> if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents, the government would need to hire as many as another 300 million people, possibly more, to keep up with the information and we’d have to redesign our entire intelligence system
This man is hopelessly naive about modern computer technology. Keeping track of 300 million people is not quite trivial (yet) but well within the means of the FBI at its current staffing and funding levels. Worse -- much worse -- is that data mining is virtually certain to result in very convincing looking false positives.
This is why it is unwise to take legal advice from performance artists.
It seems to me that people think monitoring means "in real time". It does not. It just means "recording". The government records (or it would if it had the money) all telephone conversations. It does not listen to them nor index them nor transcribe them nor even scan them for keywords. It just records. From any number to any number. All the time. The tapes are kept indefinitely. If someone becomes a suspect in something, all phone conversations he was party to can be played back, either by humans or a computer that can transcribe, cross-index, identify other people by their voice, etc., whatever the technology permits. Same for all IP packets, if they had the budget.
When they have a lead or reason to find something about you, e.g. you work for the minority party or are an actual dissident or slept with a cop's ex-wife, they comb through everything and find something you did that may not even be illegal but would be embarrassing.
No humans need to be involved in storing the voice data on tape, and automatic transcription and cross-indexing only ever needs to be performed for a few phone numbers which are under investigation. But once someone becomes a suspect, all his history can be played back in order to, for example, discover his accomplices.
There are scenarios which demonstrate how this can be useful and can save lives. I imagine these scenarios were used by the fascists to get the government to allow this. It goes like this: In a system in which wiretapping is only allowed by court order after law enforcement has probable cause, wiretapping a suspect's phone could be too late - he's either dead (law enforcement first got interested in him after discovering his body) or learned enough to not talk about his activity on the phone. But back when he was getting started he made mistakes. With conversations recorded before law enforcement ever heard of him, those mistakes can be exploited.
If I were him, I'd post everything, including text, in low quality JPG files (good enough to be readable by humans though). Good luck running recognition software on all that crap.
AFAIK image recognition already works on down-sampled images, even if the high res version is available, because the algorithms are too expensive and the details are not that important or even hurt.
WHOOOOOAAAAAA, that is definitely wrong. The FBI is definitely not actively monitoring 300 million people, and is certainly not going to start anywhere near soon. In fact, it is not even close to being ready to take that on, and certainly not either at the current level of funding or staffing. What you've said is categorically incorrect in every sense of the word. Once again, I cannot emphasize enough that what was said here is wrong.
But, on the positive side, you are totally right that he is completely naive about data mining technology.
I didn't say they were monitoring 300 million people, I said that they could, and so the author's strategy of preventing the FBI from monitoring us by overwhelming them with data is doomed to fail.
If you're going to spread FUD, then you must prove these very strong claims that you are making. Hand-waving dissent away and pretending that you've proven your point is doing no one favors, especially not the people here who may be mislead into believing that you know what you're talking about.
I cannot emphasize this enough: you have the burden of proof, and so far you have completely failed to live up to it.
EDIT: Though, to clarify, I do agree that we don't need 300 million people to monitor 300 million people. That's not the part I'm contesting.
> you must prove these very strong claims that you are making
What very strong claims are you referring to? I have only made two claims:
1) The FBI is easily capable of doing the data processing to monitor 300M people, and so flooding it with data is not an effective defense against being monitored. Facebook monitors 500M+ people. Do you seriously doubt that the FBI couldn't?
2) Data mining the information from 300M people is virtually certain to lead to false positives. Proving this is an elementary exercise in probability theory. The details are left as an exercise.
Adding to the above, when we talk about monitoring people, most people have in mind a model that requires O(log n) monitors; monitoring 300 people is like keeping 300 bookmarks in a book, as it takes only a few people to monitor those 300 bookmarks. To the government, the model is O(n). They're not maintaining 300 bookmarks, they're reading 300 pages simultaneously.
The reason is that people are the asymptotic bottleneck. If computers totally and automatically understood everything, then the dominating term would be compute time. But it's not. The dominating term is clearly people, who must ultimately review the truly promising information. Maybe the compute resources make this linear relationship hold over lower constants, but it is still definitely linear. And any technological advantage is unfortunately shortchanged by the constant factor of red tape.
Ex-Googlers like Ron here no doubt have a different view on what can/should be done to monitor people, but I argue that this is irrelevant to the government. And even if they agreed with them in principle, there's enough red tape that a system like what they have in mind would just never be realistic.
> who must ultimately review the truly promising information.
You could make the same argument for e.g. the stock market. Program trading can never become a dominant force in the market because humans must ultimately make all the decisions (like what programs to run). The flaw in this reasoning should be self-evident.
> this is irrelevant to the government [because of] red tape
You put too much faith in red tape. You may not have noticed, but since 9/11 there has arisen a shadow government that is not subject to normal bureaucratic constraints, or indeed even to the rule of law. See e.g. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
The model is not actively watching everyone it's flagging people for additional screening. It's one thing to know walking into an airport is going to be a pain, it's quite another when driving down the highway your license plate is tagged and someone pulls you over. The security apparatus get's to make it's numbers and occasionally even pick something up, but for those false positives out there there is little recourse but leave the country.
The way it works is you will never be cleared, the security-theater machine has "eaten" you.
You can only give them more reasons to collect evidence on petty crimes, their original motivation for stalking you, even if your file was flagged accidentally, is long lost.
With half a million names on the "Terrorist Watch List", once they have ways to automate this (ala nationwide facial recognition and domestic drones) you will be stalked for the rest of your life by the government. You'll be 80 years old and they will have terabytes on you for absolutely no reason. But if you even accidentally commit a petty crime, they will happily share the info with local cops to hassle you more.
There's nothing else to backfire as he is already tagged for life. I think the best thing he's done has been to go completely public with the story and go on to teach at several universities.
The feds probably won't harass him directly anymore, but he now has the joy to document how the automated security-theater system will wrong him for the next 50+ years.
What's crazy is I bet the original "tip" was bogus by either someone who didn't like him or they meant someone else. Even if it didn't pan out, they certainly aren't going to not take advantage of the opened door.
Just like during the Iraq war people turned in their neighbors and people they didn't like in general for the bounties and many of them ended up in gitmo - but now the innocent ones can supposedly never be released because they most certainly have become embittered and dangerous. Oh yeah, remember Gitmo? Still there.
I don't see how this will backfire. He seems to live a right life. No one in the government cares about whatever petty crimes he may commit.
Federal law enforcement only cares about petty crimes when they can lead to stopping major crimes. If they think you have information they want, they'll hold the maximum penalty for anything you do over your head until they get it. But they have no reason to harass someone who isn't involved in major criminal or subversive activity.
Being on a watch list sucks and it's going to cause this guy inconvenience for life, for whatever he does. But federal agents tend to be intelligent and driven people. They aren't any more likely to waste time harassing a stranger than you are.
That only works as long as he's not opposing the state or any corporation or individual with powerful state connections. I dare this guy to go down to the local Occupy Wall Street protests and then see how little the government cares.
The fact is, we violate laws every day. In addition to actual violations, we do many more things that look suspicious and can be construed as potential violations. The government doesn't have to convict you in order to radically lower your quality of life. It merely has to investigate you.
For example, I knew a person that protested against the RNC convention in 2008. Though they were protesting peacefully, their group was broken up and arrested by the FBI. For the next two years, their case was bounced down from federal court to state courts, and then from state courts to county courts. Two and a half years later, the case was dismissed without any explanation or apology. However, while the case was ongoing, this person was unable to get a job, unable to get housing, unable to do anything that would require a background check or a credit check.
Was this person involved in major criminal or subversive activity? I don't see how she could have been, given that all charges were dropped. However, the actions taken against her can only be described as harassment.
Right up until the guy says something disagreeble to a politician or federal law enforcement bully who just wants to ruin the guy's life. Allowing law enforcement to amass information that it "doesn't care about" does lead to abuse of power. See 'National Security Letters' for more information.
The way it works is you will never be cleared, the security-theater machine has eaten you.
In other words, being on a security watch list is like being diagnosed with cancer. You're never cured. The symptoms are just in remission and can resurface at any time.
Yeah, but I think the moral of his story is: "look at this crazy thing I did, isn't that crazy." And then he points out that hey, that's what we do every time we update Facebook. He brings a very interesting perspective to the use of social networking. He isn't suggesting we send info to the FBI, he is saying we already do. And it's true, you don't think at least 5 different intelligence agencies in the US alone already look at everything you do. (I don't mean that in the sense that an "person" analyst is there looking at your pics, but you better believe they are crawling, storing, and analyzing your data in code.)
It was clear who had the power in this situation. And when you’re face to face with someone with so much power, you behave in an unusual manner. You dare not take any action.
Sadly that's far from unusual. Meek compliance is how most people (myself included) tend to behave when confronted by federal or state agencies, regardless of how their privacy is being invaded.
If more people raised a stink, the number of US citizens subjected to such a thing would rapidly drop. People would not be dragged from airplanes or into questioning at the slightest hint of suspicion from highly questionable sources. You want to see what's in my storage unit? No problem, go get a warrant. As an aside - if the author was mistaken about its contents they just lied to a federal agent which itself is a crime, regardless of any original innocence).
This is a great example of how our government is making new enemies everyday by investigating everyone. They took a happy-go-lucky college student and turned him into an activist against government surveillance. I wish government employees would think more about the consequences of their actions against common people, but I fear that they are too preoccupied with their Hollywood-cop fantasies.
> how our government is making new enemies everyday by investigating everyone.
The sad thing is, as a system and individually they probably think they are helping a great deal. They are investigating and taking things seriously, they are protecting our country against pervasive and extremely dangerous terrorists. I bet most of them have brainwashed (and that includes brainwashing themselves) into thinking that.
They are making enemies but they don't see that, to them enemies just appear, spawned out of pure 'hatred of our freedoms'. The more they see this kind of antagonism, the harder they investigate everyone, the most they investigate, the more antagonism they generate.
Why do you say it is incorrect? And I don't think a statement of apparent fact can be called "derogatory". If there is a less offensive term for the meaning, I'm not aware of it.
Here's what I would like to know: has this lack of privacy resulted in the author not doing something he would have liked to do otherwise? Because the real problem with privacy invasion is not the information that is collected (which more often than not is mundane, like the author's), but rather the chilling effects on activities that, though legitimate, would raise suspicion, embarrassment, or other concern.
I'm pretty sure that what he thinks is a big, unwieldy, dataset is trivial for the TLAs to data-mine. (How big is his data? I'm about to web-search for it). He provides photographs, but has he stripped the meta data?
I note that he's an artist, not a computer scientist, and that he may be blissfully unaware of the amount of computing and programming power available to government.
He does have a good point when he mentions that monitoring good guys means more false positives and more missed opportunities to monitor bad guys.
And he does make a good point in the last few paragraphs; privacy advocates are horrified by some of the things happening at Google / Facebook / Twitter / etc; but these services are very very popular. Why do people give up these freedoms so willingly?
Why do people give up these freedoms so willingly?
I don't think it's accurate to word it that way. Allowing some information about oneself to become public is more an issue of personal privacy than about freedom.
Now, if the government decides to use that now public information to detain or otherwise strip the freedom from that individual, that's another far more frightful issue.
I think that most people tend to post updates on Facebook/Twitter because they don't consider it private. Everyone I know knows that I'm married and to whom, so I don't worry about posting that on Facebook. People are often worried about online privacy, but I would bet that most people are pretty open with friends and family in in-person situations.
Now if a site like Facebook is taking data that I intend to keep private and turning that into public data, that's also a different, and far more important, issue.
This could make for a great front. Someone with such a meticulous personality could probably produce, for example, a well-documented "business trip" that is a complete lie, while engaging in something completely different behind the scenes. If designed right it would be nearly impossible to detect.
This was my exact thought too. In fact, I would go out of my way to fabricate a tiny but measurable percentage of the data, just to see what I could convincingly fake and to give me plausible deniability for any of the real stuff, just in case. In the event that I ever found it necessary to do something shady for whatever reason, I'd have a lot of practice masking it.
...Or maybe I've also just watched too many spy movies.
I know that stark interrogation room and the L shaped desk and camera well. The waiting room he describes is called secondary processing and it's a very unhappy place, mostly folks of foreign nationality about to be deported back to their home country. I met a brazilian guy there once who was almost crying and offered him some gum, trying to offer encouragement, condolences, whatever.
I think he is being extremely naive here giving them all of his data.
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him” Cardinal Richelieu
The valuable data here is the personal data of the FBI interrogators , yeah we have nothing to hide but you (government, or power structures) have not either.
In real life you don't give your private information to stalkers that don't want to give theirs.
> but if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents
I hope he understands he is advocating a DDoS attack on FBI's information collection departments ;-)
I hope this insanity ends someday, but it's not really a very rational expectation. Once paranoia sets in, it's hard to cure. It's costing us (mankind - I am neither a US citizen nor live in the US) resources that could be better employed. I am sure the FBI folks would prefer to spend their time investigating actual crimes instead of shadows. But, again, once you start believing every shadow is your enemy, it's very hard to act rationally.
Instilling fear is the goal of the terrorists they try to fight. As far as I can see, they won. Long ago.
I doubt that they'd prefer to investigate actual crimes.
People are paid for doing work. The fact that they did work is measured i.e. by the number of cases 'solved'.
Would you rather get paid more ('solve' many cases) or less (go for difficult do solve actual cases)? People have to sustain their families etc.
A friend of mine summed it up pretty good. " 'Police' don't catch people they should catch, they catch those they _can_ catch."
I live in China for some years now. This sounds just like stuff that would happen over here. I have met so many Americans that, after having been here for more than just a few month, have realized just how similar China and the USA have become. Kind of scary.
The author was lucky not having had ties with the wrong political party or some other US opposition group.
> When I first started talking about my project in 2003, people thought I was insane. Why would anyone tell everyone what he was doing at all times? Why would anyone want to share a photo of every place he visited? Now eight years later, more than 800 million people do the same thing I’ve been doing each time they update their status or post an image or poke someone on Facebook.
The author makes an important point earlier in the article and here contradicts himself: he says that he intentionally presents the information in a disorganized way. This is a problem that Facebook and social networks in general solve. So don't think that because everyone has a Facebook and is therefore flooding the market with information about them it's no longer useful to intelligence gatherers be them governmental or private interests. That's actually the problem of a platform like Facebook where privacy is concerned.
Giving up privacy?
I hope you were only advising on public privacy, which I myself rather not give up.
I understand where you are coming from, people can observe you to get all that information but when they are doing that you barely have privacy, by controlling the information they get by sending it to them yourself you control the border of private and public yourself.
-you can manipulate the stream of information and send false information, they will still check it and they will always do if they think it is necessary, you will never be trusted by them not even if all things you sent them are true.
-It is quite a hassle to keep all this information and to send it out. It would be easier to just let them investigate it themselves.
Informing FBI whatever you do every time is such a pain. Dont you think it makes living less fun?
Also, in the future we could have sophisticated computer systems that could analyze data if everybody started revealing everything. His solution of revealing everything may not necessarily be a long term solution.
Wow, it's really sad to see somebody so completely broken and brainwashed that he'll literally report his every move to authorities. If the government was monitoring his home with an iMac this would be right out of 1984.
Maybee he should recommend this system to some of his coreligionist in his native country Lebanon. That would realy help the CIA and prevent innocent people being killed.
This man is hopelessly naive about modern computer technology. Keeping track of 300 million people is not quite trivial (yet) but well within the means of the FBI at its current staffing and funding levels. Worse -- much worse -- is that data mining is virtually certain to result in very convincing looking false positives.
This is why it is unwise to take legal advice from performance artists.