NevDull’s Take On Things

ADVISE me of my rights…

The Christian Science Monitor has a story on ADVISE, a Department of Homeland Security project devoted to Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement of information across the Internet.  Bringing together information gathered from web sites and corporate databases to try to detect anomalous patterns which hint at possible terrorist activity, flagged for human analysis.

Does the linking of all of this readily available data constitute something nefarious?

Supposedly, all that a pattern match will provide is an indication for a human to give a closer look.  A closer look at what?  Well, perhaps terrorist activity.

But this automated electronic analysis is akin to psychoanalysis of the entire nation. 

Much of a person’s behavior happens in plain sight of others, but is tempered by a risk assessment that considers the consequences of exposing a narrow amount of information.

I tell people when it’s my birthday.  Don’t you?  I don’t consider my name to be a secret.  With those two pieces of information, it’s trivial to get a copy of my birth certificate.  On there is my mother’s maiden name.  My social security number has been used for everything from my student identification number at college, an identifier for health insurance companies, and been required for tax purposes by entities that were likely to have to end up sending me a 1099.  Some of those companies no longer exist.  Some have probably had data theft.

In any case, I’ve given up information about myself, sometimes naive about the risks, sometimes having considered the consequences of sharing some bit of information.

OK, so someone could steal my identity.  But anyone who’d have access to ADVISE could probably pull up far more information on me than that.

But what couldn’t they pull up all kinds of information on?

Well, let’s see what else they could do… perhaps they could pull up my medical records to see what diagnoses there have been, and what medications were used.  Creepy, but what the hell, right?  I’ve got nothing to hide.  The HIV tests I’ve had have all come back negative, and there’s no reason for them not to have.

Since the list of corporate databases they’d have access to isn’t specified, let’s assume they have access to my Amazon.com shopping cart history.  I’ve bought many books and CDs from Amazon, as well as various gadgets.  Some were for me, some were to give as gifts.  While I eventually ordered from another site, I once had in my shopping cart every Ani Difranco CD that Amazon carried.

I’ve never purchased, however, anything from Victoria’s Secret.  Nor Frederick’s of Hollywood.  A check of my Visa or Mastercard charge history may have had 3 or 4 purchases ever from a store that sells primarily women’s clothing.  What Visa will be able to tell you about is the tickets I bought to see Tori Amos.

Boy, from the data, if you were doing some kind of automated analysis of me, I’d probably be flagged as “possibly gay”.  I’ve gotten HIV tests, but don’t buy women sexy lingerie. I’ve bought music by artists that are known to have large homosexual followings.

Of course, jumping to this conclusion would require incomplete data… like missing when I paid for birth control pills with my debit card.  But what guarantees are there that the data will be complete while the computer tries to figure us out?

Why would it matter if I were gay?  It wouldn’t.  But what does matter is that the analysis of public and semi-public information to gain psychological insight a) can certainly be wrong, and b) isn’t limited to terrorist behavior.  I can’t see the results of this automated analysis requiring a warrant.  What fishing expeditions might be performed?  What political smear campaigns will get their ammunition from ADVISE?  Conversely, what if a DHS employee is a double-agent?

Might the compilation of public data on everything lead to exposing secret information about vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure?  Small weaknesses may not present a hazard individually, but the trauma caused by a thousand or a million targeted pinpricks could be devastating.  Who knows what’s been shared about all of those tiny weaknesses.  After all, exposing any one of them individually might have negligible risk.

Paralyze enough people into inaction by using the things that they didn’t realize they’d let slip a tiny piece at a time, and there’s plenty of opportunity to do unchecked evil.

Add comment February 9th, 2006

Rambling about the ethics of a country

In a thread on Slashdot about the ethics of doing business with China, my first reply was that if one uses an absolutist view of ethics in trading partners, it certainly might be the case that people shouldn’t trade with us. For two parties to get anything done, to some extent they must compromise… and in some cases, that compromise is one of ethical ideals.

A reply came from someone using the moniker Puff Daddy, who said: I was gonna type a response to this pointing out that the US, while far from ideal, is still way ahead of most, but then I realized that you wouldn’t read it.

And here is how I responded:

I’m going to have to assume that you’re saying that because I must have a closed mind and hate America.

Quite to the contrary. I’m idealistic about my country, and despite that, I realize the compromises which must be made in order for it to work. Freedom to do good implies freedom to do bad. Freedom means that some will win, some will lose. Some will take advantage, and some will be taken advantage of.

If you think it’s unethical to have anyone ever starve, then freedom is unethical. If you think it’s unethical to deprive people of freedom, then it’s unethical to force people to give to others so they won’t starve.

Ethics, unfortunately, can’t be compared against absolutes.

I think that we can agree that killing large groups of your population is probably unethical. Most of the industrialized world considers capital punishment unethical.

Most of the world considers terrorism to be unethical. Most of the world considers what the US and UK and others seek to do to those suspected of any involvement in terrorism unethical.

Heck, fear makes a lot of unethical things done on your behalf seem unethical.

It all comes back to compromise. Whether or not we’re better than most, we also come as a country from a set of ideals embodied in a Constitution which both called a slave 3/5 of a person, but also set forth some pretty amazing principles. Luckily, we’ve come a long way from the former… unfortunately, we’ve also come too far from the latter as well.

What have we learned over the last 229 years?

We should hold ourselves to a higher standard. We should hold our neighbors to a higher standard. We should hold our country to a higher standard.

But, then again… as I said in the prior post… we have to compromise to get anything done.

Add comment November 19th, 2005

Cop Craziness

I was up in neighboring towns tonight, getting some low grade booze (flavored beer, Smirnoff Twisted) and some food. Cops were out in force, looking out for mischevious folk. There was a car stopped in the middle of the street, at an intersection, which looked like it was waiting for a sign from God. I honked, in case it was an old guy falling asleep at the wheel. Turns out it was a cop in an unmarked car. He started the strobes and didn’t move the car. What the fuck is that, some kind of macho bullshit? Do you go around a cop stopped at an intersection for no apparent reason? Is he just being a fuckwit who’s going to stop you if you deign to go around his shittitude?

Who knows?

I saw plenty more cops on the way to the liquor store.

When I got there, I mentioned the police presence. The guy behind the counter said that it’d been a much quieter night than previous years, partly due to a curfew.

I’ve not heard anything about a curfew, so I’ll be looking into it a bit.

I later went to the White Castle in North Bergen. Saw more cops on the way to that… some speeding by me, some on bikes. Pulling into The Crave Zone, I passed a posse of teens walking near the driveway. I ordered at the drive-through and then while waiting for my food, saw lots of flashing lights around and sirens and police cars and SUVs speeding up. Pulling out, I saw the teens all leaning up against the perimeter of the car, and nearly avoiding a collision with a police SUV on the way out, I figured out that the 8-10 cop cars that had converged upon the area were there because of the teens.

I sure as hell hope they had guns or grenades out in the open. While the group had got me thinking about how I’d use my car as a weapon if it turned out that they were up to no good, the police response bordered on Shock and Awe. And I could have gotten smooshed by the black and white Explorer that sped in as I was leaving.

Maybe I’ll actually read a newspaper tomorrow to find out what happened.

Add comment October 30th, 2005