Posts by David Hood
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Because, in New Zealand, our traffic is read by the U.S. (and probably, I would speculate, Australia), I hope that the U.S. outrage with their own government spurs privacy measures that benefit the world. At the moment, encrypted email is still a messy, complex option for most people.
I think, if parliamentary email records are being provided at the request of the PM's Chief of Staff, MPs have to assume they have no private communication (to be honest, they should be assuming this anyway, it is just the other people in the know are much more local than previously assumed).
I tend to feel that (as a general principle) information collected by the government needs to be publically available, if it is being collected. This avoids assymetric power through access to information and false assumptions about what is private. The question then becomes, what is the advantage of keeping logs over time of things like swipe card access, and do those advantages outweigh the public nature of such things being on the record. There are also, however, more anonymous/ unstored ways of designing such systems. -
And for Tennis fans, I see Wimbledon will be broadcast on YouTube sponsored by Rolex. I've no idea if there is any geolocation applying to the stream, but it does seem to be another example of the shift to computer based broadcast.
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Some history on spying on negotiation partners, and advantages
From the Atlantic -
The general way things are considered "safe" against spying is by being open to scrutiny- for example the code used is open to inspection otherwise trust will not get built. I think this is not a bad article from last year that highlights the culture and some of the issues around that.
wired article on openleaks -
On the need for PRISM, or not
mostly not -
So many things to reply to, so let's aggregate:
Kyle wrote:
there should be laws against allowing him access to big data
Heh. I was just near the front of the curve realizing that if you have a time series of marriage records and a time series of electoral records, you can combine the two to infer a map of widows (and similar matches). In the same way if you know Desmond Jones married Molly Smith, you can use the Desmond Molly pair to not only match Desmond and Molly Jones, but then narrow the pool for matching other Desmond Joneses and Molly Joneses in a sequential way that you couldn't previously match (and figuring out how to automate that kind of process).
The company he was using as an example in the US had remarkable success
The, ironically named, Target company.
"A Target employee gave an example: if in March a woman, hypothetically Jenny Ward, buys cocoa-butter lotion, a purse big enough to double as a diaper bag, magnesium supplements and a blue rug, there’s an 87% chance she is pregnant and due in August."
They are still using the data, but in a more subtle way (sending out seemly standard fliers but with specific products included) after they got some negative press with stories like
"an angry man demanding to see a Target store manager about his school- aged daughter getting Target ads in the mail for baby clothes and cribs. The manager rang a few days later to apologise. Says the article:
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter, he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology."”
By mixing the targetted products in catalogs with things that they no the person will not buy, they know the person is less likely to feel they are being spied on, so more likely to buy the products.Rich wrote:
Unless google actually knows my deepest unconscious
Targetted ads are a two part process, you the target and someone willing to pay for you being targetted. A lot of the targetting is based on geographic market area (so for example I see some fairly generic ads for NZ things, such as enroll to vote ones in the run up to the last election). The fallback for not having someone want to pay to target you is generic ads.
Richard:
While Tor offers a theoretical level of true anonymity, people using it are vulnerable to traffic analysis as information enters and leaves it. Which in turn allow the "metadata" kind of relationship analysis. -
Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to BenWilson,
Do we know how they got their intel for it, though?
From public accounts (in the cases where there have been public accounts) it has mostly been from people thinking someone was getting a bit extreme, alerting the authorities, and the authorities actually investigating.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to nzlemming,
That's what those of us who do genealogy live for ;-)
I did once get an enquiry to the effect of "My great grandmother and great grandfather seem to be listed as living in separate parts of town" and all I could do was agree that yes, they were.
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About a decade ago, I was doing reasonably clever work in its day on linking together late 19th century/ beginning of 20th century historical records to build pictures of peoples lives. What you can know about from tracking relationships (or as it is being called "metadata") is huge.
For a walk through of some of the current techniques and what they do, this is not a bad blog post (that doesn't seem to have been added to the thread yet). -
And let us not forget the 1980's era United States Electronic Communications Privacy Act, with it's provision that email that has stayed on the providers servers for more than 180 days is "abandoned" so does not need a warrant (Note: there is some legal dispute about the status of messages that have been opened while keeping them on the server).