There seems to be a lot of indifference in the United States regarding domestic surveillance. Perhaps this indifference is a result of a citizenry distracted by the war in Iraq, or because most people feel that they pose no real threat to the government (and therefore do not fear what government employees may seek to learn about the private lives of US citizens). Many people simply may not see how domestic surveillance affects them. Many people may simply desire anything that resembles protection from the nebulous threat of terrorism.
Wired News has published a description of the FBI's domestic surveillance capabilities, to which I posted the following comment (and immediately subsequent to which, the entire commenting feature for the article disappeared). I think these are concerns that every American citizen should consider with respect to the surveillance capabilities of the US government:
Maybe you do nothing wrong and have nothing to fear because you don't mind it when social engineers manage us like cattle.
Maybe you do nothing wrong and don't care if other people see all the personal details you reveal about yourself through your search history. Visit www.aolstalker.com and see if you still feel that way.
Maybe you do nothing wrong and don't mind if a fascist government seeks to suppress or intimidate innovative thinkers who challenge the philosophical premises of successful business models with which government interests are entangled, and you are content to spend your days in a cube and your nights bowing down to the American Idol.
Maybe you don't mind if a foreign government hacks into our surveillance network and uses it against us, at your expense.
Maybe you don't mind being drafted into the War on Terror so long as you don't have to know about it.
Maybe the possibility of all those private contractors with access to your sensitive information doesn't bother you.
Maybe you care more about convenience than justice or liberty.
Maybe you're a terrorist.
Maybe it doesn't matter whether or not all your communications are surveilled because the potential for abuse is enough to make you self-censor any criticisms you may have of a government obsessed with stifling dissent.
Maybe you vote and are willing to boycott the two party system by voting for yourself, because that way you can both register your discontent and help verify the statistical accuracy of our voting system by demanding to see your vote in print after the elections.
Maybe you think our next President will spend every waking hour reversing Executive Orders, Presidential Directives, and un-litigating the last six years.
Maybe you wish the Revolution had never happened, and want to reinstate the Crown.
Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Taxation Without Representation
The reason the National Security Agency wants to read your email is because they are trying to use algorithms to detect terrorist activity. This invasion of privacy is based on the assumption that terrorists use the Internet in ways that are statistically distinct from the ways ordinary Americans use the Internet. In order to statistically detect online terrorist activity, the governmet needs a large sample of "normal" Internet use.
Although this may seem reasonable when we are confronted with an indistinct enemy, fighting on ill-defined battlefields, this really amounts to an unconstitutional indirect tax. Just as the Federal government incorporated FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security to hide the cost of creating the largest bureaucracy in the history of civilization, the government's use of private citizens' Internet service for surveillance purposes is used to hide the true cost of the War on Terror.
When the government compels private corporations to comply with national security directives, without compensating these corporations for the cost of implementing such directives, the cost is passed on to consumers.
Because the Administrative branch of government refuses to inform Congress as to the nature of these programs, these programs amount to taxation without representation.
Beyond violating the 4th Amendment right to protection against unwarranted search and seizure, this practice also violates the 5th Amendment, by effectively situating military operatives within private homes, taking private property for public use, and opening up the potential to compel private citizens to, in effect, unwittingly testify against themselves. Not only do these practices appropriate private citizens into the Federal intelligence infrastructure without compensation, but citizens are furthermore charged for this.
Our current Administration has a constitutional duty to either halt these programs, or to fully inform Congress as to their nature. In lieu of such disclosures, we as citizens have a duty to remove these criminals from office.
Although this may seem reasonable when we are confronted with an indistinct enemy, fighting on ill-defined battlefields, this really amounts to an unconstitutional indirect tax. Just as the Federal government incorporated FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security to hide the cost of creating the largest bureaucracy in the history of civilization, the government's use of private citizens' Internet service for surveillance purposes is used to hide the true cost of the War on Terror.
When the government compels private corporations to comply with national security directives, without compensating these corporations for the cost of implementing such directives, the cost is passed on to consumers.
Because the Administrative branch of government refuses to inform Congress as to the nature of these programs, these programs amount to taxation without representation.
Beyond violating the 4th Amendment right to protection against unwarranted search and seizure, this practice also violates the 5th Amendment, by effectively situating military operatives within private homes, taking private property for public use, and opening up the potential to compel private citizens to, in effect, unwittingly testify against themselves. Not only do these practices appropriate private citizens into the Federal intelligence infrastructure without compensation, but citizens are furthermore charged for this.
Our current Administration has a constitutional duty to either halt these programs, or to fully inform Congress as to their nature. In lieu of such disclosures, we as citizens have a duty to remove these criminals from office.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Privacy, Surveillance, and Consumerism
The degree to which surveillance legislation and Internet advertising practices reach into the personal lives of Internet users is illustrated by www.aolstalker.com. These methods of producing, gathering, and disseminating information have rapidly become both pervasive and expensive. This cost is being subsidized by taxpayers and consumers, and the practices responsible for this cost are being propagated by legislators and advertisers at a time when our society lacks equally pervasive cultural idioms with which to meaningfully evaluate the philosophical, anthropological, and practical implications of these practices.
AOLstalker is a database of search queries conducted by AOL users. The information is organized according to which individual AOL users conducted various searches, and was collected between March 1, 2006 and May 31, 2006. Although the database was assembled for advertising purposes, AOLstalker appears to be an entertainment-oriented application of the data, and users of the site are encouraged to judge AOL users based on the humorousness of personal information revealed by the collected search queries.
The research that produced the database was conducted by AOL and Google, and released publicly. Derivative research has been conducted by authors Pass, Chowdhury and Torgeson, published as "A Picture of Search" for The First International Conference on Scalable Information Systems.
I happened upon AOLstalker after receiving a strange error message on MySpace. The error message included the domain name collect.myspace.com, which I did not recognize, and for which I subsequently performed a Google search. I received a result titled "Stalking users who searched for collect myspace com" at 2006-05-29 21:43:43, referencing the page:
www.aolstalker.com/search.php?q=collect.myspace.com
This got me thinking about users who search for their own names, for various facts about their city or neighborhood, their family or friends, their financial institutions... all the personally-identifiable data revealed by user searches. Beyond the voyeuristic appeal of the intimate psychological portraits AOLstalker offers users, the AOLstalker database also represents a serious privacy and security issue. Were malicious coders able to exploit existing social networking systems like MySpace through phishing schemes or system hacks, a similar "live" database could prove just as lucrative to cybercriminals and authoritarians as it has proven to advertisers.
It is my hypothesis that there, in fact, exists somewhere a "live" version of the aolstalker database, which is tied to a bit of malicious code (or possibly even plain text that has been properly formatted) in MySpace. This code, I suspect, is propagated by third parties who trick MySpace users into posting the malicious code online.
Finally, I suspect, that some targets of the "live" MySpace version of AOLstalker have been victimized by users who treated the "live" database as a form of interactive entertainment, possibly accounting for some recent Internet postings about "gang stalking."
If aolstalker is driven by information that was "publicly" available, I think Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment provides a relatively straightforward illustration of why one should feel disconcerted by intelligence applications of similar technology such as the Intellipedia.
If our Democracy is to survive and thrive in peace, we must have ways to engage in meaningful discourse about the surveillance society in all its forms.
AOLstalker is a database of search queries conducted by AOL users. The information is organized according to which individual AOL users conducted various searches, and was collected between March 1, 2006 and May 31, 2006. Although the database was assembled for advertising purposes, AOLstalker appears to be an entertainment-oriented application of the data, and users of the site are encouraged to judge AOL users based on the humorousness of personal information revealed by the collected search queries.
The research that produced the database was conducted by AOL and Google, and released publicly. Derivative research has been conducted by authors Pass, Chowdhury and Torgeson, published as "A Picture of Search" for The First International Conference on Scalable Information Systems.
I happened upon AOLstalker after receiving a strange error message on MySpace. The error message included the domain name collect.myspace.com, which I did not recognize, and for which I subsequently performed a Google search. I received a result titled "Stalking users who searched for collect myspace com" at 2006-05-29 21:43:43, referencing the page:
www.aolstalker.com/search.php?q=collect.myspace.com
This got me thinking about users who search for their own names, for various facts about their city or neighborhood, their family or friends, their financial institutions... all the personally-identifiable data revealed by user searches. Beyond the voyeuristic appeal of the intimate psychological portraits AOLstalker offers users, the AOLstalker database also represents a serious privacy and security issue. Were malicious coders able to exploit existing social networking systems like MySpace through phishing schemes or system hacks, a similar "live" database could prove just as lucrative to cybercriminals and authoritarians as it has proven to advertisers.
It is my hypothesis that there, in fact, exists somewhere a "live" version of the aolstalker database, which is tied to a bit of malicious code (or possibly even plain text that has been properly formatted) in MySpace. This code, I suspect, is propagated by third parties who trick MySpace users into posting the malicious code online.
Finally, I suspect, that some targets of the "live" MySpace version of AOLstalker have been victimized by users who treated the "live" database as a form of interactive entertainment, possibly accounting for some recent Internet postings about "gang stalking."
If aolstalker is driven by information that was "publicly" available, I think Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment provides a relatively straightforward illustration of why one should feel disconcerted by intelligence applications of similar technology such as the Intellipedia.
If our Democracy is to survive and thrive in peace, we must have ways to engage in meaningful discourse about the surveillance society in all its forms.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
patents assigned to the national security agency
the following patents are all issued to the national security agency, and describe one proprietary method the nsa may be using to analyze the network traffic it intercepts by tapping into data streams at telecommunications companies such as at&t:
***
United States Patent 6704449
Method of extracting text from graphical images
US Patent Issued on March 9, 2004
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a method for extracting text from an image which is typically displayed on web pages of the World Wide Web. The character recognition will be determined to be successful by comparing the extracted text to a lexicon of legitimate words, computing the likelihood of the sequence of characters (e.g. "Qxv" is highly unlikely in English, whereas "com" is relatively common), or character recognition software which can provide a confidence measure for each character based upon how well its pixels matched the nominal template or features.
***
United States Patent 7020338
Method of identifying script of line of text
US Patent Issued on March 28, 2006
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Script identification is a useful preprocessing step in automatic document recognition. Most optical character recognition (OCR) devices are trained to recognize a limited set of scripts. If an OCR device was presented with a document that includes text printed in a script for which the OCR device was not trained to recognize then the OCR device would not be able to process the document correctly. So, there is a need for a method of identifying each script in which a document is printed so that an OCR device that was trained in all of the scripts can be identified and used to process the document.
***
United States Patent 6904564
Method of summarizing text using just the text
US Patent Issued on June 7, 2005
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Prior art methods of processing text typically incorporate linguistic knowledge that is not resident in the text (e.g., document) being processed. Prior art text summarization methods often rely on a collection of exemplary text that is external to the text being processed to assess the role a word plays in the text being processed. For those methods that rely on a collection of exemplary text, it is difficult, if not impossible, to generate a single collection of exemplary text that can be used to successfully summarize textual documents on widely different topics because a word in one context may have a different meaning in another context. This problem is often overcome in the prior art by generating multiple collections of exemplary text, where each collection is tailored to a specific topic (e.g., scientific, financial). Generating a collection of exemplary text is difficult, time consuming, and prone to error (e.g., biases of those generating the collection).
***
United States Patent 6990634
Method of summarizing text by sentence extraction
US Patent Issued on January 24, 2006
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The field of automatically summarizing text consisting of a collection of sentences has been studied for over forty years. However, automatic text summarization has received greater attention recently because of its pervasive use in present information retrieval systems. One type of text summarization method consists of extracting a number of sentences from the text that convey the essential points of the text. The number of sentences extracted from a text may be few to present only enough information to allow a user to determine whether or not to read the entire text or many to act as a substitute for the text.
***
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-mailer/intelligence-101a_b_1142.html
***
United States Patent 6704449
Method of extracting text from graphical images
US Patent Issued on March 9, 2004
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a method for extracting text from an image which is typically displayed on web pages of the World Wide Web. The character recognition will be determined to be successful by comparing the extracted text to a lexicon of legitimate words, computing the likelihood of the sequence of characters (e.g. "Qxv" is highly unlikely in English, whereas "com" is relatively common), or character recognition software which can provide a confidence measure for each character based upon how well its pixels matched the nominal template or features.
***
United States Patent 7020338
Method of identifying script of line of text
US Patent Issued on March 28, 2006
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Script identification is a useful preprocessing step in automatic document recognition. Most optical character recognition (OCR) devices are trained to recognize a limited set of scripts. If an OCR device was presented with a document that includes text printed in a script for which the OCR device was not trained to recognize then the OCR device would not be able to process the document correctly. So, there is a need for a method of identifying each script in which a document is printed so that an OCR device that was trained in all of the scripts can be identified and used to process the document.
***
United States Patent 6904564
Method of summarizing text using just the text
US Patent Issued on June 7, 2005
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Prior art methods of processing text typically incorporate linguistic knowledge that is not resident in the text (e.g., document) being processed. Prior art text summarization methods often rely on a collection of exemplary text that is external to the text being processed to assess the role a word plays in the text being processed. For those methods that rely on a collection of exemplary text, it is difficult, if not impossible, to generate a single collection of exemplary text that can be used to successfully summarize textual documents on widely different topics because a word in one context may have a different meaning in another context. This problem is often overcome in the prior art by generating multiple collections of exemplary text, where each collection is tailored to a specific topic (e.g., scientific, financial). Generating a collection of exemplary text is difficult, time consuming, and prone to error (e.g., biases of those generating the collection).
***
United States Patent 6990634
Method of summarizing text by sentence extraction
US Patent Issued on January 24, 2006
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The field of automatically summarizing text consisting of a collection of sentences has been studied for over forty years. However, automatic text summarization has received greater attention recently because of its pervasive use in present information retrieval systems. One type of text summarization method consists of extracting a number of sentences from the text that convey the essential points of the text. The number of sentences extracted from a text may be few to present only enough information to allow a user to determine whether or not to read the entire text or many to act as a substitute for the text.
***
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-mailer/intelligence-101a_b_1142.html
Sunday, March 26, 2006
pavlovian conditioning and the calculation of social paranoia
"only by manipulating humans ever more into skinnerian rats, robots, buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformists and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product..." (p.206 general system theory, ludwig von bertalanffy)
"a dynamic order of parts and processes standing in mutual interaction..." (p.208)
thinking of whole internet as turing test... generally the turing test is conducted by humans interacting through a terminal either with another human or with a specific software program. the object, for human participants, is to determine whether they are interacting with a piece of software or with a human.
an alternate approach may be to set up a terminal where an individual interacts with a piece of software that filters input from many participants, whose combined understanding can more closely approximate the behavior of a single individual.
this approach could be exploited by a malicious entity who, by gaining access to an individual's computer via undocumented exploits installed by any variety of benign plugins or security flaws in the operating system, uses software that examines all electronic transmisssions, looking for patterns and associations in the use of individual words (or the syntax of information that has been encoded in different ways), and with occasional input from "judges," recombines these symbols (the product of patterns and associations) in a manner calculated to elicit certain responses (via the mechanisms of behaviorist psychology).
are you really visiting the web pages you think you are?
are you really afraid of terrorism, or are you conditioned to feel fear whenever you hear or see that word? everybody is afraid of terrorism because, as a concept, it can be used to invoke a variety of thoughts and emotions, from patriotic love to feelings of rage; but few people have any direct experience with terrorism beyond its impact on how their tax money is spent. even so, few people seem to think twice about the cost of the symbolic war in iraq (as opposed to the urban war), or to seriously question whether such an enterprise is worth the expenditure.
conversely, many people are affected by traffic accidents (which kill 40,000 americans every year), but never think once about what the money spent in iraq could do to get drivers off the highways (intercity mass transit would reduce traffic accidents, new urbanism invests in the fabric of the city to promote walkable neighborhoods, etc - fewer drivers=fewer accidents, fewer drunk drivers also = fewer accidents). this is perhaps intentional: the standardization of education in schools emphasizes memorization over analytic abilities. schools don't teach people to form their own opinions, but teache them to react in specific ways to specific stimuli. the centralization of school curricula only makes it easier for a distributed and interconnected media landscape to influence people all over the country in exactly the same way.
quite a few lefties were up in arms when there was talk a few years back about putting reagan on the $20. i find the prospect of putting regan on the $20 infinitely preferable to the indian killer on there now. as a formerly devout lefty myself it took the perspective of a russian linguist from soviet moscow to point out the the fact that, while regan may have made big mistakes (aids), he basically ended the cold war by climbing atop the berlin wall and, without the aid of bodyguards, demanded that the wall be torn down.
if we are to use money, as an abstract form of valuation, to evaluate such disparate entities as love, comfort, shelter, and sustenance, ought we not consider the symbolic value of our metric?
p.s. why should we be afraid of cameras everywhere, in atms, gas stations, and on traffic lights? because software that identifies statistical regularities that correspond to such traits as an individual's characteristic way of walking can gather input from many cameras to accurately track an individual's movement from one camera to another. a central database could be used to track an individual's global movements, to evaluate their behavior, make assumptions about how individuals use the symbols they are given in school to construct value... the federal government is very aware of this: ever wonder why you've seen the planes crash into the world trade center over and over and over again, but you've never seen what hit the pentagon even once? whatever hit the pentagon was recoded by some 80 security cameras around the pentagon, and every private citizen's recording of this event was confiscated by the federal government. this is how the symbolic war on terror is being constructed.
"a dynamic order of parts and processes standing in mutual interaction..." (p.208)
thinking of whole internet as turing test... generally the turing test is conducted by humans interacting through a terminal either with another human or with a specific software program. the object, for human participants, is to determine whether they are interacting with a piece of software or with a human.
an alternate approach may be to set up a terminal where an individual interacts with a piece of software that filters input from many participants, whose combined understanding can more closely approximate the behavior of a single individual.
this approach could be exploited by a malicious entity who, by gaining access to an individual's computer via undocumented exploits installed by any variety of benign plugins or security flaws in the operating system, uses software that examines all electronic transmisssions, looking for patterns and associations in the use of individual words (or the syntax of information that has been encoded in different ways), and with occasional input from "judges," recombines these symbols (the product of patterns and associations) in a manner calculated to elicit certain responses (via the mechanisms of behaviorist psychology).
are you really visiting the web pages you think you are?
are you really afraid of terrorism, or are you conditioned to feel fear whenever you hear or see that word? everybody is afraid of terrorism because, as a concept, it can be used to invoke a variety of thoughts and emotions, from patriotic love to feelings of rage; but few people have any direct experience with terrorism beyond its impact on how their tax money is spent. even so, few people seem to think twice about the cost of the symbolic war in iraq (as opposed to the urban war), or to seriously question whether such an enterprise is worth the expenditure.
conversely, many people are affected by traffic accidents (which kill 40,000 americans every year), but never think once about what the money spent in iraq could do to get drivers off the highways (intercity mass transit would reduce traffic accidents, new urbanism invests in the fabric of the city to promote walkable neighborhoods, etc - fewer drivers=fewer accidents, fewer drunk drivers also = fewer accidents). this is perhaps intentional: the standardization of education in schools emphasizes memorization over analytic abilities. schools don't teach people to form their own opinions, but teache them to react in specific ways to specific stimuli. the centralization of school curricula only makes it easier for a distributed and interconnected media landscape to influence people all over the country in exactly the same way.
quite a few lefties were up in arms when there was talk a few years back about putting reagan on the $20. i find the prospect of putting regan on the $20 infinitely preferable to the indian killer on there now. as a formerly devout lefty myself it took the perspective of a russian linguist from soviet moscow to point out the the fact that, while regan may have made big mistakes (aids), he basically ended the cold war by climbing atop the berlin wall and, without the aid of bodyguards, demanded that the wall be torn down.
if we are to use money, as an abstract form of valuation, to evaluate such disparate entities as love, comfort, shelter, and sustenance, ought we not consider the symbolic value of our metric?
p.s. why should we be afraid of cameras everywhere, in atms, gas stations, and on traffic lights? because software that identifies statistical regularities that correspond to such traits as an individual's characteristic way of walking can gather input from many cameras to accurately track an individual's movement from one camera to another. a central database could be used to track an individual's global movements, to evaluate their behavior, make assumptions about how individuals use the symbols they are given in school to construct value... the federal government is very aware of this: ever wonder why you've seen the planes crash into the world trade center over and over and over again, but you've never seen what hit the pentagon even once? whatever hit the pentagon was recoded by some 80 security cameras around the pentagon, and every private citizen's recording of this event was confiscated by the federal government. this is how the symbolic war on terror is being constructed.
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