The scifi novel ‘Nanopunk’ has a (seemingly neutral) massive Supercomputer named janus that ‘observes and analyses’ data stored or flowing across all global networks; learning, building patterns and relationships. Janus is simply the logical amalgam of technologies and systems already in place. The whole premise of ‘Nanopunk’ is based on the simple fact that technologies converge. Another strong feature ‘Nanopunk’ is the powerful role played by Private Military corporations who take over protection of government and corporate ‘assets’. We are already seeing private military corporations investing in new technologies and competing lucrative contracts and scarce resources. Bigger and more powerful private corporations with vested interests in upping the threat level in order to generate more business.
Here are the top four examples of how our rights to privacy are being eroded. And I do mean examples; there are many other surveillance and security innovations and programmes under way that are similar.
- The ‘RIOT’ program.
- Vulnerability of Cloud stored data
- Increased EU demands for personal data from google and Twitter
- Increased NSA investment in surveillance
The emergence of the RIOT is a very similar development. RIOT analyses Facebook and Twitter to not only track exactly where you’ve been, but predict what you’re going to do in future. RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology, has been built by US defence contractor Raytheon and shared with the US government. The software tracks your online relationships to see who you know and who you talk to online. And it mines latitude and longitude from EXIF data embedded in photos taken by smart phones and digital cameras and posted on Facebook and Twitter, as well as location data from check-in apps Foursquare and Gowalla.
Unfortunately our natural, social inclination of wanting to share our experiences through the use of location data and check-ins on various apps is being abused and exploited by those parts of the government who inherited the mistrust and suspicion worthy of the Spanish Inquisition and the Gestapo. It’s easy to say, “we’re ordinary, decent, law-abiding folk with nothing to hide” and although this might be true, agencies like MI5,NSA, FBI, Europol will be using algorithms that have no intuition or insight into the lives of ordinary people and will not discriminate between ‘data’ or ‘evidence’ from people up to not good and people going about their daily lives. For example you could have a purely online ‘friend’ who may not be as law-abiding as you. If that person is going around checking out potential ‘target’ sites for some nefarious deed; possibly taking and posting uppictures for his co-conspirators; and you happen to visit a similar kind of location, maybe innocently share your own pics – then a link is made, Are you then a suspect, a potential accomplice? The MI5, NSA, FBI may well think so.
It won’t take much build a profile of someone’s routines and movements. Looking at the video suggests it’s a labourious task; but you can bet your bottom dollar that all the work being done by one guy clicking on various links to view pictures, charts and associations will soon be done by a program that could undertake millions of multiple operations at the same time and churn out ‘probability’ scores on people posing a national threat. And it’s somewhere inside that mountain of data that your name will be linked to a person, a place or an activity. In the future, no one will be innocent.
And it’s not just your social media activity that is vulnerable to all manner of probing and interpretation. In a previous blog (So,your cloud storage is secure eh?) I report on leading privacy expert Caspar Bowden warning that Europeans using US cloud services that their data could be snooped on. Bowden highlights how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendment Act (FISAAA) allows US authorities to spy on cloud data.
Also take a look at my article Twitter and Google are warning of significantly increased government surveillance of our data and online activity. and consider this extract from EDRi-gram biweekly newsletter about digital civil rights in Europe
“According to Google’s latest Transparency Report released on 24 January 2013, EU governments? requests for users? IP addresses, Internet browsing history, email communications or documents have dramatically increased during the last three years. Only between July and December 2012, the average number of such requests was over 1200/month, more than a third of all requests made by governments worldwide, and a 100% increase in the last three years.”
Among other forms of intelligence-gathering, the NSA secretly collects the phone records of millions of Americans, using data provided by telecom firms AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. Photograph: NSA/Getty Images
Now either there’s been a sudden increase in people planning nefarious deeds or the EU security spooks have become more paranoid. It’s important to remember that it all boils down to the mind-set of who controls the design, development and implementation of the programs. paranoia coding and inputs – paranoia outputs.
Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian Reports. “ As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning announces “a major expansion of [the Pentagon's] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold.” Specifically, says the New York Times this morning, “the expansion would increase the Defense Department’s Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900.”
via Spyware predicts your movements from Facebook and Twitter | CNET UK.
The Guardian website has more on the subject Here is an extract:
Raytheon has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace. The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.
Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon’s intelligence and information systems department, said in an email: “Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation’s rapidly changing security needs. “Its innovative privacy features are the most robust that we’re aware of, enabling the sharing and analysis of data without personally identifiable information [such as social security numbers, bank or other financial account information] being disclosed.”
In December, Riot was featured in a newly published patent Raytheon is pursuing for a system designed to gather data on people from social networks, blogs and other sources to identify whether they should be judged a security risk.