies are taking care of the integration, performing an end run around laws and rules which are supposed to limit the flow of information gathering and criminal prosecution. Not being bound by by these niceties, corporations can create bridges over the walls. Even more so, they can 'value add' things like credit information and the like to the mix. Ask yourself what an internet advertising company, or google knows about you.

Now attach this great volume of information to law enforcement. Not just DOJ law enforcement, but anybody hooked up to Coplink. Think about the leverage that this volume of information might be able to assert if used as a stick in, say, local politics...

In my line of work, we do a great deal of work with little bits and pieces of information. It gets fed into systems which tend to do a great deal of collating and fumbling about, and we smelly apes look at the results and make decisions about what happened. For every system there are false positives and false negatives, each of which represents a failure mode in the analysis. If a similar volume of information - some correct and some not - is available, I do not think that the entire set of people using this new resource will be ready to digest the information with the sort of skeptical eye that it needs to be.

In case there might be uncertainty regarding my skeptical bias toward law enforcement - and federal law enforcement via DOJ in general - I provide the following talking points. Back in November, I had a little discussion about cell phones and privacy. From there:
"Law enforcement has absolutely no interest in tracking the locations of law-abiding citizens. None whatsoever," Boyd said. "What we're doing is going through the courts to lawfully obtain data that will help us locate criminal targets, sometimes in cases where lives are literally hanging in the balance, such as a child abduction or serial murderer on the loose."
With this in mind, we now look at a little bit of information regarding the accidental disclosure of a significant privacy issue.
A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.
This is the same thing as described in a 2006 lawsuit against Verizon.

I guess my point is that the continuing creep toward transparent access by the Corporate - Government complex, legal or otherwise, marches on.

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