Privacy

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Jane

There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true. ~ Sir Winston Churchill

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[Michael]

Well I really hate to run the risk of fueling unnecessary paranoia, but this info seems worth that risk.

This looks like a credible PI giving a really interesting lecture on privacy in the virtual age.  This was recorded in November of 2006, so is even now possibly a bit dated.  I advise viewing it all the way through, as the most interesting stuff is right near the end.

This looks like info that all folks using modern tech really should be aware of.

[jimtzu]

good vid michael...  ignorance was bliss      
last week had an incident with my online banking, it popped up the screen to enter my security answers and i entered and they were all "wrong".. got locked out..  called the bank and then had to reset with new questions, and their questions are all about relatives, work, school etc.. now they have more info.  coincidence?  don't think so. 
arn't they getting read to put a chip in the money to track it?  after that they have it all covered.

[jimtzu]

FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics

$1 Billion Project to Include Images of Irises and Faces

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer

12/22/07 "Washington Post" - -- -CLARKSBURG, W. Va. -- The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

"Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.

The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.

The use of biometric data is increasing throughout the government. For the past two years, the Defense Department has been storing in a database images of fingerprints, irises and faces of more than 1.5 million Iraqi and Afghan detainees, Iraqi citizens and foreigners who need access to U.S. military bases. The Pentagon also collects DNA samples from some Iraqi detainees, which are stored separately.

The Department of Homeland Security has been using iris scans at some airports to verify the identity of travelers who have passed background checks and who want to move through lines quickly. The department is also looking to apply iris- and face-recognition techniques to other programs. The DHS already has a database of millions of sets of fingerprints, which includes records collected from U.S. and foreign travelers stopped at borders for criminal violations, from U.S. citizens adopting children overseas, and from visa applicants abroad. There could be multiple records of one person's prints.

"It's going to be an essential component of tracking," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's enabling the Always On Surveillance Society."

If successful, the system planned by the FBI, called Next Generation Identification, will collect a wide variety of biometric information in one place for identification and forensic purposes.

In an underground facility the size of two football fields, a request reaches an FBI server every second from somewhere in the United States or Canada, comparing a set of digital fingerprints against the FBI's database of 55 million sets of electronic fingerprints. A possible match is made -- or ruled out--as many as 100,000 times a day.

Soon, the server at CJIS headquarters will also compare palm prints and, eventually, iris images and face-shape data such as the shape of an earlobe. If all goes as planned, a police officer making a traffic stop or a border agent at an airport could run a 10-fingerprint check on a suspect and within seconds know if the person is on a database of the most wanted criminals and terrorists. An analyst could take palm prints lifted from a crime scene and run them against the expanded database. Intelligence agents could exchange biometric information worldwide.

More than 55 percent of the search requests now are made for background checks on civilians in sensitive positions in the federal government, and jobs that involve children and the elderly, Bush said. Currently those prints are destroyed or returned when the checks are completed. But the FBI is planning a "rap-back" service, under which employers could ask the FBI to keep employees' fingerprints in the database, subject to state privacy laws, so that if that employees are ever arrested or charged with a crime, the employers would be notified.

Advocates say bringing together information from a wide variety of sources and making it available to multiple agencies increases the chances to catch criminals. The Pentagon has already matched several Iraqi suspects against the FBI's criminal fingerprint database. The FBI intends to make both criminal and civilian data available to authorized users, officials said. There are 900,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers who can query the fingerprint database today, they said.

The FBI's biometric database, which includes criminal history records, communicates with the Terrorist Screening Center's database of suspects and the National Crime Information Center database, which is the FBI's master criminal database of felons, fugitives and terrorism suspects.

The FBI is building its system according to standards shared by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

At the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), 45 minutes north of the FBI's biometric facility in Clarksburg, researchers are working on capturing images of people's irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those researchers will do biometric research for the FBI.

Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but it is of great interest to government agencies.

Think of a Navy ship approaching a foreign vessel, said Bojan Cukic, CITeR's co-director. "It would help to know before you go on board whether the people on that ship that you can image from a distance, whether they are foreign warfighters, and run them against a database of known or suspected terrorists," he said.

Skeptics say that such projects are proceeding before there is evidence that they reliably match suspects against a huge database.

In the world's first large-scale, scientific study on how well face recognition works in a crowd, the German government this year found that the technology, while promising, was not yet effective enough to allow its use by police. The study was conducted from October 2006 through January at a train station in Mainz, Germany, which draws 23,000 passengers daily. The study found that the technology was able to match travelers' faces against a database of volunteers more than 60 percent of the time during the day, when the lighting was best. But the rate fell to 10 to 20 percent at night.

To achieve those rates, the German police agency said it would tolerate a false positive rate of 0.1 percent, or the erroneous identification of 23 people a day. In real life, those 23 people would be subjected to further screening measures, the report said.

Accuracy improves as techniques are combined, said Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI's biometric services section chief. The Next Generation database is intended to "fuse" fingerprint, face, iris and palm matching capabilities by 2013, she said.

To safeguard privacy, audit trails are kept on everyone who has access to a record in the fingerprint database, Del Greco said. People may request copies of their records, and the FBI audits all agencies that have access to the database every three years, she said.

"We have very stringent laws that control who can go in there and to secure the data," Bush said.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the ability to share data across systems is problematic. "You're giving the federal government access to an extraordinary amount of information linked to biometric identifiers that is becoming increasingly inaccurate," he said.

In 2004, the Electronic Privacy Information Center objected to the FBI's exemption of the National Crime Information Center database from the Privacy Act requirement that records be accurate. The group noted that the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001 found that information in the system was "not fully reliable" and that files "may be incomplete or inaccurate." FBI officials justified that exemption by claiming that in law enforcement data collection, "it is impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and complete."

Privacy advocates worry about the ability of people to correct false information. "Unlike say, a credit card number, biometric data is forever," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster. He said he feared that the FBI, whose computer technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could not guarantee the data's security. "If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can't just get a new eyeball," Saffo said.

In the future, said CITeR director Lawrence A. Hornak, devices will be able to "recognize us and adapt to us."

"The long-term goal," Hornak said, is "ubiquitous use" of biometrics. A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and looking into a camera, he said.

"That's the key," he said. "You've chosen it. You have chosen to say, 'Yeah, I want this place to recognize me.' "

 

[Daniel]

One picture is worth 1000 words




Artist - Storm Thorgerson

[jimtzu]

check out the new google maps.. bit of controversy over what they're able to do now...

click on this to view my house:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=5522+Walmer+St,+Mission,+KS+66202&sll=39.032569,-94.659984&sspn=0.006617,0.012102&layer=c&ie=UTF8&ll=39.032369,-94.659984&spn=0.006617,0.012102&z=16&cbll=39.029059,-94.660708&cbp=1,78.85085480232203,,0,1.222713542403747

actually my address is different, so i'm kind of off the grid 

you can use the cursor to view 360 degrees and move up and down the street.
type in your address and see if it works.... is it international too??

[Michael]

Holy Shit!!  Incredible! 

Nice house btw...

I'll definitely have to check this out thoroughly.   Thanks for the heads-up Jim!

[marianthi]

SO: the whole world turns into a feudal town and the Lords running it can know everything they want about you.  Are we going forward or back?

 


 At least it doesn´t have stone walls around the edges.

 

[jimtzu]

i wonder what kind of camera they use for that? 

have they mapped out canada or venezuela?

at least it's not  live shot....  yet....

[Michael]

Looks like a car-topped all-angles camera of some sort.  Pretty amazing.

The only area that I've yet seen mapped out this way is in your neighborhood Jim, but I've only looked in a few cities so far.

Here's a screenshot after I moused the angle down as far as it would go:

[jimtzu]

yeah... i'd seen the car and setup... was wondering if it was movie cameras or some panoramic type lens or what.  a friend of mine checked out his mom's house in LA and was able to view it, but not the whole of LA.  another friend checked her parents house on the lake of the ozarks and it was there too. it looked like about october when these shots were taken.

[Michael]

Update on the mysterious Google streetmaps car:

So this photo shows how the magic of Google Street View happens - you can see their method all laid out. In this case, Google is using a brand-spanking-new Toyota Prius gas-electric hybrid (wouldn’t a 50-state VW Jetta TDI diesel get better mileage?) and a rather tall metal mast with mad cameras and GPSes.

[henry]

i'm wondering about the feedjit thingy. maybe this is an important tool for admin. because heartmind has been hacked 3 times, and its good to know who is loitering. i also believe in transparency, but if people can opt out, then all we know is glen morgan from w.va.(my last name is glenn and i'm from w.va./sw va.)is lurking . lets look at this for a couple of months. maybe feedjit is good. vulnerability shouldn't be hazardous ...henry

[jimtzu]

one thing i've noticed is that when i log on at home that it just says united states, when i log on from work it says lenexa,ks.   never showing my name. curious.....

[Michael]

The 5 Creepiest Advertising Techniques of the (Near) Future

By Nathan Birch

You'll be exposed to around 6,000 marketing messages today, according to researchers. You're looking at a few right now. Glance away from your computer and you'll see another one--a label on a bottle, a logo on a t-shirt, a billboard outside the window. But as pervasive as it is now, marketers are working hard behind the scenes to make sure it's much, much worse in the future. Doing things like ... #5. Tracking Every Site You Browse and Every Show You Watch Market research used to be pretty simple. You'd just put the new hamburger in front of a group of people and had them fill out a survey asking if they liked it, didn't like it and what degree of diarrhea it gave them. The problem of course was nobody told the truth on those things. For instance, they'll fill out surveys saying they want healthier food on the menu, then will continue to buy the Baconator. So how's a poor market researcher supposed to get a straight answer out of you? Easy: Just collect the data of your personal habits without you ever knowing. It's kind of like the dude who sneaks around outside your wife's window at night, only they're peering in through your computer or TV screen instead, and hopefully there's less masturbating. What They're Doing: So for instance, your TiVo grants you the miracle of watch-on-demand television and skippable ads, but also tracks what you watch, right down to which scenes you rewound and replayed over and over. But of course the web is light years ahead of TV in tracking your surfing habits. Google is already working on customizing its search results based on your personal browsing history, which requires only that it maintains a comprehensive database of every single thing you've ever tried to find on the web. No big deal, right? After all, it's not like it would be embarrassing for you if all this information ever got out. You know, like when AOL made that information public on millions of its customers. Speaking of AOL, they own a company called Tacoda which specializes in "behavioral targeting." Tacoda's technology is used on around 4,000 websites (which reach around 70 percent of the total internet audience). Every letter typed, every click or move of the mouse on the websites they're associated with is tracked, and they're hardly the only player in this game. Oh, and how about BuzzMetrics? blogs, Facebook pages, message boards, chatrooms, Usenet groups--anywhere the internet denizens can post their leet-speak-filled opinions--are being monitored. The conversation is then fed into programs that calculate the current buzz or trends. Yes, believe it or not, that 20-page debate between two 13-year-olds about whether Batman could beat up Iron Man will help dictate what next year's marketing campaign will look like. If You Think It's Bad Now ... Pretty soon, that technique for tracking your habits will become just as common in the real world. Those awesome GPS boxes for your car that prompt you with turn-by-turn directions? They also keep track of where you're going (maybe you heard the government wants to use the data to tax you, according to your driving habits). They're developing refrigerators with the super-handy feature that it tracks what you have inside, reminds you when you're out, and lets you order more without leaving the house. Oh, also, it lets retailers track every single thing you buy, all via RFID chips embedded in the product packaging. Hell, they're even coming out with a wide range of "smart clothes" with computer functions built in that can track all of your bodily functions. Soon vital data on testicular bunching, shifting and chafing can constantly be beamed straight from your boxers to a team of guys looking at a diagram of your nuts. #4. Custom-Made Shilling The tricky thing about advertising is that no one ad appeals to everybody. Car companies run those ads every Christmas where it shows a dude buying his wife a new car as a gift, knowing that only a small sliver of the people who'll see it have the cash to give a $40,000 present, and that the rest couldn't even afford one of those huge red bows. What They're Doing: Companies like Visible World are out to solve that problem, looking to make personalized ads. These spots can be broken into interchangeable segments that can be recombined by your cable company based on data they've collected. It gives them countless variations on the same commercial, to carefully target them based on what they know about you. So the high-income family may get an ad showing a man buying his wife a new diamond necklace, while the poor family next door will get the same ad except, but maybe with an added bit where the guy sells a kidney so he can afford it first. If You Think It's Bad Now ... Remember what we said about the refrigerator that keeps track of what brands you buy? Think how much advertisers will pay for that data. They can display the ads right on your fridge. Or, even better, maybe your cell phone rings, you answer it and it's Starbucks offering you $1 off on a white chocolate, pumpkin and whiskey Frappuccino. Why that's what you always order, and you just passed a Starbucks a second ago. Thank the GPS in your phone, and Starbucks tracking your buying habits. Of course, we're talking about a distant, hypothetical future here. And by that we mean they intend to have that exact program up and running in a year or two. What could be creepier than that? Well Google realizes all that data they're collecting is limited to web-surfing habits. Why stop there? Luckily they've got a prototype system that will listen to the conversation going on around your computer and add it to their database. Really, what could go wrong? #3. Fusing Ads and Culture Advertisers figured out a long time ago that marketing takes more than simply telling us how great the product is, particularly when selling to the youngsters. Gone are the days when you could just stick a nicotine-addicted Fred Flintstone on TV during prime time and expect to have father, mother and junior all rush out to indulge in the rich full-bodied tobacco flavor of Winston cigarettes. No, doing that still involves making some kind of argument in favor of the product, and that can be extra hard if your product is shitty. So how do they get around that? What They're Doing: The goal for marketers these days is to make their product an accessory to a certain lifestyle so that it becomes almost a requirement. Take Mountain Dew, for instance. For years they went with odd, vaguely sexual sounding slogans, ("Dew It To It" and the near-pornographic classic "Mountain Dew ... It'll Tickle Your Innards") but eventually decided to latch themselves onto the burgeoning extreme sports culture. Suddenly you couldn't turn on your TV without seeing some guy doing something incredibly retarded and dangerous with a Mountain Dew logo pasted on him. What does the drink have to do with sports? Not a damned thing. The shit isn't Gatorade. It's a completely arbitrary connection, and just to prove that point, Mountain Dew later attached itself to the absolute other end of the lifestyle spectrum: video games. Why not? It works. Today, despite it tasting like piss mixed with orange drink, Mountain Dew is the most popular soft drink after Coke and Pepsi. If You Think It's Bad Now ... So you think you've got an alternative lifestyle? Are you a vegan? A punk rocker? A furry? Pedophile? It doesn't matter, within a couple of years, there will be a collection of brands that everyone in your group will cling to as part of their identity. "Bullshit!" some of you say, "I'm an iconoclast, I'm hip and I reject your mainstream culture! You can't market to me." Actually, your attitude makes you a member of a very lucrative and sought-after marketing segment. Just ask the makers of Jones Soda and Converse Chuck Taylors, they'll tell you where the money is. In fact, if you want to see your future, look no further than current "urban" culture, most of which has been carefully concocted in corporate offices about 100 stories up from street level. They've got the process refined to a science. Watch as they took the most rebellious, disconnected, anti-mainstream culture possible (say, a young underground rap group singing about things like "a bloodbath of cops, dyin' in LA") ... ... and turned on the money hose. Before you know it, that fresh-faced young man at the bottom of the picture has a $100 million a year empire, his rappers signing endorsement deals with companies like Reebok and VitaminWater (which is in turn owned by Coca-Cola). Repeat the process with other acts, to the point that corporate sponsorship becomes intertwined with the culture itself. Soon, something that began as the ultimate counterculture in the poorest New York neighborhoods will mutate the point that artists will rap without irony about how great a particular corporation's sneakers are, and how you should buy multiple pairs. Nelly - Air Force Ones Next

[Michael]

I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch

Bruce Schneier 19 hours ago

It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers -- and televisions and iPods and everything else -- to ensure that you didn't violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear.

OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.

Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it's calling "Digital Manners Policies." According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast "orders" limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices -- computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders -- with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

Once we go down this path -- giving one device authority over other devices -- the security problems start piling up. Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? What prevents them from abusing that power? Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? Can they override my override?

How do we prevent this from being abused? Can a burglar, for example, enforce a "no photography" rule and prevent security cameras from working? Can the police enforce the same rule to avoid another Rodney King incident? Do the police get "superuser" devices that cannot be limited, and do they get "supercontroller" devices that can limit anything? How do we ensure that only they get them, and what do we do when the devices inevitably fall into the wrong hands?

It's comparatively easy to make this work in closed specialized systems -- OnStar, airplane avionics, military hardware -- but much more difficult in open-ended systems. If you think Microsoft's vision could possibly be securely designed, all you have to do is look at the dismal effectiveness of the various copy-protection and digital-rights-management systems we've seen over the years. That's a similar capabilities-enforcement mechanism, albeit simpler than these more general systems.

And that's the key to understanding this system. Don't be fooled by the scare stories of wireless devices on airplanes and in hospitals, or visions of a world where no one is yammering loudly on their cellphones in posh restaurants. This is really about media companies wanting to exert their control further over your electronics. They not only want to prevent you from surreptitiously recording movies and concerts, they want your new television to enforce good "manners" on your computer, and not allow it to record any programs. They want your iPod to politely refuse to copy music to a computer other than your own. They want to enforce their legislated definition of manners: to control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.

"Digital Manners Policies" is a marketing term. Let's call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It's not polite, it's dangerous. It won't make anyone more secure -- or more polite.

---

Bruce Schneier is chief security technology officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.